Dead Low Tide (13 page)

“Only one flaw in that. I can’t quite believe it.”

“Why not? The more I think of it, the better I like it. She came to you with a phony investigation she wanted you to perform. I tell you we’ve got to get them off on some other scent, some other possibility, good or bad, to get you out of here.”

“I still don’t want an innocent person to get stuck.”

He sat down again. His voice was gentle. “Before I came here a long time ago, Andy, before I came down and passed the Florida bar and started a practice here, I was a smart young assistant in the District Attorney’s office in—well, where it happened doesn’t make any difference. I got my big chance in a murder trial. The man handling it took sick. I took over in mid-trial. I got the jury just where I wanted them, and I got the verdict I wanted, the verdict the whole
office wanted because it was cruel, vindictive, premeditated murder, as callous as anything you ever expect to see. They electrocuted the guy. A real unwholesome-type guy. He yelped about innocence right up until they put the hood on him. I was so young I even wanted to see it. I was so young I was proud of myself. Eight months afterward, in connection with another case, we received a confession in such detail, containing things that hadn’t even come out in the trial, that we knew we’d made a little slip. We’d sort of accidentally electrocuted the wrong fella. My friends slapped me on the back and told me it was tough luck, could have happened to anyone. I kept seeing the way my pigeon had stiffened when the current hit him. I saw that picture a lot of times, and through the bottoms of a lot of glasses. And finally I knew I’d have to do my straightening out some other place, so I came down here. And so I know it is childish and stupid to keep thinking that innocence will out. It will, usually. But any man can be an exception.”

I waited in the long hot silence, and then I said, “O.K., Steve. I’ll take this seriously.”

“You better.”

The jailer fumbled with the door, and Wargler came in. Steve said, “Bob, I thought you told me I could have all the time I wanted.”

Wargler didn’t even seem to hear him. He looked dumb and numbed and baffled and faintly sick. He said, “Son, shove over. I got to sit down a minute.”

He sat down and we stared at him. He cracked his big knuckles. “What’s wrong?” Steve demanded.

Wargler stirred and looked at him. “I guess maybe we’ll let this boy go, come to think of it.”

“How come?” I asked, wondering why the skin on the back of my neck had started to crawl.

“Well, dead low tide come about quarter to ten this morning. It’s a slow tide right now, and those Hoover brothers, they like to net in the pass right on the tide change. They got to move fast and catch it just right, because if the tide starts to come in on ’em, they can lose a lot of net. They made the swing and they start drawing the circle tight against the Horseshoe Key side of the pass and they come up with a body. They rush it right in and get hold of me, and to hell with the fish. Strangled. I can tell that right off. Strangled and tossed in the channel in the bay someplace, and tossed in, I guess, five minutes earlier and it would have gone right through the pass and out into the Gulf.”

He turned to me and he laid his hand on my knee with a surprising gentleness. “It was that big girl, son. That Hallowell girl. That big blonde works over to Wilburt’s.”

I guess I stood up. Anyway, I got over to the window somehow, and I was looking down through the diamond pattern at the main drag, at the sun winking on the parked cars. Monday morning and the town had a more purposeful look than yesterday, yet there was still a look of marking time about it. The sticky summer, the lack of tourists. Two little girls, too young for school, were walking hand in hand down the sidewalk, lapping delicately with their tongues at tall pink ice-cream cones.

There was a picture of Christy, gold-molten in the sun, on that afternoon of love and laughter. Afternoon of the shared cigarette. And Christy, sitting on my kitchen table, brown knees greased with Ray-pell. Christy’s lips and her tears, and that thin, shy, metallic voice coming over Wargler’s machine.
When we’d had the glooms, we’d helped each other. She liked gin, and fine piano, and lots of sun.

I’d walked her right into it. I’d walked her throat into whatever had closed around it. Big, casual, vibrant, unself-conscious body, drifting down the channel, bumping along the bottom in the tide current, turning with hair afloat in the current, startling the little fishes into quick darts of silver.

I put my fists on the high sill of the window and ground my eyes down against my fists until the world was full of flashing greens and purples. But I couldn’t rub her out of my eyes or out of my heart. It was a hell of a time to find out that I had loved her.

Finally I became aware of a hand on my shoulder. I turned and it seemed to take long seconds to recognize Steve.

