Don’t Crowd Me

by Ed McBain

  “Really.”

  “The jewelry house?”

  She nodded. “Uh-huh.”

  I tried to whistle, but it came out like a weak snort. “Nice account,” I mumbled. “Joey tried for months on that one.”

  “Joey?”

  “My partner.”

  “Oh.”

  “Advertising. He tried to get Fowler and Fowler.”

  “Oh.”

  “Who’s the other Fowler?” I asked.

  “I am.”

  “You’re the other Fowler? You’re a partner?”

  “Yep,” she said.

  “Shake, partner,” I said.

  She took my hand, and hers felt warm and firm and small.

  Fowler and Fowler, I was thinking. What an account!

  She glanced at her watch again. “Golly,” she said, “Sam will be furious.” She seemed to have a new idea, and her eyes brightened. “May I borrow your outboard?” she asked.

  “Sure,” I said. “Take my boat, take my kingdom. Take my kingdom, take me. Take me, take a soldier.”

  “You’d better take a nap,” she said. She put down her cup, and I saw she’d barely touched it. I finished it for her and walked her down to the dock. She climbed into the outboard, and I started the motor.

  “Thanks,” she called as she pulled away from the dock. I watched the twin chartreuse buoys she wore around her neck fade away on the lake. The trees were beginning to sway a little as I stumbled back toward the cooktent. I leaned on the table for a few minutes.

  Something on my cooktent floor caught my eye.

  The ice! My goodness, the ice was melting clear down into the floor. I had to get an ice pick. Simply had to get an ice pick.

  I lurched forward and began climbing over the rocks again. I stumbled through the trees and stopped in front of the cooktent on Site One.

  I steadied myself and threw open the door.

  I found the ice pick easily.

  It was sticking out of Johnny’s back where he lay face down on the wooden floor, the blood covering his tanned back and staining the logs a bright crimson.

  CHAPTER THREE

  I did three things when I saw the body. I closed the cooktent door behind me. I took a step forward. I got cold sober in five seconds.

  Oddly, I didn’t think about the body on the floor. My only thought was of the ice that must be melting on my own floor. I almost reached for the pick handle, almost yanked it from between the shoulder blades.

  And then I jerked back in horror, felt the stickiness under my bare feet. I lifted my foot, calmly inspected the hot, sticky blood glued there. The closest I’d come to any sort of violence since I’d been discharged from the Army was an ad we did for an insurance firm. The ad showed a guy who’d just been hit by a car. Mike did a nice job on the art, and my copy led off with, “Death never takes a holiday.”

  I stared down at the body. The ice pick was buried clear to the handle, sticking out of Johnny’s back at a weird angle. It made a little hole and the blood ran out of the hole steadily, like a bleeding wall on a rainy night.

  I backed away from it, my eyes following the trickle of blood. My foot stuck to the planking again. I backed out and slammed the door.

  The sun was still shining, and the sky was still clear blue, a blue that hurt the eyes. The lake sparkled in the sunlight, quiet and undisturbed. A young kid in a canoe paddled by, his blond hair streaming in the wind. And a fly buzzed around my head, swooped down to my foot, and lodged in the blood on my toes.

  I shook him away and ran down to the waterfront. I stuck my foot in the water and washed the blood away, watching the water turn faintly pink, watching the blood swirl away in a billowing cloud, drift out past the dock, vanish in the cold, fresh water.

  I thought again of a kid named Johnny stretched out on a cooktent floor with an ice pick in his back. He’d smiled at me less than two hours ago, a big boyish grin in a wholesome face. Why would anyone want to kill …?

  Sudden terror gripped my senses, held them in a tight vise. What do you do in a situation like this, I asked myself? Do you yell for help? Do you run? What do you do? In the city you pick up a telephone and dial the operator. Then you ask for the police and you wait. What do you do in the middle of the woods on an island in a lake that’s thirty-two miles long?

  The ranger! There was a ranger on Glen Island. He was the one to see, I decided. I ran down to the dock, jumped into Lois’ green canoe and began paddling. I looked back at the cooktent once. All the while I paddled, I cursed the fact that I’d loaned Jean the outboard.

