The Dreadful Lemon Sky (7 page)

"When all the facts are in, all the pertinent facts, Mister Howe, I'll be able to summarize."

He turned toward Meyer. "Summarize, winterize, I feel sorry for you, friend, having to work with this sorry son of a bitch." He marched away without a backward glance. When I heard the mower start up again, I looked and saw him riding solemnly back and forth in the fading light of day.

Meyer said, "You couldn't have gotten any more under hypnotherapy. What are you looking at?"

I was down on one knee in the weeds, between the matted places where the rear wheels had rested. I pointed to the place where the weeds and grass were withered and blackened. It began at a point midway between the wheels and slightly behind them. There was an area six inches in diameter and a random line half that width leading down the slope into the dry ditch, getting narrower and less evident as it approached the ditch.

"Gasoline spill will do this," I said. I dug down into the dirt with thumb and finger and pinched some of it up and sniffed it. It had a faint odor of gasoline. "I think her car fills on the left corner, aft of the wheel. But if it fills there or in the rear center, no matter how clumsy the man was who dumped gas into it, he could hardly manage to spill this much way under here without getting a lot right under where he was pouring."

"It soaked in before it got to the ditch," Meyer said.

"There had to be a lot of spill for it to run down the slope at all. It's been dry lately." Meyer nodded. "And so she didn't stop because she ran out of gas. But it had to look as if she had a good reason for stopping. Is there some kind of drain under there, on the underside of the gas tank?"

"We'll be able to check that out. For now let's say yes."

"Am I following your scenario, Travis? X is in the car with Carrie. X is driving, let's say. He pulls off the road and stops. He picks a place a long way from any house. No street lights. He strikes her on the head with the traditional blunt object. He leans across her and opens the door. He pushes her out. The weeds are tall enough so that she would not be picked up in the lights of any passing car. He wiggles under the car with a wrench and a flashlight and opens the drain valve. When all the gas has run out, he closes the valve. He pulls her around to the front of the car, waits until he gets the right traffic situation and the right kind of oncoming vehicle, then boosts her up and walks her into the front corner of it. Then he takes off. Isn't that a little bit too much to get out of some weeds and grasses killed by gasoline? Isn't that too much of a dreadful risk?"

"Maybe it's too much. If X wears dark clothing, that would diminish the risk. He could stretch out flat beside her just ahead of the front bumper. He could look under the car for oncoming traffic heading the same way."

We went to where the front of the Datsun had been and looked at the weeds. It is too easy to let your imagination interpret the patterns.

"If so," Meyer said, "he didn't have much time to get out of sight. Too risky to go across the highway. Over the fence?"

I studied the fence line. "Under it. Where it's washed out. I think this was one very cool cat who checked his escape route first."

"Would your scenario include some telltale dark threads caught on the wire at the bottom?"

"There could have been, until you mentioned it.

I slid under the fence, on my back. Meyer stayed outside. There were inches to spare. I searched a quarter-acre area and came up with the startling conclusion that it was a very well maintained grove. Nothing more. He could heave her into the front of the Webbel truck and spin and hit the hole before the truck could stop.

Then, in dark clothing, he could melt back into the black shadows of the night and walk parallel to the fence line until it was safe to go over or under the fence.

Or, I thought as I went back under the fence, another vehicle had stopped there. Maybe a wife got nervous about a can of gas in the trunk of the family car. Dump it out this minute, dearest. Or maybe a can started leaking and somebody abandoned it there, and later somebody picked up the can, thinking it usable. Many false structures have been built from the flawed assumption of the simultaneity of seemingly related events.

As we got into the rental car, Meyer said, "We have no way of knowing that the gasoline was spilled-"

"At the same time. I just went through that."

"There are certain concepts which offend emotional logic. You have stopped beside a two-lane road at night. Traffic is light but fast. You walk to the front of your car, after sliding out on the passenger side. What are you going to do? Cross the road? Hitchhike? Open the door on the driver's side? Assume there is a good reason, do you step out, or do you look first?"

