Death by Association Page 7

“So,” Jefferson said, “if you’ll just—”

  “Leave it with you, Ronny,” Justice Little interjected. “Got to get back. Got a wedding coming up.”

  “We’ll take care of it, justice,” Ronald Jefferson promised. He was told to do that. Then Justice of the Peace and Coroner Little departed, his tent fluttering. Jefferson pulled up a chair and sat in it.

  “Now just tell me about it,” he said to Mary, and turned pale gray eyes on her.

  Mary told him.

  “How did you happen to be looking in there, Miss Wister?” he asked when she had finished. “Seems like you’d just have been looking ahead.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It just happened. There was something white. I just happened to see it.”

  The chief deputy appeared to think this over. He appeared doubtful. But he said, “Could be, I guess. Then you looked and saw what it was and told somebody?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Captain Heimrich.”

  “He a friend of yours?” Jefferson asked.

  “I met him yesterday,” she said. “He—he was sitting here. He was somebody I knew.”

  “Know him?” Jefferson asked, and jerked a fat hand in the direction of the hedge.

  “I met him yesterday,” Mary said. “I’d heard of him, of course.”

  “That right?” Ronald Jefferson said. “Never had, myself. New Yorker, most likely.”

  Mary did not know the answer to that, but Jefferson seemed to expect no answer.

  “Most likely,” he repeated, as if, so, he explained everything. He turned to MacDonald, then, and said, “How long you figure, doc?”

  MacDonald shrugged.

  “Make a guess, doc,” Jefferson urged.

  “I didn’t examine him,” MacDonald said. “Except to make sure he was dead. I’d guess, not for too long. A few hours. Your own man can make an estimate for you.”

  “Our own man?” Jefferson said. “Oh. This isn’t New York, doctor. We haven’t a police doctor. You have a look when we get him out, doc?”

  “If you like,” MacDonald said.

  “That’s the ticket,” Jefferson told him. “’Preciate that, doc.”

  He went back then and watched the photographer, who was shooting down from the tennis court, through the wire mesh. There were several shots from there, at such differing angles as the situation made possible. The photographer then crawled between hedge and retaining wall, and there were several flashes from within. He backed out again and said something to the sheriff’s deputy.

  “O. K., boys,” the deputy said, and two of the boys crawled behind the hedge. The hedge shook perceptibly with their efforts behind it.

  “Mary,” MacDonald said, “Why don’t you go sit in the sun, or something? Some place else?”

  She nodded and stood up.

  “Be seeing you,” Barclay MacDonald said and got slowly out of his chair and walked, very tall, a little stiffly, toward the group at the hedge.

  Mary went and sat in the sun. She did nothing else, and let the sun warm her. It was half an hour before Barclay MacDonald rejoined her. She looked up at him.

  “He was stabbed,” MacDonald told her, and sat down on the grass. “From behind, through the heart. Whoever did it was expert. Or lucky. Wells fell somewhere else, I imagine. Was carried, or dragged—the deputy sheriff thinks put on something, a piece of canvas, perhaps, and dragged—in there. Presumably to keep things hidden. He’s been dead, at a very rough guess, for three to five hours.” He looked at his watch. “Since between four and six o’clock this morning,” he said. “One of the city policemen thinks he knows him.” He looked suddenly at Mary. “Not as Bronson Wells, however,” MacDonald said. “Thinks he had another name and—used to live here under it.”

  “But,” Mary said, “he was so well known. Surely—”

  MacDonald shrugged.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Probably their man’s wrong. They’re checking, of course.” He pulled up a few blades of grass and examined them. “Not much soil here,” he said, and threw the grass away. He lay back on the grass and looked up at the sky. He was a very long man. He was not, Mary realized looking down at him, at all frail, as she had thought him at first. His shoulders were broad; his chest deep. He was merely very thin. She became conscious that, while she looked at him, he had turned his head and was watching her.

  “It is,” he said, “unlikely that I will fall apart.” Suddenly he grinned at her, and his face changed; the amusement was not, for that moment, detached. It was as if, from a distance, he joined her. “I could even swim,” he said. “In an angular fashion. Do you think we might try it?”

