Authors: Charles Williams
I looked down at him. There wasn’t even any satisfaction in it now. “Better beat it while you can,” I said, gasping for breath. “I’m too big for you. I lean on those arms a few more times, they’re going to weigh three hundred pounds apiece. And when they come down, the lights go out.”
He had no intention of quitting. His eyes hated me as he got up. I was a bigger man, and I’d knocked him down when he was off guard; there could never be any peace for him until he’d humiliated me. He retreated evasively, trying to stay out of reach until his head cleared. I crowded him, but I could never hit him solidly. He was too much the pro for that. We were farther away from the light now, near the ladder going down onto the barge. He was beginning to recover a little. He came in suddenly, jabbing at my face. I tied his arm up and swung at his middle again. It hurt him. His hands fluttered helplessly. I swung once more, moving in with it.
He shot backward, trying to get his feet under him. His heels struck the big 12-by-12 stringer running along the edge of the pier and he fell outward into the darkness, cartwheeling. I heard a sound like a dropped cantaloupe and jumped to the edge to look down. The deck of the barge lay in deep shadow. I couldn’t see anything. I heard a splash. He had landed on the afterdeck and then slid off into the water.
I jumped, taking a chance of breaking a leg. It was a good eight feet down to the deck at this stage of the tide. I landed safely, and clawed in my pocket for the keys. Then I remembered. The aqualung was in the trunk of the girl’s car. There was another in the storeroom, but the cylinders were empty.
It didn’t matter. I could do it without diving gear, but I had to have a light. I ran to the storeroom door, frantically jabbing at the lock. I got it open at last, wild with the necessity to hurry, and plunged inside. I was sweating. I bumped into something, and cursed. My hands located the big underwater light and its coil of cable. I ran aft, groping for the plug at the end of it. Holding that in one hand, I threw the rest over the stern into the water. It took only a second to plug it into the receptacle and turn the switch. I could see it glowing faintly thirty feet below on the mud. I ran back to the storeroom for a diving mask, kicked my shoes off, and dropped over the stern. I didn’t know how long it had been now. All I knew was that if he was knocked out he’d drown almost instantly.
Water closed over me. I kicked downward toward the light. The shadowy columns of the pilings seemed to drop away endlessly off to my right. They were encrusted with barnacles which could cut like razor blades. I passed a big lateral timber, and then another. It was like going down in a freight elevator.
I was on bottom. He should have been right there beside the light. He wasn’t. I looked wildly around. There was no sign of him anywhere. I swam along the edge of the pilings, searching. I tried to think. Unconscious, he should have settled straight to the bottom, like a dropped anchor. Maybe he hadn’t been knocked out after all, and was above, swimming. Then I saw I was in among the pilings. They were all around me. I knew what it was now, but it was too late. I had to go up. I was running out of breath.
I kicked diagonally upward, avoiding the pilings. My lungs hurt. I wondered if I’d misjudged the time, stayed under too long. I began to be afraid of the barge. If I miscalculated and came up under it I might not get out. Then my head broke surface. I took two deep breaths and went under again. Maybe he was already beyond help. It had taken me too long to realize that with the tide ebbing he would have gone down at an angle and was lying somewhere back under the pier among that tangle of pilings.
I picked up the light and swam in with it. A whole jungle of pilings began to grow up around me. I thought of all those barnacle-encrusted lateral timbers above me, and the bottom of the barge itself. If I lost my bearings I’d never get out. Then I saw him. He was lying beside a pillar with the side of his face in the mud as if he were asleep. I dropped the light and reached for him.
I was trying to get a grip on his shirt collar when I saw the plume of dark smoke drifting out of his head to thin out and disappear downstream in the tide. I reached around and put my hand on the back of it. It was like a broken bowl of gelatin.
He was dead. It was only the pressure that was making him bleed. He turned a little as I jerked my hand away, and settled on his back in the muck. His eyes were open, staring at me. I fought the sickness. If I gagged, I’d drown.
I
DON’T REMEMBER COMING OUT,
or how I did it. The next thing I was conscious of was hanging to the wooden ladder on the side of the barge, being sick. I’d left him there. The police could get him out; I didn’t want to touch him.