  The ranger on Glen was tall and brown from his constant battle with the sun. He was leaned back in a chair reading a cheesecake magazine. He seemed reluctant to be disturbed, and he lifted shaggy black eyebrows inquiringly when I ran over to him.

  “Are you the ranger?” I asked, breathless.

  “Uh-huh.” He swung the front legs of the chair down until they touched the ground. He closed the magazine and looked up at me.

  “There’s a dead man on Little Harbor,” I said.

  His eyes widened momentarily. He stroked his chin and then nodded slightly.

  “A drowning?” he asked knowingly.

  I shook my head. “He’s been stabbed with an ice pick.”

  “What?” This time his eyes stayed wide open, and he studied my face.

  “Stabbed with an ice pick,” I repeated. “I think you’d better call the mainland.”

  He didn’t say anything for a few minutes. Then he asked, “Been drinking, ain’t you?”

  “I’m sober now,” I said defensively.

  “Maybe I better have a look at this body before I call the mainland, huh?”

  “Whatever you say,” I said.

  He stood up, folded his magazine carefully and stuck it in his back pocket. Then we walked down to his speedboat and he tied a line to my canoe. We both climbed into the speedboat and he started for Little Harbor.

  “How’d you discover this body?” he asked. Every time he said “body” he stressed the word, as if it were an utter impossibility.

  “I went to borrow an ice pick. It was lying on the floor in the cooktent.”

  “The ice pick?” he asked.

  “For Christ’s sake no,” I shouted. “The body. Johnny.”

  “Johnny’s his name?”

  “Yes,” I said angrily. I was beginning to dislike the way he was treating me. Like a kid who turns in a false alarm.

  “Johnny what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I see,” the ranger said. We made the rest of the trip in silence. When we pulled up at the dock on Site One, there was still no one in sight.

  We climbed out and the ranger asked, “Where is it?”

  “Over there,” I said, pointing to the cooktent. “Inside.”

  The ranger walked to the cooktent with long, easy strides. I followed behind him and we stopped just outside the door.

  “In there,” I said.

  “Uh-huh.” He opened the door and looked in. I turned away. I didn’t want to look again. The picture wasn’t a very pretty one the first time.

  “Very nice,” the ranger said. “Someone’s washed the floor.”

  I turned angrily. “Listen,” I barked, “this is no time for corny …”

  The ranger threw open the door and I looked in.

  Just as Jean had said, and just as the ranger had repeated, the floor had been scrubbed clean. It was still wet.

  There was nothing on the floor. No blood. No ice pick. No Johnny. Nothing.

  “It …” I started to say.

  “You oughtn’t to touch that stuff during the day,” the ranger said.

  “What stuff?” I said, grabbing his arm as he started down toward the dock. “Listen, I’m as sober as you are, and there was …”

  “Yeah?” he said, and his eyes told me he thought I was lying. “Then you better stay out of the sun.” He jumped into the speedboat and threw the canoe line onto the dock. I got sore
then, good and sore.

  “Look, you goddamned fool,” I shouted. “A man’s been killed here. Are you going to sit on your fat ass or are you going to do something about it?”

  His face didn’t change at all. He started the engine and said, “You find the man that’s been killed. Then I’ll do something about it.” As the boat eased away from the dock, he added, “Meanwhile, stay out of the sun, pal.”

  He gunned out into the lake. I watched him go, boiling inside. Then I ran up to the cooktent and opened the door again. No body. Nothing. I got down on my knees and looked closely at the floor without going into the tent.

  “Lose something?” a soft voice asked. I jumped to my feet, and turned rapidly. Lois was standing there. She’d lowered the straps on her swim suit, and tied them behind her back. She was ready to burst out of the top piece. She looked very brown and very healthy. The way Johnny had looked.

  “Just get back?” I asked.

  “Yep.”

  “Were your friends home?”

  “Sure.”

  “Have a nice time?”

  “Sure Hey, why all the questions?”

  “Did you see Johnny?” I asked, watching her face.

