Джон Макдональд - All These Condemned

“Is her house down there like this one?”

“No. It’s very, very old. With a high wall around it. A Spanish house near the center of the town. She has... had that house and this one and the apartment in New York.”

“Nice work if you can get it,” the trooper said. “I’ve seen her in the village a lot of times. Well, not a lot. Maybe three or four times. I’ve only been up here two years. I used to be in the troop up in Malone. She was a good-looking woman. How old would you say she was?”

“She kept that a state secret, Mr. Maleski. When she was divorced the last time, Time covered it in their Milestones column and said she was forty-two. Wilma was furious. She wanted to be considered as being about thirty-four or so. I would say she was probably forty-five. She didn’t look it.”

The trooper grunted. “Damn well told she didn’t! Forty-five. That’s hard to believe.”

“She worked at it, Mr. Maleski.”

I suddenly realized that I was looking at the outline of the hills in the east and had been able to see them for some time. I stepped closer to the window. The stars had paled; just a few of them were visible.

“Dawn coming,” the trooper said. “Going on for five now, daylight time.”

The lights on the boats had lost some of their intensity. The water was no longer jet. It was the color of wet slate. And I heard the call then from one of the boats, a cry that had a different note from those that had gone before. All the other boats seemed to stop, and I sensed a change in the big body of the trooper beside me, a new alertness. The other boats began to move in a new way, began to converge.

“Looks like they got her,” the trooper said.

He walked ponderously to the door that opened onto the main terrace. I followed him. He opened the door and then realized I was going along with him. He stopped as though to bar the way. “You better stay in the house here. Might be messy to look at.”

“I’m going down there, Mr. Maleski.”

Talking there so long in quiet voices, we had achieved a sort of friendliness. I saw it leave his face. I was no longer a woman he had talked to in a friendly way in the semidarkness. I was one of them . One of the moneyed drinkers, the nude swimmers, the mate traders.

“Suit yourself,” he said.

I followed him down the long curve of the stone steps to the narrower terrace that sent the twin prongs of the concrete docks out eight feet into the lake. They were each ten feet wide and they were set about fifty feet apart, so that they carried out the basic U pattern of the big house on the rock ledge thirty feet above the surface of the lake.

“Got her?” the trooper yelled toward the lights.

“We got her, Joe,” somebody answered. And somebody said something in a low voice and there was a male snort of bawdy laughter, quickly stilled.

“Get those floods on, Joe, so we can see where we’re coming in.”

He asked me where the switches were. I said I would do it. I hurried up the steps and went to the box on the side of the house by the main terrace. I did not know which ones they wanted, so I turned them all on, all the batteries of sealed-beam lights that so brightly flooded the terraces and the twin docks and the house walls and the surrounding woods that the gray promise of dawn was suddenly gone and it was full night again.

I hurried back down to be on the dock again when she was brought in. Judy Jonah was already there. Others were coming. Gilman Hayes, who giggled nervously. Mavis Dockerty, sobbing aloud again. Wallace Dorn, cloaked in solemn dignity. The lights on the boats were going out, one by one. But they did not head for home. They followed the boat in, the boat containing the body of my enemy.

Steve Winsan climbed up onto the dock from another boat. He glanced at me. His good square face was pulled tight with strain. But even in the urgency of that moment he managed to put something into his look that was for me alone. And warmed me. The bier came alongside the dock. There were two old men in it. Twin Charons, with the reptilian wiriness of old men who do physical work. The trooper in the other boat bawled unnecessary instructions. Trooper Maleski and Steve Winsan knelt side by side to lift the body up. I moved close behind them. I could see down over the broad shoulder of the trooper. I saw her foot, very still and very white, projecting from under the edge of a greasy tarp. Wilma Ferris under a greasy tarp. I could imagine her nose wrinkled in distaste.

“Hook catch her in the arm,” one of the old men said to all of us. “Slipped when she come up. Nearly lost her, but Jimmy, he grabbed her quick. She was about sixty feet off this end of the dock. I’d judge she were in forty feet of water.”

There was a lot of awkward fumbling. The old men tucked the tarp around her and worked the body up to where Maleski and Steve could get hold of it. They had to move back to make room to put her on the dock, and in doing so the big trooper stepped on the trailing edge of the tarp and half stumbled backward, dropping her legs. Steve held onto the tarp and it came loose and she rolled out onto the concrete dock, white, flaccid, heavy. Her dark long hair was pasted to half her face, and the other half had a blue glow in the lights. I saw for the first time the rumored richness of her body and saw how, even in the looseness of death, her breasts were large and firm, her belly taut, her thighs like Greek marble polished by centuries.

There was a silence there in the lights that was like a long exhalation. I saw then that her body was visibly changing color, visibly darkening. The trooper and Steve began fumbling with the tarp and Judy Jonah said in her harsh expressive voice, “Cover her up, for God’s sake, you pair of clowns!”

They got the tarp over her. It was a dead thing. When it had been alive it had taken all I had. Using the weapons of money, of dominance, and of the body’s richness as they were needed.

There was considerable argument as to whether it should be left on the dock for the coroner’s inspection, or if it could legally be taken up to the house. Boats began to pull away, outboard motors catching and then rattling their tin thunder off the dawn mountains, Deputy Sheriff Fish making a point of yelling his thanks at each boat. The coroner, an unexpectedly young man with overlong sideburns, settled the argument by arriving, shooing us all off the dock except the officials, and conducting his examination on the spot.

I felt as if I had soiled myself by going down to look at her in death, and yet I had to be certain she was dead. I had needed an assurance based on more than being told. I looked in on Randy. He slept heavily, his mouth open. What would become of him now? Wilma had forced us to live up to an expected standard. So all we had left from the years of her were debts, a lease on an apartment too big for us, too many expensive clothes, and a large salary that had stopped when her heart had stopped. Somewhere he had to find the nerve, the guts to start again as we had once started together. But it was difficult to think of guts when she had so cleverly eviscerated him over the years, wrapping him in strand after strand before performing the brutal operation. Any single strand could have been broken. But not all of them. She had debased both of us.

I decided not to wake him and tell him. He would know soon enough that they had found it. I went back down the hallway toward the living room. I wondered if Steve were in his room. His door opened so suddenly it startled me.

“Noel,” he said, saying it, as he always does, with that special tone that is for me. “I thought that was your step. Nobody else walks quite that way.” He took my wrist and pulled me, unprotesting, into his room. He closed the door quietly.