Swing (Gun Pedersen Book 2)

by L. L. Enger

  They got around to the wine at last. The sun was gone and clouds were racking up low, covering the stars. A breeze came in over the palms smelling of rain. They were still on deck, a little too cool and liking it after the day’s heat. The wine was white and cold and tickled a little going down.

  “It’s good,” Diane said. In the clouded moonlight the whites of her eyes looked pale blue next to her deep brown irises.

  He said, “Cliffert recommended it.”

  “I drove into West Palm today. Looked you up in the library.”

  “I wasn’t in the library.”

  “Yes, you were.” It was getting darker. He was losing the whites of her eyes. “That was some stir you made back in eighty, quitting the team. I don’t know where I was hiding.”

  “In the right place, apparently.”

  In the darkness a glow of a smile. “And then you just... went off? Disappeared into the boreal forest?”

  “It’s quiet there. Usually.”

  “I like quiet, too,” she said.

  They had some, and it was easy as the wine, and Diane said, “You never married again.”

  “No.”

  “You must have someone. Up north.”

  He nodded, knowing she could not see him.

  There was a moment when the moon had its last chance and lit up the night for the space of two breaths, and Gun saw her looking at him and behind her the lunar incandescence hitting the water and silver masts of the marina. When the clouds shut them back into blackness Diane rose without a word. He heard her breath sweep past him close and imagined without effort the coolness of her legs beneath the skirt. She went below, stepping easily down into darkness then lighting a lamp that put a shimmer of yellow out on the water.

  He sat upon the deck smelling the green palms and rain off somewhere between himself and the coast, and it seemed to him that spoken invitations had always been the easiest to resist. A gust snapped at his hair and the boat pulled gently against itself in the slip, and the yellow light shining gave him a sudden joy like an anchor coming unmucked at last. He stood and holding the rail followed after Diane. Then finally Carol Long came into his principled brain with her contrary mind and her bright black hair, and he knew he didn’t have room inside for two and made his choice.

  He stepped off the boat slowly so as not to rock it and thought he was clear when Diane’s voice called “Gun?” and there was fear in it

  “Here,” he said.

  She came up from below, light rising around her in the open hatchway. She still wore the skirt and yellow blouse but there was something wrong in her face. Gun stepped back aboard and went to her.

  “It’s Billy,” she said. She held a single playing card and he saw the staring Queen of Diamonds. “It was here all the time,” she said simply. “He’s left something for me.”

  30

  It was the notes, she was sure of it, Billy’s missing interviews, though they searched the Long Napper until her giddiness at finding the card turned to stiff resolve. She made them do it all again, she starting from the aft stateroom and he from the cramped space forward, working over and under and between the cushions and stowed life vests, emptying and refilling the dozen Chock Full O’ Nuts coffee cans in the moldy bilge where Billy tucked spare blocks and cleats. When they met in the middle of the boat her eyes looked muddy and her skirt mistreated.

  “This much shouldn’t happen in one evening,” she said, sitting.

  “It’s morning.” The galley dock said 12:15.

  “Good morning. There’s nothing down here, is there?”

  Gun shook his head. “We could go up top. Maybe he stashed them on deck somewhere.” But his voice was tired and he knew she heard it.

  “You’re thinking I’m wrong, aren’t you?” she said.

  Looked that way.

  “That the card is nothing. Maybe it was sitting around for years, maybe he hid it before I came three, four visits ago and I just never found it.”

  “Maybe.”

  She’d crossed her legs and was swinging the top one back and forth like some sort of mainspring that would fuel the rest of her, feed her energy, wind her up. Standing again she gave a short urgent laugh. “Maybe, yes,” she said, not meeting his eyes, “but wouldn’t it be bitchy weather if we were wrong?”

  The luck on deck was lousy. They didn’t split up but worked side by side with a flashlight, Diane jean-jacketed and chilled as mist formed around them on the water. His knees on the hard deck, his fingers feeling every inch of teak. Gun had the embarrassing sense that he’d regressed into boyhood and was looking again for some mouldering chest of gold. It had been much more fun back then. Something about being six years old, and believing there was something to find.

