Where Is Janice Gantry?

by John D. MacDonald

  We returned to the business of swimming. We rounded the point and I saw some hefty channel markers ahead. We swam along, parallel to the north shore of the island, and a big boathouse slowly came into view, with a big open boat visible within the white open framework and some skiffs tied alongside.

  “There’s a low platform thing on the far side of the boathouse,” I told her.

  “I see it.”

  As we swam to the low dock attached to the east side of the boathouse I read the name on the transom of the big open boat. The Sandspur. It rang a remote bell. I hoisted myself up out of the water and stood up. I saw a lovely quiet sweep of green lawn that went up a hill to the big old frame house that stood on the crest. Coconut palms stood tall and twisted by the wind. I saw frame cottages along the shore line. When I saw the sign hanging from the archway beyond the boathouse, I knew exactly where I was. Cabbage Key, the sign said.

  I turned to give Peggy a hand up and she rejected it firmly. “I step right out of this water into a robe or a blanket, friend. Unless you can prove there aren’t any people here.”

  A man in khakis and a T-shirt came walking through the archway and onto the dock, wearing a look of inquiry. He was a trim sunbrown man in his middle years. He wore glasses with metal frames, and his expression was full of a mild good humor.

  “Thought I heard somebody talking,” he said. He looked across the water in all directions, obviously looking for a boat. “You folks anchored around the corner?”

  “We didn’t exactly come by boat,” I said. “I’m from Florence City. My name is Sam Brice. This is Peggy Varden. I guess you know Dr. Joe Arlington. He’s talked about this place often.”

  He stepped down and shook hands with me. “I’m Larry Stultz,” he said. “Joe is an old friend and customer.” He stared with curiosity at Peggy who had lowered herself until only her eyes showed over the edge of the dock. “Won’t you come ashore, Miss Varden?”

  “She … she’s not dressed for swimming, Mr. Stultz.”

  “If you’ve got anything I could cover myself with, I would certainly …”

  “Of course! Of course!” he said, and went scurrying off. He went into the structure that adjoined the boathouse and came back in moments with a faded blue seersucker robe. He turned and stood with his back to us. I leaned down and gave Peggy a hand. She climbed up, wiggled out of the shirt and dropped it onto the dock with a sodden sound and gratefully hustled herself into the robe and belted it.”

  “Now I’m decent,” she said.

  When Larry turned with a polite smile of welcome, I said, “We had to leave a boat in a big hurry last night, about four miles out in the Gulf off LaCosta. We swam to shore and this morning we came across LaCosta and waded and swam here.”

  “Boat catch fire?” he asked mildly.

  “No. It was just going to be … too unpleasant if we stayed aboard.”

  “Four miles is a good swim.”

  “There wasn’t much choice, Mr. Stultz.”

  “Glad you made it all right,” he said.

  Peggy was frowning slightly as she stared at him. “My goodness, people arrive swimming and you act as if it happened every day, Mr. Stultz.”

  He grinned at her. “I used to be in the advertising business in Chicago. My wife, Jan, and I have run this place as a vacation hideaway for ten years. After those two ways of making a living, Peggy, if there’s anything left in this world that can startle me very much, I can’t think right now what it could be. Let’s go up to the house.”

  Jan, a slim, tanned, brisk and competent lady, took the event in stride, in exactly the same way Larry did. In spite of our protests, which perhaps were not very emphatic, we were given a big breakfast, the loan of dry clothing, a pack of cigarettes and a forty minute ride up to Boca Grande in the Sandspur. Larry explained that they had two boatloads of guests coming down from Sarasota to arrive in mid-afternoon and more guests to be picked up in Boca Grande before lunch. He had been planning, he said, to run to Boca for supplies anyway, and this just meant getting there a little earlier than he had planned. It was the quickest way to get us to a phone.

  He docked the Sandspur just beyond the Pink Elephant, a small hotel at Boca Grande. I placed a collect call to Pat Millhaus from there. When I could hear him grumbling and threatening not to accept it, I told the operator to tell him it was an emergency.

  “Pat?”

  “Can’t you afford a phone call, Brice?”

