Still, Brody thought, one death in mid-June, before the crowds come, would probably be quickly forgotten. Certainly it would have less effect than two or three more deaths would. The fish might well have disappeared already, but Brody wasn’t willing to gamble lives on the possibility: the odds might be good, but the stakes were prohibitively high.
He dialed Meadows’ number. “Hey, Harry,” he said. “Free for lunch?”
“I’ve been wondering when you’d call,” said Meadows. “Sure. My place or yours?”
Suddenly Brody wished he hadn’t called at mealtime. His stomach was still groaning, and the thought of food nauseated him. He glanced up at the wall calendar. It was a Thursday. Like all their friends on fixed, tight incomes, the Brodys shopped according to the supermarket specials. Monday’s special was chicken, Tuesday’s lamb, and so forth through the week. As each item was consumed, Ellen would note it on her list and replace it the next week. The only variables were bluefish and bass, which were inserted in the menu when a friendly fisherman dropped his overage by the house. Thursday’s special was hamburger, and Brody had seen enough chopped meat for one day.
“Yours,” he said. “Why don’t we order out from Cy’s? We can eat in your office.”
“Fine with me,” said Meadows. “What do you want? I’ll order now.”
“Egg salad, I guess, and a glass of milk. I’ll be right there.” Brody called Ellen to tell her he wouldn’t be home for lunch.
Harry Meadows was an immense man, for whom the act of drawing breath was exertion enough to cause perspiration to dot his forehead. He was in his late forties, ate too much, chain-smoked cheap cigars, drank bonded Bourbon, and was, in the words of his doctor, the Western world’s leading candidate for a huge coronary infraction.
When Brody arrived, Meadows was standing beside his desk, waving a towel at the open window. “In deference to what your lunch order tells me is a tender stomach,” he said, “I am trying to clear the air of essence of White Owl.”
“I appreciate that,” said Brody. He glanced around the small, cluttered room, searching for a place to sit.
“Just throw that crap off the chair there,” Meadows said. “They’re just government reports. Reports from the county, reports from the state, reports from the highway commission and the water commission. They probably cost about a million dollars, and from an informational point of view they don’t amount to a cup of spit.”
Brody picked up the heap of papers and piled them atop a radiator. He pulled the chair next to Meadows’ desk and sat down.
Meadows rooted around in a large brown paper bag, pulled out a plastic cup and a cellophane-wrapped sandwich, and slid them across the desk to Brody. Then he began to unwrap his own lunch, four separate packages which he opened and spread before himself with the loving care of a jeweler showing off rare gems: a meatball hero, oozing tomato sauce; a plastic carton filled with oily fried potatoes; a dill pickle the size of a small squash; and a quarter of a lemon meringue pie. He reached behind his chair and from a small refrigerator withdrew a sixteen-ounce can of beer. “Delightful,” he said with a smile as he surveyed the feast before him.
“Amazing,” said Brody, stifling an acid belch. “Absofuckinlutely amazing. I must have had about a thousand meals with you, Harry, but I still can’t get used to it.”
“Everyone has his little quirks, my friend,” Meadows said as he lifted his sandwich. “Some people chase other people’s wives. Some lose themselves in whiskey. I find my solace in nature’s own nourishment.”
“That’ll be some solace to Dorothy when your heart says, ‘That’s enough, buster, adios.’”
“We’ve discussed that, Dorothy and I,” said Meadows, filtering the words through a mouthful of bread and meat, “and we agree that one of the few advantages man has over other animals is the ability to choose the way to bring on his own death. Food may well kill me, but it’s also what has made life such a pleasure. Besides, I’d rather go my way than end up in the belly of a shark. After this morning, I’m sure you’ll agree.”
Brody was in the midst of swallowing a bite of egg salad sandwich, and he had to force it past a rising gag. “Don’t do that to me,” he said.
They ate in silence for a few moments. Brody finished his sandwich and milk, wadded the sandwich wrapper and stuffed it into the plastic cup. He leaned back and lit a cigarette. Meadows was still eating, but Brody knew his appetite wouldn’t be diminished by any discussion. He recalled a time when Meadows had visited the scene of a bloody automobile accident and proceeded to interview police and survivors while sucking on a coconut Popsicle.
“About the Watkins thing,” Brody said. “I have a couple of thoughts, if you want to hear them.” Meadows nodded. “First, it seems to me that the cause of death is cut-and-dried. I’ve already talked to Santos, and—”
“I did, too.”
“So you know what he thinks. It was a shark attack, clear and simple. And if you’d seen the body, you’d agree. There’s just me—”
“I did see it.”
Brody was astonished, mostly because he couldn’t imagine how anyone who had seen that mess could be sitting there now, licking lemon-pie filling off his fingers. “So you agree?”
“Yes. I agree that’s what killed her. But there are a few things I’m not so sure of.”
“Like what?”
“Like why she was swimming at that time of night. Do you know what the temperature was at around mid-night? Sixty. Do you know what the water temperature was? About fifty. You’d have to be out of your mind to go swimming under those conditions.”
“Or drunk,” said Brody, “which she probably was.”
“Maybe. No, you’re right — probably. I’ve checked around a little, and the Footes don’t mess with grass or mescaline or any of that stuff. There’s one other thing that bothers me, though.”
Brody was annoyed. “For Christ’s sake, Harry, stop chasing shadows. Once in a while, people do die by accident.”
“It’s not that. It’s just that it’s damn funny that we’ve got a shark around here when the water’s still this cold.”
“Is it? Maybe there are sharks who like cold water. Who knows about sharks?”
“There are some. There’s the Greenland shark, but they never come down this far, and even if they did, they don’t usually bother people. Who knows about sharks? I’ll tell you this: At the moment I know a hell of a lot more about them than I did this morning. After I saw what was left of Miss Watkins, I called a young guy I know up at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. I described the body to him, and he said it’s likely that only one kind of shark would do a job like that.”
“What kind?”
“A great white. There are others that attack people, like tigers and hammerheads and maybe even makos and blues, but this fellow Hooper — Matt Hooper — told me that to cut a woman in half like that you’d have to have a fish with a mouth like this" — he spread his hands about three feet apart — “and the only shark that grows that big and attacks people is the great white. There’s another name for them.”
“Oh?” Brody was beginning to lose interest. “What’s that?”
“Man-eater. Other sharks kill people once in a while, for all sorts of reasons — hunger, maybe, or confusion or because they smell blood in the water. By the way, did the Watkins girl have her period last night?”
“How the hell would I know?”
“Just curious. Hooper said that’s one way to guarantee yourself an attack if there’s a shark around.”