“I guess so.”
“That Jenna was just the other way around. She couldn’t get enough. Funny, isn’t it? Right out of the same family. I don’t know if Donnie will ever find who killed her. Some nights people come from a long way off and drive out to the beach. Me, I think it was somebody like that, from the other end of the county. It would be easier if she was raped, because then it could maybe have been a Negro. But she wasn’t, and I guess that just about every Negro for fifty miles around must know that Donnie checks that beach every now and then and if he caught any of them out there, he’d play hell with them for sure. I think it was some stranger and she got in some kind of drunk argument and got choked. And they took off. Or maybe somebody beached a boat. But one thing, I don’t think that Donnie will give up looking.”
“I guess everybody has their own ideas.”
“Some of them are pretty crazy. Some people say it was on account of the money. They say she got killed because she knew where Spence Larkin hid all the money they never found. So they caught her there on the beach and they killed her and then they went and dug it up. They made her tell where it was. That’s plain silly, because the night she was killed she came in here without a dime. Harry’d said not to let her have any more on credit. But there was always somebody to buy her a drink. If she was out of money and knew where it was, she would have gone and dug it up, wouldn’t she?”
“Looks like she would.”
“Nobody is ever going to find that money except by some kind of accident maybe. And then I bet there won’t be much left of it. Not in this climate.”
She looked toward the doorway and her face changed in an almost dramatic way, becoming instantaneously blank, almost sleepy. Doyle heard the screen-door cylinder hiss.
He turned and saw Deputy Donnie Capp standing just inside the door. “Hello, Doyle,” he said. “Hello, Janie.”
“Hello, Mr. Capp,” she said faintly.
Capp moved in on Doyle’s left and stood at the bar. Doyle could scent the animal sharpness of Capp’s perspiration.
“Hear Charlie’s going in the navy, Janie.”
“I guess that’s right.”
“Maybe you took off twenty pounds and stopped stuffing that hungry gut of yours, you’d look better than the navy. Harry should have pounded your butt for you the very first time you started sneaking off in the brush with that Charlie. You was so sure of Charlie, Janie, you let yourself get real sloppy. Now what you going to do? Want I should pick you a husband off the road gang? Anything I tell those boys to do, they’ll do, no matter how it could ugly up their future.”
Tears had started to roll down her white face, but she couldn’t seem to look away from Donnie.
“You trot all that beef up the other end of the bar, Janie. I got words with Mr. Doyle here. I got to call him mister now.”
She moved away, slowly and heavily. Capp said, “If the slut had a head on her, she’d grab Harry. They aren’t blood kin. He’s got the asthma and the high-blood pressure, and she’d end up with a good little business instead of it going to his brother.”
Doyle lifted his beer glass and drank, and was remotely pleased to see that he could keep his hand from trembling.
“You don’t have much to say for yourself, Mr. Doyle.”
“I guess not.”
“Heard you just as I got near the door. You and Janie talking about Jenna. Guess you knew Jenna before she took off with that sailor boy. That was when you were a big athelete. Before you took up stealing. Knew her, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Now you’re getting to know the sister awful damn fast. Can’t see why the Larkins should give a damn what happens to you. Seems real strange to me. And there you are, right out there on the beach near to where she was killed, and near the colonel and his sister. And I’ve got the word to keep my hands off you. Funny.”
“Is there something you want?”
“It don’t make much sense, but I find myself wondering if somehow somebody brought you back here to look into the Jenna killing. You got you a oily satisfied look, like an egg-sucking hound dog. I’d hate to find out you were sticking your nose in something that’s none of your business. I just might have to naturally take this here club and loosen up your insides a little.”
“Why?”
“Because you’d be getting in the way of the law. We can handle everything that has to be done our own selves.”
Capp moved away, silent in the black boots. The screendoor hissed behind him.
A few minutes later, as Doyle got up to leave, an old man came in, a brown old man with soiled white hair, bleached eyes and a white stubble of beard. He stared at Doyle for a moment and said, “Say, I bet you’re Bert Doyle’s boy. You look a lot like Bert when he was alive, afore he got drownded that time.”
“That’s right. I’m Alex Doyle.”
“And you don’t know me at all?”
“Wait a minute. Arnie Blassit?”
“Dead right, boy. When I was fishing shares with old Lucas Pennyweather, you come along with us a lot of times. You made a good hand, for a kid.”
Doyle sat at the bar again and bought a beer for himself and a drink for Blassit. Blassit talked about old times, about the half-remembered people Alex had known before his father died.
“It’s not like it used to be, boy. It’s getting all fished out. We got no closed season on mullets now, but snook is a game fish and you can’t make a catch on trouts any more. I kinda hang on. Too damn old to learn new tricks.”
“How about Lucas Pennyweather? Is he still around?”
