Say No to Murder Page 17

  “Absolutely,” Goose boomed.

  “Oh dear,” Barbara said, frowning. “Now Jenny . . .”

  “I would just like to know,” I said steadily, “why I am to be punished for a crime I did not commit. A crime my father has not been arrested for, accused of, tried for or pronounced guilty of. Why is that?” I was rather pleased with that orderly progression of dangling prepositions, but didn’t think I’d say so.

  “Frankly,” the mayor said, “it’s for appearances.”

  “Well, now Barbara,” Ted began to object, but she over-rode his finer feelings with ruthless honesty.

  “Be realistic,” she advised me. “It doesn’t take a politician to appreciate the importance of appearances. It is imperative that our committee at least seem to present a unified, untarnished appearance to the community in order to preserve the harmony that has marked this project so far.”

  “Harmony?” I said. “You call that flap over the Unmarked Grave harmony? You call those vigilantes harmony?”

  “Jenny,” the mayor said then, “we have the votes.”

  “How many?”

  “Let’s just call it a majority,” she replied.

  “Let’s not,” I said. “Let’s call it by name. You, Ted?”

  He nodded, reddening and looking away from me.

  “Goose?”

  Another embarrassed nod.

  “The Towers and Webster?”

  “Yes,” said the mayor. “And I.”

  “But not the Eberhardts or Jack,” I guessed.

  “No,” she said.

  “Well.” I rose from my seat and pretended to begin to leave. “It’s nice to know who my friends are.” Then, as if it had just occurred to me, I whirled on her. “Of course! The election’s coming up, isn’t it? Are you afraid of what people will think if you don’t run my father and me out of town on a rail? Are you that hard up for votes, Barbara? Are you so afraid of losing the next election that you’d sacrifice due process on the altar of your ambition? Almost lost it last time, didn’t you? I guess you’re not taking any chances this time!” I nearly choked on my own clichés.

  “That was two years ago,” she said heatedly. “It’s a different picture now. Everybody knows I’m a sure winner. I don’t need to take any desperate measures to win.”

  “Desperate measures?” I said, “What desperate measures did you take two years ago, your Honor?”

  “It was only a figure of speech, Jenny, for heaven’s sake. Goose, you remember, you were on my campaign committee. It wasn’t all that tough a fight. I may not have won by the biggest margin in history, but I did win.”

  “Hell, I don’t remember,” he said uncomfortably. “You expect me to remember something from two years ago? I could barely remember my name this morning!” He looked over at Ted Sullivan and forced a laugh. “Two years ago! What were you doing two years ago?”

  The realtor seemed to flush beneath his tan.

  “Be quiet, Goose,” the mayor snapped. I stared at her in surprise. She said to the realtor, “Forget it, Ted.”

  Ted was shaking his head and looking down at the floor. “It was a tough year,” he said softly. “Toughest damn year of my life.”

  “But you were elected president of the board of realtors,” I objected, drawing a furious look from the mayor.

  “Yes.” His laugh was bitter. “They knew I didn’t have anything else to do, wasn’t selling anything, might as well be president.”

  “Oh hell, Ted.” Goose was embarrassed again. It was true that Ted wasn’t the world’s greatest real estate agent, and never had been. “That’s ancient history. You’re doing great now. Hell, we’re all doing better.”

  Ted glanced at me. “Right. I’m doing fine, aren’t I, Jenny? Just ask your friend Geof how many offers I’ve brought by for him to look at on that house of his. Sold it right out from under his nose, haven’t I?”

  I looked at the mayor. Her attractive face was pale. I looked back at Ted to see a glance pass between them. My little tantrum seemed to be earning all sorts of unexpected dividends, although I would have sworn I had never before seen a spark of electricity pass between the mayor and the realtor.

  Nobody seemed to know what to say next, least of all me. Finally, I improvised. “Well, don’t bother with the official vote, friends. I quit” I wheeled and flounced out of the room, nearly knocking Webster Helms on his thin ass.

