Murder in the Wind

by John D. MacDonald

  Of the three who fled, only Strellman had been successful. Until now. And now the last dangling thread had been picked up. Malden had seen the face of a fatter balder older man who had carefully tied up some tropical shrubs in the back yard of a house on a quiet street in a quiet city. And that ended it.

  It had not been five years of single-minded dedication. There had not been enough to go on. And so many routine tasks had intervened. But the departmental chiefs were aware of Malden’s personal stake, and so, during the five years, whenever it was possible to detail him to any aspect of the Santa Fe cleanup they had done so.

  It was professional against professional. It was a pure form of counter-intelligence. Malden was glad that it had nothing to do with people who claimed the fifth amendment, or who refused to sign oaths, or who had appeared on the wrong letterhead. They were the perennial amateurs, more annoying than dangerous. The professionals would swear their loyalty, lie under oath, would publicly deplore the disloyalty of the amateurs. Just as our own professionals would know better than to become public martyrs to the cause of Democracy in alien lands.

  During his two years of marriage and before, Steve Malden had known that his work was tricky, sometimes dangerous, generally monotonous, and highly essential.

  He had not known it was heartless.

  He realized that his previous attitude had been absurdly idealistic. He had believed certain holds were barred. Then he stood in the reeking mess of the apartment after they had taken her away. Here, in a tiny moment of time, in a partial second of current history, there had been blown to wet bits the satin and perfumed flesh of the long nights, and gone was the way she laughed and moved and shook her head and touched his cheek, and bent quickly to accept the lighter flame.

  He seemed the same. The ones who did not know him very well marveled that he seemed so unchanged, that his testimony had been given so soberly, without hysteria, without the flinch of loss. Those who did not know him well decided that Malden lacked imagination, perhaps lacked even the capacity for great anger. But those who knew him well saw the subtle indications of the change. There had been outside interests. Now there were none. There was laughter at the proper places, but too often it was more an imitation of a man laughing.

  Then there was the Seattle incident. Only a very few knew about that. It nearly lost Malden his position. It was a single departure from legality, and no man should ever be made to talk the way that man was made to talk by Malden. But the information gained was valid, and the man’s subsequent mental breakdown was not permanent, though he became, of course, useless to his superiors. When a man that tough has been broken, he breaks more easily the next time. Malden got off with a reprimand. Neither the incident nor the reprimand seemed to worry him, to touch him.

  Sometimes when he thought about it, Malden would try to put her death in historical perspective. World history was the history of conflict between governments. Conflict created major and minor episodes of violence. In both categories, the innocent suffered. In the wars between the city states of Italy, poison had often been drunk by the wrong persons. All who had been thrown to the lions were not Christians. Bombs killed infants with miraculous efficiency. And four hundred student doctors died at Hiroshima.

  Take her death in its historical context and it still remained meaningless, yet not as meaningless as if she had died because truck brakes had failed.

  Yet historical perspective was a chilling and comfortless thing. He knew he had to keep his personal involvement in this particular war well in the background or his efficiency would decrease. He had to move and react with coldness. Only once had the wall broken. And then he had been saved because the man who had talked—who had talked finally with bulge-eyed eagerness, spraying spittle in his intense desire to talk and to please—that man had not quite died. And what he had said was later used to prevent a strategic kidnaping in West Berlin that would have certainly been successful otherwise.

  Now he drove north through a rain as heavy as any he had ever seen. He drove the dark green Plymouth sedan north, knowing that he would waste no time in transit, would return and report for assignment. He had been offered time off many times in the last five years and he had never taken it. He knew he would not take it this time, and yet this was the first time he had ever felt remotely tempted.

  He guessed that it was the inevitable letdown that came from knowing that the last of the Santa Fe project was over. It put an end to the five years. And there should be some way of telling her that the last one had been picked up. But if you told her that, you would have to tell her that no one had ever learned, or would ever learn, who had sent the package, who had given the orders. So there was failure after all.

