Placing the light on the seat of the truck, I wrapped his clothes around the long steel legs and curving neck of the flamingo, and tied them with the ball of white cord. There was a hundred yards of it, and I used it all. I looked at my watch. It was only shortly after eight. There were cigarettes and matches in the glove compartment of the truck. I lit one and sat down, suddenly conscious that I was tired. It had been the day-long tension; and I remembered now I never had eaten anything. At nine I went down and looked at my mark. The tide was coming in. That was all right; I didn’t want to go out on to the highway with that boat until at least midnight. Of course, even if they were looking for him they didn’t know yet that he’d had a boat, but they would later.
At one a.m. the tide was at slack high water as nearly as I could tell. I drove out to the highway. There were very few cars on it now, passing at widely spaced intervals I waited until there was no one coming from westward before pulling on to it, and drove fast so as not to be overtaken. The oncoming cars, of course, could see nothing but my headlights.
At the approach to the Bahia Honda bridge a road led down off the highway to a picnic ground at the edge of the channel. I drove down, got out with the flashlight, and threw the beam outward on to the water. The tide was ebbing now, beginning to swirl around the pillars of the bridge.
I carried the boat down, put it in the water, and swamped it. It had flotation units, of course, and didn’t sink entirely. I shoved. It disappeared downstream in the darkness, headed seaward on the tide, at least fifteen miles from the car. It might not be found for days, or even weeks. I threw the oars in, and then the steel wrecking bar, heaving it as far as I could into deeper water.
Nothing remained now except the flamingo. I placed it on the seat beside me in its mummy wrappings of clothes. The Bahia Honda channel was the deepest in the Keys, and the bridge the highest, so no fishing was permitted from it. Waiting until no cars were coming, I shot on to the highway and up the incline of the bridge. When I reached the top, at mid-channel, I slammed on the brakes and hopped out. One pair of headlights was coming towards me, still over a mile away. I ran around the truck, yanked the door open, and heaved the flamingo over the rail.
It was a few minutes past five a.m. when I backed into the driveway at the apartment and put the truck in the garage. I went inside, turned on the air-conditioning unit, and poured an enormous drink of whisky. I was wrung out, and empty, and felt dead. I’d been onstage continuously for just a few hours less than thirteen days.
It was complete now. That was the whole package, and looking at it as objectively as I could, I didn’t think they’d ever untie it. I dropped the briefcase on the bed and started to open the zipper. Then I shrugged, pushed it off on to the floor and lay down. It didn’t seem to matter whether it was full of money or wallpaper samples. All I wanted was Marian Forsyth.
This struck me as an odd reaction for Jerome Langston Forbes. Maybe I’d been somebody else for so long I’d forgotten my own behavior patterns.
Thirteen
I shaved off the mustache the next morning, lay in the sun in the back yard for a few hours to erase the faint difference in the tan on my upper lip, and got a haircut, a short brush job. If the barber even suspected the bleached effect on the outer ends wasn’t entirely due to the sun, he merely thought I was queer.
The story broke a little more slowly than we’d anticipated, but once it did it gathered momentum like a rocket. On Wednesday morning Harris Chapman was a prominent Louisiana businessman who was reported missing somewhere in the Lake Okeechobee area after an apparently incoherent telephone call to his private secretary—and two days later the headlines were screaming FLAMINGO KILLER.
I could piece the sequence together pretty well from the newspaper accounts. Coral Blaine waited a full twenty-four hours before notifying the Florida highway patrol and asking them to make a search. She had no address except that I’d said I was in Lake Okeechobee, and reported I’d talked in a rambling fashion. Maybe I’d had a sun-stroke. To the police it meant merely another drunk. But it got into the paper on Wednesday morning, complete with name, and then the deluge began.
I gathered the Antilles Motel was first. I’d been missing forty-eight hours by then. My room wasn’t paid for after Sunday, but she wasn’t particularly worried, since the luggage was still there. The police probably pricked up their ears then. If this was a binge, it was a honey. The pants and stockings probably weren’t mentioned at first, but the motel did lead to Fitzpatrick, and Fitzpatrick to the bank, and then it began to hit the fan in handfuls. Drawing out that much money in cash was highly irregular, and they’d disapproved— How much money?
A hundred and seventy thousand dollars.
A hundred and—what? In cash?
By this time police lieutenants and city editors were probably trying to juggle three telephones at once. The money hit the headlines on Thursday morning, a hundred and seventy thousand in twenty, fifty, and a hundred dollar bills, in a briefcase. That was fine. The sooner, and the longer the time between this and the eventual finding of the car, the better.
Then the motel again, and the stockings and pants. No. Nobody’d ever seen a girl, and I’d left there alone that morning. Then, probably, the bartender at the Cameo, though it was happening so fast now it was impossible even to guess the sequence of the explosions. Girl with an overnight case. Argument. He’d called her Marian, and she flipped her lid. Who was she? Just a babe, and from the language she used—Then who was Marian? Tell me, Jack, I never heard of her.
The bartender at the second place remembered us together. Somebody had heard a girl’s voice say something about one o’clock that morning when I’d driven into the motel. And some bumpings in the car park some time later. And the car was backed in. And there was nothing, absolutely nothing, in the room to indicate a woman had ever been there except the one thing a man would be certain to overlook if it happened to be out of sight.
The picture was developing fast now, and you could imagine what it was like around the detective squad-rooms and city desks with the headlines and the story almost in sight. Missing millionaire may have slain night-life girl. Then Naples and the mysterious Marian again, and the car-top boat, and Lake Okeechobee. Then Coral Blaine’s admission, at long last, as to what I’d really said, and the flood burst.
But in the end it was Henry who clinched it, and topped them all, and gave it the tag every sensational story has to have. Flamingo. The Flamingo Killer. Flamingo Mystery Girl. There were pictures of Henry, and of Henry’s curio stand, and of Henry’s pink birds with their reinforcing-steel legs and sinuous concrete necks. Henry’s “as told to” first-person story appeared on the front page of one edition. I’d been there once before, and he’d recognized me. He’d even told me, he recalled, that the flamingos were made of concrete. And this time I was going past at about seventy and all of a sudden I saw the flamingos or remembered ’em and slammed on my brakes and backed up and grabbed one to see how heavy it was— And then, when he’d asked me to open the trunk I’d gone pale and sweaty and shaky and there was a wild crazy look in my eyes, and I’d screamed, ‘No, no, no!’ And then I’d said, ‘Who the hell ever heard of putting a flamingo in a trunk?’ Oh, I was crazy, all right. There was no doubt I was crazy as a loon.
The police, of course, had already checked the telephone company and learned the long-distance call had been made from Marathon. At first this raised some doubt I was as insane as I was trying to appear to be, since it looked like the workings of a logical mind deliberately throwing the police a false trail. But after talking to the guide at the Theater of the Sea and that bartender at Marathon they decided it was probable I did think I was at Lake Okeechobee. And I’d admitted to Coral I was puzzled by the fact it was somehow familiar. I’d been in Marathon for three days only the week before. The erratic pattern was there, the utter derangement alternating with moments of purpose and relative lucidity. I’d been in a screaming hurry at Henry’s place, and then I’d stopped for an hour to gawk at fish and leaping porpoises while the body of a dead girl was folded in the trunk of my car.