“He’s off in the brush someplace being et up by bugs. When he gets hungry enough and discouraged enough, he’ll come on out like a lamb. To save you from sitting here worrying about my business, I better let you sign the release and go on about your business.”
He filled in the blanks in a standard release and I signed it and two of his people witnessed it. I had been apprehended and brought in voluntarily for questioning and released with no charges placed against me.
“How do I get back to my car?”
“A man who made all the money you made just for knocking folks down should be able to figure something out.”
I walked three blocks to the bus station where I phoned a cab which took me over to my car. I had recurrent waves of nausea which effectively canceled any idea of the dinner I hadn’t had yet. I drove back to the cottage and showered and went straight to bed. In spite of a thumping headache, I went to sleep in minutes. But I kept waking myself up during the night by rolling onto my left side and putting too much pressure on the knot over my ear.
4
When I parked by the office at twenty after nine the next morning, Jennie Benjamin, Alice Jessup and Vince Avery were standing in the morning shade of the building looking irritable.
“I’ve heard the phone ringing in there,” Alice said. “What will people think?”
“You do have a key, old man?” Vince said hopefully. “I’ve mislaid mine. Jennie’s is home, and Alice was never given one.”
“Sis hasn’t showed up?” I asked as I walked toward the door, sorting out the right key.
“A flaw in her alarming efficiency,” Vince said. “And damned inconvenient.”
“I phoned from across the street,” Alice said, “but she isn’t home.”
After I let them in I went across the street and had an enormous breakfast. I had thought the major lump too diminished to be noticeable, but old Cy said, “One of your women club you, Sambo?”
“Just a love tap.”
“If that’s love, don’t you never rile that woman. You single fellers lead a right interesting life.”
“We’re busy every minute. I keep a supply penned up out behind the place, Cy. Every evening I go out there, make a choice, then I turn her loose in the morning.”
“Don’t that upset the neighbors some?”
“Only when they get to baying at the same time, those nights the moon is full. It gets hard to hear yourself think out there.”
As he refilled my coffee cup, he said, “What you should have done, Samuel, was tie up that Sis Gantry permanent when you had the chance.”
“Everybody gives me advice.”
“I’m sixty-four years old and I don’t look a day over seventy, but I got an eye for that young stuff, and I watched her enough so I got me the idea she’d do you better than that whole pen full of women you got out there, baying and all. Might even be she’d need a whole pen full of fellers like you.”
“You run a clean food operation, Cy, but you’ve got a dirty mind.”
“A man talks about the ways of nature these days and somehow it gets to be called dirt. Honest to God, Sam, how did you get that chunk on the head?”
“I had a little misunderstanding with a deputy I’d never met before.”
“LeRoy Luxey, I bet a dollar.”
“No bet, Cy.”
“He’s mean and edgy as a cottonmouth, that one. They had to get him out of Collier County this spring before he killed off some folks down there that couldn’t get to like him. His daddy has some political push, so he got saddled onto Pat Millhaus. Was it last night?”
“Yes.”
“It isn’t many people you find walking around eating a big breakfast the morning after they get into a little discussion with that Luxey.”
“My brain pan is located next to the stomach, Cy. The head is solid bone all the way through. It’s a requirement for all professional athletes.”
I walked back to the pay phone beyond the magazine racks and called the Gantry house on Jackson Street. Joe and Lois Gantry still live in the big old frame house that used to belong to Lois’s people. Joe has worked for the phone company all his life and he is nearing retirement age. Of the nine kids, six of the boys are married—with only two of the married ones still living in the area. The youngest boy is still in high school and lives at home. The next to the youngest is at Florida State, and working on a shrimp boat out of Tampa summers.
Mrs. Gantry answered the phone and when I told her who it was, she said, “Oh.” She put a world of meaning into that single flat monosyllable. She had guessed the relationship I had enjoyed with her widowed daughter, and she had resented it and cherished the hope it would blossom into marriage, and had blamed me when we broke up.