  “I’ve work to do,” she said.

  He sat up, and shook his head.

  “You’d see the wrong things,” he told her. “Take the advice of your—of a doctor.”

  They did swim, briefly, after half an hour or so. In bathing trunks he was quite amazingly thin, but at the same time gave even less an impression of fragility. “I’m a bony man,” he said, with detachment, regarding himself. After they had swum they lay in the sun, on adjacent sun chaises, talking very little. It was MacDonald who, after a time, said they had both had enough to start with. After they had dressed they met again, apparently by mutual decision—although Mary could not remember that the decision was ever expressed in words, given any shape—on the wide porch, where they lay back again in adjacent chairs and still talked little, and smoked, and let the sun soak into them. It was easy, lying so, not to think of murder; not to think of anything.

  “We get along well,” MacDonald said, at one point. “In almost complete silence, but well.”

  She turned her head to smile, but said nothing. Nor, for several minutes, did he speak again. He lay back, half in the sun and half out of it, and looked across the wide lawn toward the sea. “The Atlantic and the Gulf meet here,” he said, idly. “Along somewhere there there’s a line in the water. Gulf on one side, Atlantic on the other.” Again he was silent. “It would be hard to draw the line,” he said, and again was silent. But this time the silence seemed to wait.

  “You said you remembered about my brother,” he said, then. He did not look at her; he looked at the sea, where a line was drawn in water.

  “Something,” she said.

  “He was older than I am,” Barclay MacDonald said. “Twelve years older. In his late forties. In some ways, he was of a different generation.”

  Again he was momentarily silent.

  “Did you ever read a book called The Vital Center?” he asked her then, and this time he turned to look at her. “By Schlesinger?”

  She shook her head.

  “A good book,” he said. “An interesting book. Maybe a valuable one. Schlesinger makes it clearer than I can. About the difference in generations, I mean. My brother was born in 1905. I was a kid when things fell apart in the late twenties. You—” He looked at her again. “You were just about getting born. My brother was in his twenties, of course. He—wondered why things were falling apart. Wondered if there weren’t a better way to arrange things. It was in the air, then, he told me once—in the kind of air he breathed, at any rate. He was working for his doctorate. He was a sensitive person. He—joined things, along with a good many other men and women who were born about when he was, and thought things were falling apart. Maybe they thought things couldn’t be put back together again, ever, in the old patterns.” He shook his head. “That was before this was what Schlesinger calls ‘a New Deal country,’” he said. “It’s been that since I was fifteen. Since you were—about four—three or four?”

  “Five,” she said.

  “Five,” he repeated. “Neither of us has ever known any other kind of country—a country where people were, at the least, asking the right questions. Or don’t you agree?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I agree.”

  “You and I weren’t ever tempted,” he said. “At least, not as a lot of people who’re older now were tempted by—by what Schlesinger calls the
‘unearthly radiance’ of communism. I don’t think his term is very well chosen. It’s too—exclamatory. At least, my brother wouldn’t have thought of it as that. Of course, he wasn’t a writer.”

  “An artist, you said,” Mary told him. “A painter.”

  “That too,” MacDonald said. “But, not professionally. He painted in his spare time. Like—Churchill. Like a lot of doctors. He was a professor. And a researcher in physics. Anyway, he thought of what was happening in Russia as an experiment in a new way of living. Thought perhaps the promise was there, or that something was there.”

  He was silent again, for a longer time.

  “It’s hard for me to understand what he felt,” he said, then. “That’s why it’s really a difference in generations, not merely a difference of a dozen years. I understand it academically, but just that. Schlesinger didn’t do much more, it seems to me. He’s just my age, Schlesinger is. He thinks people like my brother were just—oh, fuzzy minded. I suppose I do, too. It’s easy for us to see there isn’t any radiance there, unearthly or otherwise—that there is merely another darkness. A darkness deeper than any we’ve ever heen threatened with. My brother saw as clearly as anybody before he—died. In his last letter he said, You have to remember we were young and, I suppose, frightened. I still think there was a good deal to be frightened of.’ Anyway—”

  He stopped. He looked at her.

