Murder in the Wind (5 page)

A year ago Charlie had lost his job. It hadn’t been his fault, exactly. The firm had decided to consolidate the Sarasota staff with the St. Petersburg office, and Agnes hadn’t felt that she could leave the city where she had been born and grown up, had married, been widowed and married again. So Charlie refused the transfer. There was enough for the two of them to get along in meager comfort, but, as Agnes told Babe, Charlie was restless and depressed because he couldn’t find anything to do—anything that suited him. Babe kept mentioning it to Johnny until at last he thought over his current enterprises and picked out something he thought Charlie could do. It was just a temporary job and it was up in Georgia, but Johnny figured he could pay a hundred a week and expenses, and Charlie was very pleased about it. Pleased and eager to please and like a damn kid about it.

So Johnny had sent him up to Georgia, and it hadn’t been a particularly delicate situation up there—just a situation where it was wise to have a man on the spot, a man he could trust to do some listening and some soothing and report back frequently until the deal went through, but Charlie had managed to foul it up. Now maybe the whole thing would fall through. Johnny didn’t know if he could save it or not. If he couldn’t save it, his charitable gesture was going to cost him a substantial piece of money—and the distressing thing was that a man would really have to scramble around to foul up a deal as well set as that one had been. It would be in better shape if there had been no one at all up there.

They turned north on 301 toward Bradenton. Johnny had his parking lights on and he was driving fast. He tried not to listen as Charlie, in his light eager voice, told some interminable and pointless story about how the yard man who came once a week cut down something Agnes hadn’t wanted cut down—what Agnes had said and what he had said and what the yard man had said.

“For Christ’ sake, Charlie!” he said explosively.

“What’s the matter? What’s the matter, Johnny?”

“I got another call from Ricardo last night, after I talked to you. Stevenson had gotten hold of Ricardo and told him that you told Stevenson that you didn’t think there had to be any organizational meeting before approval of the charter.”

“Well, it would be just a formality, wouldn’t it? I mean we know who the officers are going to be and all.”

Johnny gave him a quick glance. “Charlie, what is it that makes you so God damn dumb?”

Charlie tried to smile. His mouth was trembling. “I… I guess I just work at it.”

“I guess you God damn well do. What right did you have to even talk to Stevenson? I told you to stay away from him. He thinks control should be up there. He thinks that Christy and me are a couple of Florida slickers trying to move in on them. Then you go yap yap yap about no organizational meeting. Christ, I don’t care what he thinks after the charter goes through, but now you’ve made him nervous enough so he’s starting to try to bitch it up. And now Ricardo is getting nervous. Whichever way Ricardo jumps, the others will jump. Where the hell did you talk to Stevenson?”

“Well, he came into the office, Johnny. You know. Just passing the time of day. We got to talking.”

“Stevenson isn’t the kind of guy who goes around passing the time of day. He came in to pump you.”

“I didn’t think so, Johnny.”

“Face it. You just didn’t think. And I can tell you just what the hell you did and why.”

“What do you mean?”

Johnny heard the anxiety in the thin voice and he felt the anger swelling thick inside of him, clotting him, thickening his chest. Gene had told him to try to keep from getting angry.

“I’ll tell you what you are, Charlie. You’re a damn clerk. You never were anything else but a clerk in your life. You had to have somebody standing right over you telling you just exactly what the hell to do. I should have seen that before I sent you up there alone. You get an office of your own you think you’re some kind of a big shot. You weren’t a big shot and you aren’t a big shot, Charlie. I sent you up there to keep in touch and let me know developments. But you have to prove you can sit at a desk. So you open your mouth and start talking policy. You don’t know anything about policy. But you have to hear the sickening sound of your own voice. You have to tell those people up there how important you are. You led Ricardo to believe you’d be in on the operation after we get the charter. I wouldn’t keep you up there after the charter comes through if all you had to do was sweep the floor. I gave you this job because Agnes kept after Babe about it, and I didn’t feel sure about you and I should have had more sense. Jesus Christ! You up there acting like a big expert, and all the time you were as far out of your league as… Hell, you were a kitten up there, and those are big hungry dogs. You aren’t worth a poop, Charlie. Not one little poop in a whirlwind. And when you aren’t paddling around gumming things up, you’re a God damn bore.”

