Don't Explain: An Artie Deemer Mystery (28 page)

“Why, then?”

“I’m not sure, unless the old man freaked them out that bad.”

Something moved inside—We grabbed each other’s arm. Then we heard it again, a thunk. Something was in there, something we hadn’t seen—

A woman suddenly began to scream in staccato blasts— “Wah! Wah! Wah!”—like the siren in Nazi occupation movies.

I didn’t think, I just acted, always surprising to me. I stood up, circled for momentum, then kicked the door in. It took me two kicks, concussion jolts of pain shooting up my arm, before the ancient door fell at my feet. I charged in. This would have been a good time to have my gun, I thought. I eventually skidded to a stop in the animal shit, straining to stay up as my eyes adjusted to the gloom.

“Wah! Wah! Wah! Wah!” She was in the corner—I peered into the gloom. I saw her. She was clutching her knees to her chest and screaming, “Wah! Wah!” in that staccato way. It hurt my ears.

Her boyfriend cowered beside her. He was on his knees. His black pants were smeared with white slashes of bird shit. He held one hand up as if that might fend off bullets. I looked into the other corners. Jellyroll was not here. No one else was here. Acrid dust hung in the air.

“Wah! Wah! Wah!”

“Look,” he pleaded, “there’s no point in killing us, we haven’t seen shit, we’ve been in here the whole time, we don’t know nothing, we’re not worth the fall—but money, we can give you some bread if that’ll help you out, cash, we can lay some
cash
on you—” He spilled bills in wet little wads from his tight, shitstained jeans. “Take it all, man, hell, I’ll give you my fucking Gold Card! I’m a Frequent Flier, you can go anywhere!”

“Shut up!”

“Okay, man, okay, you name it.”

“Who are you!” I demanded, feeding off his fear of me, even unarmed and caked with black mud from the chest down. “You’re the people from the speedboat, aren’t you?”

“Right, that’s right! You’re the guy who lived here all your life, we’re just yachtsmen, visiting yachtsmen! We’re a cruising couple, got sick of the rat race, you know, followed our bliss, and—!”

“Bullshit. You’re not yachtsmen. You’re lying. Who are you?”

“All right, all right, you’re right, man, I can see you’re a bright guy, it was a little dark before. The fact is, we’re here to buy some weed off an asshole who calls himself Dickie the Red. Maybe you know him. Maybe you’d like a piece of the action off the top, I don’t know, or maybe you want
all
the action. That’s cool, too. Is that cool with you, babe?”

“Yeh,” she said, her finger in her mouth.

“We never even laid eyes on Dickie’s stash, so I can’t guarantee its quality, but I talked to the gardener, and the cat knew what he was doing. Take it, it’s yours, we’ve had enough. This is fucking nautical hell out there! Crusty, smirking Yankees knew the storm was coming. They split in time. They stole away. Did they tell anyone? Fuck no!”

“They told us,” muttered his girlfriend. Her long, shiny black hair was streaked with bird shit. I felt sorry for her, but I was glad she’d stopped screaming and sucking her finger.

“Well, they might have told us, but who can understand those accents? Look, can you put us up for a little while, just till the storm stops? Hey, we’d really appreciate it. We’re nonsmokers.”

I had no idea what was going to happen next. I couldn’t have these two ginks trailing along as witnesses. “Did you see anybody aboard the other boat when you got here?”

“What other boat? The black boat?”

“Yeah, was anybody aboard? Was a dog aboard?”

“A…dog?”

“Yes! A dog! A dog!”

“No, no, I didn’t see no dog aboard. Did you see a dog aboard, babe?”

“No. It was whataya call it? Parked. With ropes.”

“Docked?” he said.

“Yeah, docked. It was all closed up. There was nobody.”

“You’ll be safe here,” I said.

“Listen, man, we’re freezin’ our tits off here—”

“I’m sorry, I am too. I can’t help you. You can hire a boat when the storm passes.” I turned and walked out.

“Hey, nice finger you got there, neighbor,” he shouted at my back.

It was a relief to get back into the woods out of the wind. That kind of wind wears you down, makes you old. We moved fast.

“Why’d you do it, Clay?” I asked as if making conversation with a companion on a day hike. “Do you remember?”

“Kill my father, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve been remembering a snowstorm. While you were crawling to the edge of the Crack, I was remembering the night of a snowstorm. It was because of a panda.”