"If you are smashed, maybe you step out."

"If you are drunk, you would have opened the door on the driver's side, wouldn't you?"

"I don't know. But what the hell was she trying to do? Walk to one of those houses and phone? If so, Meyer, would she leave her purse and car keys?"

"Nice point. Now what?"

The wrecker stood beside the large gas station across from the entrance to the shopping center. It was a very muscular beast. It was painted bright red. It had warning lights, emergency lights, floodlights, and blinkers affixed to all available surfaces. The big tires stood chest high. The array of winches and cables and reels on the back end of it looked capable of hoisting a small tank up the side of an office building.

"Something I can do for you?" the bald sunburned man said.

"I didn't know they were making them so big."

"Mister, when you get a tractor trailer rig totaled across three lanes of an Interstate, you need something big to get it out of the way fast."

"Did that go out Wednesday night when that woman got killed just down the road there?"

His face twisted in pain. He spat and sighed. "Oh. Jesus, yes, it went out. Ray took it out. I had two guys out with flu. That goddamn Ray. You know what the payments run on this brute son of a bitch?" he kicked a high tire.

"No idea."

"Four hundred a month. A month. And Ray, the dummy, has to diagnose. Is he some kind of mechanic already? Hey, he says, no gas. So he puts some in. So what does that cost me? Thirty bucks' tow charge. Jesus!"

"Is he around?"

"Look what's your interest in this thing, mister?"

"It's a case study project for the Traffic Advisory Council for the State Department of Transportation."

"Oh. Well, that's him at the far island there, checking the oil on the green Cadillac. Just don't hold him up on working the island, okay? It's money out of my pocket."

Ray was a stumpy nineteen with blue eyes empty of guile and with a face ravaged by acne. "Gassy smell? Well, yeah. The way it was, see, I leaned inside to check the gear it was in and the brake. I was glad to see the keys there because it was in park, you know, and I was moving it to N when on account of the gassy smell inside it I looked at the gauge and seen it was empty. I turned the lights on. It's best at night, a short tow, keep the lights on, all the lights you got. I put gas in, figuring if it would run what's the sense towing it. I didn't know the boss would get his ass in such a big uproar about it, see. And I didn't even think who is going to pay for the couple gallons I put in, or the service call. That made it worse. Jesus, he's been all over me all the time since Wednesday. I'm about ready to tell him to shove his job."

I went to the boss and thanked him and said, "I have to interview the dead woman's sister. I can give her the bill for the gas and service, if you want."

He brightened up. We went into the office. He made out the bill. I looked at it and shook my head and handed it back. "Not like that, friend. Two gallons, not five. Five dollars' charge, not ten."

"So what are you, her brother? Look, the dead lady is in no shape to care what the bills are."

"Do you want to take a dead loss or fix the bill?"

"Everybody is all of a sudden getting weird," he muttered, and made out a new bill.

At ten o'clock we were back aboard the Flush, up on the sun deck under hazy stars, in two unfolded deck chairs like old tourists on a cruise ship. The events of the long day had been more abrasive than I had realized while they were happening. I felt a leaden weariness of bone and spirit.

I whapped a mosquito which tasted the side of my neck and rolled him into a tiny moist gobbet of meat and dropped him out of his life onto the deck. In many ways the Hindu is right. All life in all forms is so terribly transient there is an innocence about all acts and functions of life. Death, icy and irrevocable, is the genuine definition of reality. In my unthinking reflex I was doubtless improving the mosquito breed. If, over a millennium, man whapped every side-of-the-neck biter, maybe the mosquito race would bite only neck napes.

"Mr. McGee?" the polite voice said from the dock. I got up and walked aft to look down. There was Jason with the Jesus face and wire glasses standing under the dock light in a T-shirt with the short sleeves torn off, ragged blue-jean shorts, and a pair of boat shoes so exquisitely and totally worn out it looked as though he had wrapped his feet neatly in rags.

"Hi, Jason."

"Permission to come aboard?"

"Come on."

