Dead Low Tide (7 page)

She came up beside me. “What is it?”

“Somebody was in the house. I don’t know what the hell for.”

She laughed, but it wasn’t one of her best efforts. “How silly. What have you got worth stealing?”

“It’s a point.” That made me think of my shiny new contract. I looked in the bureau drawer. It was there.

“Gee,” she said, “I’ll hate it if we’ve got to start locking up around here.”

“It was probably just an admirer.”

“They get pretty eager, huh?”

“Isn’t it worth a little risk?”

“Fatuous. That’s what you are.”

“She works in a bookstore, so now she’s got a new word.”

We stood still and the night outside seemed a little more alien than usual. As if it had eyes looking out of it. I turned the rest of the lights on and she hugged herself and turned away from me. I could sense her uneasiness.

I went over and kissed her, and in the middle of it she turned away, and said, “But what could they
want
?”

“I told you.”

“Be serious, Andy. I don’t like it at all.”

It’s odd how a thing like that can destroy a mood. It put me off a bit, and put her further off. We wandered around each other for a while and then she wanted to go home, and I walked her down there, kissed her sedately on the tip of her
nose, and went back to my place. I have a few—not many—pet possessions. I started taking inventory. Beside the house is a thing some madman designed as a garage. I keep everything but the car in there.

It took me about five minutes to spot the empty nail. I felt forlorn. My Hawaiian rig was gone. My beautiful gimmick of stainless steel tubing and surgical rubber, complete with harpoon with swivel barb. Not that I was ever going to use it again—twice was too much. It took me two water-soaked hours of flapping around the groins and pilings to get skunked the first time, and two more hours the second time, complete with face mask and swim fins, to get close enough to a humble five pound sheepshead which was minding its own business, to pull the trigger when the barb was three inches from him and run him through. He died instantaneously and I swam to shore feeling bestial, and knowing that I would do the rest of my fishing above the water, not under it.

I was never going to use the rig again, but I liked to look at it, and I liked to see it hanging on my garage wall looking slim and deadly. Once I had shot it into a palm tree from thirty feet and it had taken fifteen minutes to cut the barb out.

At least it solved the prowler question. It was the sort of thing a kid would steal. But, damn it, I missed it. At least it started me thinking of fish, so I set the alarm for four-fifteen and laid out the equipment. When the alarm finally woke me up, it took me all the way to Horseshoe Pass before I was completely awake. There was a gray light in the east when I started. Things were slow at first, and then picked up. For a time the pass was boiling with big jacks. Some were too big and I lost plugs. After landing and releasing about ten of
them, I began to get arm-weary and wish for a snook or something I could take back with me. I switched to a spoon, and the jacks kept hitting. I worked the spoon slower and deeper and finally got myself a five pound red. Five minutes later I got his twin sister, and by then it was nearly seven, so I went back across the bridge, rinsed the equipment, cleaned the reds, cut off a slab of one and fried it for breakfast, and put the rest in the refrigerator. By the time I was fed and cleaned up, the world looked like a reasonably acceptable place. There were probably better places, but this one would do.

I went slowly by Christy’s but saw no sign of life, so I went on down to the office, arriving at a quarter to nine. The phone was ringing as I unlocked the door, so I strode over and swooped it up. “Good morning. Long, Contractors. McClintock speaking.”

A heavy distant droning voice, like a squad of summer bees, said, “McClintock, this is Chief Wargler.” I’d never met our police chief, but I’d seen him, and seen his pictures. He looked like his voice sounded, big and vague.

“Good morning, Chief.”

“I’m trying to plan out something here. Forgot just—What you say, George? Oh. McClintock, we don’t want to do this on the phone and right now I can’t spare a man or go myself. Wonder if you’d run over to Long’s house and tell his missus he’s dead.”

“What!”

“Hell, didn’t you know about it? I should have thought when that construction fella called in, he’d called you, too. He’s out at that there Key Estates of his. First man on the job found him this morning.”

“Heart?”

“No, he took his own life, son. It’s a little on the messy side. We’re waiting on the coroner and then we’ll have to get him cleaned up a little before I’d ask his missus to identify him legally. Don’t you let her come running on out here. You just find out where she wants the body took, and we’ll let her know when it’s time to come on down and tell us it was John Long, I know damn well it’s John, but we got to do it right.”

