Deadly Welcome (8 page)

Her face darkened under the tan. “You don’t seem to take a hint, Mr. Doyle. I understand that I can’t order you off this beach, at least that area below the high-tide line. I would if I could. I do not feel like talking to you. I do not feel like giving you the opportunity to work the conversation around to the point where you can indulge your idle curiosity by asking dull questions about the colonel.”

“Excuse me, ma’am, but I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. What colonel? I’m not curious about anything. I wasn’t working around to anything. I was just being friendly.”

She stood up, facing him. From her face he guessed she was in the middle forties. She had the body of a far younger woman. “This cottage is where Colonel M’Gann lives. I am his sister. Does that name mean anything to you?”

“Why, sure! It does now. I knew Jenna Larkin in high school. I missed the papers, being out of the country like I was, but folks here have told me about it. Honest, I didn’t know you people were in the Proctor place.”

“In that case, Mr. Doyle, I want you to accept my apology for being rude. We have both had a … bellyful of magazine people and would-be writers and amateur detectives and plain curiosity seekers. So we have become rather … antisocial. The traffic has dropped off considerably, but we still get a few—one tiresome little man just last week who had the gall to want to see
the colonel to ask him if he could ghost write a book for my brother. I chased him away and he became quite abusive. Horrible teenagers have walked here on the beach, pretending to choke each other and fall dead.”

“Then if I was you, I’d move away. You’re just renting the place, aren’t you? Or did you buy it?”

“We’re renting it, and your suggestion is most valid. I would dearly love to move away from here. But the colonel insists on staying.”

“I’m not curious. Well, to be honest, I guess I am, a little. Anybody would be, naturally. But I don’t care enough about it to come around asking questions. I guess it was a bad thing for you people but the way I look at it, unless that Jenna Larkin changed a hell of a lot since when I knew her, I guess she wasn’t what you’d call a big loss. Hope I haven’t said the wrong thing.”

“You haven’t, Mr. Doyle. Indeed you haven’t! If any human being could be classified as worthless, Jenna could. And it is a terrible waste for my brother to keep on brooding about her. I hope I wasn’t too rude to you.”

“I don’t mind. I understand how you’d feel about people trying to strike up a conversation. As long as I’ll be a neighbor for a while, I just won’t talk about it to you at all.”

“That will be splendid, Mr. Doyle. You’re one of the few sympathetic people I’ve found in this … truly dreadful community. They seem more like animals down here than people, really. I don’t mean to offend you, of course.”

“I guess it’s because there isn’t much goes on here, and when something does, they like to make a big thing about it.”

Suddenly the gray surface of the water was torn and boiled just fifty feet away, and the small bait fish leaped in panic from predatory jaws. He cast beyond the area, yanked the dude into it, and felt the strike. He brought in a Spanish mackerel of about two and a half pounds.
He tossed it up on the beach and caught two more of the same size before the disturbance was over.

“Welcome to two of those if you can use ’em,” Alex said. “One will do me. Mackerel. Good eating. They don’t so often work in this close.”

“You got them so quickly!”

“When they’re working, you get them quick.”

“Can I see that thing they bit on?” He held the lure so she could inspect it. “I will take the fish, and thank you very much, Mr. Doyle.” She looked at him dubiously, uncertainly. “I … I wonder if you would do me a great favor, Mr. Doyle.”

“Anything I can, ma’am.”

“I have been trying to get my brother to take an interest in something. I thought fishing might be good for him. Neither of us knows anything about it. I bought a pole and things, and we fished with frozen shrimp, but it was all very boring. We got some nasty little catfish, and one horrible looking flat thing, and some little things with prickers all over them. But what you were doing looks as if my brother might enjoy it. The pole and reel I bought are much, much heavier than that thing you use. Is it hard to use?”

“No ma’am. It’s easy.”

“And it wouldn’t be a … physical strain, I mean to catch something big?”

“Anything too big will just bust loose.”

“If I give you the money, could you buy the same sort of outfit for the colonel? How much would it cost?”

“Less than twenty dollars for all he’ll need. I can get it and you can pay me later when I bring it around.”

