Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 34, No. 13 & 14, Winter 1989

Of the Five Who Came by Fletcher Flora

I think now, looking back, that I had a feeling of trouble from the moment they came, but I had no feeling at first that the trouble was death.

They came early in the afternoon of a day in May. There were five of them. Two pairs and a single. They came in a 1958 Chrysler station wagon with flaring fins and a Kansas City license and a luggage rack on top. Behind the wagon, on a trailer, was an inboard motor-boat, sleek and polished and with a look of power. The wagon stopped in the drive behind my cottage. I went outside and started toward it, and a man got out from under the wheel and started toward the cottage, and we met between starting places.

He was a tall man with a hard, square face and heavy shoulders and big hands with long spatulate fingers. The nails of the fingers were manicured, and the hands looked fleshy and soft; actually they were very strong, and they felt, I noticed when we shook hands, like expensive and pliant cowhide.

He looked familiar. I had a notion he was someone I should remember from another time and place. His name was, I thought, Ira Boniface, for that was the name of the man who had reserved three cottages, and I had never seen him or heard of him before to my knowledge. He was wearing a soft cloth hat with little air vents in each side above the band, and a light leather jacket over a red and brown plaid shirt. His trousers were brown, some kind of tough twill, and his shoes were darker brown and pebble-grained with moccasin toes and thick soles.

“Welcome to Laird’s Point,” I said. “I’m John Laird.”

“Thanks,” he said. “I’m Dan Grimes.”

He said it as if he expected to be recognized, and he usually was. He would have been recognized, by name if not by sight, by almost anyone in the state, and by many people outside it. The boss of the dominant political party, he had never run for office or been appointed to one, but he was the man who controlled the men who did, and he exercised an incredible power and authority that had been developed through violence and a kind of magical persuasiveness and managed to survive by a complex system of alliances and loyalties and threats that no one could quite analyze or understand.

“I was expecting a Mr. Boniface,” I said.

“Ira’s in the wagon,” he said.

He turned half around toward the wagon from the hips, and this was apparently a sign for the others to move, for they got out of the wagon and came toward us, two women and two men. One of the men was as tall as Grimes, but not so heavy in the shoulders nor quite so broad in the hips, and he moved like a big cat. The other man was short and slight by comparison, though not much shorter or slighter than I, and there was about him an odd and incongruous effect of force and frailty that made you instantly aware of him. Both of the women were attractive, each in her own way. One of them was a brunette with a clear brown skin, and the other was a blonde with a clear brown skin.

Grimes began without preface to introduce the four, and it turned out that the big catlike man was Ira Boniface, the one who had made the reservations, and the brunette was his wife and was called Rita. She had the kind of looks that hit you at once and hit you hard. She was wearing a red cashmere sweater tucked into the waistband of a pair of fancy black pants that fit her a little looser than her clear brown skin.

The other couple, the slight man and the blonde woman, were Mr. and Mrs. Jerome Quintin. Her Christian name was Laura. Her head was bare in the bright sun, her hair so pale that it seemed in the light to be almost white. It was sleeked back without a part and held in a knot on her neck, and it seemed naturally the pale color that it was. She was very slender, almost thin, and she had the special and rather gaunt seductiveness of a high-fashion model. She nodded to me without speaking or smiling, and afterward she looked immediately away, down the slope behind me to the blue lake glittering in the sun. In her face, I thought, there was a kind of petulance that was not actually an expression but only the suggestion or shadow of one.

After the introductions, I pointed out the three cottages that had been reserved for them. They stood in a line along the lake shore about twenty feet apart and about fifty feet up the slope from the water, and they were the best three of the four that I had to rent. The fourth cottage was considered not so good because it was farther up the slope with the others between it and the lake, and it was not at this time either reserved or rented.

Grimes moved off toward the cottages, the others following, and I unloaded the luggage and tackle boxes from the rack on top of the Chrysler and separated it according to the identification tags. While I was doing this, I kept watching to see how the cottages were claimed. Ira and Rita Boniface went into the first, Grimes into the second, and the Quintins into the third, the last on the far end of the line near the point.

I gathered up the Quintins’ luggage, a leather bag and a metal tackle box and a long aluminum rod case, and carried it down past the first cottage and the second cottage to the third cottage on the end. I kicked against the screen door lightly, and someone said to come in, and I pushed the door open with a shoulder and went inside and set the luggage down on the concrete floor of the screened-in porch. Laura Quintin was sitting in a chair on the porch, staring out through the screen and down through the scrub oaks on the slope to the lake. Jerome Quintin came to the door and stood leaning against the jamb.

“Thanks,” he said, looking at the luggage.

“I think this is all of it,” I said.

“Bag, tackle box, rods,” he said. “That’s it.”

There was a feeling of suspension on the porch, an uneasy hiatus between something before and something that would come after, and I had arrived, I felt, between two parts of a conversation that had been bad and might become worse.

“If there’s anything you need, let me know,” I said.

“We’ll do that,” Quintin said.

He shoved a hand into a pocket and looked uncertain, but apparently he decided that a tip would not be appropriate in my case, and after a moment he pulled the hand out of the pocket and put it behind him.

“Do you own this place?” Laura Quintin asked suddenly.

She did not look at me and did not sound as if she really cared if I owned the place or not. Her voice was quiet and curiously flat.

“The bank and I,” I said.

“Do you live here by yourself?”

“Yes. Except for the guests.”

“I wonder why.”

“It’s a pretty good way to live,” I said. “A man’s life is pretty much his own.”

