Where Is Janice Gantry? (7 page)

I rested. I was very tired.

He kicked me in the ribs, with insistence rather than brutality. “On your feet, boy. Pick all youself up an’ stand tall for LeRoy.”

I made the first effort and he gave me some help. When I was on my feet I felt tall and frail and a little bit sick to my stomach. He walked behind me, and gave me little jabs in the kidneys with the night stick to steer me in the proper direction. I got into the front seat of the dark blue sedan with the county decal on the door. I had to sit on the edge of the seat.

As he started up I realized I was once again capable of speech. “You’re making a mistake,” I said humbly.

“Now don’t we all, sooner or later.”

I had the feeling LeRoy and I were never going to strike up much of a friendship. He headed across the bridge to the mainland, driving without haste.

“You a new deputy?” I asked him.

“Best part of a year. You got a name?”

“Samuel Collins Brice.”

“Then you didn’t steal the money wallet maybe?”

“No, I didn’t steal the money wallet maybe.”

I got my first good look at him in the bridge lights. The brim of his ranch hat shadowed a pinched and narrow little face. His neck was too scrawny for the collar of the khaki shirt. He was about the size of a fourteen-year-old who had been sick and underfed. He kept his chin high in order to see over the hood, and he held the wheel firmly in his little brown hands.

“And what is your name, Mister Deputy, sir?”

“Depity LeRoy Luxey.”

“I’ve seen your name in the paper a lot lately. You make a lot of arrests.”

“If a man is put hisself in the arrestin’ trade, and does his work good, it comes out thataway somehow.”

He drove through empty streets and through the open iron gate into the courtyard area behind the Florence County Courthouse. Golden light shone through an open door onto the old brick paving, and as he herded me out of the car, I heard some men laughing. I didn’t know whether to be relieved or depressed to identify the rumbling bark of Sheriff Pat Millhaus.

As you go through the door you enter a corridor which has been narrowed by the addition of a waist-high counter on your right. Pat Millhaus lounged behind the counter with an inch of dead cigar in the corner of his mouth, a blue sports shirt—sweat-dark at the armpits—strained across the mound of hard belly. He was talking across the counter to a man I did not know, an old gentleman in a white linen suit that had turned to an ivory yellow with age.

Pat stared at me, his little dark eyes opening very round and wide, and suddenly they were squeezed into slits in the dark hard flesh of his face as he began to laugh. He laughed a lot longer than was necessary.

When he paused for breath, LeRoy Luxey asked gently, “You’d maybe be laughin’ at me, Sher’f?”

There was, implicit in that mild question, a terrible and innocent ferocity. Pat had half-tamed a wild thing and was using it for his own purposes. But it had to be handled with extraordinary care. I sensed, and so did Pat Millhaus, that if he had answered yes, the stringy little man would have immediately begun the blind and automatic and inescapable process of trying to kill his superior officer. The structure of his pride would have permitted no alternative.

The sheriff sobered at once and said, “I’m laughing at this damn fool you brung in, LeRoy. I’ve known him … just about eleven years. What’s the story on him, LeRoy.”

“I was checking the beach like you said on account of the B and E that’s been a-goin’ on out there, and I come on this Brice sneakin’ along behind of the Gulfway Furniture. I put
the light on him and ast him what’s he doing, and he makes me some smart-mouth talk and comes at me, so I thumped him some and brang him on in. This here is the money wallet I took off’n him, and he’s got no knife or gun, Sher’f.”

“He talked smart, LeRoy, because he keeps forgetting somehow he isn’t a big time operator with his name in the papers any more. What were you doing out there, Sam?”

“I had the feeling I’d left the back door at Tom Earle’s office unlocked. I parked my car at Gus Herka’s place and walked back to check it. I was going back to Gus’s to get a beer and then go home when I was stopped by … your eager little assistant.”

“Would you be stupid enough to get any fancy ideas about lawing LeRoy here for assault and false arrest?”

“I think I asked for what I got, Pat.”

“We’ll get your name on a release form before you go, just in case. Unloose him there, LeRoy.”

When my hands were free, I fingered the damage. The one over the ear had left a knot the size of half a plum. It had creased the skin slightly, but the blood had caked in my hair. The other was smaller.

“If you can give me that release form,” I said.

“I think we ought to set and talk some,” Pat said. “We’ve never had a chance to talk since you come back to town, you know that?”

“I’ve never had the urge,” I told him. “I don’t have it now.”

“I could whip his haid a little more so’s he’d talk polite,” LeRoy said earnestly.

“I think you better get back on duty, LeRoy,” Pat Millhaus said. “This man has no record—at least not down here. He just has the habit of thinking he’s a little bit better than anybody else.”

The old gentleman, after staring at me with open curiosity, said good night to Pat and left. Pat took me down a corridor
past his radio communications center to his office. He directed me to a straight chair in the middle of the room, facing his desk. He went behind his desk and lowered himself into a big green leather chair and stared at me with bland satisfaction. Except for black hair cropped so short the brown skull shows through, he looks like one of those old prints of the fat Indian chiefs who got annoyed with Custer.

Pat Millhaus is a good politician and a reasonably adequate law officer.

He played football for Florida Western. While I was playing for Florence City High he was a deputy sheriff who, by a rearrangement of his duty schedule, was able to work with the Florence City High coaching staff on a volunteer basis. It took me a long time to figure out why he singled me out. I finally realized it was because of all the members of the squad, I was the one who was obviously better than he had ever been. He rode me hard throughout those two seasons. The last game of my senior year was a night game. We won. After I had showered and changed, Millhaus and I went out back of the gym, all alone in the bright white moonlight. I was nineteen and I weighed one ninety. He was twenty-six and weighed two twenty. I had more height and reach, but I had played three quarters of a hard game that same night.