I climbed up to the deck and collapsed, exhausted. I was winded, and water ran out of my clothes as from a saturated sponge. The cut places on my face were stinging with salt. My right hand hurt, and when I felt it with the other it was swollen.
I had to get out to the watchman’s shanty and call the police. Then I sat real still and stared at the darkness while the whole thing caught up with me. This wasn’t an accident I had to report. I’d killed him in a fight.
I hadn’t intended to, but what difference did that make? I’d hit him and knocked him off the pier, and now he was dead. It wasn’t murder, probably, but they’d have a name for it—and a sentence.
Well, there was no help for it. There was nothing else to do, and sitting here wasn’t going to bring him back to life. I started wearily to get up, and then stopped. The police were only part of it.
What about Barclay?
And the others I didn’t even know?
I’d already come to their attention by being with that girl. Now I’d killed one of their muscle men, and strangely enough just the one who’d wanted to beat me up and question me about Macaulay in the first place. They wouldn’t mind, would they? Forget it, Manning; it was just one of those things. Drop in and kill one of us any time you’re out our way.
Then, suddenly, I realized I wasn’t thinking of the police any more, or of Barclay’s mob of hoodlums, but of Shannon Macaulay. And the
Ballerina
. Why? What had made her come into my mind at a time like this? Of course, the whole thing was off now. Even if I didn’t get sent to prison, with those mobsters after me and convinced I had some connection with Macaulay I was no longer of any use to her.
No. I wouldn’t do it. The hell with reporting it. Sure, I regretted the whole thing. And those sightless eyes would probably go on staring at me for years. But I was damned if I was going to ruin everything just because some vicious little egomaniac couldn’t leave well enough alone. Leave him down there. Say nothing about it— I stopped.
How? Christiansen knew he was in here. There was no way out except right past the watchman’s shack. I was all marked up from the fight. In a few days, in this warm water, the body would come to the surface, with the back of his head caved in and bruises all over his face. I didn’t have a chance in the world. He’d merely come in here to see me, and had never come out. That would be a tough one for the police to solve.
It was the beautiful simplicity of it that made it so terrifying. Of all the places in the world, it had to happen on a pier to which there was only one entrance and where everybody was checked in and out by a watchman—No. Wait. Not checked in and out. Just questioned as they came in. They didn’t have to sign a book or get a pass. And the watchman only waved them by as they went out.
It collapsed. It didn’t mean anything at all, because
nobody
had gone out. There hadn’t been anyone else in here. One man had come in; nobody had left. Christiansen would never have any trouble remembering that when the police came checking.
There
had
to be a way out of it. It was maddening. I looked across the dark waterway. Everything was quiet along the other side; there was nothing except an empty warehouse, a deserted dock. Nobody had seen it. Barclay probably didn’t even know the pug had come out here. He’d done it on his own because he couldn’t rest until he’d humiliated a bigger man who’d knocked him down. That was the awful part of it: there was nothing whatever to connect me with it except the simple but inescapable fact he’d driven in here to see me and had never driven out again— I stopped.
Driven?
No. I hadn’t seen any car. But how did I know there wasn’t one out there? The shed was dark.
My mind was racing now. I sprang up and ran around to the storeroom door, still barefoot, dripping water out of my sodden clothes. I found a flashlight and leaped onto the ladder. I ran across to the door of the shed and threw the beam into the darkness inside. There it was, back in a corner. I was weak with relief. Maybe he’d parked it there in the dark to keep me from seeing it and being warned. But that didn’t matter. The big thing was that he did have a car in here.
All I had to do was drive it out past the watchman, and the pug had left here alive. It was as simple as that.
Out at the gate the light was overhead, and the interior of the car would be in partial shadow. The watchman’s shack would be on the right. I could hunch down in the seat until I was approximately the size of the pug. All the watchman ever did was glance up from his magazine and wave. He wouldn’t see my face, nor remember afterward that he hadn’t. It was the same car, wasn’t it? The man had driven in, and after a while he had driven out.
