The End of the Pier Read online

  “How’s your future look, Bubby?” asked Sam, his head lowered to the open window, hands gripping the sill.

  Bubby Dubois and the Caddy both lurched, quivered back and forth for a moment, and froze.

  “Sam?”

  Sam slowly chewed his teaberry gum and gave Bubby a tight, closed-mouth smile before saying, “You bet.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned. Sammy! Long time, no see.”

  “Small world, Bubby.”

  Sam could tell, from the way Dubois was running his hands back and forth on the wheel, from the spit-polished look of eyes like dimes, that Bubby was considering, hoping, that Sam DeGheyn had come to the cabin on a similar mission. The idea was quickly discarded when the eyes saw themselves reflected in the mirrored glasses.

  Sam was leaning against the door on outstretched arms, like someone who meant to roll a car over. “So, how’s your future look?”

  Dubois slid his sweat-slick palm from the wheel and rocked it. “Aw, you know . . . Little of this, little of that.” He smiled; he had a neat white row of teeth, like a kid’s.

  With a short bark of laughter, Sam said, “Hell, if that’s all Hubert can tell you, you wasted your money.”

  “Hubert?” Bubby stared at the windshield with a puzzled frown.

  “Prince of Liechtenstein.” Sam removed one hand from the sill to adjust the black-visored cap, bringing it down toward the mirror-glasses. Slowly, he chewed his gum as he watched Dubois trying to conjure up some image that would fit “Hubert.” Silently, Bubby mouthed the name.

  “Now, Bunny must have called on Hubert. How else could you be in touch with your loved ones?” “Like my wife,” Sam desperately wanted to add. But his mind could quickly flip through the consequences of that response as if they were printed on Rolodex cards.

  “Oh, yeah—Hubert!” said Bubby, with a cunning look. “Well, Hubert wasn’t much into things tonight . . .”

  Sam watched sweat like spittle snake a tiny track down around Bubby’s hairline. Was Dubois really so dumb to imagine Sam didn’t know what was going on in Bunny Caruso’s mirror-lined room? “Thing is, I heard this kind of crash in there, and I was worrying about Bunny.” Sam’s face drew a little closer; Bubby’s natural reflex was to lean back. “I’ve been out here for some little time.” The glasses hid his eyes; he kept his voice flat.

  Bubby’s head jerked around. “How long?” The mere idea that Sam had been keeping the cabin under surveillance was the worst thing yet.

  “Oh, twenty, maybe thirty minutes. Like I said: I heard this crash . . .” Sam’s tone made it clear he was expecting an explanation.

  “Yeah . . . yeah.” Bubby had pulled a square of white handkerchief from his pants pocket and was pressing it here and there against his face like a powder puff. “It was a lamp.”

  “Sounded more like a sideboard falling flat. Or maybe a bed breaking up.” Sweat it, man. “Probably Hubert getting up to something.” Bunny Caruso, thought Sam, should really fill her clients in on details. But he supposed only a cop could inspire the colorful account of a prince of Liechtenstein. Why bother to tell her clients? Would they appreciate Hubert? “Seances can be pretty rough, they tell me.”

  Bubby was making tentative movements towards relaxing a little—putting the handkerchief back in his pocket, lighting a cigarette—but obviously wondering if he should. The hand that held the lighter trembled; the polished corneas glittered. He took a chance and tried to joke around. “Worse’n slam dancing.” His artificial laugh was more of a snort, like someone drawing back phlegm. “You ever tried it?”

  If the man had winked, Sam would have dragged him from the car and they’d have done a little slam dancing themselves against the concrete abutment of the shack. No. Sam thought for a moment. “I guess I don’t want the past back again.” Where had he heard that, or something like it? Maud had said it, or read it. It was from one of her books. For the briefest of moments Dubois, Bunny, the shack, the stink of jail cells, of beery trailers, of the debris of broken marriages—all were elided from his mind and replaced by the end of the pier; the party across the lake; the black, unchurned water. In a flash, his mind cut through the anger, the mortification, the desire for vengeance, to the pose, and he withdrew his hands from the window, stood back from the car, and stuck them in his pockets.

