Murder in the Wind (9 page)

Frank Stratter lay flat on his back in the panel delivery as it started up. He didn’t feel sleepy. He had wanted to think. And he couldn’t think and drive at the same time.

Last night he had had bad dreams and he had awakened with a premonition of danger. The last time he had felt the same way he had been picked up a day later and eventually sentenced to five years. It was a very uncomfortable feeling. He knew that soon, very soon, when the very first decent chance came along, he would have to separate himself from these two kids. He did not know how he would do it. It would depend on circumstances. On taking the right step at the right time. It might make sense to double back, maybe head down onto the keys. Let them keep running.

Some day it would be nice to get up near Ocala, just long enough to make a chance to see June Anne. Long enough to hear her yelp at him. That would be very good to hear.

June Anne Morrissey. He’d wasted a lot of time thinking about her while he was swinging that brush hook for the state. And then, like a damn fool, after he’d gotten set up down there in Miami, he had gone up after her, thinking she’d be glad to come along just to be near him. He’d driven up there and he’d had to hide out. Too many people around Ocala knew him. It had been over a day before he had a chance to see June Anne alone. He had to check to make sure she wasn’t being watched. Then he had to find a time when her folks weren’t there.

She’d met him in the grove out behind the house after the short phone call. Now he knew he was lucky she hadn’t arranged for the police to meet him there.

“What do you want?”

“My God, honey, you sound unfriendly.”

“What do you need? Clothes? Money? I’ll give you what I can and then you get out of here.”

“I want you to come along with me. That’s what I came up here for. I got a car, clothes, money and an apartment. I think you ought to come along with me.”

“I’d as soon go along with a snake.”

“What?”

“You heard me, Frank. It’s over. It was over a long time ago. You’re a known criminal, and you escaped, and a guard was killed. I don’t want any part of you. I’m engaged to Sonny Western.”

“You’ll be marrying a hell of a nice batch of groves.”

“That isn’t why I’m marrying him.”

“You better change your mind and come along. Do some real living, June Anne, like we used to talk about.”

“We talked about living well, but not your way, Frank. Not the way you’ve picked out for yourself. I said it and I meant it. I’d as soon go along with a snake. Now you better get out of here.”

She stood tall in the shadowy grove, the house lights below and behind her. He took one step and struck her with his fist and she went down and began to sob. He stood over her, feeling a strange unlikely urge to cry also. Then he stepped around her and went down the shallow hill and past the house and out to the road. He turned down the road to where he had left the car. He heard the running steps behind him. He spun around, fists clenched. He could see by the starlight that it was a girl, not as tall as June Anne.

“Who is it?”

“It’s Hope, Frank. I snuck up there and I heard her. I’m glad you hit her.”

“She’s your own sister.”

“Anyhow I’m glad. Frank, I want to come along with you.”

He laughed at her. “You’re just a kid.”

“You haven’t seen me in two years. I’m grown up.”

“Go on home, Hope.”

She moved closer and thrust against him, catching his arm in her hand. “Take me along,” she demanded. “They won’t ever catch you. Take me along.”

He felt the warmth of her. He put his arm around her. She felt like a woman. He looked up toward the dark grove. He thought of June Anne and he smiled. He held Hope a little tighter.

“Want to go get your stuff?”

“I’m afraid she’ll catch me.”

“Okay. Come along, kid. Come along for the ride.”

They rode through the night in the Buick and when he thought of June Anne and her folks he had to laugh to himself. Hope sat very close to him. He did not get a good look at her until he saw her in their motel room in Orlando. The idea seemed to turn sour when he looked at her. She was nowhere near as pretty as June Anne. The heavy glossy brown hair was the same, but that was all. She had a pudding face and rather small eyes. But she was grown up. She had been right about that. She was built low to the ground like her old man. She had big strong hips and big round breasts.

