Standing in the darkness, with the mosquitoes chewing me, I took off his suit, shirt, and tie. I dropped the glasses in one coat pocket, bent the hat into a mass of straw, and shoved it in the other. I put on the khaki fishing clothes and the cap, transferred the money from his wallet to my own, put his back in his trousers, along with the cigarette holder, lighter, and his car keys. Taking the flashlight, I went down to the edge of the water and made a mark by which to gauge the ride.
Placing the light on the seat of the truck, I wrapped his clothes around the long steel legs and curving neck of the flamingo, and tied them with the ball of white cord. There was a hundred yards of it, and I used it all. I looked at my watch. It was only shortly after eight. There were cigarettes and matches in the glove compartment of the truck. I lit one and sat down, suddenly conscious that I was tired. It had been the day-long tension; and I remembered now I never had eaten anything. At nine I went down and looked at my mark. The tide was coming in. That was all right; I didn’t want to go out on to the highway with that boat until at least midnight. Of course, even if they were looking for him they didn’t know yet that he’d had a boat, but they would later.
At one a.m. the tide was at slack high water as nearly as I could tell. I drove out to the highway. There were very few cars on it now, passing at widely spaced intervals I waited until there was no one coming from westward before pulling on to it, and drove fast so as not to be overtaken. The oncoming cars, of course, could see nothing but my headlights.
At the approach to the Bahia Honda bridge a road led down off the highway to a picnic ground at the edge of the channel. I drove down, got out with the flashlight, and threw the beam outward on to the water. The tide was ebbing now, beginning to swirl around the pillars of the bridge.
I carried the boat down, put it in the water, and swamped it. It had flotation units, of course, and didn’t sink entirely. I shoved. It disappeared downstream in the darkness, headed seaward on the tide, at least fifteen miles from the car. It might not be found for days, or even weeks. I threw the oars in, and then the steel wrecking bar, heaving it as far as I could into deeper water.
Nothing remained now except the flamingo. I placed it on the seat beside me in its mummy wrappings of clothes. The Bahia Honda channel was the deepest in the Keys, and the bridge the highest, so no fishing was permitted from it. Waiting until no cars were coming, I shot on to the highway and up the incline of the bridge. When I reached the top, at mid-channel, I slammed on the brakes and hopped out. One pair of headlights was coming towards me, still over a mile away. I ran around the truck, yanked the door open, and heaved the flamingo over the rail.
It was a few minutes past five a.m. when I backed into the driveway at the apartment and put the truck in the garage. I went inside, turned on the air-conditioning unit, and poured an enormous drink of whisky. I was wrung out, and empty, and felt dead. I’d been onstage continuously for just a few hours less than thirteen days.
It was complete now. That was the whole package, and looking at it as objectively as I could, I didn’t think they’d ever untie it. I dropped the briefcase on the bed and started to open the zipper. Then I shrugged, pushed it off on to the floor and lay down. It didn’t seem to matter whether it was full of money or wallpaper samples. All I wanted was Marian Forsyth.
This struck me as an odd reaction for Jerome Langston Forbes. Maybe I’d been somebody else for so long I’d forgotten my own behavior patterns.
Thirteen
I shaved off the mustache the next morning, lay in the sun in the back yard for a few hours to erase the faint difference in the tan on my upper lip, and got a haircut, a short brush job. If the barber even suspected the bleached effect on the outer ends wasn’t entirely due to the sun, he merely thought I was queer.
The story broke a little more slowly than we’d anticipated, but once it did it gathered momentum like a rocket. On Wednesday morning Harris Chapman was a prominent Louisiana businessman who was reported missing somewhere in the Lake Okeechobee area after an apparently incoherent telephone call to his private secretary—and two days later the headlines were screaming FLAMINGO KILLER.
I could piece the sequence together pretty well from the newspaper accounts. Coral Blaine waited a full twenty-four hours before notifying the Florida highway patrol and asking them to make a search. She had no address except that I’d said I was in Lake Okeechobee, and reported I’d talked in a rambling fashion. Maybe I’d had a sun-stroke. To the police it meant merely another drunk. But it got into the paper on Wednesday morning, complete with name, and then the deluge began.
