The Nicholas Linnear Novels (4 page)

And all I wanted was for the war to end with my skin intact and my mind unbent.

And it had come to pass, all except for the nightmares that haunted him like a hungry vampire newly risen from the grave.

Doc Deerforth got up from behind his desk, went to the window. Beyond the fluted layers of the oak leaves that shaded this side of the house from the long afternoon’s heat, he saw the expanse of Main Street. Two or three cars were lined up for the auto teller at the Colonial-style Fourth Federated Savings and, farther down, the local DAR meeting broke like surf from the portals of the library. Just another weekday in the summer. But that world now seemed a million miles away, as remote as the surface of another planet.

Doc Deerforth turned back into his office and, scooping up the manila folder and its contents, went out of the house, down Main Street toward the one-story ugly red brick building housing the Fire Department and, beyond a courtyard parking lot, the Village Police.

Halfway there, he ran into Nicholas, who was just coming out of the automated doors to the supermarket loaded down with groceries.

“Hello, Nick.”

“Hey, Doc. How are you?”

“Fine. Fine. Just on my way to see Ray Florum.” They had met, as most residents of West Bay Bridge did eventually, along this same Main Street, introduced by mutual acquaintances. It was difficult here, even for the most devoutly reclusive, not to make friends even if they were only of the “Howdy” variety. “Just got back from Hauppauge.”

“That body they found yesterday?”

“Yeah.” Doc Deerforth turned his head quickly, spat out a bit of food that had lodged itself between his teeth. He was glad of this diversion. He felt a genuine fear of confronting Florum with what he had. Besides, he liked Nicholas. “Hey, you might’ve known him. Didn’t live too far from you along Dune Road.”

Nicholas smiled thinly. “Not very likely—”

“Braughm’s his name. Barry Braughm.”

Nicholas felt a queer sense of vertigo for just a moment and he thought of Justine’s words on the beach the day she had run into him.
You know how incestuous this place is.
She couldn’t know how right she was.

“Yes,” Nicholas said slowly. “I knew him. When I was in advertising, we worked together at the same agency.”

“Say, I’m sorry, Nick. Did you know him well?”

Nicholas thought about that for a time. Braughm had had a brilliantly analytical mind. He knew the public perhaps better than anyone at the agency. What a shock to find him suddenly gone. “Well enough,” he said, thoughtfully.

Swinging her around. Slow-dancing into the night, the screen door bang open, the record player sending the music rolling in languorous ribbons, drowning the tide. Moving in stereo.

Her arms had trembled when he had first taken them, guiding her out onto the porch. But it was the right thing to do. The perfect thing. She loved to dance, first off. And it was perfectly acceptable for him to hold her this way, even though, quite clearly, rock was sex and dancing was, subliminally, the same thing. What matter? She would dance.

She shadows on the floor, shadows on the wall

Moving in a room with no light

In giving herself up to the rhythms she was sensual, a kind of glossy exoskeleton dissolving at her feet, unearthing an ardor rich with substantive and elemental fury.

I speak to her in tongues, I speak to her in runes

As if with second sight

It was as if the music had freed her somehow of her chains, of her wounds—
inhibitions
was a word with far too few ramifications to serve the situation—of her fear, not of him, not of any man, but of herself.

She says: Go, don’t go. She says: Go, don’t go…

With her shoulder touching his and the music filling another room, she said, “I grew up reading. At first it was anything I could get my hands on. While my sister, always so good with people, was out on dates, I would be gulping down one book or another. Curiously, that didn’t last long. I mean, I kept on reading but I quickly became quite discriminating in what I read.” She laughed, a rich happy sound that surprised him in its wholeheartedness. “Oh, I had my phases, yes indeed! The Terhune dog books and then Howard Pyle—I adored his
Robin Hood.
One day, when I was about sixteen, I discovered de Sade. It was rather forbidden reading then and therefore exciting. But beyond that, I was struck by much of his writing. And then I had this fantasy that that was the reason my parents had named me Justine. However, when I was older and asked my mother about it, she said, ‘Well, you know, it was just a name that your father and I liked.’ It must have appealed to her Continental leanings, I imagine; she was French, you see. But then, oh how I wished that I had never asked her! My fantasy was so much better than the reality of it. Well, what can you expect? They were both banal.”