It was strange the way she had acted. The only time there had seemed to be any urgency in her was when she had begged to come along. Once the decision had been made, she settled into a placid acceptance. In the motel there was no girlish shyness about her. Nor any of the devices of modesty. She acted as though this were the thousandth night they had spent together, no more remarkable than any that had gone before. It irritated him that she should take it all so much for granted. He decided then that he would get up first in the morning and drive away and leave her there. It would make the revenge against the Morrissey clan no less sweet.

But he learned that her bovine placidity was due to her almost complete indifference to everything in the world except the immediate gratification of her body. And in that special area of interest she was anything but placid. He knew the next day that he had found a strange one—a highly specialized organism. In her outside interests and accomplishments she was on no more than a third grade level. By morning he had no intention of leaving her behind. He felt obscurely ashamed of himself for taking her along, and he knew he could never introduce her to anyone without feeling apologetic, but he could not part with her.

He could not have parted with her then, but he could now. But only because he sensed danger in staying with the two of them. He would leave her to the kid. He doubted that it would make any special difference to her. She seemed to lack the capacity to feel any special attachment for anyone. She was alone in the world and there was only one other individual in the world. That was Man, and it did not matter what face he wore or what language he spoke. He had to admire her for her single-mindedness, her unthinking drive and purpose. She was remote as a mountain, yet attainable as the next breath. No one would even come to know her—if indeed there was anything to know beyond the physical. So divorced was her preoccupation from normal human emotions that he felt quite certain that had he shared her with the kid from the beginning, it would have made no difference to her at all. It would have been, to her, perhaps a more desirable arrangement. He knew that should he stay with her, he would gradually become more violent with her until, one day, he might kill her. Not out of anger. Just in an attempt to pry up the lid and see if there was anything underneath, or if the box was entirely empty.

He had not yet killed anyone, but he knew that the wanting to do it was buried in him. Buried not as deep as it used to be. Buried not deep at all last night when he had kicked at the head of the stranger on the ground. Seeing the end of Big Satch had clarified the wanting. He wondered why he should wonder about killing someone. It was a stupid thing to do. They hunted you twice as hard. And when they got you, they would kill you in turn.

And, as the truck rolled through the rain, he wondered why he was as he was. A job wouldn’t be bad. He’d even enjoyed washing the cars, getting them gleaming clean. And he’d never required much money. He could get along on very little. The fact that it was there made you want to take it. Taking it was a gesture of contempt for all of Them. Taking it was a way of saying something. As taking a life would be a way of saying something. Maybe saying,
Here comes Frank Stratter.

Sometimes he would have a dream where he heard people in the street going
Ah
and
O.
He would get up and dress and go out to see what the trouble was. They were standing there, all of them, looking up into the night sky and he would look up there too and he would see his name in great letters of steady fire written all the way across heaven.
Frank Stratter.
Then they would begin to recognize him and they would move away from him in fear and go into all their houses and leave him standing there alone looking at his name and how it was written up there, higher than anything in the world.

The small truck droned on. There was a smell of aged fish inside it. The floor was hard under the burlap. He lay half smiling at the roof of the truck and he saw how huge the name was, and how the letters glowed.
Frank Stratter. Frank Stratter.

[The boy drives the stolen truck. He is conscious of the placid willing dampness of the girl beside him, and also conscious of the ominous clatter of the worn engine every time he gets the speedometer above forty. He knows motors and it sounds to him as though the main bearings are nearly gone. Too much push and it will give out entirely. The truck is a junker.

He wishes they had another car. He would feel safer in another car. Something like that big Cad that went by, or even the Mercedes, if that wasn’t too rich a dream to dream. But he knows he would settle for the slightly aged station wagon, or the green Plymouth. And certainly for the blue and white convertible that passed him cautiously a few minutes ago, with a woman driving.

The girl yawns and picks at her teeth with a thumbnail. When he glances down and to the side he can see a few inches of the inside of her right thigh. He listens to the clatter of the motor and eases the speed off to thirty-five.]

Virginia Sherrel drove north through the Wednesday rain in the blue and white Dodge convertible that she and her husband, David, had picked out together for the vacation they were to take—the vacation that David had finally taken alone. She drove north alone as David had driven south.

