Where Is Janice Gantry?

by John D. MacDonald

  Ten days later there was an explosion in a bank vault in that same city. A charge placed in a safety deposit box had gone off. The young woman who had previously rented the box testified that she had received a hundred dollar bill in the mail, and then received a phone call telling her that if she would give up her box on such and such a day, she would get a second hundred. The box rental people at the bank said that the box was rented ten minutes after the girl gave it up, to a man so ordinary-looking they could give no helpful description of him, and who had given a false address. Explosive experts said that it had been a crudely shaped charge activated by a clockwork timing mechanism and apparently designed to exert maximum force on the next box to the left of the one containing the charge. The adjacent box was rented by a young contractor, a man of recognized probity. The blast turned the contents of his box to black confetti.

  Operating on the basis of that kind of hunch that distinguishes top reporters from the pedestrian thousands, Lou interviewed the lawyer and the contractor and learned that each of them had agreed to hold a bulky envelope handed to them by a man named Maurice Bergamann who used to work at City Hall. They had each been receiving post cards four times a year which always said “Okay, M.B.” If any four-month period had elapsed without such a card coming, they were to put their envelope in the hands of the F.B.I. Bergamann had been so plausible when he set it up that both men were astonished they had been part of the apparatus of a blackmail scheme. And both men were bitterly indignant that the planned destruction of the Bergamann documents had totally destroyed other papers of great importance to them.

  In this way Weber was accurately identified as the missing Bergamann. By then he was awaiting execution, but he was curiously composed and confident. It was remembered later that he acquired this curious confidence after receiving a typewritten letter from the north. All incoming mail was read before it was turned over to the prisoner. Bergamann destroyed the letter after spending a large part of one day, reading it over and over.

  The guard who had checked that letter was semi-literate. “It was just a lot of words,” he said. “Like legal stuff. Pressures brought to bear in high places and stuff like that. It didn’t say much of anything.”

  At any rate, when they came after Bergamann, he blandly inquired if they were bringing him his new reprieve, and they told him no, that they were now going to stop the world for a moment and let him off.

  They say he kept bucking and jumping and yelling, “Wait! Wait!” They say it took four men to hold him. He kept yelling about naming names, and dates and places and amounts of money. In fact he did begin yelling names in a crazy, high, whinnying voice, but they were names nobody had ever heard of, so they wrestled him in, forced him into the chair and strapped him down. He kept yelling for everybody to wait, so that he had no chance to hear any part of the prayer being said. They gave him three jolts, pronounced him dead and rolled him out ready for a charity burial. Nobody wanted the body, and the lawyer had wound up with all the money he had saved out of his blackmail income by living cheaply.

  But way back before the trial, before the state could assemble its case, it was essential to find some bodies.

  That memory is the worst of all. That is the one I would like to discard, but it is lodged too firmly in my mind, all ready and waiting for those rare nights of nightmare.

  Based on Martino’s testimony, it looked as if it might be possible to locate the Renault. He thought they had run straight out from Horseshoe Pass for twenty-five minutes, approximately, before Weber-Bergamann had stopped the Sea Queen dead in the water. They had left the removable section of the rail back at the dock. The car was lashed down. It had been a close fit bringing it aboard easing it along the two planks between the dock and the deck. Martino said that when Ben Kelly had released the hand brake after it was untied, it had slipped away from them and gone smashing into the rail when the Sea Queen rolled in a trough. It had rolled back and gone over Weber’s foot. He had been yelling and cursing and limping and telling them to grab the car and hold it, but on the next roll it had gone neatly through the space where they had removed the section of railing. The windows were up.

  “It floated right side up for a hell of a long time,” said the transcript of Marty’s oral testimony. “Ben wanted we should ram it and sink it, but Maurie said to wait. About a foot of it was sticking out and in a little while you could see the shiny top in the moonlight, floating kind of stern-heavy. Then it was just gone. I didn’t see bubbles or anything where it had been. It just sank and Maurie got the boat started up and we came back and after a little while he turned the lights on. But that railing was a mess. All bent and splintered. And he was trying to think of what he’d tell Chase, who’d been sent up to Tampa on a goose chase to keep him out of the way.”

  It became an obsession with the local skin divers to find that car. We had a lot of windy weather and a series of bad thunderstorms which hampered the search.

  Two days after Peggy had gone back to Richmond, the weather was just right for a more efficient search method. The Gulf was like a dull blue mirror. I managed to wheedle myself aboard the big Coast Guard helicopter that took off a half-hour before noon, not realizing how many times I would wish that I had never had the impulse.