“I like a man who lives his own life,” she said.

She wasn’t really speaking to me. She was speaking to Jerome Quintin, her husband. Glancing at him, I saw that his face had suddenly set in stiff lines, his mouth pinched and white at the corners.

“I hope you enjoy your stay,” I said.

Neither of them answered, and I opened the screen door and went out and back up to the Chrysler and got another load of luggage and carried it to the middle cottage where Dan Grimes had gone. He heard me at the door and came out and held it open for me.

“Thanks,” I said.

“I should have carried it over myself,” he said.

“It’s all right,” I said. “It’s part of the service.”

He had taken off his hat and leather jacket and looked relaxed and happy in his plaid shirt.

“There’s a bottle of scotch in the bag,” he said. “Have a drink with me?”

“No, thanks,” I said. “I’ve got some work to do.”

“There must be a lot of work to running a place like this. Do you do it all yourself?”

“Most of it.”

“How are the fish biting now?”

“Fine. Lots of crappie and bass. The wall-eye are coming on.”

“That’s what I heard. A friend of mine was down here last week. He recommended your place.”

“Thank him for me when you see him.”

“I’ll try my luck after awhile. Toward evening.”

“Evening’s a good time,” I said.

He sounded natural and friendly, and I found myself liking him. I guess that’s why he’d been able to do all the things he’d done, because he had a natural and friendly way and a lot of people besides me had found themselves liking him until it was too late to know better. I said so long and went back for the last of the luggage and took it to the first cottage. On the way, I saw Ira Boniface standing at the edge of the lake at the foot of the slope with his back to the cottage. I pushed the screen door open and put the luggage on the floor of the porch. Rita Boniface asked from inside who it was, and I answered that it was John Laird with the luggage.

“Would you mind bringing it inside?” she said.

“Not at all,” I said.

I picked it up again and carried it into the sitting-sleeping room and set it on the floor by a studio couch. Rita Boniface was lying on her back on the double bed smoking a cigarette. She turned her head toward me and smiled lazily and breathed a thin cloud of smoke.

“What’s to do around here besides fishing?” she said.

“Not much,” I said. “It’s a fishing camp.”

“You look like a clever young man,” she said. “Maybe you can think of something.”

“I’ll try to make your stay as pleasant as possible,” I said.

She breathed smoke in and out of her lungs and laughed softly. The laugh had the effect of riding out on the smoke. Down below on the lake, a small cabin cruiser turned out of the main channel and around the point into the arm in front of the cottages. It pulled in slowly beside my gasoline dock, and its horn sounded twice.

“Excuse me,” I said. “Someone needs gas.”

“Come again when you can stay longer,” she said.

I went down the slope to the gasoline dock and filled the tank of the small cruiser and talked for a while with the pilot and then stood on the dock and watched the cruiser turn in the narrow arm and move back out into the channel. In spite of the sun and the quiet lake, I had a feeling that it was a bad day.

Later in the afternoon Dan Grimes came over to my cottage. He was carrying a spinning rod and reel in one hand, a green metal tackle box in the other.

“You going out?” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “Can you suggest a good place?”

“It depends on what you’re after.”

“Bass.”

“You’d better go up to the Gravois Arm. You know where it is?”

“Yes.”

“You want me to help you launch your boat?”

“No, thanks. Ira can help. Where’s the best place to launch it?”

“Just follow the road past the cottages. It runs right down to the water near the point. You’d better back down all the way. There’s no good place to turn.”

“All right. I’ll need enough gas to get around to the pump.”

“I’ve got some here in a can,” I said.

I gave him the can, and he went out and turned the Chrysler in the drive and started slowly backward down the road with the trailer in advance. As he passed the first cottage, Ira Boniface came out with his rod and tackle and got into the Chrysler while it continued to move. I went down to the gasoline pump and waited, and pretty soon they came around the point in the boat. The motor of the boat sounded sweet and strong. It was not a big boat, but it was the best you could buy of its kind and had cost quite a lot of money. I filled the tank and watched the boat move out into the channel and then went back up to the cottages to check the wood boxes.

The days that May were mostly clear and warm, but the evenings and nights generally got pretty cool, and sometimes it was pleasant to have a small fire in the fireplace. So I checked the wood boxes, and there was enough wood in all of them for that night. When I reached the last one and looked into it Laura Quintin came out onto the screened porch and spoke.

“May we please have some ice?” she said.

“There ought to be a couple of trays in the refrigerator,” I said.

“There isn’t any. Someone left the trays on the cabinet.”

“Sorry. I’ll get some and bring it right down.”

“Thank you.”

I went back to my own cottage and put a couple dozen cubes in a plastic bag and returned. Approaching the Quintins’ cottage, I heard Laura Quintin’s voice raised in anger, but in spite of volume and anger it retained, or acquired, a cold quality of deadly calm. It was somehow in accord with her pale reserve. She was the kind of woman, I thought, who would never in anger become excessively emotional and vulgar. She would become, as she was now, bitterly cold and incisive.

“The trouble with you,” she said, “is that you have an unfortunate combination of qualities. You are brilliant and charming and weak. Because you have no guts, you’re a perfect tool.”

“Thanks for your opinion,” Jerome Quintin said. “I’m happy to know precisely what you think of me.”

“Not at all. I’m delighted to tell you.”

“Would you care to learn, in return, what I think of you?”

“I don’t think I particularly care any longer.”

