Dead Meat (18 page)

“I could have slapped him with my glove,” I said.

Seelye Smith and I agreed to keep in touch. I would try to call him again in a few days.

I disconnected, got the operator back, and called Vern Wheeler in Boston. He answered the phone himself, as I knew he would, since I was one of the few people who had been given access to his private line.

“How they bitin?” he said.

“Excellent, Vern. Just like snakes.”

“We’ve been havin’ some troubles, I hear.”

“You hear correctly.”

“Tiny called the other day. Hard to believe, old Woody killin’ a man.”

“Hell, Vern. Woody didn’t kill anyone.”

“Well,” drawled Vern after a moment, “I guess that’s a matter of opinion, now, ain’t it?”

“I know you’re not asking me for a dissertation on the law,” I replied. “It’s a trumped-up case, Vern. Woody was framed, and the DA up here is taking it down the line.”

“That ain’t quite the way Tiny told it, Brady.”

“I thought you knew Woody.”

“You letting your feelings for the man color your view of the facts?”

“Nope. Something coloring your view, Vern?”

“Nope. I just figure, they arrest a man, they gotta have something.”

“Oh, they’ve got something. Enough to arrest him. But not enough to convict him. In my, ah, learned opinion. As an attorney, not a friend.”

“I do respect your opinion,” was all Vern said.

“Tiny says he’s about ready to sell the place,” I continued. “He’s fed up with all the trouble, he says. Figures the murder, the disappearance of the other guy, that they’ll ruin business.”

“Yeah”—Vern sighed—“that’s what he told me, too. You think he’s serious?”

“I can’t tell. He’s not joking, I can tell you that. Maybe he’s just down. He’ll snap out of it.”

“Selling the place might not be such a bad idea at that. Though I can’t believe Tiny really means it.”

“He’s discouraged. He’ll come around.”

“Doesn’t sound like you’re having that much fun, Brady,” said Vern. “Why don’t you come home?”

“Tell the truth, it’s not exactly what I bargained for. The fishing’s been pretty decent. But I’ve done a hell of a lot more lawyering than I counted on. Still, I’ve got a feeling Tiny would like me to hang around a while longer.”

Vern paused, then cleared his throat. “Far as I’m concerned, you don’t need to stay. Tell me. What’ve you found out about these people who want to buy the place?”

“Talked with Seelye Smith. Checked up on him, too, as promised. Impeccable reputation. I like him. Trust him, too. He says the Indian lawyers are working for an unnamed third party. Out of state. Private. He’s trying to track down who they are and what their game is. It’s the same Indian firm that’s defending Woody, by the way, which may or may not mean something. Anyhow, Smith’s okay. You’re in good hands.”

“Yeah, maybe,” said Vern. “Listen, Brady. Why don’t you come home. Tiny can take care of himself.”

“Well, if I’m costing you money…”

He laughed. “That’s not it, and you know it.”

“Think I’ll stay a while and hold Tiny’s hand, then.”

“That’s fine. Up to you.”

“I’ll give it a few more days. Mainly because the fishing’s been pretty damn good.”

“Hey, fish all you want. Drink all my Jack Daniel’s. Enjoy yourself. And don’t worry your head about old Woody.”

I promised Vern I’d be in touch if anything else happened. I thought of calling the office and checking with the answering service. Then I said the hell with it. This was supposed to be a vacation, not that it was exactly working out that way.

I returned to my table to wait for Bud Turner to take me back to the lake.

“Y
OU’RE LOOKING A BIT
glum, my friend,” said Marge that night as she eased herself down beside me on the end of the dock. I had my back against one of the pilings and my knees drawn up to my chin.

“I am thinking,” I intoned. “I am being contemplative. I am pondering the wonder of it all.”

“Oh,” she said.

“Death and transfiguration. Being and nothingness. War and peace. That sort of thing.”

“I brought you some medicine.” She tinkled the ice in the glass. I took it, sipped, and sighed.

I jammed two cigarettes into my mouth, lit them both, and handed one to Marge. She hitched herself close to me, and I could feel her shiver.

“I’m really sorry about all this,” she murmured. “You came up here for some fishing and relaxing. Now all this.”

“I went to Greenville with Bud today. Talked to Vern. He suggested I go home.”

She put her hand on my knee and didn’t speak.

“I told him I thought I’d hang around a little longer.”

“I’m glad.”