  When we got out over the Gulf we could see the big fast launch standing by with cable and marked buoy aboard. The proposed search pattern was marked on the chart of the area. Assuming a half-hour running time at fifteen miles an hour, the plan was to start five miles out and make a sweep about three miles long, parallel to the shore line, turn 180 degrees and come back about a hundred to two hundred yards further out, dropping small bags of yellow marked dye in order to be sure of staying in the search pattern. The launch tagged along behind us after chasing off a few boats that wanted to join the party.

  After experimenting with various altitudes, the pilot found that about three hundred feet gave us the best combination of range and visibility. With the sun overhead and the water exceptionally clear, we could see the pale sand bottom and the irregular patches of weed, and it seemed that we would not be able to miss seeing the small black car down there.

  I lost count of the sweeps. My eyes began to burn with the continual strain of searching the bottom. A young Coast Guard man and I lay face down on the cramped cabin floor with the port door braced open, our chins out over the edge, the rotor blowing a deafening gale down onto the backs of our heads. He had additional duty. Every time he was kicked in the leg, he had to drop a bag of dye.

  “Bingo!” the kid beside me screamed. I looked where he pointed and saw it at once. It looked incongruous. It was in the biggest empty parking lot in the world, sitting placidly on its wheels.

  We dropped down and circled it. Below a hundred feet it was much more difficult to see.

  The pilot suddenly became enraged when he found he could not make radio contact with the launch. Little gusts of wind had begun to riffle the water and black clouds were climbing up out of the west; I estimated we would have another forty minutes of direct sunlight. The receiver on the launch had conked out. The men on the launch ignored our attempts to indicate the spot and made expansive helpless shrugging motions. The pilot was filled with helpless fury.

  I went to him and spoke into his ear over the rotor noise. “Take this thing low and drop me and I’ll swim to the launch and you can guide us in.”

  I stripped down to my shorts. He brought it right down to the water and held it steady and even tilted it to make it easier to dive out of the doorway into the water made turbulent by the captive hurricane of the rotor vanes. I swam to the launch and was helped aboard.

  “Damn, stupid, lousy radio,” the launch captain said.

  “We spotted it. He’ll hang directly over it at three hundred feet and you come in on it by watching which way he points the nose of that thing. When you’re over it, he’ll do a big dip as a signal to drop your hook.”

  “What’s the bottom?”

  “Sand, it looks
like.”

  “Fathometer says we got seventy feet here, and I got only a hundred feet of anchor line. There’s one hell of a tidal drift and it won’t hold in sand. Barney, break out that float and cable and get it all ready. Bus, you get set with the end of that cable to go on down when he gives the signal.”

  As Bus, a hearty bruiser, got himself ready, I saw the extra fins and face mask and said, “Maybe he can use some help. Mind if I go down too?”

  “This is straight diving, no tanks,” he said.

  “I’ve been a lot deeper a lot of times.”

  He nodded. I adjusted the fin straps and the mask and stood on the bow beside the one called Bus. When we got the signal we lowered ourselves into the water, upended and went down. He had the weight of the cable to help him, but I had both arms free, so we made about the same time. The water color changed from gold to a clear pale green, to increasing depths of green. I saw the car in the murk off to the right and angled down that way, with Bus close by. We each caught the rear bumper and pulled ourselves down. I saw that it would help him to be able to use both hands, so I caught him around the waist and held him there. The Florida license plate looked insane. He threaded the snap end of the cable around the rear axle, brought it up and took a turn around the sturdy bumper brace before snapping it back onto itself. He gave it a tug then sprung up and out of sight. I should have followed him. I worked my way around the car, sensing I was nearing the end of my endurance. There was enough sun so that I saw her in a dark green luminous light. She was behind the wheel. There was a shadow beyond her. The safety belt—about which I had kidded her, was latched firmly across her. She was slumped against the window, looking out at me, her mouth open, her eyes open, her black hair floating still and wild in the endless silence of the flooded car. For that moment I cannot forget, her face was inches from mine, separated by the glass I could not see.

  I went up too fast at first, then slowing myself, releasing air from my lungs as I went up. It was a winding silver thread under the compression, turning into bubbles as I neared the surface. I came up through green, through gold, breaking out into the world of sun and sanity. The big red and white plastic float rested on the quiet water. I sucked the warm clean air deeply into my lungs. Off in the west I saw a short fat blue dagger of lightning bang down into the dark water under the clouds.

  The helicopter was floating off toward the mainland.

  “Thanks for the help,” Bus said. “What kept you?”

  “I wanted to see if they were in the car.”

  “The guy said they were in the car, dint he?”

  “I wanted to make sure.”

  “You don’t look so good, fella. The crabs been working them over?”

  “The windows were closed.”

  “Me, on a thing like that, I take the guy’s word for it.”

  We turned and ran for shelter, and the sun was gone under the thunderheads by the time we got in.

