Wild (13 page)

It began to mist more thickly. A wind came in from the Gulf of Mexico, full of salt, fanning the land. I had a stitch in my side like a rusty knife scraping the muscles of my heart, and I thought of Ivor Hendrix, and of the long ago when we’d known each other, and of the years between—and now.

In every way, Ivor was still more than I could ever have imagined she might have been. You weren’t supposed to be able to go back to that first dream—she was only supposed to be a ghost that haunted your lonelier nights.

Something attained, yet never attainable.

Held, yet never again beheld.

Only you had to hope, because without hope, there was nothing.

I cornered fast at a light and drove across town to the Vista Groves Hotel, hoping.

As I
WALKED
down the hall toward Ivor Hendrix’s room, I suddenly didn’t want to look inside the door. It was as if I knew she would be in there, bug-eyed and purple-faced. Or spread across the bed, naked, with a knife sticking in her back.

I rapped lightly. “Ivor?”

She didn’t answer.

The door was locked. I backed off, set my heel and let the door have it brutally, just under the lock. The door snapped with shuddering crack, lashed open, back against the inside wall.

You know you’re right, you hope you’re not right.

It’s like getting hit twice as hard the second time, in the same place as the first.

She was gone. Not just dead. Gone.

The room looked as if it had been passed through a threshing machine. It was demolished.

I had done all this by myself.

I closed the door, looked around. Whoever they were, they had gotten to her at last. The place had been picked apart with destructive meticulousness. They had been after something. What?

Elk Crafford’s name was a tantalizing whisper. I had told him where she was. If he had harmed her, I would harm him, thoroughly, completely. Ivor Hendrix had gotten to me in her own strangely cool way.

The room was dim, lighted only by a bed lamp. I checked the bathroom. The top was off the water tank on the toilet. The medicine chest had been excavated, the floor littered with smashed bottles, tubes and boxes, leftovers from former tenants.

In the other room, the mattress had been knifed and sliced; stuffing oozed out, bulging among twisted steel springs. Bureau and dressing-table drawers were yanked out, smashed, cleaned. The carpet had been torn up. The shades were ripped from the windows. Curtains had been pulled down.

It had become darker outside. Small rain ticked against the windows. I moved to the wall, switched on the overhead light. It came on brightly. I stared at the big round white globe, stared at a dark elongated shadow.

The high ceiling was faintly stained. Coolness warped along the nape of my neck.

It had been in the movie,
The Lost Weekend
, where Don Birnam hid his whisky up there. Only how would I reach the globe?

How had she reached it? I could be wrong.

I stood on the foot of the bed. Flailing the air with my hand, I was still five feet from the light. The long shape of Ivor Hendrix’s cylindrical white purse was quite plain to me now.

I leaped high off the bed, reaching, and missed, thundering to the floor. A brass candlestick lay on the torn carpet, knocked from a shelf. I reached for it, tossed it straight up at the overhead light and ducked.

Glass cracked and showered down. It tinkled and crashed on the floor. I watched her purse strike the floor and bounce. Something jumped out of the purse, bounding across the room. Whatever it was nestled up against the baseboard by the door.

I listened. There was no sound from the hall.

I went over to the baseboard and picked up the bundle of what looked like small notebooks, held together with a narrow pink garter.

I frowned, stripped the garter off, and shuffled through flat small tan envelopes. I opened one and looked at it, knowing alread what they were.

Bank books.

The one I had opened was issued to a woman. Name of Gertrude Paulding. Fort Myers.

It was a new account. I checked the deposit. One thousand, eight hundred.

I looked at another.

Ivor Heira. Lincoln Trust, Hibiscus City, Florida. One thousand, two hundred.

Interested, I opened another bank book. They were very neat, clean, brand-new bank books. They seemed to be all savings accounts. Of course, stupid of me. There was no chance overlooking the interest accumulate.

Henrietta A. Zonders. Key West. Thirty-two thousand.

Another: Loretta Stitskin. West Palm Beach. Fifteen thousand.

Getting a bit bold.

Charlotte Debra Westmark. Miami. Thirty-two thousand.

Babette Jardin. Gainesville. Seventeen thousand.

She got around a lot while she was visiting dear Auntie Liz, up in Orlando. I went over and sat on the ragged mattress, on the bed, and continued with my research. As I opened each bank book, crisply untouched, my heart rocked faintly, and I perspired slightly, and I wanted to throw up.

Mary Fuchs. Jacksonville. Nine thousand.

I hurled that one savagely across the room.

Doubtless playing her little games to while away the wearisome days of travel fatigue.

Alice Botkins Somersall. Tampa. Forty-four thousand.

Grace Golden. Planter’s Trust, Orange Corners. Four thousand.

Aileen Fielding Singer. Probably a sewing machine store across the street, there in Bradenton. Twenty-three thousand.

