The Man Everybody Was Afraid Of (19 page)

“What part of the alphabet is this?” Cecil said.

“A,” Dave said. “This is where I should have begun.” He plunged his arms in again, this time to the shoulder, turning his face aside. And it was there, lumpy and slick. His fingers tried for grips and found broken edges. He pulled a chunk out of the water and set it on the flat tile edge of the pool. Water ran off it and out of it and puddled around his shoes. “I hadn’t been in La Caleta an hour yesterday morning when Jerry Orton told me the patio had water splashed around in it when he got here after his father’s death. I couldn’t have come back then—he wouldn’t have let me. But I ought to have come back a whole hell of a lot sooner than this.”

“Yeah, Daisy mentioned it was wet,” Cecil said.

“So did Lester.” Dave bent again and felt around deep in the water, brought up a second dripping chunk and fitted its broken edges to the broken edges of the first. “But that was too late to save old Tyree Smith. If I’d understood Jerry when he told me about the splashes, I could have closed this case right then.” He shook his hands and tried to paw the water off his arms.

“Smith? The old dude that drowned himself?”

Dave reached for his shirt. “He was pushed,” he said. “Probably knocked on the head with his own vodka bottle and then pushed.” He put the shirt on and buttoned it.

“This is some old Mexican sculpture,” Cecil said. “What’s the connection?”

“I don’t like to be the one to tell you,” Dave said. “Because you’ll blame yourself.”

“Me?” Cecil stared. “What are you talking about? I don’t even know what this thing is.”

Dave eyed the stout clay figure with its spiked helmet and dwarfish legs. “It’s not what it is that counts,” he said. “It’s what it isn’t.” He tucked the shirttails into his waistband. “It isn’t a flowerpot.”

“This is what smashed Orton’s head in?” Cecil whistled softly, flapped Dave’s jacket over his shoulder, and put both hands under the figure. He lifted it a little, the broken edges grating. “Heavy. Whoever did it would have to be strong.” He set it down carefully and winced at Dave against the dying light. “I don’t want it to be somebody else who tells me. I want it to be you. Why would I blame myself?”

“Because you put me on television,” Dave said. “That was how the man who ditched this thing learned who I was. Smith had been—what?—an associate of his. Underfoot. A nuisance. He was trying to get him to go away, back up the coast where he came from. I think he’d given him money for the purpose but Smith used it to get drunk instead. Smith ended up talking to me in a bar, and the man saw us together, but he didn’t add it up to danger until he learned from the late news who I was and why I was in La Caleta. Then Smith became a menace.”

“When Smith called you at the motel,” Cecil said, “what did he say? Why did you really go out to his trailer?”

“He said he could tell me who killed Ben Orton,” Dave said. “I didn’t think so. I thought he was just frightened of being alone. Like I told Jerry Orton. He wanted company.”

“Whoever killed him thought he knew,” Cecil said.

“It looks that way.” Dave sighed, pulled the jacket off Cecil’s shoulder and flapped into it. “Think you’re strong enough to carry half of this?”

Cecil picked it up. “What can a person do to earn a living that doesn’t hurt anybody?”

“I’m a sententious jerk.” Dave carried the other half of the figure out through the shrill gate. “I was told that only this morning.”

“Then how about a sententious answer,” Cecil said.

“All right. Look out for that word
earn
.” … Dave hinged forward the flimsy bucket seat on the passenger side of the rental car and set the two halves of the broken figure together on the tough new carpet behind the seat. “What it probably means is
take
.” He clicked the seat back into place and untangled an arm from a hanging safety strap. “In the kinds of jobs you’d want, that’s what it’s likely to mean.”

“And you,” Cecil said.

“And I,” Dave said. “So what we do is to give, every chance we have—right? Get in.”

The figure thudded hard against the back of Cecil’s seat when Dave stopped the car suddenly at the gates in the weathered chainlink fence around the grounds of the cannery. Beyond the weedy stretch of abandoned sand, the clumsy old building lurching out into the surf, the sun laid a fiery sheen on the waves. Sandpipers, busy with their needle beaks, cast long, spindly shadows. A dozen gulls hunched at rest on the rusty cannery roof. Dave left the motor idling and got out of the car. The sun had flicked a bright reflection at him. It had come off the padlock. He lifted the lock and dropped it on its chain. When Cecil came up behind him, he said:

“This is something else I didn’t understand yesterday. Didn’t understand and should have questioned, and didn’t.”