“Can I come out after I tell her?”

“Why, sure. I see no reason against that. I’ll have the boys send the crew home, telling them to come back on Monday, if that’s O.K. with you.”

“I think that’s best.”

“Well, you break it to her gentle. She’s a little thing.”

I hung up. I prayed for a sudden case of amnesia, and I’d have been willing to settle for a pair of broken legs. I guessed he’d started thinking it over, and decided that Big Dake could break me in on the construction end of it. Maybe it had got painful. Cancer or something. So he’d gone out there in the middle of the night and … It seemed incredible that he could be dead, all those muscles stilled, that hard body slack. I even toyed with the idea of the phone call being some kind of gag. But nobody has that good a sense of humor this year.

So I drove to their beach house at an average rate of ten miles an hour. I’d never been inside the house before, but I had no interest in the cool look of it, the soft greens and blues, the glass, the low-slung furniture. The maid took me out on the terrace and pointed down the beach to a figure on a dark-red blanket. “She’s down there.”

I thanked her and walked nine million miles down the beach. The Gulf was a sparkling blue, and the sand was pale cream. A one-legged gull landed and gave me a ruffled, evil look. He was all white, with a black head like a penguin. A line of pelicans went by, wings still, bellies inches from the water, looking straight ahead, and all brooding about prehistory and the dull taste little fishes have had for the last thousand years. And no matter what I did, I was still getting closer to the blanket.

I glanced ahead and saw that I had been wrong about the figure. It wasn’t prone, it was supine, and clad only below the waist. I wondered dimly why any woman should want to get her bosom tanned. She had little red plastic cups on her eyes, and she was well greased. I coughed and looked out to sea.

“Why, Andy!” she cried. “No, don’t look yet. Now.”

She was back into her halter and sitting up. “What is it, dear?” she asked. “You look awful guilty.”

“Well—” I started. I was doing fine. Writing a truly great script for myself. “Well—it’s John. There’s been …” I stopped. I was damned if I was going to say there’d been an accident. It’s one of those situations where anything you say sounds as if they’d start selling soap just after you finished. I dropped to my knees on the corner of her blanket, sat back on my heels, and took her hand. In spite of the sun, her fingers were frosty.

She looked at me with a child’s soberness in her eyes. “He’s dead,” she said in a small voice.

“Yes.”

She pulled her hand away and stood up. “I’ve got to go to him. Where is he?”

“They don’t want you to go to him. It’s not—very pleasant.
They want to know where you want him taken. You can see him there.”

“Taken?” She looked dazed. “Oh, I see what you mean. Yes, he has to be taken somewhere, doesn’t he? Dangerfield’s, I guess. On Jacaranda Street. It’s next to—But they’ll know, won’t they? And I’ve been here in the sun—telling myself that everything would be …” She went down on the blanket like a doll tossed onto a bed. She fell awkwardly and cried awkwardly, and I patted her greasy shoulder and took my hand back and wiped it on the blanket, while she moaned, “Oh, oh, oh, oh.”

Women have many kinds of tears. There’s a kind they use on you, a contrived and delicate weapon that leaves them looking pretty. And there’s a healthy, lusty, snorting, boohooing brand that leaves them reddened, puffy, moist, happy, and beautifully relaxed. In that case it seems to be a form of self-therapy. Then there are the tears of agony, which must feel like acid. The gray and twisted tears, when they don’t know or care how they look. When you can walk them back to the house, as I walked Mary Eleanor back, and they stumble and lean on you and don’t know who you are, or care. I led her inside and made her lie down, and I darkened the room and sat near her until Dr. Graman could arrive. She rolled her head from side to side, and her thin fingers kneaded her flat brown belly, and not knowing, you could have thought she was in acute physical pain.

Graman came quickly. He gave me a distant, sour, who-are-you-sir look, and assembled a sterile hypo. He was real pretty. He looked a lot like Rita Hayworth wearing a false mustache. He had heard about John Long five minutes before I called, and I had caught him as he was leaving his home to
come to see Mary Eleanor. He led me to understand that he could handle things, that she would go to sleep, that he would have a nurse come over, and I could depart.