  She answered calmly, without batting an eyelid. “Not since we said goodbye. He’s probably home by now.”

  “Home?” I asked. “How come? Doesn’t he live in New York?”

  “No,” she said, “he lives right here in Hague. Very close to Bolton Landing. He can get there by bus easily.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “You’re acting strangely,” Lois said.

  “Am I?”

  “Yes. Are you angry with me?”

  “No. No, of course not,” I said softly.

  “Then what is it? What were you looking for when I came up?”

  “I lost something,” I said.

  “What’d you lose?”

  I almost said, “A body.” But I reconsidered this and wondered whether Lois had really been with her friends all afternoon. “Nothing,” I said. “Forget it.”

  She shrugged. “Okay.”

  “Let’s go for a swim, shall we?”

  “Sure,” she said, and she grinned again, as though she was glad I was back.

  We ran down the dock and she jumped into the water first. She came up tugging at the top piece of her suit. I plunged in after her, surfacing a little distance from her. The water felt good, refreshing. I began to wonder if I’d really seen a body at all. Maybe I had been drunk.

  “This suit is too small for me,” Lois said, and I began to see a little of what she was talking about. She struggled with the straps a while longer and then said, “Oh, the hell with it.”

  She ducked under, and when she came up, there was no top piece. Just Lois.

  I swam over and reached for her. She ducked under and I treaded water, waiting for her to surface. She came up behind me, wrapped her arms around my neck and pushed me under. When I rose to the surface she had already swum to the dock, and was scrambling out of the water.

  “Hey,” I yelled, thinking of her top piece. But she’d put it on under water, and it clung to her now, dripping wet, revealing as much as if she’d been without it. Drops of water trickled onto the dock, and I thought of the blood trickling down Johnny’s back.

  What the hell, I told myself. You were drunk. Bodies don’t walk away. You were drunk.

  I swam back to the dock and climbed up beside Lois. She had her head tilted to the sun, her arms stretched out behind her supporting her body.

  “Mmmmmm,” she said.

  I wished for a moment that she were Joey or Mike, someone I could talk to. “Ever see pink elephants?” I asked her.

  “Mmmm.”

  “Does that mean yes or no?”

  “No.”

  She closed her eyes again, her head back, the long black hair falling over her shoulders.

  “You’re kind of cute,” I said, “you know?”

  “Why, thank you, sir!” she answered, her eyes still closed.

  I moved beside her and kissed the back of her neck. She wriggled and took a deep breath.

  The chug-chug of an outboard chopped into the silence. I looked out to see Jean and a big guy turn the bend of the island and head into the inlet.

  “Dammit,” I muttered.

  Lois winked and said, “Later.”

  The outboard pulled up, and Jean kept it away from the shore. “Which dock do you want it at?” she called.

  “Bring it here if you like,” I answered.

  “I see you met my sister,” Lois said, a faint trace of coldness in her voice.

  “Yeah,” I answered. I looked down to the dock where Jean hopped out and wrapped the line around one of the posts. “I guess that’s Sam,” I said to Lois.

  “That’s Sam,” she said, without enthusiasm.

  I’m a pretty big guy. Six-one, weighing a hundred and eighty pounds. But this guy made me look like a flea. He was at least six-five, and he probably weighed two-forty, perhaps more. He was wearing tan gabardine slacks and a dark brown basque shirt. The muscles on his arms bulged out of the short sleeves, and he held his tremendous shoulders thrown back, his barrel chest inflated and huge. He had black, curly hair on his arms and sticking out of the neck of his shirt. The same hair covered his head, hanging in little ringlets over his forehead. He had a broken nose and eyes so brown they looked black. He looked like the stereotype of a wrestler. Or a satire of a Greek god. I pictured him in bed with Jean, and I shuddered a little.

  “Hiya, Nymph,” he called to Lois in a bellowing voice. She winced, and I saw the pain stab deep into her eyes. Sam began chuckling as he walked up the dock, his big-boned face splitting into a grin that bordered on a leer. He walked with all the assurance in the world, like a tiger stepping into a cage with a Chihuahua. I remembered where I’d seen that arrogant stride before. It came with money, plenty of money. Fowler and Fowler. Sam and Jean.

