Death Wore Fins

TWO

TWOUP THERE on the hilltop lay a large-acreage estate surrounded by an aging brick wall, six feet high to the planter top, in which bristled a yard-tall growth of cactus. Looking for local color, I admired the texture of the grout-stained brick and the weirdly stark patterns of the spike-thrusting cactus. But if I had been a burglar or a kidnapper casing the layout, I would have seen this wall to be a barrier just as tough as industrial mesh fence surmounted by barbed wire.

Lime trees grew inside, upper branches dripping bar fruit; globular oranges hung on larger trees; ornamentals offered flowers the size of teacups. And in the middle, a roof as big as that of a Minnesota dairy bam, only covered with thick shake shingles. I came to a driveway barred by twin cast-iron gates. More curlicued iron overhead formed the initials HHC.

I nosed the wagon in, stepped down, and fumbled at the gates. They were locked. I peered through the bars, along a curving avenue of roses—big hothouse explosions of yellow, salmon, and lipstick shades.

“Hi, Buddy,” I called.

Buddy was no kid, he was sixty-plus, a stocky figure in khaki pants and a leather-sleeved jacket, bald, and with the kind of thick, resolute face that belongs on old family servitors. He broke off his worshipful kneeling at the base of a Revlon-hued specimen.

“This the Crossway castle?” I halloed.

He headed my way, swinging hands gloved in lineman’s gauntlets. The right carried a pruning clipper that went ka-snip, ka-snip. He had the appearance of a combination chauffeur, handy man, and possibly superannuated bodyguard. This last I gathered from his eyes, which were those of a bouncer about to ask me to leave quietly or be thrown out.

“What are you selling?” he called in a voice that didn’t want any.

“It’s all right … The name’s Svederup. Ken Svederup. The lord of the manor expects me.”

He stopped, six or eight yards short of the gates. His toe kicked at the driveway. “See these metal strips? It’s the same on your side. Drive over them and the lock works automatically.

It worked just as he said, the gates swinging apart and reclosing as the wagon’s tires crunched over the inner strips.

“Thanks, Pop,” I said through the window.

“Park by the pool.” His voice thinned behind me.

I drove on. The rose-bordered driveway swung right, swung left, and threw a loop around a swim pool separated from the house by a golf-green lawn. Sprinklers were playing, and a rainbow danced. Very pretty, but how was I to reach the house?

The latter impressed me as being about a twenty-room replica of a European chateau, architectured in the exposed-beam and stucco style. The former were painted blue, the stucco tinted lemon, and the trained and intervaled vines flung out sprays of scarlet.

I sized it up through the Leica view-finder, including the king-sized centerpiece of a pool done in blue- and lemon-colored tiles. But it needed a movie shot, to get the wind skittering sprinkler drops across the pool’s surface.

Buddy, or Pop, came along—I expected to valve off the artificial rain storm.

“You didn’t fly,” he remarked.

Some of those old servitors consider themselves practically members of the family. Ungloved now, this one twiddled a cabbagehead of yellow rose as he eyed the Chevie wagon.

“You drove in that all the way from Milquevais?” He gave the place name a French pronunciation. Back home, we say “Milky Way,” and speak of our burg as the Cottage Cheese Capital of the World.

But how in heck would H. H. Crossway’s hired help know I hailed from Milquevais? A bubble of suspicion ballooned in my mind, I peered closely at Buddy, or Pop, or was he … ?

What I had to go on was the framed photograph hanging in the Milquevais Globe editorial office, an iron-maned, granite-jawed, captain-of-industry face over a silver plate inscribed: “Founder and President, Crossway Press, Inc.”

The old codger looked enough like it to be a member of the family—a distant, indigent relative living here on the President and Founder’s largess.

“Yuh, I drove out,” I said. “My vacation was due, and I took off a week early and looked in on Yellowstone and Zion National Parks.”

He regarded me with rather grim, faded, blue denim eyes.

“It’s been a hell of a week,” he said.

That office wall photograph could have been taken ten to fifteen years ago. Possibly an airbrush had firmed the jowls and placed a high-powered executive gleam in the eyes.

Anyway, Buddy or Pop resembled that photo as much as the average politician looks like his campaign poster portrait.

He must have observed suspicion in my manner. “I mean, you must have found those places terribly crowded—reservations sold out months in advance,” he explained.

I put him to the test. “There’s always room for one more, as the cow said when she put her foot in the milk pail.”

If he had smiled at the crack, I would still have put him down as an unemployed relative. But his face was dead-pan.

“A guy can always squeeze in if he’s willing to bunk in the car, light the propane, and dump a package of dehydrated soup in the pot.” I stepped behind the wagon, lowered the tailgate, and showed him the groceries and Kamp Kit stashed in under the plywood frame of the air mattress bed.

All the time, I studied him, and he studied me. “You’re a rugged outdoorsman, evidently,” he commented.

“We all have our hobbies. And I guess yours must be roses.”

He nodded with vigor.

“Raise ’em with your own hands, I see.”

Another nod. “Yes, the gardeners aren’t careful. They carry spores of various fungus diseases on their clothes. These roses are my own varieties. You might be interested in the latest …” He held up the yellow specimen as a young mother offers her infant, to be seen and cooed over but not touched. “I’m thinking of naming it the Billy Graham. …”

I knew now, from the way his jaw jutted and his eyes charged with blue sparks of personal-magnetism electricity.

Should I apologize for my mistake?

