Dead Meat

by William G. Tapply

  It took me a minute to interpret her look. Then I remembered. I had told her that Gib had asked me to fly out with him. I could have been on that plane with him. I could have been killed. That was Marge’s thought.

  And then it became my thought, and I had to press my elbows close against my ribs to control the shudder that suddenly shook my body. I sighed deeply a couple times. It helped.

  A little while later Tiny came out and sat beside me. “Jesus Christ, anyway,” he said, sighing.

  “Amen.”

  He glanced sideways at me. “Marge said you were going to go with Gib today. Good thing you changed your mind.”

  “I didn’t. Gib decided to go without me, that’s all.”

  Tiny rubbed his bushy beard with the open palm of his big hand. “Like maybe he knew something was gonna happen to him, huh?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. I haven’t figured it out.”

  “Most likely an accident.”

  I nodded. “Most likely.”

  “Still…”

  “I’ve been wondering myself.”

  “Gib and the Rolando boys,” said Tiny.

  “Did you call the sheriff?”

  He nodded. “Got ol’ Thurl on the shortwave. He said he supposed he’d get here sometime today, but what in hell did I expect him to do, and I told him how the hell should I know. I was just tellin’ him what had happened like I was suppose to, goddammit. So he said he’d call the FAA or the CAP or some damn thing or another. Asked me if it looked like an accident or what. I told him I had never seen a plane get itself blowed up before. Hell, I didn’t see this one, neither. So just how in hell did he expect me to tell whether it got itself blowed up accidental or on purpose. Thurl allowed I wasn’t a shitload of help. I told him I wasn’t specially tryin’ to help, just tellin’ him what happened, and anyway, you and Bud saw it. Expect Thurl might want to talk to you.”

  “I’ve never seen a plane blow up before, either.”

  “Poor li’l Polly’s pretty shook up,” Tiny said softly. “She and Gib were kinda sweet on each other, I think.”

  “That right?”

  Tiny nodded. “He was a good fella, Gib. Dependable. Good company. Vern found him for us some years back. Gib did all our flyin’ for us. Most camps, they depend on the services, take whoever they can get, but Raven Lake had its own pilot. Gib did other work now and then. But he was always ready for us when we needed him. And we did need him to make this place go. Gonna be hard to replace him. More and more, I keep thinkin’ we oughta sell this place, let someone younger’n me worry about it.”

  “That’s a big step, Tiny.”

  He sighed deeply. “Yep. Big step. Don’t know how Marge’d take it.”

  He glanced sharply at me, and I wondered guiltily what Tiny suspected. Then I wondered why I felt guilty about it.

  Tiny gazed out toward the lake. “She ain’t the easiest woman in the world to talk to sometimes. Least for me she ain’t. She talks to you some, I know. That’s good. I’m glad she got somebody more her own age. Guess I’m just too goddamn old. On different wavelengths, seems like. Her and my little girl. I dunno, maybe it’s just women in general. You seem to have the knack, Brady. What’s the secret?”

  “Women?” I laughed. “I know absolutely nothing about women. I’m the last person on earth you should ask.”

  He shrugged. “Don’t suppose it’s important, anyway. ’Cept now they’re both so shook up, and I don’t know what to say to them.”

  “The closest I can come to wisdom on the subject,” I said, “is, when you don’t know exactly the right thing to say to a woman, it means you shouldn’t say anything.” I shrugged. “Not that it’s done me a hell of a lot of good.”

  Tiny grinned and lifted his bulk out of his rocking chair. “Got me another problem here. Guests need to be flown out, new guests flown in. Gonna have to get me to Greenville and see if I can’t scare up a new pilot. I dunno, Brady. Seems kind of…” He waved his hand around as if he hoped to snatch the word he wanted from the air like a pesky mosquito.

  “Disrespectful?”