“Nevertheless, I want to tell you. Just for my own satisfaction. You have, my dear, no scope, no imagination, and not, I suspect, much intelligence. Because you want to be a nonentity, you want to make me one also.”

“You see? You have proved your weakness beautifully with your own words. Is being a nonentity the only alternative to what you’re becoming? For heaven’s sake, can’t you exploit your own talents in your own way for your own good?”

I had stopped outside the screen door, and I was suddenly aware that I was deliberately listening. I was a little ashamed, but not much. In the interval of silence that now fell, I knocked quickly and was told by Jerome Quintin to come in. I opened the door and crossed the porch and went into the cottage and put the bag of cubes on a table.

“I hope these will hold you until your own have time to freeze,” I said.

“That’s more than enough,” Quintin said. “Thanks very much.”

Two bottles were sitting on the cabinet by the sink in the kitchen area. He took three glasses from a shelf above and put ice cubes in the glasses.

“You’ll have a drink with us, of course,” he said.

“No, thanks,” I said. “I’d better get back.”

“Nonsense. Surely you can take time for a drink. We’d be pleased to have you join us, wouldn’t we, Laura?”

“Yes, of course,” Laura Quintin said. “Please do.”

She said it promptly and nicely, but it obviously made no difference to her, one way or the other. The quality of anger was no longer in her voice, but it was cold and rigidly contained.

“All right,” I said. “I’ll have one with you.”

“Good. Bourbon or scotch?”

“Bourbon.”

“Straight?”

“A little tap water, please,” I answered.

He poured bourbon over ice in one of the glasses and added water. He repeated the operation with the other glasses, using scotch instead of bourbon. Afterward he distributed the drinks, and Laura took hers first and swallowed some of it instantly without ceremony. I lifted my own in a small salute to Quintin for his hospitality. It was a strong drink of good whisky.

“I think,” Laura said, “that I’ll drink a great many of these tonight. It seems to me like a good night to drink lots and lots of scotch.”

She drained her glass quickly, as if it were so much water, and got up immediately and began mixing another drink. Jerome Quintin laughed and shrugged it off lightly. I had a feeling that he was furious, but it was only a feeling without any evidence of expression in his face or voice.

“Laura doesn’t particularly care for fishing trips,” he said.

“He’s wrong,” Laura said. “It is only this particular fishing trip that I don’t care for.”

“Laura’s feeling sorry for herself at the moment,” Quintin said. “You must excuse her.”

“He’s wrong again,” she said. “It’s him I’m feeling sorry for.”

They were talking through me again, as they had before, and I didn’t like it. I took another swallow of my drink and thought I’d finish it quickly and get out of there.

“Will you tell me something, Mr. Laird?” Quintin said.

“If I can,” I said.

“Do you expect to become governor of this state?”

“No.”

“If you did become governor of this state, would you consider it an accomplishment of some merit?”

“Yes.”

“Well, it so happens that I do expect to become governor of this state, Mr. Laird. In a short while, as you’ll see, I shall become attorney general and in due time after that I shall become governor.”

“Congratulations.”

He had finished his drink and was fixing another. Watching the pair of them, Jerome and Laura Quintin in their queer cold conflict, I became aware of something that I’d missed before. They’d been working on the scotch warm, before the ice came. They were both already a little drunk, quietly and bitterly.

“Thank you, Mr. Laird,” he said. “It may interest you to know, however, that Laura does not share your feeling about the significance of being governor. Would you believe it? She seems to feel that it would somehow be degrading to be governor.”

“He’ll never be governor,” Laura said.

“Of course I’ll be governor. It’s all set, Mr. Laird. Long range planning, you know.”

“No. He’ll never be attorney general, and he’ll never be governor. Dan Grimes will be attorney general, and Dan Grimes will be governor. Jerome Quintin will be nothing.”

“She’s talking too much,” Quintin said. “You’ll please pardon her, Mr. Laird.”

She drank from her glass and looked at me levelly over the rim.

“Yes,” she said, “you’ll please pardon me, Mr. Laird. I’ve been attending a wake for a long time, and I’m a little drunk on scotch and grief. I’m in mourning for a man I knew once and loved. A young lawyer I helped put through law school. He was brilliant, and I thought he had integrity, and I admired him in addition to loving him, but he died. He died of corruption, and he’s dead, and he’ll be buried in the state capitol.”

Quintin stood looking into his glass until she’d finished. Then, without looking at her or me, he simply walked out of the room onto the porch and stood looking out through the screen and the gathering shadows beneath the trees to the darkening surface of the lake.

“I’d better go,” I said. “Thanks very much for the drink.”

“You’re quite welcome,” Laura Quintin said.

I set my glass carefully on the table and went out behind Quintin. He didn’t turn or speak as I opened the screen door quietly and left.

As I crossed in front of the Boniface cottage, Rita Boniface spoke to me from the shadows. I stopped and looked up and saw her dimly on the other side of the screen.

“Come in and have a drink with me,” she said.

“I just had a drink,” I said.

“Come in and have another.”

“If you don’t mind, I won’t.”

“I do mind, however. If you just had a drink, you must have had it with my dreary friends, the Quintins. I demand equal consideration.”

“As a paying guest,” I said, “I guess you’re entitled to it.”

I went up onto the porch. She was standing there in the shadows, but when I entered she turned and went inside, and I followed.

“You don’t sound as if you like the Quintins much,” I said.

“You’re wrong,” she said. “I don’t like them any. Not one bit.”

“To me,” I said, “they seem like a reasonably nice couple having a little reasonably normal trouble.”