I gathered the Antilles Motel was first. I’d been missing forty-eight hours by then. My room wasn’t paid for after Sunday, but she wasn’t particularly worried, since the luggage was still there. The police probably pricked up their ears then. If this was a binge, it was a honey. The pants and stockings probably weren’t mentioned at first, but the motel did lead to Fitzpatrick, and Fitzpatrick to the bank, and then it began to hit the fan in handfuls. Drawing out that much money in cash was highly irregular, and they’d disapproved— How much money?
A hundred and seventy thousand dollars.
A hundred and—what? In cash?
By this time police lieutenants and city editors were probably trying to juggle three telephones at once. The money hit the headlines on Thursday morning, a hundred and seventy thousand in twenty, fifty, and a hundred dollar bills, in a briefcase. That was fine. The sooner, and the longer the time between this and the eventual finding of the car, the better.
Then the motel again, and the stockings and pants. No. Nobody’d ever seen a girl, and I’d left there alone that morning. Then, probably, the bartender at the Cameo, though it was happening so fast now it was impossible even to guess the sequence of the explosions. Girl with an overnight case. Argument. He’d called her Marian, and she flipped her lid. Who was she? Just a babe, and from the language she used—Then who was Marian? Tell me, Jack, I never heard of her.
The bartender at the second place remembered us together. Somebody had heard a girl’s voice say something about one o’clock that morning when I’d driven into the motel. And some bumpings in the car park some time later. And the car was backed in. And there was nothing, absolutely nothing, in the room to indicate a woman had ever been there except the one thing a man would be certain to overlook if it happened to be out of sight.
The picture was developing fast now, and you could imagine what it was like around the detective squad-rooms and city desks with the headlines and the story almost in sight. Missing millionaire may have slain night-life girl. Then Naples and the mysterious Marian again, and the car-top boat, and Lake Okeechobee. Then Coral Blaine’s admission, at long last, as to what I’d really said, and the flood burst.
But in the end it was Henry who clinched it, and topped them all, and gave it the tag every sensational story has to have. Flamingo. The Flamingo Killer. Flamingo Mystery Girl. There were pictures of Henry, and of Henry’s curio stand, and of Henry’s pink birds with their reinforcing-steel legs and sinuous concrete necks. Henry’s “as told to” first-person story appeared on the front page of one edition. I’d been there once before, and he’d recognized me. He’d even told me, he recalled, that the flamingos were made of concrete. And this time I was going past at about seventy and all of a sudden I saw the flamingos or remembered ’em and slammed on my brakes and backed up and grabbed one to see how heavy it was— And then, when he’d asked me to open the trunk I’d gone pale and sweaty and shaky and there was a wild crazy look in my eyes, and I’d screamed, ‘No, no, no!’ And then I’d said, ‘Who the hell ever heard of putting a flamingo in a trunk?’ Oh, I was crazy, all right. There was no doubt I was crazy as a loon.
The police, of course, had already checked the telephone company and learned the long-distance call had been made from Marathon. At first this raised some doubt I was as insane as I was trying to appear to be, since it looked like the workings of a logical mind deliberately
throwing the police a false trail. But after talking to the guide at the Theater of the Sea and that bartender at Marathon they decided it was probable I did think I was at Lake Okeechobee. And I’d admitted to Coral I was puzzled by the fact it was somehow familiar. I’d been in Marathon for three days only the week before. The erratic pattern was there, the utter derangement alternating with moments of purpose and relative lucidity. I’d been in a screaming hurry at Henry’s place, and then I’d stopped for an hour to gawk at fish and leaping porpoises while the body of a dead girl was folded in the trunk of my car.
But what girl? That was still a mystery.
