“What’s happened?” he demanded. “Paul, what’s the matter?”
He saw her then, beyond us. He dropped the rod and reel into the sand and plunged toward her. He fell to his knees, reached toward the towel, hesitated and then took it off. Linda had reached the group. She screamed. I turned sharply toward her as she screamed and saw the stringer drop to the sand. There were three plump sheepshead on the stringer with their gay wide black and white stripes. They began to flap around in the sand.
“What happened to her?” Jeff asked in a toneless, mechanical voice. “What did that to Stella?”
Someone took the towel from him and covered her face again. The people were moving down onto the beach again.
“She was shot in the head,” Vernon said brutally.
Jeff stared at me. “Paul... It was an accident. Wasn’t it an accident, Paul? Paul!”
He got to his feet. My mouth worked but I could not say anything. I took a step back. Linda made a sick sound in her throat, took a ragged step to the right and crumpled to the sand. Jeff came at me. His hard fist hit under my ear and knocked me sprawling. People were yelling. I was dazed. He fell on me and his hard hands closed on my throat. I grabbed his wrists and tried to pull his hands loose. He was grunting with effort. They pulled him away. I sat up, coughing and massaging my throat. Four men were clinging to Jeff’s big arms. He wrenched and plunged, trying to tear free. I coughed and swallowed. My throat felt as though it was full of sand. A man had rolled Linda onto her back. He knelt beside her, massaging her wrist, watching Jeff warily.
Suddenly the fight went out of Jeff. “All right,” he said woodenly. “All right, you can let go.”
They released him tentatively, ready to grab again, but when he just stood there, they stepped back. “Just what in the purified hell is going on here?” Sheriff Vernon demanded bitterly. I got slowly to my feet. The whole left side of my face ached where I had been hit.
Jeff looked out toward the Gulf, his face bitter. “I guess I can tell you,” he said. “Cowley has been pestering my wife for the last two weeks. Making a fool of himself. Making clumsy passes. Stell was amused at first. I told him to lay off. He said he would, but as soon as he had a drink he’d start again. We threatened to leave. Linda — Mrs. Cowley, begged us to stay. He was better yesterday and this morning. I was going to go fishing. Linda wanted to come too. Stell said she’d stay. Cowley borrowed my rifle to do some target shooting, he said. He probably started the same old routine and Stell got annoyed. I felt uneasy leaving the two of them here. I should have come back.”
I stared at him. It was like being in a nightmare. They were all looking at me. A man in uniform had eased around behind me. Linda was sitting up, looking at me with completely phony sadness.
I am positive that I looked the picture of shame and guilt. My voice was too shrill. “It wasn’t that way! It wasn’t that way at all! It was you, Linda, running around with Jeff. You shot her, Linda. I saw you shoot her and you shot Jeff too.”
He stared at me. “Linda shot her! Linda’s been with me for the last hour and a half. She caught two of those three fish. And you say Linda shot me, Cowley? Where? Show me where I’m shot.”
Linda came up to me. She put her hands on my forearm. Her fingers were cold. She looked into my eyes. Her mouth was sad. I thought I could see little glints of triumph and amusement deep in her eyes. She looked sedate, respectable, in her severe swim suit. “Please, darling,” she said. “You don’t know what you’re saying. Please be calm, dear.”
I hit her across her lying mouth, splitting her lips and knocking her down. They jumped me. They roughed me up and handcuffed me to a man in uniform. They hustled me up to the car. Two men were getting out of a tan ambulance. A man with a black bag glanced at us and walked down toward the beach. They put me in the back seat of one of the official cars. They drove me away from there. They spun the wheels on the sand, and screamed the tires when they were on concrete.
Bosworth, the county seat of Semulla County, was eighteen miles further south. I was officially charged with suspicion of murder, photographed, fingerprinted. I was still, incongruously, in swimming trunks, barefooted. There were no pocket items to be surrendered. They gave me a pair of gray twill coveralls much too large for me. They were clean and stiff and smelled of medicinal disinfectant. I rolled up the cuffs and turned back the sleeves. I gave my age, name, address, height, weight, date and place of birth and told them, when questioned, that I had no prior arrests or convictions. I felt as if it was all taking place behind thick glass. I watched through the glass. I could see lips move, but I could not hear clearly.
They walked me down a long hall with a cold tile floor. I could look through open doors and see girls in light blouses working at oak desks. My bare feet padded on the floor. People in the halls glanced at me with casual, knowing curiosity. They took me into a small room with a big table, five chairs, two barred windows. They pushed me into a chair. Stay there, they said.
They left a fat young man with a red face with me. He wore gray pants, a white mesh sports shirt, a black pistol belt. He sat on the table, swinging his legs, working a kitchen match back and forth from one corner of his mouth to the other.
Now I saw how all the parts went together. Nothing had made sense until the final act, and then it was all clear. I could enumerate all the little pieces which blended so carefully. Obviously, after we had gotten to know the Jeffries, Linda had met him clandestinely. Others too, perhaps. But I did not want to think about that. This was her big chance. What they had stolen had not been enough for them. They had to have everything. Everything in the world.
I remembered her strained silence on the way down. After she had heard the Carbonellis’ description of Verano Key, of how deserted it was out of season, she had decided on it as the perfect scene for the crime to be.
After talking it over with Jeff, she had brought it up casually while we played bridge. Jeff, according to plan, had become enthusiastic. Thus they had trapped the two of us. He had brought the gun. I remembered that it was a new one. They had spent hours alone together on the key while Stella was still alive, planning, practicing, rehearsing. Knowing they had to be alone to plan, they — or Linda — had taken the boldest way. They were confident that their two white mice wouldn’t escape from the trap.
All the parts fitted. His coaching her in the use of the rifle: her aim had to be good to miss him convincingly. She knew I wouldn’t go and examine him. She remembered the cat.
The people in Hooker would remember the times I had come in alone with Stella. They had even made certain of that.
Even the live fish. Sheepshead are durable. They will live overnight on a stringer in the water. Jeff had gone fishing alone, yesterday, on the bay side. I had seen him catching fiddler crabs for bait on the muddy bay beach. I had not seen him return. Obviously he had caught three fish, fastened his stringer to a low mangrove branch, hidden the rod and reel, sauntered back. Three live fish — that was a touch of art, nearly of genius.
They had known I would take the rifle away from her.
I wondered how many times they had gone over their lines. Perhaps the size of the audience surprised them a bit. Their act had not run true — not to me. But it had sounded right to the others. I could see that.
Linda had not rehearsed being sick. Perhaps that is the single thing in all of it that truly came as a surprise to her. How carefully she must have searched the beach, before turning the gun on Stella. Through the telescopic sight the hair lines would cross on that fair hair. How long did she hesitate before she pulled the trigger? Or did she hesitate not at all, while Jeff, jaw muscles bulging, body tense, sat and looked out into the Gulf, awaiting the snapping sound of the shot which would eliminate this wife who liked to live simply. Which would release him into a new world where the money was his own and the cat’s-paw woman he had used to obtain the money would also be his.