“Do you think so?” she said. “How tolerant of you. Never mind, though. The bottle’s on the cabinet.”

Beside the bottle was the glass she’d been using. Two small pieces of ice were floating in the bottom in about a quarter of an inch of water. I emptied the glass in the sink and I rinsed it and made a fresh drink in it. I mixed another for myself in another glass, and then she came over to me, moving out of the light of a small lamp into the fringe shadows of the kitchen area. Taking her glass and drinking from it, she made a face and immediately poured some of the liquid into the sink. She filled the glass again from the bottle.

“You make a very poor drink, Mr. Laird,” she said.

“Sorry,” I said.

“Will you have a little more whisky in yours?”

“No, thanks. This suits me.”

“Really? I can’t understand how anyone can tolerate a weak drink. A good strong drink is what I like.”

“I see it is.”

“You needn’t look concerned, however. It’s perfectly all right. I have a remarkable capacity for alcohol.”

“I’m glad to know it.”

“It’s kind of a gift or something. Some people have a capacity for it, and some people don’t, and you’d be surprised who some of the people are who don’t. Do you realize that it’s practically impossible to judge a person’s capacity from his appearance?”

“I’ve never thought about it.”

“It is, I assure you. Take Dan Grimes, for instance. You wouldn’t think a man so big and strong and important as Dan would have practically no capacity at all for alcohol, but it’s true. That’s why he never drinks except when he’s with friends where it won’t make any difference. He always gets drunk almost immediately, and the next thing you know he’s getting sick and passing out. What I mean is, he’s susceptible. Are you susceptible, Mr. Laird?”

“I don’t drink much.”

“How unfortunate. It might make you more entertaining if you did. Are you susceptible to anything else in particular?”

She was standing very close to me, and I could smell the astringent sweetness of her perfume, and feel on my face as she talked the moist warmth of her breath. All at once she put an arm around my neck and put her lips on mine, kissing me slowly. There was a suggestion of a taunt in the way she took her time. I stood quietly with the glass in my right hand, the left hand empty behind her back and carefully not touching her, and after awhile she stepped back past the empty hand and leaned against the cabinet and began to laugh softly as if she were genuinely amused.

“You are also a very poor kisser, Mr. Laird,” she said. “You make a poor drink, and you kiss a poor kiss.”

“I guess I just have no talent,” I said.

“It’s possible. On the other hand, it’s possible that you’re merely undeveloped. You might improve with experience.”

“I’ll think about it,” I said.

From the lake came the strong, sweet sound of a motor-boat moving pretty fast. The sound moved from the main channel past the point and into the arm.

“It’s Ira and Dan,” Rita Boniface said.

“Sounds like it,” I said.

I finished my drink and set the glass on the table. Turning toward the door, I saw clearly in the light of the lamp something I had not seen before. It was a shoulder harness, complete with .38 automatic, and it was lying in a casual way across the foot of the bed like nothing more than a discarded shirt. I stopped and stared at it, feeling a cold and heavy congealing of the uneasiness that had been gathering inside me ever since the arrival of these odd people that I did not understand and did not like. I wished that they had not come, or that they would, having come, go away again at once.

“What a pretty toy,” I said.

“The gun? It’s Ira’s.”

“Is it part of his ordinary equipment?”

“It is when he goes anywhere with Dan Grimes, and he’s going somewhere with Dan practically all the time.”

“You mean he’s Grimes’s bodyguard?”

“That’s one of the things he is. Ira’s a number of things that might surprise you. He’s a capable guy.”

“I got that impression.”

“He’s a very capable guy, and he’s mine. Don’t be fooled because I try to entertain myself when I’m bored. Ira’s number one.”

“With you and Grimes both?”

“That’s right. With me and Dan and others too. As I said, where Dan goes, Ira usually goes.” She paused, and I could hear her breathing, the sound of it suddenly slow and deep and measured in the room. “Maybe soon,” she said softly, as if I were no longer there and she were speaking only to herself, “Dan will go somewhere without Ira, and there will only be Ira left.”

“What?” I said.

“Nothing,” she said. “I was just thinking.”

The boat had pulled up to the dock, and I went outside and walked a few steps down the slope and waited. Dan Grimes and Ira Boniface came up the slope toward me. Grimes was walking a little in advance, and he was carrying a metal stringer with half a dozen bass hanging from it. He held the string up for me to see, and it was plain that he was feeling exhilarated by his luck.

“What do you think of these?” he said.

“They’re beauties,” I said.

They looked as if they’d weigh about three to five pounds each. There were two white bass and four black bass.

“You knew what you were talking about, all right,” he said. “The second cast I made, I got a good strike.”

“Did they give you a good fight?”

“Yes,” he said, “they fought hard.”

Rita Boniface had come after me out of the cottage. She lit a cigarette and stood looking at the bass without enthusiasm.

“I’m getting hungry,” she said.

“We’ll go get something to eat,” Grimes said. He turned back to me. “Where’s a good place to go, Laird? From now on, I’m taking your advice on everything.”

“There’s a place just where you turned off the highway onto the lake road,” I said. “They have good Kansas City steaks. Charcoal broiled.”

“Fine,” Grimes said. “How’s a KC charcoal broiled steak sound, Rita?”

“It sounds good,” Rita said. “Let’s go get it.”

She turned and started up the slope to the cottage, and Ira Boniface went after her.

“I’ll clean your bass and put them in the freezer,” I said.

“Will you do that?” Grimes handed me the string. “I’d appreciate it.”

