by Chris Wiltz
“How'd you know about that?” Ah, a spark of life.
“I ran into him that night. He told me there'd been some trouble.”
“I'll say. He came back in a coupla hours later and accused me of pickpocketing him. He said his wallet was missing after he left Curly's. Maybe so, but he sure had it while he was in there. He paid us off out of it. Right?”
“So what did you do?”
“I told him to eat it. He got so filthy-mouthed that Curly came over and tossed his ass out. Told him he'd call the cops if he bothered to come back.” He shook his head. “Curly, Curly.”
“Come on, Murphy. What else do you know about Groz? Do you know where he lives? Does he work? I need it all, Murph. It's important.”
He talked into his been “I know all the four letter words he knows.” He looked at me. “He's a drunk. He always came to Curly's in the morning and he was always drunk. He's lost all his coordination from drinking. He blows the easy shots. It's like he can't concentrate anymore. I tell you what, Neal, if that guy wasn't so crocked all the time, he'd be dangerous. You know what I mean?”
I thought I did. I asked him if Groz had ever brought a woman into Curly's or ever talked about Lucy. Murphy said the only woman he'd ever heard the Boy Scout talk about was some mother or another.
I stayed with Murphy for a while, drank several beers, and tried to snap him out of it. There seemed to be no way. He wouldn't even stand me for a fifty dollar game of pool. I finally figured he would just have to go through his time of grief.
I left Grady's more loaded than I needed to be, but I felt bold. And in no mood to go home.
28
* * *
Getting Warm
I went through the sparse forest, the picture-book forest. Lamps glowed softly through the trees, but the houses and the spaces between them were dark. I got that feeling again that they were all unoccupied, unreal. I felt my attitude changing. It was never quiet like this in the Channel, but loud and crass and cramped. I knew my roots were still there, but I wondered if my heart was. I reflected on the effect of the booze in my system. It didn't seem like my heart should be thudding like it was.
Catherine came to the door with a robe wrapped loosely around her, her hair tossed from sleep, thick looking. She showed no surprise that I was there.
“Have you been alone long enough now?” I asked her.
“Yes.”
I went in and kissed her like I was coming in from work. “I've had a lot to drink.”
She looked at me without expression. “I'll make you some coffee,” she said.
I sat in the kitchen and watched her pour water into a small drip pot. We didn't speak. Every now and then she would turn from the stove and look at me.
She sat across from me and watched while I sipped coffee. Under her watchful eyes, I felt compelled to say something.
“I didn't come here for coffee.”
“I know.” She put her hands together and rested her chin on her fingertips. Her body swayed back and forth slightly.
This time I led the way to the bedroom. We handled each other gently, a bit hesitantly, like neither of us had ever had anyone before. She didn't shudder or shake, but my quick first response left both of us trembling. We lay there kissing and stroking, first-time lovers still filled with desire, unable to rest. We lay there until I felt my blood soar again, and this time we got lost in it. There was no time, just the darkness, the dampness, and the way we moved. We fell away from each other; hardly able to keep our fingertips touching. I took her hand and put it over my heart and held it there.
We stayed like that until the cool air forced us to find the covers. She put her head on my shoulder and lay in the crook of my arm, getting warm. I didn't feel the least bit sleepy. I looked around the dark room, seeing the outlines of the bookcases. I thought I could see the pictures, the dark statuettes. I could feel the brown and beige atmosphere of the large room, so unfamiliar, so unlike any other room I'd ever been in. Territory that was not mine, the territory of the warm body next to me. I would enjoy the gradual feeling of becoming at ease in this alien atmosphere. I remembered when familiarity finally put me at ease in Myra's green and white bedroom. It had taken a long time because I couldn't get over knowing that I was not the only man who shared her most personal place with her. Things would be easier for Catherine and me. I had a place now, too. I thought about our time together there. I thought it might even be nice to move out of the Euclid, get a place where there were trees and a yard, more of a house. I thought about all the choices there could be. Catherine's breathing seemed deep and regular.
