Dead Low Tide (18 page)

“Didn’t she date anybody?”

“You know something, Andy, I never could figure that girl. We had this dishwasher, see? I mean a real moody guy. Bright, kind of, and a lot of the time you’d figure he was laughing at you. Funny to have a punk washing dishes laughing at you and you don’t know why. This was better than six months ago, see? In March, I guess it was, and, oh God, are
we busy. People waiting to eat in this dump, can you imagine? So she eats here twice. And without no permission or nothing, the second time she come here, she goes charging right out in the kitchen, and the manager finds her out there, nose to nose with that Ken, the dishwasher, and them talking in low nasty voices to each other. See, she must have known he was working here. He’d been on for a couple of months. Well, he tells her—the manager I mean—that she’s got to get out of the kitchen, and she steps up and asks him for a job. We need girls and he takes her on, and honest to God, she was green as beans. She kept getting all fouled up and, see, we had to get her straightened out on orders and things, and everybody in here busy as a college girl in a—oops, I still don’t know you good enough, Andy. Anyway, she catches on fast and she does her share of the dirty work, and pretty soon she’s a good waitress. We couldn’t figure out what it was with the two of them. He had an old beat-up car, and sometimes after work they’d go off in it. But always acting kind of sore at each other. We kind of hinted around, but she wouldn’t say anything. We tried to get her off on dates, but, no sir, not Joy. We’re closed on Tuesdays here, and one Tuesday I even get the guy, this Ken, see, to take me out. I figured I could find out from him whether they were married, those two, or something like that, and he run out on her and she found him again, and took the job so she could be close enough to needle him or something. Anyway, he picks me up in that beat car. I live just down the road in that Glory-Bee Court, Gawd what a foul dump, but it’s handy being so close by, and we’re going swimming, see? I don’t really like the guy. He gives me the creeps. He really does. I find out he doesn’t want nothing to do with any public beach. Not him. Not good enough for
him, I guess. On the way he keeps talking over my head. Smart stuff. Confusing me and making me sore. He goes over there where the big houses are, over there where it’s all private beach, and there’s one of those big houses empty, and he goes right in the driveway and parks, bold as anything, and he tells me he always swims there, and if somebody moves in, he’ll find another empty house and do the same thing. He has busted the door of the cabana on the beach, and we change in there, but he doesn’t get fresh or anything, like I thought maybe he would, and wished he would because, see, I had a big yen to smack him down good for all the wise talk. Well, he gets his swimming pants on and I see right off he’s a real well-built guy, which I figured he was anyway, and he goes strutting down the beach and we spread the blanket and open some beer and he waves at people. I ask him how he knows them. He says he tells them he’s the owner’s friend, and if you do things bold, nobody stops you. It certainly made me nervous, and I kept wondering if the cops found us if I’d be in trouble too on account of busting into that cabana. He says he’s making a lot of friends around there and he said if they knew what his line of work was, they’d drop their teeth. We swam and I’m a no-good swimmer, believe me, and boys usually help me in the water, but that lunk just swam out about forty miles and left me splashing around alone for a hell of a long time. When he comes back and we’re drinking beer I try to wiggle some info out of him about Joy. But he’s like clams, see. And like he’s laughing at me. It got me sore. I drank a terrible big amount of beer, especially when he was way down the beach talking to people and he wouldn’t let me come, like he was ashamed of me or something, and him only a dishwasher, the nerve! When I drink beer I always get
terrible sleepy, so don’t you feed me beer tonight, sugar, because I go out like lights. I can leave here pretty soon now and there’s a real cute place about a mile down the road. It’s just juke for dancing, but Gawd, I’d dance to a guy playing a paper comb if it come to that and there was nothing else. But to get back to that Ken—oh, Jeez, how he griped me. I go to sleep right there on the blanket and the funniest damn thing, I get a bad dream about drowning in the water, and I open my eyes and there are his eyes looking right down into mine, and at first I think maybe it is a pass and I get a chance to slap him down like I wanted to because he talked so wise to me, see, like I was ignorant or something, but it isn’t that. It isn’t no pass, Andy. It’s just the fingers on my throat and him looking down at me. Gawd, have I had dreams about that! I didn’t even dare twitch. Him looking at me like he was one of those professors looking down at a bug and wondering where to stick the pin through, I tell you, I was all through, right there. Then all of a sudden he takes his hand away and gives a little shrug like I wasn’t worth sticking a pin through, like I was a dull kind of bug not worth collecting. He says we better go and I say we better had, and I feel a lot better when he’s ten feet away, believe me. Still there’s no pass, and he brings me back and he doesn’t even want to come in for a drink. Well, it was maybe—let me see—May? Early in May, I guess, he quits. No notice—no nothing. Frankie popped a couple guts, believe you me. Joy gets awful quiet-like, but she keeps on working. We figured he blew town. Then a good customer of mine who knows him by sight tells about seeing him driving one of those new little foreign-type cars. So you know how I got it figured out? She worked here until she could get a better job because she knew he was still in
town, see. And I bet he got himself some rich babe he met on that beach, and she’s keeping him because, like I said, he’s a pretty well-built fella, and that would be just his style. He always acted like he was too good for dishwashing. And a guy like that, I mean a guy who’ll bust into places like that, he just doesn’t give a damn. My God, the coffee is terrible tonight. Honey, let’s you drive me to my place and I’ll change and I got a bottle there, and then we can go dancing. It isn’t air conditioned there but it’s cool.”

