The End of the Pier (12 page)

“You trying to tell me that that murder-rape over in Elton County a couple years ago and that Eunice Hayden case—you trying to tell me that because of this you think there's some Jack the Ripper type out there?”

“No.”

“Then you trying to tell me you think the same sombitch did all these women?”

“Yes.”

“Just because there's been three murders in four years—four years, mind you—”

Sam interrupted. “All of them done the same way. And I'd say that sort of thing in two tiny places like La Porte and Hebrides might suggest our women better bolt their doors.”

Sims leaned back and smiled meanly. “Well, I guess I know what your problem is. You never did find who killed Eunice Hayden, so you want to make it look like neither did Sheriff Sedgewick find who really killed the others. That it?”

“No, that's not it.”

Sims's mode of argument was to ignore answers and repeat himself. “So since you never did discover the Hayden girl's killer, you want to throw up a little dust to make it look like maybe Sheriff Sedgewick over there didn't do a good job?”

“I think maybe he didn't. I think the wrong man's in prison. I also think the criminal justice system showed signs of working pretty quick, for once.”

“And just what's that supposed to mean? You inferring there's something fishy?”

“I'm just saying Boy Chalmers went inside as quick as the jurors went out.”

This was too much of a conundrum for Sims. He stared at Sam through squinty eyes and tossed down his pen. “My god, but you got crust. There's nothing to show Boy Chalmers ever even
knew
Eunice Hayden, so the Hayden case, that's got nothing to do with these two others. Why, not even our state attorney could get past Chalmers's alibi, and she's tough as they come.”

Sims loved Billie Anderson, who was just as political as he was. What Sims was too stupid to see was that his own argument was circular. Follow it around again and it would show that if Boy Chalmers hadn't killed Eunice Hayden, it was a good bet he hadn't killed the other two women. But all Sam said was, “There's nothing to prove Chalmers knew Antoinette Perry, either. It was just assumed, wasn't it?”

Apparently, the mayor was so certain he was right that his anger drained away and his small, wet mouth twisted into a pearly little smile as he leaned back, hands locked behind his neck. “Well, you do take the biscuit, Sammy, you really do. First off, that Perry and Butts woman, they were
raped.
Eunice wasn't ever
raped.
”

“Oh. What would you call it, then, that knife stuck up in her? ‘Interfered with'?”

“Watch your mouth, DeGheyn. The doc said she wasn't raped. Now, I'm not a big-time policeman like you, but even I've heard of what is called an MO. Then why wasn't the Hayden girl done the same things to as the others? You tell me.” Mayor Sims drew some papers toward him and started signing—his indication the interview was over. “Now get outta here and check the parking meters.” He looked up. “You just might be needing a vacation, Sammy.”

Meaning: lay off or you'll be taking one. Sam hadn't expected cooperation, so he wasn't especially disappointed; as far as the threat was concerned, he couldn't care less.

But Sam didn't lay off; he kept on asking questions about Boy Chalmers. What he found was that Boy had never had a serious love interest, though he was extremely popular—one girl thought he looked like Robert Redford, and talked as if Boy's incarceration couldn't be really happening, that it was more like a movie, and maybe Paul Newman would come along and somehow get Boy out.

And two months ago, back at the end of June, Boy
had
gotten out. It hadn't been with the help of Paul Newman, though; it had been Alexis Beauchamp Chalmers.

•  •  •

A little over two months ago, at the end of June, Boy's mother had gone to visit him in prison. It was Boy's birthday, and Alexis had been permitted to take him a cake. Oh, there'd been no files, knives, or guns in it; it was pretty much hacked up and kind of pasted back together by the time Alexis and Boy sat down to blow out the unlit candles.

But because it was his birthday and because Boy had been a model prisoner, they were allowed to sit in one of the detention rooms with a guard at the door, to celebrate.

The guard told the authorities later that Mrs. Chalmers had even offered him a piece of cake—a real nice woman, Mrs. Chalmers—but of course he'd just put the slice of cake aside. “You don't think I been stupid enough to eat it? Coulda been drugged.”