“A panda?”

“It was a big stuffed panda. It was as big as I was. He bought it for me at F.A.O. Schwarz. I remember he made a big show of buying it in the store, the generous, nurturing father routine, but I loved it anyway. I slept with it. We were inseparable. One night—that night, I think—he pulled the panda from my arms.
Then he took his penknife from his vest pocket—he always wore vests—and he sliced my panda open from its neck to its crotch. The son of a bitch disemboweled my panda. Then he handed it back to me.” Clayton fell silent. I had grown used to that gym bag full of his father swinging in his hand.

It was hard to sustain a quick pace over the rocky, hummocky ground. We tripped and stumbled. My hand hurt constantly, and combined with fear and rage, pain had drained my energy. I imagined some sunny morning in the future—a cup of coffee, Ella and Louis singing “The Nearness of You”—when this would be over, with a happy ending, I imagined, but regardless, over.

We arrived at the outer reaches of the swamp—and immediately began to sink. The wind blew big drops of water from the swaying treetops. Trunks creaked. Mud still blackened the water in billows from our last crossing. Vaguely it occurred to me that there was a sexual quality to the way the swamp wanted to suck us in. We followed the billows into the water.

“Clayton, why’d he do that to your panda?”

“Because he saw how much I loved it, the fucker!” Clayton shouted at the memory. “I tried to sew it back together. I used a shoelace because the wound was so big. But it didn’t work!”

I stopped short in the center of the swamp when it dawned on me: that was the panda Crystal had found in the bedroom, only it wasn’t a panda, it was a teddy bear. And it wasn’t as big as Clayton remembered, but it had been slit open and sewed back together with a shoelace—

“That night, I went into his bedroom. He didn’t like that, I knew, but I was frightened of something, and I wanted…something. He was lying in bed on his back reading a copy of
Railroad
magazine. I couldn’t see his face from the foot of the bed, just the nose of a black locomotive steaming straight at me from out of his chest. ‘What do
you
want?’ he said. I left. But I came back. I came back.”

It’s a gift of the human psyche that return trails always seem shorter.

“With my Cub Scout hatchet.”

We arrived at Sonny’s body. Nothing had changed for him, reposing in the ferns. I circled looking for my shotgun.

“What?” asked Clayton.

I told him, and he began to circle. But we couldn’t find it. Why? I knew where I’d fallen and in which direction—

“Here, look,” called Clay. Bending, he disappeared into the ferns.

I assumed he’d found the gun, and delighted to be rearmed, I went to get it, but he hadn’t found the gun. He’d found the guy’s video recorder. We never found the gun. I ran the rest of the way to Crystal’s tree—

She was gone.

I began to shiver looking at that empty tree trunk. This is what I feared most when I left her. The chain lay in a pile between two thick roots. It was absurd. Leave your lover chained to a tree—My knees wanted to sag. I picked up the chain. Wait a minute, the heavy padlock was still locked in place. The chain had been cut. It was a stout chain; you’d need a serious set of bolt cutters for that job. That might be good news—I couldn’t see Dick Desmond running around with heavy-duty cutters slung over his shoulder.

Clayton was watching me wordlessly. “Let’s try the boathouse,” I said.

We ran. I tried to keep my finger from flapping.

I stopped near Jellyroll’s woodpile to watch the place. Was there life inside? If so, whose? I heard nothing. I walked quickly, quietly to the foot of the stairs and stopped again. Clayton came with me, and I suddenly noticed he was carrying the dead guy’s camcorder as well as the gym bag. If Desmond, or some other psycho I didn’t even know about, was in there, he’d hear the boards creaking as I came up. But maybe Crystal and Jellyroll were waiting for me and everything was jake. We’d spend the evening peacefully, reading about wildflowers, listening to water lapping. I peeked in the back door—

The stairs creaked. Someone was coming down!

“Artie—!” It was Crystal! She had appeared around the side of the house.

I moaned with joy, but Jellyroll was not with her. We hugged each other. Crystal was crying into my shoulder.

“He’s here, Artie. Desmond is inside, and he’s got Jellyroll. Hawley’s here. He got me off that tree, but Desmond sent him to get the other guy’s video camera—”

Jellyroll must have heard us. He began to bark. This was his alarm bark. It is a high-pitched, continuous sound, like a wailing, that penetrates the brain. I felt confused and inadequate. I hunched my shoulders.