“Well … all right. And then could you show my brother how to operate it? I don’t really know if he
will
take any interest in it, but he does need some hobby. You see, he’s never really had a hobby. Except all those model airplanes when we were little. I used to help
him. We’re twins. Then, when he was in school he worked. We both did. He didn’t work when he was at the Point, of course. He has always been such a … dedicated man. So diligent. There was no room in his life for the things other men did. The fishing and the sports. Oh, he always kept himself in wonderful physical condition through exercise, so he could better accomplish his work. I sometimes wish he’d had more … desire and opportunity to play. Then maybe he wouldn’t have been so vulnerable when she … Anyway, now that he can’t work he has nothing to fill his time. I don’t want to trouble you, Mr. Doyle, but I would … be most grateful to you.”

“Glad to do it,” he said.

“If you could find time to come around tomorrow with the fishing things? About this same time. He naps in the afternoon.”

She thanked him again and put the two mackerel in the aluminum pot on top of the coquinas, the long slim mackerel tails protruding over the rim, rigid in death. He walked back toward the cottage with the single fish. Thus far it was all too easy. And would continue to be easy, very probably. It sometimes seemed terrifying to him that it was so utterly easy to disarm people by lying to them. People seemed so recklessly anxious to take you at your face value. They would believe what they wanted to believe, and you need only to guide their thinking in a gentle and unobtrusive way. It had worked so many times before, and it would work again. The fishing had been a lucky accident. But if it had not been the fishing, it would be something else. Celia M’Gann was obviously lonely. Once her suspicions had been quieted, she would have responded to casual friendliness. And, inevitably, he would have met the colonel. And, inevitably, made the chance to be alone with him. This fishing gambit did not alter anything. It merely accelerated things.

He cleaned and fried the mackerel and ate it for lunch. He thought of going in to see the Larkin boat yard. And see Betty again. But it seemed too soon. He had accomplished one decisive step in the mission. And now it was waiting time until he could walk up the beach tomorrow with the new tackle.

He stretched out on the bed and wondered who had taken over in Montevideo. He hoped they’d picked Schmidt. He wouldn’t mess it up the way some of the new kids might.…

He came up out of sleep and heard somebody rapping sharply and insistently on the back door.

There was a sedan in the back yard, a dark dusty green with bumper aerial for short wave, and a red spot on the roof, and a faded yellow decal on the door that said
Sheriff—Ramona County
.

A man stood on the back steps, a dark silhouette against the white shell glare of the back yard. Doyle had belted on his old seersucker robe. He felt sweaty and fogged by sleep.

“I was sleeping,” he said.

“So wake up,” the man said, and pulled the door open and came into the kitchen. He was about five seven, with a toughened leanness about him, a deeply seamed and sallow face, narrow eyes the color of spit. He wore bleached khakis, tailored to his body and freshly pressed, a pale, cream-colored ranch hat. The trouser legs were neatly bloused over black gleaming paratrooper boots in a small and curiously dainty size.

On the pocket of his shirt was pinned one of the most
ornate badges Doyle had ever seen, large and golden, with some red enamel and some blue enamel. In a very legible way it said
Sheriff
, and in much smaller letters it said
Deputy
, and it said
Ramona County, State of Florida
, and bore some sort of ornate seal. He wore a black pistol belt with a black speed holster, old leather, shiny and supple with care and age, worn canted to bring the revolver butt-down to the level of “Gunsmoke.” A chrome whistle chain disappeared into the other shirt pocket. A black night stick hung from the other side of the pistol belt, white leather thong suspended from a small brass hook.

He brought into the kitchen the slow creak and jingle of petty authority, and a thinly acid edge of sweat, a back-swamp accent and an air of mocking silence. Doyle felt irritated by his own feeling of intense wariness. It was a legacy from the faraway years when there would be trouble and men like this one would come to the bayou and go to Bucket Bay. You let them swagger through the house and poke around as they pleased. You never told them anything. And you never made a fuss because they would put knots on your head.

Yet on another level he sensed his kinship to this man. That light-eyed cracker sallowness the generations of bad diet and inbreeding behind both of them that had resulted, curiously, in a dogged and enduring toughness, a fibrous talent for survival.

“I’ve seen you before,” Alex said.

