Dead Low Tide (19 page)

I was tired of looking at the face of death.

I was tired of the thought of death, tired of delicate machines interrupted in their course. Life had burst out through the throat of both the Longs, and left them shrunken.

The phone began again. I counted the rings as I went out and searched for it, found it on a low table near the glass window wall. There was phosphorescence in the Gulf waves, a billion tiny creatures were twinkling and dying.

“I am certainly
glad
to get
somebody
on this line! Who is this speaking! I
must
speak to Mrs. Long. This is William Dangerfield,
and I
certainly
want
some
expression of opinion on what sort of ceremony she wants for the deceased tomorrow.”

My brain felt like an ancient reluctant engine. That starter was turning it over slowly, but it wouldn’t catch. “What?”

“
Please
, whoever you are. My goodness, if she can’t come to the phone, for heaven’s sake talk to her and find out what she wants.
Nobody
has even selected a
casket
for the deceased. And how in the world can I arrange a permit when
nobody
has told me where the deceased is to be buried? I’m
frantic
, I tell you.”

“Mrs. Long is also deceased,” I said woodenly.

“What? What! What was that?”

“Mrs. Long is dead, too. Just like her husband.
D-e-a-d
.”

The voice lost its urgency. It seemed to collapse in upon itself. “I’ll be a son-of-a-bitch,” it said in lost, tired resignation. There was a click and he was gone.

I went back to the bedroom. The policeman had rolled onto his back. He breathed through his open mouth and his fingers made motions as if he were feeling the texture of the rug. His eyes opened and he looked blankly up at the ceiling. I stood over him and his eyes slowly changed direction, stared stupidly at me. He grunted then and his eyes narrowed, and he sat up with a great gasp and skittered backward on his fanny and grabbed at the gun in the holster and got it out, and there was only a blind instinct in his eyes. I made a dive toward him and pushed the gun away and he fired twice, as I lay half sprawled across his legs.

“No!” I yelled. “No!” And my ears were ringing with the hard impact of the shots in the quiet of the room.

He seemed to have needed the sound of the shots to bring
him back to here and now. The tension went out of him and I cautiously drew back and knelt by him, my eye still on the revolver. He turned the gun wrist up and stared at his watch.

“Oh, dear God,” he said weakly.

I got up and extended a hand to help him up. He waved the gun at me. “Stand over against the wall,” he said. I did. He shook his head gingerly, reached around with his left hand, and tenderly touched the lump. He winced, grunted up onto his feet, and weaved a bit, squeezing his eyes tightly shut for a moment.

Keeping the gun aimed in my general direction, he half turned and looked at what was on the bed.

“Oh, dear God,” he said again in the same tone. He looked at me and he pouted as though he were close to tears. “Goddamn you, McClintock, if you did this—”

“When did it happen?”

“I got banged on the head about ten-thirty.”

“At ten-thirty I was sitting in a restaurant at least four miles from here, and I’ve got at least five witnesses to that. I got here ten minutes ago.”

He staggered a little and moved over to a flimsy-looking chair and sat down heavily. He looked at me, looked at the gun in his hand, shoved it back in the holster. He put his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands and shuddered. “I feel terrible,” he said.

“What happened?”

His voice was muffled by his hands. “I’m waiting and I don’t hear a thing. All of a sudden somebody starts whispering. ‘Come here, please. Come here, please.’ Like that. I thought it was her. I thought she woke up and maybe she was
sick. So I come out and stand by the bed. Then I hear her snoring and I tried to turn fast but—I never did get all the way around. Suckered—that’s what I was! Somebody whispers, you can’t tell if it’s a man or a woman.”

He lifted his head and sighed and got up and went over to the bed and looked down at her. “Oh, brother!” he said in an awed voice. He took a step back and turned and I saw his throat work as he swallowed a few times, quickly. He rubbed his hands across his mouth, and said, “I better call in. God, how am I going to tell them about it?”

I waited in the room, listening to his low voice on the phone. I looked around to see where the bullets hit. I turned on another light and found them, at least found the holes splintered into the paneling three feet off the floor and about two feet apart. For the unconscious man, there had been no awareness of the passing time. When he had awakened he had evidently thought I was the person who had just a few moments before knocked him down.

