Where Is Janice Gantry? (19 page)

Three blocks from the courthouse I discarded Pat Millhaus’s theory. It was not within the range and limits of Sis’s character not to let her people know she was all right. And it was not conceivable that Charlie Haywood could have wanted to or been able to restrain her forcibly. All persons are imprisoned by their own moral and ethical standards. Never, except in madness, do they step beyond their own limitations.

At quarter after four I decided to go take a look at the
Sea Queen.
It was an idle impulse. I’d never seen her close up. And I realized it might be an easier way to check ownership.

I had a choice of several marinas, but I remembered that it had been repaired previously at Jimson’s. I turned off the main road a mile north of my place and drove over to the bay front. Though it has gradually turned into a big operation,
Jimson’s retains a look of clutter, rust, decay and indifference. The sheds and bigger buildings are clustered in a haphazard way. Their big docks need new pilings. They have covered storage, both fresh and salt water. They have a good deep channel and they can haul anything up to seventy feet, run it inside on cradle and tracks and rebuild it, if you have money enough. They have the best marine engine mechanics in the area, good franchises, and a pricing policy that has made strong men weep.

On that Saturday afternoon there was the usual aimless, dogged activity you find around any big boat yard, a whining of saws and sanders, clang of engine tools being dropped on concrete, sharp odors of varnish, paint, gasoline and solvent. Owners were working on their own boats, and the yard employees were working on contract tasks.

I wandered around without anybody paying the slightest attention to me until I found the
Sea Queen.
She was at that covered dock space where repairs are made, sitting in a slip with her stern to the dock. A man in dirty khaki shorts and a blue baseball cap was fitting a new section of railing at the starboard corner of the transom. He slipped the freshly shaped piece of mahogany into place. He was a small old man with a knotted brown back.

He turned and looked at me and grinned, exposing a crying need for expensive dentistry and said, “Well now! Hayou, Sammy?”

“Hello, J. B. I thought you were in a rocking chair, living off your grandchildren.”

“That’s surely where I’d like to be. But old Jimson, he sweet talks me into working myself right to the edge of the grave, saying he can’t get people to do good work any more. And he can’t, by God. But it gives him fits how I won’t work on no production line boats. It shames me to touch one of them shoddy things. I’ll only work on boats that’re put together honest in the first place.”

“This is the Weber boat, isn’t it, J. B.?”

“Yep.” He took the piece of railing over to his work bench, sanded one end carefully, brought it back and tapped it carefully into place with a padded mallet. “Ought to do it,” he said.

“It’s a perfect match, J. B.”

“Has to be, if I do it.” He examined the bit in an electric drill, and began to drill for the screws that would hold the section in place.

“What happened to it, J. B.?”

“It was being brung into a dock at low tide, with the wind and current tricky, and the stern swung under the dock and the rail got splintered and bent all to hell, Sammy. Shame to have happen to a boat gets the care this one does.”

“Care if I go aboard and look at her?”

“Don’t matter to me none, but if that Chase fella comes back when you’re aboard, he could turn up ugly. He left when the rain started and didn’t say if he was coming back. He don’t say much of anything. Your daddy, he was a quiet man, but not the same way. Your daddy liked other folks to be talking, but Chase don’t want much to do with the human race, it looks like. Its a relief to have him gone for a while. He watches every damn move I make.”

I went aboard. It was fifty-four feet of luxury and had every navigation aid known except radar. It was equipped with air conditioning and television and a handsome flying bridge. It took me about two minutes to find the log and the papers. There are very few logical places to keep such items aboard any boat. The listed owner was Starr Development. I checked below fast and furtive as a thief. When I stepped back onto the deck, I knew what was wrong with the
Sea Queen.
The Webers had been using her for over four years. But they’d left no mark on her. There were some clothes, toilet articles, liquor and food stowed neatly aboard, and there was an oversize bunk in the master stateroom neatly
made up, but it looked as though they had used it for four weeks rather than four years. And only obsessive maintenance could have kept the below decks and topsides in such perfect and shining condition.

J. B. was countersinking brass screws into the new section of rail. “Good shape, isn’t she?”

“The best.”