  He shrugged. “Yeah. I guess. Me worrying about business and poor Gib blown all to hell and gone out there. Lew and a couple of the boys, maybe you saw them, they went out in a canoe. Couldn’t find a damn thing. Sorta hopin’ we might find Gib out there still alive. Nothing. Wind blowin’ down the lake at a pretty good clip now. Anything that’d float must be down the foot of the lake by now.” Tiny put his hand on my shoulder. “Glad you’re here, Brady.”

  “I am no help whatsoever.”

  He squeezed quickly, smiled, and went inside.

  Something Tiny had said had pricked my mind, and it took me a moment to recall what it was. Then I remembered. Marge had told Tiny that I was planning to fly out with Gib. If Tiny knew, others might have known, as well. Gib may have told somebody. Tiny may have passed along the information. Perhaps everybody had known, well before Gib taxied out onto the lake, that I was supposed to be going with him.

  If that was so and if the explosion of Gib’s Cessna had been produced by sabotage, then there was one terrible conclusion I had to recognize: Gib’s fate might have been intended for me, too.

  Worse, it could have been intended for me, with Gib the innocent bystander.

  The idea was like a smooth, opaque stone, and I turned it over and over in my mind, rubbing its soft, rounded contours, staring into its blurry surface, trying to determine its exact shape and dimensions. Maybe Gib had known who murdered Phil Rolando. Maybe he was flying out to report what he knew and wanted me along for moral support. Then he realized he might be endangering me, so he decided to go alone. If somebody blew him up, it was to keep him quiet. Whoever it was might assume Gib had shared his knowledge with me.

  Now I was still alive. For all the murderer—if there was one—knew, I still had that knowledge. That thought did not soothe me.

  A further thought. If Gib had been murdered, odds were that it was the same person who had murdered Rolando. And it couldn’t have been Woody.

  Then who? I tried to catalog the possibilities. Start with Tiny. If he ever found out that Phil Rolando had slept with his daughter, that might do it. For that matter, it would give him motive to kill Ken Rolando, too.

  Marge. Same thing. Marge of the sweet, soft kiss. She could murder for Polly’s sake. Maybe.

  Gib was off the hook. Unless he had killed himself in his plane, the act of a conscience-stricken man who had murdered his girlfriend’s lovers.

  Or Polly herself, acting on some weird, adolescent, neurotic love-hate motive, some imagined or real slight. Jealousy, maybe.

  I tried Bud Turner and Lew Pike and the other guides and found no motive. But plenty of opportunity. Likewise the guests.

  One thing I now believed: Woody’s innocence was beyond question. Gib had been murdered, and that murder was linked to Rolando’s.

  Gib had been Polly’s lover, just like the Rolando boys. There was a link. It brought me back to Marge and Tiny. And Polly herself.

  I stood and stretched. I had been sitting and rocking for too long. All the blood had drained out of my head and had pooled in my backside. I was thinking foolish thoughts. Gib’s death had probably been an accident. Happened all the time, small planes crashing in the bush. Gib himself had told me that when I had flown in with him. All the rest was nonsense.

  I became aware of the growling in my empty stomach. I needed breakfast. Just as I put my hand on the door handle, it pushed open toward me. I stepped back.

  Polly Wheeler came out. She looked somber but dry-eyed. Her face was pink, as if she had just scrubbed it. “Brady,” she said. “I hoped I’d find you here.”

  “I’m here,” I said, smiling at her. “How are you doing?”

  She shrugged, as if that were not the important question. “Look,” she said. “I’ve really gotta talk to you.”

  “Okay.”

  “It’s about Gib,” she said. “Something he told me. Last night.�
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  Fourteen

  “NOW I KNOW EXACTLY what they mean by the kiss of death,” said Polly as we wandered away from the lodge. She scuffed her sneakers in the pine needles and kept her eyes averted from mine. “I am the kiss of death. Literally.”

  “You were with Gib last night?”

  “I was, as you put it, with him. Yes. And now he’s dead. Just like Phil. And Ken, too, I guess. What’s the matter with me?”

  I assumed she was being rhetorical, so I didn’t tell her that I didn’t believe she ought to feel guilty or that she was indulging in a classical post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. Just because one event follows another doesn’t mean that the first caused the second.