  “This is your idea isn’t it, Web, kicking me off the committee? You cooked it up in The Buoy yesterday with the Towers, didn’t you? Just another one of your bright ideas, like those damn vigilantes.”

  “I can’t take credit for that, Jenny,” he said, somehow managing to sound boastful anyhow. “That was Ted’s idea. I just took the ball and ran with it.”

  “Webster Helms,” the mayor called out to him, “if you ever give me the wrong time for a meeting again, just because you know I’ll vote against you, I will never appoint you to another committee!”

  He flushed and looked apologetic. Some people are gluttons for punishment. And committees. I pushed past him and continued my dramatic stomp out the door.

  Once in my car, I tried to sort through the information I’d gleaned from my theatrics and my hours at the newspaper. The mayor had faced a tough election last time, and would face angry voters this fall if the project fell through. Ted was feeling like a professional failure, despite the civic offices he held. And if he wasn’t having an affair with the mayor, she surely had sympathetic eyes for him. Webster, according to his own words in the paper, was a believer in the fast-track method of construction which had, more than once, been known to contribute to construction accidents and building failures. And Goose, feeling the need to prove himself once more, had probably underbid the project in order to get it But what did any of those frailties, idiosyncrasies and bits of gossip have to do with lover’s leap, the second week of February, two years ago? The Towers still looked like the best bet, but only because Betty had actually been in the vicinity at the right time. Beyond that, there was nothing to link them to murder or motive.

  Well, I still had two friends upon whom to inflict my wiles and stratagems this evening. I swallowed the tamp of guilt which lodged in my throat and drove to the house of the minister of the First Church of the Risen Christ.

  I caught husband and wife at home, between church meetings. From their backyard came the sound of children playing.

  “Yours?” I inquired of Mary when she brought coffee and sugar cookies into the living room of the neat, two-story brick manse.

  She glanced toward the back of the house and smiled. “Everybody’s,” she replied. “Actually, our three are teenagers, Jenny. I suspect they are driving around tonight, eating up their allowances on gasoline.”

  We laughed together, comfortable in the shared memories of growing up that transcended race and neighborhood. “Cream?” I held out my cup. She poured for me.

  “It’s funny that I didn’t know that about you,” I remarked. “The ages of your children, I mean. I’m not sure I even- knew you had three.”

  “Well, we’ve probably known each other a long time without really knowing each other. It’s something we lose as adults, I think, that capacity for really personal friendship. Our friendships seem to form around work or causes or hobbies, focusing on only one or two elements of our lives, to the exclusion of everything else.”

  “There doesn’t seem to be time to get to know people well.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Maybe we should try to make the time, Mary.”

  She looked at me, and smiled. “Maybe we should, Jenny.”

  Hardy came in from the kitchen carrying a plateful of sugar cookies. He sank easily into an armchair, put the plate on his lap and commenced to empty it. “It’s nice to have you visit us, Jenny,” he said. “Why haven’t we done this before?”

  Mary and I exchanged looks and smiles.

  “I’ve never been kicked off a committee before, Hardy,” I said light
ly.

  “Consider it a privilege,” he advised me. “I spent most of my youth trying to gain admittance to important committees. Getting kicked off of them is a luxury I’ve only recently begun to enjoy.”

  I laughed. “You do give me a different perspective on things, Hardy.”

  “Black skin will do that,” he said seriously. “Every time.”

  “Now Hardy,” his wife said tartly, “martyrdom will not absolutely guarantee your canonization. He who feels sorry for himself ain’t no saint.”

  He grinned at her, his face lighting with affection.

  “Hardy, Mary,” I said, putting my cookie on the saucer which also held my cup, “I want you to know how grateful I am to you for being so loyal to me. But I was going to resign anyway.”

  “Suspected you might,” Hardy said, munching. “Bad idea.”

  I looked up in surprise. “It is? Why?”

  “Don’t want to let the bastards get you down.”

  “But it is a conflict of interest, Hardy.”

