Jaws

“Her kid. Out by the beach.”

A twinge of unease shot through Brody’s stomach. “What happened?”

“It’s…” Bixby faltered, then said quickly. “Thursday.”

“Listen, asshole…” Brody stopped, for now he understood. “I’ll be right there.” He hung up the phone.

He felt flushed, almost feverish. Fear and guilt and fury blended in a thrust of gut-wrenching pain. He felt at once betrayed and betrayer, deceived and deceiver. He was a criminal forced into crime, an unwilling whore. He had to take the blame, but it was not rightly his. It belonged to Larry Vaughan and his partners, whoever they might be. He had wanted to do the right thing; they had forced him not to. But who were they to force him? If he couldn’t stand up to Vaughan, what kind of cop was he? He should have closed the beaches.

Suppose he had. The fish would have gone down the beach — say, to East Hampton — and killed someone there. But that wasn’t how it had worked. The beaches had stayed open, and a child had been killed because of it. It was as simple as that. Cause and effect. Brody suddenly loathed himself. And just as suddenly, he felt great pity for himself.

“What is it?” asked Ellen.

“A kid just got killed.”

“How?”

“By a goddamn sonofabitch of a shark.”

“Oh no! If you had closed the beaches…” She stopped, embarrassed.

“Yeah, I know.”

Harry Meadows was waiting in the parking lot at the rear of the station house when Brody drove up. He opened the passenger-side door of Brody’s car and eased his bulk down onto the seat. “So much for the odds,” he said.

“Yeah. Who’s in there, Harry?”

“A man from the Times, two from Newsday, and one of my people. And the woman. And the man who says he saw it happen.”

“How did the Times get hold of it?”

“Bad luck. He was on the beach. So was one of the Newsday guys. They’re both staying with people, for the weekend. They were onto it within two minutes.”

“What time did it happen?”

Meadows looked at his watch. “Fifteen, twenty minutes ago. No more.”

“Do they know about the Watkins thing?”

“I don’t know. My man does, but he knows enough not to talk. As for the others, it depends on who they’ve been talking to. I doubt they’re onto it. They haven’t had any digging time.”

“They’ll get onto it, sooner or later.”

“I know,” said Meadows. “It puts me in a rather difficult position.”

“You! Don’t make me laugh.”

“Seriously, Martin. If somebody from the Times gets that story and files it, it’ll appear in tomorrow’s paper, along with today’s attack, and the Leader will look like hell. I’m going to have to use it, to cover myself, even if the others don’t.”

“Use it how, Harry? What are you going to say?”

“I don’t know, yet; as I said, I’m in a rather difficult position.”

“Who are you going to say ordered it hushed up? Larry Vaughan?”

“Hardly.”

“Me?”

“No, no. I’m not going to say anybody ordered it hushed up. There was no conspiracy. I’m going to talk to Carl Santos. If I can put the right words in his mouth, we may all be spared a lot of grief.”

“What about the truth?”

“What about it?”

“What about telling it the way it happened? Say that I wanted to close the beaches and warn people, but the selectmen disagreed. And say that because I was too much of a chicken to fight and put my job on the line, I went along with them. Say that all the honchos in Amity agreed there was no point in alarming people just because there was a shark around that liked to eat children.”

“Come on, Martin. It wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t anybody’s. We came to a decision, took a gamble, and lost. That’s all there is to it.”

“Terrific. Now I’ll just go tell the kid’s mother that we’re terribly sorry we had to use her son for chips.” Brody got out of the car and started for the back door of the station house. Meadows, slower to extract himself, followed a few paces behind.

Brody stopped. “You know what I’d like to know, Harry? Who really made the decision? You went along with it. I went along with it. I don’t think Larry Vaughan was even the actual guy who made the decision. I think he went along with it, too.”

“What makes you think so?”

“I’m not sure. Do you know anything about his partners in the business?”

“He doesn’t have any real partners, does he?”

“I’m beginning to wonder. Anyway, fuck it… for now.” Brody took another step, and when Meadows still followed him, he said, “You better go around front, Harry… for appearances’ sake.”

Brody entered his office through a side door. The boy’s mother was sitting in front of the desk, clutching a handkerchief. She was wearing a short robe over her bathing suit. Her feet were bare. Brody looked at her nervously, once again feeling the rush of guilt. He couldn’t tell if she was crying, for her eyes were masked by large, round sunglasses.

A man was standing by the back wall. Brody assumed he was the one who claimed to have witnessed the accident. He was gazing absently at Brody’s collection of memorabilia: citations from community-service groups, pictures of Brody with visiting dignitaries. Not exactly the stuff to command much attention from an adult, but staring at it was preferable to risking conversation with the woman.

Brody had never been adept at consoling people, so he simply introduced himself and started asking questions. The woman said she had seen nothing: one moment the boy was there, the next he was gone, “and all I saw were pieces of his raft.” Her voice was weak but steady. The man described what he had seen, or what he thought he had seen.

“So no one actually saw this shark,” Brody said, courting a faint hope in the back of his mind.

“No,” said the man. “I guess not. But what else could it have been?”

“Any number of things.” Brody was lying to himself as well as to them, testing to see if he could believe his own lies, wondering if any alternative to reality could be made credible. “The raft could have gone flat and the boy could have drowned.”

“Alex is a good swimmer,” the woman protested. “Or… was…”

“And what about the splash?” said the man.

“The boy could have been thrashing around.”

“He never cried out. Not a word.”

Brody realized that the exercise was futile. “Okay,” he said. “We’ll probably know soon enough, anyway.”

“What do you mean?” said the man.

“One way or another, people who die in the water usually wash up somewhere. If it was a shark, there’ll be no mistaking it.” The woman’s shoulders hunched forward, and Brody cursed himself for being a clumsy fool. “I’m sorry,” he said. The woman shook her head and wept.

Brody told the woman and the man to wait in his office, and he walked out into the front of the station house. Meadows was standing by the outer door, leaning against the wall. A young man — the reporter from the Times, Brody guessed — was gesturing at Meadows and seemed to be asking questions. The young man was tall and slim. He wore sandals and a bathing suit and a short-sleeved shirt with an alligator emblem stitched to the left breast, which caused Brody to take an instant, instinctive dislike to the man. In his adolescence Brody had thought of those shirts as badges of wealth and position. All the summer people wore them. Brody badgered his mother until she bought him one — “a two-dollar shirt with a six-dollar lizard on it,” she said —