  Come to think of it, I wasn’t sure that there was no connection.

  Polly and I followed the winding pathway among the tall pines until we found ourselves down where the cabins were clustered, and as if we had planned it ahead of time, we ended up sitting on the front step of the cabin where first Ken and then Phil Rolando had stayed.

  I lit a cigarette. As an afterthought, I held the Winston pack to Polly. She shook her head. “You mentioned something Gib said to you,” I reminded her gently.

  She nodded slowly. “How well did you know him?”

  I shrugged. “Just from flying in the other day, really. Nice guy.”

  “Yes. A very nice guy. Gib is—was—what I imagine my father used to be like when my mother met him. A real man. Independent. Good at things. Quiet, strong. Know what I mean?”

  She looked up at me. I nodded.

  “He told me he was leaving today. That he might not be back for a while. He was saying good-bye, I realize that now. But that’s not really the way it seemed. He had something important to do. Important for him. For his conscience.”

  “Did he mention what it was?”

  She smiled thinly. “No, not exactly. Gib could be more indirect than anybody I’ve ever met. But I figured this much out from what he said. I can’t remember his words or anything, but it had something to do with flying to Canada.”

  “He was flying to Canada today?”

  She motioned impatiently with her hand. “No, he had been flying there. What he was going to do today was related in some way to those trips to Canada. What he had been doing there.” She looked up at me and shrugged.

  “Something illegal.” I made it a statement, not a question.

  She nodded. “He didn’t say so. Not in so many words. But, yes, I think so. He said you were going with him today, and he was going to explain it all to you in the plane. He said he needed a lawyer.”

  “Did he mention anybody else, somebody who was involved in this Canada business?”

  “No. He didn’t mention anybody at all.”

  “Nothing about Phil Rolando?”

  “No.”

  “Or Ken?”

  She shook her head.

  “Did they know each other?”

  “Gib and Phil and Ken?” She shrugged. “Not especially, as far as I know. I mean, just the way you knew Gib. He flew them in here. Gib flew everybody in here. People always felt they knew Gib. He was like that. But, no, I don’t think…”

  She touched her face with her fingertips and looked away from me. I said, “Polly.”

  “I know. You think Ken and Phil were up to something illegal. Like smuggling in dope or something. Working with Gib. I don’t know. Maybe they were. But I don’t remember ever seeing Gib with either Phil or Ken while they were here, and I don’t think any of them ever mentioned the other one to me. But what’s that worth, anyway?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you think that what happened to Gib—do you think it was…?”

  “Murder? Do you?”

  “Yes.” She nodded several times, as if to reassure herself. “And I’ll tell you why. Because Gib was a very careful pilot, and he took good care of that airplane. He wouldn’t have an accident. I used to tease him. I said he cared more about the damn plane than he did about me. Know what he’d say?”

  I shrugged and smiled.

  “He’d say, ‘Right.’ He was kidding, I suppose. I mean, I could usually tell. There was like a little glint in his eye. But he wouldn’t smile, even when I’d tickle him and bite his ear. You could not make that man smile if he didn’t want to. He really would never admit that he liked me more than that dumb old airplane. Dammit…”

  I gave her my handkerchief, and she blew her nose in it. “He knew all about stuff floating on the water that he might hit. He had the sharpest damn eyes you ever saw for seeing things on the water. And where he was out there this morning, there are no rocks or anything. He knew the lake. He didn’t hit anything accidentally, I promise you.”

  “I thought about engine trouble,” I said.

  “All I can tell you is that he used to say that that engine was the only thing that kept him from crashing to the ground. If the engine died, he died. He said it wasn’t love, it was survival. Can I tell you something?”

  “Sure.”