“But, see, I can’t do anything. I don’t even especially want to do anything. But here I am. That is what I am trying to contemplate.”

“You do blather,” she whispered. I turned to look at her. She was staring out across the lake. In profile she looked remarkably like her daughter. I touched her hair, and she turned to face me. Her eyes sparkled in the darkness. I realized she was crying.

“Hey, look,” I said. “I don’t…”

She shook her head impatiently. “Shh,” she said. “Don’t pay any attention to me.”

I shrugged. “If you want to talk…”

“That’s not what Vern pays you for, Brady.”

“What the hell. It’s after five. I’m on my own time.”

She hugged her legs. “Anyway, there’s nothing, really. I mean, you know about Polly. She’s been a perfect angel for the past couple days, by the way.”

“Since the murder.”

“Yes. It seems to have put things into some kind of perspective for her.”

I nodded and didn’t comment. Marge apparently did not suspect Polly’s involvement with the dead Mr. Rolando, and I certainly wasn’t going to be the one to tell her.

“Then, of course, there’s my husband,” she said.

“This I don’t think I want to hear about,” I said quickly.

“I really think he’s ready to sell the place,” she said. “First he talks about staying open all year. Now he’s ready to sell. Brady, if we left this place, I don’t know what I’d do. I don’t think I’d go with him. It would be like starting a new marriage. Tiny Wheeler and Raven Lake are all one person. Do you know what I mean?”

I shrugged. “Look…”

“No, listen to me. Please. I can’t imagine living with Tiny in some condominium in Sarasota or Phoenix or San Diego or something. When I committed myself to Tiny Wheeler, it was a commitment to a way of life, not just a man. I can’t separate the two. It scares me.”

“He feels responsible for everything that’s happened. I imagine Vern doesn’t make it any easier for him.”

“Vern has never made anything easy for Tiny.”

“Have you told Tiny how you feel?”

“He knows.”

We fell silent. I hadn’t heard the loons since I had been out there, a fact that deepened my morose frame of mind. Marge poked me and said, “Gimme another one of them cigarettes.” I did, and we smoked quietly, staring at the shiny purple surface of Raven Lake.

“You want to go fishing tomorrow?” she said after a while.

“Sure.”

“I’ll take you. Tiny’s flying out for the day.”

I hesitated. “You think it’s a good idea?”

“What, you mean with my husband gone?” She laughed, a genuine laugh that sounded good. “Would it matter? Listen, Counselor. I’m a registered Maine guide, okay? It’s one of the things I do. I do it damn well, matter of fact. I’ll show you some salmon. Deal?”

I grinned at her in the darkness. “Okay. Deal. Where’s Tiny going?”

She paused before answering. Finally she said, “I don’t ask, he doesn’t say. It happens now and then. He tells me he’s going to be gone for the day. He and Gib, they fly out after breakfast. They’re back before dusk. They don’t bring back supplies. They don’t take any guests out with them or bring any back in.”

“And this makes you suspicious.”

Her laugh was low, deep in her throat, cynical, wry, and it made me uncomfortable. “I am not naive, Brady,” she said.

“And I am, huh?”

“Yes, you are. For a lawyer it’s pretty unusual. It’s a lovable trait.”

I harrumphed my disagreement but didn’t say anything.

“I don’t suspect,” she continued. “I assume. See, that’s the difference between us. You’re naive. You assume the best. Innocent until proven guilty. That stuff. Well, not me. Tiny has a lady friend. It’s pretty evident. It’s kinda cute, actually. A couple days before he leaves to see her, I can tell it’s coming. He gets tense. Becomes polite and considerate of my feelings. Out of character. Then, when he figures he’s got me softened up, he announces, and it’s always when there’s other people around so we won’t really be able to discuss it, he says, ‘Oh, by the way, honey, I’ll be flying out with Gib tomorrow, just for the day. Business, you know.’ And when he gets back he’s—he’s cordial, formal, very proper with me, as if I were an important stranger.” She snorted a little laugh through her nose. “As if I had no idea what was going on.”

“I wouldn’t jump to conclusions,” I said lamely.

“Jump? Shit. It took me a year to figure it out. I didn’t jump. I took many small, careful steps. Anyway, it doesn’t matter one way or another. He’ll be gone tomorrow, and we’ll go fishing, and then you can tell me whether Woody’s any better at guidin’ than me.”

