Foggy, Foggy Death Page 24

  I rolled the body over on its face, because it wasn’t so bad that way—a large calibre slug makes quite an exit wound, sometimes—and stood up. The Pooh was standing there, looking at it, and shivering. She was shivering all over, convulsively. She said, “Ugly, so ugly, so—” and I went to her and took hold of her face in both hands and turned her away from it. She was shaking under my hands.

  I said, “Quit it, Pooh. Snap out of it!” and when she didn’t seem to hear me, or to know I was there at all, I took her shoulders and shook her. She looked at me then. She said, “Everything’s so ugly. It’s all so ugly.”

  It was that, all right. Things had caught up with us. They had with Uncle Tarzan too, but he didn’t know it any more, and we did.

  She kept on shaking. I got my shirt and did what I could to get her dry, which wasn’t much—the shirt hadn’t been very dry to start with. Then I got her to put on her clothes; she was still shaking, and she moved mechanically, but we got on the pants and bra and dress she’d been wearing, and her shoes. That was all she had, and she kept on shivering. I put my jacket on her, which wasn’t much help—it wasn’t intended to be warm—and put on my shorts and slacks and socks and shoes. She kept turning to look at what had been Uncle Tarzan and I kept talking to her, telling her not to. After a little she wasn’t shaking so much any more, and then she said, “I’m all right now” and was, or almost. She kept on shivering, but she said it was just because she was cold. It did seem to have got a lot cooler.

  All that was ever going to happen to Paul J. Barlow had happened, and I thought he would be all right where he was. I didn’t think anyone would steal his body and I knew damn well he wasn’t going to get up and walk away. So I grabbed the Pooh and got her out of there. Once we were around the pool, and not looking back, she was really all right, and we ran up the path toward the Townsend house. We got warmed up quickly enough that way—physically, at any rate. I didn’t feel warm at the center. One of the things I’d planned not to do was to see anybody else after a bullet had gone through him. But a lot of guys planned that in 1945; maybe the whole world did, for a little while.

  There were two or three lights upstairs in the big house and, as we got close, but were still to anyone on the terrace only a sound of people running, somebody sitting there shot a cigarette butt out from between thumb and finger, toward the grass. It was a little spark, twisting over and over in the air, and we turned a little to make for the terrace.

  George was there, smoking a cigar, and Dwight Craig was there too, not smoking anything by that time. They both had glasses, and as the Pooh and I got there, George got up in the moonlight and took a step toward us and then said, “What the hell?”

  We told him what the hell. That is, I told him.

  He said, “Jesus Christ!”

  Craig was standing up by then, too. Craig said, “You say he was shot?”

  I told Craig Uncle Tarzan was shot all right. In the back, I told him. From close quarters. I thought with a forty-five. I said the impact of the slug probably knocked him into the pool. Craig said it was a hell of a note. George went over to a switch and turned on a couple of lights, one of them by the bar, which was still out there. I don’t know what he thought we needed light for; I suppose he just thought electricity would make everything more matter of fact, more sensible, than moonlight. George said we’d better both have a drink, and we both did. Mine didn’t taste like anything. The Pooh was still shivering a little, only from dampness and cold now, I thought, and I asked George if there was a coat or something we could put on her. He went in and got one, and I took my own jacket and put it on. I still didn’t have any shirt; I’d thrown it down somewhere by the pool after I’d used it as a towel.

  I told George—who wasn’t, it seemed to me, taking hold of things in the proper executive-like fashion—that we’d better tell somebody about Uncle Tarzan and he looked at me a moment and then said he guessed we had. He seemed, I thought, a little dazed by the whole business. He started in and then somebody else came running up from the direction of the pool. We heard the running and then somebody yelled, “Hey!” and Francis Eldredge came up the path, slowing to a trot but still breathing hard.

  “Mr. Barlow,” Eldredge said, panting the words, “He’s—he’s down there by the pool. He’s—he’s hurt, or something.” He looked at us, then. He looked pretty shocked by the whole thing, I thought, which was reasonable enough. “I guess you know,” he said.

