The Corpse Without a Country (5 page)

I didn’t doubt her a bit. I turned around. She said, “Where is that envelope with the report, Mr. Durham?”

I said, “You must have me mixed up with someone else. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

She laughed at me. I didn’t blame her. My attempt had been a feeble one at best. She said, “I do not think I have confused you with someone else. Peter Durham: five-feet, eleven inches, weight one hundred and eighty pounds, thirty-three years old, brown hair with faint gray at the temples, a broad face—perhaps with a touch of American Indian in the past—large nose a little twisted, a small raised scar on the point of the chin. No, I do not think I am wrong.”

I said, “You must have a good camera or telescopic vision.”

“I never saw you until yesterday,” she said. “But I know you well.”

I wondered who had been making a dossier on me—and why. I didn’t answer her, and she said, “The report now, please.”

“Sorry,” I said.

“Must I make you give it to me?”

“I haven’t got it.”

Her throaty voice held a thread of hardened steel. “I wish the report and also to search you.”

I was getting hungry. I hadn’t eaten since morning. And when I get hungry, I irritate easily. I let that show in my voice. I said, “I haven’t got anything you want. And if I had, you wouldn’t get it.”

She lifted her voice a little. “Mr. Ghatt.”

The rear door of the Buick came open. An aluminum crutch appeared. Then a leg encased in a metal brace was thrust out. I saw a face, the skin the color of dried mustard. It was topped with a white turban. A hand followed, and it held a gun. It didn’t look like any dart shooting toy either.

I saw all this very clearly because just as the door to the car opened, a spotlight lit up the pier. I turned and looked toward the source of the light. I’m sure the woman did too.

Someone up in Reese Fuller’s offices had a big portable spot at a window and it was trained down on us. I didn’t stop to decide whether it was a watchman or Reese himself or some eager beaver clerk working late. I took a chance that the light startled the man and the woman as much as it had me. I jumped back onto the deck of the boat. This time I kept going, on over the port railing and into the cold, dirty water of the canal.

I must have made a fine splash. When I surfaced, the character working the light turned it directly onto me. I twisted away from it and looked back the way I had come. The woman was standing on the deck of the boat, trying to bring the gun into line with me.

I went down. I stayed down as long as I could, swimming under water. When I surfaced, I let my face break water just long enough for me to get a breath of air. Then I went under again.

Swimming with a coat and trousers and heavy shoes on takes a lot of energy. By the time I had come up for air the third time, I was close to exhaustion. I didn’t try to go down again. The light was no longer hunting me. It was aimed at the Buick. I could hear the motor roar up. Evidently the blonde and her boy friend wanted no more of the spotlight than I did. I listened to the Buick back along the pier; then I turned and swam toward the nearest dock.

I found a rickety wooden ladder and pulled myself up. I was just behind the stern of the
Norway Queen
. Here it was dark. Above all I craved darkness.

I got more of it than I wanted. I pulled myself onto the dirty planking of the dock and lay puffing. Then I got to my feet. My clothes hung soggily on me, and when I took a step, water squished up out of my shoes.

Something came out of the dark and caught me on the chin—like that, with no warning!

I have a glass jaw. It took me six attempts to get through the Golden Gloves before I admitted it, but since that time I’ve tried to keep my jaw to myself. But tonight it wouldn’t have mattered if I’d been built of cast iron. The fist that hit me had enough power behind it to crack the hull of a ship.

I remember feeling the rush of air and then once more tasting the dirty water of the canal. After that there was the darkness again. But this time I didn’t want it.

T
HE SCENT IN MY NOSTRILS WAS DELICIOUS
. It was a compound of broiling salmon, spicy salad dressing, freshly brewed coffee, and subtle, expensive perfume.

A wet towel came down none too gently over my face. I lifted a hand and pushed feebly at it. A familiar voice said, “Slap him good. That always brings him around.”

I went back fifteen years. I was a college kid, fishing for Arne in the summer. He had just finished “teaching me some manners” and he was waking me up by slapping my face with a wet towel.

I opened my eyes. It wasn’t Arne with the towel at all. It was his daughter Jodi. She had another one of those halter-and-shorts combinations on. This one was a deep rose. She looked terrific.

