The Drowner Read online

“It’s a big part of it.”

  “For God’s sake, get me some cop work so I can live with myself for a little while. I’ve got cop training. This kind of assignment sickens me.”

  “So maybe you’re a little stale, Paul. Try B and B. Broad and bottle.”

  “Let me ask you one question, Mr. Kippler. Am I worth hanging onto?”

  “You’re working out pretty good here.”

  “Then please assign me to something more like police work, and soon, or I’m going to have to get out. I don’t care if it’s something that checks out to be nothing at all, just so long as I get a change from the bedroom circuit.”

  “You’re working in the world’s biggest bedroom.”

  “I can take it, if I get a change once in a while.”

  Kippler sighed. “I shouldn’t do this. But the very next thing that comes along, you get it. The thing I have for you now, I don’t even want to show you the file until you’re in a better mood. So come in in the morning, and best of all, come in with a slight hangover, Paul.”

  And so, that evening, thinking Kippler’s advice might do some good, he dated a girl he knew slightly. They cruised the beach and had a little too much to drink and he kept telling himself he was having a good time, that he was relaxing. He went back with her to her small apartment on the mainland, and as soon as they were inside the small living room, before she had turned a light on, she turned hard into his arms and broke her mouth upward against his in a breathless hunger, dug her nails into his back and canted her body into him in total, unmistakable presentation of herself. For a moment it was fine, until suddenly in the darkness she was the very same woman Rogers had been enjoying, the same woman he had seen over and over again, in different shapes and sizes.

  He pushed her away and went clumping down the stairs, hearing the anger and the disappointment in her voice as she called his name. He drove without thought of destination, left the city and drove north for an hour and found a beach road, a tract for sale, parked and walked through the sea oats and rough grasses to an empty starlit beach, and a sound of surf.

  He sat on the dry sand and tasted the seawind. The fuzziness of the drinks had faded away, but he felt caught in the torment of an agony he could not define, akin to the yearnings of the adolescence a decade and a half behind him. He knew out of a cumulative knowledge that Paul Stanial could not survive much longer as this particular human being unless he found his own meaning again. He wanted prideful work, to use all his skills, all his energies and abilities. And he wanted a woman to go with the work. A woman who knew what he was and what he needed, so that he in turn could give himself to her. So that there could be a communication beyond words and rituals. Not a child-woman who knew none of the tastes and terrors of the world. Nor one hardened by too many emotional abrasions. Just a woman of taste and sensitivity, of such restraint she would not give of herself until she knew the extent of the gift would be known, and then would give deeply and gladly and forever, knowing she would be cherished. Is this, he wondered, too puerile, too romantic an image? I don’t want a breath-taking beauty. I want her to value herself, and me. And I want to value her and my work. I want some damned purpose, some dedication.

  Once he had thought he had the job and the woman, but they had both soured. Now, he realized, with some bitterness, that he was living the daydream of ten million men—to be single, mature, husky, well-paid and have a job in the Miami area with freedom of movement and the chance to develop all the contacts any man could use.

  He looked south where the sky reflected the pink-white glow of the Lauderdale, Hallandale, Miami complex. Sure, fellas. Break all ties and come on down. The biggest hedonistic complex in the known world. One big noisy sunny cauldron of busy butts and ripe red mouths, rare steaks and guitars, skinny-dipping and party games, twisters and gin, kicks and tits, laughter and brass horns, oiled brown backs and tall teased hair. Wade in, guys. Welcome to the most concentrated, gut-wrenching loneliness ever devised by man.

  After a long time he stood up and stretched until the hard muscles of his shoulders popped and creaked, yawned until his jaw ached. The last resentment, he thought. One final day of yearning for what might have been. Then he spat into the sand and headed back to the car.