  “I won’t ask whether this is boring you,” he said. “I’d rather think it wasn’t.”

  “It isn’t,” she said.

  “I did ask, of course,” he admitted. “Anyway—my brother left the university he was teaching at and went to Chicago, and got a room on the twentieth floor of a hotel and jumped. They had just decided to dismiss him from the faculty—as, since he was a physicist, a bad security risk. He had two children. He didn’t have much money, but he had insurance, with no stipulation against suicide—or, I suppose, a stipulation that had run out. But I don’t think it was only that. His letter to me wasn’t very logical. He wrote it in the room, and then one to his wife, and then he jumped. I don’t know actually what happened to him. I suppose that, in some way, the bottom just fell out.” He paused again. “I told you he was a loyal man,” he said. “In all things. Didn’t I tell you that?”

  “Yes,” she said. “You told me that, Mac.”

  “He’d been accused of being a member of the Communist Party,” MacDonald said. “In his letter he said that that wasn’t true—that he wasn’t a member, of the party, and never had been. He had told the university that, and they said they had proof he was lying. Finally, they told him they got the proof from Bronson Wells. They had a list of things he had joined, and some of them were border-line. Some had changed in twenty-odd years, so that they were more than borderline. But what decided it was Wells’s oath that Ralph MacDonald had been a party member. Wells said he didn’t know whether he was one then—two years ago—but certainly didn’t know he wasn’t. Wells lied.”

  He paused once more.

  “Or say I believed my brother instead of Bronson Wells,” he said. “Say Wells may have believed what he said; got my brother mixed up with someone else.”

  Again he paused.

  “I was very fond of my brother,” he said. “I told you that. I couldn’t tell anybody I’m heartbroken over Wells’s death. It would be convenient if I could, perhaps.”

  “You won’t be asked,” she told him. “Anyway it’s all—ridiculous.”

  “Oh,” he said, “as for that—yes, it’s ridiculous enough. To me. But to the sheriff and Mr. Little—who knows?”

  “Anybody,” she said.

  “It is,” he said, “advisable for young women to think seriously about their associates.”

  “I think it’s time we had some lunch,” Mary Wister told the long, thin doctor, who blinked at her, and then said, “I’ll buy you a drink, first.”

  They had a drink in the Penguin Bar, which opened off the patio, where lunchers were gathering. The Penguin Bar had a mural of penguins, parading gravely in procession around the walls. They were not, Mary thought, very animated penguins.

  It was interesting, MacDonald said, when they had found a table under an umbrella and had ordered lunch, how quietly everyone seemed to be taking the violent demise of the Mr. Bronson Wells. It must be gratifying to Mr. Grogan. No one shunned the tennis courts because of their proximity to violent death; it was true that the dance floor was deserted, but that might be because the guests would rather eat than dance. The police had taken themselves off, along with Bronson Wells’s body. Mr. Grogan moved undismayed among the tables, tending his sheep. It was as if nothing at all had happened, which was surprising.

  “I don’t know,” MacDonald said. “I suppose that, in a place like this, we’re all out of context. There aren’t any patterns to be broken. Everything is shifting and unreal—a man named Wells was around, and now he isn’t around. Where are those nice Joneses we saw so much of yesterday?’ ‘Oh, they left this morning.’ ‘Oh—there’re the Smiths.’ Also, the authorities are co-operating, undoubtedly. Don’t disturb the Northern geese. They’re laying. However, I doubt if it will last.”

  The calm lasted, at any rate, through lunch. Afterward, Mary Wister talked again about working, and this time she insisted; this time, indeed, MacDonald did not argue. As a matter of fact, he told her, he was trying to make himself sleep each afternoon. “As a doctor, I order it,” he said. “As a patient, I try to obey orders. I’m a fairly good patient.”

  So, for three hours or so, Mary sketched and, working, forgot that she had found the body of a murdered man and forgot Dr. Barclay MacDonald, also. If a sub-knowledge that he was about somewhere persisted, and was somehow comforting, she was not specifically conscious of it.