  She had stopped right there at twenty-four. She had been abruptly halted. And the years went by and she was still twenty-four. Now you were thirty-two instead of twenty-seven, and you would become forty-two and fifty-two, while she stayed back there, frozen in that explosive moment of time, still twenty-four, forever slim and clean-limbed, forever three months pregnant.

  “Death was instantaneous.”

  He had often wondered about those words. How did such a death feel? A great blast of whiteness? A sudden roar of darkness? A feeling of falling?

  She put the box on the gate leg table by the living room window. She read a letter from her mother first. Then she went to the bookshelf and opened the wicker basket and took out her sewing scissors and went back to the box and cut the cord. (“The firing device was armed by tension on the wrapping cord. With release of tension the firing pin arm, impelled by a spring, was allowed to drop and strike the primer, thus detonating the main charge.”)

  It had been a warm bright day. The blanket was still out in the back yard, sun lotion, dark glasses and book beside it.

  So he drove north on that Wednesday, eyes on the road, big strong hands on the wheel, while back in the silent corridors of his mind the old compulsive dramas were reenacted, the doll figures moving with the stilted precision of puppets too often used. But this time there was a sourness in the corridors, and a dissonance in the unheard music. He felt as though he were a missile that had been fired at an unseen target five years ago. The trajectory had been low and flat and powerful for a long time. The missile has no cause to think or wonder about destination. It flies true. Now the impetus was fading and the arc of its fall had begun to be perceptible. He did not want this to happen. He did not want to be forced to think—to conjecture about what would happen to him. He wanted the flight to continue. He did not want to feel the stir of life again, of decision. It was enough to be aimed, to perform the function of level flight.

  The image of Dorothy was now faded. And he despised himself for being unable to maintain the sharpness and the clarity. The fading was a sign of weakness. The slight urge to take time off was another sign of weakness. And he had lived through his strength, and off his own strength.

  [The big man with the face of silence drives the green sedan through the increasing force of the wind. He drives automatically, his mind on other things.

  And then he sees the red rhythmic flashing ahead and he slows the sedan and pulls over to the right as directed, pulls over and stops behind the slick tail of a low wide foreign car. He remembers that it passed him long minutes ago with a Cadillac following it too closely.

  He looks back and sees a blue and white convertible stop behind him. He can see the vague blur of a woman’s face through the windshield. He turns back and lights a cigarette and settles himself more comfortably in the seat and begins to wait—with the heavy somber patience learned on a hundred streets in a hundred cars during five thousand hours, watching a door, or a window, or an alley entrance.]

  9

  Hilda, the eighth hurricane of the season, missed Key West. But tons of rain fell on that peculiarly disappointing city at the terminus of a magic highway.

  The highway slants down across the bridges and the causeways and the keys—Largo, Matacumbe, Grassy, Boot, Pigeon, Ra
mrod, Sugarloaf—a shining engineering project—which should lead only to a city fairer than any yet designed by man. Yet it ends in Key West, a shabby, dirty and uninspired town from which it is very difficult to catch a glimpse of the sea, a town of tough bars and honky-tonks, fairies and whores.

  Hilda dropped tons of rain on Big Cypress Swamp. They are logging the cypress out of there. The water level used to be high enough to make logging impractical. But with the draining of vast areas of the Everglades there is a faster runoff and now they can get in and get to the giant cypress in the dying swamps. The cypress is cut up and used in the building of the thousands upon thousands of houses that sit in rows on land where the big bulldozers have ripped out the scrub and the cabbage palm. And they sit on made land all the way up the West Coast, where builders have filled in the blue bays with shell from the bay bottom.

  Rain fell heavily on the very very rich and very self-conscious little city of Naples. It fell on the fertilized ranch lands and the water ran off and took with it the fertilizer which, later, in the Gulf, would cause the explosive growth of a micro-organism and again the Red Tide would kill billions of fish, sending them in clotted stinking masses against the shoreline and into the quiet bays.