“Sis hasn’t showed up here yet, Mrs. Gantry.” I listened to a silence that promised to continue indefinitely. “Is she home?”
“No, Mr. Brice.”
“Well … do you know where she is?”
Her worry overwhelmed her strong feelings about me. “No, I don’t, and I wish I did. She didn’t come home all night. She got a phone call last night a little before eight o’clock and she went out without saying who phoned her, and she just … hasn’t come back. I phoned Mr. McAllen but he hasn’t seen her. And I … phoned your place a little while ago but there was no answer.” I knew what it had cost her to make that call, and to tell me she had made it.
“She didn’t pack a bag or anything, as if she was going on a trip?”
“Oh, no! She didn’t do anything like that. She practically didn’t change a thing to go out, so I knew it wasn’t very important. We were watching television when she got the call. She kept on the same dark red halter top and just changed from shorts to some gray slacks and put on some sandals and … said she’d see us later. I didn’t even know she hadn’t come home until I looked into her room this morning. I keep wondering whether to tell the police.”
“Maybe it would be a good idea, Mrs. Gantry.”
“Are you hinting about something you’re not telling me?”
“No. She’s a reliable gal. It isn’t like her to go off on impulse, is it?”
“No, it isn’t …”
“And she would have phoned so you wouldn’t be worried.”
“Yes, I guess she …”
“If she should phone the office or if I learn anything, I’ll let you know right away, Mrs. Gantry.”
“Thanks, Mr. Br … Sam.”
After I took care of twenty minutes of desk work, I drove to Boca Grande and made it in a little less than fifty minutes. An insured from New Jersey had clipped a column and brought a large chunk of the roof of an old hotel garage down onto the top of his Chrysler Imperial. I had made an appointment with a local builder to meet me at the scene, and we went over his estimate with the owner. The column was powdery with dry rot up under the eaves where it had snapped. The warp of fifty seasons had pulled the rusty old spikes out of the roofing timbers. The owner got too greedy. He thought he had a brand new two-car garage coming. He yammered too long and too loud about my plan to prop the sagging roof up on a new column and reshingle the corner area. It could have been done for about two hundred dollars.
The owner cheered up when I told him I’d changed my mind and I was willing to call it a total loss. I asked the contractor what he thought the structure was worth before the car smote it.
“Maybe fifty dollars,” he said.
“Put it in writing, and I’ll get another estimate.”
The second estimate was seventy-five dollars. I told the owner I would approve a check to him for sixty-two dollars and fifty cents for a total loss and he would receive it in due course.
He was still roaring at me as I drove away. I wished I could have continued the argument indefinitely. It was one way of being able to stop thinking too clearly about Sis Gantry. But alone in the car, traveling on roads too familiar, I had to endure the torment of my own worry, my special concern.
“Stupid broad!”
I said, and hit the heel of my hand on the steering wheel. “Big, dumb, happy, generous broad!”
I caught the twelve o’clock news on the car radio. By the time they got down to the local news, I could have guessed how the news-hungry boys caught in the August doldrums were going to handle it.
“In the unexplained disappearance of Janice Gantry last night, local police authorities do not discount the possibility that Miss Gantry could have been abducted by Charles Haywood, escaped safecracker believed to have been seen on Sunday night within five miles of Florence City. All highway patrol units have been alerted to look for Miss Gantry’s car, a 1957 black Renault two door sedan bearing Florida license 99T313. Miss Gantry is twenty-nine years old, five-foot-ten inches tall, weighing approximately one hundred and forty-two pounds. She has black hair and dark blue eyes. When last seen she was wearing a maroon halter top, pale gray slacks and straw sandals, and she was carrying a straw purse with a floral design embroidered in yarn.”
When he began talking weather I turned him off. I didn’t need him to tell me it was going to be hot with a possibility of afternoon thunderstorms. The weather forecasts for every day from July 15th to September 15th on Florida’s West Coast are exactly the same. Sometimes the storms threaten, but never quite get to you. Sometimes they hit early in the afternoon. Sometimes they hit late and last until midnight. It never changes.