He felt the anger begin to fade. The hard peak of anger crumbled and fell slowly and softly away. Charlie Himbermark sat small in the seat beside him. He looked bludgeoned and shrunken. Johnny was half amused at his own anger, and he felt a small twinge of compassion for the poor old fool.

“Aren’t… aren’t you driving pretty fast, Johnny?”

“Shut up!” There was that much anger left.

The miles ran fleetly under the fast wet wheels of the car. They went through Bradenton, and turned toward the Sunshine Skyway and Route 19. Tampa Bay was obscured by rain. Johnny could not see the bridge far ahead. One incredibly steadfast fisherman stood on one of the smaller causeway bridges, huddled against the rail, back to the gusty wind, line stretching down to the gunmetal water, frothed with white.

“You just didn’t handle it so well, Charlie,” Johnny said at last, his voice soft.

Charlie responded immediately to the hint of forgiveness, and he sat erect and turned toward Johnny. “I guess I just wasn’t too clear about what you wanted me to do up there, Johnny. Gosh, I understand it now. I never would have talked like that if I’d understood all the ins and outs. Now that I’ve got it all clear in my mind, I can handle it all right for you. You can leave me up there when you head back and you won’t have to have a worry in the world. That’s it, Johnny. Not a worry in the world. I was talking to Will Wilson last night—he’s my neighbor—and I was telling him…” The voice faltered and stopped.

“Go on, Charlie. What were you telling him?”

“That it… was an interesting job.”

“And dropping a lot of little hints about it.”

“He wouldn’t tell a soul, Johnny. Will knows how to keep his mouth shut.”

“If that’s true, I should have hired him instead of you. Jesus, Charlie, let’s not talk about it. We won’t talk about it again until we get up there. I wish to God we could have flown up there.”

The big car sped on. St. Petersburg was lost and gray under the thick fat rain. Johnny Flagan sat low in the seat, hands holding the wheel lightly. His mind was not on the road or the weather, or even the problems ahead. He was playing a mental game that was old with him, a game that had begun years ago and had become more satisfying to play each year.

He divided his mind into two parts, like a big white balance sheet with a sharp dividing line down the middle. On one side he slowly listed what he owned. Land, securities, cash, buildings, options. He thought of each item carefully, lovingly, remembering to a penny the cost of acquisition, assigning a conservative current valuation to each one. When he was through, when he could think of no other item, he drew a line and added the figures. Next he listed his obligations, finding the exact total. He did it all slowly, so that the game would last longer. He subtracted one from the other.

Johnny Flagan, at this moment, at this instant of time, you are worth almost five hundred and ten thousand dollars. And, except for Bruce Lovingwell—one of the smartest tax attorneys in the business—there is no one else in the wide world who even suspects that it’s that much. Half of a million, Johnny. Now let’s get on with the game. A dollar bill isn’t quite six inches long, but we’ll call it six inches and cut the total down to an even half million. Let’s see. That’s two hundred and fifty thousand feet. About forty-seven miles. Four point seven miles if it was ten-dollar bills. Or damn near a half mile of hundred-dollars bills. Five hundred thousand-dollar bills. Three thousand inches. Two hundred and fifty feet.

He could picture the money spread flat and even along the highway and it gave him a sensual almost voluptuous pleasure to think about it.

The more there was of it, the easier it was to get hold of more.

The old man thought you worked for it. He thought if you broke your back out there in the celery, you’d make money. Or if you hauled on the nets until your hands bled, you’d make out. And the old man had died because he couldn’t afford to take the boat out of the water long enough to fix up the rotted leaky bottom. So he drowned out there in the Gulf, him and Buck and Howie, going down in the black night water, choking in the salt water, flapping and choking and yelling and no one to hear them. If the old man had been fifty bucks ahead, he could have taken the boat out and fixed it.

[The big blue Cadillac moves fast. He keeps it at ninety as much as he can. His is the type of mind that can remember details that seem unimportant at the time. Some part of him is forever observing, recording, filing. And that knack has made him money.

Suppose a question were asked: What were the last five cars you’ve passed, Flagan?

“Counting the ones pulled over on the shoulder?”

Just the moving ones.