She had not liked the idea of an urn. The very word had the sound of a funeral bell. Bell? Fragment of an old pun. The New Hampshire farmhouse, on honeymoon. And they had walked too far and it had begun to rain and they had run back. And David had knelt and taken the hem of her tweed skirt and twisted the water out of it and, smiling up at her, said, “Wring out, wild belle.” He had made a fire later and they had made love by firelight on an ancient glossy horsehair sofa.

Not the sound of urn. And the urn itself had made a sound when the undertaker, with an almost grotesque callousness, had taken one down from a shelf and opened the screw top with a shrill grating sound and then held it out to her—and she, caught up in the wicked pantomime, had leaned forward a bit and stared inanely down into it and said, “No, I don’t think so.” Not for David.

So it was a box. A flat bronze box not quite as long or quite as deep as a cigar box. With a discreet border design, a small catch. The undertaker had snapped the catch three times.

It was in the trunk compartment of the car, and she knew how it was wrapped. Back in the hotel in Sarasota she had closed the room door behind her and she had made certain it was locked, and she had untied the cord, unwrapped the brown paper, lifted the lid of the cardboard box.

Inside the cardboard box the bronze box lay wrapped in tissue, resting on a nest of tissue. As she unwrapped it she thought of the presents they had given each other. He had said once, “I think best I like to see you unwrap presents. Such a posture of greed. Such intense absorption. And all the sensuous little delays, such as untying knots instead of cutting them.”

All the presents and this, then, is your final present, David.
She lifted the bronze lid and looked wonderingly at the fine grayish ash. She touched it lightly with her finger. It was soft and a few flakes adhered to the moisture of her finger tip and she brushed them off. Here is the receding hair and the troubled gray eyes, lips and long bones, fingers and phallus, blood and pores and the crisp curled body hair.
Here is all of you, my lover.
She closed the lid and it snapped as it had in the undertaker’s show room. She wrapped it in the tissue, and closed the cardboard box and refolded the brown paper and tied the cord. Then she went over and stretched out on the bed. Gift from David. Gift of himself. And riding now, tucked away in the luggage compartment, riding through the gray rain, riding north.

Yet it could not be comprehended. It could never be understood in its entirety. This was a grief unspeakable. It was a soiled grief, a shameful agony.

September fourteenth. Ten in the morning in New York. Ten in the morning in Florida. Ten o’clock in the small apartment on the East Side. She went down after her breakfast and got the mail. No letter from David. She went back up to the apartment and poured her second cup of coffee. The sun came in. The apartment was in a building only a little over a year old. The apartment was as they said, a machine for living. Full of an incredible cleverness. You see, this fits here, and then that slides back out of the way. All you have to do is turn this, and adjust that. Special plastics and special metals and lighting that was as carefully conceived as any stage setting, so dramatic that the apartment in daylight never quite lived up to its evening promise. Thus it was a place for people who lived most at night.

She sat and looked at the bills and the circulars and read one letter from an old and dear friend who now lived in Burlington and who wrote, “I suppose it is a sort of modern wisdom to take a vacation from each other, but damn if I like the sound or taste of it. To have you and David indulge in such a thing is to me like the teeter and fall of great idols. Forgive me if I am too blunt, Ginny, but I can’t help thinking David needs, more than anything else, a sound spanking.”

She was annoyed as she read the letter. In her attempt to be light when writing Helen she had given Helen a distorted picture. It was not a marital vacation. It was a sudden queerness in David, a hint of breakdown.

It was then that the phone rang.

“Mrs. David Sherrel, please.”

“This is she.”

“I have a long distance call for you from Sarasota, Florida, Go ahead, please.”

Dim male voice blurred by miles, distorted by a jangling hum. “David?” she said eagerly. “David, is that you?” And as she asked she could remember the last few lines of the letter she had written him. Lines she had worked over very carefully. “Please know that I try to understand to the extent that it is within my capacity to understand. I know that you feel this is important to you. If it is important to you it is also important to me, darling. But please write to me. I think I deserve that much. I think you owe me that much, David. You have always had imagination. Think of what it would be like to be me, and to be here, and not know.”

