But what girl? That was still a mystery.
Two Deputy Sheriffs found the car on Thursday afternoon about five o’clock. That was nearly four days after it was abandoned and some twelve hours after it was known all over the State that it probably had a hundred and seventy thousand dollars in it. The story was plain. I’d gone out in the ocean in a six-foot boat with a girl’s body and a concrete flamingo, and I’d never come back. Some man wearing rubber-soled shoes had come along later, pried open the trunk, and made off with the hundred and seventy thousand dollars. They found the blue shoe with the broken heel.
And by Friday morning they were pretty sure who the girl was. They finally located the taxi driver who’d taken her to Hollywood. He remembered where he’d picked her up. The girl’s name was Justine Laray, the paper said, and her occupation was unspecified, but she had a police record in Miami and in Pittsburgh for soliciting, vagrancy, and one conviction for shop-lifting. Nobody in her apartment house could recall having seen her since Sunday night. Some of her clothes were still in the apartment, but nobody knew just how many things she’d had. There was no suitcase at all. But the taxi driver and the Cameo bartender both swore she’d had only one with her. So maybe that was all she had. They were both sure she’d worn blue shoes.
On December 2, just a week after the car was abandoned, two fishermen found the boat near Pigeon Key, some twenty-five miles from where the car had been. No body was found. Of course they didn’t expect to find the girl’s if it was tied to the flamingo, but Chapman’s should have come ashore. They nearly always did, in drownings. The police were suspicious or this, but admitted it could have become snagged in coral along the reefs or wound up in the impenetrable tangle of mangroves along the shore.
A lot of space was given to Marian and her former relationship with him, but as far as I could determine from the papers she was never suspected. What could they suspect her of? Driving him mad by remote control? She was in Thomaston all the time; that was established from the first day. They ran a picture of him—probably the one she’d mentioned—but there was more glamor and character than resemblance, and it had been taken without the glasses. If anything, it looked less like him than I did.
And not once from beginning to end, as well as I could tell from the papers, did anybody ever question the fact that it was Chapman.
As she had pointed out, why should they? He said that was his name. And what reason would he have for lying about it? Would somebody pretend to be Chapman, just to go mad and drown?
After two weeks other sensations began to crowd it off the front page, but it didn’t die entirely. Several things kept it alive. One was the continuing search for the man who had looted the car, and for Chapman’s body. Then there was the concrete flamingo; that had caught the morbid public fancy.
But everybody had accepted it now, and we were safe. She’d write, or call, and let me know where she was.
She didn’t. Another week went by. I was growing to hate the apartment. Being away from her was bad enough but being reminded of her every minute I was in the place made it unbearable. And he was in it. I had the rug shampooed, and all the time the men were working on it I wondered if I were going as mad as Lady Macbeth.
But I couldn’t leave. I could have had the mail forwarded, of course, but suppose she telephoned? There was no way at all I could find out where she was. Presumably she’d left Thomaston, but she was supposed to get in touch with me. I waited, hating the place but hating to leave it, even for food. Even when I was sunbathing in the back yard I left the door open so I’d be able to hear the phone. Two hours before the postman was due I was pacing the floor by the front window, watching for him.
Then, on December 18, it came at last. It was early in the morning. The boy had thrown the paper up on the walk and I was starting out to get it when a Post Office van stopped and the driver got out with an Airmail Special. It was from Houston, Texas. I ran back inside, forgetting the paper, and tore it open.Dear Jerry:This is a very difficult letter to write, but I’ve avoided it as long as I can. I lied to you. I suppose you have begun to realize that by now, and I’m not asking for forgiveness, but I do think I should have the courage to face you and admit it. So if you still want to, will you come to see me here at the Rice Hotel?Sincerely,Marian.
I stared at it, bewildered. What did she mean, she’d lied to me? And then, suddenly, I remembered the other thing she’d said, that night of the 13th. “I took advantage of you.” None of it made any sense. She hadn’t lied about anything, as far as I could see.
But I was wasting time like a fool when I could be on my way to Houston. I grabbed the phone and began calling for reservations. I could get a flight out at one p.m. That would give me just about time enough to pick up the money. It was in a safe-deposit box in a Miami Beach bank. I hurried into the bedroom, changed clothes, and started packing. The phone rang. The airline, I thought, as I picked it up.
“Mr. Forbes? I have a telegram from Houston, Texas. The text reads as follows: URGENT DISREGARD LETTER SEE NEWS STORY. There is no signature.”
“Thank you,” I said. I hung up and ran out in the yard for the paper I’d completely forgotten.
It was on the front page, date-lined New Orleans but with the usual eye-catching local headline tag:—FLAMINGO CASE—NONSENSE, SAYS PSYCHIATRIST
I sat down, feeling a chill of apprehension.New Orleans, La. Dec. 18—Dr. J. C. Willburn, well-known professor of psychiatry and author of a number of books on mental illness, stated today that in his opinion it was highly improbable if not completely absurd that Harris Chapman could have deteriorated from apparent good mental health to a psychotic condition in two weeks, no matter how deep-seated his feeling of guilt.Dr. Willburn, who is on leave of absence, became interested in the case at its outset, and for the past three days has been in Thomaston interviewing dozens of Chapman’s friends and associates. He says he unearthed no prior instances of hallucination or irrational behavior at all and that the picture he has of Chapman is that of a practical, hard-driving, relatively insensitive, vigorous man in the prime of life, too given to hard work for brooding or much introspection—”
The whole thing exploded in the papers again. The police said they’d never ruled out the possibility the insanity was faked. I was scared all over again, but what was even worse I didn’t dare try to get in touch with her. But at least I could get out of the damned apartment, because I knew now where she was. I canceled the lease by paying an extra month’s rent, and moved to the Eden Roc Hotel. I bought some expensive clothes and luggage, spending money like a maharajah, and I drank too much.
The story went on. Another psychiatrist intimated that Willburn’s statement was ill-advised. Nobody could form a psychiatric opinion from second-hand evidence gleaned from lay observers; Chapman could have been in a potentially dangerous mental condition for months. A third psychiatrist said the second psychiatrist was ill-advised. The police were still suspicious of the fact his body had never been found. And by now they knew I’d bought the wrecking bar. The man in Palm Beach who’d sold it to me gave them a good description. So was this the act of a madman buying a weapon to defend himself against a woman he’d wronged, or that of a coldly logical schemer buying it to jimmy open his own car and fake the theft along with the rest of the fantastic hoax?