“Was your father American?”

She turned her face toward him and the warm glow from the living room lamps burnished one cheek as if by an artist’s brush. “Very American.”

“What did he do?”

“Let’s go inside,” she said, turning from him. “I’m cold.”

First there was the large black and white photograph of a rather heavyset man with a firm jaw and undaunted eyes. Printed underneath was the legend:
Stanley J. Teller, Chief of Police 1932
–
1964.
Next to that was a framed copy of Norman Rockwell’s
The Runaway.

The office was a spare cubicle with double windows overlooking the courtyard parking lot. There was not much to see out there, this time of the evening.

“Why don’t you cut the doubletalk, Doc, and run it by me in plain English,” Lieutenant Ray Florum said. “Just what’s so special about this drowning?”

The subdued crackle of the two-way radio down the hall was a constant background chatter, like being on the telephone with a crossed connection.

“That’s just what I’ve been trying to explain to you,” Doc Deerforth said slowly and patiently. “This man did not die of drowning.”

Ray Florum sat down in his wooden swivel chair. It creaked beneath his weight. Florum was a big man, both in height and girth, which made him the butt of a series of ongoing jokes batted about good-naturedly among his staff. He was commanding officer of the Village Police of West Bay Bridge. He had a beery-cheeked face on which was positioned dead center, as if it were the bull’s-eye of some target, a bulbous red-veined nose. His skin was tanned to the color of cured leather; his salt and pepper hair was cut
en brosse.
He wore a brown Dacron suit not because he liked it but because he had to. He would just as soon come to work in a flannel shirt and a pair of old slacks. “What, then,” Florum said equally slowly, “
did
he die from?”

“He was poisoned,” Doc Deerforth said.

“Doc,” Florum said as he wearily rubbed his hand over his face. “I want this to be real clear, understand? Crystal clear. So perfectly clear that there won’t be any possibility of a misunderstanding when I make out my report. Because, besides the State Detectives who, I’m sure you’re aware, I’m gonna have to copy on this—and when I do, they’re gonna be down here like locusts on a wheat field asking us to do all their goddamned field work and then sucking us dry—besides those sonsabitches, I’ve gotta contend with the county bastards who’re most probably gonna claim that this thing’s in their jurisdiction. And, to top it all off, now that you tell me it’s a murder, I’m gonna have Flower rumbling in from Hauppauge on his white horse wondering why our investigation is taking so long and when’s he gonna be relieved of the stiff, his staff’s so overworked.” Florum slammed the flat of his hand down on the cover of a copy of
Crime in the United States, 1979.
“Well, this time they’re just gonna have to wait long enough so that they’re one great step behind me.”

A sergeant came in and handed Florum several typewritten sheets and went out without a word.

“Christ, it makes my blood boil sometimes. I’m no goddamned politician. That’s what this job calls for. Who the hell cares whether I know police procedure or not. God!” But he got up, still, and came back with a file which he opened on his desk. He ran a hand through his hair, scratched at his scalp. He began to sift through a number of eight-by-ten black and white prints which, even upside down, Doc Deerforth recognized as shots of the drowned man.

“First of all,” Doc Deerforth said calmly, “I’ve taken care of Flower. He won’t bother you, at least for the time being.”

Florum looked up briefly, inquisitively, then his gaze returned to the photos. “Yeah, how’d you work that little miracle?”

“I haven’t told him yet.”

“You mean to say,” Florum said, as he reached out an oblong magnifying, glass from a desk drawer, “that nobody knows about this … murder but us chickens right here in this room?”

“That’s precisely what I mean,” Doc Deerforth said quietly.

After a time, Florum said, “You know, there’s nothing shows up on these photos.” He shuffled the photos like a deck of cards until a closeup of the head and chest of the drowned man was on top. “Nothing but a routine drowning.”

“You won’t find anything there.”

“That’s what I said.”

“Doesn’t mean, though, that there isn’t anything to see.”

Florum sat back in his chair and crossed his hands over his ample belly. “Okay, Doc. I’m all ears. You tell me about it.”