He came back in and sat down again. “What a head,” he mumbled. There was a curious gargling sound from the object on the bed, a sound that prickled the hair on the back of my neck and the skin on the backs of my hands, and turned me rigid.

He stood mildly at the bed. “Gas,” he said. “Gas in the gut. Deads’ll do that. I heard it a couple times in Korea.”

There was a thin sound in the night. We listened. Sirens coming fast. He stood up heavily. His color wasn’t good. He half turned toward me and there was an odd expression on his face, like a half-smile of apology. Then his eyes rolled upward and his knees gave way, and he went down before I
could get to him, went down with a thud which shook the house and rattled the bottles on the glass top of Mary Eleanor’s dressing table.

It was quarter after two before people finally stopped yelling in my face and waving their arms at me and interrupting every time I tried to tell them something. Wargler himself, with George along, had taken me out to Glory-Bee, and then down the highway until we found the “cute” dive and found Cindy drinking beer at the bar. The four of us gathered in a little back room.

“Say, I’m glad you nailed this dirty son-of-a—”

Wargler looked pained. “Don’t use bad words, you. Were you with this guy at ten-thirty?”

“Yes, I was that stupid. But when I found out, I didn’t stay with him, see. I’m not that type girl, see.”

“What type?”

“To pose for his dirty pictures. What else? You arrested him for it, didn’t you?”

It had got me placed at ten-thirty, but it brought up a new topic to yell at me about. The trouble was, I couldn’t remember where I’d left the pictures. Somewhere in Mary Eleanor’s house, I thought. We roared back there at one-thirty, and there was a man posted and the body had been taken away and Jimmy was still taking pictures and prints. The familiar envelope was on the phone table. Wargler turned on a big aluminum floor lamp and sat down and took out the pictures. George looked over his shoulder.

“Good God Almighty!” Wargler said, almost with a tone of reverence. “Where’d you get these nasty things?”

“Look, here’s the story. Apparently John found them. They—”

“Answer the question. Where’d
you
get them?”

“Out of the bottom of the Kenney girl’s bureau.”

“Where did
she
get them?”

“I think she got them out of John Long’s desk. I think she broke into the desk and got them.”

“O.K., how did you know there were any such pictures?”

“I didn’t. Mary Eleanor told me to look for the envelope.”

“Want to try proving that?”

“You know damn well I can’t prove it!”

“Stop that damn bellering.”

“If you’d only listen to me. If you’d only let me talk for ten minutes without asking a bunch of idiotic questions, maybe you’d learn—”

“Shut up!”

And that’s the way things went until quarter after two. Every time I had to walk, George would push me just often enough in the back to keep me off balance. At a quarter after two I got smart. The Chief’s office was crowded, and everybody looked stained, strained and weary. Jack, Steve, the Chief, George, Jimmy, and a couple of policemen whose names I didn’t know, one of whom was taking notes.

“How come she wanted
you
to get those pictures?” Wargler demanded.

“I’m not answering another damn stupid question.”

“You can’t do that to me,” Wargler said. “Your lawyer is right here. You heard him tell you to answer questions.”

“I won’t answer any more, because you never give me a chance to tell you what’s important. If you’ll close that big mouth for ten minutes, and if nobody interrupts me, I’ll try to give you the whole thing. But if there’s one question asked, one interruption, you can all go to hell in a bucket.”

“Who do you think is giving the orders around here?”

Jack Ryer said easily, “Why don’t you give it a try, Chief? It won’t hurt anything.”

I tried to look calm. Finally Wargler nodded, saying, “Go ahead.”

I tried to tell it like a story. I started with Ken getting a job as a dishwasher. I guess I did it right, because before I’d said fifty words they had all got silent and rigid. There was no sound in the crowded office except my voice and the intermittent rustle as the sweating cop-secretary filled one sheet and whipped over to the next one.

“And finally,” I said, “knowing that I was free, knowing that his biggest source of danger was Mary Eleanor Long, knowing that he had to shut her up permanently, he had to risk it. He came and killed her. John Long can’t talk. Christy can’t talk. Mary Eleanor can’t talk. He’s gone the full circle. Maybe he’s in that shack on the island. I don’t know. I don’t know where the island is, or even if that Cindy was right.”

