The End of the Pier (15 page)

Binoculars raised to his eyes, Sam said, “Um . . . Well, there's some people wouldn't agree it's perfection.”

Maud gave him a soppy smile. “That comment is beneath you. What are you doing with my binoculars? Put them down!”

Sam dropped them, and they dangled on the narrow black strap. “For Christ's sake, that's what they're for. Distance. What do you do with them, count your toes?”

Maud started rolling her hair up the side as if the lake were her
mirror. She knew the gesture irritated Sam. “The rule is, we're not supposed to see the party up close.”

Sam sighed. “The rule. You just made that up.”

With feigned sweetness, Maud said, “I never needed it before. The rule is, you do not try and see the people over there any closer than you can see with your naked eye. I don't know why, so don't ask me. It's the rule. I think it's because—” Maud stopped to sip her drink and stir the glass flamingo—“it would spoil the design. It would break it all up.” She gazed up at the night sky. “The moon would crack, the lake would shatter like glass, the patio would tilt, and the pier would collapse.”

For a moment Sam looked at her. “That is certified shit.”

As if there were crumbs in the lap of her skirt, she brushed it smoothly, slowly. “That is because you are blind. You can't see anything if it isn't in perfect focus.”

Sam swung the binoculars from around his neck and set them on the pier. He pulled a Coors from the bucket, snapped the cap. At least she'd got off the subject of Eunice Hayden. So he was, really, pleased to sit there and listen to her ramble on about some fucking room or other she'd seen in a vision.

“I didn't say ‘
vision.
' I'm not clairvoyant—which is one of my favorite words. It's musical. . . . Anyway, I was talking about a room in my imagination. I keep seeing it. It must be in Spain; there are Spanish tiles on the floor. Or in Mediterranea. The weather—”

Sam's head snapped up. “ ‘Mediterranea?' There is no such place.”

She sighed and dropped her head in her hand. “I mean, as any fool could tell, any country or place around the Mediterranean Sea. God, can I just tell about this room?”

“Shoot.”

“The weather is fine. I mean, it's not just sunny; it's silky or gauzy. There's a bed with an iron frame, and a big wardrobe, and a wooden chair pulled up at a sort of dressing table. Peachy-shaded
powder is spilled a little over the table. One of those old Pond's powder boxes is sitting on the glass . . . though probably in Mediterranea you can't buy it. The curtains are as translucent as chiffon and billow around the window that looks over the sea. There's a small wrought-iron balcony that I can walk out on—I wear a loose dress and I'm barefoot—that I can walk out on and look out over the sea. The sea is the color of jade until the sun starts setting and tosses this dazzling scarf of light over it at six o'clock and turns it to topaz. At night it's grape-colored. And it's always moving. I can't see the waves breaking on the shore because my room is very high up; but I can see the waves barely forming out there in tiny wrinkles. At night if the moon is very bright, which it usually is, I can see narrow bands of white foam, just a ruffle of white.” Maud stopped to take a cigarette from his pack and tamp it down. She had her own, but she enjoyed filching his.

“Is the ice bucket on the balcony?”

She squinted past the blue flame. “What?” Then she looked around at the tub and frowned as if it were some newfangled thing tilting precariously on the end of the pier. “No,” she snapped. “If there was an ice bucket I'd have said.”

Dangerous waters, but Sam stroked through them. “Well. It was only because the place sounded a little like here . . .”

Her eyes were as wide and wild as a gazelle's as she swept them over the scene around her. “Here?
Here
? Well, fortunately not. The polizia don't go around arresting the wrong people in Mediterranea.” The rocking chair thumped back, and she smoked in quick little jabs.

Sam was wary. “What're you talking about?”

“As if he didn't know. Those women raped and murdered. Nancy Alonzo and Loreen Butts and the other one.” She looked at Sam. “That Chalmers fellow you arrested—”

“Boy Chalmers. And
I
didn't arrest him—the police in Hebrides did that. And the mayors in both towns were extremely pleased. Not to mention the state's attorney.” Maud was rocking the chair
gently to the rhythm. “ ‘Moonlight Becomes You.' Can you imagine? Remember Dorothy Lamour? Someone told me she lived in Baltimore, Maryland . . .”

