Dead in the Water (6 page)

"Kind of," she said.

"And Charles Murray was along because Doctor Pardoe had found something important."

"Very important." She stood up and looked at me as if she were trying to guess my weight. Then she flipped up the mattress and took out an envelope, a flat manila envelope about half the size of an ordinary sheet of paper. I looked at her in amazement. She may have been bright as a star in her own field, but she was a babe in the woods at hiding things. It would have taken a professional literally two seconds to find something under the mattress.

She handed the envelope to me. It had no address but was stamped with the letterhead of the Straiton Company.

She said, "I may be wrong, but I have a feeling I can trust you."

I skipped any wisecracks. "Yes," I said. I tapped the envelope with one finger. It was rigid, as if something firmer than sheets of paper were in there.

I took out my notebook in its leather binder. Between the backing and the pages that logged the repetitiveness of my days at Murphy's Harbour I had a couple of property tags. I took one out and wrote her name on the top, then "One manila envelope, sealed" on it, signed it, and handed her the duplicate.

She looked at me, mystified. "Is this necessary?"

"It's your insurance", I told her.

She folded the slip and I made a motion to fold the envelope, not following through, which was fortunate because she stopped me instantly. "It has to be kept flat. That's vital."

"Okay." I opened two buttons on my shirt and tucked the envelope inside. "Fair enough?"

She nodded.

"Now, I'd like to phone Straiton Chemicals and find out who they have on staff who lives up here in the summer," I told her.

She stiffened. "Don't do that," she said.

"What would you propose instead?"

She wrung her hands. Only once in my whole life had I seen anyone else do that. It was a Jewish factory owner, the night plant burned down. I had always thought it was an affectation, until now. "Please," she begged, dragging the syllable out four times its length. "Please don't. You may be putting someone into terrible danger."

I lost patience. "This is getting ridiculous. I've got one man dead, two more missing, and you're playing your damn silly games as if none of it mattered."

She pressed her hands together and calmed herself, letting the tension leak out of her fingertips. It looked like a yoga trick. "I promise you that if I haven't heard from Doctor Pardoe by this afternoon, I'll tell you," she said.

I tried a little toughness. "What good will that be if he's in the water, bobbing down to the lock like Charlie Murray?"

She looked at me with horror widening her eyes, then she matched me, brutality for brutality. "Then it won't make a damn bit of difference, will it?" she said.

She had me. "Mazel tov," I said and walked out of the door.

I went to the motel's office and got myself a ride back down Winslow's place, where my boat was tied. Ross still wasn't back, and Sissie Lowrie was busy selling hamburgers by herself. I let myself into the back room and telephoned Straiton Chemicals in New York. The only guy on duty was a scientist who acted snotty when I got through to him on the night line. He didn't have any information. He snapped at me in the way New Yorkers have. I hung up and called again, this time to the police in Manhattan. The desk man was just as snotty. It was a hot afternoon and I guessed the inhabitants of his island were cutting one another up. He had very little time to waste on an out-of-town policeman, even a chief. I bullied him a little and he finally put me through to the right precinct. They had one number for Straiton Chemicals, the home number of one of their executives, in case the office was found open at night. The phone rang twenty-seven times. I gave up and called my own office to see if any more cadavers had floated own to the dock. The office was empty. Murphy was at home where the extension phone rings when the office is vacant. His wife answered and told me that nothing more had happened.

That left me with nothing else to do but try the waterway. If Winslow and his passengers had gone far upstream they must have passed through the narrows. Assuming that the others had not drowned, they must have come to ground there where the waterway narrows to forty yards. On one side is the mainland, on the other an island that reaches almost to the mainland the other way, leaving a gap of only twenty yards at one end. If they had drowned, their bodies would be there, in the cattails.

I started the motor and tooled off upstream toward the arrows. There were no cottages on the island. It was all swamp, a few drowned trees and a few cedars and the occasional rock. Other than that, it was a desert island, soggy and useless. I headed for the navigable gap between the island and the west shore, not sure what I was looking for but prepared to swat mosquitoes and cruise the reed beds, looking for the floaters.