“What was Ken’s last name?”

“God knows. I don’t even think Frankie knew. He just walked in one day when Frankie had a sign in the window about a dishwasher, and he was always going to get his social security number looked up or something, and he never did, even though Frankie kept after him.”

“Where did he live when he worked here?”

“Down the line some place. Somebody said, I forget who, that he was in a shack on one of the islands in the bay. Some little island where you got to wade across the flats to get to it, and I guess that’s right because he was always coming in with his shoes soaked in the morning. I bet you he’s moved off that island now. I bet he’s living up with some rich bag in one of those big houses. I don’t know why a girl like Joy would want to toss herself away on a bum type like that. I can shove off now. Gee, maybe you don’t like dancing. My place is sort of crumby, and all the movies stink. I looked them up. You know, Monday night is sort of like a weekend to me, the way we’re closed Tuesdays. I mean I can sleep all day, and I usually do because I’m up all night. That is, if you don’t feed me beer. Then I get awful dopey and I’m no good to anybody, but I bet you aren’t the type of fella buys beer.”

She stood up, and one of the other girls said, “Have a good time, honey.”

I had been just about to apply the brush-off, but it suddenly seemed too bad to make that much of a dent in her pride. I decided, to save her face, that I’d leave with her and then apply the brush-off at her place.

I paid the check, and we went out and got in the car. The grease smell was caught in her hair. I could detect it when we were inside the car. I started up and swung out into the road and headed for Glory-Bee Court.

“What do you usually do Monday nights?”

“Oh, when I don’t have a date—that doesn’t happen often, see—well, I go on down to that cute place I was telling you about. There’s a gang of nice kids goes there. We have a lot of laughs and play some table shuffleboard, and you ought to see Bernie the bartender do imitations. Honest to God, his Charles Boyer is a riot.”

I turned into the floodlit driveway of Glory-Bee. “The one on the end. It’s more private-like. Of course when the season starts, I got to move back into town because the prices go way up in the courts. What’s this? Pictures, hey.”

I tried to snatch them but I was too late. She had the top picture turned toward the floodlights. She slid them slowly back into the envelope. She turned slowly to face me as she placed the envelope between us. Her voice was entirely different. “Where’s your camera, you bum?”

“What do you mean?”

“I know about guys like you. I know the racket. Please, baby, just one little picture. Just a keepsake. Then you bastards make a million prints and sell them all over the country. I had a girl friend in Detroit who got sucked into that one.
She was so dumb she let this guy take some special movies of her. Then her husband’s old man goes to a smoker and sees her in the movies. Why don’t you guys hire tramps? You’re just too damn cheap, I guess. You don’t sucker me, mister. I’m just not that damn dumb. I’ve been around a couple of years. We would have had a good time tonight until you pulled out a camera, buster, and then I’d have screamed your damn ears off, so maybe you’re lucky, after all. I should hope to drop dead if I’d walk ten feet with you in the sunshine on a busy street. You stink.”

She half ran to her door. I turned around and got out of there. My ears were burning. I felt ashamed—I guess merely because I was a member of the same race that had developed that kind of racket. She had been almost pathetically vulnerable. So arch and coy once she thought she had a date. I knew I’d never dare go back there.