Two Deputy Sheriffs found the car on Thursday afternoon about five o’clock. That was nearly four days after it was abandoned and some twelve hours after it was known all over the State that it probably had a hundred and seventy thousand dollars in it. The story was plain. I’d gone out in the ocean in a six-foot boat with a girl’s body and a concrete flamingo, and I’d never come back. Some man wearing rubber-soled shoes had come along later, pried open the trunk, and made off with the hundred and seventy thousand dollars. They found the blue shoe with the broken heel.
And by Friday morning they were pretty sure who the girl was. They finally located the taxi driver who’d taken her to Hollywood. He remembered where he’d picked her up. The girl’s name was Justine Laray, the paper said, and her occupation was unspecified, but she had a police record in Miami and in Pittsburgh for soliciting, vagrancy, and one conviction for shop-lifting. Nobody in her apartment house could recall having seen her since Sunday night. Some of her clothes were still in the apartment, but nobody knew just how many things she’d had. There was no suitcase at all. But the taxi driver and the Cameo bartender both swore she’d had only one with her. So maybe that was all she had. They were both sure she’d worn blue shoes.
On December 2, just a week after the car was abandoned, two fishermen found the boat near Pigeon Key, some twenty-five miles from where the car had been. No body was found. Of course they didn’t expect to find the girl’s if it was tied to the flamingo, but Chapman’s should have come ashore. They nearly always did, in drownings. The police were suspicious or this, but admitted it could have become snagged in coral along the reefs or wound up in the impenetrable tangle of mangroves along the shore.
A lot of space was given to Marian and her former relationship with him, but as far as I could determine from the papers she was never suspected. What could they suspect her of? Driving him mad by remote control? She was in Thomaston all the time; that was established from the first day. They ran a picture of him—probably the one she’d mentioned—but there was more glamor and character than resemblance, and it had been taken without the glasses. If anything, it looked less like him than I did.
And not once from beginning to end, as well as I could tell from the papers, did anybody ever question the fact that it was Chapman.
As she had pointed out, why should they? He said that was his name. And what reason would he have for lying about it? Would somebody pretend to be Chapman, just to go mad and drown?
After two weeks other sensations began to crowd it off the front page, but it didn’t die entirely. Several things kept it alive. One was the continuing search for the man who had looted the car, and for Chapman’s body. Then there was the concrete flamingo; that had caught the morbid public fancy.
But everybody had accepted it now, and we were safe. She’d write, or call, and let me know where she was.
She didn’t. Another week went by. I was growing to hate the apartment. Being away from her was bad enough but being reminded of her every minute I was in the place made it unbearable. And he was in it. I had the rug shampooed, and all the time the men were working on it I wondered if I were going as mad as Lady Macbeth.
But I couldn’t leave. I could have had the mail forwarded, of course, but suppose she telephoned? There was no way at all I could find out where she was. Presumably she’d left Thomaston, but she was supposed to get in touch with me. I waited, hating the place but hating to leave it, even for food. Even when I was sunbathing in the back yard I left the door open so I’d be able to hear the phone. Two hours before the postman was due I was pacing the floor by the front window, watching for him.
Then, on December 18, it came at last. It was early in the morning. The boy had thrown the paper up on the walk and I was starting out to get it when a Post Office van stopped and the driver got out with an Airmail Special. It was from Houston, Texas. I ran back inside, forgetting the paper, and tore it open.
Dear Jerry:
This is a very difficult letter to write, but I’ve avoided it as long as I can. I lied to you. I suppose you have begun to realize that by now, and I’m not asking for forgiveness, but I do think I should have the courage to face you and admit it. So if you still want to, will you come to see me here at the Rice Hotel?
Sincerely,
Marian.
I stared at it, bewildered. What did she mean, she’d lied to me? And then, suddenly, I remembered the other thing she’d said, that night of the 13th. “I took advantage of you.” None of it made any sense. She hadn’t lied about anything, as far as I could see.
But I was wasting time like a fool when I could be on my way to Houston. I grabbed the phone and began calling for reservations. I could get a flight out at one p.m. That would give me just about time enough to pick up the money. It was in a safe-deposit box in a Miami Beach bank. I hurried into the bedroom, changed clothes, and started packing. The phone rang. The airline, I thought, as I picked it up.
