“And was he in line to be the one to come to Lauderdale and bring me back if I was picked up there?”
The sheriff looked uneasy. “That was what was planned, mister.”
“I guess I would have tried to open the car door and jump out when we were going seventy-five or eighty. After I got through bounding along the pavement, nobody’d find a little extra lump on my skull.”
“Now you can’t be sure that would have happened that way.”
“I wonder why he told anybody about hearing from his Uncle Press that I was going to be here this morning?”
“Because,” said Tom Windhorn, “he knows I play golf Sunday mornings in a foursome with Press LaFrance every week of my life, and Press knew we were hunting you, and Freddy knew there was no way in the world of stopping Press from telling me. So he brought it in first. And the fool thing about it is that Press never did play yesterday. He phoned in he was feeling poorly, too late for us to get somebody to fill out, and so they stuck some old coot in with us that couldn’t hit the ground with his hat.”
“That poor boy just had plain bad luck all the way around,” I said. “He never did get a chance to kill me.
“He’s no killer,” the sheriff said. “He just lost his head some.”
“Nice I get to keep mine. Find the stuff he picked up out at the cottages?”
The sheriff nodded. “It was at his place, under his clean shirts. The narcotics we got packed up to mail in for analysis. No case on that because, without Freddy we can’t prove the chain of possession.” He opened the shallow middle drawer of his desk and then held an envelope toward me. I reached and took it.
The color prints were sharp and clear. I leafed through them. They did not leave the feral and cynical impression that the posed product of the hardcore studios’ induce. This was a tumble of aging children, most of them rather badly nourished. In spite of their placid, dazed, beatific smiles and grimaces, they were a kind of curious sadness, in their weird, bright patterns of love-paint on the scrawn of flesh, in their protest bangles and their disaffiliated bells, crushing the flower blossoms in a dreamy imitation of adult acts that for them had all been bleached of any significance or purpose. The rites of the strobe, frozen in such a sharpness it caught forever a wistful dirtiness of knuckles, the calico of bad bleach jobs, the moles and the blemishes and the sharp, helpless angle of shoulder blade. This was not a rebellion against mechanization, or emotional fraud. This was denying life itself in all eras and all cultures, and instead of being evil or outrageous was merely empty, bland and slightly saurian somehow, as though in a vain attempt to warm the blood that had begun to turn cooler in some gigantic and total regression that would take us all back through geological time, back into the sea where life began.
Said Tom, “Ain’t that Arlie the damnedest sight a man would ever want to behold?”
“Unforgettable,” I said, and put the envelope on the edge of the desk. “I’ve been waiting around to ask permission to leave your area, Sheriff. Here’s the address where you can get me. I’ll come back if you need me. But now I’d like to drive up to Frostproof and see Jan Bannon.”
“Get your business done with Press?”
“Yes, thanks.”
“Well… I guess there’s no call to keep you waiting around. Thank you for your cooperation, Mr. McGee.”
“Thank you for your courtesy and consideration, Sheriff.”
When I phoned ahead, Connie said that Janine had heard the news and that she was very upset and puzzled. I said it would be well after midnight before I could make it, and she said that it had been too much of a long, hard day to wait up. I told her my day had been on the same order, and told her that everything had gone very smoothly so far.
It was ten after one when I got there and turned under the arch and through the glare of the gate light and drove to the big house. The night was cool and the stars looked high and small and indifferent.
Jan stood in the open doorway waiting for me. And she leaned up to rest her cheek for a moment against mine, with a quick, soft touch of her lips. “You must be exhausted, Trav!”
“And you shouldn’t have waited up.”
“I couldn’t have slept.”
I went in and sat down into the depth and softness of a big leather couch. There were two red embers among the silvery ashes of the hearth. She wore a floor-length navy robe with a white collar. She said, “Connie left orders to give you a great wallop of bourbon to unwind on.” I said it sounded great. She drifted out of sight and I heard the clink of cubes and the guggle of a generous dose.
“Water?”
“Just the ice, thanks.”
She brought it over and fixed the cushions at the end of the couch and told me to lie back and put my feet up. She moved a footstool close. The light behind her from the corner lamp, the only one on in the room, shone through the fine ends of her cropped black hair. Her face was in shadow.
I sipped the strong drink and told her about Deputy Hazzard. “That’s what I couldn’t believe,” she said. “He and the older one, with the funny name. Not the Sheriff.”
“Windhorn?”
“Yes. They were the ones who… came out with the padlocks and the notices. And he, the young one, seemed so very shy and nice and troubled about everything. There was no point in taking it out on them. They had their orders.”
“Had he been out there before?”
“Several times, yes. To serve papers, and the time they checked to see about the licenses we have to have for the houseboats. A lanky boy with a long face, kind of a red, lumpy face, but sweet. But very official about what he had to do. All leather and jingling and creaking.”
“That reconstruction of it doesn’t fit,” I said. “It doesn’t fit Tush.”
“I know. He never got mad that way. Not like me. I fly off the handle and want to hit everything I can reach. He’d just get very very quiet and sad-looking and he’d walk slowly away. It’s better for me to… to be absolutely positive once and for all that he didn’t kill himself, Trav. But it just seems to be such… a stinking trivial way to die, to be killed by that harmless-looking young man.”
“Most of the ways people die are kind of dingy and trivial, Jan.”
“It just shouldn’t have been that way for Tush. But how in the world did that Freddy person get Arlie Denn to tell such an ugly lie about you? She always seemed to me to be sort of dull and placid. She never seemed mean or vicious or anything. It must have been horrible for her-watching like that. I would think she would just… have never told anybody at all, ever.”
And that took some explaining and finally I managed to make her comprehend it, up to a point. But comprehension was comingled with revulsion. “But we let that wretched girl sit with our boys a lot of times! She could have taken something… and hurt them.”
“I doubt it.”
“What kind of people were those others? How old were they?”
“I’d say Roger and Arlie were the oldest. The others looked nineteen and twenty. And the one girl about fifteen or sixteen.”
“What are they trying to do to themselves?”
“Drop out of the world. Hallucinate. Turn on. Dig the sounds and colors and feels. Be at one with the infinite something or other. I can’t lay too big a knock on them, you know. In another sense I’m a dropout. I don’t pay for my tickets. I jump over the turnstile.”
“I think I’ve been dropped out somehow. For good.”
“Now I am supposed to tell you about how you’re a young woman still in your twenties with most of your life still ahead of you.”
“Please don’t.”
“A guy will need you in the right way sometime.”
“Tell him not to really need me. That’s when I run like a rabbit.” She took my empty glass and said, “Another?”