Where Is Janice Gantry? (6 page)

“Thanks, Sam. It’ll help. Even if I find out I don’t need it, it will help the morale to have it in my pocket.”

We left the cottage at twenty minutes of eight. During the four-mile trip to the city line the neon gets more frequent and more expensive. He crouched on the floor beside me, one shoulder tucked down under the glove compartment. He had asked to be let off in town handy to some pay phone he could use with a minimum chance of being seen and recognized. I had suggested the outdoor booth at West Plaza, at the big shopping section, not far from the mainland end of City Bridge. The booth was brightly lighted, but set so deep
in the parking area, so far from traffic that it was unlikely anyone would come within a hundred feet of him.

Charlie said it sounded all right. I pulled off into the shadows of the lot, away from the street lights. The stores were closed, their night lights shining. The big drugstore was open, with fifteen or twenty parked cars clustered close to it. All the rest was a dark desert of empty asphalt. He moved up onto the seat, poked the cotton into place, tugged the bill of the cap down to eyebrow level. The sunglasses were in the breast pocket of the sports shirt, along with the cigarettes I had brought him. “Thanks a lot, Sam,” he said.

We shook hands. His hand was hot and dry, leathery with callouses. “Best of luck, Charlie.”

He got out of the wagon and walked toward the booth. I could see nothing furtive about the way he walked. He did not look back. I saw him step into the booth, close the folding door and open the phone book. I swung around in a big arc and headed out onto the street.

I could have gone home. That was what I wanted to do. I wanted to cook myself a meal, put the sheets and pajamas he had used in the laundry bundle, clean the place up, put Peggy Lee on the changer and go sit on my screened porch in the dark, in the canvas womb of the safari chair, and drink some big drinks and think small, random, unimportant thoughts, and listen to Peggy and forget the existence of Charlie Haywood. Sis was to be married. Judy was forever lost to me. Charlie would never bring me into his problems again.

I will never know why I didn’t do just that.

It’s what I should have done.

But there was something particularly touching about the gallantry of the new Charlie Haywood. He had been an ineffectual boy. They had ground him into a man. Maybe I wanted to help him. Or maybe I just wanted to watch. Maybe he had stung me a little with his remarks about having crawled
into a hole and pulled it in after me. I knew how true it was. I knew why I had done it. But it hurt my pride to have it pointed out. The big wheel had gone too fast for me, and it had flung me off, and I wasn’t about to climb back on.

So instead of heading on home, I hit the brake at the first cross street and doubled all the way back and came back onto the parking lot from the far side.

It wouldn’t hurt me at all, I told myself, to kill another ten minutes and see what Charlie did next.

3

I
parked on the far side of the group of cars near the drugstore. I slid out and stood up cautiously and looked out across the roofs of the cars toward the distant booth. He was still in there, and he was talking over the phone. I saw him hang up and step out of the booth. He walked a dozen feet, paused in a hesitant way, and then came angling over toward the drugstore, giving a perfect imitation of a man killing time. I could guess at what the casual manner was costing him.

I pleaded with him mentally not to go into the drugstore. There was a gift shop beside the drugstore. The night lights were on in the gift shop. The show window was illuminated, but not brilliantly. He stopped there and stood with his hands in his pockets, looking at the merchandise.

It was a perfect device. He was just outside the brightness that streamed out of the drugstore, yet he looked as if he might be waiting for someone to come out.

I had gotten back behind the wheel. I could see him through the windows of the car next to mine, a spare shadowy figure in the humid night.

Now what? I asked myself. Sam Brice, public eye. On any T.V. show they would have cast me as the heavy. Maybe at twenty-nine, moving too fast toward thirty, I would still have been acceptable for the rugged hero part had I not spent eleven seasons in football. Four in junior high and Florence City High, as All-State fullback. Four in the semi-pro brand of college ball played in Georgia, as defensive linebacker and defensive end. Three seasons—
almost
three seasons—in the National Football League as a two hundred fifteen-pound offensive tackle, a little bit light for that job of work, but compensating with quickness and balance.

Take those eleven years of eating cleats and spitting blood and being bounced off the frozen turf, and add the unavoidable social fist fights, and you have a face to loan bill collectors. Store teeth, a crooked jaw, a potato nose, miscellaneous scars and lumps and the tracery of long ago clamps and stitches.

It is, as they keep saying, a sport involving body contact. If I was casting the T.V. series, I would put myself in as the big dumb ugly assistant to the brilliant hero, the comedy relief who bungles the simplest orders, but comes through with the muscle in the clutch. The weight is still at two hundred fifteen, but it requires work and thought to keep it there, and I often wonder why I bother. An automatic reflex in the pride department, perhaps.

The long minutes went by. Kids came out of the drugstore and drove away. Replacements arrived.

Finally a curious thing happened. The stodgy little black Renault turned in and went chugging across the great expanse of empty parking area. It gave one irritable bleat of the horn. Charlie was already on his way toward it. It had stopped thirty feet from the phone booth.

I didn’t begin to actually believe it until he had gotten into the little car and it had started up again. She had bought it
way back when we had been together. She had driven out to the cottage with it many many times.

I wanted to know what right Charlie had to bring Sis Gantry into the picture. I didn’t have to ask myself why she’d let herself be sucked in. Anything with a broken wing would get her immediate attention.

Suddenly I knew it was my fault. I had told Charlie of her blind belief in his innocence. He had needed someone for some service I either couldn’t handle, or he had decided I wouldn’t handle. He had been sorting over the people he knew, wondering who to ask. And I had handed him Sis on a platter.

“Goddamn you, Charlie Haywood,” I muttered, and swung around into amateur pursuit. The streets of Florence City are too empty on any given night in August. I knew Charlie would be alert for any sign of a car following them. And I knew both of them would know my wagon, Sis particularly.