  “The Otises just found him,” George said, from the door. “They say he’s dead.” He looked at me, and I nodded. I said he was dead enough.

  “I thought so,” Eldredge said. “I—I don’t know about that sort of thing. I found this.”

  This was my shirt and he held it out. It was wet—and a little pinkish. It wasn’t a pink shirt. Eldredge looked at the shirt and then at me, working it out. I held out my hand and he gave me the shirt and there was this watery pink on it, all right. I supposed that, after I’d wiped the Pooh off with it, I’d dropped it on the grass over which we’d dragged Uncle Tarzan, getting him out. It looked as if he must still have been bleeding a little.

  “I was just taking a walk,” Eldredge said. Nobody had asked him, although I suspected that a good many people might, from there on in. They would also, I imagined, ask the Pooh and me a good deal about my shirt. “It’s such a warm night,” Francis Eldredge said, although nobody had asked him about that, either. He meant it, clearly enough, as an explanation of his walk, which had taken him as far from home as George Townsend’s pool. I figured that would be over a mile and a quarter, round trip. I’d have thought he would have cooled off more quickly sitting at home, but it was his story.

  “Get yourself a drink, Francis,” George told him, and Eldredge said thanks, he would. He did, and George went on in. He turned on lights inside and after a few minutes, indistinctly, we could hear him talking, obviously on the telephone. I sat down by the Pooh and put an arm around her and she said, “I’m all right, Oh-Oh. Don’t worry.” I said, “Sure you are.”

  George came back to the door and said he’d got the State Police and that he was going to waken Faye and have her waken Pauline. He told us this very carefully, as if he were making clear something extremely important; he still, I thought, seemed a little dazed. He went back in, and Craig and the Pooh and Eldredge and I stayed out there, the Pooh and I sitting down, Eldredge standing by the bar drinking and Craig moving around, a little pointlessly. He offered the Pooh and me cigarettes—Blends, of course—and we took them. He offered Francis Eldredge one, and Eldredge said he’d stick to a pipe, if it was all right. He said he always smoked a pipe after dinner. I said, “Well, well” and he looked at me, evidently wondering what I meant. I hadn’t meant anything in particular; I was merely noticing him.

  “Maybe somebody ought to go down there,” Eldredge said then, holding his pipe and getting ready to fill it. “I mean—”

  He stopped and waited for somebody to answer him. Craig did; he said he didn’t see the point of it. He said that if Eldredge wanted to go, it was all right with him. Eldredge said, “Well—” and filled his pipe and lighted it, and didn’t go. I told the Pooh to drink her brandy, which she was merely holding. She shook her head and said, “Not when everything’s this way” and, of course, I knew what she meant. Brandy—good brandy—is for when things are all right, or almost all right—when they’re somewhere between the fine way they’d been at the pool when we were swimming and the way they were now. The Pooh said, “Anyway, I’m all right. Perfectly all right.”

  Then, at the same time, we heard Faye’s voice in the living room saying, “It’s impossible, George” and George’s voice saying something—presumably that it wasn’t at all—and, still a long way off, a siren. Craig said, “Well, here they come,” and Eldredge said yes, he guessed they did. And the Pooh shivered again, just a little, because there is something forlorn and frightening about a siren crying in the night; just in the sound itself, aside from what it means, althou
gh I suppose the two things get hopelessly tangled up in our minds. Anyway, I knew what the Pooh was feeling, and held her tighter for a moment.

  “It was like—what was it like, Oh-Oh?” she said, very softly, only for me. “Like crystal?”

  That came close enough; it was broken now. Faye came out and said, “Isn’t it dreadful?” and I stood up and the Pooh stood up too. “It must have been awful for you,” Faye told us, sounding about as she always did. “Your poor uncle.” I said it had been bad enough and the Pooh merely nodded. Then a couple of state troopers on motorcycles came up the driveway, making the racket motorcycles always make. They came as close to the terrace as they could on the driveway, and propped their motorcycles up and came over to us. They were good-looking, alert men, ready to take things over.

