Where Is Janice Gantry? (4 page)

I shut the door and said, “Nice friendly welcome, Charlie.”

“I didn’t know who was driving up, Sam.”

“Somebody you might have to kill, maybe?”

“I don’t want to kill anybody. I just want to be left alone until I do what I have to do.” He placed the gun carefully on the end table by the couch, half concealed by the big ashtray I keep there.

He looked better. The lumps the insects had left on his face and arms and neck did not look as painful and obvious. My discarded clothing fit him reasonably well. The sneakers were laced tight enough to stay on.

“Want some of your coffee, Sam? I made more than I need.”

I sat down with him at the table in the kitchen alcove. “When did you get up?”

“Maybe an hour ago. It was two o’clock by that bedroom clock. I’m sorry, I cooked more of your eggs than I could eat. I thought I could eat everything in the place the way I felt. But I guess my stomach got shrunk.”

He took the cigarette I offered with obvious eagerness. “I found the gun when I was hunting around for cigarettes, Sam.”

“I didn’t think, or I would have left some.”

“The ones we get, they’re a prison product, you know. Lousy cigarettes. Lousy food. Mostly fatback and beans.”

Two years at the camp had toughened this boy. He seemed a lot more calm than I would have been under the circumstances.

“Anybody bother you at all while I was gone?”

“The phone rang once. Eight rings before they gave up. That’s all.”

“What are your plans, Charlie?”

“Take a nap and then get out of your hair at dusk. Can you drive me into town? Then that will be the end of it.”

“You’ll be spotted inside one minute, won’t you?”

“I found a couple of things you maybe could give me. I could pay you later on, if things work out. I experimented a little.” He got up and went into the bedroom. He came out wearing an old baseball hat of mine, with the bill pulled well down. He wore big mirrored sunglasses. And the shape of his face was subtly but so completely changed I would not have recognized him.

“You can have the hat and glasses, but what have you done to your face?”

“Cotton between my lips and my gums, and a couple of wads in my cheeks, Sam. It changes your voice too. I heard about it in that camp, Is it going to work?”

“I think it will, and nobody around here has seen you in over two years.”

“Less than that, Sam. Thirteen months. Remember, they let me come to my mother’s funeral. With a guard.”

“I’d forgotten that.”

“I haven’t. It’s something I add onto the score, Sam. Everything was sold and the money is in an account. When I can come out into the open, I’ll pay you for this stuff out of that money.”

“Forget it, for God’s sake!”

“I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t been willing to help me, Sam. I was right at the end. I didn’t have anything left.” He picked the cotton out of his mouth, put it in the shirt pocket, took off the hat and glasses and sat down to finish his coffee.

“You were identified at two in the morning a mile or so south of here. Cass Corners. So the cops are checking the whole area.”

He stared at me and then cursed bitterly. “I was so tired I wasn’t tracking right. The wind kept me from hearing that car coming and like a damn fool I turned and looked at the lights for a second before I got the hell off the shoulder. It makes it a little rougher, I guess.”

“If I knew your plans maybe I could give you some advice.”

“Like give up? I don’t need anybody else in on this, Sam. I haven’t got the right to ask anybody else in on it.”

“Somebody told me this morning that she was sure you hadn’t done anything criminal. She brought you up because she’d heard the radio report on your being seen in the area.”

“Who?”

“Sis Gantry.”

“So she got her own name back? I hoped she would.”

“She petitioned the court and had it restored.”

He looked beyond me, his face softening perceptibly. “I used to run around with two of the Gantry boys that were my age. Billy and Sid. That’s how I got to notice Sis. I knew her
but I wasn’t aware of her until I was, I guess, about fourteen and she was eighteen. And then I got the damnedest crush on her. God, how I hated those big guys who were dating her! When I got within ten feet of her I couldn’t breathe and I felt as if I’d faint. If a day went by and I didn’t get a chance to look at her and adore her, it was a lost day. I used to imagine the wildest, craziest things about her. Wonderful things, and dirty things too. You know how kids are. She knew how I felt, I guess. She’d kid me a little bit and my face would get so hot it would feel as if it was going to blow up. Sam, you remember Grouper Island?”

“Sure.”

