Murder in the Wind (4 page)

The sports car was built like a low fleet expensive boat. It squatted low on the road, thrillingly responsive. The wind out of the west did not make it sway. But Bunny saw the hard sway of the palms and the pines and he wondered about the hurricane. They had thought it was going to catch them in Miami and they had talked about it and been excited by the idea and been disappointed when the storm had veered to the west below Cuba.

When they stopped in a roadside restaurant for a late breakfast, the few customers were all talking about the storm. An old man with the long sallow knotted face and pale narrow deep-set eyes of the cracker said, “They
say
they know where it is. I ain’t fixin’ to listen too hard to ’em, with their planes and charts and all. You get this here rain and then it comes right at you like you had the bar’l of a gun aimed right down your gullet. Nobody knows where it is. Where the hell you think all the birds went? Me, I say it’s fixin’ to roar right down on us. I got me all boarded up and ready, by God. Try to breathe this here air. There ain’t enough goodness in it. You got to keep a-fillin’ your chest. That’s one
sure sign.”

When they were back in the car Betty said, “He sounded awfully certain, that old man in there.”

“So we’ll add a few knots and get out of here. It would have been fun in Miami, but I wouldn’t want to have to sit it out in a car.”

The gray car, gray as the rain, sped through the moist heavy air. It threw up a great spume of spray behind it. When the winds became strong enough to make the car swerve, he had to slow down.

[Slow down. And in that time of slowing a big dark blue Cadillac swings out and passes the Mercedes, and he gets half a glance at the two men in the Cadillac, at the Florida plate.

The driver of the Cadillac gets a certain savage satisfaction out of passing the sleek foreign car. The Cadillac trembles on a long curve and he knows that he is holding it on the edge of control. The smaller man beside him seems about to speak, to complain about the speed, but he does not.

Ten minutes later the Cadillac passes the station wagon which had passed the Mercedes when it was stopped at the restaurant.

Traffic is thinning out. The rain and wind have become too heavy, too frightening.

The cars head north, up Route 19.

There is an impersonality about train and bus and plane. You buy the ticket and you are, for a time, with strangers. You are linked only by common destination, by the need to be at another place at another time. Yet you look at the other, at the cool inward faces, the man with the briefcase, the lame girl with the silly hat, the sticky-faced child, and you wonder about them—casually, with no special interest.

The highway is the coldest of all. You are alone and all other vehicles are mindless, untenanted.

Yet when there is a common destination, unplanned and violent as that destination may be, and when the vehicle engines are stilled, you are with strangers who mean even less than the accidental companions of train, bus and aircraft.]

Johnny Flagan stood shaving in the light of cold fluorescence in his bathroom. The motor in the shaver made a high whining hum which sagged in pitch when the head bit into the crust of hard sandy whiskers along his jaw. He was a suety man in his fifties, with gingery gray hair surrounding a bald spot the size of a coaster. He stood spread-legged, slabs of fat moving on his sloped shoulders as he steered the razor. He had once been a strong man. But the years had run through the puffy body, the years of the cigars and the bourbon and the hotel room women. Years of the quick meeting and the dickering and the club cars. There were brown blemishes on his lard white shoulders and back, a matronly cast to his hips. But all the drive was still there, the hint of harshness.

He was an amiable looking man. Sun and whisky kept his soft face red. He smiled easily and had the knack of kidding people. He wore round glasses with steel rims and the glasses were always slipping a little way down his blunt nose and Johnny Flagan would look over his glasses at you and grin wryly about his morning hangover and you would never notice that the grin did nothing to change the eyes. The eyes were small and brown and watchful and they could have been the noses of two bullets dimly seen in the cylinder when you look toward the muzzle of a gun.

If you walked down the street with him you would soon come to believe that he knew more than half the people in Sarasota.

But what does he do?

—You mean Johnny Flagan? What does he do? Well, he’s got a lot of interests you might say. He was in on some pretty good land development stuff on the keys. He’s got a fellow runs a ranch for him down near Venice. Santa Gertrudis stock, it is. He’s got a piece of a juice plant over near Winter Haven. Then he’s director on this and that. And he’s got some kind of interest in savings and loan stuff. Hell, Old Johnny keeps humping.

—He seems like a nice guy.

—Sure. He’s a nice fella. Got a raft of friends. You get him going sometime telling stories. He’s really something.

—Successful and honest, I suppose.

—Successful, sure. You understand I’m not a fellow to talk about anybody. Gossip. That kind of thing. But you go throwing around that word honest, and there’s a lot of people got different ideas of what it means. Johnny’s a sharp one. I don’t think he ever in his whole life done anything he could get hisself jailed for, but you get on the other end of a deal from him, and you got to play it close. Like that time, hell it was seven eight years ago, there was this old fellow down Nokomis way didn’t want to let loose of some land Johnny wanted to pick up. Both Johnny and the old man were pretty damn sure the State Road Department was going to put the new road right through his land. Well sir, one day these young fellows come to the old man’s house and they’re hot and they want a drink of water. They got transits and so on, all that surveying stuff, and the old man gives them the water and they get to talking and it turns out they’re surveying for the road and it just doesn’t come nowheres near the old man’s land. Very next day the old man unloads his land on Johnny, trying to keep a straight face. Inside fourteen months the new road cuts right across the land and Johnny has himself a bunch of prime commercial lots. That old man just about drove them nuts up there in Tallahassee, but he never could find out just who those surveyors were or where they come from. Sure, Johnny’s honest, but he’s damn sharp

—He lives right here, does he?