“David!” she cried to the blurred phone. “I cannot hear you.”

“Please hang up,” the operator said, “and I will try to get a better connection.”

She hung up and sat by the phone and waited. She wanted to hear him say he was coming home, that this frightening thing that had separated them was over.

When it rang again she snatched it quickly. “David?”

“No ma’am. My name is… Police Department… phone number in his wallet.”

“Police? What’s wrong? Is my husband in trouble?”

“Sorry to have to be the one to tell you this, Miz Sherrel, but your husband is dead. We got to get a legal identification on him, and I guess you ought to come on down here. Hello. Hello? Miz Sherrel? Operator! Operator! We’ve been cut…”

“I’m still here,” Virginia said in a voice that sounded not at all like her own. It sounded cool and formal and controlled. “I’ll fly down. I’ll be there as soon as I can.” The man started to say something but she heard only the first few words before she hung up.

In the first few moments there was the shock, and then there was the sense of inevitability, so strong and sure that she wondered that she had not known at once when the phone had rung—she wondered that she had been so naive as to expect to hear David’s voice.

She phoned the airlines and made a reservation on a flight leaving at five minutes of two. She rinsed the breakfast things, packed, closed the apartment, cashed a check, picked up her ticket and, after a short wait at Tampa International, she was in Sarasota a little after eight in the evening. It was a still night, very hot. People walked slowly in the heat

The man she talked to was large, soft-voiced, gentle. He had her sit down and he told her what had happened. “He’d been staying at a place called the Taine Motor Lodge out on the North Trail. He hadn’t been making any trouble or anything, but he was acting kind of peculiar and Mrs. Strickie, she’s the manager out there, she was sort of keeping an eye on him. She’s got efficiencies out there. She noticed his car was in front of his place yesterday and he didn’t go out in the evening and this morning she got to thinking about it and knocked on his door about eight and when she didn’t get any answer she used her key and went in and backed right out again the gas was so thick, and called us right away. We got it aired out and he was on the kitchen floor, and this note here was on the table.”

She took the note and read it.
“Ginny—It just wasn’t any use. It just didn’t do any good. I’m sorry.”
It wasn’t signed.

“Is that his handwriting?” The questioning voice came from far away, echoing through a long metal pipe. She swayed on the chair, didn’t answer. The man went away and came back with a paper cup. She took it, lifted it, smelted the raw whisky, drank it down.

She gave the cup back to him. “That’s his writing.”

“It checks out that he did it about midnight. Was his health bad?”

“No. He was in good health.”

“Money trouble?”

“No. He had a good job. He was on a leave of absence.”

“What kind of work did he do?”

“He was in the radio and television department of a large advertising agency.”

“Any children?”

“No. No children.”

“You know any reason why he did it, Miz Sherrel?”

“Not… exactly. I think it was some kind of a breakdown. His work was very demanding. He felt he had to get away for a little while. He thought that would help.”

“If you feel up to it, we can go over and take a look at him now and get that part over with. If you don’t feel like it, it can wait until morning.”

“I’m all right. We can do it now.”

And so it was done. David was gone. The body seemed to be the body of a stranger. It was familiar to her in contour, in the shape of each feature, but no longer known to her. They went back and the man gave her the keys to the car. David’s things were packed in the car. She found a place to stay. The next morning she made the arrangements about cremation. Then she placed a call to Jim Dillon in New York, their lawyer, a classmate of David.

“Jim? This is Ginny. I’m calling from Sarasota.”

“That’s what the operator said. What are you doing down there, girl? How’s Dave?”

“David killed himself, Jim. They found the body yesterday morning. I flew down.”

“He what! Oh Jesus, Ginny! My God, why? Why did he do that?”

“I don’t think we’ll ever know. Jim, I need your help.”

“Anything, Ginny. You know that. I think I could even come down there if…”

“No. No, thanks, Jim. I just don’t feel like coming right back and facing… everything. I suppose there are legal things that have to be taken care of. There’s the deposit box and things like that. There’s a will in it.”