“You certainly know the right thing to wear . . .” Maud sang. She had a light, sweet voice that put Sam in mind of a tall, pastel summer cooler—the sort of thing you held sitting on white wicker on a wide green lawn . . . Christ, he was getting as bad as her.

“She wore hibiscus in her hair. Dorothy would be better off in my room than in Baltimore. I wonder if she sells real estate. I think someone told me she did.” Maud shook her head. “That doesn't fit, either.”

Although she appeared to have forgotten about Boy Chalmers and the rape-murders, Sam knew she hadn't. Maud rarely forgot any of the threads of her conversation, any more than Odysseus' wife—what was her name?—would have given up weaving that endless tapestry. “Tell me some more about the room. It's interesting.”

“Why should I?” She sang a few more words:

What a night to go dreaming,

Mind if I tag al-looooong . . .

“Well . . . I'll tag along to your room.” He thought of Florence. Had she been out going dreaming with Bubby Dubois? How could anyone go dreaming with him?

Maud's voice came through the image of that blubbery body humping his wife. Her sly voice. “Why don't you ask me if there was anyone else in the room?”

Better sly than hurt, so Sam said, “Okay. I'm asking.”

Maud stilled the rocking chair and leaned over the arm, closing in. “Nooo.” Now it was sly sweetness. “Nooo. There're no chairs on my balcony, so I'm not sitting out there looking over the water with some knuckle-brained, ham-fisted member of the polizia.” In a grand gesture, she made a curve with the hand that held her martini
glass and the liquid went flying out, sparkling the air, as if she were baptizing the pier. “Shit,” she said, looking into its emptiness.

“Sounds like your room's in Venice.” It appeared to be a neutral comment, but he just couldn't keep the fecklessness out of it. He knew well enough that she didn't want to qualify her room or place it anywhere in particular beyond its Mediterraneal bearings. He knew she was looking up at him from under the veil of her hair. “Because of the water,” he said. He was really more interested in why she was so sure Boy Chalmers was the wrong man. Probably just to be pig-headed.

“It most certainly is
not.”
She grabbed the vodka bottle and wrung another drink out of it. “There's no jade sea around Venice—at least not in the postcard I saw of it. And, anyway, Venice is on the
Adriatic.
”

Anyone who didn't know
that
was surely too witless to be the repository for her great dream. “Oh. Well, I guess I'm not swell enough for Mediterranea. Or even Adriatica.” Sam stretched out his legs and dropped the mirror-sunglasses down from their resting place on top of his hair. “So tell me why you think Boy Chalmers is innocent.”

“Who?”

He had interrupted her fantasy-telling, and now she was going to be difficult. “The wrong man. The wrong man I arrested.”

She had herself picked up the binoculars now and was training them across the lake. He knew she would refuse to talk about Chalmers unless he noticed what she was doing. And commented. Sam sighed. “Well, you're breaking your own rule, aren't you? Didn't you just say we're not supposed to be looking through the binoculars?”

“I'm not.”

If he didn't know Maud so well, he'd've thought she was drunk silly. But she was never drunk, just silly. Sam stared up at the black sky. He was tempted not to comment, but he supposed he'd have to. “You're not. But you're looking right through those binoculars.”

“My eyes are closed.”

Oh, for Christ's sake, her eyes are—Sam couldn't stand it; he reached out and wrenched them from her grip. Which was, of course, just what she wanted—to drive him to distraction. She was smoothing out her skirt and humming “Moonlight Becomes You.”

As he wound the strap around the binoculars and then set them on the dock, he said, “I'd appreciate it if you'd tell me why you think the Chalmers kid didn't do it.”

Dignified silence reigned.

“Maud?”

Making a long sausage curl of her hair, she rolled it slowly up above her ear. She knew it annoyed him, which is why she did it.

“I'd really like to hear what you think. Since we seem to be the only ones who think it. Sims thinks I'm nuts.”

He must have hit just the right mendicant-on-the-street-corner note.
“He's
the nut. An alcoholic old nut who shouldn't ever be mayor.” She stopped in the act of pulling the little beaded cord of the lamp off and on, off and on, as if she'd just discovered the wonders of electricity. “He hates you because if you ever ran for mayor, you'd win. Still, I hate to say it, but it would be just too much of a coincidence that on the very day Boy escapes from prison there's another murder.” She looked at Sam, worried.