Anyway, she had helped—a lot. I could drop that name I’d used for him—Joe. Now it was Ken. And in a lot clearer focus. Mary Eleanor on the beach. And that “well-built fella” moving in on her. A lot easier than breaking into a cabana. This was like breaking into something where the door wasn’t even locked.

So they’d gone to Miami together. At least it was probable that they had. But he would have come back with her. I wondered why the pictures had been mailed from Miami. That didn’t make much sense. Unless Ken, too, was a dupe, and they had stayed together at the wrong place, and he received no part of the forty thousand. I was so fond of my structure that I had built up that I resented any little fact which didn’t fit into it perfectly. But the picture of Ken was becoming distressingly clear. And I had to give up the idea of a rational
being with larceny and murder in his heart. Cindy’s picture of Ken set it up as a distorted intelligence, perhaps over-endowment and overtones of the psychopathic. And that made what had happened to Christy fit better. Killing her had seemed needless, from any rational point of view. But if the need were in the mind of the killer … Perhaps Wargler and I were both right. It was related to John’s death, and unrelated at the same time. Two opposing facets of irrationality. A headless man standing death-quiet in the brush of Tickler Terrace. I was sorry about Cindy. There was more to ask her.

IT WAS ELEVEN-THIRTY
when I parked, once again, in the dark driveway in front of the Long house, and heard the Gulf as I turned off the motor. If the burly young policeman was still staked out there, I was going to make him let me talk to Mary Eleanor, even if I had to phone Wargler and get him over here, phone Steve and get him here, too, get Jack Ryer—open the whole thing up and let them take over. Maybe one quick look at the photographs, and the young cop would see that there was something to be discussed. I could bluntly and directly ask Mary Eleanor where Ken was. Maybe we’d have to walk her around and give her a cold shower and put hot coffee into her, but it ought to bring her back out of green dragon land soon enough.

I pushed the bell. I knocked softly, and then when there was no answer, I knocked loudly. I yelled into the darkness of the house: “Hey! Hey, in there.”

Maybe they’d moved faster than I had. Maybe, once again, I’d underestimated the fat sleepy chief, and Cro-Magnon George. They’d all be back in town, and the house would be empty. I could see a dim light shining from her bedroom door into the hallway. I tried the screen and the latch was still broken, and the cylinder overhead made a soft sighing sound as I pushed it open, made a Japanese apology as it shut behind me.

I went down the hall walking loudly, setting my feet down firmly, as I did not want the policeman to shoot.

I walked into the room saying, cheerfully, as insurance, “It’s only me again.”

There was a bed lamp on. It had a small blue shade, quite heavy, so that most of the light was directed downward. But enough of it slanted out across the floor so that I was able to avoid setting my foot on the face of the young policeman. He lay there the way a child sleeps, ruddy cheek against her rug, left hand near his face, palm up, fingers slightly curled. On the right side of his head, over the ear and just behind the temple, was a comedy touch—a half a hen’s egg that had to be makeup. Nobody could swell up like that. His cap was a couple of feet from his head. His breathing was shallow and fast. You see a big man like that, you inevitably think of how he was as a little kid. Ralphie banged his head falling out of that nasty old tree, and Mother put witch hazel on it and tucked him in and kissed his cheek, which tasted of salt from too many tears. The light struck him in such a way that I saw he had very long eyelashes, something you would never notice under other circumstances.

In the dark house the phone began to ring. It had the sound of all phones in empty houses. Nobody here, boss.

Nobody here but us chickens. I mechanically counted the rings. Six, seven, eight, nine, ten—and half of eleven. Then just the Gulf sound, the quick shallow breathing.

She still wore the flimsy robe. She had rolled onto her back and the robe was parted, and she was a deep oven brown except for the narrow glaring white band across her loins. And deep brown except for her throat. I stood by the bed. The weapon used had been placed, after use, on her flat brown belly. It was a most casual, arrogant touch. The weapon was a pair of small curved nail scissors. From the look of her throat it had not been the handiest weapon in the world. It had taken a bit of prying and prodding to find and open the jugular. The hard spurt of blood had gouted upward at a slant, darkening her left cheek, matting her dark hair to the pillow on the left side, impacting viscidly against the wall beyond the head of the bed. Slack lips had slid back from the oversized teeth. There had been a great deal of blood, an incredible amount. It was drying, and it had a hot sick odor. Under the brown skin of her face was the skull shape, accentuated by the slant of lamplight.