I was close enough to congratulate myself on having an orderly mind when I saw the flash. It was almost an accident, sudden pinprick of light. I blinked and slowed the motor, turning toward it. It was halfway along the island, on the downstream side. I grinned. This was it. The other two guys had gone to shore for some reason and been stranded when the boat floated away. I eased the motor up a little and nosed toward the nearest rock.

I thought the men would be there, Ross Winslow, burly and foul mouthed, and the mysterious Pardoe, citified and elegant, face swollen up with mosquito bites, shouldering one another aside in their rush to get into the boat. They didn't appear. But knew I had seen that flashing.

The hair on the back of my neck began to prickle, the way used to on night patrol in Nam. I wished Sam was here to bound ashore and prod through the debris of drowned trees to find them. But he was back at the funeral parlor with Murphy.

I cupped my hands and shouted, "Hello!"

The sound died away, soaked up in the bush.

The mosquitoes found me and I fanned my face a couple of times and shouted again, quieter this time, feeling foolish. There was a pause of about thirty seconds, filled with the viciousness of the mosquitoes humming and the slack-string grumphing of a bullfrog. Then I heard the voice. Quiet, weak, called out, "Help me," very faintly.

I climbed over the prow of the boat and tied the bowline to root. "Keep calling and I'll find you."

The same voice called "Over here," faint and weak again. I swore once and then plunged ahead through the five-foot-high tangle of fallen trees and wild raspberry canes. The mosquitoes filled my eyes and ears with their noise and their joyful biting at my bare face. My feet sank ankle deep in the rich sedimentary mud, black and stinking. Swearing out loud now, I kept on, toward the place the voice had come from. This had better be important, not some fool with a bent for practical jokes.

Ahead of me was the last obstacle, a toppled tree, covered with green mossy slime. I pulled myself over it, crusting my uniform with green filth. I was angry. This didn't make sense, none of it.

There was nobody behind the tree, but there was a trail, broken canes and boot marks drying on the boles of other fallen trees, leading away to my right. I scrambled back on the tree and looked around. Nothing moved. And then behind me I heard the burble of an outboard motor.
My
goddamn outboard motor.

I dived back the way I had come, tearing through the growth as fast as I could move, but I was too late. I reached the shore in time to see my boat fifty feet offshore, its stern deep in the water as some unseen person sitting low in the boat cranked the outboard up to full speed.

My hand dropped to my gun. I drew it and aimed with both hands, but as I did so I saw a sailboat tacking down the channel, out where my bullet would end up if I missed.

The realization stopped me cold. I was no killer. I let the gun sink back into the leather and strained my eyes to see if I could make out the person in the boat. He didn't raise his head until he was a hundred yards out, too far for me to be sure whether his hair was gray or blond.

I swore again in a low savage monologue, taking time out to swat the mosquitoes away from my face. As I watched, the boat made a long left turn and headed north, through the arrows. That drove even the mosquitoes out of my thoughts. Ross Winslow was in the boat, it figured he would have headed down to his place. The man there had to be Pardoe. It had to be.

It took me about twenty minutes to attract the attention of the people in the sailboat, and then another ten for them to come up close enough for me to jump aboard. They were startled. You don't expect stinking chiefs of police to come out of the undergrowth in mid-channel islands. I spun them a story about having been put ashore to look for a missing kid and my relief being late. They probably didn't believe me, but least it saved the embarrassment of telling them the truth. I sure didn't want that getting around the district.

In midlake I managed to transfer to another boat, a power boat that dropped me at the dock of my house. The girl who as driving it was a dumb, big-busted blonde who snapped gum all the time and kept looking at me and sniggering. I sat there grinning like a stupefied saint and watching how the wonders of her front stretched her T-shirt and made nonsense out of the words on it. "Lone Pine Lodge" became "one Pin odg" under the torture. I thanked her and went into the house to change into clean clothes.

