When I reached the car I placed it on the seat beside me, unzipped it, and removed ten fifties from one of the bundles. I placed them in the wallet and started out US 1. At the edge of Coral Gables there was a large sporting goods store I’d already located. I stopped and bought a six-foot aluminum car-top boat. While the men were installing the carrier atop the car and securing the boat and oars to it, I walked impatiently up and down, chainsmoking cigarettes and muttering about the delay. It came to a little over a hundred dollars. I gave the clerk three fifties, and when he brought my change, I asked, “How far is it to Lake Okeechobee?”
“You’re headed the wrong way,” he said. “It’s north. Go back—”
“Thanks,” I said, paying no attention. I was already walking out.
It was only a few miles from there to the roadside curio stand. I began watching for it, and when I saw it ahead I checked the mirror to be sure no one was too close behind me. I was clear. I kept booming right on at fifty until I was slightly past the place, and then hit the brakes in a crash stop. Rubber screamed, and the car yawed back and forth across the pavement, finally sliding to a stop on the gravel several hundred yards away. I put it into reverse, and shot backwards, and slid to a stop again right before the place.
The cold-eyed proprietor was waiting on a pair of tourists from Michigan. They were looking at seashells on a long table—or had been. They’d stopped everything now to stare at me. I leaped out of the car and ran over to the row of ornamental flamingos beside the fence. Grabbing one of them up, I lifted it, as if estimating its weight. It was one of the type normally set in paddling pools, with a circular concrete base at the bottom of the thin steel legs.
I turned towards him with an imperious gesture. “I’ll take one of these.”
He regarded me coldly. It was possible, of course, that he didn’t like anybody, but I felt sure he remembered me. “I’m waiting on these people, mister,” he said. “What’s the hurry?”
“Look,” I said, beginning to shout. “I didn’t stop here to tell you the story of my life. All I want to do is buy one of your goddamned flamingos—”
I grabbed it up in my arms as if to take it to the car, but lost my grip on it and let it drop. It fell over on the gravel. I lunged for it again. At that moment his wife hurried out of the shop and said anxiously, “I’ll take care of these customers, Henry.”
The Michigan couple was fascinated with the performance. Henry grabbed the flamingo away from me and stalked to the car. Nodding curtly to the trunk, he asked, “You got the keys?”
“The keys?” I was aghast. “No, no, no! Put it in here!” I yanked the rear door open. “On the seat.”
He looked at the pale blue leather and then at me. “Mister, it ain’t none of my business what you do with your car, but you ort to put it in the trunk.
I removed the cigarette holder from my mouth and stared at him in sheer outrage. “In the trunk? Who the hell ever heard of putting a flamingo in a trunk?”
This broke the tourists up at last. They had to turn away, and I heard strangled sounds of laughter.
“I mean—damn it—” I went on, gesturing wildly. “There’s no room. My—my suitcases are in there.”
He dropped the flamingo on the seat. I shoved a fifty-dollar bill in his hand and got in and roared away. As soon as I was out of sight I slowed to forty; there was still a lot of time to put in, and only the remotest chance that Henry would call the police and report me as a menace to navigation. If I were picked up he might have to part with the change from the fifty. I stopped in Homestead and bought a roll of heavy white cord.
It was shortly after two p.m. when I turned off into the large parking area at the Theater of the Sea, located between Tavernier and Islamorada on the Overseas Highway. It was one of the well-known tourist attractions of the Keys, a large souvenir shop and a fenced area containing the aquarium ponds and tanks stocked with marine life. There were two performing porpoises, and a guide who conducted a tour. I went inside, bought a ticket, and waited for the next tour.
When the crowd was large enough, some fifteen or twenty tourists, we started around, staring at the fish and listening to the lecture. I paid scant attention and spoke to no one until the guide was squatted at the end of one of the ponds coaxing a jewfish to come up and gulp the mullet he had in his hand. In a moment it did, and then settled slowly back into the rather murky water.
The guide rose. I pushed my way through the crowd around him, and demanded, “Did you say that was a jewfish?”
“That’s right,” he replied. “They’re one of the grouper family—”
I stared at him suspiciously. “I thought they lived in salt water.”
Someone giggled at the rear of the crowd. “They do,” the guide explained with weary patience. “These are all salt-water fish.”
I pursed my lips and nodded. “Just as I suspected. All I can say is it’s a hell of a way to treat fish.”
He sighed, opened his mouth to explain that the ponds were filled with sea-water, but turned away with a well-you-run-into-all-kinds expression on his face. The crowd tittered. The tour went on. I remained on the outskirts, aloof and disapproving.
I arrived in Marathon at four-thirty p.m., after stopping several times along the way to get out and look at the water. One hour and twenty minutes to go. I checked my watch against a time announcement on the car radio to be sure it was still reasonably accurate, and hunted up a bar. It was quiet, with hardly anyone in it, and there was a telephone booth at the rear. There was also one out front on the sidewalk, in case the first happened to be occupied.
I ordered one Scotch and water and nursed it for an hour. The bartender tried once or twice to start a conversation, but I gave no indication I even heard him. At exactly five-fifty, I got up and started out, and then stopped abruptly. “Oh, my God, I’ve got to make a phone call—” Getting several dollars’ worth of change, I went back to the booth and called Coral Blaine.
“Where are you, dear?” she asked. “I’ve been trying to reach you—”
“I’m at Lake Okeechobee,” I replied.
“Then you’re on your way home?”
I paid no attention. “It’s funny, though. I keep thinking I’ve been here before. I’ve never been in Lake Okeechobee have I?”
“Heavens, dear, I don’t know. I’ve never heard you mention it. But I’m glad you’ve started back—”
“Tell Wingard it was too late,” I said. “But he can forget it now.”
“Oh,” she said, a little uncomfortably, I thought. I was listening carefully for clues. “That was what I wanted to get in touch with you about. He was in this morning—”
And he’d told her, of course. “It was too late before I figured it out,” I went on, ignoring her completely. “It wasn’t your fault. You kept telling me Marian was there—”
“Darling,” she interrupted, “couldn’t we stay off that subject, just once?”
I nodded. There it was. I was sure now.
“You kept telling me she was,” I continued, “but I didn’t believe you, because I kept seeing her down here. Everywhere I went. What she was doing, of course, was going back and forth. But I don’t know why I didn’t figure out about the radio station in time. I knew how clever she was—”
“Harris, is this some kind of joke?”
“All she had to do was walk in there and pick up the microphone and spread her lies to everybody in the country, and turn ’em all against me. Make ’em think I didn’t treat her fairly. The way they turned against Keith, and it wasn’t his fault at all. The girl walked right into his car—”
“Harris—!”
“People believed her, too. I can tell. I see ’em looking at me on the street— But I stopped her, even if it was too late. She’s here with me now.”