Marcia Muller - Games to Keep the Dark Away

Her flesh, when I touched her wrist, was cool but pliant. I felt carefully, but could find no pulse. Brushing aside her long dark hair, I touched the spot where the big artery should have throbbed. Nothing. I grasped her shoulder, rolled her on her back.

And looked down into the lifeless face of Jane Anthony.

“No!” I said. The word sounded loud in the stillness.

How had it happened? I picked up my flash from where I’d dropped it next to Jane’s body and shone it on her. There was a red stain on the front of the white sweater. She had not fallen from the pier and broken her neck. She had been murdered. Stabbed, maybe. Or shot.

I looked around for a weapon or some other evidence, but saw nothing. Standing up, I began breathing hard and for a moment was afraid I’d hyperventilate. Police. I had to call the police. Remembering a phone booth in front of the Shorebird Bar, I scrambled back up the bank and started running.

Of course there was no 911 number. The operator, spurred by the urgency in my voice, connected me with the Port San Marco Police. I told them who and where I was, then left the booth. As I waited for the police to arrive, I resisted a strong urge to go into the bar for a drink.

It was ten minutes before I heard the sirens and, by the time the cruiser pulled up, I had been joined by a crowd of weathered men in work clothes who had been inside the bar. I climbed into the police car and directed the officers to the old pier. The crowd followed on foot.

I pointed out where Jane’s body lay on the bank beneath the pier, then returned to the cruiser. A plainclothes detective named Barrow spoke briefly with me and said we would talk more later. An ambulance arrived, and lab technicians. The crowd grew larger. After a while I got out of the car and began to pace up and down beside it.

The compact in Sylvia Anthony’s driveway must have been Jane’s. Yes, Jane had gone to see her mother again. But where was Mrs. Anthony? And why had Jane come here, to the deserted pier? And what about the fisherman I’d met running down the road? Had he found Jane’s body? Or had he…

The police had set up floodlights and now they illuminated the ambulance attendants as they brought the body up the bank. The crowd moved forward, as if it were one person. The lights’ glare picked out eager faces, eyes greedy for a glimpse of the body. Young and old, male and female, they all wore expressions of undisguised anticipation.

My anger rose as I watched them, and I was about to turn away when my eyes met a pair of familiar dark ones. John Cala and I stared at one another for several seconds before he stepped back and vanished into the crowd.

As I was leaving the Port San Marco police station at a little after midnight, I saw a plainclothes detective bringing Sylvia Anthony in. They had located her, Lieutenant Barrow had told me, at a church bingo game, and by now she presumably had identified her daughter’s body. The police had not been so lucky in finding John Cala. The fisherman was missing from his unusual haunts. Barrow had run a check on him, and it turned out he had a record, including a conviction for assault.

Mrs. Anthony’s head was bowed and she clung to the plainclothes detective’s arm. She seemed frail and even older than she had that morning. When I started over to her, she looked up. Her eyes were red-rimmed but dry, and the bitter lines I’d seen before were deeply set on her face.

She said, “Get away from me.”

I stopped.

“Get away,” she repeated. “If you hadn’t come snooping around here, my girl would still be alive.”

The detective raised his eyebrows, shook his head at me, and steered her across the lobby toward the squadroom. I watched them go, then went out to my car. A fine mist hung around the lights in the parking lot and the MG’s windshield was covered with salt cake moisture. I got in and turned on the defroster, then sat there waiting for the glass to clear. There was nothing I could do now except go back to my motel and call Snelling. My case was finished-or was it? Maybe he would want me to follow up and see what the police found out about Jane’s murder.

When I entered my room I saw that the red message button on the telephone was lit. A sleepy-sounding voice at the desk told me I should call Hank Zahn. It was late, but I knew my boss habitually stayed up until all hours, so instead I dialed Snelling’s number. The phone rang and rang, but there was no answer.

Odd, I thought. Where would the reclusive photographer be at almost one in the morning? I dialed again, to make sure I’d called the right number, but the result was the same. Very odd. I pondered it for a moment, came to no conclusion, and called Hank.

He answered immediately, sounded as fresh as if it were nine in the morning. Hank was a restless man whose lean, loose-jointed body needed little fuel other than coffee and the horrible concoctions he whipped up in the All Souls kitchen-and that the other attorneys steadfastly refused to eat. His keen mind thrived on massive doses of information collected from such wide-ranging sources as the newspapers of several major cities, lectures by little-known experts on esoteric disciplines, and advertisements on the backs of cereal boxes. Neither his mind nor his body required much in the way of sleep.

“I just called to see how the investigation’s going,” he said.

“Not so good.”

“How come?”

“The woman Snelling hired me to find is dead. Murdered.”

There was a pause. “You do manage to get mixed up in this stuff, don’t you?”

“Yes.” I’d been involved with six murders in the three years I’d worked for All Souls. Jane Anthony’s made it seven. “It’s depressing. The victim’s mother claims if I hadn’t been, as she puts it, snooping around, it wouldn’t have happened.”

“Do you believe that?’

“No. It was just an emotional statement.”

“You don’t sound like you don’t believe it.”

I shrugged, then remembered Hank couldn’t see me. “Intellectually, I don’t. Otherwise-who knows?”

Hank seemed to sense I didn’t want to talk anymore. “Well, I’m sorry it turned out that way. When will you be back?”

“Tomorrow, maybe. After I report to Snelling, I’ll let you know.”

“Okay.” Again he paused. “And, Shar…”

“Yes?”

“Try to get some sleep now.”

“Sure. Take care.” I hung up and sat on the bed a while, staring at a crack in the beige wall. Then I got up, undressed, and crawled between the sheets.

For a long time, sleep wouldn’t come. I shifted positions, bunching up the pillows this way and that, trying to clear my mind of images of Jane’s lifeless body. When I finally did doze off, I was half-conscious of tossing and turning, coming fully awake in the midst of unclear but disturbing dreams to find myself tangled in the covers, drenched in sweat. As grey light began to seep around the edges of the curtains, I gave up and propped myself against the headboard to think.

I’d certainly never intended my life to take the direction it had. The job with the detective agency that I’d taken after leaving college had been a stopgap measure for an out-of-work sociology graduate who was waiting for her real opportunity to come along. But the flexible hours and freedom from the confining walls of an office suited me; and when the agency had fired me for my inability to bend to authority, my old friend Hank had hired me on at All Souls. The unconventional atmosphere there had suited me even better. I was good at what I did, and proud of it.

If it had stopped there, it would have been fine. Or even if it had stopped with the first murder case, it would have been all right. But there were other deaths, and the older I got, the more violence I saw, the more I wondered if I could go on like this indefinitely. And when I wondered that, I also wondered what I would do if I couldn’t go on. What on earth could a former private eye with a useless sociology degree do for a living?