By the time I was dressed she was snoring softly. I pulled the sheet and the thin blanket over her and turned off the light. When I went out the door, I made certain it locked behind me. I walked out to the edge of the water, where the small waves lisped and slapped against the sand. A seabird flapped up, honking, startling me.
The hours before dawn are when the spirits are supposed to be lowest. That is when most hospital deaths occur. That is when the labored breathing stops, with a final rattle in the throat. I tried to heap ashes on my head. McGee, your handy neighborhood stud. Always on call. Will provide references. I tried to summon up a smidgin of postcoital depression. But all I could tell about myself, in spite of all introspection, was that I felt content. I felt happy, satisfied, relaxed-with an overlay of a kind of sweet sadness, the feeling you get when you look at a picture of yourself taken with someone long gone on a faraway shore long ago.
Six
THE DINING room at Eden Beach had a wing like a small greenhouse, with an opaque roof. Broadleafed plants in big cement pots provided the illusion of privacy for each table.
I arrived for brunch at one thirty, and while I was still examining the menu, a pair of unordered Bloody Marys arrived, complete with celery stalks for stirring. A few moments later the lady herself arrived and slid into the chair across from me. She looked shy and a bit worn. Her lips were puffy and there were bruised patches under her eyes.
We looked at each other in that moment which has to set the style for the whole relationship. I had guessed that perhaps we would have a bawdy little chat about how we had missed arranging a nooner, and how exhausted the male might be, and how badly lamed the female.
But from the look in her eyes I knew that was not the way to go, and knew that I would have relished that kind of talk as little as she. So I hoisted the glass. “To us.”
“To us,” she said, and we touched glasses. The drink was spice-hot and delicious.
“It’s going to be kind of difficult and awkward, keeping control of my staff, Travis. I really want us to be very very discreet, very careful. This job does mean an awful lot to me.”
I smiled at her and said, “You are implying, of course, that these fun and games are going to continue.”
She flushed and said, “Don’t you want to? I thought we were-”
“Hey! I was afraid you might have second thoughts. Remember, I was sent into the game as a substitute for the doctor.”
“That’s not fair!” she said angrily. I kept smiling. Anger faded. She laughed. “Well, maybe that was the way it started. Okay. Let’s say I got lucky.”
“We both got lucky. It has to happen like that sometimes.”
She reached and touched my hand, her eyes glowing, then looked and saw a waitress coming and yanked her hand back.
“Look,” she said in her business voice, “I have to finish this and run. I really do. I am getting some kind of a short count in supplies, and as it isn’t my people, it has to be the wholesaler, and I had him hold the next truck. I have to go down there with my bookkeeper and prove to him he’s got thieves in his warehouse. I talked to Prescott Mullen this morning-by the way, he looked kind of shrunken and uninteresting-and gave him your name and told him you were checking out how Ellis got killed and said you’d find him sometime today.”
“Thank you.”
“We always put a sprig of mint in the half grapefruit. All the time Prescott was talking to me, Marcie Jean stood there smiling, with a piece of mint leaf stuck on her front tooth.”
“I’ve thought it over and decided she does have a fat face.”
She patted my hand. “Thank you, dear. You know the old joke about the ideal wife?”
“Deaf and dumb and owns a liquor store?”
“Right. Well, you’ve got an old lady now that runs a hotel, and she’s entitled to put dear friends on the cuff, so you better count on coming across the state at pretty regular intervals, hear?”
She got up, touched a fingertip to my lips, and hurried away.
I found Dr. Prescott Mullen on the beach, sitting in a sling chair under a big blue and white umbrella. The bride was face down in the shade beside him, a towel over her head, her legs and back pinked by fresh sunburn. Her new rings winked in reflected sunlight. I introduced myself and he told me to pull another chair over, but I sat on my heels, half facing him.
“I’m just doing a favor for a friend,” I told him. “Ron Esterland is suspicious of the timing. If Ellis had outlived his daughter, a lot of money would have moved in a different direction.”
“Some of it to him?” the doctor asked.
“Yes. But I don’t think that’s the primary motive.”
“So what is?”
“Anxiety. Guilt. A sense of loss. He’s sorry they didn’t get along, and he’s sorry his father didn’t live to see him make it as a painter.”
Prescott Mullen looked thoughtful. “I suppose in some sense it would be an easier murder to justify than if the man was healthy. How many months was he robbed of? If I had to guess, I’d say six at the outside. And the last six weeks would probably not have been what you’d call living.”
“What was his attitude toward his illness?”
“He seemed to think of it as a challenge. To him the cancer was an entity, an enemy, a thing that had invaded him and plotted against his life. I was no fan of Ellis Esterland. He was a highly competitive organism. I used to wonder how Anne could put up with him, why she didn’t just walk out.”
“When did you last see Esterland?”
“Mid-June. About five weeks before he was killed. He looked better than I expected him to look. But he was in pain. He wouldn’t admit it. I know he was in great pain.”
“How could you tell?”
“Observation. You see a lot of pain, you know what it looks like: Sudden sweats. Quick little intakes of breath. A sudden pallor. I think he could probably handle more pain than most, just out of arrogance and pride. He was a stubborn old man. I knew there would be more coming, and it might get to the point where he couldn’t handle it. I tried to get him to admit the pain, and I tried to tell him it would get worse. He told me not to worry about it. He said he was fine. I remember giving him a little lecture about the psychology of pain.”
“Would he have arranged to get himself killed rather than admit he was hurting?”
He shook his head slowly. “No, I can’t see Esterland in that role. I gave him a lecture about the effects of the hallucinogens on pain. We know now that cannabis can quell the nausea some people feel during chemotherapy and radiology. Cannabis and hashish and LSD have an interesting effect on the subjective experiencing of pain. Intense and continuing pain seems to the patient to be a part of him, something swelling and burning inside of him, taking him over. The hallucinogens have the odd effect of making the pain seem aside and apart from the patient. The pain may be just as intense, but it is, subjectively, off to one side. Pain creates a terrible and consuming anxiety, on some very deep level of the brain. Pain is nature’s warning that something is terribly wrong. If anxiety is quelled by any hallucinogen, then pain, though still as intense, becomes less frightening and consuming. That may be the answer. I thought Ellis was fighting the pain relievers because they would dull his wits, dull his perceptions of the world. He wanted to stay just a little brighter than anybody else he knew. I urged him to find a private source for hallucinogens and experiment with them. I explained that it would leave his mind unimpaired but would enable him to handle pain better. I told him that it was the best way for him to get any enjoyment out of the time he had left.”
“Did you tell him how long he had left?”
“I told him my guess. That was our relationship from the start. Total candor.”