  I heard later how they worked it, how they recovered the car. I didn’t care to see any part of it. They went out in a work boat and recovered the buoy and bent the cable around a winch and plucked the tin coffin off the floor of the Gulf. When they brought it to the surface they put another line on it and used a boom to swing it aboard. It leaked water throughout the long trip back to the Florence City Municipal Pier, and the upright bodies sagged in a boneless way as the water level dropped inside the little sedan.

  I attended Sis’s funeral. All the Gantrys looked through me and beyond me, never at me.

  After the funeral, until it was time to fly up to Dayton to be married, I worked like a horse, not only catching up on everything, but also breaking a kid in on the work so that he could at least handle the most routine things while I was gone. And I had begun to think about an office of my own, and maybe getting into actual adjusting work for some of the smaller companies and maybe expanding my area a little.

  There isn’t much more to tell. I brought my bride back. We used the Lesser Evil for a honeymoon that consisted of all the hot weekends in September and October, until the first chill of the winter season came down out of the north. We camped out on empty beaches, snug under all the stars.

  We had our own private honeymoon habit of swimming naked in the warm shallow sea, and finding that buoyant incomparable love in the shallows whenever there was no surf. She would ask me solemnly if I thought there was very much danger of our toes becoming webbed.

  That brings me to the best memory of all. It was a September night on LaCosta Key, a night of a full moon. She was curled beside me under the mosquito bar, but I could not sleep. There was enough of a west wind to keep the bugs away, so I slipped out quietly and walked down to the edge of the water.

  I began to think of the Sea Queen. They had not yet given up looking for her at that time. I thought of her out there in the deeps. Maybe she had opened up enough so that the currents moved through her, so that Charity and Captain Stan Chase were at that moment doing an infinitely slow dance down there where the moonlight would never reach, taking a full five minutes for each bow, each random pirouette.

  It struck me with horrid force that four of us could be down there, in that black minuet, touching, turning, spinning with a slow rotten grace.

  It was a moment of nightmare so real that I could not believe in that moment that my Peggy existed. I turned to go back to her and saw her coming slowly down the slope of the beach toward me, reaching a sleepy hand in a woman’s habit to pat her shining hair, moving toward me in slender, silvered loveliness.

  “I lost you,” she said in a grumpy sleepy voice. She stood close and peered up into my face. “That’s a strange expression.”

  “I started thinking about … where we might have been tonight, and what it’s like down there. And suddenly all this didn’t seem real.”

  She put her arms strongly around me and held herself tightly against me. “Oh, darling, it’s real. It’s very real.”

  “It just made me feel strange.”

  “You come with me,” she said. She took my hand and we went back to the blankets and lifted the edge of the mosquito bar and crawled under.

  “I’ll show you how real it is,” she said.

  And she gave of herself with a completeness, a tenderness and a yearning strength that brought my world back into focus, back to sweet reality.

  After it had ended, we shared one cigarette in that earthy and comforting silence which only love can create. She did not have to ask me what she had done for me. She knew.

  After I reached out to stub the cigarette into the sand she sighed and took my hand and held it against her trim stomach and said, “Do you think he shows yet?”

  “He won’t show for months.” (He was what you could call prominent when we had to testify at the murder trial in March.)

  “Do you think he’ll have fins?”

  “What!”

  “Considering what you’ve put me through, mister, the little son of a gun will probably have gills, fins, scales and he’ll love worms.”

  “You’ve carefully concealed your reluctance.”

  She nestled her head against my throat and said comfortably, “I’ve hated every living minute of it. Mmmm. Seems as if every time I turn around, slosh, there I am flat on my back in the surf. Golly, I’m learning all the constellations, though. But in the daytime, I think you ought to give me a chance to put on my sunglasses. You know, darling, some women actually rub their faces with sandpaper as a beauty treatment, and if sand helps, I ought to have the most beautiful …”

  “Shut up and go to sleep. I love you.”

  “Yes sir,” said my bride.

  In a little while I was able to reach down and pull up the sheet without putting a hitch in her deep and regular breathing. I admired Orion’s belt for a little while and then slid down into sleep, grinning like a fool, thinking something about the longest way around being the shortest way home.

  About the Author

  John D. MacDonald was an American noveli
st and short story writer. His works include the Travis McGee series and the novel The Executioners, which was adapted into the film Cape Fear. In 1962 MacDonald was named a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America; in 1980 he won a National Book Award. In print he delighted in smashing the bad guys, deflating the pompous, and exposing the venal. In life he was a truly empathetic man; his friends, family, and colleagues found him to be loyal, generous, and practical. In business he was fastidiously ethical. About being a writer, he once expressed with gleeful astonishment, “They pay me to do this! They don’t realize, I would pay them.” He spent the later part of his life in Florida with his wife and son. He died in 1986.