“That’s easier. Let me see. Five. I’ll even tell you in the order I passed
’
em, A blue and white convertible. Dodge or DeSoto. Woman driver. Then a beat-up old panel delivery. Then—let me see—didn’t get much impression from the next one. Dark. Small car. Dark green I think. Then a foreign job. Fancy. I don’t know what the hell it was. Followed him for a time and finally made it when he slowed down some. Some people don’t like anybody on their tail. When they try it on me, I walk away from them. Then the last one was that station wagon, loaded pretty heavy. Local plates. Clearwater or St. Pete. How’m I doin’?”

Doing fine in your big car, Johnny.

And he senses trouble ahead. He leans forward. He uses the brakes gingerly and the big car skids, straightens, skids, straightens, slows and stops and he lets his breath out and hopes that the station wagon is going to be alert and not pile into him, or get shoved into him by that foreign job.]

About eleven miles north of the town of Crystal River on Route 19, on Florida’s West Coast, State Route 40 crosses 19 at a village called Inglis. Forty doesn’t go far west after it crosses. Just three miles to a place called Yankeetown on Withlacoochee Bay. The Gulf is that close to Route 19 at that point.

Follow Route 19 further north and it swings inland a hit, through Lebanon and Lebanon Station, then Gulf Hammock. By the time it gets up to Otter Creek, six miles north of Gulf Hammock, it is twenty-two miles from the Gulf. Cedar Key is out that way, twenty-two miles along Route 24.

In that straight six miles of Route 19 between Gulf Hammock and Otter Creek, Route 19 crosses the Waccasassa River. Not much of a river. Not much of a bridge where it goes under the road.

The Waccasassa River empties—ten miles from the highway—into, almost inevitably, Waccasassa Bay. The bay makes an almost triangular indentation into the coast of Florida, just about half way between Yankeetown and Cedar Key. The shores of the bay are dreary, uninhabited. Thick mangrove grows down to the salt flats. Behind the mangrove the land is sodden, marshy. In the Gulf Hammock area, Route 19 cannot be more than six feet above the high tide mark in the Gulf ten miles away.

The bridge over the Waccasassa is a relatively modern concrete highway bridge, two lanes wide. Some years ago it was built to replace a rickety wooden lane and a half structure with timbers that flapped and rumbled under the wheels of the vehicles. At the time the bridge was being replaced, through traffic had to take a detour. Not a long detour, about four miles in all. If you were headed north you had to turn west off Route 19 about a mile before you came to the bridge. It was a narrow sand road, and it angled sharply away from Route 19 for over a mile. It turned north then and crossed a narrow wooden bridge over a vagrant loop of the sleepy Waccasassa, and about three hundred yards farther crossed a second bridge over the main river. Two and a half miles farther on, after bearing almost imperceptibly east, the sand road rejoined Route 19.

When the new bridge was built, construction lasted well into the tourist season, despite State Road Department assurances that it would be done by Christmas. As a consequence, many southbound tourists went over the detour down the narrow sand road that wound through sparse stands of pine and then cut through the heavy brush near the river. Many of the tourists had cameras and a few of them, more aware of pictorial values than most, stopped on the stretch between the two wooden bridges to take a picture of a strange old deserted house quite near the sand road. It was a ponderous and ugly old house built of cypress, decorated with the crudest of scroll saw work. It was weathered to a pale silvery gray. The shuttered windows were like blinded eyes. The house sat solidly there and you thought that once upon a time someone had taken pride in it and had ornamented it with the scroll work. It was like a heavy gray old woman wearing crude and barbaric jewelry.

Then the bridge was opened and there was no one to take pictures of the house. No one to see it except for the infrequent local fishermen who knew the times when snook came up the Waccasassa from the Gulf and could be caught from the larger of the two wooden bridges.

It was almost noon on Wednesday, the seventh of October, that the concrete highway bridge became blocked.

Dix Marshall had picked up the load in New Orleans and it was consigned to Tampa. He knew from the way the rig handled that they had loaded it as close to the limit as they dared. The inside rubber on the two rear duals was bald and it felt to him as though the whole frame of the trailer was a little sprung. It had an uneasy sideways motion on long curves to the left. But the diesel tractor was a good one. New and with a rough sound, but with a lot of heart to it. That was a break. Usually the company kept the best tractors off the flat runs, saved them for the mountain routes. Once he’d made this same run with a job you’d have to shift down three times on a four per cent grade. It was six hundred and sixty-five miles from New Orleans to Tampa, and he hadn’t gotten a very good start out of New Orleans on Tuesday. He’d felt so woozy after the fight with Gloria that he’d almost asked the dispatcher if he could have a helper on the run. There was the usual bunk behind the cab seat. But the company didn’t believe in double wages for a run this short.