Helene Demmonds Dartell. Miami. Fifty-six thousand.

“I’m so sorry I forgot to tell you, Lee. We can phone Aunt Liz right now, while I’m here. She’ll verify that I asked her not to tell anyone I was there.”

They call it
brass
.

Barbara Penny. Fort Lauderdale. Thirty-three thousand.

Virginia Allsworth Kring. Boca Raton. Twenty-one thousand.

Vicki Amont. Miami. Thirteen thousand. Each time she was in Miami, she became faintly continental,
chic, or
downright supercilious in her choice of names.

Ruth Mary Allswell. Damned confident. St. Petersburg. Forty-three thousand.

Mimi Loveall. Venice. One thousand, two hundred.

Betty Smythe. De Land. Six thousand.

Marie Fitz-Simmons. Sarasota. Thirty-six thousand.

Margaret Dee Switz. She had glanced at her watch. Pahokee. Twelve thousand.

Nineteen different banks. Over four hundred thousand dollars. All of Florida searching desperately for that money. All of Florida well covered with it.

I stood up, retrieved the bank book I’d hurled across the room. I bundled them neatly together again, snapped the snappy pink garter around them, and dropped them into my pocket—or rather, stuffed them.

I checked her purse. I found a small silver bottle opener from the Mingo Club, in the shape of a dancing girl. Three pencil stubs, well worn with figuring the take, probably. Two lipsticks. A broken jade comb. A broken mirror. Two knotted handkerchiefs, one with three pennies tied in it. Some scraps of paper. A bent cigarette covered with her lipstick. A swizzle stick from some joint called The Silver Lagoon. A ribbon, a hank of hair….

I quit. I dropped the purse and got out of there.

I wasn’t sick. I was crazy.

I
N THE CAR
, I looked at the hound. He opened one eye, yakked softly, wagged his tail, gaped with a crack, miffed and maffed, then closed the eye and went to sleep again. He snored faintly.

I thought back on things she had told me. The things ticked off in my mind like the fond sound of breaking pretzel sticks. Sometimes that’s how it is, when it’s raining outside, and growing dark, and you’re carrying nineteen bank books in your pocket.

I knew what I‘d been doing all this for. Getting myself fouled up and ready for the royal screwing. The one with the luscious auburn hair and the sad, winning smile, and the troublesome skirts, and the faintly-slanted dark blue eyes that could look at you and make you lose sleep.

That’s who I’d been doing it for.

My jaws ached with keeping my teeth clamped together so I wouldn’t yell.

I started the engine and drove across town without seeing a single cop.

I saw her in my mind’s eye. Running around Florida, popping into banks to start just one more savings account.

Planning for the future.

• • •

The pink Cadillac was nowhere to be seen at the Canawlside Drive address. I told the hound to stick where he was and ran across the lawn to the front porch.

The door chimes chimed delicately. A drape had been drawn across the entrance glass panels.

I left the porch after a moment, went around the side of the house, through dipping oleanders, jumping azealea bushes. I passed a clump of punk trees and stepped onto a broad patio. Half of it was enclosed by a screen. An archway led into the house. It was open. More glass doors.

Inside, I moved fast through the house. Nobody in the living room. Somebody had been doing some heavy drinking at the bar. Several bottles stood on the bar, opened; brandy and gin, mostly. Melting ice cubes were scattered across the thick carpet. The cubes weren’t far gone, indicating someone had been here shortly before.

I went upstairs. The rooms were debatable reading material, but deserted of human life.

Door chimes rang. Inside the house, the sound of the chimes was dreamy. They rang everywhere, musical and sweet The sound made me angrier than I was. I tried not to let it.

As I reached the head of the stairs, the chimes ceased. I ran fast along the broad landing on deep carpeting. At a large amber glass window in an arched alcove at the front of the house, I stopped, looked out.

It was the big guy, watermelon-puss; the same handler of skull-crushing .45's I’d had dealings with. Seeing him made my cracked knuckle ache. He was moving down across the lawn toward the curb.

The yellow Dodge sedan I’d swiped was parked down past the boundary of the Crafford lot. He didn’t give it a second glance. I saw nothing of the maroon Olds.

The guy opened the door and slid under the wheel of a light gray forty-nine two-door Ford sedan. For a moment I felt cool, then remembered Ivor Hendrix telling me about a similar car. I recalled something else and looked at the right front wheel of the Ford. The hubcap was missing.

I ran hard for the stairs, took them close to headlong, and struck the marble hall sliding. I ran for the front doorway. I got the first of the big glass doors swung open in time to see outside through a crack in the drawn drapes. The Ford pulled speeding away from the curb.

Outside, I made the Dodge, got it underway. I trailed in the direction the Ford had gone. It was no dice. He had flown. I drove around the nearby blocks, but saw nothing.