  Still, Billy had believed enough in boyhood and danger to build a cache in his bathroom at home; and so they worked the deck, took the seats out of the cockpit, removed the huge old sentimental captain’s wheel from its spindle and shined the flashlight on it. When the boat was wrecked to Diane’s angry satisfaction she said, “The mast,” and they took it down, lowering it straight aft on what Diane called the tabernacle until it rested back over the transom. It was a wood mast and hollow and the big bronze halyard block at the tip pried off easily. They aimed what they could of the flashlight beam inside but there was nothing.

  They righted the mast and she sat with her back against it and her legs crossed, her mainspring now not moving at all.

  “In the morning,” Gun said, “we can talk about what to do.” He had the flashlight and was playing it idly over the boat in the neighboring slip.

  “It’s morning,” she reminded him.

  The boat next door was a fine old sportfisherman that stood up high-shouldered from the water. It was white with the lower hull gone reddish from too many seasons without cleaning. It had classic ring portholes in tarnished bronze.

  “It isn’t right,” she said absently. “I found the card, there should be something on the boat. In the boat—”

  The old sportfisherman had a rail around its forward deck, draped with a tangle of chain and rope, and a folding navy anchor hung over the side.

  “Or outside the boat,” she said. Gun saw that she was looking at the anchor. Thinking.

  “I didn’t see one when we were looking. An anchor.”

  “Of course not,” she said. “It’s in the water.”

  “Here in the marina? Why? The boat’s secure, all tied up.”

  She led the way forward slowly enough to let him know she wasn’t getting her hopes up and they found the chain exiting its worn hole, swinging down loosely into the water.

  The power winch was disconnected and Gun had to lean down and grasp the cold links and pull the anchor up hand-over-hand. It was a straight mushroom-shaped thing of perhaps forty pounds with a clean wide shaft and a bellyful of silt. Gun knelt and studied it in the white beam and there circling the shaft was a slender even crack not an inch from the top, and he knew the six-year-old was about to find his treasure.

  31

  He wedged the anchor between his knees and screwed the top off like it was a mason jar.

  The preserves were even better than they’d hoped for.

  “The interviews,” Diane breathed. She was holding the light on a rubber-banded Baggie Gun had extracted from the anchor. Inside were a narrow steno pad, the cardboard cover inked solid with names and telephone numbers, and two tape cassettes the size of cigarette lighters.

  She’d seen Billy’s little Sony in the glove box of the Lincoln and was back on the boat with it in the time it took Gun to unwrap the Baggie and take it below. The tapes were unlabeled. He looked at the notebook cover while she tried to figure out the recorder. Rott Weiler’s name was there. Harold Ibbins. Neil Faust. A list of others he didn’t know.

  “Ohh-kay, we’re testing one-two-three,” said all that remained of Billy Apple.

  Diane’s jaw was clenched knuckle-white.

  “It’s, what, eleven-thirty at night,
second of January 1991, and we’re talking live”—Billy’s voice suddenly turning top-40—”from high atop the emergency ward at St. Luke’s Sickhouse in West Palm Beach. Here we are in the waiting room and I’m finding out why they call it that. The day after New Year’s, can you believe this?”

  Diane didn’t look like she could. The voice on the tape was strong and round and there was humor in it, but also tiredness and pain.

  “As of now, Moses Gates owes me one hell of a favor,” Billy said, his breathing noticeably short. There was a lull and a shuffling, some nearby activity in the waiting room, and the voice went to a whisper and lost its humor. “For the record. I turned in before the news tonight. Sick stomach, Pepto Pukehole. I’m barely asleep and then headlights are coming in my bedroom window. Nervous ... I got up and looked out and somebody’s parked out in my oranges. Piss me off? And they wouldn’t turn their lights off. So I went to the door, in my Jockeys. I opened it and they were right there ... God what a sick stomach, and then seeing these two. The big one I’m already haying nightmares about, he’s hunched forward all the time and seems built wrong, the way hyenas are built wrong, all shoulders but God how big and crafty ... I thought, oh shit I wrote the wrong thing and they had me all right, said nothing, they hauled me back to their van—that’s right, you pricks, I wasn’t too scared to notice your sweet little Ford van—they dragged me back there and got a rope off the backseat. Intro to Journalism ...the big one tossed the rope up and I thought, You know these trees are probably just barely big enough to hang from. He makes a loop for my neck... God damn them, this isn’t two hours ago! The smaller one says, ‘You want to live?’ Well, sure. ‘Okay then,’ he says, ‘you go on to the next big scoop and let Moses Gates go down to Hell.’ And the big one takes the rope and makes a knot like a fist and clubs me right in the sick gut with it until I puke my supper at his feet. And they went away.”