  The pose was Town Loot, Mr. Danger, Black Leather. At what was he angry? With whom? Did he really think he was out in the dirt road in front of some honky-tonk saloon, the sheriff with his gun hand just above the holster, about to protect some lady’s honor? If he didn’t love his wife, and his wife was screwing another guy, and that guy was doing the same with someone else, what the hell was that but ironic and trivial? What infuriated him was a marriage acted out before a microwave instead of a bed; that his wife was a foolish, fearful woman; that he wasn’t really trapped but that he felt like it. And that he’d like to slough everything off.

  He really didn’t want the past back. He didn’t much want the present, either.

  “Sam?”

  Dubois’s voice brought him out of this haze of thought. The name was spoken plaintively, as if Bubby were some kid requesting the teacher to let him leave the schoolroom to take a piss.

  Sam slapped the hood of the car. “See you, Bubby. I’ve got places to check out yet.” He made it sound as if Bunny’s was merely a stop on a long list.

  Bubby’s body went slack with relief. Immediately, he twisted the key, gunned the accelerator. “Swell seein’ you, Sammy. Be sure to give my love to—” The name stuck in his throat. Bubby looked alarmed.

  “Florence,” said Sam, looking over the hood of the Caddy.

  “Sure.” The car shot back, turned at the road, spat up gravel as it shot off.

  Sam didn’t look around but kept his eyes on Bunny’s cabin. The windows had darkened, lights gone off as soon as she’d left the porch.

  He’d been fooling around here, playing cop, when he should have been over at Wade’s house.

  As he crossed the road to the patrol car, he told himself he’d cut his ritual visit to Wade’s short; he wanted to get back to the pier. Maud would be sitting there alone.

  Sam slammed the door, started the car, stared for a moment through the windshield.

  He was out there somewhere.

  • • •

  It was hard for Sam to imagine any sort of violent act taking place on Hayden property. It was almost as peaceful as that old pier, and far less illusory. Or was it? Sam frowned as he drove down the road with the big white house up on his left and into the tarmac area near the barn where Wade’s white station wagon was parked beside a Jeep pickup.

  Ever since he had started spending hours talking with Maud and looking out over the lake, Sam had begun to wonder if he could put his hand through stuff that looked solid but might turn out to be mist and fog.

  Sounds were muted; objects seemed to have dropped where they stood. Off to one side of the tarmac was an ancient Chevy, up on blocks. It had taken on the air of sculpture or statue, something immutable, unchangeable, marking a spot whose significance everyone had forgotten.

  No one had forgotten the Hayden place, though. Not Dodge Haines, certainly, whose cigar it must be sparking up there on the porch, and whose truck was parked on the tarmac.

  Occasionally, Dodge came for a visit, probably to still any lingering doubts in Wade’s and the township’s mind that Dodge had had anything to do with the death of Eunice Hayden.

  As he walked across the close-cropped grass, his shoes wetted with ground mist, Sam was aware of lingering doubts about Dodge Haines, a man he had never much liked, even before the Hayden crime, a man who was mostly bluster and bad jokes, and another client of Bunny Caruso’s. Dodge (who’d got his nickname years ago because of his loyalty to Chrysler) considered himself a hellion with the ladies. The Rake of the Rainbow Café was stuck back there somewhere in the forties; he thought that mock kisses, pinched thighs, ogled necklines got the women all worked up.

  Th
ere was no love lost. If Sam disliked Dodge Haines, Dodge hated Sam DeGheyn. After the murder of Loreen Butts, Sam had knocked on Dodge’s door so often that Mayor Sims had finally told him it looked like harassment.

  “There was just as much circumstantial evidence to indict Dodge Haines for Eunice’s murder as there was to convict Boy Chalmers for the Butts woman’s,” Sam had said.

  “Jesus, but you’re full of shit, DeGheyn,” Sims had replied, dragging his height and girth around his desk like a man in manacles. “Haines found her, didn’t he?”

  “So he says.”

  “Hell’s that mean?”

  Sam shrugged. “I’m just wondering when he got there.”

  “The Moffits said they saw his truck parked by the barn.”

  “Sure. But they don’t know when it pulled up.”

  “In the man’s sworn statement he says he went out to see Hayden, walked into that barn, and there was Eunice ‘trussed up like a chicken.’ That’s what he said. And the rest.” Sims looked at Sam blackly.