Cecil fingered the lock. He looked along the sagging fence. He looked at Dave. “New,” he said. “And the gate’s old. Everything here is old.” He gripped the wire mesh, put his face close to it, like a kid shut out of a playground. He gazed down the broken blacktop road to the cannery loading bay. “Nobody’s used this place in years.”

“That’s what I thought. Wrong.” Dave crouched. Small purple-blue stains were on the gritty earth. He picked up a half-crushed blossom, stood, and held it out to Cecil.

“Jacaranda?” Cecil said.

“Off the shoes of the man”—Dave let the blossom fall—“who stood here to work this padlock. So he could use this place.”

“What for?” Cecil asked. “What man?”

“The one who dumped that figure in the fountain. I don’t want to tell you his name till I’m sure. The artsy-craftsy lady he sleeps with owns a gallery full of those figures. And right outside the gallery door is a jacaranda tree.” Dave tugged thoughtfully at the padlock. It was expensive, strong, and its insides would be complicated. He let it go, stepped back, and judged the fence. “As to what for—that’s what I need to know next.”

“Mona Windrow?” Cecil asked. “But Daisy said Ben Orton was sleeping with her.”

“And three’s a crowd,” Dave said. “Give me a boost.” Cecil made a stirrup of his hands, then squatted enough so Dave could set a foot in them. Dave stretched, fastened fingers in the fence, and said, “Now—straighten up.” Cecil straightened. His hat fell off. Dave lodged the toes of the canvas shoes in the mesh and carefully tugged at the barb-wire that topped the fence. It was limp with age and powdery with rust. He shifted to where he could reach one of the angled struts that held the strands. He crimped and twisted the lowest strand against the strut. It broke. So did the middle strand. He let them dangle and eased over the fence, keeping flat so as to miss the top strand. He dropped inside the fence. “Thanks,” he said. “You want to find Jerry Orton for me, please? Right away? Start at city hall. Show him that figure. Tell him where we found it. And bring him back here. On the double. Okay?”

“Okay.” Cecil picked up his hat. The slanting sun put the crosswork pattern of the fence on his puzzled face. “Only how is this supposed to get your company’s money back?”

Dave shrugged. “I must be working. Somebody’s about to get hurt.”

“Yeah.” Cecil ran the plume between his fingers and put the hat back on. “Will fingerprints still be on that thing? After all that time in the water?”

“Yes, if it matters,” Dave said. “They’ll be greasy. He runs a boat and he’s his own mechanic. And it happened right after he docked.”

S
IGNS HAD BEEN TACKED
to the cannery, but a long time ago, and the red brushwork of the warnings had almost faded out
. DANGER. CONDEMNED. UNSAFE. KEEP OUT.
He climbed warped steps to the truck loading dock. Shoreside, away from the brunt of the weather, it still felt sturdy underfoot. But its barnlike sliding door didn’t budge when he heaved at it. The overhead rollers looked rusted to their tracks. He chose the deck to the left, the one where gaps in the planks had been repaired with bright new boards. It led all the way out to the end of the long, sad building. The railing wasn’t in shape. In places it had fallen away. He leaned gingerly on it to look at the dark water below, curling and foaming around weed-hung, barnacled pilings.

He found a door. Boarded up. He went on for another twenty yards and there was a second door like the first. He tugged at one of the boards. The nailheads popped and the board came away in his hands. He swung and tossed it over the railing into the tide. The nails in the second board came away as easily. He drew back, careful where he stood, and gave the door a kick. It fell in with a rip of hinge screws in rotten wood. Dust billowed up. The door tilted and slid through a yawn in the floor and splashed below.

Gripping the doorframe, he leaned inside. The place looked vastly empty but the light was poor. Decades of salt spray had blinded the high windows. The only real light struck down through cankered holes in the roof past big, white wooden crossbeams held by bolts that had been bleeding rust for a long time. Among the wooden beams and the beams of light, swallows flickered in and out of lumpy mud nests. The twittering of the birds echoed shrill in the emptiness. Dave edged a foot around the doorframe and tried a floorboard. It felt secure. Keeping a grip on the doorframe, he put his weight on the board. It held and he let go the doorframe and was standing inside the building in the gloom, the piercing cries of the swallows above, the hiss and wash of the sea below.

