Deadly Welcome (13 page)

“You’re clever, Mr. Doyle. If that’s your name. Who sent you?”

“Colonel Presser.”

“I should have guessed. Austin has always had a taste for intrigue and melodrama.”

“The problem was to contact you, sir. The strangers they sent down couldn’t make it. Your sister has …”

“Celia has been very diligent about shielding me from all pleas and requests. This little subterfuge will annoy her. She can’t seem to understand that I am willing to say no—to Austin Presser or anyone else.”

“Can you tell me why you’d say no, Colonel? Is it … health?”

The colonel looked out across the Gulf. “I am getting stronger. As a civilian consultant, I could pace myself. But it is as if all that work was done by somebody else. Far away and long ago. I can’t go back now, Doyle. I never thought that anything could become more important
to me than my sense of duty and obligation. Right now I have a personal problem. Call it an emotional problem. I don’t intend to explain it to you. Until it is solved, if it ever can be solved, I am … incapable of considering anything else.”

“And if you solve this … emotional problem?”

“I can go back to work. And make Austin happy. But you see, Mr. Doyle, one possible solution to my problem would be for me to see how far and fast I can run down this beach.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I don’t expect you to understand. Sometimes a man can find himself in a maze that seems insoluble. Laboratory rats, faced with an insoluble maze, have been known to give up and lie on their backs and nibble their forepaws. I find that quite touching to contemplate. A man in the process of trying to find a solution to what seems to be an insoluble problem, Mr. Doyle, is not inclined to devote his time and energies to his profession, no matter how vital his work may be. I am sorry. You may tell Austin I am sorry.”

Doyle remembered with distaste the next phase of his instructions. “Colonel Presser seems to feel that you are brooding over the death of your wife, Colonel. He has acquired a long and accurate file on her. It isn’t pleasant reading. I can give you some of the facts.”

“I’m not interested, Doyle. I made a very bad marriage. It took me a long time to become aware of how bad it was. My wife was a reckless, selfish, faithless woman. I met her at a time when she had a yearning for respectability, apparently.”

“Then I don’t understand.”

“There is nothing for you to understand.”

“Colonel M’Gann, if your wife’s murderer was caught, would you then be willing to go back to work?”

M’Gann looked at him quickly, with an odd expression,
as though Doyle had shocked him. Yet, to Doyle, it had seemed a most obvious question.

“I might.”

“Here comes your sister. Are you going to tell her about this?”

“I see no point in telling her. I can’t see that you have changed anything.”

After Celia joined them and they walked back down the beach, M’Gann was again back in his shell. Celia was most friendly. Doyle refused her invitation to lunch. When he glanced back, they were going into the house. She was holding the screen door for the colonel.

Doyle walked slowly back toward his cottage. I might have something to tell you one of these days, Colonel, he thought. I might have a message for you. I’m beginning to see a pattern in things. I might even know why she was killed.

At two o’clock he drove by the Mack and turned in at the Larkin Boat Yard and Marina at the end of Front Street. He had remembered it as a place of clutter and corrosion, with sun-drab, sagging structures and docks, a general air of aimlessness.

But now white posts marked the entrance to a graveled parking area beside a small white office building. There were half a dozen cars in the lot in addition to the familiar jeep and a freshly painted pickup with the Larkin name on the door. When he got out of the car he could hear the busy chatter of office equipment and, farther away, the high whine of a wood saw and the roar of a motor under test. As he walked toward the office he could see three wide solid docks built out into the bay, with a T and bright gas pumps at the outer end of the nearest one. He could see a big covered work shed with the open side facing the bay, heavy ways and cradles, some warehouse
structures, a covered boat-storage area with an aluminum roof that was blinding in the sunlight.

When he went into the office Betty was typing and a woman in her middle years was operating an adding machine. The interior was clean and bright and efficient looking.

Betty smiled with obvious pleasure, got up quickly and introduced him to the other woman, a Mrs. West, and then took him on a guided tour. Today she wore a dark red blouse and a red-and-white-striped skirt. The unruly hair, in all its streaks and shades of umber, toffee and cream, had been pulled back into a rebellious pony tail.

“This is certainly a different place from the one I remember.”