  “Can you have this recorded so you can check it over if you have to?”

  “What can you tell me that I should have …”

  “Do you want to know who killed Sis and Charlie Haywood?”

  I listened to shocked silence, and then he said, “Let me get this thing hooked up.”

  After it began to beep at fifteen second intervals, I told him who to pick up, and where they might be found, and how fast he would have to move. When he tried to interrupt I yelled him down. I gave him descriptions as complete as I could make them. Peggy stood close to me, prompting me on points I had overlooked.

  “Suppose it’s a false arrest deal?” he complained.

  “Damn it, Millhaus, I have proof. And if they get clear because you didn’t budge off your fat tail, I’ll make certain every newspaper in Florida gives you some big headlines you won’t like.”

  “You can’t talk to me like …”

  I hung up on him. I knew he would move fast, but I did not know if it would be fast enough. I hadn’t quite dared request that a car be sent after us. I ran the borrowed dime through the phone again and this time I made it collect to D. Ackley Bush.

  “My dear boy, this is a horrid time of day to ask anyone to …”

  “Ack?”

  “Yes, Samuel.”

  “I have the Weber house guest with me. And we have all the answers, Ack. And if you can keep your mouth shut all the way back to Florence City, we might tell you the whole thing before even the sheriff knows it.”

  “Dear boy, you are now at the Pink Elephant?”

  “Yes.”

  “I estimate the running time of my timid little machine to be fifty minutes. And I shall leave here in … ten.”

  It gave me an hour to prepare her for D. Ackley Bush, and tell her the part he had played in my life. She was prepared to adore him by the time he came clattering up in his little gray car.

  “Do drive, Samuel. If I try to drive and listen, I shall roll us into a field. Glory be, what a handsome neighbor I had and didn’t know it! You have a very good face, child. You two exude a sweet rapport. Beware of linking your future to this bonehead, dear girl. His great flaw is his desire to impress the world with his open, amiable stupidity, whereas we who love him know he is an almost excessively complex creature.”

  I drove. Peggy was beside me. There was no room for three in front. Ack rode in the back, but he leaned forward with an enduring intensity that kept his rosy old face suspended between us.

  The story lasted longer than the trip. I turned in at my place. I had to break into the cottage. Peggy fixed iced tea. I located the extra key to my wagon, and changed into clothing that fit me. We sat on the porch with Ack and finished the story.

  He shook his head slowly. “A dismal thing, children. A sad, dirty, frightening thing. Utopia will never be possible until we have no more two-legged animals. Can they be bred out of the race?” He looked at Peggy and said gently, “Will you feel very bad about your stepsister, my dear?”

  “I … I don’t think so. She had me come down both summers not because she really needed me, Ack, but because it gave her a chance to pretend to herself there was something even a little bit normal about the way she was living. She lied to that poor Charlie Haywood. She was drunk most of the time. Yesterday afternoon was when she killed anything I might have felt for her.”

  “How?” Ack asked.

  “She knew they had me, and they’d hurt me, and she didn’t know what they were going to do to me; so she kept drinking so she would have an excus
e she could tell herself. They had me in the main house then, and I heard Maurice raise his voice, telling her to get Sam into the house when he came. I yelled through a locked door to her, as loud as I could, ‘Tell Sam to run! Tell him to bring help!’ I know she heard me. They all did. Weber came in and cuffed me around and they put me out in that utility room then. You wouldn’t know she was as drunk as she was, because she could walk and talk pretty well right up until the time she passed out, but she could have told Sam to run. She asked him in, so they could hit him.”

  “People better not hit you with this lady present,” Ack said. “That welt over your ear looks nasty, Samuel. How do you feel?”

  “As if I’d spent a full ten-hour day trying to stop Rick, Jimmy Brown and Allan the Horse.”

  “Gentlemen!” Peggy said firmly. We stared at her. “I have no comb, toothbrush, lipstick, money or bed to sleep in. No clothes, nothing. I slept in a sand pile last night. I’m waterlogged. If I start to yawn, I won’t be able to stop. I’m not ready for any kind of official questioning. Somebody better do something about me before I start screaming and leaping.”