  Later, after he knew all that was worth knowing about the life and death of Lucille Hanson, he was to remember that day and that evening. It was all beginning then, of course. Perhaps a good starting place was in the afternoon, when that old musician walked down to the boathouse to tell Kelsey Hanson his wife was dead.…

  Kelsey Hanson, all hungers appeased and brute-softened muscles relaxed, lay snorting in his sleep on a white sun cot on the second floor cypress sun deck of an elaborate boathouse overlooking Lake Larra. He wore brief shiny blue trunks. The hero mouth hung open.

  Between her little drowsings there on the big beach towel spread on the cypress planking of the floor, the naked girl looked at him without enthusiasm. She was nineteen, and a student at the local college. Her name was Shirley Feldman. She wished Kelsey could sleep a little more attractively. She yawned and steeped herself in the languor of the afternoon sun, hidden from the world by the wooden wall around the sun deck. Sweaty-sweet, limber-small of waist, usefully round of hip, she was a breasty, brown, sturdy little girl with a face narrow and sensitive and small under the hard mushroom mop of black hair. The sun was a hearty and indifferent weight against her body, yet with a hot sly touch on the places it seldom reached. Her pumpkin-colored play suit, her scuffed sandals and sensible underwear lay spilled a yard away, efficiently shed in a four-breath hiatus between the wine and the loving.

  If only he didn’t sleep like … like a slob. It confused the images, she thought. It made her feel used. There was a choice of patterns. The older man—he was at least thirty—seeks a new clarity of vision through the eyes of an intellectual woman, able to detect the fraudulence of his emotional attitudes and postures and point them out to him in reasoned statement. Mid-century man, without direction, re-examining his male purposes. That made it the project pattern, the one she had discussed at such length with Debbie. But when Debbie had given up and—in a sense—passed him along, Debbie had claimed the whole thing was just a sales posture, saying that Hanson had signed up for a few courses and had hung around the college merely to score with the gullible ones that would believe the lost lamb attitude. But there had to be more to him than that. Debbie had failed because she didn’t have the patience to get past his defenses. Debbie said, with an ugly mouth, he could cry on cue by thinking of sliced onions.

  If such was actually his hunger, then that could be another project in itself, to show him that it was not that important, that he was victimized by a socio-sexual trauma based on some puritanical and primitive consciousness of sin. Liberated by her freedom from sex superstitions, and by a disc of latex, she had certainly showed him, time and again, that it was merely a healthy and companionable reflex, with the cues given in a cheery voice so that a proper and skilful and earnest climax could be achieved; not something to get all knotted up about, sickly and guilt-ridden, not something shameful. That damned priss wife of his had probably contributed more than her share to his emotional shambles. So it was a pleasant, unimportant and gratifying task to prove to him that total honesty was really the ultimate innocence.

  But she wondered why it would all make more sense were he not such a sloppy sleeper.

  Then you could take it hedonistically. The muscles, money and Mercedes, the steaks and wine and speedboat certainly made the tropical life one hell of a lot more instructive for a scholarship student with an impressive IQ far from her New Jersey beginnings. Stay trapped on campus and you might as well have gone to CCNY.

  She wished he could look defenseless and childlike while sleeping. Then it would all be better. Asleep he looked like a cigar smoker at a convention hotel. It gave her a feeling she could not define. An unrest.

  In the hot silence of the afternoon she suddenly heard the slow, ascending clump o
f footsteps on the outside staircase that led from the ground level up to the sun deck and living quarters. She sat up abruptly, rigid and breathless in a panic which astonished her. Then, from the labored cadence of the footsteps, she knew it was the old composer to whom the elder Hansons had loaned the big house before going on their cruise around the world. She stood up slowly and lifted the big gaudy towel and wrapped it around her body, overlapping it above her breasts and tucking it in, in sarong fashion. Giving an old creature like Habad Korody free food and lodging was a pathetic and typical gesture—a yen for culture.

  She had looked him up. He had enjoyed a small vogue a generation ago. He was a dusty footnote in musical history. The fiction was, of course, that he would live in the big house and compose while they were gone. If he dropped dead, no one would install a plaque on the spot.