“Sis and one of her girlfriends named Louise and another girl whose name I can’t remember, they used to sail down there in hot weather in Louise’s little sailboat for a picnic and swimming, and then I heard the rumor they went down there to get tan all over, and it nearly drove me out of my mind. I found out the next time they were going and I got down there awful damn early in the morning and landed on the bay side and pulled my little outboard way up into the mangroves and out of sight. By the time they landed on the beach side at noon, I had an observation post that looked right out on the most likely spot.

“The sun was blazing hot, and they established themselves right out in front of me, and before I could get mentally adjusted, they’d spread blankets, stripped themselves right down to the buff and they were rubbing the suntan oil on. The first time I saw all there was to see of Sis Gantry, I thought I’d die of love and yearning. She made those other two look like sick, plucked chickens. They kept going into the Gulf to cool off and walking back and stretching out again. I was perfectly hidden, and I wasn’t twenty feet from those blankets. By about the third time Sis took a dip, I could stare without feeling dizzy. When they all sat on one blanket, giggling and quacking and splitting up the big picnic lunch,
I had time to realize that between hunger and thirst and hungry bugs, I was the most uncomfortable boy in the whole state of Florida.

“By late afternoon when she took her tenth or fifteenth dip in the Gulf, it didn’t matter to me whether I looked at her or not. I looked, out of some sense of duty I guess, but a glass of ice water would have looked twice as good and three times as useful. I had no way to sneak out of there. I had to wait it out. And I knew that if they found out about me being there, I’d get half killed.

“When the edge of the sun touched the horizon, those girls sailed away. I never wanted to see another naked woman. They hadn’t left a scrap of food or a swallow of Coke. I’d spent eleven hours on that island, and the last seven of it on my belly, without food or drink. When I walked back into my house I felt seventy years old and I looked so terrible it scared my mother. I ate so much she stopped worrying.

“The next time I saw Sis in the flesh, I knew my great love had ended somehow. I not only didn’t have to wonder what was under her clothes, I kept wishing I could forget. I can still close my eyes and see her padding up the beach toward her blanket. I guess it was about two years later she married that bum.”

Charlie Haywood sighed and yawned. “That’s a lot of woman going to waste. Is she just the same as ever?”

“If a runaway tiger jumped through the window near her desk, Sis Gantry would scold it for breaking the window, scratch it behind the ear to show she wasn’t really mad, then lead it across the street and buy it a steak.”

“And she automatically assumes I’m innocent?”

“That’s what she said.”

He stood up. “I’ll wash this stuff up and then go get a nap. You going out again?”

“I’ll be back a little after six.” I looked at my watch.
“It’ll be dark enough by seven-thirty to drive you in. Where do you want to be left off?”

“I’ve decided to give that a little more thought, Sam. I’ll know by the time you take me in.”

I left him my cigarettes, re-locked the cottage, and drove into town and over the bridge to the office next to Orange Beach. Neither Sis nor Jennie Benjamin was there. I knew the boss man wouldn’t be in. Tom Earle was taking a summer vacation at a Canadian fishing lodge. Vince Avery was there, in persuasive, low-voiced conversation with a well-padded female prospect. Vince is an incurable lightweight who does everything imaginable to enhance his own fancied resemblance to the Clark Gable of twenty years back.

Alice Jessup came over to my desk as I sat down, and gave me a phone slip to return a Tampa call. She is a sallow, timid girl in her twenties, the only purely clerical and secretarial worker in the office. The associates work on a percentage deal with Tom. Sis has her real estate license and she is half and half. She gets a salary for the secretarial work she does, plus a smaller percentage on those deals she swings.

“Can you fit in a little dictation, Alice?” I asked her.

She blushed, as she invariably does, and said, “Oh, sure, it’s real dead around here, believe me. I’ll get my book.”

Sis and Alice keep a separate account of any time spent on my work and bill me at the end of each month. I dictated the three reports, then returned the Tampa call and learned of two new appraisals to make, one in Osprey and one in Punta Gorda, and I would get the pertinent papers in the morning mail. I walked a half-block south on Orange Road to stand in the murky chill of the Best Beach Bar and nurse a cold dark Löwenbräu and argue the pennant race with fat, opinionated Gus Herka, owner, proprietor and bartender.