  I donated a shower and a bed. Ack volunteered to purchase all the items on the list she made out, and bring them back to the cottage. I headed for the Florence County Courthouse.

  11

  Memory retains only the sharpest images, the violences, the dramatics, the incongruities.

  But I can remember a lot of the interminable questioning. T. C. Barley, the State’s Attorney handled most of it. Pat Millhaus was there, and Deputy LeRoy Luxey and another deputy. Bunny Biscoe had wormed his way in presumably on the basis of not releasing anything with the approval of Barley and Millhaus. Cal McAllen was there, with the worn, stunned look of a man who has been told he has something incurable. There were a couple of officials there I couldn’t identify, and a court reporter tapping each word onto a stenotype tape. The Mahlers had been found in Lauderdale and were being brought back for questioning.

  After I had been through all of it the first time, Barley kept taking me back to my initial suspicions, the beginnings of my investigation.

  “You concealed an escaped convict?” he asked again.

  “Yes.”

  “And if you had turned him in, Miss Gantry would now be alive? I am making the assumption she is dead, of course.”

  “Yes, I know that. I didn’t know it would happen that way, but it did. And I’m going to have to learn to live with it.”

  “Mr. Brice, I have yet to get a satisfactory answer from you that is pertinent to one whole area of this investigation. You kept accumulating facts and rumors that would have been of great interest to Sheriff Millhaus, yet you did not come forward and tell him what you were learning. Why?”

  I glanced at Pat’s impassive Indian face. “I am not one of the sheriff’s favorite people, Mr. Barley. He would have taken the smallest excuse to whip my skull and stick me onto one of his road gangs. I didn’t care to take that chance.”

  “That’s a goddam lie!” Pat roared. “My personal opinions don’t come in at all. I tried everybody fair and equal in my job. He could have come to me. He’s trying to cover up something, the way it looks to me.”

  “Well, Mr. Brice?” T. C. Barley said.

  In the silence LeRoy Luxey cleared his throat in such a meaningful way that everybody looked at him. He licked his lips and swallowed, looking like a shy leathery child. He said humbly, “Maybe I shouldn’t say one word on account I whipped this fella’s head by myself, but it was an honest mistake he brung down on hisself. But he did get that little girl out of bad trouble. And I say fair is fair, no matter what it costs a man. If’n this Brice had come in here with his ideas, the sher’f would not listened at all. This sher’f would have jailed him for any small thing on account this sher’f hates Brice and tole me so hisself and has been dreaming on ways he could get Brice locked up so he could whip his head for him nine times a day, which he said to me in his own words.”

  “You’re through!” Pat yelled at the small man.

  Barley looked quietly amused. “Luxey,” he said, “turn in your badge. It so happens I have an opening on my personal staff. I can use a man who believes that … fair is fair, no matter what it costs.”

  Luxey pointed a thumb toward Millhaus. “A job like that, Mr. Barley, what will it make me to him?”

  “When you deal with him, Luxey, you will be representing me. And when you work in this county, you’ll be working with him, not for him.”

  “I would surely like it just that way,” LeRoy said.

  Just as it began to look as though the top of Pat’s head was going to blow off, the phone rang. We all knew that only that one call was authorized to come through. Millhaus listened for a long time, grunting infrequently, and finally said, “We’ll put out the welcome sign. Thanks, Ed,” and hung up.

  “Got ’em!” he said. “I was dreadful scared they would split up, making it almost too tough to spot em, but Ed Howe and his people nailed them at the Tampa International just a while back, ten minutes before they got on an Eastern flight to New York. Their luggage has gone, but we’ll have it grabbed at the other end and shot back. They’re saying it’s some mistake, which is to be expected. I guess they figured you and that girl drowned and they would have time to get out safe without splitting up, Sam.”

  He gave me a wide warm friendly grin that fooled nobody.

  I remember very vividly the scene that evening in Pat Millhaus’s office. By then Peggy had rested and had been questioned and was dressed in one of the glamorous summery outfits Ack had bought for her. (He had expanded the hell out of her simple list, labeling it all pre-wedding presents.)