  He reached the top of the stairs and paused a moment for breath, staring at her. He wore a big planter’s hat, sandals and oversized khaki shorts. His ancient body was skeletal, the parchment-brown hide dried against sinew and bone. There was a tuft of pure white hair in the center of his narrow hollow chest. The shrewd old monkey-eyes gleamed out at her from under the wide brim of the straw hat.

  “What do you want?” she asked in a low scornful voice.

  “I come with a message for the king, O maiden fair,” he said and trudged over to the sun cot and stabbed Hanson cruelly in the softness of his waist with the iron spike of the musician’s finger.

  Kelsey erupted out of his sleep, bubbling and snarling and dazed. He sat up and stared at the old man. “What the hell?” he asked vacantly.

  “Your phone here doesn’t work and so they bothered me at the big house, please would I walk down and tell you. Go to the hospital. Something about your wife. Go talk to somebody named Walmo.”

  “Lucille? Something happened to Lucille?”

  “I’ve told you all I was told.”

  After a motionless moment, Kelsey Hanson gathered himself and raced into the living quarters, leaving the sliding glass door open. The old man stared at Shirley. “Such a college,” he said. “Such an education.”

  “It isn’t anything to you. Who ever heard of you?”

  The old man gave her a simian grin. “Defiance! Anger! Who’s attacking?”

  Hanson came hurrying back out in slacks and a sports shirt. He looked blankly at them and started toward the stairs, patting his pockets.

  “What about me!” the girl yelled angrily. “What about me?”

  Hanson paused and turned back and thrust a ten-dollar bill at her. It fluttered out of her grasp. “Call a cab,” he said and ran down the stairs. His car roared, spewed gravel, whined away up the curving drive.

  She picked up the money and picked up her clothes. “You delivered your message, old man.”

  He looked at her. “And another for you. If it matters. The human voice is an instrument without subtlety. It wasn’t said on the phone, but it was obvious. The wife is dead.”

  The heat of the sun had a different quality. It made her flesh crawl. “You know everything,” she said.

  He shrugged. “I know about little ones like you. Smart little ones. Nothing changes. A little time of defiance and guilt, playing with an empty man like that one. Then you get pulled back to what you thought you were getting away from, girl. The things you think you despise. Home, husband, babies. Fruitful.”

  “You don’t know anything about me!”

  “I knew you forty years ago, and you haven’t changed. His wife is dead. Put on your clothes. Comb your hair. Come to the big house and call a taxi.”

  He turned and went to the stairs and stomped slowly down, hanging onto the railing.

  Two

  Sam Kimber slouched in the oak chair in Sheriff Walmo’s bare office and said in a tired voice, “Harv, you giving me the idea you’re getting too damn diligent about a drowning. It’s hard enough on me as it is, and you know it.”

  Harv Walmo shook his big head sadly. He had two habitual expressions, sadness and heartbreak. “I know it and can’t help it, Sam. We just got to trace out where Miz Hanson was and why. You see any stenographer here taking notes? This is just you and me. Now what was your exact relationship to the decedent?”

  “Dear Jesus,” Sam Kimber said softly. He was a long gnarled knuckly powerful pale-eyed man with a lazy effortless look of importance. “You can answer it yourself. My exact relationship was she was my woman, as everybody guessed and nobody could prove.”

  Walmo moved and aligned papers on his desk. “When did this intimate relationship with the decedent begin?”

  Sam Kimber jerked himself erect and stared at Harv with astonishment and anger. “Now just exactly what the …” He stopped suddenly, aware of the little flags and signals and alarms in the back of his mind. In a moment the equation was clear. Because they had always known each other, since earliest memory, he had made Harv an exception to his working rule that all friendships were conditional and limited. From the years of hunting, fishing, gambling, drinking and wenching with Harv Walmo, and due to the small pressures he had exerted which had gotten Harv elected sheriff some years back, he had thought the friendship was something true and lasting for them both. He looked into Harv’s sad eyes and saw a little shift and glint back in there, a satisfaction, and knew it was his first clue in all these years to a hidden store of jealousy and resentment. It saddened Sam Kimber. So this too was false. And here and now, for the first time in all these years, Harv Walmo had his chance to lean a certain amount of unpleasant weight on his benefactor, and he was enjoying it. Because, after all, they had started even, and Harv would have to believe all of it was luck, not that Sam was the better man.