We fought for over an hour. We beat each other to bloody ruin. At times I couldn’t remember who I was fighting or why. At times we rested, our lungs creaking, our arms like dead meat, and then went at it again. I don’t know how many times I got up from the cool moist grass, back onto my feet, when I thought I’d never make it. I don’t know how many times I watched him climbing ponderously, slowly back onto his feet, as I waited, praying he wouldn’t make it.

It was a standoff. Afterwards we required medical and surgical attention and bed rest. Neither of us was worth a damn for a couple of weeks.

Folklore says that such an experience creates undying friendship. But it neither enhanced nor reduced our hatred.

“It’s a shameful thing to come so far down in the world you’ve got fellas like LeRoy putting knots on your All-American skull, Sam.”

“He’s a little quick with that stick.”

“It’s a shame you can’t call a press conference.”

“Knock it off, Millhaus.”

He shook his big head sadly. “There you were, right on top of the heap. Finest tackle in the league they were calling you. Had what they call a shining future. Had that blonde wife that could make a fella go all sweaty just seeing her half a block away.”

“You’ve been waiting for this a long time, Pat. So have your fun.”

“But you were always so much more important than anybody else you figured you could make your own rules. So you got real cute, and you got thrown out of pro football for life. Oh, I know it didn’t get into the papers because that was part of the agreement. The papers talked about a bad knee you didn’t have. But they had to unload you, Brice, because they couldn’t take a chance on you throwing a ball game for a little cash money.”

“Enjoy yourself.”

“And when all of a sudden they busted you right down to nothing, you didn’t have a thing left to sorta hold the interest of that fancy little wife. Guess she decided if you were going to live under a cloud, you could live there all by yourself.”

“You’re a son of a bitch.”

He smiled comfortably. “I’m a sheriff son of a bitch, Sam. You’re a crooked ballplayer son of a bitch. And I’d love for you to get into some real trouble around here sometime, so you could see how I operate this department. And if you felt you were being treated less than fair, who would you yell to?
Since that last uncle died, you’ve got no kin down here. No special friends. People figure you think you’re too good for the common folk. You’re a loner, Sam.” He leaned forward, “And there isn’t one soul in the big world gives enough of a damn about you to care what the hell I might do to you, given half a chance.”

“I’m intrigued to see how you can use your position to lean on me, Pat, instead of trying to pick up Charlie.”

I saw the flicker of a dangerous anger in his dark eyes. It went away as he leaned back in his big chair. “Right dangerous character, that Charlie Haywood.”

“Who knows?”

“He’s off in the brush someplace being et up by bugs. When he gets hungry enough and discouraged enough, he’ll come on out like a lamb. To save you from sitting here worrying about my business, I better let you sign the release and go on about your business.”

He filled in the blanks in a standard release and I signed it and two of his people witnessed it. I had been apprehended and brought in voluntarily for questioning and released with no charges placed against me.

“How do I get back to my car?”

“A man who made all the money you made just for knocking folks down should be able to figure something out.”

I walked three blocks to the bus station where I phoned a cab which took me over to my car. I had recurrent waves of nausea which effectively canceled any idea of the dinner I hadn’t had yet. I drove back to the cottage and showered and went straight to bed. In spite of a thumping headache, I went to sleep in minutes. But I kept waking myself up during the night by rolling onto my left side and putting too much pressure on the knot over my ear.

4

W
hen I parked by the office at twenty after nine the next morning, Jennie Benjamin, Alice Jessup and Vince Avery were standing in the morning shade of the building looking irritable.

“I’ve heard the phone ringing in there,” Alice said. “What will people think?”

“You
do
have a key, old man?” Vince said hopefully. “I’ve mislaid mine. Jennie’s is home, and Alice was never given one.”

“Sis hasn’t showed up?” I asked as I walked toward the door, sorting out the right key.

“A flaw in her alarming efficiency,” Vince said. “And damned inconvenient.”

“I phoned from across the street,” Alice said, “but she isn’t home.”

After I let them in I went across the street and had an enormous breakfast. I had thought the major lump too diminished to be noticeable, but old Cy said, “One of your women club you, Sambo?”

“Just a love tap.”

“If that’s love, don’t you never rile that woman. You single fellers lead a right interesting life.”

“We’re busy every minute. I keep a supply penned up out behind the place, Cy. Every evening I go out there, make a choice, then I turn her loose in the morning.”

“Don’t that upset the neighbors some?”

“Only when they get to baying at the same time, those nights the moon is full. It gets hard to hear yourself think out there.”

As he refilled my coffee cup, he said, “What you should have done, Samuel, was tie up that Sis Gantry permanent when you had the chance.”

“Everybody gives me advice.”

“I’m sixty-four years old and I don’t look a day over seventy, but I got an eye for that young stuff, and I watched her enough so I got me the idea she’d do you better than that whole pen full of women you got out there, baying and all. Might even be she’d need a whole pen full of fellers like you.”

“You run a clean food operation, Cy, but you’ve got a dirty mind.”

“A man talks about the ways of nature these days and somehow it gets to be called dirt. Honest to God, Sam, how did you get that chunk on the head?”

“I had a little misunderstanding with a deputy I’d never met before.”

“LeRoy Luxey, I bet a dollar.”

“No bet, Cy.”

“He’s mean and edgy as a cottonmouth, that one. They had to get him out of Collier County this spring before he killed off some folks down there that couldn’t get to like him. His daddy has some political push, so he got saddled onto Pat Millhaus. Was it last night?”

“Yes.”

“It isn’t many people you find walking around eating a
big breakfast the morning after they get into a little discussion with that Luxey.”