The Crossroads

by John D. MacDonald

  It was a car down there. Maybe last night some tipsy kids had driven into their necking area a little too recklessly. He knew he would have to report it. He resented having seen it. It spoiled the day. He checked the nearby road network against his map until he was certain of his location, and then headed for his home port.

  After he had tied the Cub down, he walked over to the main terminal building and called the Sheriff’s office.

  “My name is Derlock. I want to report seeing a car sunk in a pond south of here.”

  “You what?”

  “I was up in my airplane and I saw a car under water.”

  “What kind of car?”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea. It’s a red car. I’d say it’s in thirty feet of water.”

  “You were up in an airplane and you saw a car in thirty feet of water?”

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe it’s an old junker somebody just run in there.”

  “I wouldn’t have any idea. And maybe it went in by accident and is full of drowned schoolchildren. I don’t have any intention of finding out. I’m just reporting it.”

  “Give me your name, address and occupation, mister.”

  “Don’t get hard with me, friend.”

  “I’m not getting hard with you. I got to fill out a form on this. People report things, I got to fill out a form. We get these crackpot calls.”

  “I’m a crackpot?”

  “I don’t get hard with you, you don’t get hard with me.”

  Derlock gave him all the information he required, and told him where the pond was. “It looks as if it was an abandoned quarry or gravel pit.”

  “I think I know the place.”

  “How about letting me know what you find out?”

  “Mister, if there’s somebody in there, you’ll read it in the paper. If you don’t see anything in the paper, it means it’s just a false alarm.”

  “You make being a good citizen such a pleasure.”

  It was two in the afternoon before a car with two deputies arrived at the flooded gravel pit. The wrecker was there. A burly man in his underwear stood soaking wet beside the wrecker.

  “Is there a car in there?” the older deputy asked.

  “Yeah. There’s a car in there. And it’s deep. And that water is like ice.”

  “You get a hook on it?”

  “We’re just about to try.”

  “So try.”

  “Wait’ll I get my breath from the last time, will you?”

  The heavy wrecker was parked parallel to the shore. Cable had been unreeled from the winch drum. The burly man picked up the hook and waded out with it until the water was high on his chest.

  He turned and said, “Marty, this hook is going to take me down like a rock.”

  “So don’t forget to let go of it later on, Joe.”

  Joe looked at the deputies, with a disgusted expression. “I have to be the one who can swim. Goodbye, men.”

  He disappeared. Wire cable snaked into the water. The other man kept a close watch over it to keep it from snarling. The cable stopped. The long seconds went by. The three men stared at the water. Suddenly Joe burst up to the surface, gasping. He swam toward them and waded, shivering, to shore.

  “You get it?” Marty asked.

  “I got it wedged good the first time, boy. I didn’t want to have to go down there again. Haul her up.”

  Marty got in the cab and started the winch. The cable slowly came taut, angling down into the water. The rear duals slid on the gravel, angling the rear end toward the water. The tires snubbed against a small stone ridge and the cable began to come in. Joe had put his clothes back on.

  Raising his voice over the whine of the winch one of the deputies asked, “Some old crate?”

  “No. New enough. Convertible. Ford, I think.”

  They watched the water. They saw it under the surface. The sodden canvas roof came into view first, then the rear window and the rear end. When just the front wheels were left in the water, the man in the cab stopped the winch, started the wrecker and drove part way up the slope, pulling the car away from the water. Water ran steadily out of the car, trickling back toward the water.

  “Maybe we got something,” the older deputy said. “Walterburg plate. This year’s.” He was peering in the window. “Seems to be empty.” He opened the door. The trapped water belched out onto his shoes, and he cursed.

  “Luggage,” the other one said.

  “They can trace it from the plate,” Joe said.

  “That’s handy to know,” the younger deputy said.

  The older deputy walked to the rear of the car and tried the trunk compartment lid. It was latched, but not locked.

  He lifted the lid.