“It’s been a lot of work, Alex, building it up. And the bank still owns a pretty good hunk of it. But we’re doing a good business. Got a total of fifteen on the payroll. We do good work and we get a lot of word-of-mouth advertising among boat people. That’s the best kind. We can yank stuff out of the water up to seventy feet long. There’s Buddy. I guess he’s a lot bigger than when you left.”

They walked toward a man who had his back turned to them while he scraped at the hull of a small twin-screw cruiser. He was a huge brown man with corn yellow hair worn a quarter of an inch long. He was well over six feet tall. He wore greasy shorts and sneakers. There was hair on his back and shoulders, bleached silvery white by the sun. His calves were like oaken kegs. He was wide and solid from top to bottom, like a tree.

When Betty spoke he turned. He had a brute jaw and small, gray, smoldering eyes under a solid ridge of brow. He could have played a villain part in a Viking movie.

“Glad to see you again, Alex,” he said as they shook hands. Just as Alex was considering falling to his knees and howling like a dog, Buddy released his grip. “Hear Donnie welcomed you home.”

“In a big way.”

“We’ll keep him off your back. He goes too damn far lately.”

Alex suddenly realized that this prehistoric mammoth was ill at ease, actually quite shy. It amused him.

“I just remembered a phone call I should make,” Betty said. “Why don’t you show Alex around, Buddy, and introduce him to John Geer. When you’ve had the rest of the tour, Alex, you come back to the office and you can take me down the road and buy me a beer.”

When Betty was out of sight, Buddy said, “This place wouldn’t run right without her. I can’t handle that office stuff. It drives me nuts. Come meet our partner, John Geer.”

John Geer was working on a marine engine. He was grime to the elbows, a shambling man with a remote resemblance to Gary Cooper, but with brown eyes too close together and a pendulous lower lip.

Buddy showed him around the shop area. Alex could sense the man’s devotion to good materials and fine workmanship. He showed him the warehouse. As they turned away from the warehouse Alex saw a trim little Thistle on a yellow trailer under a shed roof. The mast was stepped and lashed. He could see the name. The
Lady Bird
.

“Betty’s?” he said.

“Her pet. She can really make it get up there and fly. And she’ll take it out in the worst weather you ever saw.”

“She’s quite a gal, Buddy.”

Buddy propped one foot on the trailer tire, lit a cigarette and shook the match. “She likes you, Alex.”

“I’m glad of that.”

“I … I don’t want you should upset her.”

“I know the score, Buddy. I got it from her. I’ve got no intention of upsetting her.”

“I had to say it.”

“I know.”

“Well, I guess there isn’t much else around here to see.”

“That skiff there, Buddy. Wasn’t that your father’s?” He gestured toward a small skiff, pointed at both ends, with a center engine hatch and a horizontal wheel. The paint was fresh and it was up on stubby saw horses.

“That was his. We talk about putting a new engine in it and unloading it. But we never seem to get around to it.”

“I want to ask you something, Buddy. You’re a little older than Betty, so you might be able to remember more clearly than she could. I haven’t asked her. I don’t even want you to try to ask me why I’m asking such a question. When you were little, your father used to take Jenna on picnics all alone, didn’t he?”

“In that same skiff. All the time.”

“And Sunday was Jenna’s day, wasn’t it?”

“He spoiled her rotten, Alex. The way she turned out, it was his fault.”

“Did he take her to a special place?”

“On the picnics? I don’t think so.”

“Can you remember anything about there being a special place?”

Buddy glared back into the past, motionless for long seconds. “There was a place. It’s been a long time. Twenty years. Sure, she used to tease us about it. It was a big secret, she said. She wasn’t supposed to tell.”

“Can you remember anything she said about it?”

“No. All I can remember is that she used to make up all kinds of stuff. Why are you …” Buddy stopped suddenly and looked beyond Alex with an expression of surprise, almost of consternation, and said, as though speaking to himself, “That’s where he could have hid the money.”

“That’s what I’ve been thinking.”

Buddy looked directly at him, his face changing, growing hard and skeptical. “That’s what you’ve been thinking, is it? Just who the hell are you, Doyle? What’s this
big fat interest in where the money is? What are all these questions?”

“Now wait a minute.”

“Wait for what? I don’t know where you came from. You show up here and sweet-talk Betty. Tell her you never stole a dime. She believes you. You get her to tell me you’re such a nice guy.”