  Sam slouched again, crossed his ankles, grinned at Harv with a wicked amiability and said, “Now any other man owning so much grove land and developments and little pieces of this and that around these here three counties, a sheriff starting to get feisty, he’d stand on his rights and yell for a lawyer. But you and me, we’re friends all our life, Harv. Isn’t that so?”

  “I’m just …”

  “Doing your sworn duty to the people voted you into office, and I respect you for it. I’m right proud to have for a friend a man who’ll put his duty way to hell and gone ahead of his chance of getting re-elected.”

  Walmo was motionless for a moment. “You never said a thing like that to me before, Sam.”

  “You never give me cause. It’s a hot month and a hot day, and time we stopped wearing each other out and got back to making sense. You want me to talk about Lucille, I’ll talk about Lucille. And things will be just the way they were.” Which, Sam thought, we both know is a damn lie, but one we’ll have to live by from here on.

  “I’d like for you to tell me, Sam,” Walmo said.

  “It goes against me to talk about a woman. Any little ol’ swamp kitten is good for a story, like them two down to Arcadia that time, remember? But Lucille, she’s been something else. I knew her before she and Hanson split up, but didn’t think much about her one way or another, just she was a real pretty young woman he found up there in Boston and married and brang down here, and the two of them partying around with the rest of the hard-drinking young ones. It was all over town how they come to split up, so you must have heard it told one way or another, and you might as well know the truth of it as she told it to me. Eleven months ago it was, April last year, time they went out of Stuart over to Bimini with the Keavers on that big Huckins he had then. Three years married, and him drinking hard and playing around and her waiting and hoping for him to grow up and turn into a man. Jase and Bonny Yates were with them at first and then had to fly back. I think it was the next day they took the boat around and were anchored off some beach, and she and Stu Keaver went to the beach in the dinghy leaving Kelse and Lorna Keaver aboard. She took it in her head to swim back and she went up the boarding ladder, quiet without meaning to, and caught Kelse and Lorna having at it. She made a big stink, and Lorna and Kelse didn’t seem as upset as
she thought they ought to be. And when Stu came back aboard and got the picture, he didn’t act too agitated either. Everybody had a couple drinks and then a kind of kidding started she couldn’t understand at first and all of a sudden she realized they were trying to talk her into putting out for Stu Keaver. Like she told me she was all of a sudden stone cold sick sober, looking at their animal eyes and all the smirking and dirty talk going on, and she knew she was a stranger in a strange place and it was all over for her.”

  “Dear Lord,” Harv Walmo said.

  “Soon as they got back to the Bimini dock, she got off with her gear and flew on Mackey back to Lauderdale and back to here, and by the time he could catch up she’d moved out of the big house, into the Orangeland Motel, getting set to head back north. He came around whining and begging and promising, but she said it didn’t move her one inch. Except finally she agreed, trying to be fair, she’d settle for a legal separation for one year, and she’d stay in the county, and he’d support her, and if nothing had changed by the end of the year, then she’d go ahead with a Florida divorce, and he agreed because it was the best he could do with her, the mood she was in. She was going to file next month.”

  “How was that going to set with his folks?” Harv asked.

  “Good question, and I guess you could answer it yourself. The old lady adores him, and she’s been thinking of all this as just a little marriage spat, but old John Hanson has had the idea a long time his only son isn’t worth the rope it would take to hang him. Old John liked Lucille, and he figured it was Kelsey’s last chance to turn into anything at all. If the divorce had gone through, old John was going to finally heave Kelse out of the nest for good, no matter how much fuss the old lady put up. But now I don’t know. When they left to go around the world last February, old John put Kelse in charge of the groves, but if he’s been out there twice I’d be surprised.”

  “Then you got friendly with Lucille after she moved out?”