I decided it was inevitable for the news people to tie the only two hot local stories together, to invent some link with or without evidence. I suspected I was the only one in the area, aside from Sis and Charlie, who knew how good the guess was—not abduction, but at least a joint effort—and neither of them would know that I knew. Charlie would have no special reason to tell Sis where he had found refuge. And it was out of character for the Sam Brice either of them knew to come lurking around, seeing them meet, following them. Following them up to that point when LeRoy Luxey put a hickory halt to the project.
If I had guessed right—if I had seen her phoning Charity Weber—then I had a ready-made starting place, if I could figure out what to do with it. For some reason I could not feel it would be a wonderful idea to go to the Weber house and ask if anybody had seen Sis and Charlie.
After a fast lunch in town I went out to the office and found a note for me to call Cal McAllen. I learned there was no news about Sis. The office was buzzing with excitement. People had been stopping in all morning, full of gossip, rumor and curiosity.
When I returned Cal’s call, he asked me if it would be convenient for me to come to his office. He sounded hesitant and apologetic. I said I’d be over in a few minutes.
The law firm of Wessel and McAllen occupies a suite of offices on the fourth floor of the Florence City Bank and Trust Building. I had talked to Calvin McAllen five times that I could remember on matters connected with my little Automotive Appraisal Associates, and on three of those occasions it had been a phone conversation.
As I drove over I reviewed what I knew about him. He had been a highly successful corporation lawyer in Washington. About six years ago his wife had died very suddenly and unexpectedly of leukemia. He had resigned, liquidated all holdings that required careful watching, and retired to Florida at about thirty-eight, after stowing his two sons in private schools in the North. He had lived alone in a beach cottage for about a year, doing nothing, and then had suddenly taken the Florida bar exams and gotten his license to practice law. The town didn’t pay any particular attention to him until he showed considerable shrewdness by going in with Wessel. You call him Hunk Wessel or Judge Wessel according to your station in life. He has more connections in three counties than any one man can use. Hunk isn’t exactly crooked, but he is known to be very fast on his feet.
The girl at the front desk gave me a pretty smile and sent me right back through to Cal’s office.
He stood up as I came in and said, “Good of you to come over, Sam. I appreciate it. I really do. Sit right there if you will. Would you try one of these cigars?”
“I’ll stick to these, thanks, Cal.”
He looked at me and moistened his lips and looked away again, and I knew he didn’t know exactly where to start. The word ‘colorless’ suits him. He is middle-size, middle-height. He has fine textured gray hair, combed with precision, and a neutral face, gray eyes, and neat, tidy, unremarkable clothes. His voice is dry and level and precise, his nails neatly kept. He could commit murder in front of forty witnesses and not a one of them would remember a thing about him. Because of my last talk with Sis, I could not help trying to draw a mental picture of the two of them in the marital sack. I could not make it plausible. I could not even imagine him with his hair uncombed.
“This is very difficult for me, Sam.”
“You want to talk about Sis, don’t you? Why should it be a strain? You’re in love with her, aren’t you?”
He squared his shoulders. “I have asked Janice to marry me.”
“I think that’s fine. But you didn’t ask me here to give you my blessing.”
“I’ve heard that.… you have known her very well.” The poor guy was trying to be civilized and properly casual, but I could sense how much he would have enjoyed gutting me with a rusty machete.
I planned the words, then said, “Never fault her for that, Cal. We’re good friends who like and respect each other. When the world had beaten us both flat, we got into an emotional thing, but that ended over two years ago because we found out we don’t want the same things out of life. Nobody feels guilty or ashamed. Okay?”
“Nobody but me, right this minute,” he said, with a smile that cost him dearly.
“She’s steady and level and honest, Cal. Trust her, always.”