  “I know what he said, Mr. Mayor.”

  “Get off my back, Mr. DeGheyn.”

  • • •

  “Coffee, Sam?” asked Wade, holding up the dented aluminum percolator that seemed as much a part of the Hayden place as the house and the cows and hens. He brought it out to the porch on these Sunday nights and set it on a hot plate so he wouldn’t have to keep going back and forth to the kitchen. The porch was his favorite venue, the ladder-back rocker his favorite chair.

  Dodge was sitting in the swing, whose chains creaked when he moved. He nodded curtly, looked off into darkness.

  “I don’t mind, Wade. Thanks,” Sam said as Wade handed him the white mug. “How’s business, Dodge?” Dodge had a construction company that Sam thought might be getting too much county business. Dodge and Mayor Sims were great pals.

  Dodge shrugged. “So-so.” He rocked his hand just as Bubby Dubois had.

  Everyone must be going broke around La Porte. Dodge wasn’t drinking coffee; he had a pint bottle in a brown paper bag. It was part of a persona Sam had never quite placed. Tough guy? No frills? Down-to-business? Sam didn’t know, and neither, he figured, did Dodge. The Seagram’s in a paper bag was meant to underscore the cowboy boots, the wide belt with the heavy buckle, the string tie. He had a hound’s face—heavy jaw, jowls, drooping and bruised-looking tissue under the eyes.

  “Want a snort?” Dodge held up the bottle. He still called them “snorts” and often drank Seven and Sevens. Dodge had to be civil to Sam, even, at times, convivial, to make sure no one would get the idea he harbored a grudge, which might also make them wonder why.

  Sam smiled slightly. “I don’t mind,” he said again, holding out the mug of coffee, into which Dodge dribbled whisky. Sam thanked him and leaned back against the railing of the big wraparound porch, freshly painted every three years. The whole Hayden spread looked painted in place, it was that neat.

  Talk was sparse with the three of them there. In addition to Sam’s lingering doubts about Dodge, and Dodge knowing the doubts lingered, there was Wade himself, a still sort of man. One-on-one, he didn’t mind talking. When it got up to three, Wade seemed to consider it a party, and he wasn’t much good at parties. Sam remembered him hovering with his paper punch cup when Mayor Sims had cut the ribbon for the opening of the new post office on Main. It was neatly laid pink brick, more efficient, bigger, air-conditioned, square, and charmless.

  Sam made some comment about Wade’s tomato crop; and Dodge said about Wade’s horse, Fleetwood, “Oughta race that horse over to Brewerstown races someday.”

  “Well.” Wade rocked and sipped, sipped and rocked.

  “No, you ought,” said Dodge, as if it were an argument. “That’s one damn fine horse.” He unscrewed the bottle cap, took a mouthful, and put the cap back on. He wasn’t cheap, but he seemed to like to husband his whisky, as if he were drinking on a dare. He’d have loved Prohibition, Sam thought, if he’d been old enough to drink back then. Dodge was somewhere in his mid-fifties.

  Comment about the old sow, about the half-dozen cows that Maud called “a tragedy of cows,” with their thin white faces all looking hopeless and alike, like actors in a Greek play wearing masks.

  Dodge apparently thought he’d earned the right to leave, had appeased the gods of doubt, and rose from the swing. Sam told him not to go, that he himself had just stopped by for coffee and couldn’t stay long.

  But Dodge just stretched and yawned and said he’d had a long day and went clattering down the porch steps. With his pint under his arm and his hands gouging his pants pockets he went whistling phonily off to his pickup.

  • • •

  “How you feeling, Wade?” Sam asked. It was no casual inquiry. Often, in the last years, Sam had got to worrying about Wade. He was a somber man, but very mild and pleasant, and much liked by the people of La Porte. In his tall, lanky way, he was almost handsome, too. The double deaths of daughter and wife had brought the women out in droves with their freshly baked pies and chicken casseroles. It was the first time Sam had seen Ella Ponteen in a fancy dress and carrying a covered dish. Women, Sam had thought, from the time their kids were born, always thought of food as salvation. Eat your spinach, drink your juice. Maybe they were right.