  The rain interrupted the operations of the commercial fishermen around Boca Grande, Placida, Englewood, Punta Gorda, Fort Myers. Many of them suffered a monetary loss through being unable to net snook. The snook, with its narrow head, undershot jaw, striped body and vicious fighting heart, is one of the last great small game fish in the world. Its meat is sweet. It is rapidly disappearing from Florida waters.

  So, while Hilda moved up the Gulf, the rain moved up the coast, falling on innumerable motels and motel signs, on the raw bulldozed land where houses would soon be built, on the dredges and the draglines that were filling in the bays; it fell on a million pottery flamingos and uncounted shell ash trays; it pounded gum wrappers, ice-cream spoons, broken coke bottles into the sand of the littered beaches; it thundered on roofs that sheltered the twined bodies of honeymoon and the slack bodies of the dying.

  And, up and down the coast, the rain softened the earth around the root structure of the Australian pines. There is a city ordinance in Fort Myers prohibiting the planting of these pines within the city limits. That is because the root structure is wide and shallow. When drenching rains precede winds of hurricane force, the pines topple too readily.

  Hurricane Hilda, perverse, unpredictable, slowed and made a gentle curve to the northeast, moving ever closer to the coast. She moved to within fifty miles of the mouth of the Suwannee River and there all motion seemed to cease—all forward motion. She was static in that area, the whirling winds churning the Gulf. She drew her great gray skirts closer around her. She had covered an enormous and violent area. Now, in a time when the force of her should have been dying, she shrank into herself and, gaining force from compactness, her winds whistled with a new fury. Already hard gusts of wind struck the coast. The tide had been rising in the Gulf throughout the morning. High tide along the Cedar Key area was predicted at three o’clock.

  It was determined later that it must have been at about one o’clock when the hurricane, smaller and fiercer than at any time before, began to move due east toward the Florida coast, moving at an estimated twenty miles an hour, with the winds nearest the eye reaching a velocity that could not be measured.

  Slow traffic bypassed the Waccasassa Bridge where technicians worked to free the jammed truck trailer. The heavy rain and the traffic had made the detour less passable. The state policemen on duty had, by one-thirty, evolved a system that simplified traffic control. Dan Boltay had tied a scrap of cloth to a stick. He would hold up a flock of cars until the cars coming from the other direction came through and the last one gave him the stick. He would then give it to the driver of the last car in his batch. He was able to let cars through at half hour intervals. It made a long exasperating wait in the rain. He had radioed in, suggesting that the detour be closed, but it was desired that it be left open.

  It was at one-thirty that Roy Stark, on the south end of the detour, having just sent a batch of cars through, began to accumulate another group. Stark was damp and bored. The rain was letting up. The wind was getting a lot stronger. Sudden gusts would make him lose his balance. The corner of the lapel on the rubber rain cape would snap against his cheek, stinging him. When a sheet of rain did come, it was driven nearly horizontal by the wind.

  The first car he stopped was a dark blue Cadillac, a new model. He flagged it down and went over to it. The driver rolled the window down. He was a balding, ginger-haired man with a red-faced look of importance.

  “What’s the trouble here?” he said over the noise of the wind.

  “You have to detour around the bridge. One way traffic. You have to wait for a batch to come through from the other end.”

  The other man in the car was smaller and older, and he looked nervous. “Is the bridge out?” he asked in a high voice.

  “No. There was an accident on it. It’s still jammed up.”

  “Anybody hurt?” the driver asked.

  “Truck driver was killed.”

  “How long do you think we’ll have to wait?” the driver asked.

  “Not too long,” Stark said and moved back to flag the next car into line. The next car was slowing down. With the rain letting up visibility was better, and the flashing dome light on the road patrol car was more effective.

  The second car was a heavily loaded station wagon with a youngish couple and a pair of kids. They asked the same questions, the questions Stark was getting weary of answering. He noticed that as he stood next to the car answering their questions, the wind from the west was making the car sway.

