"Help! Somebody! C'mere!"
The voice was thin and urgent and some distance off. I went out on the porch and looked down at the Swamp Ride. It was laid outin a huge figure eight but I couldn't see all of the water-ways because the jungly growth was too dense. I could see one of the little powered swamp boats scooting back to the dock though, and all the yelling seemed to be coming from it.
I went back inside and got my pants.
A couple of the rummy sweep-up men were wobbling toward me when I reached the Swamp Ride gate, and two or three of the guide girls were coming on the run too. I went around the closed ticket booth and stepped out on the dock.
The powerboat was just pulling in and my friend Freckles was at the wheel. His freckles looked like measles against the ashen color of his face. He was scared witless.
"Oh my God!" he gasped when he saw me. "It's awful! Just awful! He's dead!"
I jumped into the boat with him, nearly scalping myself on the roof rod. They had eight or nine of those little boats and each one of them was built like the _African Queen_-with the canvas tarp for a roof.
I got Freckles by the shoulders before he could come apart at the seams. He was pretty hysterical but I didn't slap him like they always do in the movies and on TV because it never works in real life. It just seems to jar loose more hysteria in the nut.
"Somebody's got to do something!" Freckles yelled in my face, spit and all. "My God those gators!"
"Yeah yeah," I yelled back at him. "But who? Who's dead? Where is he?"
"_Yes! Yes!_" the kid said frantically insistent. "_He's dead!_ I'm telling you _he's dead!_ He's in the water and those gators-"
I wasn't getting anywhere, and if I'd had any sense I would have gotten out of there because it wasn't any of my business. But who has any sense these days?
"Okay. Okay. Show me." I gave him a shake. "Show me where."
I could feel him shrinking in my hands.
"I never saw a dead man before." His voice was hoarse now, gaspy. "It's terrible!"
"Yeah. All right, kid. Get out." I didn't need a hysteric on my hands. "Where is it?"
Freckles pointed across the bow at a jungle-arched waterway. Then he scrambled up on the dock. More and more people were gathering with question marks for faces.
There was nothing to those little boats. Freckles had left the power on and I gave it a healthy goose and spun the wheel and went ripping down the waterway at about half a knot an hour. The governor on that boat must have been as tight as a virgin's something or other.
There was very little about the Swamp Ride that was phony. All the palmettos and sweet gums and tupelos and the intricate network of prehensile vines were real. There's no great trick to cultivating a swamp in Florida.
Even the gators were real. They came from a nearby gator farm. They were harmless old daddies who were used to being around people. All they wanted to do was sleep in the sun and wait for some kind man to bring them their food.
I suppose that's why they were all riled now. They didn't know what to make of this outrageous man-size bundle of meat that had been dumped in their nice little sheltered swamp.
The tangle of gaudy, suffering foliage spread open on either side and my laboring boat put-futted into a jungleribbed slough. The water was as opaque as green milk-glass and there was a little setback in the mudbank on one side.
Three bewildered gators were standing there in the shallows grunting up. There wasn't much to them. The smallest was three foot and the largest six. Their manner seemed to imply that they didn't like the thing they had found in the water and why didn't someone come along and take it away because it obviously didn't belong there.
I idled the boat toward them and they lumbered off into the water in a tail-spanking huff. I had to get out of the boat and into the gafocky water up to my knees to get the body.
It was face down and it was a large man and when I rolled it over it was Robert Cochrane. A long knife was standing jauntily in the Irishman's chest right where people usually think the bull's-eye should be.
It had a mother-of-pearl handle.
4
A fair crowd of Neverland employees had ganged around the dock and a couple of the uniformed lot guards were there making like FBI agents. They were the usual half-tough characters who always hold down jobs like that and they were having a swell time giving Freckles a pushing around when I got back with the boat and the body.
They lost interest in the scared kid. They damn near knocked each other into the water trying to get into the boat to have first look at the body.
"What a you know about this?" one of them growled at me.
Tough as nails. This was his big moment. Probably the only exciting thing that had happened to him all year was manhandling some poor drunk.
"I found him," I said.
"Jesus. I know that, I said-"
"That's all I know. I found him."
I was being a big help to him. He asked his partner wasn't I a big help and then the other toughy had a go at me.
"What the hell business was it of yours to go running in there after him?"
"The kid wasn't making much sense," I explained. "I thought maybe the gators were doing something to him."
"You know who shived him?" the first one asked me.
I shook my head and said, "Who killed Cock Robin?"
They looked at me and one of them said Hmm?_
"Just a crazy association of ideas," I said. "Robert Cochrane, Cochrane Robert, Cock Robin. See?"
The one who had said Hmm said it again. The other one looked like he was getting pretty hot.
"You some kind of nut, buster, or what?" he wanted to know.
A broad bluff-faced man in a two hundred dollar suit pushed through the crowd and started yelling at the guards.
"Who is it? Simpson! Who's been hurt?"
The guard named Simpson got up and told him it was the boss and that he was dead.
"Jesus, Mr. Franks, somebody knifed him! It's murder!"
This Mr. Franks tucked in his mouth till it looked like a zipped purse and his eyes snapped at Simpson and at Cochrane's body and at me. He gave me a double snap.
"Who the hell are you?" he demanded.
I got out of the boat and joined him on the dock.
"I found him," I said. "After the kid started to unhinge."
"But who are you?"
"Thaxton."
"Thaxton-shmaxton!" he said furiously. "What the hell are you doing here? I don't know you."
"Makes us even. Who the hell are you?" I didn't need any more emotion blown in my face that morning.
He gave me a look that should have stuck four inches out my back.
"I'm Franks," he said. "Mr. Cochrane's business manager."
"I'm Thaxton," I said. "Mr. Cochrane's prestidigitator. He hired me yesterday."
"Thanks loads for the news," he said in a sour voice. He brushed by me like I wasn't somewhat in his way and got into the boat to have a look for himself.
Neverland didn't open till ten in the morning and it was now about eight-forty. I wondered if they would open at all that day, and then I figured yes they would if May had her say. She could no more turn back a mark with a buck than a wolverine could refuse a dead rabbit.
I looked at the press of faces in front of me. I knew one of them. Billie. She was staring into the boat with a sort of entranced expression. I thought she was turning sick without realizing it. You could see that good-god knife in Cochrane real easy when one of the guards or Franks wasn't hunkering in front of him.
The law would arrive shortly and that would mean more tough talk in my face. I was in no hurry for it. I went over and got Billie by the elbow and said let's take a walk.