“I didn’t get her to tell you a thing, Larkin.”

“What do I know about you? Maybe you’ve been in the can for years. You were one of Jenna’s boy friends. You’d hear about the murder. The newspapers brought up how the old man’s money was never found when they covered the murder. Tried to tie it in somehow, but it wouldn’t hold together. How do I know how much Jenna told you and how much you remember? Now you come down here sucking around, asking questions. The hell with you, Doyle.”

“Use your head, Buddy. If that was what I was after, why would I give it away talking to you this way?”

“I think you’re a clever guy, Doyle. I think you’re down here on the make for something. Maybe Donnie does too and that’s why he whipped your skull for you.”

“Do you want to find out who killed Jenna?”

“Sure, but …”

“Then we should put our heads together and try to figure out if it was tied in with the money your father hid.”

“But why should you give a damn who killed Jenna?”

Doyle was momentarily trapped. He could not give his actual reason. And he couldn’t think of any other convincing reason.

“You’re just meddling,” Buddy said. “So get off the place. Keep away from Betty. We can handle our own problems.” And he pushed Doyle roughly.

And that push ignited a white flare in the back of the skull of Alex Doyle. He had been physically humiliated by Donnie Capp. He had been conscious of the public disapproval
of his return. The emotional tensions and frustrations exploded into a hard overhand right that smacked the shelf of Buddy Larkin’s jaw, knocked his mouth open, glazed his eyes, caused him to take two steps back and sit down heavily.

There was no one to see them in that sheltered area near the warehouse. The noise of the marine engine being test-run by Geer obscured any sounds of combat. After a moment of inert surprise, Buddy bounded up with disconcerting agility and lunged toward Doyle, chin on his chest, big fists held low. Doyle ducked and slipped two powerful hooks, looking for a chance to land solidly. Before he had his chance, a solid smash on the chest knocked him backward into the skiff. As Buddy reached for him, he scrambled out the far side and came around the stern. They met there. Doyle got in one solid blow and, without transition, found himself on hands and knees, shaking his head. He got up and, after a moment of blackout, found himself on his back. He wobbled to his feet and swung blindly at the vague shape moving toward him. His fist blazed with pain and with the effort of the blow, he knocked himself sprawling. He got up onto one knee. Buddy Larkin was sitting eight feet away. They stared at each other, sobbing for air. As Buddy got up, Doyle got up and raised his fists.

Buddy stared at him. “Knock it off. Can I whip you?”

“Yes, I guess you can,” Doyle said in a remote, rusty voice.

“But you’ll keep trying?”

“As long as I can keep getting up.”

“Stubborn bastard,” Buddy said glumly. He walked over to a hose faucet, bent over, caught water in his cupped hands and sloshed his face thoroughly. When he was through, Doyle knelt by the faucet and stuck his head under the stream.

“Am I marked?” Buddy asked.

“Just a lump on your jaw.” Buddy touched the place and winced.

Doyle worked the fingers of his right hand. The knuckles were puffy. Buddy said, “You look okay.”

“My mouth is cut on the inside.”

They sat on a saw horse, still breathing more deeply than normal.

“Damn fool,” Buddy said.

“I don’t like to be pushed.”

“All right. You don’t like to be pushed. I’ll make a note of it. To get back to the old man. He was always going off by himself. He’d come back from a business trip and almost the first thing, he’d be off in the skiff. He was such a secretive kind of guy. He must have had some place he’d go. Hell, he’d never go there direct. But he’d always head south down the bay, not that that will do us much good. Give me one of those cigarettes.”

Doyle lit it for him. He felt sourly amused. The suspicion was gone. Buddy Larkin had made up his mind about him in his own special way. Possibly it was a better way than logic. In Larkin’s book a man who kept getting up could be trusted.

“Here’s something that might fit, Buddy,” he said. “See what you think. The night Jenna was killed, she spent some time talking to old Lucas Pennyweather, and they were going to go out the next day in his boat. That’s one of the things that started me thinking. She wouldn’t have been nice to him unless she wanted something. You know that as well or better than I do. So maybe she wanted his help in finding the place where her father used to take her. Maybe she could remember enough so there was a good chance of Lucas finding the place she described.”