  Her eyes brimmed, but she looked intently at me. “Gib was really afraid of flying. Isn’t that dumb? I mean, that’s how he made his living. It was his life. What he loved most was being up there, like he said, alone and free. He always said how good it was to know how you’re going to die. He’d say that nothing ever bothered him, because he knew how he’d die, and it made things real simple. Take care of the plane and stay alive. So maybe it wasn’t exactly fear but, like, respect for the danger of it and knowing that any time might be the time he was going to die. He told me that whenever he took off, he always wondered if it would be the last time. He was probably thinking that this morning.”

  She smiled bravely and blinked back her tears. I patted her arm.

  “You do think he was murdered, then,” I said.

  “Don’t you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Somebody’s murdering people around here.”

  “You’ve got a point there.”

  “Unless…”

  “Unless what?”

  She shook her head. “It’s dumb. But I was thinking. He could have—you know, if he saw a big log or something in the water—I mean, he would see it, but…”

  “You think he might have done it on purpose, you mean.”

  She twitched her shoulders. “Only because of how he seemed last night.”

  “Guilty, you mean.”

  She nodded.

  “Was he the kind of man who’d kill himself?”

  She made a flip-flopping motion with her hand. “Really, no. At least I wouldn’t have said so. He thought about dying more than most people, I think. Like every time he went up in the air, which usually was a couple times a day. But it was more like fatalism. He was ready to die. But I don’t think he wanted to. It’s just that, last night, the way he seemed…”

  “How late did you stay with him?”

  “Oh, not late at all. Actually, we just took a walk. I got in early. I’ve been trying, ever since Phil, you know, my mother…”

  I nodded. Then I gestured at the cabin at our backs. “Have you cleaned up in there yet?”

  She shook her head. “Don’t tell my mother. I just haven’t had the courage.”

  “So far as you know, it’s just the way it was the night Phil Rolando was killed, then?”

  “If I didn’t clean it, nobody did. It’s my responsibility.”

  “Can we talk about the last time you saw him?”

  “Phil?”

  “Yes.”

  “I told you everything.”

  “Can we go over it again?”

  She shrugged. “I guess so. There’s not much to tell. We made love. We had candles. He talked about getting the guy who killed his brother.” She looked at me and shrugged again. “What do you want me to say?”

  “I don’t really know. About getting whoever killed Ken. What did he say about that?”

  “Just that he was going to get him. That he and I’d get him and string him up.”r />
  “Like Bat Masterson, you said.”

  She smiled. “Wyatt Earp, actually. It was so—it seemed childish. Silly. He deputized me. He was going to pin that phony badge on me, but I didn’t have any clothes on, see—”

  “What badge?”

  She smiled quickly. “He had this make-believe badge. I thought I told you.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Well, it’s dumb, anyway. He put it on my breast in its little leather holder, and—”

  “What did it look like?”

  “Jesus, Brady. What difference does it make? It was just a game. We were laughing about it.”

  “Tell me about the badge, Polly.”

  She sighed. “It was in the drawer of the bedside table. He reached across me, opened the drawer, and took it out. And he put it on my breast, like I said, and he said, ‘I hereby deputize you an officer of the law.’ Like that. Then we laughed, and he put the badge back into the drawer.” She arched her eyebrows at me. “You want to know what it looked like?”

  “Please.”

  She frowned. “A star, I think. I mean, I didn’t exactly examine it. But it was a star. Not a shield.”

  “Did it have a circle around it?”

  She nodded slowly. “Yes. Yes, I think it did. A star with a circle around the outside of it.”

  “And you assumed it was a toy.”

  “Well, sure. It was all a joke, anyway.”

  “I suppose it was,” I said. “Can you remember anything else?”

  “About the badge, you mean?”

  “About anything Phil said that night.”

  She stared off toward the lake, which glimmered through the trees. “I know you’re trying to help,” she said softly. “And I know it was me who asked to talk to you. But I don’t like thinking about it. I told you everything. About Phil and about Gib. I feel responsible. I really do. I know that’s irrational. I can’t help it. But I’ll feel that way until I know what really happened to them. Can we—can we not discuss it anymore?”

  I put my arm across her shoulders and hugged her. “Sure,” I said. “End of conversation. If you want to talk again, look me up. Okay?”