“Sure you’ve seen me before, Doyle. Turkey Kimbroy and I, we tooken you over to Davis long time ago to he’p you get in the army. If’n they’d shot your ass off, you wouldn’t be back here giving me problems.”

“I’m not making any problems.”

“That’s what I got to be sure about. Turkey don’t have no problems any more. Fool nigger had a razor hung down his back and when Turkey beat on him a little, nigger
took one swipe and spilled Turk all over the side of the road. Made me a carefuller man.”

Doyle remembered how this Donnie Capp had been on that long-ago ride, a pale slim blond man with a limp, not afraid to be friendly to the boy they were taking in.

“What’s that got to do with me, Donnie?”

The thin mouth tightened. “I get called Donnie by my friends. Niggers and thieves, they call me Mister Deputy, sir. You try it.”

“Mister Deputy, sir.”

“That’s nice. Now stand still a minute. Okay. Now you just walk on ahead of me slow while I look around some.”

Capp made a leisurely and careful inspection of the cottage. He found the money belt on a hook in the back of the bedroom closet. Doyle made no protest as he took it out and unzippered it, fingered the money.

“Maybe you better come along in and tell Sheriff Roy how come you got all the cash money, Doyle.”

“If you think it’s necessary, I’d be glad to.”

“Then you can tell me how you got it.”

“You can look in the top bureau drawer on the left again, Mister Deputy, sir. Under the shorts. A folder with passport and visas and work papers and pay vouchers.”

He opened the folder, looked at the papers, threw folder and papers on the bed.

“But right now you got no job, right?”

“No job. Not yet.”

“Where do you figure on working?”

“Some place around here.”

“I don’t figure that way. I don’t figure that way
at
all. Over in Davis we got pictures of you and we got prints and they’re in a file. And that there is what you call a dead file. Now I don’t want to have to go move that file up into the other file, the one where we keep the records of people living around here. I’m just lazy, I guess. You know, maybe you forgot to stop by and register as a known criminal, Doyle?”

“Would that be necessary? It was a suspended sentence.”

“I’m not up on all my law, but maybe it would have been sort of friendly of you to stop by when you come in and not let me find you by accident. And you could have brought us up to date on the police trouble you’ve had since you been gone.”

“There hasn’t been any.”

“Guess you been clever about it, huh?”

“Can I ask you a question?”

“Always glad to oblige.”

“Why are you on my back? I’m not in any trouble. I don’t intend to get into any. I came back here because … this is home. That’s all. There isn’t any law about that, is there?”

“You know, Doyle, the end of this here county is about the cleanest end of any county in the state. Roy likes for me to handle it just the way I do, on account of he doesn’t like sending in bad figures on crime up to Tallahassee. And he knows I know this end of the county better than anybody, so he just rides along and he lets me handle it all my own sweet way. You understand?”

“I guess so.”

“And one way I do, anybody making for trouble, I just up and run ’em off. Let ’em light some other place. Let ’em go spoil the crime figures in some other county. Now if there’s a family or something concerned, then I let ’em stay. But I persuade them to stay out of trouble. You haven’t even got a job, so it’s no trouble to run you off. Besides, I don’t like having you out here on the beach. You stay down in Bucket Bay, I might think on letting you stay ’round.”

“I want to stay right here.”

“What you want and what you get is two different ends of the rabbit. All this here for miles around is my little ole bait bucket. I keep it nice and clean and throw out the spoiled bait. It isn’t good for a fella like you not to
have a job. You lay around and get ideas and pretty soon you make me some trouble. But I’ll show you I’m not a bad guy, Doyle. You paid a month rent, and it ain’t likely you can get it back. So all you got to do is ask me nice if you can stay here, and tell me you won’t make trouble.”

“I’d like to stay. Please. And I won’t make trouble.”

Donnie Capp smiled in a thin way and unhooked the night stick, and glided toward Doyle. “Now I’ll be quietin’ you down a little.”

Just as Doyle started to back away, raising his arms, the stick smashed down on the point of his left shoulder, bruising the nerves, numbing his arm from shoulder to fingertips. In painful reflex, he struck out at Capp with his right fist. Capp stepped aside and paralyzed his right arm with the same cruel and scientific blow, then shouldered him back against the wall beside the bedroom doorway. He could not raise either arm.