“He’s okay, he’s not hurt,” Crystal was saying. “Desmond’s got Jellyroll hostage. He’s holding him by a rope around the neck, and he says he’ll kill him if we don’t do what he wants. He’s got a machete—”

“What does he want?”

Clayton had gone around the other side of the boathouse, and now he came back—“Hello, you must be Crystal,” he said. “I’m glad you’re safe.”

Clayton and Crystal had never actually met, only spoken on the phone. I introduced them.

“Is that the video camera?” Crystal asked.

I told her about the dead guy, the son, and all this time Jellyroll was barking in fear. It was breaking my heart, but I wasn’t tired anymore. The adrenaline began to pump. “What does Desmond want, besides the camera?” I asked.

“Publicity. He says the press is waiting over in Micmac until the storm dies. And he wants to have the most media present when he releases Jellyroll.”

“Releases?”

“That’s what he says.”

“You don’t believe him?”

“No.”

“Jellyroll,” I called gently but loudly enough to get through to him on the other side of the wall, “no barking.”

He didn’t completely stop, but close. I was afraid that the barking would cause Desmond to crack.

“Good boy,” I said. Crystal had felt so good in my arms.

“Who killed the son?” Crystal wondered.

Hawley came hustling out of the woods. When he saw Crystal, Clayton, and me standing by Jellyroll’s woodpile, he waved the shotgun over his head and ran toward us. “That guy’s stone fucking dead out there in the ferns! His head’s split—” Something, our body language, told him we already knew about that. “You already got the video machine, the asshole sent me for it—But I found this here. This is a murderous fucking weapon right here.”

Hawley was agitated. “Clayton, you don’t want to be carryin’ him around in that gym bag like that. That’s just askin’ for trouble.”

Clayton had it hung over his forearm by the handles while he fiddled with the camera.

“So what do you want to do?” Hawley asked. “If you want me to, I’ll kick the door open and blow the asshole through the wall.”

“I don’t think so,” said Crystal.

“ ’Course it’d kill the dog, too.”

“That’s all we want to do here—” I said. “Get Jellyroll back safe. Understood?”

Hawley promised he wouldn’t do anything hasty.

I told him he had been right and I had been wrong about Desmond. I told him he could keep the gun as long as he didn’t use it until after we had Jellyroll safe. I asked Crystal if Desmond was coherent. I didn’t know what I was going to do, but since he was my dog, I guessed I was in charge.

“Oh yes, he’s coherent, but he’s real nervous. That’s what scared me about him, how tense he is.”

“Oh, Jesus—” said Clayton. He was looking at the tiny TV screen at the back of the video recorder.

“What?” everybody asked.

“Wait, let me rewind.”

We hunched shoulder to shoulder around the little screen, no bigger than a playing card, while he did so. There was nothing to see but snow. He stopped the rewinding, hit play. The image was so tiny, we had to scrunch even closer together. Crystal and I gasped in unison—

It was Sid aboard the black sportfisherman. He was sitting in the stern. The shot was taken from an elevated angle, as from the flying bridge. Water was rushing by. Sid was grinning slightly at the camera. What the hell was he doing on that boat? Undercover work? Then Sid turned and looked back toward the wake. Then there was a flurry of motion in front of the camera. The image resolved itself into a man’s back—the man was stepping into the camera from below and behind, and he was moving sidelong toward Sid. The man had a club in his hand. It looked like a fat, stubby baseball bat, and the man held it cocked like a slugger stepping into the pitch. We all cringed as the bat struck Sid, full swing, in the back of the head. Even on the grainy little screen, we could tell that Sid was dead before he hit the deck.

He dropped in his own footprints. His face came to a rest staring up at the camera. His eyes were flat. Then the man stuck his own face into the frame. He had to bend over to do that. He was making funny faces, mugging as people often do in front of these cameras at, say, the office picnic on Memorial Day, all good fun. Crystal whimpered. Somebody else was whimpering, but it was unclear who. Maybe me. I put my hand over the screen, but the tape had already ended. Dick Desmond was the man in the home video, the giddy one with the bat.

“Mr. Desmond,” I called, and Jellyroll started barking again, “I’m coming in. We’ve got to talk.”

“Just you! You’d better come alone!”

Crystal gave me an encouraging kiss before I went into the house.

TWENTY-SIX