  Sam’s question was taken, too, as serious, calling for a serious reply. Wade put down his coffee mug for a moment, stretched his arms so the large hands clamped onto his knees, and looked past Sam and the porch rail. “I been better, Sam. I been better, as you know.”

  Sitting thus, his posture for serious speech, Wade started to talk. The shyness and hesitation in speech disappeared as he progressed, and his progression was along familiar lines. Sam had taken Dodge’s place on the swing, was pushing himself back and forth with one foot, arm across the swing’s back, head on fisted hand. It was pretty much always the same speech, and Sam wondered if that was what therapy was all about: the same speech over and over, the same events culled from memory, chipped away at in slightly different words, as if the experience were a piece of sculpture turning a many-faceted precious stone, but the heart of it never changing. It was always the same stone.

  Was this what Dr. Hooper listened to—over and over again, the same details? Sam looked off, hearing Wade’s voice as a kind of muted background music, and thought he’d ask her on one of her passages through La Porte. Maybe even tomorrow, Labor Day. She was staying over at the Stucks’ rooming house. He’d seen her earlier, coming out of the Rainbow, and had to stop and stare. Sam hadn’t told Maud that he considered Elizabeth Hooper a mysterious and beautiful woman who appeared almost out of nowhere at an appointed time and place and who carried within her the remnants of other people’s lives, torn memories, rags of feeling.

  “. . . All of four years now, and I still just can’t work it out in my mind, you know, how someone coulda done such a thing . . .”

  Despite his reverie, part of Sam’s mind still following Wade’s drift—although it was always much the same study in loneliness, guilt, reprisal—Sam never knew but what the man’s words might not offer up a clue, some new way of saying it. So he listened, staring off into darkness towards the barn.

  Sitting with his hands locked on his chair arms as if he meant to shove himself out of the chair, Wade was saying what he’d said many times before, that the loss of a child was the most bitter loss to be borne. That it was difficult for Sam to understand, perhaps, he being without.

  “Being without.” It sounded as if the barrenness of Sam’s marriage were a judgment, and that such aridity prevented compassion.

  “What’s terrible is, he got away with it. It’s not to be borne that someone could do that and get off scot-free. There’s times I wondered was it that Chalmers fellow.”

  Sam stopped the swing. How many times had he heard Wade say it? Wade just couldn’t take in that Boy had an ironclad alibi for the time of Eunice’s death. But he supposed it must ease the pain a bit for Wade to think there was someone he could lo
ok to. He turned his gaze from the far fields, indistinguishable one from the other in the dark. “I’m sorry we didn’t find him, Wade.”

  “Hell, I ain’t blaming you, Sam, you know that.” Wade’s voice was tight, and his jaw was working on a piece of tobacco. The hard way he chewed, it might have been gristle. Then he sat back and picked up his mug, two fingers through the handle, thumb on the rim. “Dodge said you was rooting around—that’s his words, ‘rooting around’—and that you had been ever since Eunice . . . well . . .”

  Sam studied Wade’s profile, the way the flesh beneath the cheekbone, the socket of the eye had hollowed out more over the last year. “When’d Dodge tell you that, Wade?”

  The tall man shrugged. “Couple months ago. Round the time that Alonzo woman was killed. Dodge said it’d started you asking questions about the others. That Butts woman, and Eunice.” Slowly, he turned to look at Sam, and his tone was slightly accusing: “You never told me nothing like that, you know.”

  No, he hadn’t. Sam had said nothing to Wade about his suspicions regarding Boy Chalmers, though it had meant possibly short-circuiting some of Sam’s own unofficial investigation. He would himself have liked to get Wade talking more concretely about that day, replaying it over and over again.

  “Well, Wade, I wouldn’t say I was ‘rooting around.’ It’s been a long time, after all—although I have been thinking about it, that’s true.”

  “I’m glad to hear that. I thought the police just closed the case and forgot all about Eunice.” He took another swallow of coffee.

  “Hard to forget, Wade . . . a thing like that.” Sam shook his head when Wade raised the pot again from the warmer. “No, thanks.” He drained his cup, rose, and set it on the table. “It’s nearly twelve; got to be going.”

  “I don’t guess Dodge and Mayor Sims is too happy about it. About you rooting around.” Wade gave a slow smile, almost sly.