“Neal?” It surprised me when she spoke.
“Hm.”
“It's nice like this, isn't it?”
“Yes.”
“It's been a long time for me, Neal.” The way she said it, I waited for her to go on, like she was going to make something clear to me. “What about you?” she asked.
“Yes. It's been a long time for me, too.”
I waited again.
“Was it someone you were in love with?”
“Yes.”
She didn't speak for a long time. I was starting to drift off.
“Why aren't you with her now? Why didn't you marry her?”
I thought about all the times I'd tried to make an honest woman out of Myra. “Honey, you're not rich enough,” she told me. She had wanted me to buy her a house. So I lived at home, saving every penny. I was going to get her the biggest, finest house I could. “She's dead. She was murdered.”
Catherine's body tensed. She didn't ask me any more about it. I turned to her and put my arms around her. We fell asleep that way.
29
* * *
The Milton McDermotts
When I woke up that morning Catherine was gone. She'd left me a note that she would be at the hospital and would see me later. I put my message under hers—I would be in Florida. I went back to the Euclid first to get my gun.
I decided to find out at the New Orleans post office what points a letter postmarked Gulf Breeze could have been mailed from instead of trusting my Chevy to get me to Florida before the post office there closed. I left with a list that included most of Santa Rosa County and parts of Escambia County and spent the better part of the next five hours on an irritably hot and uneventful drive east. Just mile after mile of uninteresting express highway that starts to roll a bit after you get out of the flat land New Orleans sits on. I bypassed Pensacola and the beach area by staying on the highway until I had to get off to get to Milton, the county seat of Santa Rosa.
It would have been easy if Lucy McDermott had been listed in the directory for either county or if she had a new listing, but those are the kinds of things a private detective does first that always add up to a big zero. There weren't enough McDermotts in either county to sneeze at, so I jotted all of them down with their statistics. After all, Lucy's dead aunt could be one of them just like she could be any other name that was listed. After that I went over to the municipal building where the records are kept and got a cooperative guy there who liked that I was from the hot spot on the river and wanted to try to find me a clue. But first he wanted to know the current status of Bourbon Street. And that only after he had given me a rundown of the singularly swinging time he'd had on the strip many years ago. He still had the name of every joint he'd visited carefully filed away in a prominent memory cell, along with the name of his favorite stripper in each one. He chuckled, chortled, and snorted over it all and finally got around to asking for the second time what I needed. He went through some files and told me that no Lucy McDermott had been born or married there, nor had she died there, and that he sure would like to do some more digging, but it was time to close and I should come back tomorrow.
The first name on my Santa Rosa list of two was Avery McDermott on Sycamore Street, Milton. I drove slowly down the street past municipal row to a pleasant, tree-lined avenue. There wasn't a gas station on every corner in Milton and it
took me a while to find one and get directions.
I passed through a section of Milton with old rambling houses and cottages on spacious lawns. Then the houses got smaller and closer together, and by the time I turned down Sycamore Street, lawns were almost nonexistent and the residences ramshackle. I found number 406 by a process of elimination and went up the three steps where I noticed the number, under several layers of paint, over the top step, underneath the screened door. A man in a white undershirt and a fat cigar jutting angrily out of his mouth answered my knock. He pushed the point of his belly up against the screen, which put him about two feet away from me on the other side of the door. He planted himself and grew out of the flooring.
“I ain't answering no survey questions and I ain't buying nothin’,” he said and bit his cigar.
“I'm not conducting a survey and I'm not selling anything,” I answered. “I'm looking for Lucy McDermott.”
He chewed his cigar over that and said, “My wife's name is Ethel.”
“Do you know Lucy McDermott? Or maybe you're related to her,” I suggested.
“No.” He uprooted himself and closed the door in my face.
I made a firm decision to try a different approach with George, who lived on (you might know) Myra Street a couple of miles to the east of Milton.