I waggled my jaw. It seemed to be in one piece. I said, “I’m fine. You can stop the treatment.”

I sat up. I was on a leather couch in the pilot house of the
Norway Queen
. This was Arne’s home and his office. I recognized it by the clutter of papers, open-drawered files, checkbooks lying around, and a pair of wool socks drying in front of a porthole. He was the least neat sailor I had ever known.

Through a doorway beside me came the odors I had smelled. Arne must be in the galley cooking, I thought. I sniffed deeply. The perfume wasn’t coming through the door; it was coming from Jodi.

Arne poked his head into the pilot house. “Still got the same glass jaw, Durham,” he said with a happy grin.

“Go to hell,” I told him.

He disappeared and I looked at Jodi again. She was worth looking at, and I spent a moment enjoying myself. Jodi caught me.

She said, “You didn’t look at me that way thirteen years ago.”

I was too bushed and too hungry to blush. I said, “Thirteen years ago you didn’t look quite the same.”

She gave me a gamin grin and brought me a bottle of Arne’s fifteen dollar scotch and a glass. I took down three fingers neat. I got up, took the bottle and glass, and went into the forecastle. I located a shirt and pair of dungarees that had shrunk down enough to fit me. I put them on, had another drink, and went back to Jodi.

She said, “Every time I see you lately, Peter, you’re borrowing someone else’s clothes.”

Arne stuck his head into the pilot house. He got a big laugh out of the way his shrunken-down clothing hung on me. I scowled at him. “What’s the idea of belting me that way?”

“When somebody comes busting on my dock, I don’t ask who he is until afterward,” Arne said. “And I told you I don’t like snoopers.”

“I wasn’t snooping, damn it,” I said. “I was running from a beautiful blonde who had ideas about shooting me.”

I was looking straight at him when I said it, and I could have sworn that for a moment he lost all color under his heavy tan. Then the moment was gone. He gave a snort hefty with disbelief and held out his hand for the scotch bottle.

“Come and eat,” he said.

I gave him the bottle and stepped aside to let Jodi go into the galley. When we were seated before broiled salmon, shrimp salad, and hot rolls, she said, “Was it the same blonde you saw in the islands, Peter?”

I was too busy eating to answer right off. When my mouth was empty, I said, “I’ll bet on it,” and waited for Arne’s reaction.

He gave me another snort. Jodi said quickly, “Arne’s irritated because I’m trying to get him to come and live with me.”

He gave her a look that seemed pure venom. But again the moment was too short for me to be sure. He said, “A house don’t feel right under my feet.”

Joli gave me a faint smile that asked for understanding. She said, “But, Peter, why would this woman shoot at you?”

I told them what she wanted. Arne said, “What could Harbin put in a report to make anybody want it bad enough to kill for?”

I shrugged. “The blonde and her mustard-colored friend were getting downright nasty when someone in Reese’s office turned on a spotlight and gave me a chance to duck out.”

The door to the after deck stood open. A head came through the doorway and Reese Fuller said, “I didn’t know that was you in trouble, Durham, or I’d never have turned on the light.”

He didn’t sound as if he was joking.

Jodi said quickly, “Have some coffee, Reese.”

He accepted and sat down opposite me. He had evidently been listening to our conversation from out on deck, because he said, “I agree with Arne. Last week Harbin told me that he had nothing significant to report.”

I said, “Last week he wasn’t in the hospital with his head broken.”

Jodi fretted her lower lip with her teeth. “Will Tom be all right?”

I said, “With a concussion like this one, he has to be all right soon or he won’t make it at all.”

Reese Fuller wasn’t interested in Tom Harbin’s condition. He gulped down his coffee and stood up. “I came down to the office to get the work order ready on the
Flyer.”
He was talking to Arne. She’s due in tomorrow early.” He nodded to Jodi. “Thanks for the coffee.” He took off. I thought it was a hell of a way to leave his fiancée.’

The conversation had died and we finished the meal in silence. I mopped up my plate and got to my feet. “Thanks for everything, Jodi.” In the doorway, I stopped. “Arne, I’ll send your clothes back soon.”

He grinned at my pointedly not thanking him for the meal. He said, “Don’t bother, Durham. I got them from a shanghied leper on my last trip to Honolulu.”