  T. C. Barley had us sit side by side off to the left on the leather couch against the wall where they would not see us as they were brought in. By then, of course, battalions of news people were milling around the halls and drinking beer out on the courthouse lawn in the warm dusk after the late afternoon rains.

  They brought Ben in first—Benjamin Kelly he called himself—big, impassive, freckled, brutalized, wearing the attitudes of previous imprisonments.

  “Do you know those people?” Barley asked, pointing.

  He turned and stared at us. He was very good. I could detect absolutely no change of expression. “No sir,” he said. “I don’t know them.”

  “He shot and killed Captain Chase,” Peggy said in a small, but firm voice. “He carried me aboard the Sea Queen. Then he left in the rental car to drive it down to Naples to meet the other two.”

  “I don’t know what the lady is talking about,” he said.

  “They took him out and brought Marty in. Rafael Martino, he called himself. He looked undressed without his cigar.

  When directed to look toward us, he didn’t handle it quite as well as Ben Kelly had. His expression did not change, but his color paled to a bloodless gray and was suddenly oiled by sweat.

  “I never saw these people in my life,” he said in a husky whisper.

  “He and Mr. Weber burned my hand,” Peggy said. “The Mahlers can identify him and the other one too. He tried to … rape me aboard the boat.”

  “She’s nuts,” Marty said, but it carried no conviction. I remembered his certainty that things would go wrong, his contempt for amateur operations. Things could not have gone much more wrong.

  Weber was last. And he was not a pro. He walked in arrogantly.

  “It’s about time you people did some explaining,” he said.

  “Do you know those people over there?”

  He turned quickly and looked at us. “Hello, Maurice,” Peggy said. He looked as if he had been sledged in the pit of the stomach. His mouth dropped open and his eyes rolled wildly. He took a half-step and I thought he was going to go down, but he caught his balance.

  “Can’t you say hello?” Peggy asked blandly.

  In the silence you could sense the way his mind was racing around the small perimeter of the trap, looking for some gap, some tiny logical plac
e just big enough to wiggle through.

  “Hello, Peggy,” he said at last in a ghastly voice. He had to acknowledge knowing her.

  Peggy nodded at T. C. Barley. “It was his cute little plan to drown the three of us, just like he had the other two drowned, Mr. Barley.”

  “It didn’t work very well, Mr. Weber, or whatever your name is,” Barley said.

  I suspect that for a few seconds he came very close to breaking completely, turning into a droning, helpless idiot. But he slowly gathered the small strength remaining to him and said, “I get to have a lawyer, don’t I?”

  “Before the indictment by the Grand Jury, yes.”

  “I got the money for a good one,” he said.

  “I think you’ll need a good one,” Pat Millhaus said, grinning like a raccoon.

  In the end it was LeRoy Luxey who simplified the problems of the prosecution. He studied the transcripts of the statements made by Peggy and me and the Mahlers. He decided where a little persuasion might help. And he arranged, without authorization, a little soundproof time with Martino. There are those who claim that Martino has never been quite right, mentally, since being interviewed by LeRoy. It is a fact that for days he would scream at any sudden sound. But it cannot be denied that, in one sense, Luxey did him a favor. In return for his vast eagerness to assist the prosecution, he was given thirty years, as opposed to the death by electrocution awarded Weber and Kelly.

  Lou Leeman, with top legal assistance, managed to trace Starr Development back to a series of dummy principals and fictitious addresses in a large city in Michigan, but there the trail was lost in an impenetrable tangle. When it was clear that Weber would die, Lou waited for the delayed exposure that would blow the lid off that city. But nothing happened. Nothing at all. Unless two curious things that happened indicate that the men who were to be exposed by the Weber documents had a second line of defense.

  A safe was blown in the office of one of the most reliable lawyers in that city, a man who could not be reached or bribed. It was assumed to be a ludicrously amateur job because the safecracker had used so much soup he had not only blown the safe open on all four sides, but had atomized the contents, blown a wall down and broken windows in a three block area. No one was hurt and it was considered a miracle that the clumsy thief or thieves had escaped alive.