Myra Street was a combination of the old and the new. The house I was looking for was of the latter, a low-slung ranch-type affair with a picture window and horseshoe drive. They were still working on the sidewalks in front of it. I parked and jumped across the moist, dug-up earth and went up the drive to the door. Another screen separated me from George, a tall thin man with nervous eyes, one long eyebrow above them, a beak of a nose, and a gaunt face.
“Mr. George McDermott?”
“Who's askin'?” It was a shallow voice that clipped the words out. Not at all the kind of voice you'd have expected to come out from underneath that nose.
“The name is Rafferty. I'm a private investigator from New Orleans.”
“That so,” he said like he was real interested.
“I'm trying to locate a woman named Lucy McDermott. Ever heard of her?”
He paused longer than he should have had to. “No, can't say that I have,” he said, “but I tell you what. You hang on there and I'll go get my wife. She's always gettin’ together with the womenfolk around here and she just might know. You hang on.”
He made sure the screened door was locked, closed the door behind it and locked it, too, and I hung on. I should have known better but the idea to bolt didn't get strong until I had smoked a cigarette halfway down. I ground it out and was leaving when I heard the lock being turned. George McDermott shoved a pudgy woman, who kept running her tongue across her top lip, ahead of him to the door. She coughed discreetly and swiveled her head to glance up and back at him and got a prod in the back for bothering.
“I never heard of a Lucy McDermott,” she blurted, her voice raising an octave on the first syllable of Lucy.
“You sure now, honey?” The words were crawling from George's mouth now. “This man's come all the way from New Orleans to find her, so it must be important.” His eyes darted from the street to me and back again.
The woman didn't answer She didn't have to—George had stalled long enough. A black and white job with a cherry on top turned into the horseshoe. Two men in khaki uniforms alighted lethargically from the car, one of them resting his hand on his gun butt.
“This here's the man, Earl,” George clipped self-importantly.
“Well, now, you done right to call me, George.” Earl turned his receding sandy curls to me. He still had on sunglasses although the sun had long since started slipping its way into the west. “Looks as if you and me are going to get the opportunity to know each other, mister,” he drawled. I thought grimly of going through the Big City P.I. Has Showdown With Small Town Law Enforcement Official routine. “Give him a go over, Shark.”
Shark had a face that could have stopped a train. His nose was so bent it looked like it was trying to get in his right eye, one cheek was going to be blue and puffed and a little higher than the other one forever. I could have fit my kitchen table in his mouth and used his top lip for a tablecloth. But Shark knew his business. He lumbered over with his right hand still on his gun butt and with his powerful left twisted my right arm behind me and shoved me over to the car, thereby indicating that I should assume a position against the car amenable to search. I did. He poked, prodded, slapped, scraped me down and swiftly extracted my gun.
“Thought you'd want to know, Earl,” George was saying behind me.
“Sure thing. I always want to know when we got a visitor.” Shark turned me around so I could see him niftily slide my gun through the air where it thudded neatly in Earl's hand. “Well, now, mister,” Earl said as he inspected the machinery, “I think we oughta let the McDermotts here get back to their peaceful home life while you and me have a nice informative chat back at the department.” His deputy's badge glinted in the light over the door.
“That's too bad, George,” I imitated Earl's drawl and threw some disappointment around the edges. George's one eyebrow shot up involuntarily. “That you won't get to watch me bite the deputy on the hand.”
Earl gave a derisive laugh as the door whooshed back into its frame, but Shark didn't like my sense of humor. “Watch that business,” he muttered threateningly through his thick lips and pushed me down into the back seat. The doors locked me behind a strong mesh screen. Shark climbed in front with Earl.
“You sure you wouldn't feel safer if I was wearing handcuffs?” I asked, but no one answered. I wouldn't exist until we were in the sheriff's office.
