He took an object from his shirt pocket, a very generous cigar butt, better than three inches long, wrapped in a tissue. He held it on the palm of a big paw, prodded it with a thick hairy finger. “We had a good rain about eight last night, remember? This hasn’t been out in the rain. Looks like a very good leaf. From where I found it, right at the edge of the brush, the passenger threw it out. I don’t think you could throw a cigar that far from a car on the highway proper. And this isn’t the kind you throw away. The wet grass put it out. You don’t throw it away unless you’ve lit it to settle your nerves, and then somebody says let’s go, and you have a girl to dump over a bridge railing in the next minute. Then you throw away a good cigar. Nice teeth marks, Travis. Big choppers. They’ll stay nice and clear even after this has dried out all the way. So would you humor an aging economist and tuck it away in a good safe place? One of us might meet the fellow again.”
He rewrapped it carefully and I accepted it. “Anything else, Inspector?”
“Ah, yes. As an ignorant tourist I queried a surly old fellow about water depths. Except in the main channel under the center of the bridge, most of the rest of the area averages about three feet at low tide. One exception, the hole where we were fishing, where the outgoing tide sets up a good swirl. Fifty feet in diameter, twenty and thirty feet deep. The highway people worry about it undercutting some of the bridge piers eventually. Over the main channel the bridge walls are considerably higher, too high to conveniently hoist a girl over. So either the man with the cigar, or the fellow racing the engine, or perhaps a third man if there was one, knows the waters hereabouts. In fact, dear heart, there might be other cement blocks down there, with empty loops of wire. When the crabs and the other scavengers have picked them clean, the ligaments would rot and the bones separate at the joints. The slender bones of the leg would slip out of the loops as soon as the feet were gone, and it would not make much difference by then, I imagine. We may have discovered the southeastern repository for surplus bawds. The fatal ka-slosh on many a dark night, my boy. And the slow empty dance of the tethered bawds in the final caress of the current deep and black, the wild hair drifting, and the aimless sway of their emptied arms, and the slow oceanic tilting of their sea-cool hips in the
“Meyer! At eight in the morning?”
“Extreme hunger gives me poetic delirium. Travis, good lad, you look unwell.”
“I was, for a moment. You see, Meyer, I was down there. And it was black. And when I wound my fist in her hair to try to lift her, and found I couldn’t, she was just enough alive to reach up and put both hands on my wrist, as gently as a sick child. If she hadn’t done that, I wouldn’t have been able to stay down long enough to get her loose. Yes, Meyer, it was deep and black. And not very nice.”
“I am often guilty of vulgarity. Forgive me. Have we a nice mild onion I can chop into my six scrambling eggs?”
We were on second coffees when we heard her running the water in the head. Soon she appeared in the doorway, looking down at us in the booth adjoining the stainless-steel galley, wearing the black pants and the white shirt with its trimmings of lace.
“Good morning to Meyer and McGee,” she said. “If there is really no other woman aboard, one of you is a perfect jewel, washing out the dainty underthings.”
“Always at your service, Miss Doe,” Meyer said. He got up. “Sit here, my dear. Opposite the McGee. Boat owners get waited on hand and foot. I’m chef as well as laundress. And your turn will come. Coffee black and hot first?”
“Please.” She slid rather stiffly into the booth, grimaced as she lowered herself. “How do you feel?” I asked her.