The mirror had funny news for me. The bug bites around my eyes and under my chin had puffed up. I looked like an overweight Rod Steiger who'd just gone three rounds with Ali.

When I took off my shirt the envelope that Angela Masters had given me was stuck to my skin with sweat. I pulled it away and looked at it carefully. This was the key. I stood there for a moment, debating whether to open it up. But I didn't. Rules are rules. It had been handed to me sealed. I would let it stay at way until I visited her again in a little while. After that, if there was no help from her, I'd open it up and see if it gave me any answers. I put on my last clean shirt and spare pair of pants, pushing the envelope back inside my shirt.

Then I called Murphy at the station to tell him about the missing boat. He wanted to know if I thought Ross Winslow had taken it, and I told him I didn't know. I told him to call the locks at both ends of our stretch of water and tell them to keep a lookout for the boat. He had the license number with him at the office. If the boat turned up they were to keep the lock half full, playing dumb while I came up there and arrested the guy in it. Times like this I wished I had at least one other fit man to help me. The City Department would have put a man at each lock and that would have been the end of that worry. For me it was yet another juggled ball in the air.

I bundled up my dirty clothes after calling Murphy and walked down to Main Street to leave them at the cleaners. He's a smiling old Chinese who likes me because I have a few words of Mandarin. As a favor he promised to have them ready for the morning. Then I picked up the car from the marina and went to the office. Murphy was typing. Sam was lying on the floor. He sat up when I came in and Murphy told him "Okay, Sam, go to Reid." He bounded over like a kid let out of school. I rolled him over and bumped his chest while he squirmed with delight. I wondered for the hundredth time whether it was possible to get that kind of loyalty from a human being.

After a moment I straightened up, hung up the car keys, and sat on the stool behind the counter. "This is a lot more complicated than it looks," I said. "This Pardoe has something big to discuss with somebody here. He brings up a bodyguard and the bodyguard gets himself killed. Pardoe goes missing, so does Ross Winslow, and so does the police boat. And we still don't know who Pardoe was trying to see or what he was here see him about anyway."

Murphy shrugged. "Must be somebody who's up here on vacation; that's all I can think."

"Yeah, me too. So what we have to do is ring everyone at any of the lodges and see if they have any Americans staying with them, people from New York for openers."

"What if the guy's got a place of his own here?"

"You'd already know who he was," I said simply.

His grin dug quick trenches in his craggy old face. "You got a lot of faith in my memory. There must be fifty Americans got places here."

"Try 'em all," I said. "Anything else happen while I was out losing the boat?"

He thought a moment. "Oh yeah, that girl was in, the one from the funeral parlor."

I wondered why he hadn't told me first. "When?" was all I asked.

"Just after you phoned. Said you had some property of hers. I told her you hadn't left it here. She said she'd come back."

"Great," I said irritably. "Why didn't you ask her to hang on for me?"

Murphy looked wary. I don't often bite his head off, anybody's head for that matter. "I suggested that. She said she couldn't."

"Did she say anything else?"

He looked thoughtful, then shook his head. "Nothing else. But it was funny, ya know. She looked as if she'd been hit in the face."

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I
shouted. "Hit in the face? Why in hell didn't you tell me right away?"

"I just told you." He was shouting himself now. "You're posed to be the policeman. I'm just the goddamn mister, member?"

I came down. His contempt at his own lack of rank was embarrassing. "Okay. I'm sorry I flipped. But it's important. It sounds like her boyfriend came back and slapped her around for giving me the envelope." I was pacing up and down in frustration. Sam watched me, chin on the floor, eyes following my spitshined boots.

Murphy was calm again. This was the first time I'd ever seen him angry. "What envelope?"

I patted my chest. "The one she gave me to keep for her." He started to speak but I cut him off with a thought of my own. "Was there anyone with her?"

He shook his head. "No. I checked. She came in that Volvo hers and she left on her own, drove back out of town to the highway."

"Back to her motel. Get the car keys, I'll go up there and talk to her."