30
* * *
The Dead Aunt
Earl slapped a straight-backed chair on the side of his desk and eased himself on top of a frayed cushion in the seat of a wooden swivel chair behind it. Six pairs of eyes watched every move. The only person in the big room who was uninterested was Shark. He busied himself with the loose papers lying all over his desk. Earl carefully removed his sunglasses and rested them on top of a plastic pen holder. A finger darted under a stack of paper, bending the edges back so he could sneak a look at whatever was underneath. He diddled around some more so that he could build up the suspense that was already killing me. When I could stand it no more, he leaned back, folded his hands over his stomach, and gave me his undivided attention.
“State your name and your business,” he said efficiently. I did. “You got an identifying card?” He leaned forward, extending his index and third fingers. I took out my wallet and showed him. He looked at it a long time, then turned it over and looked at it some more. I got a hard stare as he handed it back. He examined me almost as minutely as he had the card. I held my eyes open for inspection and remembered not to sigh too audibly. This Earl was tough, no two ways about it. He set his face into a plastic smile.
“Now you know, Rafferty, most gun-carrying strangers who come to our town here remember to drop by and give us a howdy-do. I guess it slipped your mind, though.” He was being so polite I wished I had a raw beefsteak to shove down his throat.
“No, it didn't slip my mind,” I said. The smile started slipping out of the corners of his mouth. “I didn't know it was a town custom.”
He tightened the smile into a grimace. “Well, now you know.” He picked up a ballpoint pen and clicked it slowly a couple of times. “Just what business you got in our neck of the woods?”
“I'm sure George was happy to fill you in on that.”
The pen clicked to writing position and he shoved the point into the stack of papers. “I want to hear it from you,” he said, not quite yelling. The paper shuffling around the room slackened and stopped. The only sound was the slow click of the pen as Earl's big thumb mashed the button. Furtive eyes darted conspicuously and ears flapped in the breeze. Earl swept the room through slits and the paper moving resumed. Things must have been slack in Santa Rosa.
“Okay,” I
said. “I guess George was too excited to get it straight.” His big thumb came down so hard on the pen that his nail turned white. “I'm trying to locate a woman named Lucy McDermott for questioning in connection with the murder of her employer in New Orleans. I understand she spent time in the neighborhood of Gulf Breeze. Could be she has relatives in the area that she might be staying with, so here I am.”
He stared at me with a face devoid of comprehension, or any expression for that matter “Hey, Shark. Where've I heard the name Lucy McDermott before?”
Shark swiveled his chair languidly. “We got an APB on net” Shark was one of those types who always mutters threateningly no matter what he is saying, only he could adjust the mutter to carry over a mountaintop.
“Don't tell me,” I said to Earl. “You knew it all along.”
His neck jutted, pushing his face halfway across the deck. “Now you look here Mr. Wise Guy. We gonna get somethin’ straight and we gonna get it straight right now. This here, right here,” he slapped the desk, “is the law in this town. When the sheriff ain't here, I'm in charge. You got business here, you come and speak it to me or the sheriff. Now that's the first thing you ought to remember. The second thing is we don't like strangers like you showing up on the doorstep of our private citizens askin’ a lot of questions. We ask the questions around here and people like George McDermott know that and like it. Now if you don't like it we got ways of makin’ you like it. The fact of the matter is that we got out own ways of doin’ just about everything. And that's why we got law and order in this county and people that like law and order.” He sat back like he'd just made the acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize.
“I can see that you keep your boys busy and in shape, though.” He either didn't get it or let it pass. He just sat there looking like he didn't understand anything, which I decided was his way of being tough. “Look, Deputy, I wasn't trying to cut you boys out of the action. For all I know there won't be any. I may be in the wrong part of Florida. The woman may have come from Miami and just liked to visit the beach areas around here. All I know is she had an aunt who died and who she was close to and that she liked Gulf Breeze. So I thought I'd take a trip down here and check out the records for inheritances over the past couple of months. Maybe the aunt owned a house around here and left it to the McDermott woman. Only trouble is I got here a little too late to do much checking. Sure, it's a shot in the dark, but what does anyone have to go on? The woman's holed up somewhere and this is as good a place to start looking as any.”