“How?” I said.
“Come on,” he said. “I’ll show you.”
He spun around abruptly and started across the face of the slope with long strides, and I went after him. A small table lamp was burning beside the bed in the last cottage. Boniface had left it burning, I suppose, after his earlier visit. We went inside and stood beside the bed in the area of light and looked down at the body of Dan Grimes. He was wearing, I thought at first, some kind of long, barbaric earring. Then I saw that it was not an earring at all. It was a metal stringer. The stringer was made of about a dozen large pins, much like safety pins, attached to a chain. Someone had unsnapped one of the pins and straightened it and driven it into Dan Grimes’s brain through the auditory canal of his right ear. It was the stringer, I somehow knew at once, that I had left on the oak stump between this cottage and the next after I’d finished cleaning six bass the night before.
“We’d planned to go out on the lake early this morning,” Ira Boniface said. “I came over to see if he still wanted to go, after last night, and this is the way I found him.”
His voice was even and hard. If he was feeling any emotion at all, any anger or grief or regret or guilt, it was not discernible. I turned and brushed past him and went out onto the porch, and it was becoming then the clear bright morning of a bad day.
“I’ll go phone the sheriff,” I said.
The sheriff came about forty minutes after I got him out of bed. He was a very fat man. His name was Sam Austin.
“This is big, Johnny,” he said.
He drew a long breath and blew it out slowly, pursing his cupid’s mouth. His round blue eyes stared at me reproachfully, as if it were all somehow my fault.
“I guess I better go have a look,” he said.
“He’s in the last cottage,” I said.
“You stick around close, Johnny. I’ll want to talk to you later.”
“I’ll be here,” I said.
He sighed again and went lumbering across the slope toward the cottage in which Dan Grimes lay dead. I could see Ira Boniface standing on the screened-in porch. He had guarded Grimes in life, and he guarded him still in death. Jerome and Laura Quintin came out of the middle cottage and stood together inside the screen. Rita Boniface walked across from the first cottage to join the Quintins. I turned and went over to the porch steps of my own cottage and sat down. I sat there for about half an hour, maybe longer, and then Sam Austin and Ira Boniface came out of the last cottage and walked over to the middle cottage, and I kept on sitting where I was. I tried to concentrate on the lake and the cool coves still deep in the shade of shoreline timber, but it was all ruined and no good at all, and what I kept thinking about was everything that had happened since the Chrysler wagon had pulled in yesterday from Kansas City. I had a feeling that something significant had happened between then and now, something said or done that had hung for a moment on the edge of consciousness and then had slipped away. Whatever it was, I felt, would now assume in the after-math of murder a kind of definitive and terrible meaning that had not then registered.
I didn’t really want to remember it, to tell the truth, but I couldn’t help trying in spite of myself, and I went over in detail everything I had seen, but it didn’t help, and then I went over in detail everything I had heard, but that didn’t help either. I got up from the porch steps and went down the slope to the dock. The water of the lake was still as glass and dark, dark green.
It must have been an hour later when Sam Austin came down to the dock. I could hear him descending the slope behind me, and the dock, floating on steel drums, fell and rose and fell again under the shifting of his weight as he came across it. He didn’t sit down on the bench beside me. He stood at the edge of the dock and looked across the lake as if he were wishing desperately that he were on the other side. At his feet, nosing the dock in company, side by side, were the motorboat in which he’d come and the sleek inboard that had belonged to Dan Grimes.
“Big, Johnny,” he said. “This is big. And I don’t like any part of it.”
“Neither do I.”
“Sure. I can see that. It won’t do your place any good when the news gets out. These are important people, Johnny.”
“I got that impression.”
“Powerful people, Johnny. You heard of this Ira Boniface?”
“I understand he was Dan Grimes’s right arm. Something like that.”
“More than that. He’s always had his own connections, his own followers. I’ve heard it said that he planned to get rid of Grimes and take over the organization himself in his own good time. Now’s the time, I guess. With Grimes gone, he’ll take over.”
“You think he may have arranged the time?”
Sam looked over his shoulder, and a shudder seemed to pass through the flesh of his enormous body.
“For God’s sake, keep your voice down, Johnny,” he said. “You know how voices carry here.”
“Sorry.”
“I can’t afford any mistakes, Johnny. About what you said. About Boniface arranging the time. You think so?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“The way it was done. Stabbed through the ear that way. I don’t think Boniface would kill anyone like that. It’s out of character.”
“Maybe deliberately out of character.” Sam looked at me with a glint of shrewdness in his eyes that reminded me that he was no fool, however frightened he might be. “Maybe just an opportunity that he snatched to make it look like someone else.”
“Maybe. I don’t think so.”
“I understand you left that stringer on the stump outside the cottage after cleaning some bass last night. That right?”
“That’s right.”
“Anyone could have picked it up.”
“Anyone.”
“But only one did.”
“Only one.”
“The blonde woman said you helped her put Dan Grimes on the bed where he was killed. She said he’d passed out.”
“Laura Quintin. Yes, I helped her.”
“Afterward, she said, you and she went to town and didn’t get back until nearly daylight. After Boniface had found the body.”
“That’s true. Boniface met us.”
“Boniface says he and his wife, that blackheaded looker, went to their own cottage right after you and Mrs. Quintin left for town. He says the whisky they’d drunk had left them drawn tight and wide awake, and they couldn’t sleep. He says they lay in bed and smoked and talked until it was almost time for him to get up and meet Grimes for the fishing they’d planned. He says his wife went to sleep maybe half an hour before the time, but he didn’t sleep at all. I’m not the coroner, Johnny, but I’ll bet my best spinner, after looking at the body, that Grimes died more than half an hour before he was found.”
“I see. You mean the Bonifaces alibi each other. And Mrs. Quintin and I do the same.”
“They could be lying, of course.”
“The Bonifaces?”
“Yes.”
“So could Laura Quintin and I.”
“Not likely, Johnny. If it was her husband instead of you, I might consider it.”
“The way it looks to me, you’ve got Jerome Quintin left.”
“That’s the way it looks. He says he fell on the bed in the cottage Dan Grimes had taken, the one the party was in, and he didn’t wake up until his wife came in this morning. Just his own word.”
“It doesn’t make sense that Jerome Quintin killed Grimes.”