He came up the side ladderway like a big swift cat. He accepted a can of beer from the cooler. He had something to say, but he seemed to be puzzling out how to say it. He sat on his heels, on those brown legs bulging with big muscles.

I finally had to give him some help. "Something bothering you?"

"Sort of. I mean maybe it isn't any of my business. What I wouldn't want is her having a worse time than she's having already. Okay?"

"Her being Mrs. Birdsong."

"She's really a great person. If I could have got to the office quicker, maybe the two of us, you and me, we could have grabbed onto Cal and quieted him down. I know how he could get. Did you hit him with anything? Did you pick up anything and hit him on the head?"

"I sort of hurried him into the wall once. Ralph or Arthur rapped him on the head with a hickory stick, a couple of good licks."

"Hey! That's right. I forgot that part. Then maybe it was from them. Look, can you tell-not you but medical doctors-can they tell which knock on the head did the most damage?"

Meyer answered. "I don't think so. Provided, of course, there's no depressed fracture or anything like that. The brain is a jelly suspended in a lot of protection, and oftentimes the greatest damage happens in the area directly opposite the point of impact. This could be in the form of a subdural hematoma, a bleeding which gradually creates enough pressure inside the brain to suppress the vital functions."

"Well, she visited him and then went out and got something to eat and went back and found a half dozen people working on him, but he was dead. There's going to be an autopsy. She came back in terrible shape. They gave her some pills. She's asleep now. A girl friend of Oliver's is sitting with her. Bet you it was a heart attack, or maybe a stroke that didn't have anything to do with getting hit on the head."

My neck was still sprained from being popped on the forehead. I hadn't enjoyed meeting the fellow, but had not wished him dead.

"Thanks for letting me know," I said.

"It's okay. I've been here the whole two years, you know. He was a pretty great person until he got to boozing real bad. And until just a little while ago, even though he got too drunk when he got drunk, he wouldn't drink when there was something he had to do that was best done sober. Like when Jack Omaha would hire him to captain."

"Jack Omaha!"

He turned toward me. He was slowly and carefully folding his empty beer can the way somebody might fold a Dixie cup, turning it into a smaller and smaller wad. "You knew Jack?" he said.

"No. But I heard he took off with a lot of money."

"That's what they say."

"You don't believe he did it?"

"No. But that's because somebody told me he didn't."

"Who would that be?"

"Somebody that knew him better than I did."

"Carrie?" I said.

I heard the air whoosh put of him. He stood up. "Who the hell are you?"

"Carrie's friend. When she married Ben Milligan she honeymooned aboard this old barge."

"Hey! I remember something about that. Sure. Have you got a great big shower stall aboard, and a big tub? And… uh…"

"A big bed? All three."

He leaned his rear against the rail and stood with ankles crossed and arms folded.

"Cheez. That Ben came by a year ago. She was still living at the cottage then. She and Betty Joller and Joanna Freeler and some bird name of Flossie. How come she ever married him, I wouldn't know."

"Nor anybody else. It happens."

"Mister America. Mister Biceps. He was in some kind of movie deal they were making up in Jax, probably an X movie. He came down to con some money off of Carrie. He'd done it before. She didn't have any. He said he would hang around until she got some. Betty came over and got me. It was a Sunday afternoon. Mangrove Lane is right down the shoreline to the south of us. I got there and he was sprawled out in the living room. I told him it was time for him to get on his Yamaha and into his helmet and head north. So we went out into the side yard and he began jumping back and forth and yelling 'Hah! Hah!' and making chopping motions. He came toward me and I kept moving back. I picked up the rhythm of the way he was hopping, and when he was up in the air, or starting up, I stepped into him and hit him in the mouth so hard it pushed this middle knuckle back in, and the first thing that hit the sod was the nape of his neck. He jumped up with both hands on his mouth, yelling, 'Not in the mouth. My God, not my mouth. Oh, God, my career!' So the girls babied him a little and I stood around until he got on his bike and roared away. I haven't seen him since. I don't think Carrie saw him either before she got killed. Are you coming to the service tomorrow morning?"