  He dropped his bag near the table and stuck out a beefy hand. “Sam’s the name. Sam Fowler.” He said it as though he were announcing it over a nationwide hookup.

  I remembered shaking hands with Johnny not so long ago. For the moment, I had forgotten that I was the only one, outside of the murderer, who knew Johnny was dead. Or did I know? Where the hell was the body I’d seen? If I’d seen a body.

  I took Sam’s hand and he squeezed hard. It was a handshake designed to make your spine curl up into your cranium. My spine did exactly that, but I felt instinctively that he wanted me to yell, wanted me to yank my hand back. I clamped my jaws tight and hung on. He cocked a black eyebrow over one eye and grinned again.

  “Steve,” I said softly. “Steve Richmond.”

  “I see you’ve already met our little Nymph,” he said, and he winked at Lois.

  I nodded, feeling embarrassed for her.

  “This is my wife, Jean,” he said, taking her hand in his own enormous paw.

  “We’ve met,” I said.

  The grin dropped off his face and crashed somewhere down around his belly. “Oh?” he said.

  “Yeah. We had a drink together this afternoon.”

  I saw a tight little flicker begin on the side of Sam’s nose, just inside his right eye. He glanced at Jean.

  “If you want to call it that,” she said lightly. “Steve poured one for me while I waited for him to start the outboard.” She took Sam’s arm and cooed, “I knew you’d be waiting.”

  Sam smiled down at her, patting her hand with his.

  “Sure,” he said.

  He seemed pacified when Lois threw another big bombshell at him.

  “Johnny was here,” she said, her eyes blazing.

  Sam looked from Lois to Jean, then back to Lois.

  “What the hell did he want?”

  I thought again of the body lying in the cooktent. Had Sam really been on the mainland?

  “He just came to say goodbye,” Lois said.

  “Good riddance,” Sam mumbled.

  He started
up the path, his head bent low, watching his feet. “Hot as hell,” he told Jean. “I’m going for a dip.” He stopped and said to Lois, “Want to come, Nymph? We’ll try it B.A.”

  When she didn’t answer, he laughed loudly, took Jean’s hand, and walked into the woods toward their cabin.

  “That bastard,” Lois cursed softly. “That lousy bastard.”

  “What’s the trouble?” I asked.

  “He’s a pig,” she spit. “Him and his ‘Nymph.’ That bastard.” She took my arms, gripped them tightly, her fingernails digging into my flesh. “I’m just that way, Steve,” she said, and I thought she would begin crying.

  “Sure,” I answered. “What did he have against Johnny?”

  “Still has,” she said, correcting my unconscious use of the past tense. “He hates his guts.”

  “Why?”

  “Ask him. You see, Sam is not only a bastard. He’s also a very jealous son of a …”

  “I thought you said Jean was a cold tomato,” I interrupted.

  “She is,” Lois said blankly, “Don’t let her fool you.”

  “You can’t judge a book …” I started.

  “Oh, her cover is all there,” Lois admitted. “I guess you noticed that, all right. But there’s nothing inside. Blank pages.”

  I shrugged and watched a crow wing across the sky, swoop low, and disappear in the heavy foliage. From the northern end of the island, a speedboat jutted out into the lake and poured on fire power.

  “It’s Mark,” Lois said. “Call him, Steve.”

  “What the hell for?” I was beginning to dislike Mark and the obvious magnetism he held for anything with skirts on.

  “Call him!” She waved at the boat and yelled, “Mark! Mark!”

  The boat began edging over, never slacking its speed, until it was traveling on a straight line for the dock. Then Mark cut the engine and she drifted in and poked her nose against the dock while he jumped ashore with animal litheness.

  “I was coming over, anyway,” he said. “You didn’t have to yell.”

  “This place is like Grand Central Station,” I protested.

  “I wanted to apologize to Jean,” Mark explained. “I was supposed to pick her up to meet Sam, but I got tied up.”

  “The lye?” Lois asked, the smile playing around her lips again as she secretly caught my eye.