Тэлмидж Пауэлл: The Second Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 20 More Classic Mystery Stories

I nodded. “Got back early this morning.”

“You going to remember us country hoogers when you’re famous, Gauguin?” The thought brought fat laughter from him. I let his little joke pass and in due time he waddled behind the counter and asked, “You here to buy something?”

“Chain.” The word formed in my parched throat but didn’t make itself heard. I cleared my throat, tried again, “I want to buy about a dozen feet of medium weight chain.”

He blinked. “Chain?”

“Sure,” I said. I had better control of my voice now. “I’d like to put in a garden, but I have stump problems. Thought I’d dig and cut around the roots and snake the stumps out with the station wagon.”

He shrugged, his eyes hanging onto me as he moved toward the rear of the store. “I guess it would work — if that bucket of bolts holds together.”

I turned and stared at a vacant point in space as the chain rattled from its reel. “Easier to carry if I put it in a gunny sack, Gauguin,” Sawyer yelled at me.

“That’s fine.” I heard the chain clank into the sack.

Seconds later Sawyer dropped the chain at my feet. I paid him, carried the gunny sack out, and loaded it in the station wagon. Then I walked down the street to the general store and bought a few things — canned goods, coffee, flour, and two quarts of the cheapest booze available, which turned out to be a low-grade rum.

I’d stowed the stuff beside the gunny sack, closed the tailgate, and was walking around the wagon to get in when a man called to me from across the street. “Hey, Taze.” The man who barged toward me looked like the crudest breed of piney woods sheriff, which is what Jack Tully was. Big-bellied, slope-shouldered, fleshy faced with whisky veins on cheeks and nose, his protruding eyes searched with a sadistic hunger. His presence reminded me that not all Neanderthals had died out ten thousand years ago.

He thumbed back his hat, spat, guffawed. “Kinda left you high and dry, didn’t she, bub?”

An arctic wind blew across my neck. “What are you talking about, Sheriff?”

He elbowed me in the ribs; I recoiled, from his touch, not the force behind it. “Bub, I ain’t so dumb. I know Melody Grant’s been sneaking out to your shack.”

“Any law against it?”

“Not as long as the neighbors don’t complain.” He gave an obscene wink. “And you got no neighbors, have you, bub?”

His filthy thoughts were written in his smirking, ignorant face. No explanation could change his mind, not in a million years. Might as well try to explain a painting to him.

“Maybe she ain’t told you yet, bub?”

“Told me what?”

“About young Perry Tomlin, son of the richest man in the county. She’s been seeing him, too, now that he’s home with his university degree. Going to marry him, I hear, honeymoon in Europe. Big come-up for a shanty cracker girl, even one as pretty as Melody. I reckon that shack’ll be mighty lonesome, knowing you’ll never see her again.”

“Maybe it will, Sheriff, maybe it will.”

“But...” We were suddenly conspirators. He gloated “...there’s one thing you can waller around in your mind.”

“What’s that, Sheriff?”

“Son of the county’s richest man is just getting the leavings of a ragtag artist who’s got hardly a bean in the pot.” Laughter began to well inside of him. “Bub, I got to hand you that! Man, it would bust their blood vessels, Perry’s and the old man’s both, if they knew the truth.”

Raucous laughter rolled out of him, to the point of strangulation.

When I got in the station wagon and drove off he was standing there wiping his eyes and quaking with mirth over the huge joke.

Back at the cottage, I opened a bottle of the rum, picked up a brush, and stood before the easel. I swigged from the bottle in my left hand and made brush strokes on the unfinished canvas with my right. By the time her face was emerging from the skull-like pattern, the rum had begun its work. I knew I wasn’t cut to fit a situation like this one, but the rum made up a part of the deficit.

I dropped the brush and suddenly turned from the canvas. “Why did you have to leave me? Why?”

She was, of course, still out there when the gunny sack dragged me down through thirty feet of water. Her thin cotton dress clung to her as she wavered closer. Behind and beyond her a watery forest of seaweed dipped and swayed, a green and slimy floral offering.

I felt as if my air tanks were forcing raw acid into my lungs as I spilled the chain from the gunny sack. My trembling hands made one... two... three efforts... and the chain was looped about her cold, slender ankles.

I passed the chain through the holes in the cement blocks, and it no longer mattered whether the hempen rope held. The job was done. No risk of floating away.

In the cottage, I picked up the rum jug and let it kick me. Then I put on a clean shirt and pants and combed my hair nice and neat.

I went to the porch and took a final look at the bloodstains on the rough planking. My eyes followed the dripping trail those blood droplets had made down to the rickety pier and the flat-bottom skiff. Before my stomach started acting up again, I dropped from the porch, ran across the sandy yard, and fell into the station wagon.

I pulled myself upright behind the wheel, started the crate. Through the non-reality of the day, the wagon coughed its way over the rutted, crushed seashell road to the highway. Trucks swooshed past and passenger cars swirled about me.

On the outskirts of Palmetto City, I turned the wagon onto the private road that snaked its way across landscaped acreage. The road wound up a slight rise to a colonial mansion that overlooked half the county, the low skyline of the town, the glitter of the Gulf in the far distance. A pair of horse-sized Great Danes were chasing, tumbling, rolling like a couple of puppies on the vast manicured lawn.

A lean, trim old man had heard the car’s approach and stood watching from the veranda as I got out. I walked up the short, wide steps, the shadow of the house falling over me. The man watched me narrowly. He had a crop of silver hair and his hawkish face was wrinkled. These were the only clues to his age. His gray eyes were bright, quick, hard, as cold as a snake’s. His mouth was an arrogant slit. Clothed in lime slacks and riotously colored sport shirt thirty years too young for him, his poised body exuded an aura of merciless, wiry power. In my distraught and wracked imagination he was as pleasant as a fierce, deadly lizard.

“Mr. Tomlin?”

He nodded. “And you’re the tramp artist who’s become a local character. Didn’t you see those no trespassing signs when you turned off the highway?”

“I’ve got some business with your son, Mr. Tomlin.”

“Perry’s in Washington, tending to a matter for me. He flew up yesterday and won’t be back for another couple days. You call, and make a proper appointment. And get that crate out of here — unless you want me to interrupt the dogs in their play.”

My stomach felt as if it were caving in, but I gave him a steady look and said in an icy voice, “If Perry’s away, you must be the man I want to talk to. Sure. Perry wouldn’t have killed her, but you didn’t share your son’s feeling for her, did you?”

“I don’t believe I know what you’re talking about.” He knew, all right. The first glint of caution and animal cunning showed in his eyes.

“Then I’ll explain, Mr. Tomlin. Yesterday I went to Sarasota to try to interest an art dealer in a one-man show. When I got back this morning I found some bloodstains. They led me to the water. I spent the morning diving, searching. I found her in about thirty feet of water.”

I expected him to say something, but he didn’t. He just stood there looking at me with those small, agate eyes.