“Funny thing, Sammy. This much boat is for cruising. Marathon, Nassau, all over hell and gone. They use it often, but they don’t go no place. Hell, the way they use it, they could get along with that little punkin seed you got.”

“Leave my boat out of this, old man.”

A battered yellow motor scooter chugged along the dock area toward us. “You got off her just in time, Sammy,” J. B. muttered.

The man parked the scooter on its brace and walked over without glancing at either of us. He walked directly to the section of rail, ran the palm of his hand across the two joinings, bent to inspect it inch by inch.

He made a grunting sound which I thought was supposed to express approval. “Sure it’s seasoned good?” he asked J. B.

“It’s top grade.”

“I’ll do the finishing on it myself.”

“When you come to rubbing it down between coats, you’d best use …”

“I know how.” It wasn’t said with irritation or anger. It was said to inform J. B. that no help was needed. “Set those last couple screws and I’ll take her along now.”

“It’s a nice craft,” I said amiably.

He turned and gave me one quick glance of appraisal and dismissal. He was a solidly-built man in his forties with a face like carved dark stone, with weather wrinkles that turned his eyes to bright blue slits. He had a look of competence, self-sufficiency. He turned away without an answer and I
knew he would never answer the casual comment. He did not need conversation with strangers. If I were going to pry him open, it would have to be with some other method.

“Too damn nice,” I said with manufactured indignation, “for some clown to bash her into a dock. That’s what keeps the yards going, the people that don’t know how to handle a boat.” I would have thought he wasn’t hearing a word if I hadn’t seen the back of his neck slowly deepening in color.

“When they got enough money they don’t have to bash their boats up themselves,” I said. “They can hire some guy to do it for them.”

That brought him around to face me, his eyes more slitted than before, his jaw muscles working, brown fists clenched. “And just what kind of a license do you hold, mister?”

“I don’t hold any. But I’ve been handling boats since I was four years old and I never shoved one half under a dock yet, friend.”

“Shove off, mister.”

“J. B., this comedy captain is talking rough to me. Friend of yours?”

“Let’s not have any fussing going on,” J. B. said.

“If a man racks up a boat he ought to be man enough to admit it.”

Captain Stan Chase took a slow step toward me. “I didn’t damage the boat.”

“What got to it? Big termites maybe?”

“I wasn’t aboard.”

It startled me. “I thought you ran this Matthews for the Webers.”

“I do. And when I do, mister, nothing happens to it. Nothing!”

“Then it looks like you should run it all the time, friend.”

“I always have. Except this one time.”

I could sense that the injury to the boat was as painful to
him as a wound in his own flesh. This was basically a shy man, a quiet man, perhaps a good man.

“It’s too much boat for an amateur,” I said.

“He’s run it a lot when I’ve been aboard. He knows how to handle it pretty good. But not at night. It’s too tricky at night. He shouldn’t have tried it.”

“Good as new,” J. B. said, “once you put the finish on it.” He patted the rail. “You’re all set now, Captain.”

“If you didn’t think he could handle it,” I said, “why didn’t you go along?”

For several long seconds I thought he wasn’t going to answer. “I wasn’t even there,” he said. He spat down into the shadowy green water of the bay. “They sent me up to Tampa to meet her sister coming in on a night flight. But she wasn’t on that flight. She didn’t get in until Wednesday. They had their wires crossed.”

“Last Monday night?” I asked.

“Yes. So what?”

I shrugged. There was more that I wanted to ask. But I couldn’t go any further without making him suspicious. Why was he sent instead of Mahler? At what time did they ask him to leave?

He spread a length of tarp and wheeled his motor scooter aboard and laid it down gently on the tarp. J.B. and I helped with the lines. He eased the
Sea Queen
expertly out of the slip, rounded the Jimson marker and took her out to the main channel and turned south toward her home berth.

“Bet he hasn’t talked that much in a full year,” J. B. said, stowing his tools. “You stung him some, Sammy.”

“I tried to.”

“What good did it do?”

“I’ve just got a mean nature, J. B.”

