“She was a very small woman. I understand he makes you work around the place.”
“Oh Christ, I don’t mind that. He lives like a hog. it’s just he won’t let me keep ahead of it. He lets it go, then it’s twice as much work.”
“Is he always there when you’re cleaning up?”
“When I’m there, he’s there. What he says, I ever come around when he’s gone, or come without him calling me he’s got- something special he’s saving for a big surprise. I’m not fixing to get any surprise from him for sure.”
“All right, when you are cleaning the place, is there any particular part of the house he won’t let you touch?”
“Huh? I don’t get it.”
“As if something could be hidden in the house?”
“Huh? No. Nothing like that. But I sure God stay clear of the grove there back of the shed. One time, back in March I think, it got hot unexpected like. He’d come by and give me a blast on the horn pretty late. At like three in the morning, him asleep and snoring by then, I was there smelling some stinking fish he’d forgot about and left on the porch maybe since that noon. Redfish. They turn fast when it’s hot. It got my stomach rolling over finally, so I up and pull my dress on and go out and pick them up by the stringer, get a shovel from the shed and go off back into the grove to bury them holding my breath mostly. I hardly dug half a hole and he come at me, running flat out, grunting, that belt knife of his winking in the moonlight, charging bareass crazy right at me. Me, I take off through the grove and hear him hit a root or something and go down hard. Then he’s coming on again, yelling he’s going to kill me, and I’m yelling I was burying his stinking fish before the stink made me snap my lunch.
“Then he was quiet, so I snuck in a circle and see him back in the open part of the grove, finishing digging the hole. He dabbed the fish in and covered them over, then he hollers for me to come on in, saying it was okay, he was just having a funny dream and he woke up. Hell he did. A long time after he went back in the house I get the nerve fin’ly to sneak back in, and the way I got grabbed sudden in the dark from behind, it like to kill me. But what he wanted to do was just horse around. You know. Laughing and tickling. And he got me all turned on prakly before I got over being scared. And I tell you one thing. I never seen any shovel anywhere around his place since. But he isn’t so dumb he’d bury that dwarf woman onto his own place. Not with a couple million acres of glades close by, where he could put a little dead woman back in there so far and so deep, the whole army and navy couldn’t find her in a hundred years. Why, he could just float her into a gator pool and them gators would wedge her down into the mud bottom for ripenin‘ and have her et’n to nothing in a couple weeks. Maybe they can catch him killin’ somebody, but they’ll never get him for it afterwards. I’ll tell you one more thing for sure. If’n you mess him up good, and he knows who done it, you’re best off leaving him dead your own self. That’s the thing about that tobacco work. I get maybe up past Georgia someplace and the bus stops and there he is, leanin on that white Lincoln grinnin, and I pick up my suitcase off ‘n the rack and get off that bus, because that’s all there’d be to do. And he knows it.”
On one of her notebook sheets I drew a crude sketch of the cottage and shed and road, and she made an X where she had started digging, and drew in some lopsided circles to indicate where the trees were standing.
As I let her off, she looked at me for a moment, eyes squinty and her lips sucked in. “I’d hate for you to say I told you this stuff.”
“Cindy, you’re fifteen years old, and you’re going to get out of this mess and in another couple of years you won’t remember much about it.”
There was a bleak amusement in her woman’s eyes. “I’m three weeks from sixteen, and it’ll keep right on going on until Boo gets tired of it, and there won’t be a day in my life I don’t remember some part of it or other.”
I drove into Naples, on the alert for Land Rovers and white Lincoln convertibles. I found a hardware store several blocks along Fifth Avenue, parked in their side lot, bought two spades and a pick and put them in the trunk. Then I thought of another device that might be useful, a variation of the way plumbers search for buried pipes. I bought a four foot length of quarter inch steel reinforcing rod, and one of those rubberheaded mallets they use for body and fender work. Naples was drowsy in the heat of the offseason, pre-noon sun. I phoned Crane Watts’ office number, and hung up when he said hello. Next I phoned his home number. It did not answer. I tried the club and asked if Mrs. Watts was on the courts. In a few moments they said she was and should they call her to the phone. I said never mind.
When I arrived at the club the parking lot was nearly empty. There were a few people down on the beach, one couple in the pool. As I walked toward the courts I saw only two were in use, one where two scrawny elderly gentlemen were playing vicious pat-ball, and, several courts away, the brown, lithe, sturdy Mrs. Watts in a practice session. The man was apparently the club pro, very brown, balding, thickening. He moved well, but she had him pretty well lathered up. There were a couple dozen balls near the court. He was feeding her backhand, ignoring the returns, bouncing each ball, then stroking it to her left with good speed and overspin. She moved, gauged, planted herself, pivoted, the ball ponging solidly off the gut, moved to await the next one. The waistband of her tennis skirt was visibly damp with sweat.
It seemed, for her, a strange and intense ritual, a curious sublimation of tension and combat. Her face was stern and expressionless. She glanced at me twice and then ignored me. Gave no greeting.
Finally as he turned to pick up three more balls she said, “That’ll do it for now, Timmy.”
He took a handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his face. “Righto, Miz Watts. I make it three hours. Okay?”
“Anything you say.”
As Timmy was collecting the balls in a mesh sack, she walked to the sidecourt bench; mopped her face and throat with a towel, stared at me with cold speculation as I approached.
“Pretty warm for it, Vivian.”
“Mr. McGee, you made an excellent first impression on me the other night. But the second one was more lasting.”
“And things might not have been what they seemed.”
She took her time unsnapping the gold glove on her right hand, peeling it off. She prodded and examined the pads at the base of her fingers. “I do not think I am interested in any nuances of legality, Mr. McGee, any justification of any cute tricky little things you want to involve my husband in.” As she spoke, she was slipping her rackets into their braces, tightening down the thumb screws. “He is not… the kind of man for that kind of thing. I don’t know why he’s trying to be something he isn’t. It’s tearing him apart. Why don’t you just leave us alone?”
As she gathered up her gear, I picked the words that would, I hoped, pry open a closed mind. “Vivian, I wouldn’t ask your husband’s advice on a parking ticket, believe me.”
She straightened up, those very dark blue eyes becoming round with surprise and indignation. “Crane is a very good attorney!”
“Maybe he was. Once upon a time. Not now.”
“Who are you? What do you want?”
“I want to form a little mutual aid society with you, Vivian. You need help and I need help.”
“Is this… help I’m supposed to get, is it just for me or for Crane too?”
“Both of you.”
“Of course. I get him to do some nasty little piece of crooked work for you, and it will make us gloriously rich and happy.”
“No. He did his nasty little piece of crooked work last year, and it didn’t do either of you any good.”