There was a long silence. Wargler said petulantly, “Why the hell didn’t you tell us all this quicker?”

He saw the expression on my face and looked away uneasily and rattled his ridged fingernails on the desk top. “Jimmy, go get them air pictures out of the files.”

Jimmy came back in five minutes with a sheaf of big clear pictures of the bays, taken from the air. Wargler spread them out on his desk. Jack Ryer moved around to stand behind him, peering over his shoulder.

Jack said, “I do enough bay fishing, so I can tell you which ones you can wade to. This one here—and here. This set of three in a row over here. Then here’s three, four, five down below Shay’s Pass.”

“Ten of ’em,” Wargler said. “George, you do bay fishing, too. Which ones have shacks on ’em?” George pointed silently to three. “That all?” George nodded.

Jack said, “An old duck lives in the shack on that island. That leaves us these two.”

Wargler said, “Well, eliminate that one because the guy is supposed to have a car, and it would be a two-mile walk through swamps to get to that one. If you fellas know what you’re talking about, then he lived or is living on this one here.”

I stood by the desk. You could see a roof, a small roof, through the trees. The island was the shape of a lima bean and seemed to be about a hundred yards long. The deep water passes showed up clearly, and it was plain that only about sixty feet of flats separated the island from the mainland. On the mainland you could see the curve of a secondary road that came to within fifty feet of the bay front. But the bay front there was such a low tangle of mangrove that it hadn’t yet been cleared, filled, and built on.

Wargler said, “The sucker, if he’s there, might have a boat. You can’t tell. We got to coordinate this. George, you go call Odum Davis and tell him to get on down to his boat and get it ready to roll. George, you and Al go with Odum. And you can go along with them if you want to, Jack. Let’s take a look at the time. We ought to fix it to get there at, lemme see, quarter to four sharp. We’ll cut off the road side, and if he’s on there, you bring him back in the boat, George. No damn need wading around in the dark getting hit with a stingaree. If he makes a run, provided he’s there, we nail him ashore. Jimmy, lock up this McClintock.”

“No, dammit!” I said. “Who has been steering you onto
him? I wanted to get him myself for—for personal reasons. Now he’s yours, but you ought to be fair enough to at least let me go along.”

“Withholding evidence,” Wargler said. “Barging around messing things up like one of those private eyes in the books. God, if I ever hear one of the operatives called a private eye any place but in a book. McClintock, you’ve been a goddamn nuisance. But, O.K. Come on. You come with me.”

The details were set up. We took two cars. We started fifteen minutes after Odum had cast off, starting chugging down the channel.

There was no moon. The town was flat on its back and snoring as we went through. I sat in the back in the first car, beside Jimmy. Steve was in front with the Chief.

ALL THE WAY OUT THERE
I thought of Christy, and I felt alone. Even in the car with the three of them, with Wargler’s big shoulders hulking against the headlight gleam on the road ahead, with Steve’s cigar smoke being whipped back on the warm night air, I felt alone, as though Christy and I had been the only two live people in the world, and all these others were cleverly animated puppets, their bellies full of straw, clockwork brains.

Wargler slowed. “This here is the turn.” He pulled over onto the shoulder and we got out.

“Here’s the car, Chief!” Jimmy said, suppressed excitement in his voice. We went over to it. It was nosed down the slope of the shoulder, the hood under the dark trees. Wargler put his light on it. It was old, dusty, beat up, and gray. Wargler went down onto one knee and held the back of his hand against the tail pipe. He grunted.

“Warm?” Jimmy asked.

“No. But it’s a long time since that woman got herself killed.” He turned the light on his watch. “Three-forty. Should be a path here.”

There was—a narrow path that was dry at first and then turned mushy underfoot as we neared the water. Mosquitoes fell on us with shrill cries of delight, yelling to all their relatives to pile on and have some nice blood. We cursed softly and slapped and lighted cigarettes. Finally we came to the edge of the water, humpy with mangrove roots and smelling of low tide.