  “Life is one long conflict of interests, Jenny, in case you hadn’t noticed. Listen to me, Sister Jennifer, you ain’t done nothin’ wrong nohow, and you don’t be takin’ no shit from nobody.”

  “But Hardy.” I was laughing, feeling better about the world in general; he was, indeed, a minister to the ailing in spirit. “It’s not always appropriate to fight; sometimes the better course of action is to give in gracefully, and wait to fight another day.”

  I turned to Mary. “Don’t you sometimes find in the movement that it is better to accept a loss today in order to win a bigger battle tomorrow? It seems to me that if my father and I bend over backward to accommodate these small, sensitive matters, the community will be more likely to feel sympathetic toward him when it really counts—like if he’s arrested for crimes he didn’t commit? Mary, isn’t that true with the black . . .”

  “Yes,” she said, “it is, although my husband will deny it to his last sugar cookie.”

  “Take those phone calls that Hardy and I received last week.” They looked embarrassed. “Hey, we might as well talk about them and take the sting away. Don’t you sometimes find that when racial slurs are made public, or when somebody does something like burning a cross on your lawn, it has the effect of turning some public opinion your way?”

  “Interesting that you’d appreciate that fact,” Mary said. “A couple of years ago, we sponsored a forum on black leadership, and that turned out to be an underlying theme of it the idea of listening for the chords of sympathy that always break through when decent people are denigrated or abused, and then to play on that sympathy in order to obtain support for future, important concerns.”

  “I haven’t heard much out of you two about the Unmarked Grave since Sunday,” I remarked. “Is this an example of that philosophy in action? Are you letting go of that, gracefully, and using the sympathy it engenders, in order to pin something important for the future?”

  They looked at each other and smiled.

  “You must think us very Machiavellian,” Hardy said wryly. “We are flattered at this compliment to our intelligence and farsightedness, but wizards at strategy though we are, we hadn’t thought that far ahead. We could hardly have predicted that the cross would end up in a man’s chest.”

  His wife made a distressed sound.

  “I’m sorry, honey.” He turned back to me. “We still want the grave, Jenny, but it seems a tasteless time to say so.”

  “But what more do you want?” I pressed. “For yourselves, as black leaders, for the community?”

  Again, they looked long at each other, but when the two pairs of eyes turned back toward me some of the directness and frankness had gone out of them.

  “We only want the usual,” he said vaguely. “More jobs, more recognition, more admittance to the halls of power, more of our legal rights as citizens and our moral rights as people.”

  But Mary burst our laughing. “And if you believe that, Jenny, we have some swampland in Florida we’d like to show you!”

  “Mary!” he said, trying to look put out, but only looking amused. “Close the closet door before Jenny sees our skeletons!”

  “What skeletons?” I said, laughing, too, but without feeling the humor. “Tell me.”

  “No,” Mary said, wiping her eyes, and shaking her head with evident regret, “we can’t tell you. But we will, soon, I promise you’ll be among the first to know.”

  “How will I know?”

  “Oh,” said Hardy, “you’ll know . . . everybody will. But I’ll tell you this much: it came out of that forum two years ago, the one Mary mentioned. And it’s been building since then, like a fire inside us.” Indeed, the minister looked suddenly consumed by whatever desire it was that burned within him. Looking at him, listening to him, I was startled, then uneasy. Geof would find this conversation extremely interesting; I only hoped it delivered less than it seemed to promise in potential motives for murder.

  “Jenny,” Mary said sharply, seeming purposefully to draw my attention away from her husband, “will you have another cookie?”

  And that’s all I got out of them that evening, though I stayed another half hour: more sugar cookies, no more information.

  I drove to the police station to discuss the day’s gleanings with Geof, but the sergeant on duty told me that Detective Bushfield had already gone home for the night. I called his home from the police station. Instead of the man, I got the telephone answering machine and heard my own voice asking me to leave my name and number.

  “Police recruit Cain, reporting in,” I said. “Now leaving my post, will be en route to Pirate’s Cove where I will maintain a stakeout until morning. If you come to the shore tomorrow and wave a lantern twice, I will row over to pick you up and take you back to the boat for coffee. Ten-four. Over and out. Or, as my stepmother would say, kissy, kissy.”