He said, “I told Bob some of the other stuff, and he says it’s O.K. to leave. Want to get out of here?”

“O.K. to leave?”

“Yes. Come on.”

Seemingly without transition, I was standing in the Chief’s office, threading my belt through the loops. I sat down and worked the laces into my shoes. I think Steve walked with me for a while as I headed for my car. I think he was trying to tell me something or ask me something. I don’t know what it was. Then he was gone and I sat in the car wondering why it wouldn’t start. I looked in through the big plate-glass window. The office was empty. I found my keys finally and put the ignition key in the switch. I didn’t want to go look at her. I didn’t know where she was. I didn’t want to find out where she was. I didn’t want to see, on her face, that look of remote dignity and humility I had seen on John
Long’s face. Christy was gone and there was no purpose in looking at what was left. The strong golden body was empty of her now. That body had given her pain and given her pleasure. I had seen her going down a corridor, with a strong swing of round brown legs and a swirl of skirt, and the look of her blonde hair against the green blouse and her quick parting look as she reached the end of the corridor.

I got the stubborn car started and drove back through the noon sunshine to my place, not looking at where Christy had lived as I went by. I parked and went through to the bedroom, stripped off the clothes, which had a jail smell on them, and lay across my bed.

No smart chatter, Andy boy? No winsome remarks? No banter at all? Come on. Make with the gay philosophies, the witty sayings, I thought.

It had been under my nose and I hadn’t known it. Under my nose, and I had never realized I was that unknown guy walking around shot with luck.

So I cried. Shut my teeth on my wrist and cried. Like for candy they took away. Like for no more Saturdays. Like for bright life going like a train into a gray tunnel. It pulled all my nerve ends out through my skin and left me for dead. I slept then.

Something goes wrong and usually you sleep and wake up and at first you are aware that the world is not right, and you try to think what, and it all comes breaking over you like a wave. But it wasn’t like that this time. I had gone to sleep with the clean knowledge of loss. It was with me while I
slept. And I woke up instantly aware of the precise extent of my loss.

When I woke up it was three-thirty and Jack Ryer was standing by my bed, hands on his hips, cigarette in the corner of his mouth. I moved my legs over and he sat down on the corner of the foot of the bed, eyes steady.

“How are you making it?”

“Not good.”

“You don’t look good. I wouldn’t want to run into those eyes in a dim alley.”

“Does it show that much?”

“Enough so I’m telling you to watch it. Let Wargler operate. He has his dull moments. At times he’s a little childish. But he eventually gets where he’s going. Right now he wants to know where she was tossed in. Time of death was between midnight and two this morning. Slow tides, and he’s been working it out and figuring, and he is pretty sure she could have been dumped in the creek right here at about twelve-thirty and ended up in the pass right at dead low tide. He knows the area and the waters better than you or I will ever know them. I came out with him. He and George are questioning everybody who lives at this layout, one at a time. When you feel like it, he wants you over there.”

“Where is he?”

“At Christy’s place.”

“He can come here if he wants me.”

“You’re a big boy now, Andy. You can go over there.”

“Why are you riding me? Is this the time and place for that kind of thing?” I was aware, again, of the coldness of his eyes above the rather unexpectedly sweet smile.

“When you feel like it, the Chief said.” He got up,
squashed out his butt in the glass ashtray on the windowsill, and walked out. I heard the screen door bang behind him. It was an empty sound in the house.

After a while I got up and showered and put on fresh clothes, and dumped the jail-worn stuff in the laundry hamper. I was going to see Mary Eleanor. I was going to see Joy Kenney. But first the Chief was going to see me.

I didn’t let my mind run ahead of me and imagine what it would be like to be in her place. I just took it a step at a time. Ardy Fowler sat on her steps. His hands, coiled and knotted from fifty years of hammer and saw and chisel and plane, rested on his blue-jeaned knees. And tears, which he was perhaps unaware of, ran out of the clear blue carpenter eyes.

He looked up at me, and said sternly, “Goddamn it, Andy. Oh, damn it all.”

“I know.”

