Dishevelled and coatless in the misty rain, Mandarin stood glumly beside the broken guardrail. It was past 3 AM. His clothes looked slept in, which they were. He’d continued the cocktail hour that began on his evening flight from New York once he got home. Sometime toward the end of the network movie that he wasn’t really watching he fell asleep on the couch. The set was blank and hissing when he stumbled awake to answer the phone.
“Hello, Russ,” greeted Saunders, puffing up the steep bank from the black lakeshore. His face was grim. “Thought you ought to be called. You’re about as close to him as anyone Stryker had here.”
Mandarin swallowed and nodded thanks. With the back of his hand he wiped the beads of mist and sweat from his face. Below them the wrecker crew and police diver worked to secure cables to the big maroon Buick submerged there. Spotlights, red tail lights burning through the mist. Yellow beacon on the wrecker, blue flashers on the two patrol cars. It washed the brush-grown lakeshore with a flickering nightmarish glow. Contorted shadows wavered around objects made grotesque, unreal. It was like a Daliesque landscape.
“What happened, Ed?” he managed to say.
The police lieutenant wiped mud from his hands. “Nobody saw it. No houses along this stretch, not a lot of traffic this hour of night.”
An ambulance drove up slowly, siren off. Static outbursts of the two-way radios echoed like sick thunder in the silence.
“Couple of kids parked on a side road down by the lake. Thought they heard brakes squeal, then a sort of crashing noise. Not loud enough to make them stop what they were doing, and they’d been hearing cars drive by fast off and on all night. But they remembered it a little later when they drove past here and saw the gap in the guard rail.”
He indicated the snapped-off stumps of the old-style wood post and cable guard rail. “Saw where the brush was smashed down along the bank, and called it in. Investigating officer’s flashlight picked out the rear end plain enough to make out the license number. I was on hand when owner’s identification came in; had you called.”
Russ muttered something. He’d met Saunders a few years before when the other was taking Styker’s evening class in creative writing. The detective had remained a casual friend despite Mandarin’s recent confrontations with the department.
“Any chance Curtiss might have made it?”
Saunders shook his head. “Been better than a couple hours since it happened. If he’d gotten out, he’d’ve hiked it to a house down the road, flagged down a motorist. We’d have heard.”
Someone called out from the shore below, and the wrecker’s winch began to rattle. Russ shivered.
“Rained a little earlier tonight,” Saunders went on. “Enough to make this old blacktop slick as greased glass. Likely, Curtiss had been visiting some friends. Had maybe a few drinks more than he should have — you know how he liked gin in hot weather. Misjudged his speed on these slippery curves and piled on over into the lake.”
“Hell, Curtiss could hold his liquor,” Mandarin mumbled. “And he hardly ever pushed that big Buick over 35.”
“Sometimes that’s fast enough.”
The Buick’s back end broke through the lake’s black surface like a monster in a Japanese horror flick. With an obscene gurgle, the rest of the car followed. Lake water gushed from the car body and from the open door on the passenger side.
“OK! Hold it!” someone yelled.
The maroon sedan halted, drowned and streaming, on the brush-covered shore. Workers grouped around it. Two attendants unlimbered a stretcher from the ambulance. Russ wanted to vomit.
“Not inside!” a patrolman called up to them.
The diver pushed back his facemask. “Didn’t see him in there before we started hauling either.”
“Take another look around where he went in,” Saunders advised. “Someone call in and have the Rescue Squad ready to start dragging at daylight.”
“He never would wear his seatbelt,” Russ muttered.
Saunders’ beefy frame shrugged heavily “Don’t guess it would have helped this time. Lake’s deep here along the bluff. May have to wait till the body floats up somewhere.” He set his jaw so tight his teeth grated. “Goddamn it to hell.”
“We don’t know he’s dead for sure.” Russ’s voice held faint hope.
Sloshing and clanking, the Buick floundered up the lakeshore and onto the narrow blacktop. The door was sprung open, evidently by the impact. The front end was badly mauled— grill smashed and hood buckled — from collision with the guard rail and underbrush. Several branches were jammed into the mangled wreckage. A spiderweb spread in ominous pattern across the windshield on the driver’s side.
Russ glowered at the sodden wreck, silently damning it for murdering its driver. Curtiss had always sworn by Buicks — had driven them all his life. Trusted the car. And the wallowing juggernaut had plunged into Fort Loundon Lake like a chrome-trimmed coffin.
Saunders tried the door on the driver’s side. It was jammed. Deep gouges scored the sheet metal on that side.
“What’s the white paint?” Mandarin pointed to the crumpled side panels.
“From the guard rail. He glanced along that post there as he tore through. Goddamn it! Why can’t they put up modern guard rails along these back roads! This didn’t have to happen!”
Death is like that, Russ thought. It never had to happen the way it did. You could always go back over the chain of circumstances leading up to an accident, find so many places where things could have turned out OK. Seemed like the odds were tremendous against everything falling in place for the worst.
“Maybe he got out,” he whispered.
Saunders started to reply, looked at his face, kept silent.
It missed the morning papers, but the afternoon News-Sentinel carried Stryker’s book-jacket portrait and a few paragraphs on page one, a photograph of the wreck and a short continuation of the story on the back page of the first section. And there was a long notice on the obituary page.
Russ grinned crookedly and swallowed the rest of his drink. Mechanically he groped for the Jack Daniel’s bottle and poured another over the remains of his ice cubes. God. Half a dozen errors in the obituary. A man gives his whole life to writing, and the day of his death they can’t even get their information straight on his major books.
The phone was ringing again. Expressionlessly Mandarin caught up the receiver. The first score or so times he’d still hoped he’d hear Curtiss’s voice — probably growling something like: “The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” Eventually he’d quit hoping.
“Yes. Dr Mandarin speaking.”
(Curtiss had always ribbed him. “Hell, don’t tell them who you are until they tell you who’s calling.”)
“No. They haven’t found him yet.”
(“Hot as it is, he’ll bob up before long,” one of the workers had commented. Saunders had had to keep Russ off the bastard.)
“Yeah. It’s a damn dirty shame. I know how you feel, Mrs Hollister.”
(You always called him a hack behind his back, you bloated bitch.)
“No I can’t say what funeral arrangements will be made.”
(Got to have a body for a funeral, you stupid bitch.)
“I’m sure someone will decide something.”
(Don’t want to be left out of the social event of the season, do you?)
“Well, we all have to bear up somehow, I’m sure.”
(Try cutting your wrists.)
“Uh-huh. Goodbye, Mrs Hollister.”
Jesus! Mandarin pushed the phone aside and downed his drink with a shudder. No more of this!
He groped his way out of his office. That morning he’d cancelled all his appointments; his section of the makeshift clinic was deserted. Faces from the downstairs rooms glanced at him uneasily as he swept down the stairs. Yes, he must look pretty bad.