Along about midnight he’d gotten so groggy he’d pulled off somewhere near Pensacola and climbed back in the bunk on the sour blankets and corked off. When he woke up it was still dark and he felt a little better, but he felt he’d slept too long.

He wanted this one to be over in a hurry. There would be a load to take on in Tampa consigned to Atlanta, and a load in Atlanta for Biloxi and maybe a short haul load from Biloxi back into New Orleans—he wouldn’t know until he got there. He wanted it to be a short trip because he wanted to get back because every time he thought of what Gloria might be doing, he felt sick enough to gag.

Dix Marshall was a small man in his early thirties with thick shoulders and husky tattooed arms. He had thick brown hair which he wore combed straight back, large rather expressive brown eyes, a long upper lip and very bad teeth. He had been driving a truck since fifty-one when he got out of the army and he had been married to Gloria for the last seven years. They had lived in a trailer until the second kid came and then they had moved to a small rented house on the northeast edge of New Orleans.

He had awakened in the truck and he drove toward the dawn thinking about Gloria and feeling sick about the whole mess and wondering just what the hell you did. Did you kill them? What did you do? He knew that all he wanted to do was get back as soon as he could and talk to her some more and maybe they could figure out how it would be for both of them in the future.

She was still a dish. Not so much of a dish as before, but still a dish. Between the two kids she had been fat but after the second one she’d worked on those diets and gotten down pretty well. Not all the way down to the hundred and fifteen like when they were married, but down to a hundred and thirty about.

She’d been so damn cute. That black hair and those dark blue eyes and that cute build. Just about danced his feet right off him. Couldn’t think of anything but dancing. On her feet all day long in that store on Canal Street, and then want to dance all night long. Good dancer, too. Lot of rhythm. She’d had a steady boyfriend when he met her. What was that joker’s name? Carl something.
Big
bastard. It all happened like he imagined it happened with just about everybody. You think it’s for kicks and then it turns out to be something you want permanent. And that old crap about not chasing a streetcar after you caught it was just that. Crap. God knows how many times it was in the back seat of that old Chev of his, and sometimes in motels and once that time in her own room in her own house when her folks had gone over to Lake Charles that time her married sister was sick. It had made him feel strange to be there in her room with the school pictures on the walls and those stuffed dolls and things.

He wished she hadn’t let him. He wished she hadn’t let him until they were married and then he wouldn’t be thinking what he was thinking now. She probably let Carl too, even though she claimed she didn’t.

He wanted it to be permanent. She met his folks and he met hers and pretty soon the wedding was all planned and pretty soon the wedding was over and he was married to Gloria. They could have moved in with either set of folks but they didn’t want to, and he put the down payment on the used trailer and they had moved in. My God, that had been one hot son of a bitch in the summertime. Lay there in the narrow bed with sweat pouring right off them, but it was the first summer and they did more joking about it than complaining.

She wasn’t real bright. Tell her something and she couldn’t remember it worth a damn. Couldn’t cook much either, but she got better at that. Not bright but always laughing, making jokes, jumping around. Did all her thinking with her body. Talk a blue streak and not say a damn thing. Always wanting to go to the movies—just like now she can’t hardly tear herself loose from that television. Not bright, but good. He thought she was good. And it was good to be married. It made you feel settled. You had kids and it made you think you were doing something, building something. And you settled into the job better and you got more dependable and so you got the better hauls and a better rating.

The house wasn’t much, but they’d fixed it up pretty good. They did a lot of inside painting they couldn’t get the landlord to do. The kids getting old enough to be sort of fun. Hated like hell to be away from them so much, but the money was good, and they were putting some aside, and it all looked fine. Until Sunday night.

He knew he could live to be a million and never forget a second of it, how it was, how things looked—so clear—like it had been engraved somewhere in his mind like a bunch of pictures in an album.