He was quite fierce. “But you don’t know! You don’t know anything. I got old bones and tired old muscles. I get myself into bed, and God, it feels good. Got tired of waiting for her to come back and tell me how you were. Wanted to find out if I could come see you. It got late. I went to bed, but I wasn’t asleep. Then I heard the bus on the way out from town, heard the air brakes hissing on it, and heard it start up again. I stuck my head around the window frame and I looked out, and she came walking down the road in the moonlight, walking slow like she was thinking. I wanted to know how you were doing in that jail. I sat right up there in bed and I was tired. A bed feels so damn good to an old man. So I lay back down and think morning time is good enough, and nobody can do anything this time of night. All I had to do was go talk to her. And the animal that got her would have run.”

“Take it easy, Ardy. He would have just waited until you came back to bed.”

“Maybe not. Maybe it wouldn’t have been that way. Maybe that animal would have gone and found himself some other girl, somebody I—I don’t know. That George fella told me about it. They were thinking there was a connection. You know, with that John Long murder. But the doc says she was attacked, too, and when that animal found out he killed her, he just dumped her in the creek, so there isn’t any connection, maybe. Just something got her—something that shouldn’t be running around loose.”

He sat looking hopelessly toward the creek, and I went on into the familiar room. Elly, looking ten years older, got up and edged by me and left, not looking at me.

Wargler had set up the card table. Christy and I had played gin on that table all day long one Sunday in August, when the rain sounded as if it had finally decided to wash away all the land, and all the works of man. There was a lingering fragrance of her in the room, Effluvium of girl, spiced faintly with Ray-pell. Like every healthy, well-adjusted young animal, she had been clean as new dimes. Scrub and soak and scrub some more. And it made me think of that time during our brief affair, that laughing time we had taken showers together, and got into crazy awkwardnesses, and laughed at the absurdities, and ignored the hard roar of the water against us, her blonde hair pasted flat to her head, and I thought of what a damn fool I had been to think because we could laugh at our own love play that therefore it wasn’t love; that love had to be something solemn, moody—a sweet dying torture.

I ached to have her back. For five seconds. Alive for just five seconds so I could tell her what I had learned about myself
on this day. And for just long enough so I could ask her if she had known, all along.

Wargler said, “I got a different slant on this here thing, McClintock. I don’t figure this is tied up with John.”

And I knew that was exactly what I wanted him to think. I wanted him snuffing along another trail.

“So do I report back to the cell?”

“By God, if Steve and Jack hadn’t give me proof that little Long woman lied flat out to me, you’d be right back there now. I want you where I can grab you any time I put my mind to it, hear?”

“O.K.”

“And you better not go wandering around where anybody can get you cornered too easy. Lot of people in this town that liked John want to string you up by the thumbs and slip the hide off you, real gentle. Don’t give ’em any chances at you.”

“What are you doing about finding Christy’s killer?”

“Son, I know my work. Sex crimes have an MO, same as other kinds. There’s central files we can use. Now just stay to hell out of my way, but not too far away.”

It suited me perfectly. It was dandy. It was candy and cream. But I had to look dull and disinterested, even though little wires were jerking at all my muscles.

I got into my car and drove away from there. I needed gas. I stopped at a gas station, and while the tank was being filled up I used the phone to call Mary Eleanor. The maid said in a hushed voice that she was in, but she’d taken medicine and she was sleeping and she left orders not to wake her up for anything.

That could wait a bit. That could wait and I could anticipate it. The gas station man gave me my change and did a
double take as he looked at me. As I drove out, he was hustling toward the phone. Big deal—escaped murderer.

I had a vague idea where Taylor Street was. I was right about the general area, but about three streets off. Eighty-nine was a frame house that looked as if it had been picked up bodily out of some small Indiana town in 1914 and moved to Florida. Two stories and two stunted gables, and a deep front porch with rocking chairs, and brick front steps. That happens sometimes. People retire, and distrust the unfamiliar. So they come down here and duplicate the awkward living they have endured during all the years of working and saving. Tired boxlike rooms and overstuffed furniture with crocheted dinguses on the backs and arms of the chairs. Ferns in pots, and two floors and an attic. There is a way to live in Florida—a way of turning a house inside out, so there is no real transition between outdoors and indoors. Glass and vistas and the good breeze coming through. Tile and glass and plastic, so there is nothing to absorb the dampness and sit and stink in dampness.