—Near all his life. Married one of the Leafer girls. Never has had any kids. But they seem to get along good, that is except for the times she’s found out about Johnny getting out of line on one of his trips. He travels around a lot. Used to live right off Orange, but some time back he built himself a hell of a nice house out there on St. Armands Key. You ever get an invitation to a party out there, you go. He really lays it on. Bartenders and everything. But nobody holds it against him he’s made out so good. He doesn’t ever try to hide it from you he’s one of old Stitch Flagan’s ragged-ass kids. That’s Stitch that come down here from Georgia forty years ago and went broke in celery and finally ended up as a commercial fisherman and went night netting in the Gulf after mackerel thirty years back and drownded out there, him and two of his boys, Johnny’s brothers they were. Johnny would have been along and drownded too, except he was hot after some gal down in Osprey and run out and his old man couldn’t find him and took off without him. Johnny must have been twenty-two or so about that time. Husky kid and real woman crazy. Funny thing, it was after Stitch and the two boys drownded that Johnny began to take sort of an interest in money. He begun to go after it the way he’d been going after every piece of pussy from Arcadia to Punta Gorda.

Johnny Flagan blew the sandy stubble out of the razor, coiled the cord, put razor and cord in the plastic box and put the box in the toilet article case he used on trips. He checked the case to see that everything he needed was there, and carried the case into the bedroom and put it beside his suitcase. The air conditioner made a dissonant buzzing sound. Babe slept heavily under a single blanket. Johnny dressed quietly and quickly in a nylon shirt, figured red bow tie, cotton cord suit. When the suitcase was snapped shut he went over and sat on Babe’s bed, put his hand on the big warm mound of the blanketed hip and shook her gently.

“Hey, honey!” he said softly. “Hey!”

Babe came walrusing up out of sleep, circling her eyes around and then focusing them on him, frowning and saying, “Wass?”

“No flights today. I’m starting earlier and taking the Cad.”

“Huh? You be careful. Don’t you drive when you’re drinking.”

“I’ll be careful. I’ll phone you when I know when I can get free. Okay?”

“Be careful.”

He kissed her and carried his suitcase to the bedroom door.

“Johnny?”

“Yes, honey.”

“You going to give that Charlie a bad time?”

“He’s got a bad time coming to him.”

“You going to fire him?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“If you could just scare hell out of him it would be easier on me, knowing her and all.”

“I’ll see,” he said. He shut the bedroom door behind him. The rest of the house was warmer—muggy and gray and cheerless. It was a big house with long stretches of terrazzo, glass jalousies, graceless furniture. Though they had lived in it several years, it had a flavor of transiency, an uncaring coldness.

Ruth had cleared the newspapers off the dining room table, but she had known enough not to touch the business papers he had laid out and worked on the night before. His orange juice, in a tall glass, seemed the only bright spot of color in the long dim room. The morning paper lay beside his place. It was damp from the rain. He sat down and unfolded the paper and called out, “Ruth!”

She pushed the swinging door open and came out of the kitchen immediately, carrying his plate in one hand, coffee pot in the other, as though she had been waiting there just beyond the door for his call. She was a slim woman, quite tall. She was in her late twenties and she was just a shade or two darker than some of Babe’s more heavily tanned friends. There was a look of austerity in her face, the sharp nose and thin lips not at all Negroid. In all the years she had worked for them, she had never looked directly at him. She walked with the contradiction of her nature clearly expressed—there for all to see. Cold face and rigid bearing, no sway or dip to her shoulders. Yet whenever she turned to walk away he would look automatically at the back of her, at the sway back and the strong outthrust hips and the swinging suggestive cadence.

There had always been tension between them. Tension and a certain wary understanding.

“Good morning,” she said, her voice crisp and cool.

“‘Moanin’, Ruthie,” he said, reacting to her perfect diction by becoming so mush-mouthed as to be almost incomprehensible. He knew that it annoyed her, and he knew that she would not show it. He knew that the brain behind that cool thin face was of excellent quality. She expressed resentment through efficiency. The more she despised the two of them the harder she labored to make the house run smoothly, make the food perfection. It was a form of defiance, and she knew that they used and appreciated the products of her defiance. She was well-paid, well-treated, but he knew she felt trapped.

She put the plate in front of him. Three eggs fried, turned over lightly, thick strips of country bacon, grits with butter and pepper. She stood beside him and filled the coffee cup.

“Coming down hard rain, Ruthie.”