When we had exhausted baseball he said, “Hey, how about that Charlie Haywood? How about him, hey? He was a customer, you know it? Not a steady customer. Just sometimes.
Nice looking boy, you know it? Sam, you figure like they say he’s come back here, hey, maybe? Why should he do that? Three years to go, more when they catch him. Stupid, you know it?”

“Pretty stupid, Gus,” I agreed.

He glared at me. “You know damn well it was stupid, Sam!” That’s a thing Gus has. If you agree with him he comes back at you as though you had contradicted him. Sometimes it is difficult for strangers to understand.

Though I was, at the moment, the only customer, he leaned across the bar toward me in a heavily conspiratorial manner. “There’s more than meets the eye, you know it?”

“Like what, Gus?”

“Like a week before he got arrested, he come in here late, a little bit drunk, not too bad, lipstick all around his mouth, buys a bottle, you know it? Six dollars. Edgy, he acted. Like he would fight anybody. Not like that boy at all, you know it? He went out with the bottle and drove away. Me, I pulled the blind here to look out like this. See? He had a woman in the car with him, you know it? Saw her under the street light, just the hair on her head, silver as a dime, floozy hair.”

“So what does that prove, Gus?”

“You are stupid, Sam, you know it? No broad comes into the case. So a nice boy like that, he has a cheap broad making him edgy and drunk, and she needles him and needles him to come up with big money so he tries something foolish. I seen it a dozen times before, you know it?”

I told him he was a great psychologist, and walked back to the office. The reports were done and on my desk, errorless. Miss Alice Jessup does my work with such speed she cheats herself.

I thanked her and sealed the envelopes and said, “It’s quarter after five, Alice.”

“I know but I got to wait for Sis because she’s the one that locks up.”

“I’ll wait. Where is she?”

“Thanks. She shouldn’t be long. It was a rental thing. She went to show the people the house just a little bit before you come in.”

I had ten minutes alone in the office before Sis came to a screeching stop out front and trotted in. The white blouse was a bit wilted, the green skirt slightly rumpled. I thought of a fourteen-year-old Charlie watching the beach girls.

“What are you grinning at, Brice?” she demanded.

“A joke I couldn’t possibly tell you.”

“That kind, eh? Hey, I rented a house.”

“Good deal.”

“In August any kind of a deal is good.” She came and sat on the corner of my desk and looked down at me. “How are you doing, Sam?” she asked, her dark blue eyes solemn.

“I like summers the best, and this is a good one. Fishing, swimming, reading, and not too much work. A little bowling, with beer to top it off.”

“Have you got a girl these days, Sam?”

“No girl.”

“Maybe that isn’t even healthy, dear.”

“Maybe it isn’t. But it’s sure peaceful.”

“Was I such a nuisance—way back when I was your girl?”

“You were just right, Sis, in every way.”

As she looked at me I saw a little bit of the hurt she had so honorably concealed from me for so long. “If I was right, Sam. And what we had was certainly right …”

“Then I’m the wrong one. Not right for you, or for anybody.”

“And I know what’s wrong with you, Sam. It took me a long time. But now I know what it is.”

“The brand Judy left on me?”

“You enjoy bleeding over that goddamn Judy, don’t you? Not that, Sam. No. It’s something basic in you. You’ve never decided what you are, Sam. You want to be all meat and
muscle and reflexes. You want to deny how bright and intuitive and sensitive you are. You’re a complex animal, Sam. You try not to think, and so you think too much. You couldn’t just plain love, Sam. You thought us to death. You like to talk ignorant and act ignorant. It’s some kind of crazy protective coloration. Maybe you think it’s manly. I don’t know. You seem to have to … diminish yourself. But people sense that good mind, and it makes them uncomfortable because you are being something you’re not.”

“Standard pattern,” I said, and faked a yawn. “You overcomplicate it. I’m a simple guy, with simple needs.”

“Oh sure. That guard certainly comes up fast when anybody tries to get too close to you. Anyway, what I want to tell you is I think I might get married.”

“To that lawyer?”

“Yes. To Cal McAllen.”

“Love him?”

“I like him. I respect him. Maybe that question is academic. I loved Pritch like crazy. I’m twenty-nine, Sam, and I was built for babies, as any fool can plainly see, and time is beginning to run out. He’s forty-four, and wise and steady and loving, and he makes me feel completely girlish.”