It was helplessness I felt now. The anger was turned against myself, precipitating bitterness and despair. It was as if the gods had strained all the fine, subtle futilities of the world through their suddenly partial sieve and packaged them for me, covered with godly gall, the very bitterest of all.

Then I thought of the dead. The late dead of my own concern—Yonkers, Ailings—and Vince Gamba. And they, too, were turned on the spit of futility, skull-grinning midst the ferocity of vanquished desires.

So she could have reasons too. Not just because it was four hundred thousand dollars. You could try to understand that, or you could let it go.

There was little left that wasn’t obvious to me, now. The one thing I couldn’t understand was how to dig myself free of this mess.

Because I could taste the earth against my teeth.

I drove toward Calcutta Shores.

• • •

The Yacht Club was deserted in the rain. The striped umbrellas on the lawn were folded down like the self-consciously lidded eyes of a whore’s mother who’d met a priest in the street. Beyond the gently streaming windows of the clubhouse I heard the melancholy tink and boop of ginned-up piano.

I walked along the pier until I reached the
Carol
.

“Knew you’d get here.”

Elk Crafford stood up there on the bow against the dark pall of sky over Tampa Bay. He held a bottle in one hand and a shotgun in the other. His eyes were menacing.

“You come up here,” he said.

He still wore the white dinner jacket, but with no shirt now, and a pair of red-striped pajama pants. He looked as if he’d been used as a sea-anchor on the Queen Elizabeth.

“You don’t need that gun,” I said.

“Hurry up,” he said.

I walked up the gangplank. He was very drunk.

“Say I don’t need this gun?” he said. “Don’t I, really? You trying to tell me I don’t need this gun?”

I stood four feet from him on the deck.

I said, “Yes. That’s right.”

His mouth sagged, slaver running from one corner. He cradled the gun in his left arm. His finger was on the trigger. It was an automatic. He dangled the bottle from his other hand by the neck, like a slain animal. Gravity on the bottle threatened to tip him over. He was a thoroughly practiced drunk, probably carrying six times the amount of alcohol an average man could stand up with.

“Oh, hell,” he said. He turned away. He took the shotgun in a backswing and hurled it straight up and out over the cabin of the
Carol
. I heard it splash in the bay.

My voice was distant. “Where’s Ivor Hendrix?”

He looked at me with hair falling in his eyes. “How hell do I know?”

I felt if I touched him I would kill him.

I shouted at him. “Where is she!”

He stared.

“You son-of-a-bitch,” I said. “I told you where she was. She’s gone. You’re the only one who knew. I found the key to the padlock right on the deck where you’re standing.”

His head moved slowly back and forth. If he was acting, he deserved a stage. There was a sharp pain in my stomach; the old ulcer starting in again. I tried hard not to step in and hit him.

“Where’s your wife?” I heard myself say.

He pitched his head back and roared with angry laughter. His face got red. The veins choked with blood. The eyes bugged redly, like bleeding thumbs. He staggered violently backward, brought himself up sharply against the cabin. Something fell and broke inside.

“Thought I would fall, didn’t you?”

His articulation was good.

“I don’t care if you fall overboard and drown. Not at all.”

“Yes,” he said. “That’s the right answer to that. Anybody would give me that answer.”

He drank moistly from the bottle. Some of it ran down his chin. He let his arm droop again. Whisky sloshed onto the deck.

“What key?” he said. “What padlock?”

“Where did your wife go?”

“You want a lay? That it?”

I said nothing.

He dropped his chin on his chest, watching me all the while.

“She’s not here,” he said.

“Not home, either.”

“Went downtown. Crazy wild insane bitch. I love her.” He looked at me. Tears sprang to his eyes. “I love her, you hear?” He wiped the tears with the back of the hand holding the bottle. Whisky spilled. “Crazy, isn’t it?”

“It’s understandable.”

He groaned quietly. “Don’t feed me any of that goddam crap.”

“She went downtown?”

He nodded, pointed, dropped the bottle. It smashed. Whisky streamed around the deck, reeking pungently. He stared at the puddle.

“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “Got eight cases aboard. Matter at all.”

“Why do you have the gun?” I said. “Who were you expecting?”

“Christ,” he said. “I worked myself up to it. I thought I would have it out with him.”

He turned and fumbled along the cabin to the companionway, and fell through the hatch. He didn’t touch a step. He landed thickly. I looked down. He lay down there in a crumpled position, softly cursing. As I watched, he came to his knees, crawled to a bunk, pulled himself up and sat there with his head in his hands, his elbows resting on his knees.

I went down and looked at him. Just stood and looked at him.

He couldn’t keep his elbows balanced on his knees. They wobbled and slipped off. He would carefully place them back each time. They would slip, and his head jerked down. He gave that up. He sat there, hanging out over the bunk like the broken limb of a once-sturdy tree.