The summer sun burned away the morning mists and beat down brutally on the lake. By eight o’clock, when breakfast was over and Gib and Tiny had taxied away from the dock in Gib’s Cessna, the temperature had already reached eighty. No breeze relieved the heat. Raven Lake was a mirror, except in the coves, where thermal tricks sucked the air gently across the top of the water, corrugating its surface.

I lugged my fishing equipment down to the dock. Marge had maneuvered the canoe around to the side, where we could load it easily. I handed the gear down to her. A big wicker basket sat on the dock. I had to use both hands to lift it.

“What’s in here, the anchor?”

She grinned. “Just lunch stuff. You’ll see.”

“A basketful of skillets, then.”

I eased myself into the canoe and cast us off from the dock.

“Lousy day for fishing,” said Marge as she shoved us off toward the middle of the lake with a strong thrust of her paddle. “Salmon’ll be down deep.”

“Maybe we should just concentrate on the bass,” I said.

“We’ll catch us some salmon,” she said. “Just have to work a little for them. Good guidin’ll make the difference. I know a place.”

I was nestled in the bow, facing backward for the run downlake. Marge sat in the stern to run the motor. She wore a plaid cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled up over her elbows, short cutoff blue jeans, tennis shoes without socks, and a man’s felt hat, with the brim pulled low over her forehead.

She gave the engine rope a yank, and it sputtered to life. Then she turned to face forward, hunched in what looked like a familiar position, her left elbow cocked up behind her to handle the steering and her right arm resting casually across her smoothly tanned thigh. She squinted her eyes against the reflected glare of the sun and smiled at me. She mouthed something to me, which was lost in the roar of the outboard motor. I thought she said, “Tallyho!” I responded with a grin and a thumbs-up sign. She rolled her eyes, and I knew I had misunderstood her. I shrugged apologetically. She shook her head in mock disgust.

After a ten-minute run she cut the motor. The sudden absence of engine noise was startling, and we drifted for several moments without speaking, unwilling to destroy the silence.

Marge took up a paddle and steered us to a spot perhaps a hundred feet from shore, off a point of land. “There’s a ledge that runs out here,” she said softly, respectful of the quiet. “Drops off quick on either side. We’ll anchor on top of it, and we can cast parallel to the dropoff. Salmon like to lie here on a day like this.” She took bearings from the shore, grunted her satisfaction, and let the anchor over the side, paying out line through both hands. “There,” she said, as the line went slack. “Perfect.”

She took a couple of half hitches with the anchor line onto a thwart. Then she picked up her fly rod. “You gonna fish, Counselor, or are you gonna sunbathe?”

“Gonna fish.”

“This is Woody’s place.” She stripped line off her reel and began to cast. “He took me here once. Day like this. Rest of the lake was dead far as salmon were concerned. We done real good that day,” she drawled in a poor imitation of Woody. “Everyone else got skunked. So we agreed. Neither of us’d show it to anybody else. It was our place. Mine and Woody’s. I don’t think he’d mind if I shared it with you, though.”

“I’m not so sure,” I said.

“Brady?”

“Yes?”

“You don’t think Woody killed that man, do you?”

“No, I don’t. Do you?”

She stared at the lake thoughtfully for a moment. “I want to,” she said finally. “It makes me feel like a traitor, but I want it to be Woody.”

“I think I understand.”

“See,” she continued, “in my heart I don’t believe it. But if it wasn’t Woody, then it was someone else, right? And if it was someone else, that frightens me. Because that someone else…”

“Sure.”

“They’re still here,” she finished. “That’s why nobody wants to say that Woody didn’t do it.”

I nodded. There was nothing more to say.

We fished hard for more than an hour without a strike. Marge cast comfortably and accurately, and she didn’t seem to tire. Once we saw a dimple on the surface of the water, maybe eighty feet away, equidistant from Marge and me. It could have been a tiny baitfish. Or it could have been a monster salmon, sucking in a floating insect.

She glanced sideways at me from under the brim of her hat. “My fish,” she said.

“Like hell,” I replied. We both took aim at the disappearing rings. It was a long cast for a fly rod, maximum distance for a strong caster with properly balanced equipment. I dropped my streamer fly on the edge of the nearest widening ripple. Marge’s landed five or six feet beyond mine, almost a bull’s eye.

The fish, whatever it had been, ignored both of our flies.

“That,” I said, “was one helluva cast.”

“For a woman, you mean,” she said.