“Well, if you have, you surely got the looks to go with it.”

*   *   *

I went home and showered and stretched out on my bed. The rain had brought the toads out and they were in good voice. Bugs, mourning doves and mocking birds were trying to drown them out. I felt tired but not sleepy. When the phone rang it was D. Ackley Bush.

“Dear boy, thank you so much for returning the shell, but what made you think you could avoid giving me a progress report?”

“Wouldn’t you rather wait for a complete story?”

“Nonsense! You have been seen in the company of a young and lovely stranger. Who is she?”

“Sort of a sister of Mrs. Weber’s, Ack. The same one who spent two weeks visiting her last summer.”

“And I didn’t know?”

“Apparently not.”

“I often wonder if one can become senile without being terrible aware of it, Samuel.”

“Your very best friends wouldn’t tell you.”

“Why are you so elusive, my boy? Is the sister succumbing to those charms I have never been able to perceive?”

“We have become buddies.”

“Which is, of course, a much more effective way of learning all the secrets of the Weber household. Perhaps you have the conspiratorial knack, Samuel.”

“Me? I’m just dating a fine item.”

“Come and tell me all you’ve learned, dear boy.”

“I haven’t learned a thing that would interest you.”

“I can be very interested by very minor things. And how would you know what fragments of information are significant. You need to enlist a better mind than yours to sort out all the bits and pieces.”

“Later on, Ack. Maybe. But not yet.”

“You are very stubborn.”

“I’ll be in touch, later on.”

I heard him sigh. “I know. Don’t phone me; I’ll phone you.”

By three minutes after nine I was parked in a very dark place with my arms around Peggy Varden, and for that little space of time the world made very good sense. She wanted the same kind of evening as before, which showed superb judgment.

She made her report as we were heading for the cottage. “Absolutely nothing today, Sam. A perfect empty blah. Char has been out of circulation most of the day. She fell last night, somehow, and hurt her face. Her left eye is puffed almost shut and she feels miserable.”

“Maurice put the slug on her.”

“I’d like to think so, but they don’t ever get that … emotional.”

I told her about LeRoy’s report of the incident. She was astonished.

“It
must
be true! Golly, Sam, they must be cracking up.”

I gave her all the rest of it after we were on my porch with the lights adjusted, music playing, tall drinks in hand. I told her all I could remember about the conversations I’d had with Cal McAllen, Pat Millhaus, Captain Stan Chase.

“When I heard the boat coming I went out. I helped a little with the lines, but he was so sour about it I gave up. He likes to do everything himself. He rigged a canvas thing over the railing and he was working out there until dark, refinishing the new part.”

“Now I’ve got some specific things I want you to find out, Peggy. I don’t know if you can. But don’t press if you run into a block. Okay?”

“Okay. No pressing.”

“I’d like to know just when Chase was told to go to Tampa. I think Sis made that phone call at about eight-thirty, maybe a few minutes later. If they had an airline timetable in the house …”

“I know they do. I’ve seen one.”

“Good. Then, if they wanted Chase out of the way, they could look up a likely flight and send Chase up there in the Lincoln to meet it. And he would have gotten his orders
after
Sis talked to Charity. Now I wonder if the Mahlers would be sent anywhere too.”

“But they wouldn’t have to be.”

“Why not?”

“They’re usually through by eight-thirty, Sam, and they hole up in their own apartment beyond the garage. Herman is getting a little bit deaf. They keep the television on loud, and I do mean loud. Their draperies are always pulled shut, and besides, their windows face north. Once they’re on their own time, they never come back into the main part of the house, or even set foot outside.”

“And that would leave Sis and Charlie alone with the Webers and the two house guests.”

“I don’t like this kind of … hinting,” she said in a very small voice.

“Not hinting. Thinking out loud. But the direction I’m going makes me feel sick.”

She came over to my chair. “Make a lap. The way you sound, Sam, I want arms around me, if you’re going to keep on talking.”

I took her onto my lap and held her snug. “You’ve guessed what I have to say, Peggy. Two people and a small car are missing. That’s a big boat. It was taken out on that same Monday night. A section of rail was smashed.”