  Diane stopped the tape. She’d been crying through it but had quit now and was only drawn. “It’s like it’s not him,” she said. “He’s—tough.”

  “Yes.”

  She clicked the Sony on again. “Still waiting,” said Billy. “Feeling better. Bruised ribs is all, I bet” The voice rising and getting back its roundness. “Ford Aerostar, and I know the plates. Plates now, names tomorrow. This is what I went to school for, you bastards, and you should’ve just strung me up because one sunny morning, sooner than you think, I’m going to get out of bed and screw your lives.”

  When she put up her hands to cover her eyes Gun saw the prickles on her forearms.

  32

  The Aerostar was registered to Casper Leavitt. Billy got to that on side two of the same tape after detailing his bruises and two cracked ribs. Gun remembered calling the number he’d found in Faust’s file cabinet, the girl saying, “You got the wrong Casper.”

  A street mugging, Billy had told the doctor. He told the truth to a friend at law enforcement who traced the plates. And then went out and learned everything he could about Leavitt, most of it from Clarence Coldspring.

  “You want to talk, man, you put that thing away,”

  they heard Clarence say on tape. “Those things, they make me sound like a wuss.” That was it from Clarence, but there were some notes in Billy’s pointy scrawl in the steno pad that went over what Gun and Diane already knew: the night raids, the disappearances of Coldsprings over the years, the bones in the swamp. Billy came back on the tape and narrated a minute or so of what he knew about Casper Leavitt: that he’d been a big dairy man, sold off in the government buyout, that he gave generously to the senate campaign of a former Klan official, who lost anyhow. Nothing surprising.

  It was running toward three in the morning and with the adrenaline going dry Gun felt slow, almost underwater. He looked at Diane over the Sony and she said, “There’s the other tape.”

  Harold Ibbins didn’t remember a single sinister thing about the day Ferdie Millevich died, though Billy tried hard to make him.

  “It was a lousy day for practice, is what it was,” Ibbins mused. “All around. Night before, there were gale warnings on the coast, the forecast was for rain, so me and Gates and some others went out after curfew and put a few down. More than a few. Then next day the damn skies cleared up “—Ibbins gave a husky chuckle—”so Skip called an afternoon practice. Practice? Man, we couldn’t even see.”

  Billy said, “Was Rott Weiler with you? Putting ’em down?”

  “Rott? Man, no. He was so sure of practice getting scrapped that he went down to see some lady in Miami. That was Rott. Probably still is. I was sitting with my head in a sling and he called me up to find out was there practice. Damn right, I say, and I’m gonna see three baseballs for every one comes my way, and where the hell’re you? He giggles a little and he says I’m in the Hotel Miami, or what-the-hell-ever, and I’m not even gonna open the shades till tomorrow morning, you think of something to tell the Skip.”

  “When did he get back?”

  “Next day, I guess. After they found Ferdie. Rott, you know, he wasn’t so brokenhearted about it”

  Long silence from Billy. Finally, “You roomed with Rott for a while. What did he think of Ferdie Millevich?”

  Ibbins chuckled again. “Think of him? Listen. Ferdie was starting to swing the bat, you know? He was comin’ around, and playing some good outfield. Only he wasn’t a regular, like Rott was. Last part of seventy-six, Rott went into a hell of a slump, he was like one-for-thirty-four, and the manager, Mauch, tells Rott to sit down and up gets Ferdie. And Ferdie hits about four-fifty for the last twelve games of the year. Rott wonders, Do I have a job? See, that’s what he thought of him.” Harold took a couple breaths that sounded like tough ones and his voice took on some gravel. “Actually, it went deeper than that. Stop the tape.”