Maybe he was a little deaf and hadn’t heard clearly. He must have been past the mid-century mark when that photo was taken, and probably now could have qualified for Social Security if he’d needed it. His hand with the glove stripped off showed arthritic gnarling.

“Suppose we sit down,” he said.

With senior-citizen caution, he lowered into the nearest pool-side chair. I hiked up the imported Italian pure silk knees to save the crease and settled into the next nearest.

He stared at the pool, seemed to be prompted by it. “I’m given to understand, Svederup, you’re a swimming champion.”

Well, once I did win the Lake Milquevais Annual Cheese Day Swim. But how come he’d ever heard of that?

“Dive a bit, by any chance?” he pursued.

“I can jump in headfirst. Nothing graceful or acrobatic.”

“I mean skin diving. ‘Goggle fishing,’ I believe it’s sometimes called. Underwater spearing and hunting. Any experience along that line?”

“No, sir. Ours is a mud-bottom lake, and down on the floor you’d only kick up a lot of silt. Besides, in warm weather the water turns green with algae.”

“Still, you’re young enough to learn.”

I said nothing. If I had spoken my thoughts, there were other abilities I would rather have mastered. The truth is, I’ve always wanted to be a writer.

Only, I’ve also liked to eat. That was why, a couple of years ago, I’d gone to work as a reporter on the Milquevais Globe. I never mentioned my aspirations there, however, because it’s the sort of thing you play hush-mouth until you’ve produced a best seller. Or at least until you’ve sold something somewhere.

H. H. C.’s voice gruffed a bit. “It seems you have certain talents as an investigator.”

I knew where he got that idea. Back home, we’d this sort of crazy taxi-driver and bootlegger, Canadian Jones, who shotgunned to death a Minneapolis flour-mill salesman. And when the manhunt was several days old, the thought came to me Canadian might be lying low on one of the little cattail islands up at the sloughy end of the lake. None of the islands was any bigger than a tennis court, but a man could hide in the reeds and brush willow and live on roots and bulbs and frogs. With the advantage that before being seen, he could blow the head off anyone who came poking around in a boat. I took the notion of swimming out there after dark and before moonrise.

“Frankly, Mr. Crossway, that was all luck”—just my good fortune that the moon, when it came up, was behind Canadian instead of silhouetting me.

“Luck?” You’d have thought from his voice it was a dirty word. Nobody with a million bucks in the bank believes luck plays much part in life, I guess.

“No,” said the old boy, “it took more than mere luck to extract a confession from that scoundrel. Obviously you’re pretty good at getting people to talk, open up with their inmost confidences and motives. …”

But what else had there been to do but talk after I’d managed to tie up Canadian with his bootlaces? The mosquitoes wouldn’t let us sleep, and we’d the whole night to spend before I could find the killer’s boat he had sunk in five feet of water. All I did was probe him for the motivations any writer would need to know in connection with a character committing a murder.

That’s the low-down on how the Milquevais Globe and the thirty-seven other Crossway Press newspapers came to scoop the Twin Cities and Chicago dailies with the capture and confession.

Later I got a letter of congratulation signed by H. H. Crossway, with a bonus check and the news I’d won the Monthly Expense-Paid West Coast Trip Award.

The award generally went to a circulation manager or advertising salesman. The lucky winner went to La Jolla to receive a citation from H. H. C. personally, went to Hollywood for lunch with some starlet who wanted the country newspaper publicity, went to some TV shows, finished at San Francisco full of Fisherman’s Wharf food and ambition to again break all circulation or advertising sales records.

Well, it was free. And worth it, if a guy could work in Yellowstone and Zion and maybe the Grand Canyon on the return trip.

Then a crack like a kid’s Fourth-of-July pistol startled me, but it was only Mr. Crossway hooking one knee over the other. He must have stiffened up at his rose gardening.

“You have the same strange effect on me, Svederup, and old as I am, I feel tempted to take down my hair—in a manner of speaking—and give vent to my—er—personal problems.”

I wondered what this was all about. Maybe I should have felt flattered, but I turned as uncomfortable as the bridegroom in a command-performance wedding.

“I’m a rich man, yes,” he soliloquized. “But a happy man, no. I’m lonely; I’ve found nothing except bitter disappointment at life’s end.”

I guess what got under my hide was the Big Brass attitude. His idea that naturally I’d share his sorrows over the things his money wouldn’t buy. Well, what if I had opened up on him—remarked that he looked like an understanding, fatherly old man, and I wanted him to bend an ear to my personal problems? He’d have blown the whistle fast, you bet. Sympathy between a rich old publisher and a poor young reporter is a one-way street, and I wanted to detour it.

“Mr. Crossway,” I said, “you don’t even know me.”

“I think I know you pretty well, Svederup. You remind me so much of my own son…”

I reminded him of Junior? I figured he must be crazy, figured the locked gates and cactus-topped wall were to keep him from running at large. I even peeked around to see if there wasn’t a good husky attendant lurking in the shrubbery.

It must have been I had subconsciously overheard a rustle or a caught breath, Because there was a face peeping around from behind the Chevie wagon—the most utterly beauteous, sensuous, alluring face I ever gazed on, before or since. The features I can’t describe except in clichés: a perfect oval face with aristocratically high cheekbones, eyes that were wells of Oriental mystery, lips shaped in a Cupid’s bow carved in pink-flesh fruit.

There are dames that a man has to go for or go against. I jumped up. I wasn’t tearing out my hair at sight of her, just trying to doff the hat I happened not to be wearing.