A uniformed cop got out of the squad car and started toward us, coming in that casual, overbearing walk they use whenever they are about to give you some trouble. He pulled an aluminum-backed notebook from his hip-pocket and gave me a onceover that said 'You ain't much,' and gave Billie one that said 'How much, baby?' I knew he and I weren't going to get along.
'What's your names?' he wanted to know.
'Why? What's the beef?'
'I said what's your name, buster?'
'Buster Thaxton,' I told him. 'What's the beef?'
He lowered the notebook. He was about my big except that he outweighed me with the harness and boots and badge and gun and all that nonsense. We sized each other up like a couple of surly male dogs.
'Thax.' Billie laid a warning hand on my arm. 'We work for Cochrane Enterprises, officer,' she said.
'I figured. I still want your names.' He was looking at me.
'L. M. Thaxton and Billie Peeler. She's Billie,' I said.
He wrote in the notebook. 'Occupation?'
'We both work in the sideshow. What's the beef?'
He wrote in the notebook. 'Where do you live?'
'I live in town, officer,' Billie told him. 'At the Regency. Is something wrong?'
He wrote in the notebook. 'You?' He meant me.
'Tarzan's Tree House.' I knew he wouldn't like it.
He lowered the notebook.
'Check with Ferris, if that'll make you happy,' I said. 'And now maybe you'd better give me
He didn't like me any better than he had a minute ago, but it gave him pause for consideration. I talked like a man who had an in with his boss. I didn't mind making him sweat. I hate those storm troopers who jump on you when you're minding your own business and start giving you a hard time and refuse to tell you what it is you're supposed to have done. It's unconstitutional.
'There's no beef,' he said. 'We're just supposed to keep tabs on anybody we see hanging around here at night after closing time. There's been a murder, you know.'
'Honest to God?' I turned back to Billie. 'I'll see you tomorrow.'
She gave me a bright searching smile.
'Two weeks, Thax. Then the Mediterranean.'
'Sure. Night-night.'
In two weeks Ferris might have me sitting in poky with a murder charge on my back. Billie drove off across the lot in the topless MG, low and sleek and white in the fog. The storm trooper and I started back to Neverland. He was still feeling a little edgy.
'You really know Ferris?'
'Uh-huh,' I said. 'I'm his prime suspect.'
I walked away from him. When I looked back from the main gate he was standing in the big empty smoky lot staring after me.
Right inside the entrance was a big glassed-in map of Neverland. It was done in a bird's eye view and it was very colorful and carefully detailed. It showed me something I hadn't realized before. One portion of the Swamp Ride backed up to the manmade lake. According to the map there was only a rib of land separating the large body of water from the southern loop of the Swamp Ride's figure eight pattern.
It planted a little seed of an idea in my brainsoil.
I scouted around till I ran down one of the night watchmen. He was earning his pay watching the late movie on TV in the security building, which was just a small affair built to look like a Hansel and Gretel cottage.
'Hi. I'm Thaxton. I work in the sideshow.' I showed him my magical card and asked him if he had a spare flashlight he could loan me and gave him some kind of phony reason for needing it.
It was all one to him. He wasn't going anywhere if he could help it. He gave me his.
He was a lonely old cuss so I hung around for a couple of minutes and helped him watch his movie. It was Mae West's 1933 _She Done Him Wrong_ and Mae was doing a very young Gilbert Roland wrong in the scene we watched. It was in this picture that Mae was supposed to have delivered that immortal line: 'Come up and see me sometime.' Which sounded like a line I should use when inviting people up to my tree house.
I thanked the old guy and got out of there.
I passed a couple of sweep-up men and another watchman but nobody I knew. Neverland seemed lonely and haunted, like a long lost Aztec city brooding in jungle mist. I heard a girl's throaty giggle somewhere nearby in the dark as I walked through the central garden, and then some rustling around, and it reminded me of that moss-beard kindergarten joke about the Simple Simon who stuck his head in the bushes to ask the young couple rolling in the leaves 'How far is the Old Log Inn?' and got a punch in the nose.
So I kept my nose out of their business and went on my way, thinking, kids will be kids.
The one big light burned bluewhite over the Swamp Ride's deserted dock. The little _African Queen_ type boats were all snug in their berths for the night. Nobody was around. I climbed over the rail and went along the dock to the far shadowy end and jumped down to a weedy bank. Damn near turned my ankle on a stupid rock I didn't see in the dark.
But I didn't want to use the flash yet. Like the couple who were misbehaving in the garden, this was my business. I didn't want company.
The fog was creeping over the dark water and coiling around the black roots and the whole slimy place seemed to be writhing to life around me. Once I was in there-what with the fog and the dark and the unearthly silence-it was actually like being in an honest to God swamp. I don't mean the little five acre morass, but like I had wandered into the Everglades or Okefenokee.
Tell the truth, it gave me the willies, like something monstrous was out there in the night-that even to look at was a sin, something that had the grisly feel of those man-eating plants that grow in the jungles of Malaya.
Then I remembered those goddam pet gators and I nearly turned around and took off for my nice high tree home.
Now now, silly bastard, I reasoned with myself. They won't hurt anybody. Everybody says they won't. I switched on the flash and took a hasty look around. I'd just had another sick thought.
What if they kept real snakes in there?
They didn't. I was damn well certain they didn't; but you get into a place like that at night and you get something like snakes in your mind and you just can't shake 'em out.
A mossy trunk-stump shook itself out of the gray mist like a shaggy black dog coming out of the water, and the flash hit it squarely and knocked orange glints out of the wet moss. It seemed to me the damn thing had a twisted mouth and that the mouth was grinning at me. I went around it like it was a Frankenstein's monster in damp wood.
I kept going, sticking as close to the edge of the waterway as I could. I wanted to find that little setback where I'd fished Cochrane out of the shallows.
The setback reared itself out of the swampy shadows as if startled at the approach of light. I played the flash over the water and the bank but there really wasn't anything there I wanted to see. It was that finger of high-ground behind the setback that interested me. I started walking over it.
There were a lot of tropical ferns and flowers and saw palmettos, and in about ten-twelve seconds I came out on the opposite bank and found myself standing on the edge of the manmade lake. The distance between the lake and the waterway was about one hundred feet.
That made one thing quite clear-the manner in which the murderer had moved the body from the tearoom into the Swamp Ride without too much strain and without being observed.
He-if it was a he-hauled the body from the tearoom to the Admiral Benbow dock, put it into one of the rowboats, rowed it across the lake in the dark and landed about where I was now standing. Then he or she or they lugged the body over the rib of land and dumped it into the setback. Neat.
But could a woman do it? Lug a heavy dead weight like Cochrane that far? None of the females I'd ever known could. Certainly not May.