“Yes, sir. It really is.”

“Got them plenty of leaky roofs down there in Newtown.”

She had backed away with the coffee pot. “A lot of them leak.”

He grinned at her but could not find or meet her eyes. “Ought to tear down half them shacks down there.”

“Yes sir,” she said and moved quickly to the kitchen, and the door swung shut behind her. It was a petty victory, too easily won this time. As he opened the paper he held in his mind the after image of her hips as she went through the door.

He sensed that part of the tension between them was due to the knowledge that she attracted him physically. Not because she was pretty. The most she could be called was handsome. It was the contradiction which intrigued him, the hint of fire under ice. He had idly daydreamed about her many times while going to sleep—thought of the brown still cold face unmoving on a white pillow, the eyes veiled and unknowable, while, like a separate organism, her hips led their own quick, hard, rhythmic, lubricious life. It could be thought about, but never, never, never could there be the slightest move or gesture which could be interpreted by her as the first step in a campaign to achieve that startling goal. Because that would give her the ultimate unforgettable victory—would give her a stature that could never be weakened.

Just two years ago, if Babe had not been so pleased and delighted with Ruth, Johnny would have fired her. Now he thought that even should Babe become discontented with Ruth, he would manage to keep the woman around. The game had become too interesting. They had both become too adept in their ways of muted conflict. It was like having a pet around that you couldn’t quite trust.

Johnny Flagan scanned the headlines and turned to the real estate transfers. He saw that Ross Wedge had unloaded three lots in the Lagoon Park development for eighteen thousand. He knew that Ross had picked up six lots at just about the same time he had picked up ten. They’d both had to pay about two thousand apiece for them, and that was dirt cheap on account of Barkmann had needed the cash money to develop the rest of the area. He wondered why Ross Wedge had unloaded half his holding right now. Better off to wait a while. Lagoon Park was coming along fine. But then Ross was in with Whitey building those new stores on the boulevard and maybe he needed a little cash money. Better keep it in mind though, and see if Ross got rid of the other three soon. If he did so, it would be worth nosing around and finding out if anything was coming up that might hurt Lagoon Park and make this a good time to get out.

Ruth came out of the kitchen and filled his coffee cup.

“Thanks,” he said. “You take good care of Miz Babe now, Ruthie. I’ll be gone for a couple days. Up in Georgia. Say, I couldn’t find my Orlon suit. That light gray one.”

“It ought to be back today, Mist’ Flagan.”

He detected the faint slur in her speech, the slur that was the tip-off to a feeling of guilt. When Ruth forgot something, or did something wrong, the slur became evident. He knew that if he did a little digging he could find out that the suit hadn’t gone out when it should have. But it did not seem worth the effort.

After he finished his coffee, he picked up the suitcase and went out through the kitchen to the garage. Babe would have the red Hillman to get around in. She despised driving it, but she certainly couldn’t expect him to drive up to Georgia in it. He put his suitcase in the Cad, then paused, turned and went back into the house and phoned Charlie Himbermark again and told Charlie he was just leaving and to be ready.

He drove off St. Armands Key, over the Ringling Bridges to the mainland. The gas tank was nearly full. The big dark blue Cadillac was running smoothly. The rain was a damn nuisance, but he decided he ought to be able to make pretty good time in spite of it. Run right up to Waycross and then it was only another thirty miles to the small Georgia city where Himbermark had come so close to fouling up the entire operation.

He turned south on Orange and, a few minutes later, he pulled up in front of the small frame house on one of the back streets beyond the post office where Charlie Himbermark lived. He blew the horn. Charlie came out onto the porch and turned to say good-by to Agnes. Agnes waved at the car and Johnny waved back. Charlie wore a transparent raincoat. He kissed Agnes and came hurrying down the walk through the rain and got in beside Johnny.

“Hell of a morning,” Charlie said cheerfully. He struggled awkwardly and got himself out of the raincoat and tossed it into the back seat, then lifted his suitcase over and put it on the floor in back. He plumped himself down and wiggled around and adjusted himself and gave a small sigh of relaxation—all of which irritated Johnny Flagan.

Johnny wished he’d never seen or heard of Charlie Himbermark, never seen his pale sixty-year-old face, heard his high nervous voice. Charlie was a man always anxious to please everybody. When he stood talking to anyone, his whole attitude was that of intense eagerness to be found pleasing. He would lean forward, his eyes eager, his mouth working as you talked. He would laugh before you came to the point of the joke. He would pat you quickly and lightly on the shoulder whenever he could, his wide blue eyes watering.

Charlie Himbermark had come down to Sarasota about eight years ago. His wife had died in the north and he’d had some sort of breakdown. He came down with a small pension and a desire to find something to do. He had been in a big bank in the north, some sort of job in the trust department. After a year or so of looking, Charlie found a job in one of the brokerage offices in town. Two years later he married Agnes Steppey, one of Babe’s oldest friends. Agnes had been widowed for over a year, and they met when Agnes went into the brokerage office to ask about some stock her husband had left her.