I left to avoid more of his humor. Jodi caught up with me as I started along the dock. She was carrying my soggy suit. She handed it to me with a smile no engaged girl should offer except to her fiancé.

She said, “Be careful, Peter.”

I said, “I’ll go get the report and then lock myself in my apartment. Not even the blonde would invade me there.”

She said, “Don’t sell yourself so short,” in the kind of voice that sent goose pimples prickling up my spine.

I started off. She tagged along at my side. I said, “Maybe you’d better go back. The blonde might still be around.”

“I thought I could help,” Jodi said.

“From the way Arne acted, there isn’t any need to help. There isn’t anything to help about.”

“Arne is scared silly,” she said. “He’s scared because he doesn’t understand what’s happening.”

I hoped that was the reason. I said, “Just what
is
happening?”

Jodi followed me along a narrow dock to the other pier. She said, “I mean he doesn’t understand about the fires.”

I didn’t either. I said, “Did he say anything about them tonight?”

“Not to me,” she said. “You got there before I did. When I arrived, Arne was trying to cook dinner with one hand and bring you around with the other. I came to argue him into staying at my house. You saw how far I got.”

I said, “Arne’ll never leave his boat.”

“It’s more than his just being stubborn,” she said. “Ever since I left here and went to England to study commercial art, he’s been mad at me. Why until I began to make a little money, he wouldn’t even write. It was all foolishness to his way of thinking.”

I said, “That’s Arne, all right. How’s the art going, by the way?”

“I did well enough in England illustrating children’s books so that now I can try some serious painting,” she said. “That’s why I came back to Corning Island. It’s wonderful for seascapes.”

I didn’t answer. We’d reached the workboat. I went aboard and into the pilot house. I found the light switch and snapped it on. Jodi came in at my heels.

I started for the locker where I’d hidden the report.

Jodi’s scream of “Peter!” stopped me flatfooted.

I saw him too. It was Mike Fenney, in his new nautical clothes. He lay in front of the locker where I’d hidden the report. His head was twisted in such a way that I knew he had a broken neck.

He was obviously dead.

“T
HAT’S
M
IKE
F
ENNEY
,” Reese Fuller said in a worried voice.

This was the first time I had ever really seen him lose any of his suavity, and I was pleased. Despite the cool night air, he was sweating. Little droplets of water trickled down those features women loved to pet. Fuller kept dabbing at his chin with a linen handkerchief.

Lieutenant Maslin, working out of Homicide, grunted. “I can see it’s Fenney,” he said.

I was thinking that everyone in Puget City must have known Mike Fenney. The great Fenney, erstwhile professor of Journalism at the college, then columnist for the Express, and finally the town drunk. Not finally, I corrected myself, because when I had seen him in Bellingham he had become something else.

I recalled the way he had looked when I had spoken to him up there: his tan, the clarity of his eyes, his fresh, expensive clothing. These were not the signs of a wino who has decided to lay off for a day or a week; these were the signs of a man who had gone through a cure—given it to himself maybe—and had regained his self-respect.

I wondered what had wrought the change in him.

And I wondered how much it had to do with what he had become now. His body lay twisted up, exposed harshly now and then as a police photographer’s flash lit up the scene. In death, the beating he had given his body showed plainly. He was forty-one; he looked sixty.

The lab boys padded around with somber expressions. Fenney had at one time been a great favorite with everyone who knew him at all. And, I thought again, everyone had known him.

But there was certainly one person he hadn’t been a favorite with.

Lieutenant Maslin shook his head sadly. “He was the only man I knew who ever reported crime news honestly.”

It was a kind of eulogy. Reese Fuller said, “What’s he doing here on one of my boats?” His voice made it plain that he didn’t give a damn for the great man Mike Fenney had been.

“Lying dead with a broken neck,” I said. I bunched my fists in my pockets to keep from hitting Fuller.

Maslin turned to Fuller. “You tell us what he’s doing here?”

“How in the devil would I know?”

Maslin ignored Fuller’s bad manners. He was looking at big Arne who had just come into the cabin. Beyond Arne, I could see Jodi walking back and forth on the pier, smoking in rapid, nervous puffs despite the big
No Smoking
sign prominently displayed. Stumbling over Fenney’s body that way had given her quite a jolt. I was glad to see her walking off her edginess.