All the way

I stared at him suspiciously. “I thought they lived in salt water.”

Someone giggled at the rear of the crowd. “They do,” the guide explained with weary patience. “These are all salt-water fish.”

I pursed my lips and nodded. “Just as I suspected. All I can say is it’s a hell of a way to treat fish.”

He sighed, opened his mouth to explain that the ponds were filled with sea-water, but turned away with a well-you-run-into-all-kinds expression on his face. The crowd tittered. The tour went on. I remained on the outskirts, aloof and disapproving.

I arrived in Marathon at four-thirty p.m., after stopping several times along the way to get out and look at the water. One hour and twenty minutes to go. I checked my watch against a time announcement on the car radio to be sure it was still reasonably accurate, and hunted up a bar. It was quiet, with hardly anyone in it, and there was a telephone booth at the rear. There was also one out front on the sidewalk, in case the first happened to be occupied.

I ordered one Scotch and water and nursed it for an hour. The bartender tried once or twice to start a conversation, but I gave no indication I even heard him. At exactly five-fifty, I got up and started out, and then stopped abruptly. “Oh, my God, I’ve got to make a phone call—” Getting several dollars’ worth of change, I went back to the booth and called Coral Blaine.

“Where are you, dear?” she asked. “I’ve been trying to reach you—”

“I’m at Lake Okeechobee,” I replied.

“Then you’re on your way home?”

I paid no attention. “It’s funny, though. I keep thinking I’ve been here before. I’ve never been in Lake Okeechobee have I?”

“Heavens, dear, I don’t know. I’ve never heard you mention it. But I’m glad you’ve started back—”

“Tell Wingard it was too late,” I said. “But he can forget it now.”

“Oh,” she said, a little uncomfortably, I thought. I was listening carefully for clues. “That was what I wanted to get in touch with you about. He was in this morning—”

And he’d told her, of course. “It was too late before I figured it out,” I went on, ignoring her completely. “It wasn’t your fault. You kept telling me Marian was there—”

“Darling,” she interrupted, “couldn’t we stay off that subject, just once?”

I nodded. There it was. I was sure now.

“You kept telling me she was,” I continued, “but I didn’t believe you, because I kept seeing her down here. Everywhere I went. What she was doing, of course, was going back and forth. But I don’t know why I didn’t figure out about the radio station in time. I knew how clever she was—”

“Harris, is this some kind of joke?”

“All she had to do was walk in there and pick up the microphone and spread her lies to everybody in the country, and turn ’em all against me. Make ’em think I didn’t treat her fairly. The way they turned against Keith, and it wasn’t his fault at all. The girl walked right into his car—”

“Harris—!”

“People believed her, too. I can tell. I see ’em looking at me on the street— But I stopped her, even if it was too late. She’s here with me now.”

“Harris, will you please listen to me? You’re mistaken—”

“Oh, no,” I said triumphantly. “Maybe she’s got you believing those lies too. Don’t defend her. You know it was all lies. And she is with me. Right here. I’ve got her out in the car. She broke into my room last night, and when I woke up she was leaning over whispering lies to me. I tried to make her shut up—”

“You don’t know what you’re saying!” Her voice was growing shrill. “It’s utterly impossible.”

She had turned the knife that Monday morning, but in the field of really exquisite deadliness she was an amateur. While she was sitting there listening to me say I’d just killed Marian Forsyth, Marian was standing at the next desk, talking to Barbara Cullen.

I dropped my voice to a conspiratorial whisper.

”You’ll hear from me. I’ll be in a foreign country, angel, where they didn’t hear the things she told about me, and I’ll send for you.” I hung up.

I went back to the bar, ordered another drink, and sat for ten minutes or so staring moodily at the mounted sailfish above the backbar mirror.

“Beautiful fish,” I said to the bartender. “You know, they catch a lot of those down in the Keys.”

He was so happy at having somebody to talk to again he did a clown routine. He picked up the bottle from which he’d just poured my drink, stared at it unbelievingly, and shook his head. “Pal, you’re right square in the middle of the Keys.”

“Lovely country,” I said. “Next time you go, you ought to take the whole family; they’d love it.” I got up and went out.

I went on towards Sugarloaf Key, still driving under forty. There were several problematical factors now, but I was sure I had plenty of time and didn’t want to make that turn off the highway until it was dark. A lot depended on when she decided to call the Florida highway patrol—if she did at all. It would be the logical thing to do. There was still a good possibility I hadn’t really killed anybody, but not much doubt that I was foaming mad and might at any minute. But Marian had insisted her first concern would be getting off the ship herself before it went down, and that she’d chicken out at the prospect of having to call and have her insane fiance picked up and spread all over the front pages before she had a chance to start disowning him.

But at any rate, she was going to have to tell somebody, and that somebody would call the Florida authorities. But the Okeechobee thing should have stuck in her mind; God knows I’d hit it hard enough. Of course, the operator would have said it was Marathon calling, but nobody ever paid any attention to that, and she’d said it to Mrs. English, anyway. The chances were there would be no alert in this area until they started picking up my trail, and I needed less than an hour now to duck into the hole and pull it in after me.

When I reached Big Pine Key I could see I was still too early, so I pulled off the highway, drove up a back road for a mile or so and parked, still facing away from the highway. Two or three cars went past. If they noticed me, so much the better. It would take a long time to search Big Pine; it was one of the largest of all the Keys.

When it was completely dark, I turned and went back. There wasn’t a great deal of traffic on the highway. As I began closing on the turn-off at Sugarloaf there was only one car behind me. I slowed and let it pass, and then made the turn. I speeded up, hurtling over the bumpy country road. In a few minutes I came to the trace of a road going off to the left, and in only two or three more to the openings through the wall of mangroves where boats could be launched. My headlights splashed against the pick-up truck. Aside from it, the place was utterly deserted.

The faint ruts ran on for another two or three hundred yards through heavy brush that scraped the car on both sides, made a sharp turn toward the water, and dead-ended among the mangroves. There was a narrow channel here, going through them to open water, but it was never used for launching boats because the underbrush and mangroves were so heavy on all sides it would be impossible to turn or maneuver. I stopped just above high tide, and cut the lights and engine. Impenetrable darkness closed in around me, and thousands of mosquitoes, and utter silence except for the faint lapping of the water. There was no surf, because of the shallow water and the mangrove islands farther out.

Getting out, I fumbled the key into the lock, and opened the trunk. When I’d located the flashlight, I turned it on, unfastened the boat, and lifted it down. I dragged it down to the edge of the water, put the oars in it, the concrete flamingo, the ball of cotton cord, and my canvas shoes. Taking out my khaki shirt, I wiped the steering wheel, dash, door handles, and trunk handle, and then rubbed and wiped my hands and fingers over them to leave a satisfactory number of unusable prints in case they did start to check.

I opened the whisky, took a drink of it, poured the rest into the water, and threw the bottle far over into the mangroves. Lifting out Justine’s shoe with the broken and dangling heel, I dropped it beside the rear of the car, under some overhanging brush, and checked it with the flashlight. It couldn’t be too obvious. I nudged it farther out of sight with my foot. Good. I dropped the other shoe in the boat. Closing the car, I pushed off. The water was quite shallow and I had to wade out several steps before I could get aboard.

I sat down and poled it out of the narrow channel with one of the oars. When I reached open water I threw the other shoe overboard. It would move around with the tide, and might or might not be found, but it made no