Slam the Big Door (25 page)

“Leaving a note for a friend.”

“I own this here place. They’s payin’ for two and sleepin’ three. I got toll about somebody movin’ in with a suitcase yestiddy, so they owes more, startin’ then. You see ’em, you tell ’em.”

“I won’t see them.”

“Don’t keer about a thang but gettin’ full money.”

“I have a feeling they won’t be with you long.”

“That’ll be a good thang, mister, on account I got me too many complaints on them people.” She turned like the
U. S. S. America,
grasped the door frame, lowered her weight down the two steps with much grunting, and headed for her cottage.

He followed her slowly, went out to where he had parked the Porsche. The shabby gaudy shacks stood disconsolate in the late afternoon sun. The Wiltin’ Hilton, he thought. Bad housekeeping. Nobody has dusted the cabbage-palm fronds. Somebody left some fish in the sun. Come to this retirement paradise, all you senior citizens. (This seems more palatable than ‘oldsters.’) You’ve got your savings and you’ve got that Social Security, so take your choice. Be a guest of Ma Shelder and live right on the water. Or should you prefer to own your own home, the possibilities are infinite. Take Gracious Heights, for example. There you can buy the version of the Retire-a-Days which best suits you. These exquisite cinderblock homes range from $7,777.95 up to $13,333.50, including closing costs, complete with jalousied Florida room, modern kitchen, carport, septic tank and homestead exemption. Gracious Heights is only fifteen minutes from a new modern shopping center. (Clocked by Fangio in a D Jag with a running start.) You will live in the real Florida. (Entirely authentic, eighteen miles back into the scrub lands, flat as a two-dollar tire.) Become an expert on the flora and fauna. (Chinch bugs, red bugs, cockroaches, fire ants, coral snakes, nutria, palm rats, buzzards, strangler figs, palmetto, saw grass, scorpions.) Retire the exciting way. (Gracious Heights is under an average six inches of water twice a day during the rainy season.) Or, if you prefer to build, spacious quarter-acre lots available, ten dollars down, ten dollars a month. (A quarter acre is roughly one hundred feet by one hundred feet.) Four more natural lakes ready soon.

Rodenska inserted himself into the Porsche, fumbled it into reverse, backed out and got away from there.

That was Monday. On Tuesday Hanstohm operated on Debbie Ann in the late morning. Sam Scherman observed the operation. He was pleased and optimistic about the eventual results. As Debbie Ann came out of the anesthetic in the recovery room, a nurse waited with wire clippers so as to be able to free her jaw quickly should Debbie Ann become nauseated and thus in danger of strangling. She was moved back to her private room in the late afternoon. Mary saw her and reported to Mike that she seemed very listless and groggy but otherwise all right.

They had dinner alone that night at the Key Club. Mary skillfully parried the questions of the overly curious who stopped at their table. She said there would be talk about the two of them being together—stupid, inventive talk, but she did not give one damn. They drank to that and drove home through a gusty night in the Porsche, with the top down, the radio tuned too loud to a Havana station.

On Wednesday morning Mike drove Mary to the hospital and waited there for her, and then they drove into town and conferred with the lawyer, vague elderly Morton Stalp, whom Mike had met during the course of his investigation. Stalp kept the books of the Corporation. He explained all that had to be done to change the setup so deeds could be properly signed, and promised to start taking the first steps immediately. From there they went to the sales office on the property and talked to Marvin Hessler.

Hessler was depressed. But he cheered up remarkably when he found that Troy was out, and that things might well improve. They talked a long time. Hessler’s ideas seemed valid to Mike. He knew he would have to check them out with expert, disinterested parties before going ahead.

As they were about to leave, Marvin said, “Say, yesterday that old Purdy Elmarr was here, poking all over the place. He didn’t want any help at all. Said he was just looking. That’s what they all seem to say. But he sure looked a long time.”

“Thanks, Marvin,” Mike said.

After they were in the car, Mary said, “Trouble?”

“I don’t know. Maybe that old man snowed me good. I had the feeling he quit too easy. He’s—hard to figure. He’s playing poker every minute. Now I got the feeling I showed him my hole card and while I was doing it, he was palming an ace.”

“If he’s going to squeeze us, Mike, I won’t let you come in with me. I won’t permit that.”