“No. He was getting pretty crippled up. And last November a grown daughter of his come all the way down from North Carolina and she and her husband, they took Lucas back up to live with them. One day you’d think he was going to be here forever, and the next day he was gone. It was real sudden. Sold his boat and gear, but sold ’em so fast it was damn near giving them away. I tell you, there was nobody knew these waters any better than Lucas. Some will tell you Spence Larkin knew more, but I say Lucas Pennyweather.”
“He liked kids. I can remember going out with him when I couldn’t have been more than three or four years old.”
And suddenly Doyle remembered a scene that had been buried for years. Old Lucas had taken a half dozen kids out with him on a Sunday to fish with hand lines in a grouper hole not far outside Windy Pass. And on the way back they had passed a small white skiff with a man at the wheel and a little girl sitting in the bow. The little girl was blond and she wore a pink dress, and to Alex, about six at the time, she was the cleanest prettiest thing he had ever seen.
“There goes Spence Larkin and his daughter,” Lucas had told them. “He’s a big important man there in Ramona, and that’s his eldest. He takes her on picnics of a Sunday, down there in those bay islands some place.”
Alex remembered that he had turned and watched the small girl until she was lost in the sunny distances of the bay. And later he had seen Spence Larkin many times alone in the same skiff. It was his commonly known eccentricity to leave his office at the boat yard at any time of day and go off down the bay alone. People said that was where he did his thinking. People said he would go out in that skiff with its ancient engine and chug along and plot new meanness, new ways to make a dollar grow from a dime. He always took a fishing rod and a tackle box that he kept in his office, but he didn’t do much fishing.
Arnie Blassit chuckled and said, “Just about the last thing old Lucas did in this town was get himself arrested on suspicion of murder. Didn’t mean anything. Everybody who’d been right here in the Mack the night Jenna Larkin got choked to death, they got picked up. Me too. But me and Lucas, we could clear each other. We run out of drinking money along about eleven, and we were sharing a shack down to Chaney’s Bayou, and we had come up in my boat and tied her right across the road there. So about eleven we went on back down the bay together and the first thing we knew about it, them deputies come and took us all the way over
to Davis and locked us up. Let us go the next day. Lucas sure was mad. Thing was, he’d spent some time talking to Jenna that night. I thought about that. It was as if the Lord give her one final chance to be nice to somebody and she took it.”
“How do you mean?”
“Up to that last night she didn’t have any time or any politeness to spare for any old beat-down fishermen. There was a good crowd and after we’d been in a few minutes, standing right over there, she come over to us and was real nice. She wanted to talk about the old days. And after a while she took Lucas right over there to that corner table, and they sat there and talked a long time. And when it finally broke up, some of us were kidding Lucas till he got pretty mad about the whole thing. And then he made it worse for himself by saying that he’d made a date with her to go out in the boat the next day and look around the bay islands. Matter of fact, Alex, when they come and took us to Davis, Lucas was just getting ready to take the boat on up to the yard and pick Jenna up. But she was dead by then. And it sure upset Lucas to hear about it.”
“I guess the whole town was upset from what I hear.”
Blassit chuckled again. “I see that Donnie Capp leaving as I come down the street a little while ago. Now I guess he was the one most upset. That boy is just as mean as a snake. And he’d been trying to move in on Jenna. Now there’s a lot of things people called her, but nobody called her especially choosey when it come to men. But she wouldn’t have a thing to do with that Donnie Capp. She just laughed at him. I’ve heard that Donnie has made some gals real willing by roughing ’em up a little first, but he couldn’t take a club to Jenna and get away with it. Matter of fact, he was the one broke up Jenna’s nice little talk with Lucas. Went right over and sat with them without any invitation, and after a while she got tired of him listening, so she went away. Donnie sat there and talked to Lucas for a while, and then he left. I guess Donnie thought he was getting close to talking Jenna into something, because he sure acted like a crazy man after he found she’d been killed. He put knots on half the heads in the county until the sheriff got him soothed down some.”
“Arnie, I’ve got to run along. It’s been good to see you again.”
He drove back out to the cottage. After he had unloaded his purchases he took a walk on the beach until the afterglow of the sunset had died to streaks of yellow and green close to the western horizon.
He fixed a simple supper, and after he had cleaned up he sat and smoked in the dark on the little screened porch and thought about the days of childhood. The vivid memory of Jenna in the pink dress had aroused other memories. They were memories of the other life that he had tried to forget, telling himself that it had all been bad. But in the reawakened memories there was much that was good.
And later he began to think about Jenna. And he began to wonder why she had been pleasant to old Lucas. She must have had some reason. There must have been something she wanted.
chapter SEVEN
ON FRIDAY MORNING at eleven, Alex walked up the beach to the Proctor cottage, carrying the two spinning rods. When he was a hundred feet from the porch, Celia M’Gann came out and walked to meet him.
“I expected you yesterday, Mr. Doyle.”
“Sure sorry about that, but something came up.”
“You didn’t have those terrible bruises on your arms and legs. Did you fall?”