“It’s nothing,” I said. “Part of the service.”

“Next time anyone wants to know a good place to fish, I’ll know where to tell him.”

“That’s what I like to hear,” I said.

He went up the slope at an angle to his own cottage. There was a big stump of an oak on the slope between the cottage he was in and the one occupied by the Quintins. I used the stump for cleaning fish for guests, and now I got a knife and a scaler and cleaned the bass on the stump. I had just finished with the last bass when Grimes and the others came out of the cottages and drove away in the Chrysler wagon. It was almost as dark then as it would get, and there was a bright moon rising out of the lake.

They came back about ten and went into Grimes’s cottage. A little later I went down the slope to the dock and sat on the bench in the moonlight. It was a wonderfully clear, cool night, the air filled with scents and stirring with small sounds, and I sat there for a long time on the bench, but I was unable to feel any of the good things a man should feel on that kind of night.

Someone in the cottage turned on a portable radio and tuned in a d. j. program. The music was very bad and very loud, and the talk and laughter became louder in competition with the bad music. They were having quite a party up there. I was glad the fourth cottage was unoccupied, because otherwise I might have had a complaint about the noise, which would have created a problem.

I kept sitting on the bench on the dock until it got to be midnight, and then I got up and walked along the edge of the lake to the point. I stood on the point for quite a long time. I could hear now and then, out in the water, the splash of a leaping fish, and in the trees across the arm along a ridge, a loon and an owl. After awhile I turned and started up the slope at an angle toward the cottages. In the middle cottage the party was still going on, but the laughter and talk had become sporadic and not so loud as before, and it was apparent that things were coming slowly to an end. Among the trees on the slope, it was very dark. In the Quintins’ cottage, the first I reached, I could hear faintly a harsh, aspirate sound of deep breathing. I was not more than two feet from the porch, and I stopped and looked inside, but it was too dark to see anything, and I stood there for a minute listening to the breathing, which was suddenly quieter and hardly audible. I took a step backward to turn and leave, and my foot came down on a dead branch. The branch cracked sharply, and someone spoke instantly beyond the dark doorway. It was the voice of Laura Quintin.

“Who’s there?” she said.

“It’s John Laird,” I said.

“Oh. I’m glad you’ve come along, Mr. Laird. I could use some help.” Her voice sounded tired and curiously flat.

“What’s the matter?” I said.

“Will you come in, please?”

I went up across the porch and into the cottage. Dimly in the darkness, I could see Laura Quintin standing beside an easy chair near the bed. In the chair was the slumped figure of a man who was, from his size, either Dan Grimes or Ira Boniface.

“It’s Dan Grimes,” she said. “He’s passed out.”

“What’s he doing in your cottage?”

“He got sick at the party and went outside. Afterward he came in here and passed out in the chair. I just found him a few minutes ago.” Her curiously flat voice had suddenly a thin edge of disgust. “He always gets drunk and sick when he tries to drink.”

I had been aware of something unpleasant in the air of the room, and I recognized it now for the faint and sour stench of vomit. Grimes, in his sickness, had soiled his shirt.

“Do you want me to get him back to his own cottage?” I said.

“No. Just help me put him on the bed. He can spend the night here.”

“What about you?”

“Jerry and I can take his cottage.”

“You needn’t help move him. I can do it alone.”

“No. You’re kind enough to help at all. Just take his feet, please.”

“He’s a heavy man. You’d better let me do it alone.”

“I’m quite capable, thank you. I’m really much stronger than I look.”

As if to settle the matter without any more delay, she leaned over the chair and slipped her hands under Grimes’s slack arms at the shoulders.

“You’ve got the heavy end,” I said. “Come take the feet.”

“I’m quite all right.”

So I took his feet, and we carried him between us to the bed and put him on it. She must have been, as she claimed, much stronger than she looked, for he was very heavy, dead weight, and she carried him well. We left him on the bed and went out onto the porch. I offered her a cigarette, which she took. In the light of the match that I struck for her, her face looked pale and slightly drawn, set in lines of fastidious distaste.

“Thank you for helping me,” she said.

“You’re welcome,” I said. “I only wonder why you bothered with him.”

“He was drunk. I put him on the bed, that’s all.”

“Your bed. In your cottage. It will be an inconvenience, at least.”

“No inconvenience is too great to suffer for Dan Grimes. Haven’t you heard? People will do anything to gain his favor. If you don’t believe me, ask Jerry.”

“You don’t approve of Grimes?”

“He’s an unclean animal,” she said, “who corrupts everyone he touches.”

She spoke quietly with no inflection of anger. It was as if anger had burned itself out in its own excesses, leaving only a kind of sodden acceptance and bitterness. I said good night and turned to leave, and she spoke again.

“Please don’t go,” she said.

I stopped and turned back. She lifted a hand, touched me on the arm, dropped the hand again to her side. The gesture was a kind of appeal.

“It’s late,” I said. “It’s almost one o’clock.”

“I couldn’t possibly sleep,” she said. “I feel as if I’ll never sleep again. I’d be grateful if you’d stay with me. I don’t think I could bear being alone.”

“Your husband will be looking for you.”

“No. He’s been drinking heavily. He’ll go to sleep just as soon as the others leave. I’ll go tell him to stay in Dan’s cottage for the rest of the night. Will you wait for me?”

“I’ll wait.”

We went outside together, off the porch, and I waited in the darkness under the trees while she went alone into the middle cabin. The radio was not playing. I could hear no more laughing, no talking. The party, I thought, was over. In about three minutes Laura Quintin returned.