  I hung up, intensely missing him.

  “Would you care for a cup of java, Miss Cain?” asked the fatherly sergeant with the drinker’s nose.

  “I’ve already drunk enough to keep me awake through a boring lecture,” I admitted, “but yes, thank you, Sergeant.”

  For the next half hour or so, I nursed the strong coffee and wound down from the day by observing the quiet comings and goings of the station at night. By the time I washed out my cup and placed it on the coffee tray by the sergeant’s desk, I was ready to return to the boat . . . and bed.

  chapter

  31

  The night seemed unusually dark when I pulled my car up to the shore. For the first time in weeks, the sky was cloudy enough to mask the stars; a hazy ring around the moon promised rain for tomorrow, or sooner. A sudden wind bit into me as I got out of the car, and I felt chilled in my shorts and T-shirt. By staring into the darkness, I could just make out the black shape of the Amy Denise.

  I picked my way through the rocks and sand to the dinghy, which I had dragged up on land and tied to a tree that morning. When I reached it, I removed my shoes and tossed them into the boat, following them with my purse, suitcase and a small bag of groceries. Then I untied the dinghy and pushed her into the high and lapping tide. Dripping water from the knees down, I climbed in. I reached into the bottom of the boat for an oar to push off with, but my hand grabbed pure air.

  “What the . . . ?” Somebody had stolen both oars. I fumbled under the seats only to discover the life jackets were gone, as well.

  I was too tired to cuss or care. I merely let out a disgusted sigh, then jerked the engine to life. The loss could have been worse, I consoled myself: the thief could have taken the entire boat.

  The dinghy puttered faithfully against the choppy tide, I might not break any speed records on my way back to the Amy Denise, but at least I’d get there.

  I had my hand firmly on the throttle when a heavy swell rocked the little boat violently. I felt the little engine give a jerk under my hand. I grasped the throttle more firmly, just as the entire engine slid off the stern into the ocean,
with me still firmly attached to it. Wildly, I grabbed for the edge of the boat just as we were hit broadside by the first of the larger waves that foretold storms at sea that were coming our way.

  Suddenly I was in the water, gagging, flailing, but finally having released the throttle. The faithful little engine sank to the bottom of the cove.

  “What the hell?” I spat.

  I was too surprised to be frightened. How could this have happened to the world’s most reliable boat? One moment I had been securely riding along toward the Amy Denise and supper and bed, and the next minute I was swallowing saltwater and treading high swells. I couldn’t believe it.

  What I had to believe was that somebody had loosened the bolts on the outboard just enough to cause the engine to come loose in rough water. The thief who made off with the oars and life jackets must have wanted the engine, too. Had he changed his mind in mid-theft? Or, had I returned too soon, surprising him in the act and forcing him to flee with his job half done?

  The water was very cold and getting rougher.

  I treaded water and considered my options. I could ride the tide back to shore, except that the shore was no longer visible to me and I wasn’t crazy about the idea of passively allowing the ocean to carry me God knew where.

  I craned my neck, trying to keep my face out of the water long enough to find the Amy Denise again. She was only a dim shape in the night, but I was a strong swimmer and she looked close enough to reach. And if I couldn’t reach her, I could still hope to ride the tide back into shore. I only hoped it wasn’t a far distant shore.

  Determinedly, I struck out against the tide, and with the first overhand stroke, I knew my effort was doomed. Swimming against the tide is the act of a fool. But I was a fool without any less frightening alternative, and any action seemed better than giving my fate up to the whims of the sea.

  And I was frightened, finally.

  But too stubborn to admit it.

  The swimming was agonizingly difficult. Every forward movement seemed to drag all the breath from my lungs and all the energy from the muscles of my legs and arms and back. But I didn’t dare to stop and tread water again, since then I would lose any forward momentum I might have gained. Through stinging eyes, I looked again for the Amy Denise.