“What I really want to ask you, Sam, is if you think this disappearance could be … my fault?” He continued quickly as he saw my look of bewilderment. “I’m an older man. She’s a young girl. I’ve been pressuring her to make up her mind. Maybe she had to run away and give herself a chance to think it over.”
“She is not a giddy young girl. She’s twenty-nine, and all woman, and tough where it pays off. For God’s sake, she spent four years married to a madman. He came within a sixteenth of an inch and thirty seconds of killing her when he killed himself. Run away? Sis walks right up to any problem that comes along and stares it square in the eye.”
“I guess I keep trying to think of … reasons that won’t scare me.”
“She’s a complete woman, and when she says yes, she’s going to say it all the way, for keeps.”
He picked up a long yellow pencil, studied it mildly, then abruptly snapped it in two and hurled the pieces into the wastebasket. “Then what the hell happened to her, Brice?”
“I don’t know.”
He swiveled his chair a quarter turn and looked out the wide window toward the blue bay. “When I lost Mary,” he said in a tired voice, “I was certain I could not survive. But I did. I knew I would never want another woman. But now I do. I know now that I might survive the loss of Janice. But I do not like to think of what I might become without her.” He turned back to me. “Do you know this Charles Haywood?”
“Yes. Not very well.”
“Would he hurt her?”
“Not a chance of it. Maybe he’s capable of hurting somebody if they hurt him. But not Sis. They’re friends.”
There was a sudden glint of shrewdness and speculation in his gray eyes. “Friends? I understand this Haywood has no family left here. If he wanted someone to help him, and he knew Sis, he might call her. She has such a great capacity for loyalty. He could have phoned her last evening. That could have been the call she got. It wasn’t like her, Mrs. Gantry tells me, for her not to tell her people who had phoned. If it was Haywood, she wouldn’t have told them the name.”
It impressed me, that quickness and logic.
“So she took her car and picked him up. Then what, Cal?”
“This is the last place in the world Haywood should have come to. So he had some good reason. He had
someone he wanted to see. She went with him, perhaps. And if harm came to him, it would not be safe to let her go. But who would he want to see?”
“He tried to rob a man named Maurice Weber, Cal. Weber lives out near the south end of Horseshoe Key. Now this is only idle gossip I happened to hear, but at the time Charlie was sent up, there was a rumor around town that he was seeing Charity Weber. That’s Mrs. Maurice Weber. There’s a rumor the whole story never came out.”
He thought for a few moments, then said, “Let’s see what Millhaus has done. I’ll put the call on the room mike so you can hear it.”
He told his secretary to get the sheriff on the line. When the call came through it came out of a box like an intercom on McAllen’s desk. Cal leaned back in his chair and answered in a normal tone of voice.
“Sorry to bother you again, Sheriff.”
“Perfectly okay any time, Mr. McAllen. You know that.”
“What I’m wondering now is if you’ve considered the possibility of Janice voluntarily helping this Haywood person?”
“Yes, I have. It wouldn’t be a smart thing to do, but it would be the kind of thing Sis Gantry would do. He was a friend of some of her younger brothers and I guess she knew Charlie pretty well from him hanging around the house when they were all kids.”
“In that case, have you thought of the possibility of Miss Gantry driving Haywood to the Weber house?”
“I thought of that, Mr. McAllen, and I was out there on the Key this morning to see the Webers. I figured that on account of Mr. Weber capturing Charlie, Charlie might have come back to settle the grudge. Me and two of my deputies, we went all through the house and grounds. They got a good burglar alarm system and they went to bed early last night and they didn’t hear a thing. In fact, Mr. Weber told me his wife had been a little nervous ever since they heard about Charlie escaping, and he wanted to know if I could spare a man to patrol around the house nights until Charlie is picked up. I said I could do that for him, so I’m putting Deputy Luxey out there beginning tonight.”
“Well … thank you, Sheriff. It was just an idea.”
Where Is Janice Gantry? Page 6