I wasted no time driving from the house down to Key Estates. A police car was parked just inside the entrance and a uniformed young man with his thumbs in his belt stood astride the road until I had identified myself. A hundred yards down the drive I passed John’s Cadillac. I went out onto the end of the finger and parked near several other cars, one of which was a police sedan, and another I recognized as belonging to Jack Ryer, local newscaster, local columnist, local wire-service correspondent, local intermittent legman for the Ledger when fat stories broke, local man about town, and—according to my sources—competent local collector of female scalps, though not of the bundle-and-brag school. I have bent elbows with him and he is a most pleasant drinking, poker, and fishing companion, though many consider his charm to be applied with a shade too clumsy a spatula, and there are those who say that he laughs with a very cold eye indeed. He is what is called clean cut and well set up, and they say he is not long for our town, as he has that integrated manner of a national phenomenon.

He came around the corner of the house nearest completion, and he was wearing his abnormally alert look, yet under the look was a grayness like the cinder blocks. He stood and lit a cigarette and had to move the match a half inch to the left to get it close enough to the cigarette. He looked at me and then said, “Yo, Andy.”

“Where is he?”

“Other side of the house.” Jack sat down on a cinder block and licked his lips and studied the toes of his shoes.

The ambulance came crawling down the new blacktop behind me. I went around the corner of the house. Chief Wargler looked at me, and said, “You’re McClintock. Tell her, did you?”

“And called a doctor. He’s to go to Dangerfield’s.”

“I figured so.” He was wide and he blocked out what the coroner was bending over. Other men stood around with that particularly useless and thoughtful expression worn in the sight of sudden and violent death.

I moved around Wargler. John lay on his back, his head braced at an oddly nauseating angle against a lumber pile. One leg was outstretched and the other leg was doubled up, the knee canted outward. Beside him was one shoe, the sock laid across it. A pale gray sock with a chinese-red clock. He wore a white shirt and gray slacks. There was a great deal of blood. He looked smaller, and older, and grayer, and shrunken. From the throat socket, at an angle, protruded the gleaming stainless-steel haft of the sort of harpoon they use in skin fishing. His right foot was bare. Near the coiled fingers of his right hand lay a Hawaiian rig. I saw the scratch in the metal where I had banged it on a rock. I saw everything clearly. Every pebble and tiny fragment of white sun-hot shell, and every splinter on the edges of the boards in the wood pile. His face was turned so that the eyes, dry of moisture, seemed to look at the haft of the slim harpoon. There is seldom expression on the faces of the dead. Or perhaps, there is only one expression, always. A look of austere, remote, and yet humble dignity. As though they say, “All along I knew I was clay. Now see me and know thyself.”

The white shirt was unbuttoned and peeled back from the left shoulder. The coroner reached down and pulled the thermometer
from the armpit. He looked at it and looked at his watch. He was a small man with a look of eternal indignation.

“With the goddamn sun,” he muttered to himself, “and the heat, who can tell a goddamn thing? Sometime between midnight and five-thirty, or maybe even six.”

I looked at my rig and I nibbled the tip of my tongue. What to do? Point and say, “Hey, that’s mine!”

Maybe you do. Maybe there are a lot of people in the world who go around instinctively doing the logical, uncompromising thing. Maybe they haven’t any imagination, too. I’m always blundering around paying so much attention to what other people could think, that I’m always balanced on a rough rail of indecision, tarred and feathered with my own doubts.

I lit a cigarette and it tasted like burned farina. I found out that there are two ways of gagging. One is in the throat—a very ugly spasm. The other one is back in the mind, and you wish it were in your throat.

The coroner fussed and muttered and wrote things down. Two frail clerical men brought the basket woven of metal straps. They set it down, argued about the harpoon and what to do until the coroner, in a fury of impatience, wedged the heavy body over onto its side, grasped the bloodied barb, and pulled the haft quickly and neatly through the torn wound.

Wargler said, in his buzzing voice, “By Henry, when I get around one of these days to killing myself, I’d sooner stick this here muzzle in my mouth than pig-stick myself with that darn thing. George, Marvin got all his pitchers. You set that wicked thing in the back of the sedan. You there. Take that shoe and sock along. George, you and—you there,
McClintock, give those puny fellas a lift on that now they got him strapped in. John was hefty.”