But Mrs. Chalmers had become violently ill, and he had gone quickly for help. And the chain of events, the several flukes from then on, from that unguarded door all the way down the hall to freedom, was a warden's nightmare. Another guard had been in the john; still another had left his post at the bidding of two other guards who were having trouble containing a prison fight. And the last guard, the one who stood between him and the outside world, Boy had managed to overpower. It was a small prison and not a maximum-security one.

People figured Alexis Beauchamp Chalmers was the best little
actress they'd ever seen. But they could never be sure, because she really
had
got sick, and the pretty little pink-icing rosebuds had turned up traces of salmonella poisoning. What had passed between Boy and Alexis, sitting there eating that cake, no one knew. Since he hadn't got sick, people figured Alexis must have planned the whole thing.

It was only twenty-four hours before they caught Boy in Dubois's used-car lot, trying to hot-wire an old Ford. He'd been stupid enough to run back to Hebrides and right into Sheriff Sedgewick's arms instead of running hell-for-leather in the opposite direction.

For Boy, it was the wrong twenty-four hours. This, at least, was Sam's thinking; for, in spite of the awful coincidence of Boy's escape and the murder of Nancy Alonzo in that same wood, near the spot where Loreen Butts was murdered, Sam still didn't think Boy was guilty.

•  •  •

The mayor, on the other hand, seemed hardly to be able to contain his jubilance at proving Sam DeGheyn one hundred percent wrong.

Right after Boy's recapture, he'd gloated. “I guess that pretty much shuts you up about Boy Chalmers, don't it, Sammy?”

All Sam could think of, looking at Sims's mouthful of teeth, which he'd happily punch out, was that the mayor could stand a visit to the dentist. The rise of anger he felt was at Sims's ability to laugh in the face of this horrible tragedy. Sam hadn't known Loreen Butts or Tony Perry personally, but he had known Nancy Alonzo.

While Sam just stood there, his hands under his armpits, his arms hugging his chest in an attempt to smother his rage, Sims had gone on signing whatever documents were on his desk, signing them with a flourish. And talking.

“Yeah, I reckon Billie Anderson'll throw the book at him this time. No more birthday parties for Boy. Now maybe you can use
your energies on something more useful, huh? Maybe you can start earning your salary.”

Sam didn't answer. He just stood there, and although there was a trickle of sweat down his back and dampness under his arms, he felt stone cold as a statue.

“Cat got your tongue?” Mayor Sims smiled broadly, showing those teeth again that seemed to be shrinking away from the gums, as if the teeth weren't too happy about being so close to Sims, either.

Sam just stood there.

The smile disappeared suddenly. The goading wasn't working, and Sims didn't like that. “Now, I heard you don't agree with some of the evidence. I heard you think that crime-scene officer was wrong.” When Sam didn't answer, Sims leaned forward. “Well? What did you think that man who's got more experience and smarts than you ever had was wrong
about
?” When Sam still didn't answer, Sims went on, but with increasing uncertainty. “Hell, she writes his
name
in her own blood on the ground there and you
still
say maybe Boy Chalmers is innocent. My godamighty, man! What kinda proof you need, anyways? Man's a jailbreaker and out one day and
another
woman gets her throat slit? I mean, what
kinda
proof—?” Pure exasperation stopped him. Sims just shook his head at Sam's foolishness.

But when Sam still didn't answer him or move a muscle, Sims got up, leaned over his desk with his hands fisted, and nearly bellowed. “Let me just tell you something, fella! This Alonzo case is
closed.
I don't give a tinker's damn if she
was
a La Porte girl, or if she
did
do cleaning at the court house here, or if she
was
a friend of yours. The case is
closed.
Now, why don't you get out there”—and here he waggled his arm in some general “out there” direction—“and maybe do something useful. Drag your Deputy Donny Dawg out there to the Red Barn and clean up the sugar bowls.” His face was mottled purple.

Sam nodded and turned away.

“You hear me?”

“I hear you, Mr. Mayor.” Sam's voice was without expression.

•  •  •

Sam had been the sheriff around here for too many years to give a thought to Mayor Sims's temper or Mayor Sims's threats; he was as much a fixture as the courthouse pump, a town relic, a piece of history the people could no more do without than their Labor Day parade.