  “This where there’s been an accident?” one of them said.

  “I’m afraid it is, Officer,” George said. “Down by the pool. I’m afraid—”

  “Mr. Townsend?” the trooper said. “Maybe I’d better ask you to show me, sir.”

  There wasn’t, I thought, any “maybe” about it, and George obviously thought the same thing. He went off down the path toward the pool and the vocal trooper went with him. The other trooper just stood there, easily, looking at us. Then we heard more sirens. The trooper who had stayed didn’t indicate he had heard them; he just merely waited. Everybody else did, too.

  It wasn’t motorcycles, this time. This time reinforcements came in a sedan, with police red lights on front, and a light truck. Two men got out of the sedan, which came first, and four out of the truck. The two men who came in the sedan were in civilian clothes and, at first, looked a little alike. They were both solid men with weathered faces; one of them was taller than the other and his face, particularly, might have been cut out of a block of very hard wood. The other man was as broad, but shorter. Neither of them looked as alert and aggressive as the young troopers had; they merely looked solid and—well, I guess tireless is the word. If they were going to be in charge of the investigation of Uncle Tarzan’s taking off we weren’t, I decided, going to encounter any particularly subtle minds—intuition and esoteric ratiocination weren’t going to come into it.

  The shorter of the two men walked a little in front of the other, as if that was where he belonged. He looked around and picked on Craig, and said, “Mr. Townsend?”; thus going neatly off on the wrong foot. Craig told him he wasn’t Mr. Townsend, and who he was, and where George had gone.

  “Oh yes,” the broad man said. “Naturally. Maybe you’d better take the boys down, Sergeant. Down that way?” The last was to Craig again; the taller man apparently was the sergeant. Craig agreed it was in the direction the broad man indicated. The sergeant went that way, and the “boys”—who had a good bit of gear, including cameras—went with him.

  “My name’s Heimrich,” the broad man said. “Captain Heimrich. I understand a Mr. Barlow has been shot? Paul J. Barlow?”

  Craig looked at me, and I said, “That’s right, Captain.” Then I told him my name was Otis and that this was Mrs. Otis. He looked at the Pooh. Then he looked again and said, Oh, he saw. Apparently her white hair had thrown him for an instant, but only for an instant.

  “We found him,” the Pooh said.

  Heimrich made a sound with his tongue and teeth, indicating that that was too bad.

  “He was in the swimming pool,” the Pooh said and then added, I don’t know why, “He swam a good deal.”

  “It’s a very unfortunate thing,” Heimrich said and paused. “Naturally,” he added, as if he felt the sentence needed rounding off. Then he found out who Faye was and who Francis Eldredge was and then Pauline came out. She had been crying, I thought, but wasn’t then. He found out who she was. He made the sound with his tongue and teeth again.

  “I’m very sorry about this, Miss Barlow,” he said. “Very sorry.”

  “I can’t believe it,” Pauline said. “I can’t make it seem true.”

  I had a feeling she had written those lines for herself to speak, and hadn’t been very inventive. I looked at Heimrich, but he seemed to think what Pauline said a perfectly adequate reading for a girl whose father had just been murdered. (I’ll have to admit I don’t know what she should have said; it’s not a situation for which most of us have words ready.)

  “Naturally,” Heimrich said. “A very sad thing, Miss Barlow.”

  He spoke as if he did really feel it was a very sad thing. It was, of course, even if the sadness was only about Uncle Tarzan.

  “An ugly thing,” Heimrich said, and that startled me a little, because it was what the Pooh had said. I suppose Heimrich had a right to think that too, but I was still surprised. I didn’t have much time for that, however.

  “Now Mr. Otis,” Heimrich said. “If you and Mrs. Otis can tell me about it?” He looked around the terrace. “Inside, somewhere,” he said. “I’m afraid Mrs. Otis is cold out here.”

  I suppose it was obvious that we were both rather damp still, and hence might be cold. Nobody else had noticed it much and I’d more or less forgotten it. But it did appear that Heimrich saw what he looked at; not much more, I thought, but at least that. A good many people don’t.

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