“He’s got you scared?”

“I’m not scared of Purdy or anybody else and you know it. But trying to buck him would be like—trying to stop a train by falling in front of it.”

“I’ll have to see him again.”

“We’ll have to see him. Both of us. And tell him Troy is out.”

“I’ll bet eleven dollars he knew all about that by noon last Monday.”

Mary fixed dinner for them Wednesday night. They played cribbage after dinner. She was a resolute competitor, with all the proper desire to win.

The phone rang during the middle of the third game. “Don’t stack the cards,” she said as she got up.

“Yes?” he heard her say. “Yes, this is she. What? What is that? Oh! Oh, my God!”

He had gotten up quickly at the sound of her voice. He went to her. Her face was so bloodless her deep tan had turned a dirty yellow. She swayed. He pushed her into a chair. “Debbie Ann?” he asked her.

“No. Troy,” she said.

He picked up the dangling receiver.

eleven

THE BACK ROADS OF FLORIDA are narrow, straight and rough. The big produce trucks roar through the night. Back there in the black night are the lonely gas stations, the infrequent shabby motels, the night-time beer joints with their quorum of dusty local cars and pickups. The rare towns are small islands, darkened houses and a brave spattering of neon. The cross-state traveler makes good time at night on the back roads, but there is a sameness to all of it, like crossing a dark sea. The headlights are hypnotic. A raccoon makes a very small thump against a front tire, and an opossum even less. So the cars whine down the roads, falling through the night, the lights picking up the wink of animal eyes and dead beer cans.

And sometimes in the lonely cottages set back in the piney woods, the sleeping people will be awakened by a sound like that of an enormous door being slammed. The first time it is heard it cannot be readily identified. But those who hear it the second time know at once what it means.

This one was only eight miles from the Tamiami Trail, on a big curve on State Road 565, that runs east-west and comes out about four miles below the Ravenna city limits. So there were people to hear it. A few. Not many. Sometimes the sound goes unheard, except by those for whom it is their final sensory experience. This is the up-to-date version of the ancient, illogical wheeze about that tree falling in the middle of the desert.

Anything that kills over thirty thousand people a year, and has killed a million since it first became possible to kill a person in this way unique to our culture, is going to be studied intensively. Of course, on a passenger-mile basis, our highways get safer every year, a fact distasteful to the National Safety Council which sees its function as a continuing effort to keep the daylights scared out of everybody. Give them this. It seems to be working.

At any rate, at such institutions as Cornell University, there are continuing studies of what happens to people who are going from here to there, for no particular reason, too carelessly.

Newton’s laws of motion are eminently applicable. And it is interesting to contemplate the idea that were a modern automobile to be reduced to an overall length of three inches, with all parts in perfect scale, the steel foil of the body would be so delicate that it would be impossible to pick it up between thumb and forefinger without denting the sides in, deeply. And were a baby to hammer one with his fist it would flatten like a cream puff, tail fins and all, except for the stubborn hazelnut of the engine. We go fleetly in frail chariots.

The unimaginable energy of a ton and more of one of the delicately realized myths of Detroit traveling at ninety miles an hour must be dispersed in some fashion. Usually it is accomplished by wind friction, road friction, friction of moving parts, savage pressure on brake drums and a long spoor of black rubber, screamed onto pavement. But should something upset the equilibrium, this momentum can also be dispersed by a long end-over-end and sideways roll through tree trunks, power poles, rock gardens, store fronts, school children—whatever objects are immediately available. The effect of this on the passengers who happen to remain with the vehicle is somewhat similar to the effects that might be obtained if you popped them, along with two bushels of scrap iron, into a blown-up model of a piece of laundry equipment and set the dial for Spin-Dry.

But by far the quickest, most startling and most efficient way of dispersing all of this energy is through a truly classic head-on. A perfect head-on is a rare thing. The energy of the two vehicles—which is the product of mass and momentum—must be almost identical. And they must meet perfectly centered, both traveling in a reasonably straight line, with no attempt on the part of either driver to diminish speed before the moment of impact. When this feat is accomplished, and in all cases where the combined speed of the two vehicles had been in excess of a hundred miles an hour, no one has ever survived. The momentum of each vehicle is totally dispersed by the act of absorbing the energy of the other vehicle. It has been computed that when each vehicle is traveling at ninety miles an hour the impact is just a little bit less than were a single vehicle, in free fall, to strike an utterly unyielding surface. The state of free fall is achieved when any object has attained its maximum rate of fall. To state it another way, if an automobile were strapped to the belly of a big jet and released at forty thousand feet and fell, nose first, onto an enormous block of tool steel, the inhabitants of that vehicle would provide the medical people with much the same set of interesting distortions and jellied phenomena as can be observed after a classic head-on at a combined speed of one-eighty plus.