“What it boils down to is this. The man was dead before he even hit the water.” Doc Deerforth sighed. “It was something that might have been overlooked by even as good an M.E. as Flower.” Florum grunted but said nothing. “Look, there is a small traumatic puncture wound in the man’s chest, middle-left, and it could easily have been mistaken for a rock scrape—which it is not. The puncture led me to take blood samples, one of which was from the aorta, where this type of poison concentrates; it’s flushed from the rest of the bloodstream within perhaps twenty minutes of death, by what means I have no idea. It’s a highly unusual cardiovascular poison.”

Florum snapped his fingers. “Poof! Heart attack.”

“Yes.”

“You sure about this?”

“About the poison, yes. Otherwise you know I wouldn’t have come to you. But I’ve still got some more tests to run. It appears likely that a sliver of whatever punctured the man’s flesh is still lodged in his sternum.”

“There’s no exit wound?”

“No.”

“The fall could have dislodged it. Or the sea—”

“Or it was pulled free after the man fell.”

“What you’re saying, Doc …” He paused and, pushing aside the photos, consulted a filled-out preprinted form. “This guy, Barry Braughm, an account executive at”—here he named Sam Goldman’s advertising agency in New York—“lived at three-oh-one East Sixty-third, was murdered. But in this way? For what reason? He was out here alone. No jealous wife or boyfriend …” He laughed. “He’s got a sister in Queens whom we’ve already contacted and interviewed. We checked on his house on Dune Road. Nada. No sign of it being broken into or even that anything was taken. His car was where he had driven it up and parked it in front of the house as secure as Fort Knox. There’s nothing to—”

“There’s this,” Doc Deerforth said, knowing that, at last, he had come to the moment he had been dreading ever since he had discovered the puncture wound and, subsequently, had pulled the blood from the drowned man’s heart. It isn’t possible, he kept telling himself, all the while his hands and eyes were running the tests that were confirming it; saying it over and over to himself like a litany against evil. And he felt now rather out of himself, a dreamlike unreality that allowed him to sit in another part of this room and watch himself talking to Ray Florum just as if he were an actor in some film.

Outside there came the sound of a child’s laughter, harsh and brittle, transformed by some aural magic into an eerie, other-worldly sound, the mocking shrillness of the macaws’ cries in the Philippine jungle.

“It’s the poison,” he continued. “It’s a very specific type.” He ran his palms down the sides of his pants. It had been a long time since he had felt his hands wet with sweat. “I came across this particular compound when I was stationed overseas.”

“During the war?” Florum said. “But, good God, man, that’s thirty-six years ago. Do you mean to tell me—”

“I could not forget this poison, Ray, no matter how many years have passed. A patrol went out one night. Five men. Only one returned and he just made it to the perimeter. We’d heard no shots; nothing but the birds and the buzz of the insects—It was odd, that kind of stillness, almost creepy; we’d been fired upon by snipers all through the day and every day for about a week.” Doc Deerforth took a deep breath before plunging onward. “Anyway, they brought me the man who’d come back. He was a boy, really. No more than nineteen. He was still alive and I began to work on him. I did everything I could, everything in and out of the book, but I was helpless. He literally died before my eyes.”

“Dying of this stuff?”

Doc Deerforth nodded bleakly. “The same.”

“Do you want me to go?” Nicholas asked her.

“Yes,” Justine said. “No. I don’t know.” She stood behind the couch, her fingers pulled distractedly at the-tufted Haitian cotton. “My God, but you confuse me.”

“I don’t mean to,” he offered.

“Words don’t mean anything.”

He was quite startled to see that her face in profile seemed remarkably different, as if he was seeing her now from the perspective of a different age, some other life. In this respect, she reminded him of Yukio. Of course with Yukio he had always imagined it to be the diverse mixture of her heritage, shrouded in some mysterious world to which he did not belong and to which he had but brought the insight of an alien. That, he knew now, had been a purely Westernized response to what was, quite obviously, inexplicable and it somehow confounded him that here, in the West, it should strike him so differently. Perhaps it was but the passage of time—a certain distancing from the anguish—which enabled him at last to see Yukio for what she really was, to him and to those around him. It was, he thought, the space he had gained from all the ramified, ritualized patterns of his life in Japan, which allowed him to realize the mistakes he had committed, to understand the role of his participation in it all.