“Guess you could say I fell into a deputy sheriff, ma’am. He came out to have a little talk with me. He talked with a club, mostly. That was Wednesday, and I was too stiffened up to get much done yesterday.”
“Were you drinking? Why did he hit you?”
“Sort of on general principles, I guess.”
“Was it a man named Capp?”
“That’s him. Donnie Capp.”
“I had difficulty with that man. I don’t like him at all. He was determined to bother the colonel. And I was just as determined that he wouldn’t. He was very rude.”
“Here’s the stuff I bought for your brother.”
“How much do I owe you?”
“Here’s the receipt, ma’am.”
She told him to wait and went into the house and came out with the exact amount in cash, and said that the colonel would be out in a few moments.
Colonel M’Gann came out of the cottage and came slowly down the steps. He was a big man, almost uncomfortably thin, but with the look and bearing of someone who had once been much heavier. He had gray hair like his sister, and the same strong planes and structure of face. He wore rope sandals, khaki shorts. He was tanned, but it was tan over an unhealthy skin tone. There was a strange remoteness about him, not coolness or unfriendliness, but merely a vast indifference.
“The mackerel was excellent, Mr. Doyle. My sister and I thank you.” As he spoke Alex had the feeling that the colonel was looking through him and beyond him.
The three of them went to the water’s edge, and Doyle showed Colonel M’Gann how to handle the spinning tackle. He learned with that special quickness possible only to people who combine manual dexterity with that sort of analytical mind which quickly perceives the purpose of each movement. Yet it seemed a sterile effort. M’Gann obviously had no interest in it, was merely attempting to please his sister.
“No point at all, Colonel, in standing out here and whipping up the water when you don’t see any activity. Say, it looks like something going on up the beach there a ways.”
Celia tagged along. But when they moved farther, she said she would get lunch started and went back toward the house.
They caught several small jacks and released them. M’Gann said, “Thank you very much for the lesson, Mr. Doyle.” He walked up onto the dry sand and sat down. “I think I’ll rest for a few moments and then walk back to the house. I still tire easily.”
Doyle sat beside him. “You better rinse the rod and reel off in fresh water when you get back.”
“Yes, of course.”
Doyle turned so he could watch M’Gann’s face and said, “They are still having a great deal of trouble with the Henderson circuits, sir. They haven’t gotten the bugs out yet.”
For long moments the colonel still stared out toward the Gulf, his face impassive. And then he turned and looked at Doyle. The remoteness was gone. And Doyle was aware of the unforgettable impact of a truly strong personality.
“You’re clever, Mr. Doyle. If that’s your name. Who sent you?”
“Colonel Presser.”
“I should have guessed. Austin has always had a taste for intrigue and melodrama.”
“The problem was to contact you, sir. The strangers they sent down couldn’t make it. Your sister has…”
“Celia has been very diligent about shielding me from all pleas and requests. This little subterfuge will annoy her. She can’t seem to understand that I am willing to say no—to Austin Presser or anyone else.”
“Can you tell me why you’d say no, Colonel? Is it… health?”
The colonel looked out across the Gulf. “I am getting stronger. As a civilian consultant, I could pace myself. But it is as if all that work was done by somebody else. Far away and long ago. I can’t go back now, Doyle. I never thought that anything could become more important to me than my sense of duty and obligation. Right now I have a personal problem. Call it an emotional problem. I don’t intend to explain it to you. Until it is solved, if it ever can be solved, I am… incapable of considering anything else.”
“And if you solve this… emotional problem?”
“I can go back to work. And make Austin happy. But you see, Mr. Doyle, one possible solution to my problem would be for me to see how far and fast I can run down this beach.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I don’t expect you to understand. Sometimes a man can find himself in a maze that seems insoluble. Laboratory rats, faced with an insoluble maze, have been known to give up and lie on their backs and nibble their forepaws. I find that quite touching to contemplate. A man in the process of trying to find a solution to wh
at seems to be an insoluble problem, Mr. Doyle, is not inclined to devote his time and energies to his profession, no matter how vital his work may be. I am sorry. You may tell Austin I am sorry.”
Doyle remembered with distaste the next phase of his instructions. “Colonel Presser seems to feel that you are brooding over the death of your wife, Colonel. He has acquired a long and accurate file on her. It isn’t pleasant reading. I can give you some of the facts.”
“I’m not interested, Doyle. I made a very bad marriage. It took me a long time to become aware of how bad it was. My wife was a reckless, selfish, faithless woman. I met her at a time when she had a yearning for respectability, apparently.”
“Then I don’t understand.”
“There is nothing for you to understand.”
“Colonel M’Gann, if your wife’s murderer was caught, would you then be willing to go back to work?”
M’Gann looked at him quickly, with an odd expression, as though Doyle had shocked him. Yet, to Doyle, it had seemed a most obvious question.
“I might.”
“Here comes your sister. Are you going to tell her about this?”
“I see no point in telling her. I can’t see that you have changed anything.”
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