At twelve minutes after eight on that Wednesday evening in spring, a five-year-old Mercury and a nine-year-old DeSoto slammed that enormous door on a long and very mild curve on State Road 565 about twelve miles southeast by east of the City of Ravenna, Florida.

And in that instant of finality, in the construction of that sound audible in the still night over two miles away, seven brains, hearts, livers, spleens, burst like rotten fruit which had clung too long to the branch of a high tree.

The experts of the State Highway Patrol did their best to reconstruct it. There were no skid marks to measure, so speed could be but roughly estimated. The green Mercury had been heading west at an estimated ninety plus. For the driver, the long curve was to his right, so he should have remained in the lane on the inside of the curve. But the high speed even on such a gentle curve had induced a factor of centrifugal force which had carried him out so that he was straddling the double yellow line at the point of impact. On the other hand the DeSoto had probably been traveling at such a high rate of speed that the driver could not keep it in the lane on the outside of the curve without losing control. So he had drifted in, cutting the curve, and had been straddling the center line at the point of impact.

The two vehicles struck with such force that they both rebounded from the impact and came to rest, smoking, still aimed at each other, the DeSoto with its rear wheels in a shallow ditch on the south side of the road, the Mercury on the shoulder on the north side. By then, of course, the trade names of the vehicles were academic, the use of them a matter of convenience. As in all classic head-ons, most of the passengers remained with the vehicles. Directness of impact made the windshield the only exit route, a quick journey available only to the passenger beside the driver. The driver, with the steering column through his chest, and the motor in his lap, tends to remain in place. Also, in the classic head-on, there is a grotesque lack of damage to the rear half of each vehicle. From the midpoint forward, they were compacted, unrecognizable junk. From the midpoint to the tail lights, they were quite obviously automobiles, but even in the undamaged rear it was possible to detect startling evidence as to the force of impact. Tail light lenses were collapsed in upon themselves. Gas tanks mashed forward. Rear bumper braces compressed. Rear window glass hurled forward into the car. Dense objects in trunk compartments were hurled forward through the trunk compartment wall into the car’s interior. When the vehicles stopped with that ultimate abruptness, every loose or weakly braced object, every bit of bone, blood and tissue, strove mightily to continue forward at the unabated pace of approximately one hundred and thirty-five feet per second. This is approximately the initial velocity of a three-hundred-yard drive by Snead, and the initial impact flattens the dense ball to almost one half its normal diameter.

A man was hurled through the windshield of the DeSoto, a woman through the windshield of the Mercury. In delicate irony, after each vehicle had come to rest, the ripped and broken bodies of those ejected two each lay closer to the car in which they had not been riding. This momentarily confused the investigation until one trooper noted in the floodlight glare that a body can make skid marks, in blood.

Moments after the impact the DeSoto caught fire, and it burned briskly for over ten minutes before foam smothered the flames. By then there were four state patrol cars, two county cars, three ambulances, two wreckers and a fire engine at the scene, as well as approximately fifty spectators who had parked their cars along the shoulders. The red dome lights winked. The bright floods cast heavy shifting shadows. Men took flash photos. Other men stretched tape measures along the pavement and made computations. Another man was on the radio, relaying the Oklahoma and New York plate numbers to the message center to speed identification of the bodies. Newspaper reporters and photographers had arrived. The coroner arrived, stared, shrugged and went home. Troopers were sending the curious on their way—in lesser quantity than they were arriving—as the bodies were being loaded to be taken to the Police Morgue in Ravenna in the basement of the lab wing of the hospital. The first probable identification was made at the scene. A trooper, holding his breath, gingerly worked a wallet out of a hip pocket in the Mercury. The hip pocket was not where one would expect to find it. In fact, the hip was not where it should have been.