  There was about five minutes before another car came. The storm was making them hole up. Stark decided that it was a good thing it wasn’t a day of heavy traffic, like in the middle of the tourist season. They’d be lined up all the way back to Lebanon Station.

  Stark was pleased when the next car came along. It made a break in the monotony. He’d never seen any other car that looked quite so rich and haughty. And the damn thing was really low. He saw the name on it as he walked up to it. Mercedes-Benz. There was a couple in it. A good looking guy and a girl who was not as good looking, but looked like plenty of money.

  The way the car door opened was the damnedest thing Stark had ever seen. It swung out and tilted up. It was hinged on the roof and counterbalanced. It left a high sill to step over if you wanted to get in or out.

  After the usual questions and answers the man said, “Where’s that hurricane?”

  “I haven’t had any report on it lately. I guess it’s out in the Gulf, heading for Texas.”

  “You sure of that? This wind is getting pretty hairy.”

  Stark looked at the tree tops. The gusts were beginning to seem solid enough to lean on. And the sky, now that the rain had nearly stopped, was an odd yellowish color. “Doesn’t look too good, does it?” he said.

  The fourth car was a dark green Plymouth with a husky hard-faced guy driving it. He was alone and he had Maryland plates. He didn’t ask as many questions as the others. He didn’t seem as impatient about the delay.

  The car that pulled up behind the green Plymouth was a Dodge convertible, a blue and white one with one hell of a good looking woman alone in it. He answered her questions. He kept looking toward the detour and soon he saw the first car come laboring up onto the main road, straighten out and pick up speed. There were ten cars, and the last one had the flag—two giggling girls in an MG and the driver handed him the flag and he gave it to the woman in the blue and white convertible and told her to give it to the officer at the far end. Not much business this time. Just five of them. He motioned them on and they turned off onto the narrow dirt road. The big Cad and then the station wagon, then the foreign job, and then the husky guy in the Plymouth, and then the good looking woman. Just as the convertible turned into the road, a beat-up panel delivery came along. St
ark hesitated and then waved it on. It turned into the road too fast and the back end swung a little before it leveled out. He caught a glimpse of two kids, a boy and a girl, in the front seat and something about Hollywood fish printed on the side.

  As he stood there a truly massive gust of wind came along. It slammed against him and drove him back. He turned and took several running steps before he caught himself. The force of it shocked him. He heard a rending crack, muffled by the wind noise, and a big limb fell onto the road, bounced and slid and was pushed over into the far ditch by the wind.

  He leaned into the wind and walked to the car. He was on call. He called in and he heard the strain in the metallic voice at the other end:

  “The hurricane has changed direction and it’s moving in on us, Stark. It’s pushing a high tide ahead of it and raising hell along the coast. No more cars go through that detour. Stay there and turn ’em back the way they came. Tell ’em to find shelter. Tell ’em to get the hell out of this. It looks like a bad one. Cruise south and stop everything coming at you and turn ’em around.”

  Stark started the motor and swung around and headed slowly south, dome light flashing. The wind swayed the moving sedan. On impulse he pushed the siren and kept it on. The sound seemed buried and lost in the new high wail of the great wind.

  The Australian pine was a huge one, very near the end of its life span and beginning to die. It stood on the north bank of the Waccasassa River, thirty feet west of the wooden bridge over the main part of the river.

  The same gust that drove Stark across the road struck the old tree. It tilted, leaned. There was a ripping, crackling sound and the flat root structure was pulled slowly up on the west side of the tree. The tree fell slowly at first and then more quickly. It brought up square yards of black soaked soil with it. It fell thickly, heavily, onto the north end of the wooden bridge. The great weight of it in free fall smashed the tough old timbers. The bridge folded and sagged, supported the weight for a few seconds, and then with small harsh noises as spikes were pulled slowly from weathered wood, bridge and tree sank into the swollen Waccasassa.