It was the thing that happened to other guys. And it was an old joke, too. A corny old joke. The guys down at the shop would ride each other. “Who’s taking care of that while you’re away, Dix?”

“I just fix it before I go so it don’t need anything in between.”

“Nuts. I bet you got yourself one of them there what they call it chastity belts. Let me see the key, Dix.”

“Not you, you bastard. You’ll get a copy made and you just aren’t man enough to handle it.”

You made jokes about it. Sometimes the jokes got a little raw on account of Gloria is really a dish, but you didn’t let them see you were getting sore. If they knew they could make you sore they’d never let up on you one minute.

He’d taken one of the usual runs to Denver, the Friday to Monday run, but he got up there, just making it, with the transmission sounding like somebody shaking glass in a basket, and there wasn’t a spare for the return haul. He’d phoned in and they told him to take an air coach back and so he got in at dusk on Sunday instead of midnight Monday like he always did. He took a bus on out and walked three blocks to the house. The house was dark and he could see there was just one light on, the kitchen light, and he figured she was out there maybe eating by herself after stashing the kids in bed, and it was probably right in between two of her favorite television shows. He thought he would come up behind her sitting there at the kitchen table and put his hands over her eyes, maybe, and say “Guess who?” So he walked quietly onto the porch and opened the screen door and shut it quietly and just started to head across the living room when there was all of a sudden a grunting and rustling from the couch and the bastard from the gas station down at the corner came running at him and got by him and the screen door banged and he heard his steps on the walk, half running. He didn’t know who it was in the dark. He hadn’t seen him. But he’d pounded the name out of her later.

He turned on the light and she was there on the couch, her black hair all messed up, her face like chalk, her lips without any blood in them, her hands shaking as she tried to hook herself up.

Who’s taking care of that while you’re away, Dix?

Fellow named Sparkman that works at the Esso Station. Bob Sparkman. Big blond-headed fellow.

He saw her there and he knew he would never forget how she looked, and he just stood there and pointed his finger up in the air and said, “With the kids asleep right over your head.”

He was one yard from her, his fists shut tight, when she found her voice and began pleading, explaining, telling him to wait. He gave her a chance to talk. She said nothing had happened, that it was the first time they’d ever been together, that she’d offered him a beer because it was a hot night and he’d turned into a wise guy and turned off the light and she was trying to get the light back on when he walked in. See, there was the beer can.

He kept after her then. He went after her and he kept after her. He hurt her with his hands and he hurt her with his words and he didn’t have all of it until two in the morning. Then they were in the kitchen and she sat with her cheek against the cold porcelain top of the table and she was crying silently, hopelessly, and her face was puffed and discolored where he had struck her, but he had the whole truth, he was sure.

It had been going on for six months. Before that there hadn’t been anyone for over a year, but there had been another one and his name had been Schneider and that affair had lasted almost a year. Then the record was clean all the way back to the first year after their marriage when there had been one named Cooper and that had only lasted two weeks and they had only been together three times. She didn’t know why she did it. She didn’t know how it happened to her. She wanted to be good, she said, but these things happened to her. She couldn’t help it. They just seemed to happen. And he was away so much.

She lifted her head from the table and looked at him with tired dazed blue eyes and said, “Dix, honey, I’m so ashamed. I’m so terrible ashamed.”

There wasn’t any other hurt like that. It was like a rusty knife in your gut that kept twisting slowly. He lay beside her while she was in deep exhausted sleep and he tried to think it out logically. But what did you do? Did you kill them? What did you do about it?

And yet in some funny way the most tragic thing seemed to be the tiny nick on his middle knuckle where she had tried to cry out as he struck her, not hard, and her tooth had cut his knuckle. So how could you hurt her bad? How could you kill her? She hadn’t ever been very bright. Just sort of fun. And cute. And real good with the kids. Always full of all that sloppy emotion that came over the television. Dirty little affairs and yet she was probably all the time calling them romance. Like a kid playing games, not understanding just how serious it was. She even kept her dolls until she was married. And now, caught and exposed, she still acted more like a naughty child than a grown woman, a mother.

What did you do?

He wanted the trip over. He wanted to go back and talk to her some more. He could give up the whole thing and leave her. But what would happen to her? He knew he could get custody of the kids. But what would happen to Gloria?