He was the loot. Sam smiled.

He heard voices, a man's and Bunny's, her piping voice which sounded eternally surprised, and looked through the screen of pines. Bunny and her customer were standing on the tiny, slanting wood porch, and she was waving away moths that had fluttered in when the porch light flicked on. Fireflies thronged the patchy grass, and mosquitoes hung like a veil of gauze over the water holes. The man was slapping the back of his neck, uttering some obscenity. Then he laughed.

Sam watched Bunny Caruso, standing there in her long, loose dress—her “medium's gown.”

He wasn't thinking of loose women; he was thinking of misfits.

Tony Perry had lived alone with her two children, never been married, hadn't had much to do with people, except the men she slept around with. Sam frowned.

Eunice Hayden wasn't Sam's idea of “loose”; whatever Eunice had been up to those last months before her death, Sam could still remember her as the washed-out young girl he'd seen standing on the corner of Tremont and First like a shipwreck victim, marooned.

“She didn't make friends easy,” her mother had said, probably meaning that Loreen, as a youngster, didn't have any at all. Maybe the girl had been smart; maybe not. Smart can kill you socially at that age.

Bunny Caruso, who was giggling on her front porch, had been counted the school idiot, more or less—laughed at, kept forever on
the fringes of the crowd. Got fired from one job and then another; treated with contempt by some of the La Porte people long before she'd found her True Calling. A misfit, to say the least.

Willow Pauley, who lived her agoraphobic life, had reported someone watching her house: a man in the trees. “Swingin' from them, Willow?” Another woman alone; another misfit.

And Sam's favorite misfit: Maud Chadwick.

W
atched her through the trees.

The memory of watching her through the trees rose in him like thick black smoke. If he didn't get at her, he would suffocate.

Sitting here now with the drawer of knives, he found himself gulping air.

He had run his thumb over each one, meaning to choose the one that drew blood with the lightest touch. He barely caressed the blade of the hunting knife—his favorite; drew it easily and smoothly along until the thread of blood came to the skin's surface.

He breathed easier.

Letters, he had been thinking, were bad news. One had been propped on the cold potbellied stove, and it wasn't even to him, but to that sorry old drunk with his sharp whiskers and callused hands he'd had to call “Dad.” He'd had to call him that or his mother wouldn't lie with him anymore. And the letter had been for that old drunk.

Letters. Women. They came and they went. The women around here saw him and didn't know they'd seen him. They didn't know he was imprinted on their eyes.

He thought of Sam DeGheyn watching through the woods. Now, that was really funny. He giggled, thinking of it. The sound rose in his throat like froth. It was so funny, he cut himself deeper, running the knife blade absently across the palm of his hand.

Licked it. He didn't care; he didn't often feel pain. In his crotch he felt pain, the pressure from that thick coil of smoke rising upwards through his limbs, engorging.

Watching from the woods, he knew just where she went, and when.

And what was funny was that Sam thought he was out there all alone, watching them.

Yet there he'd been while Sam was watching.

The sheriff's shadow.

Now, that—that was funny.

Both of them—with a gun, with a knife—watching through the trees.

Oh, that was a scream. He was out there somewhere. That was a scream. He felt a pressure in his throat rising and he tossed his head back.

Beyond the window the sparrows took off.

B
unny Caruso's coy giggle was matched with the man's hawking laugh that sounded more like a man having a seizure than a man having a good time. They stood on the tiny porch.

Because his back was partially turned, Sam couldn't make out who it was. At first he thought it might be Dodge Haines's brother Rob, but then he heard that laugh. Sam thought he recognized it; and when the screen door creaked shut and Bunny's friend's lounge suit moved like quicksilver toward his car, Sam gaped.

Bubby Dubois.

His first reaction was a short gasp of astonished laughter; his second was a molten anger that seemed to twist his stomach muscles as if he had a cramp. He felt, he supposed, the way a father must who finds his daughter's young man screwing another girl. Why he thought Dubois, unfaithful to his own wife, would be faithful to Sam's, he didn't know. Why he should feel what would be Florence's own humiliation, he didn't know, either. He felt betrayed.