  The force of the water trapped in the trunk, as it rushed out, moved the body of the woman just enough so that the upper part of her torso spilled out of the trunk, hung head down over the rear bumper, the legs caught inside the trunk. The man was wedged back in there, his sightless eyes open.

  The one named Joe turned away, walked a dozen feet, and began to be sick. The one called Marty cursed without emphasis. The older deputy turned and walked toward his car radio, taking long strides in his damp shoes.

  Sharry and Gold were conferring with two FBI specialists when the report came in. The four of them arrived at the gravel pit in a little under twenty minutes. After a preliminary examination the bodies were taken in to Walterburg, to the city morgue. There it was determined that the woman had been shot twice in the back and once in the chest with thirty-eight-caliber slugs. One slug had smashed her left shoulder. One had gone entirely through her at the waist, shredding the right kidney, perforating the intestinal tract. The third one, entering the chest cavity from the front, had been immediately fatal. Peter Drovek identified the woman as his wife, and made a tentative identification of Lawrenz, later confirmed by Martin Simmons of the Crossroads Corporation.

  Five minutes after the bodies had been taken away from the gravel pit, the first reporters arrived and had to be content with pictures of the murder car as it was being towed out toward the highway.

  Sharry and Gold stood in a corridor at Police Headquarters.

  “No money,” Gold said. “No money at all.”

  “Who do you like?” Sharry said, unnecessarily.

  “Brodey.”

  “So let’s go get him.”

  They got the warrant and went and got Brodey. On the way in, after five minutes of asking questions and getting no answers, Brodey gave up. He rode in sulky silence.

  They didn’t book him. They put him in a room and locked the door and left him there, to enjoy the decor of bare walls, bare floors, scarred oak table and chairs, barred window and peanut-can ash trays.

  They let him sit and think and sweat until six o’clock. While Brodey was sweating it out, Sharry and Gold made a trip to the hospital. And, after getting the information from the old man with less difficulty than they had anticipated, they requested the co-operation of a local man who kept large amounts of cash on hand.

  At six o’clock, Sharry, Gold and a department secretary went into the room where Brodey was waiting. Sharry carried a brown paper bag. He put it on the table.

  “What the hell is the idea of all this?” Brodey yelled.

  They ignored him. They sat down. They had agreed that this was a very hard operator. They would allow him no chance to fence with them. Shock and surprise would be the most valid weapons.

  They looked at him. Brodey sat down again cautiously.

  “What do you want?” he asked.

  “The whole thing, Brodey. From the beginning.”

  “What whole thing? What beginning? Are you guys nuts?”

  “Give him something to start with, Lew,” Sharry said.

  Sharry picked up the bag and casually dumped the two objects it contained onto the top of the table, tumbling them so they came to rest in front of Brodey. One was a golden sandal, sodden with water. The other object was a heavy
brick of money fastened with three thick red rubber bands. Brodey had no way of knowing that only the top and bottom bills were fifties, and that all the rest were ones.

  Brodey pushed his chair back abruptly. He stared at the slipper and thick packet of bills. He couldn’t seem to stop looking at them.

  “I … I …” He licked his lips. The sharp Adam’s apple bobbed up and down in the lean throat.

  “I just …”

  The room was silent. Without looking at them, Brodey lowered his face into his hands and began to sob. Ten minutes later they were able to start taking notes. Brodey looked down at the floor as he talked. He took them through the double murder.

  “How did you pick that place to hide the money?” Gold asked gently.

  “I never thought anybody’d look there,” Brodey said listlessly. “An old well like that. Weeds growing on it. I figured it was close to the cabin.”

  Sharry and Gold exchanged glances of pure delicious triumph.

  And then Lew Gold, because he did not like Brodey in the beginning, and now liked him less, said crisply, “Thanks!” When Brodey looked up in question, Gold riffled the edge of the block of bills, showing Brodey the ones. He watched Brodey’s expression change. At first the change of expression delighted him. And then it began to make him feel ill.