“Mr. Forbes? I have a telegram from Houston, Texas. The text reads as follows: URGENT DISREGARD LETTER SEE NEWS STORY. There is no signature.”
“Thank you,” I said. I hung up and ran out in the yard for the paper I’d completely forgotten.
It was on the front page, date-lined New Orleans but with the usual eye-catching local headline tag:
—FLAMINGO CASE—
NONSENSE, SAYS PSYCHIATRIST
I sat down, feeling a chill of apprehension.
New Orleans, La. Dec. 18—Dr. J. C. Willburn, well-known professor of psychiatry and author of a number of books on mental illness, stated today that in his opinion it was highly improbable if not completely absurd that Harris Chapman could have deteriorated from apparent good mental health to a psychotic condition in two weeks, no matter how deep-seated his feeling of guilt.
Dr. Willburn, who is on leave of absence, became interested in the case at its outset, and for the past three days has been in Thomaston interviewing dozens of Chapman’s friends and associates. He says he unearthed no prior instances of hallucination or irrational behavior at all and that the picture he has of Chapman is that of a practical, hard-driving, relatively insensitive, vigorous man in the prime of life, too given to hard work for brooding or much introspection—”
The whole thing exploded in the papers again. The police said they’d never ruled out the possibility the insanity was faked. I was scared all over again, but what was even worse I didn’t dare try to get in touch with her. But at least I could get out of the damned apartment, because I knew now where she was. I canceled the lease by paying an extra month’s rent, and moved to the Eden Roc Hotel. I bought some expensive clothes and luggage, spending money like a maharajah, and I drank too much.
The story went on. Another psychiatrist intimated that Willburn’s statement was ill-advised. Nobody could form a psychiatric opinion from second-hand evidence gleaned from lay observers; Chapman could have been in a potentially dangerous mental condition for months. A third psychiatrist said the second psychiatrist was ill-advised. The police were still suspicious of the fact his body had never been found. And by now they knew I’d bought the wrecking bar. The man in Palm Beach who’d sold it to me gave them a good description. So was this the act of a madman buying a weapon to defend himself against a woman he’d wronged, or that of a coldly logical schemer buying it to jimmy open his own car and fake the theft along with the rest of
the fantastic hoax?
But what object could he have had?
By now it was almost inevitable. On December 20, when I grabbed the paper off the breakfast trolley in my hotel room and spread it open, the bottom began falling out of everything.
—FLAMINGO CASE—
WAS CHAPMAN
REALLY CHAPMAN?
The story didn’t mean anything itself; it was merely a rehash of all the old evidence with the addition of a lot of conjecture. But now that the question had finally been asked, they’d check those signatures, start pinpointing descriptions— But I had to be sure before I ran, so I could warn her. I waited. It was like walking on eggs. Two hours later the afternoon papers were out.
RIDICULOUS, SAYS
CHAPMAN FIANCEE
The police had already questioned her about that, she explained to the reporter in a long-distance interview. Of course she’d talked to Mr. Chapman. He’d called her every day. She would never understand what hold that woman—Mrs. Forsyth—had over him, or what she had said or done that goaded him beyond endurance—
Stripped of the vituperation, it said simply: The man she’d talked to was Chapman.
I grabbed the phone and called the travel desk. “Get me a reservation to Houston on the first flight you can.”
The girl called back five minutes later and said there’d been a cancellation and I could get out at eleven-thirty. It was ten now. I started throwing things in bags. I’d already bought an attache case with a good lock; calling the desk to get my bill ready and send a boy for the bags, I ducked out to a cab, and went to the bank. In a cubicle in the safe-deposit vault, I emptied the bundles of currency into the case, took the same cab back, and told the driver to wait while I checked out. We made it to the airport with five minutes to spare. I was over the weight allowance, and had to pay excess baggage. They were just starting to pull away the loading ramp when I sprinted out the gate with the attache case under my arm.