“How big will the estate be?”

“Maybe thirty thousand. Somewhere around there. Then there’s the insurance. The policies are in the box.”

“Have you got money now? If you had a joint checking account you won’t be able to write checks against it.”

“I have my own checking account. There’s enough in it for now, Jim. I just want to stay down here for a while. I don’t know how long.”

“How about the funeral?”

“I… I don’t think there’ll he any. He wanted to be cremated. I’m having that done. I’m going to phone his sister in Seattle and phone my parents. Maybe when I come back I can arrange some sort of memorial service, but I don’t know about that yet. Can you do everything that has to be done?”

“Of course. Give me your address there. I’ll send stuff for your signature.”

She told him where she was staying. He told her how shocked and sorry he was, questioned her as to whether it was wise for her to be alone just at this time. He said he would inform the agency, and let their friends know. She said she would write a note to some of the people. After they finished talking, she made the other two phone calls. They were both bad calls to make. When she talked to her parents she was barely able to dissuade her mother from coming down.

“But what are you going to
do,
Virginia? Why are you staying there?”

“I have some thinking to do, Mother.”

“You can think
anywhere.
You can come here and stay with us and think here. This seems so
insane.”

But in the end she won out, won reluctant acceptance. She drove around the city and decided she would rather live at the beach. She found a tiny apartment in a blue and white motel on Siesta Key. Her door opened onto the beach. It was September and it was hot and there were few tourists. In the mornings she would see the high white cloud banks against the blue sky and on many days the hard rain would come down in the afternoon, dimpling and washing the sand and ending with the same abruptness that it had come.

She had wired Jim Dillon her new address. Legal papers came and she signed them and sent them back. Sympathy notes arrived. The most careful and intricate one came from the advertising firm.

She spent her days in a quiet pattern. In the early morning she walked on the beach. Later she lay under the weight of the sun, walking gingerly down to swim in the warm water when the heat became too great. The sun blunted her energies, softening the edges of her grief. She was a tall woman with a strong, well-made, youthful body, with black crisp hair, unplucked black brows, eyes of a clear light blue. The sun tanned her deeply and the continual swimming tightened the tissues of her body. She would come in from the dazzle of the beach and take off her suit in the relative gloom of the small apartment and, catching a glimpse of herself in a mirror, be startled by the vivid contrast of deep tan and the white protected bands of flesh. The bronze box was in the back of her closet.

It was a time to think. And to wonder how she had failed. And to wonder what would become of her.

The marriage had lasted seven years. They had met in New York. She was from upstate New York, from Rochester. She was working in the fiction department of a fashion magazine when she met him. David had done two short pieces for them. Virginia had read them and thought them quite strange, but she had liked them. A third piece, according to the judgment of the fiction editor, needed reworking. The fiction editor had made a luncheon date with David Sherrel and had been unable to keep it. Virginia was sent along to the midtown restaurant to meet him, armed with the manuscript, the fiction editor’s notes, and some money from the petty cash fund.

They had been awkward and earnest with each other during lunch. David turned out to be tall, slim, blond and—in spite of Madison Avenue manners and clothing—rather shy. He was apologetic about working for an advertising agency. He had curious moments of intensity, after which he would slip behind his façade.

She had been dating several men, but after lunch with David they all seemed very predictable and tasteless. The second time she saw him he was very drunk. The third time she saw him it became evident to both of them that they would be married.

It had seemed to be a good marriage. She felt needed and wanted. She learned to accept his moods of black hopeless depression, accepting them as the evil to be balanced against a gift of gaiety, of high wild fun, of laughter that pinched your side and brought you to helplessness. It was their dream that one day his novel would make them independent of the agency. Often she felt strong enough for the two of them. There was the deep stripe of the erratic in him. He seemed to be always on the verge of losing his job, only to regain favor by some exercise of imagination that not only re-established him as a valuable man, but usually brought a pay raise. Though he sneered at his job and his work and could talk at length about the artificial wonderland of the advertising agencies, when he was in ill repute, he could not keep food on his stomach, nor could he sleep without sedatives.