“All right?” I said.

“All right.”

“Shall we go down to the dock?”

“No. I think I’d like some coffee. Is there someplace we can go?”

“The places on the highway are closed by this time. There’s an all-night restaurant in the nearest town.”

“Will you take me there?”

“If your husband doesn’t mind.”

“He doesn’t. The truth is, I told him you were taking me for coffee and not to expect me back for a while. He’ll go to sleep on Dan’s bed when Ira and Rita leave.”

“In that case,” I said, “let’s go.”

We walked past the Boniface cottage to my own, and I put her in the front seat of my Ford and went around and got in beside her, and we drove down the lake road to the highway and south on the highway about fifteen miles to the nearest town, which made a total distance, lake road and highway together, of about eighteen miles. She sat all the way on the far side of the seat by the door, her body slumped and her pale head against the back of the seat and her eyes staring at the roof of the car above the windshield as if she could see through it to the stars in the sky beyond. Now and then I turned my head and looked at her, and I began slowly to see and feel the beauty of her, not lush and belting beauty like that of Rita Boniface, but a stark, high-fashion beauty that a man, once he was aware of it, might never forget. She didn’t speak once in the eighteen miles.

In the all-night restaurant, which wasn’t much of a restaurant in a town that wasn’t much of a town, we sat across from each other in a booth and had good coffee, and finally she began to talk, or it seemed she did, but afterward I realized that she mostly listened to the talking of John Laird. I told her how I happened to be running a fishing resort, and why I liked what I did and didn’t particularly want to do anything else, none of which was important to anyone but me, and it wasn’t long before early dawn when we left the restaurant and started back for the lake. She was more relaxed then, and I thought there was more color in her hollow cheeks beneath high bones. She sat close to me in the seat and rested her head on my shoulder, and I liked the feel of it there, the nearness of her pale hair. On the lake road, just before we reached the cottages, she sat up and kissed me lightly and said, “Thanks for humoring me, John Laird,” and I said, “It’s part of the service,” and then, in a minute, we were pulling into the area beside my cottage, and Ira Boniface was standing there waiting for us in the first faint light of the day.

That was the little bit of good in all of it, the short time with Laura Quintin, and it was the end of the good when we saw Boniface. I knew it even before we got out of the Ford, before Boniface spoke.

“Where the devil have you been?” he said.

“To town for coffee,” I said.

“You were gone long enough,” he said.

“We took our time,” I said.

“Never mind that now,” he said. “Laura, you’d better go to your cottage. The one Dan had.”

“I know which one,” she said.

She looked at him for a moment after speaking, as if trying to decide whether to go or not, and then she shrugged and walked across the slope to the cottage and went in.

“What’s the matter?” I said.

“Did you see Dan Grimes last night after we got back from eating?”

“Yes. He was drunk. Passed out in the Quintins’ cottage.”

“Tell me about it.”

“There’s nothing much to tell. He’d been sick. He went into the cottage and passed out in a chair. Laura Quintin found him there, and I helped her lay him on the bed.”

“How’d you happen to be around?”

“I’d been down to the point. On the way back I passed the cottage, and she heard me. She called me in to help.”

“All right.” He took a deep breath and held it and then released it slowly. “Dan’s dead.”

“Dead? You mean he died after we left him?”

“He was killed. Someone murdered him.”

I had felt in my bones that things were going bad, but not this bad, and I stood there for a long minute staring at him and trying to make some kind of sense of what he’d said, and then, when I had, the first thing I thought afterward was what a hell of a bad break it was for my little camp that I’d worked so hard to build into a good place for good people to come fishing.

“How?” I said.

“Come on,” he said. “I’ll show you.”

He spun around abruptly and started across the face of the slope with long strides, and I went after him. A small table lamp was burning beside the bed in the last cottage. Boniface had left it burning, I suppose, after his earlier visit. We went inside and stood beside the bed in the area of light and looked down at the body of Dan Grimes. He was wearing, I thought at first, some kind of long, barbaric earring. Then I saw that it was not an earring at all. It was a metal stringer. The stringer was made of about a dozen large pins, much like safety pins, attached to a chain. Someone had unsnapped one of the pins and straightened it and driven it into Dan Grimes’s brain through the auditory canal of his right ear. It was the stringer, I somehow knew at once, that I had left on the oak stump between this cottage and the next after I’d finished cleaning six bass the night before.

“We’d planned to go out on the lake early this morning,” Ira Boniface said. “I came over to see if he still wanted to go, after last night, and this is the way I found him.”

His voice was even and hard. If he was feeling any emotion at all, any anger or grief or regret or guilt, it was not discernible. I turned and brushed past him and went out onto the porch, and it was becoming then the clear bright morning of a bad day.

“I’ll go phone the sheriff,” I said.

The sheriff came about forty minutes after I got him out of bed. He was a very fat man. His name was Sam Austin.

“This is big, Johnny,” he said.

He drew a long breath and blew it out slowly, pursing his cupid’s mouth. His round blue eyes stared at me reproachfully, as if it were all somehow my fault.

“I guess I better go have a look,” he said.

“He’s in the last cottage,” I said.

“You stick around close, Johnny. I’ll want to talk to you later.”

“I’ll be here,” I said.