  There was a clicking and Ibbins was back. Either Billy had talked him into staying with the recorder, or Harold didn’t know it was still on.

  “Look at me, now,” Ibbins said.

  “What about you.”

  “I look as white as you, don’t I? Sure. But I’ve got black in me, on my mother’s side. One-quarter blade, give or take a squirt. Tell you what, me and Rott were just fine until we’re up late one night in Anaheim and I let it go, about my blood. Throw him? Like a damn catapult. It chewed on him good and finally we had a big blowout in the clubhouse, and after that he started staying with Ferdie on the road. Now there was a match made in heaven, two guys going after the same job—”

  “Why’d they do that? Who assigned rooms?”

  “Rott asked Ferdie, far as I know. Ferdie said okay.”

  “They get along, then?”

  “Uh-uh. I think what happened, Ferdie found out about the badness between Rott and me. Old Millevich, he was a Minnesota boy, you know? Read Dr. King, a real abolitionist. Let me tell you something about Rott Weiler. The only thing he hates more than blacks is whites who don’t hate blacks.”

  “Well,” Diane said, “what do we know?” The galley table was littered with cassettes, Billy’s papers, muddy-bottomed coffee cups. It was three-thirty a.m. and even the light seemed old.

  “Rott hated Ferdie, and somebody paid Faust to set Ferdie up,” Gun said. “According to that pastor in Rott’s hometown, Rott’s got a rich relative down here somewhere. Could be it’s Casper Leavitt. Remember what I told you about that note in Faust’s file cabinet? ‘Funds for Fun in the Sun?’ The call I made to that number? Makes sense, I think. Leavitt and Rott.”

  Diane said, “They had Faust point the finger at Moses after Ferdie died. No wonder Faust didn’t want to talk. Weiler’s a nasty guy to have in the other corner.”

  “So’s Casper, from everything I’ve heard.”

  “What about that Miami thing, though?”

  “I know. Rott couldn’t have done the killing. Miami’s how far from Orlando? Half a day’s drive?”

  Diane leaned back, closed her eyes like she felt the hour. “I guess Ferdie really could’ve committed suicide. They made thin
gs bad enough for him.”

  Gun was silent. His eyes stung with the lateness. He had the dreamlike sensation that his eyes and ears were fuzzing out from too much concentration and coffee. He’d thought, when they began, that the tapes and the notes would make everything clear, including Moses: that they’d learn, like Billy, why Ferdie was murdered, and by whom. He’d been certain it was Rott Weiler until Harold Ibbins came on the tape and confounded it all—Rott had reasons to kill Ferdie, probably would’ve liked to, but he wasn’t even there. Now everything was scattering. Harold and Miss Mary entered Gun’s mind the way he’d seen them last, and Billy Apple, and Neil Faust in the ice wash.

  Diane said, “I have to sleep.”

  Something was down there, down in the whirling. Some tiny rock-hard conviction that told him there was happy news in all this, only it wasn’t getting to the part of his brain that told him things. He closed his eyes, kept them still so the sand in them wouldn’t scrape. The conviction grew.

  She stood. “You can have the stateroom. Bed’s almost long enough for you.”

  “Wait.”

  It wouldn’t go away. Too much information and something in it didn’t fit. Gun pressed the bridge of his nose and thought, Come to me.

  And it came, fighting him, like a recalcitrant puppy.

  “Well, what do you know?” he muttered.

  “Not enough,” she said.

  “There is a bitter little man in a wheelchair,” he told her, “who collects the signatures of ballplayers. On March seventh, 1977, he collected Rott’s. In Orlando. In the evening.”

  She squinted in the old light

  “Rott,” he said, “was supposed to be in Miami with a giggling girlfriend. Remember? Wasn’t going to open the shades for a whole day. Except on the same day, he got nailed by this old guy in the wheelchair. In a lowlife bar.”