  So they booked him for murder first, took everything off him he could use to kill himself with, and shut him up in the first of the few cells in which he would live for a few months until it came time to kill him.

  EPILOGUE

  It was a long hot summer, lasting well into October before the first of the cool days came. Papa Drovek came home in late August. He refused to stay with any of his children. He wanted to be in his own house. Sometimes he became a little confused, but most of the time he was just as he had been before. They were able to keep a nurse-housekeeper with him for a couple of weeks before he rebelled and drove her out. Chip took him to the bank and he packed the money back in the box.

  The old man had a new joke. He would grin his tough, tight grin and point at the ugly, puckered scar of the incision and say, “Charlie, this is old man with hole in the head.”

  Nancy went away to school in September, after a frenzy of last-minute shopping and preparation.

  Betty learned that she was once again with child. Leo hoped secretly that this one would be a little less susceptible to the common cold virus.

  Jack Paris sharpened his badminton and handball in preparation for the winter season.

  The predictable hundreds of thousands of cars went by on 71 and 82, and left off the predictable amount of money in the restaurants and motels and shops.

  The winter was long and wet.

  Brodey was killed in February, on a bleak morning. He died badly. He screamed and fought weakly as they carried him to the place of execution.

  The traffic flowed unendingly to Florida, and when the spring days came, the traffic began to flow back. The automobile agency was completed in November and was almost immediately successful.

  In February, after months of tortuous negotiation, Joan and Jack Paris adopted twin girls, age thirteen months.

  On a beautiful morning in May, Chip and Jeana lay brown on a sandy Gulf beach in front of a startlingly modern hotel on Padre Island, just off the Texas coast near Brownsville. They were perhaps fifty feet from the door of the cabana where they had lived for the past fourteen days.

  She wore a swim suit of broad blue and white stripes. He wore matching swim trunks. They sat crosslegged on gaudy beach towels, playing a viciously competitive game of cribbage. Each day they had swum together along the beach until she had given up, and then she had walked along the packed sand parallel to his progress until he had run out of steam. The exercise had hardened him.

  “I think you gave me a very fast count there, woman,” he said.

  “So check it.”

  He advanced the pegs on the board. “No. I’d hate to find out you’re honest.” He crumpled an empty pack of cigarettes. “Out again.”

  “There’s more in the top drawer of your bureau. And you smoke too much.”

  “That sounded alarmingly like a wife.”

  “I’m an alarming wife.”

  He grinned at her, reached and folded strong fingers around the slimness of her ankle. “You know, alarming wife, you might come with me and help me find those cigarettes. Hmmmmmmmm?”

  “What an approach!” she said, counterfeiting dismay. “You are a ravening beast of a husband, and I am a shy, tender, winsome, nervous bride.” Behind her clowning he could detect her sudden excitingly humid response to him.

  “Aw, you’re just another one of those sexy Eyetalians. Cribbage can wait. Come on.”

  As they started toward the cabana, his arm around her waist, she giggled.

  “What’s so funny, butch?”

  “Oh, just thinking what if Pete should phone again at the wrong moment. I’ve never seen you so mad.”

  “He’s got to make the decisions. Leo leans on him. So he was phoning me to take himself off the hook. He’s got to learn to handle Leo just as I had to learn.”

  “After the way you talked to him, he won’t phone again in a hurry, darling.”

  She fixed the blinds. The morning sun was muted in the room, washing everything with warm gold. “Enough of this commercial jabber,” she murmured. “Leave us get on with this honeymoon routine.”

  “It’s all legal,” he said. “So why should I feel as if we’re stealing?”

  “Because it’s so good,” she whispered. When the blue and white suit was off she stood there for him for a moment, proud and half-smiling, especially luminous, and then came into his arms with her own special sound which was part sob, part sigh, part purr.

  About the Author

  John D. MacDonald was an American novelist 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.