  V

  Mary Wister didnot think particularly about Dr. Barclay MacDonald, but nevertheless, she took especial pains as she dressed that second evening at The Coral Isles. Soft brown hair was very thoroughly brushed; lipstick most carefully and artfully applied. In the enormous closet she hesitated a moment, and then took down a short dinner dress in muted green of which Sophie of Saks Fifth Avenue was, on the not to be questioned word of Mrs. Snodgrass of the Salon Moderne, very proud. She did not, Mary decided, need to wear black for the late Mr. Bronson Wells.

  And for him, she found when she was again in the lounge, nobody found it necessary to wear black. The group which had gathered the evening before was in the process of gathering again, not needing a nucleus, if Wells had been a nucleus. Judge and Mrs. Robert Sibley were there, the incident of the evening before forgotten, gracious dignity again wrapped about them. Paul Shepard was there, neat in white dinner jacket, with his reasonably beautiful wife. And Dr. Barclay MacDonald was there, talking to Shepard, but not so engrossed that he did not see a brown-haired girl in a dinner dress of muted green as she walked toward the corner. He saw her, and began to lift his length carefully out of a chair, and pursed his lips in a whistle which was soundless, which also was gratifying.

  No one wore black for Bronson Wells. Nor did his passing seem to shadow the minds of those who, the evening before, had sat and watched him drink ginger ale, speak commandingly of the subversive perils from which he sought to protect an insufficiently aroused nation. He was not, however, forgotten. Mary’s arrival reminded them.

  It reminded Mrs. Robert Sibley, beside whom Mary found a place to sit, with Barclay MacDonald in front of them both, on an ottoman.

  “Such a shocking thing about poor Mr. Wells,” Mrs. Sibley said. “And so dreadful for you, my dear. To find him that way.”

  “It was,” Mary said. “I—”

  And then the picture of Wells lying there, on his back, black eyes staring up at green and blue they could not see, was all at once horribly vivid in Mary’s mind and she was moistening lips which suddenly were dry, holding the lower lip momentarily between her teeth.

  “Forget it, Mary,” MacDonald said, his voice almost sharp, and at the same time Mrs. Si
bley said, “Oh, my dear, I’m so sorry. So thoughtless.”

  “It’s all right,” Mary said. “I hadn’t been thinking about it. I—I did, for a minute. But it’s perfectly all right. I mean—I’m all right. Poor Mr. Wells—”

  Mrs. Sibley shook her head, but the gesture was only an appropriate one; she deplored, but in the abstract.

  “What a lovely dress,” she said, of Sophie’s triumph, and then her interest was authentic. She enquired further about the dress, and was informed. “We get to New York so infrequently,” she said. “My poor husband has been so—so tied to Washington. But perhaps now—” She left the sentence incomplete, and lifted a glass and sipped from it.

  Her attitude was, it seemed to Mary as the impromptu party continued, characteristic. Penny Shepard also considered Mr. Wells’s abrupt departure from the scene a shocking thing, and Mary’s ordeal of discovery hardly less so. Judge Sibley shook his head with gloomy dignity, but did not linger on the subject. He described, to Barclay MacDonald, the arrival that day of a cargo of sea turtles, whose destination was soup, and urged MacDonald not to miss the next unloading. Oslen came, and the vivid Miss Rachel Jones was with him, and he had, he told them, not even heard—he’d spent the day on a fishing boat. When he did hear, he made a clicking sound with tongue and teeth, and shook his head in the familiar fashion, “Who’d do a thing like that?” he wondered, and then all shook heads and expressed bafflement.

  But nobody wore black for Mr. Wells. Paul Shepard came nearest—and became the first to admit past association with Bronson Wells. It was, Shepard told Oslen, but in a voice for anyone to hear, not only a shocking thing, and a damn strange one but also, for him, a damned annoying one.

  “Just about got him signed up,” Shepard said. “Going to do a fifteen minute commentary for us. Had a sponsor lined up. Now look.”

  This time they all were interested.

  “A commentary?” Oslen repeated.

  “Paul’s with the United Broadcasting Alliance,” Penny Shepard said. “I’m afraid he’s apt to think everybody knows.” Her tone was tolerant; she looked at Mary and offered amused, womanly appreciation of the self-assurance of the male—of, of course, the successful male, the outstanding male.