He sighed again and went lumbering across the slope toward the cottage in which Dan Grimes lay dead. I could see Ira Boniface standing on the screened-in porch. He had guarded Grimes in life, and he guarded him still in death. Jerome and Laura Quintin came out of the middle cottage and stood together inside the screen. Rita Boniface walked across from the first cottage to join the Quintins. I turned and went over to the porch steps of my own cottage and sat down. I sat there for about half an hour, maybe longer, and then Sam Austin and Ira Boniface came out of the last cottage and walked over to the middle cottage, and I kept on sitting where I was. I tried to concentrate on the lake and the cool coves still deep in the shade of shoreline timber, but it was all ruined and no good at all, and what I kept thinking about was everything that had happened since the Chrysler wagon had pulled in yesterday from Kansas City. I had a feeling that something significant had happened between then and now, something said or done that had hung for a moment on the edge of consciousness and then had slipped away. Whatever it was, I felt, would now assume in the after-math of murder a kind of definitive and terrible meaning that had not then registered.

I didn’t really want to remember it, to tell the truth, but I couldn’t help trying in spite of myself, and I went over in detail everything I had seen, but it didn’t help, and then I went over in detail everything I had heard, but that didn’t help either. I got up from the porch steps and went down the slope to the dock. The water of the lake was still as glass and dark, dark green.

It must have been an hour later when Sam Austin came down to the dock. I could hear him descending the slope behind me, and the dock, floating on steel drums, fell and rose and fell again under the shifting of his weight as he came across it. He didn’t sit down on the bench beside me. He stood at the edge of the dock and looked across the lake as if he were wishing desperately that he were on the other side. At his feet, nosing the dock in company, side by side, were the motorboat in which he’d come and the sleek inboard that had belonged to Dan Grimes.

“Big, Johnny,” he said. “This is big. And I don’t like any part of it.”

“Neither do I.”

“Sure. I can see that. It won’t do your place any good when the news gets out. These are important people, Johnny.”

“I got that impression.”

“Powerful people, Johnny. You heard of this Ira Boniface?”

“I understand he was Dan Grimes’s right arm. Something like that.”

“More than that. He’s always had his own connections, his own followers. I’ve heard it said that he planned to get rid of Grimes and take over the organization himself in his own good time. Now’s the time, I guess. With Grimes gone, he’ll take over.”

“You think he may have arranged the time?”

Sam looked over his shoulder, and a shudder seemed to pass through the flesh of his enormous body.

“For God’s sake, keep your voice down, Johnny,” he said. “You know how voices carry here.”

“Sorry.”

“I can’t afford any mistakes, Johnny. About what you said. About Boniface arranging the time. You think so?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“The way it was done. Stabbed through the ear that way. I don’t think Boniface would kill anyone like that. It’s out of character.”

“Maybe deliberately out of character.” Sam looked at me with a glint of shrewdness in his eyes that reminded me that he was no fool, however frightened he might be. “Maybe just an opportunity that he snatched to make it look like someone else.”

“Maybe. I don’t think so.”

“I understand you left that stringer on the stump outside the cottage after cleaning some bass last night. That right?”

“That’s right.”

“Anyone could have picked it up.”

“Anyone.”

“But only one did.”

“Only one.”

“The blonde woman said you helped her put Dan Grimes on the bed where he was killed. She said he’d passed out.”

“Laura Quintin. Yes, I helped her.”

“Afterward, she said, you and she went to town and didn’t get back until nearly daylight. After Boniface had found the body.”

“That’s true. Boniface met us.”

“Boniface says he and his wife, that blackheaded looker, went to their own cottage right after you and Mrs. Quintin left for town. He says the whisky they’d drunk had left them drawn tight and wide awake, and they couldn’t sleep. He says they lay in bed and smoked and talked until it was almost time for him to get up and meet Grimes for the fishing they’d planned. He says his wife went to sleep maybe half an hour before the time, but he didn’t sleep at all. I’m not the coroner, Johnny, but I’ll bet my best spinner, after looking at the body, that Grimes died more than half an hour before he was found.”

“I see. You mean the Bonifaces alibi each other. And Mrs. Quintin and I do the same.”

“They could be lying, of course.”

“The Bonifaces?”

“Yes.”

“So could Laura Quintin and I.”

“Not likely, Johnny. If it was her husband instead of you, I might consider it.”

“The way it looks to me, you’ve got Jerome Quintin left.”

“That’s the way it looks. He says he fell on the bed in the cottage Dan Grimes had taken, the one the party was in, and he didn’t wake up until his wife came in this morning. Just his own word.”

“It doesn’t make sense that Jerome Quintin killed Grimes.”

“No? Why not?”

“Grimes had ambitious plans for Quintin. He intended to put him in the capitol.”

“Governor?”

“Eventually.”

“Who told you?”

“Quintin himself. His wife corroborated it.”

“It didn’t have to be true, just because he said it.”

“It didn’t have to be, but I think it was.”

“Maybe something developed that we don’t know about. Maybe Grimes changed his plans. Maybe he told Quintin he was going to dump him.”

“I doubt it, but maybe so. If so, how would it have helped matters to kill Grimes? Quintin would still have been in the dump.”

“Not if he had an agreement with Boniface.”

“I see what you mean. Quintin kills Grimes. Boniface becomes the power. Boniface assumes the support of Quintin.”

“Something like that. You think it sounds reasonable?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think you would. Neither do I, as a matter of fact. The thing’s too clumsy. If it had been planned that way, Quintin would have to have been left in the clear.”

“That’s right. A man who’s been a murder suspect is no candidate for office.”

“You got any other ideas?”

I looked across the lake into the cool, deep pocket of a cove. “No,” I said.