“Have it out with whom?” I said.

“Whom-diddy-whom-whom—whom—
whom!”
he said. “Bull-crap,” he said. He smiled unhappily at the deck.

“Have it out with whom?” I said.

“Bull-crap,” he said. “Ivor vanished,” he said. “Can’t see me for dust, anyway, no-how. Not really. Love her. Love two women. How you love two women? Sisters. One a whore and the other a—” He ceased.

“A what?”

“A lovely. A love. She gone anyway. ‘Oh, Elk,’ she say. ‘You are just a darling big old bear.’ She said that and I ‘dore her, the ground she walks on—all that crap. Love wife, too.”

“You’re getting pretty wild. Maybe you need a drink.”

“Prolly so.”

“I just came from your house,” I said. “As I was leaving, a gray forty-nine Ford sedan drove up. Had a missing hubcap on the right front wheel. Anybody you know drive a car like that?”

“Sure.”

“Who?”

“Me.”

Maybe I was too tired. I stared at him. I felt crazier than usual.

“You sure it might be your car?”

“Positive,” he said. “It
is
my car. Couldn’t be anybody else’s car but mine. How many gray forty-nine Fords have missing hubcaps right front wheel?” He waved his hand and nearly fell off the bunk. “If came to my home, then’s mine car. Isn’t that logical?”

“Anything could be logical right now,” I said. “Who drives it mostly?”

“Me. I drive it mostly. In fact, nobody else but me drives it. It keep it over at Vine Tree, use it as a fishing boat, I mean, fishing car. You know, lakes and rivers, rivers and lakes. Like to fish. By God, I think I’ll go fishing. Whyn’t you come fishing with me? We could….”

I said loudly, “Shut up!” I was nervous. I could hardly control my voice. I said as quietly as I could, “What’s this Vine Tree you mentioned?” I could remember Ivor Hendrix saying those words over the phone on this boat. Now he was saying them. She’d denied the words.

“My other place,” he said. “North side town. Call it Vine Tree, because there’s a big old tree with a vine hanging on it.” He started to laugh, belched instead. “Stomach burns,” he said. “Not eat enough. Reason.”

“Did you talk with Ivor on the phone this morning, when she was here on your boat?”

“Nah. She wouldn’t talk with me. I let her be.”

“Did you talk with her this morning? Try and remember. Did you talk with her and maybe mention Vine Tree?”

“No. Never, not me. Memory like elephant.”

She had told me she’d been talking with Elk.

“Listen,” I said. “Did you go down to see her at the Vista Groves Hotel? Where I told you she was?”

“No. Was—but I got drunk instead.”

“Did you tell anybody where she was?”

“Don’t think so. You asked me not to.”

“But did you maybe tell somebody?”

“Don’t think so.” He shrugged. “Might’ve.”

I was mad as hell now. The son-of-a-bitch sat there grinning and reeling and belching on the bunk.

“She’s gone,” I said. I said it very carefully. “She was taken away. By force.” I tried to play on this great goddamned love of his that he claimed he had for her. “The room was wrecked.”

He came reeling to his feet, lurched around, plowed into me, and fell down. He crawled around, then got back on the bunk and sat.

“Who did you tell?” I said.

I thought he would cry. “I don’t know. Honest, God.”

“Where’s Vine Tree?”

He gave me the address in the north side of town.

I said, “Try to remember if you told somebody about where she was. Try, for hell’s sake!”

He lurched to his feet and stood as solid as a tree. He shouted, “How do I know? I don’t know. Leave me alone, God damn it I can’t be trusted when I drink. The hell with it.” He turned and crashed to the other side of the cabin. He clawed into a cupboard and came out with a bottle of whisky. He turned to me, digging at the tape around the cap of the bottle.

“Get to hell off my boat. Insult me, you bastard. Go! I’m going sail Mexico today. Go fish off banks.”

I watched him. Tears welled thickly in his eyes. He tore the tape off the bottle and fumbled with the cap. He got that off. It rattled on the deck. He guzzled from the bottle. Whisky streamed down his chest and splashed on his feet.

He shouted, “Sail Mexico!”

I shouted back at him.
“Bon voyage!”

I got out of there. As I reached the lawn at the end of the pier, I paused and looked back. Elk Crafford was reeling around on the pier, untying lines and heaving them at the
Carol
. He leaped up the gangplank. The schooner eased away from the pier on a swell. The gangplank gave way. He caught the rail, slung himself up onto the deck.

I turned for my car, stopped, then ran in a long diagonal, off across the yacht club lawn. A police cruiser nosed into the parking area. Probably this was a regular check-point for me. I cut out around the clubhouse, climbed a wire fence, ran through bushes to the yellow Dodge. I had parked it outside in the street.

I was scared now, and I didn’t like it.

I made the car, and drove off toward the north side of town.