He wished for the flashlight that was in the Electra, sunk on its flat tires under the Bayfront Motel. He groped his way through the dark, testing each board as he went and holding to wall studs. Something hulked up between him and the frail light. Not all of the machinery was gone. Here were banks of pipe, plate steel, gears, cogwheels, broken and drooping conveyor belts. The pale faces of gauges peered at him. He seemed to smell the reek of cooking fish again. He went a good many steps before the machinery was not beside him anymore. And it was very dark. The sea had muscle out here and the old structure shook. He began not to trust the flooring. Maybe he had guessed wrong, maybe he ought to give this up.

Then he thought the structure was shaking because something was hitting it, something solid.
Clunk
it went in the darkness.
Clunk. Clunk.
Measured, hollow, heavy. And each time, the floor shivered. He smiled grimly to himself. He saw Tyree Smith again, drunk, unsteady on his legs, under the jacaranda tree.
Where do you keep that boat of yours?
Voices, sea-washed, wind-tattered, talked about fog and tides and hauls of fish through the shiny radio on the shelf in back of Ben Orton’s desk. Dave pushed away from the half safety of the cannery wall. It was down there in the dark. Not far now, not far.

He let the muffled thudding guide him. And a tall slit of light so narrow it kept flickering out. Where doors met? He took maybe twenty steps on flooring without flaw. Then he stepped out on nothing. The surprise made him cry out. The sound went up to the metal roof and ricocheted off it, and for an instant the swallows were silent. Falls in the dark were all alike—you couldn’t judge how long they took. He expected water. It wasn’t water. He hit an ungiving horizontal surface—on his feet but off balance.

Then he struck his head.

Something prodded him roughly in the gut. He groaned and rolled away from it. It prodded him in the left kidney. He wanted to escape it and he tried to crawl. Pain burst inside his skull. He lay still. The pain slowly dulled. He touched his head and his hand came away wet and sticky. The prod was to his ribs this time and less prod than kick. He rolled over again, careful of his head now, but not able to be careful enough. The pain made him yelp. He waited for it to back off, then opened his eyes. Light slammed into them, the fierce dying light of the sky. He shut his eyes. But his other senses worked. The planks he lay on vibrated. There was the beat of an engine beneath them, the quaver of a propeller shaft. He heard water slicing off a bow, the tumble of water at a far stern. The deck lifted under him and dropped. Vomit rose in his throat. Not from the motion—he didn’t get seasick. It had to be from concussion. He couldn’t focus right but the hand he showed himself was thick with blood from his head. He panted quickly, shallowly against the nausea. He was gripped roughly under the arms. Al Franklin’s face, bearded, sunburned, was upside down above him. He hauled Dave to his feet.

“Come on, you prying son of a bitch. Off my boat and out of my goddam life.” He swung Dave around in a bear hug. Red horizon, the white superstructure of the boat, a dazzle of glass wheeled sickly. Dave sagged. Franklin staggered. “Help yourself, for Christ’s sake. This wreck won’t steer itself. I haven’t got time to fuck around with you.” The boat pitched. Spray flew up. They did a drunken waltz. The boat yawed. They came hard and together against a wooden gunwale. Franklin gripped him around the middle and tried to lift him. Very far off, Dave glimpsed shoreline, tiny La Caleta with sundown sparking off its windows. The boat plowed into a wave and shuddered. White water foamed around their legs. The scuppers sucked. Franklin staggered off balance again. Dave gripped the rail, raised himself—the pain ripping around inside his skull—and brought a foot down hard on Franklin’s instep. It was protected only by a sandal. Franklin let him go, so suddenly Dave dropped to his knees. He skidded on his knees across the wet deck and slammed up against the edge of an open hatch. Below were broken crates and bundles of packing straw. Franklin fell on Dave’s back, wrenching at him. Dave sank teeth into his fingers. Franklin clubbed him with a fist above the ear. Dave blacked out. He woke facedown in his own vomit. He turned. Franklin stood over him, long hair flying. The ship tilted and he sat down hard on the deck. Something was under Dave’s hand, a shaft of cold, wet metal. Franklin lurched to his feet and flung himself at Dave. Dave swung the crowbar at Franklin’s head. It connected. Franklin rolled with the ship and came to rest crumpled against the gunwale.

Dave dragged himself toward the wheelhouse.

“The fountain didn’t soak all the blood and hair off,” Jerry Orton said. “I could see it. And his greasy prints. I didn’t need the lab. Or you. I needed an arrest.”