He sighed and slapped a fat thigh. Turning fully around, he stared up the slope toward the cottages.

“I’m afraid to move, Johnny. That’s the truth.”

“You better call in the state cops.”

“That’s what I’ve been thinking.”

“There’s a phone in my cottage.”

“Thanks. I’ll use it. I’ve got to get the coroner out here, too.”

He lumbered off the dock and up the slope. I sat on the bench and listened to him go. He breathed so heavily on the ascent that I could hear him almost the entire way to the top. And then, in a kind of flash of insight, I remembered what it was that had hung last night for a moment on the edge of consciousness, and it was nothing I had seen, and nothing I had heard, but something, instead, that I hadn’t heard and should have.

The bad that had come in the Chrysler would get no worse. It was now as bad as it could get.

The sun rose higher in the east, and shadows shortened under shoreline trees. I sat in the sun on the dock and waited for the murderer to come, and after a while she did. It seemed like a long, long while, but it wasn’t. It was, from the time Sam Austin went up the slope, no more than five minutes. She sat down beside me on the bench with a soft sigh.

“You should despise us,” she said. “We’re corrupt people.”

“Maybe I should,” I said, “but I don’t. Especially not you.”

“You should despise me most of all.”

“No. I confess that I admire you very much.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re beautiful. Because you were a fine companion for a little while. Because you’re the coldest, cleverest woman in an emergency that I’ve ever known. I admire you, and I’m afraid of you.”

She didn’t look at me. As I remember it, she never looked at me once while she sat there. All I remember is the stark, high-fashion beauty of her cold profile as she stared steadily across the glittering water.

“Why do you say that?”

“I say it because it’s so. Last night when I came up from the point and heard you in the cottage, you made a bad mistake. When I made a noise, you were startled and spoke immediately without thinking. It was a mistake most women would have been unable to surmount. Not you. You did the only possible thing that could give you a chance to escape the consequences, and it almost worked. Instead of sending me away, which would have put you in the worst possible position after the body was found, you called me inside. You had me help you put the body on the bed, taking the head and shoulders yourself to prevent my discovering the stringer, and to prevent its making a noise in the movement. Who would dream that a murderer would ask for help to move the body of his victim? There was simply no reason why it should have occurred to me that Dan Grimes was dead, and it didn’t. I accepted naturally the reasonable explanation — that he was drunk. It must require a special kind of woman to drive a piece of pointed steel into a man’s brain and then, afterward, nearly caught in the act, to carry out calmly such a dangerous deception. Not only did you have a witness to the fact that Grimes was alive when you left him, but also, by keeping me with you the rest of the night, a witness to the fact that you could not have killed him later. I feel rather bad about that. I hoped that it was only my company you wanted, but I see that it wasn’t. Never mind. Providing an alibi, I guess, should be considered part of the service, too.”

She lifted her head, tilting her face to the sky, as if, by doing so, she could expose herself to more of the clean bright light of the new day.

“You said you had no reason to think that he was not alive. Why do you think so now?”

“Something that almost registered at the time, but didn’t quite. A little while ago, as I listened to Sam Austin climb the slope, it did. There were three of us in that dark cottage, but only two of us were breathing. A man in a drunken sleep breathes heavily, but during all the time we were in the room together, the three of us, I never heard Dan Grimes breathe at all.”

She shrugged her thin shoulders, still looking at the sky, seeming to dismiss the indictment with indifference.

“It’s really very flimsy, you know. After several hours, you remember that you didn’t hear a man breathe. I doubt that it would be given much credence against my word.”

“I doubt it, too. If it isn’t, your husband will certainly have to pay your consequences.”

She was silent. For a full minute, she was a still as stone.

“Why?” she said.

“Because, to start with, the death of Dan Grimes must be paid for by someone. Because, to continue, Jerome Quintin is in the most vulnerable position. Because, to finish, he’s now expendable. Ira Boniface, at this moment, is probably the most powerful man in this state. He doesn’t have the same regard for Jerome Quintin that Dan Grimes had, and he won’t have the same plans. He doesn’t even like Quintin, as a matter of fact, and I’ve got an idea he’d be happy for a chance to dispose of him permanently. In less than a day I’ve learned that much, and you know it better than I do. There may be no case now, no real evidence, but it won’t be too hard for Boniface to arrange it.”

She stood up and walked over to the edge of the dock. I sat and looked at her thin body against the bright water and distant dark trees. After a while she spoke to me without turning.

“I was in our cottage when he came in and passed out in the chair. I started back to the other cottage, and then I saw the stringer, and I had a feeling that it had all been planned for me. I felt a kind of compulsion. I picked up the stringer and went back and killed him. It’s odd, isn’t it? I killed to save my husband’s soul, and now I must confess to the killing to save his life. What you said is true, and I was foolish not to see last night, when I asked you to take me away, that it would be this way. Well, it would be all right, I think, if only I could feel that it’s worth it. But I don’t. Now that I’ve done what I have, and must do what I must, I understand that Jerry’s worth none of it. I should simply have left him and gone away. Will you do me a favor?”

“If I can.”

“Will you please go up and ask that fat sheriff to come down? Perhaps he can take me away immediately in his boat. I don’t think I could bear to face the others.”

“All right,” I said.

I stood and turned and started up the slope. I was about halfway up when the inboard roared to life behind me. I didn’t stop or turn my head.

When we find her, I thought, tomorrow, or the day after, she will no longer look like a high-fashion model, or anyone I ever saw or knew, and it will be like looking at another person entirely.