It helped a great deal to have them head directly for the causeway and City Bridge. Horseshoe Key is five miles long and in all its length it is seldom over a quarter-mile wide. Orange Road is the paved road that extends the full length of the Key. The commercial strip takes up most of a mile, right in the middle of the Key opposite the bridge and including the Orange Beach section. If you turn right when you get onto the Key, you head north through the junkier part of the commercial section, and then through an area of cottages and beach houses set too close together, until the road ends at the North Pass Public Beach. If you turn south you pass stores, bars, restaurants, and than a batch of pretentious motels with pretentious names, and suddenly you are in the land of the Large Money, the big homes you can’t see from the road, and you can read all the neat signs that say No Stopping, No Trespassing, No Deep Breathing. There is a barricade and a turnaround at the end. In the summer you can risk parking there and walking out along a narrowing sandpit
to a good place to cast out into Horseshoe Pass after mackerel and blues. But if you try it in the winter season, you can find your car expensively ticketed.

I hung well back and didn’t speed up until I saw the Renault turn left. When I made the turn the road was empty. No small ruby taillights. The road was straight for so far, I knew they had ducked off, and I would have had a lot of trouble learning where—had I not seen too much light coming out of Tom Earle’s office.

I slowed down and as I went by, saw the two of them walking from the front door back toward Tom’s private office. Evidently they had just walked in and she had clicked on the additional light a moment before I saw it. The Renault was tucked close to the side of the building, its lights out. I used a motel drive for a U-turn and when I went by again I could see neither of them. I turned into the small parking area next to the Best Beach Bar, cut the lights and motor and wondered what the hell to do next. It had ceased being any of my business, and I should have gone home. If Sis got into any trouble, it would be Cal McAllen’s problem, not mine. I could think of no reason in the world for her to have taken Charlie right to the office. It bothered me.

I got out and rubbed a thumbnail along the evening bristle on my jaw. I yearned for my dark porch, a tall drink, and the special timing of Miss Lee.

But I kept remembering Tom’s office had two windows on the rear of the building. So I went back there, stepping on something that broke with a sharp snapping sound, then kicking an empty can a dozen feet—about as stealthy as a drunken actor falling into the drums. An unseen cat spoke irritably to me. A mosquito did slow rolls inside my ear.

The blinds were down, the slats closed, but like most Venetian blinds the closure was less than perfect. From the first window I could see a section of the closed door and a segment of red leather couch and an edge of one of Tom’s framed
pictures of himself receiving an award of some kind for civic virtue. The other window was better. I could see part of the shoulder of the sport shirt I had given Charlie, and I had a closeup of the back of his ear, so close that I was startled into backing away. I looked again, over his shoulder, and I saw a slice of Sis’s face. She was sitting at the desk, talking into Tom’s red telephone. He has a fixation about red, from T Bird and speedboat to his wife’s gaudy hair. But the reds he surrounds himself with make her look like gray carroty death.

The windows were sealed shut. I could see the movement of her lips, but I could hear no sound. Charlie moved out of my range of vision and reappeared beside Sis, bending to whisper into her ear as she momentarily covered the mouthpiece.

Many things dropped neatly into place all of a sudden. Charlie had been happy to sacrifice his freedom as some unknown service to Charity Weber. He had changed his mind in prison. He had to get hold of Charity. She would be the one who could clear him. He couldn’t risk phoning her. Sis could make the call and perhaps decoy Charity Weber into a situation where Charlie could get to her and talk to her. Once it was set up, he would have no more need for Sis’s services. Suddenly I remembered how very calm Charlie had seemed after he had gotten some rest. It wasn’t a very healthy calm. Suppose he was using Sis to decoy the woman into a situation where he could kill her. With his hands. He hadn’t wanted the gun. That would be nice. That would be very nice for everybody.

So it wouldn’t hurt to follow the whole deal a little longer.

I wanted to be in the car, ready to go. I started back toward my car. I had to pass once again behind the big new furniture store between the Best Beach Bar and the office.

After I had gone forty feet the flashlight beam struck me in the face. It was about ten feet away. It had nice new batteries
in it. Surprises make me irritable. And I strongly disapprove of bright lights glaring into my eyes.

I wrenched my head around and said, “Cut it out!”

“Who you and what you doin’ back here?”

Because I was born and raised in Florida, I have often been accused of ‘mush-mouf’ diction, even though it seems to me I talk the same as anyone else. But this was basic swamp-talk I was hearing, the back country, slough and ’gator, grits and pellagra whine, full of a mock servility, yet flavored with an arrogance born of self knowledge of a special toughness that must be constantly tested to make certain it is still undiluted. I should have recited my name, address and occupation like an obedient child, and told him I had come back to check the rear door of the office building because I had wondered whether I had left it unlocked.

But he kept the light on my face, so I said, “I’m gathering mushrooms.” I took a step toward him and said, “Now get out of my way.”

The light went off. I had half a second in which to wonder if I was handling this very well, and then I had the same sensation as if a cherry bomb had been firmly taped to my skull over the left ear and detonated. The whole world jumped eight inches eastward. I felt the jar as I went down onto my knees, and I listened to a roaring that went fading, echoing, down through spiral staircases in the back of my brain.

The light was on me again and he said, in a tone of warm appreciation: “Well, you one tough son of a bitch! Plenty big, anyways.”

He moved to the side and I heard a faint whisper. The second bomb cracked a crater near the crown of my head and I spread myself gently, face down, into the warm and placid Gulf, floating, while all the girls were laughing and Miss Lee sang. I felt him wrench my arms around behind me, felt a meaningless coolness of metal on my wrists. I felt him pry my wallet out of my hip pocket.