Эд Макбейн - Beauty and the Beast

“That would make it two and a half hours.”

“Like I said, a coupla hours.”

“Was the tide high or low?”

“High. Couldn’t a been sittin only twenty feet offshore with my draft if the tide had been low. Check with the papers, you don’t believe me. High tide, full moon.”

“What were you doing during those two and a half hours?”

“Fishing. What d’you think I was doin? That’s what I am, is a fisherman.”

“Catch anything?”

“Yep. Not as many as I hoped, but I pulled in a few.”

“What’d you do when you weren’t pulling in fish?”

“Had a few beers, whiled away the time. Fisherman gets used to being alone out on the water.”

“How many beers?”

“Just a few. If you’re thinkin I was drunk, Mr. Hope, forget it. Ain’t a fisherman in all Calusa can drink me under the table.”

“How many beers did you have, actually?”

“Drank me a coupla six-packs.”

“Twelve beers?”

“More or less.”

“Which was it, Mr. Jackson. More or less?”

“Maybe broke out another six-pack, started on that. Ain’t much to do out on the water when they ain’t bitin.”

“So you drank something between twelve and eighteen beers in the two and a half hours before you saw the man and the woman on the beach.”

“Which don’t mean I was drunk.”

“Nobody says you were. Did you see a fire on the beach?”

“Nope. Didn’t see no fire.”

“But you did see the man and the woman struggling.”

“Yep. Grabbed her by the arm, yanked her off her feet. Started slapping her, seemed like, I couldn’t see too clear when they were rolling around there in the sand. But I could hear the slaps, and I heard him yelling her name, too.”

“What name did you hear?”

“Michelle.”

“What else did you hear?”

“Called her a no-good whore. Said she always was a whore, said a whore wasn’t to be trusted.”

“You heard all that from the boat?”

“Yep. Wind was carrying from the east, you check the papers. Wind from the east, high tide, full moon.”

“What did the woman say?”

“Nothing. Just kept whimpering while he was hitting her.”

“Then what?”

“Dragged her off.”

“Dragged her through the sand?”

“Yep. By the hands, it looked like. Her hands were together, he was draggin her by the hands.”

“What’d you do?”

“Same thing.”

“What do you mean?”

“Dragged ass.”

“Why?”

“Fish weren’t bitin, no sense hangin around there. Pulled up the hook, went on my way.”

“Did you report what you’d seen to the police?”

“Not till after I heard about the murder.”

“When was that?”

“Tuesday sometime. Heard it on the radio. Figured maybe that was what I seen on the beach Monday night.”

“But you didn’t see any fire on the beach?”

“Nope.”

“Not after you saw the people there, and not while you were under way, either.”

“Nope. Went south, anyway. They were heading north, toward the pavilion — where they found her body, you know.”

“Mr. Jackson, I’d like to have you come to my office to repeat under oath what you just told me. Would you have any objection to signing a deposition?”

“None a’tall. Ain’t going to help your man none, though. I seen him on that beach, I heard him calling her them dirty names, I heard him slapping her, I seen him dragging her off through the sand. It was Harper I seen and nobody else, and I’ll swear to that on a stack of Bibles.”

“Thank you, Mr. Jackson,” I said.

“For what?” he said.

I phoned Sally Owen from the marina office, and caught her between customers at the beauty parlor where she worked. She told me she had somebody coming in at two, and asked if I could possibly get there at two-thirty, by which time she should be finished. As it turned out, she was still working on her customer when I got there at twenty to three.

Sally was a good-looking black woman in her early thirties, dressed for work in tight-fitting slacks, high-heeled sandals, and a white work smock that flared out over the slacks like a short miniskirt. She wore her hair in the sort of Afro cut Angela Davis had made famous, and she wore as well a pair of dangling ruby earrings that seemed more suited to a night out on the town than to the somewhat sterile decor of her surroundings. The shop was in New Town, the black section of Calusa, not too far from where Michelle had lived with her husband. Sally asked me to take a seat, and I watched as she continued twisting the woman’s hair into the countless number of slender braids Bo Derek had popularized in the film 10 .

The woman upon whom she labored was a “6” at best — if one insists on rating women by their looks alone. Dale had despised the film. She asked me afterward, with some justification, how I would enjoy being rated by a numbers system. She insisted that Blake Edwards, the director, had to be some kind of a male chauvinist pig at heart. I told her I’d found the movie only slightly amusing, but that Bo Derek certainly was a beautiful woman. In an amazing turnabout, Dale asked me — somewhat shyly and a trifle coyly — how I would rate her if given the opportunity. Ever nimble on my feet (we were, in fact, supine in Dale’s bed at the time) I told her she surely rated a “20” on looks alone, plus another “20” for the purity of her mind. Dale said, “Liar,” but she snuggled closer to me.

The braiding was only half-finished when Sally came to where I was sitting. “Didn’t tell me this was what she wanted,” she said. “Gonna take another hour at least. I don’t want to keep you waiting. We’d better talk now.”

We moved to a corner of the shop away from the chairs and the hair dryers and the sinks. An end table between us was covered with back issues of Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar , and Ebony . Sally offered me a cigarette, and then lit one for herself.

“So,” she said. “Something, huh?”

She had, I realized all at once, extraordinarily beautiful eyes, a pale amber against the smooth tan of her complexion. Her left eye turned in ever so slightly, in what the British might have called “a bit of a squint,” not enough to make her look truly cross-eyed, but lending to her face a somewhat out-of-focus, smoky, and oddly sexy appearance. She was perhaps five feet six inches tall, a well-proportioned woman who sat with her legs crossed, the ruby earrings suddenly seeming appropriate with the high-heeled sandals she was wearing.

“You get to know a person, and then something like this happens,” she said, and shook her head, and dragged on the cigarette.

“How well did you know her?” I asked.

“Pretty well. For neighbors, we got along better than most. She lived only three houses down the street, you know. Only white woman in the neighborhood.”

“And that’s how you knew her? As a neighbor.”

“Well, a friend, too. I suppose we were friends. Considering.”

“Considering what?”

“She was white, I’m black. Aren’t too many whites and blacks who’re real friends in this town, are there?”

“Did you consider her that? A real friend?”

“I was a shoulder to cry on, let’s put it that way.”

“How so?”

“Whenever King Kong started up, she called me.”

“King Kong?”

“George. Her husband.”

“Started up how?”

“Well... hassling her, you know?”

“What do you mean by that?”

“The green-eyed monster is what I mean.”

“He was jealous of her, is that what you’re saying?”