He popped another can of Coors. “Oh, I'm not saying it's coincidence. I guess I'm saying whoever's doing these killings took advantage of Boy's being loose.”

Maud frowned and went back to pulling the cord. It illuminated and then plunged into darkness the edge of the dock where the black cat was snoozing. “That's certainly possible, I guess. Do you know Chad said that?” When Sam looked at her, eyebrows raised, she nodded. “He did.”

“Chad?”

“Um-hm. He was talking about him a few weeks ago, down here. He was setting up the lamp for me and all the extensions . . .” She looked behind her.

Impatiently, Sam prompted her to go on. “Why didn't Chad think it was Boy like everybody else?”

“Chad is
not
like everybody else.” She sighed and dug around in the ice for a cocktail onion, which she plunked in her glass before pouring a fresh martini. “I guess he's like us.” And she sighed again, as if she, Sam, and Chad belonged to some alien race of folk who because of their greater perception and subtlety had to live beyond the fringes of ordinary society. “Did you know he met Boy Chalmers once?”

“Hell,
no,
I never knew it. You never told me.”

“That's because
I
never knew it, until that weekend. Chad was riding that ancient bike out on the road to Hebrides—oh, way over a year ago, I think he said. One of the tires gave out, and Boy was coming along on his motorcycle. He stopped and fixed the tire. To do it, he had to go back to his bicycle shop and get a pump and patch, or whatever, but Chad said he was really
helpful.
He went to a lot of trouble.”

“Why didn't he ever tell you this after Boy was up for Loreen Butts's murder?”

She was pulling the little metal cord of the lamp. Off. On. Off. On. “He says he did. He says I forgot. But I didn't forget. He just forgot to tell me. You know how he is.” She kept twitching the cord.

“No, I don't know how—will you stop fucking around with that lamp? A person would think you'd been living by gaslight all these years. You shouldn't have a lamp down here, for Christ's sake, Maud!”

She looked at him evenly, said coolly: “Then tell me, how else can I read my book?” She lifted the book of poetry.

“Read
inside.
I'm surprised Chad would help you set this up.” Sam turned and looked behind him. “You must have a dozen extensions trailing back there to the house. Have I ever seen anything so stupid!”

“I don't know. Have you?” Maud was reading her poem, mouthing the words silently and elaborately.

Sam gritted his teeth. “You could have an accident. You could topple over into the lake and that lamp right on top of you.”

Maud did not look up from her book as she replied, “I've often thought of going swimming with the lamp, yes.” Quickly, she reached up and tugged the cord. Off, on.

He should sic her on Mayor Sims. No, Maud was only like this around him. And Chad, too. He drank his beer and looked over at her as she sat there pretending to read that poem, dramatically mouthing the lines and now fluttering her hands a little, just in case he wasn't noticing that she was ignoring him. She turned a page. It rustled elaborately.

Sam knew the reason he'd got on her case about the lamp, and knew the reason he was so irritable, was because it made him terribly nervous, Maud sitting out here alone for half the night, unprotected except when he could be here with her. “Go on about Boy Chalmers. What else?”

“Chad didn't say anything else.” She closed her book, a stage prop not immediately useful to her. “He just said he didn't see how Boy could possibly have done these murders. Boy was just too fucking
nice.
Those were his exact words.” She looked meaningfully at Sam. “I don't approve of people always saying ‘fuck this' and ‘fuck that.' It's a word that should be used sparingly, if indeed at all. Some people must always resort—”

Oh, shut up, Sam thought, listening to her ramble on about the impoverishment of the language. “Did Chad say anything at all else?”

“No. But Boy must really have made an impression on him for him to believe he's innocent when he'd rather not.”

“How do you mean?”

“Chad would rather think he's guilty.” Maud turned to him. “That would mean whoever's guilty had been caught. For
that
would mean I'm out of danger.” She folded her hands in her lap and looked out over the lake with the most self-satisfied expression Sam could imagine. Chad worrying about her pleased Maud immensely.