But wait. There was something else. I’d still have to get back inside without Christiansen seeing me. He knew I was in here, and I couldn’t very well come in again without having left. But that was easy, too. It must be nearly eleven now. Chris went off duty at midnight. All I had to do was wait until after twelve and come back in on the next man’s shift. He wouldn’t know where I was supposed to be, or care.
I walked over to the car and flashed the light in, and the whole thing fell in on me again. I realized I should have known it if I’d been using my head. You always removed the keys automatically when you got out of a car. It was worse than ever now.
I leaned wearily against the door. I knew where the keys were, didn’t I? It would take only a minute. Revulsion swept over me. I thought of what it was like down there, the light shining among that surrealist forest of dark pilings while grass undulated gently in the current and a dead man watched you with smoke coming out of his head. It was something out of a madman’s dream.
But it had to be done. I walked back to the barge, dreading it, and stood on the afterdeck where he had landed and slid in. I could see the faint glow of the light below me, back under the pier, and began taking off the wet trousers and shirt. There was no use being hampered by them this time. In the deep shadows beside me I could just make out the form of the big steel mooring bitt. That was what had killed him. He’d been wheeling vertically as he fell, and his head had crashed down onto the top of it with force enough to brain an ox. I felt queasy, and tried not to think about it.
Then, suddenly, the whole plan began to take form in my mind at once. I’d had only part of it before; this would clinch it. Men had been found floating along water fronts before with their heads broken in, and usually their pockets were empty. And I didn’t merely take the car out; I parked it among those dives in the tough district between here and town. It wouldn’t matter where he was actually found. Bodies drifted erratically with the tides as they began to grow buoyant.
I was ready. Then I hesitated, thinking coldly. I didn’t know much about law or the workings of courts, but I had sense enough to realize that what I was about to do was deliberately criminal. The other hadn’t been, even though it had killed him. I could still go call the police and report it, and everything would be on my side. A half dozen generations of lawyers and New England clergymen leaned over my shoulder and whispered fiercely that that was the only thing to do.
And on the other hand? Once I did this it was irrevocable, and I was on my own. If they caught me then there’d be no evidence of a fight or accident. They might convict me of deliberate murder, because I’d tried to cover it up. Even there in the hot night I could feel the chill run up my back.
I waited, trying to make up my mind. I didn’t have all night. Which was it to be? Then, strangely, there was nothing in my mind except that girl, just the way it had been before. There was an odd feeling of finality about it, of inevitability, as if I already knew what I was going to do because there wasn’t actually any choice. I didn’t try to understand it. That would have been futile. On the face of it, it was crazy. For hours I’d been fighting against taking her job, and now that something was in the way which might stop me I knew I wouldn’t let anything stop me. I put the mask over my face and dropped over the stern into the water.
I went straight down until I was below the last of the horizontal timbers and then cut in among the pilings. There could be no lost motion. Thirty feet down and thirty back used up a lot of precious air, and I’d cut it too fine those other times. The light grew stronger. He was still lying there beside it. I looked away from his face. I swam down and took hold of his belt. Revulsion shot through me as I pushed a hand into the first pocket. It yielded nothing but a handkerchief. The next held a pocketknife and a package of contraceptives. The desire to hurry, to run from him and get back to the surface, was almost overpowering now. I had to fight it. I turned him over. Mud sucked at him. A cloud of silt lifted and obscured the upper part of his body, drifting down the current. I felt for the hip pockets.
The leather key case was in the first. Then I had the wallet. I slid back a little, looked at them in the light to be sure I made no mistake, and then rammed the wallet down into the muck beyond my elbow. I withdrew my hand and closed the hole. I swam out, following the light cable. I went up. My head broke surface. Darkness and the clean night sky had never looked more beautiful.
I went around to the ladder, still shaking a little, and climbed aboard. My right hand hurt against the rungs. I hoped I hadn’t broken any bones. I stood naked and wet in the night, thinking furiously. One of the bad moments was over now. But there was still another. No, I told myself reassuringly, there’d be nothing to it. Was I losing my nerve now that I was actually going to do it instead of just thinking about it? The chances were a thousand to one he’d merely glance up and wave me on as I went past in the car.