blow; instead, he vomited, staggered back, and fell to his knees.
Snarled within the clump of weed was a woman’s head, still attached to shoulders, part of an arm, and about a third of her trunk. The mass of tattered flesh was a mottled blue-gray, and as Hendricks spilled his guts into the sand, he thought — and the thought made him retch again — that the woman’s remaining breast looked as flat as a flower pressed in a memory book.
“Wait,” said Brody, stopping and touching Cassidy’s arm. “I think that was a whistle.” He listened, squinting into the morning sun. He saw a black spot on the sand, which he assumed was Hendricks, and then he heard the whistle more clearly. “Come on,” he said, and the two men began to trot along the sand.
Hendricks was still on his knees when they got to him. He had stopped puking, but his head still hung, mouth open, and his breathing rattled with phlegm.
Brody was several steps ahead of Cassidy, and he said, “Mr. Cassidy, stay back there a second, will you?” He pulled apart some of the weeds, and when he saw what was inside, he felt bile rise in his throat. He swallowed and closed his eyes. After a moment he said, “You might as well look now, Mr. Cassidy, and tell me if it’s her or not.”
Cassidy was terrified. His eyes shifted between the exhausted Hendricks and the mass of weed. “That?” he said, pointing at the weed. Reflexively, he stepped backward. “That
Brody was still fighting to control his stomach. “I think,” he said, “that it may be part of her.”
Reluctantly, Cassidy shuffled forward. Brody held back a piece of weed so Cassidy could get a clear look at the gray and gaping face. “Oh, my God!” said Cassidy, and he put a hand to his mouth.
“Is it her?”
Cassidy nodded, still staring at the face. Then he turned away and said, “What happened to her?”
“I can’t be sure,” said Brody. “Offhand, I’d say she was attacked by a shark.”
Cassidy’s knees buckled, and as he sank to the sand, he said, “I think I’m going to be sick.” He put his head down and retched.
The stink of vomit reached Brody almost instantly, and he knew he had lost his struggle. “Join the crowd,” he said, and he vomited too.
THREE
Several minutes passed before Brody felt well enough to stand, walk back to his car, and call for an ambulance from the Southampton Hospital, and it was almost an hour before the ambulance arrived and the truncated corpse was stuffed into a rubber bag and hauled away.
By eleven o’clock, Brody was back in his office, filling out forms about the accident. He had completed everything but “cause of death” when the phone rang.
“Carl Santos, Martin,” said the voice of the coroner.
“Yeah, Carl. What have you got for me?”
“Unless you have any reason to suspect a murder, I’d have to say shark.”
“Murder?” said Brody.
“I’m not suggesting anything. All I mean is that it’s conceivable — just barely — that some nut could have done this job on the girl with an ax and a saw.”
“I don’t think it’s a murder, Carl. I’ve got no motive, no murder weapons, and — unless I want to go off into left field — no suspect.”
“Then it’s a shark. And a big bastard, too. Even the screw on an ocean liner wouldn’t have done this. It might have cut her in two, but…”
“Okay, Carl,” said Brody. “Spare me the gore. My stomach’s none too hot already.”
“Sorry, Martin. Anyway, I’m going to put down shark attack. I’d say that makes the most sense for you too, unless there are… you know… other considerations.”
“No,” said Brody. “Not this time. Thanks for calling, Carl.” He hung up, typed “shark attack” in the “cause of death” space on the forms, and leaned back in his chair.
The possibility that “other considerations” might be involved in this case hadn’t occurred to Brody. Those considerations were the touchiest part of Brody’s job, forcing him constantly to assess the best means of protecting the common weal without compromising either himself or the law.
It was the beginning of the summer season, and Brody knew that on the success or failure of those twelve brief weeks rested the fortunes of Amity for a whole year. A rich season meant prosperity enough to carry the town through the lean winter. The winter population of Amity was about 1,000; in a good summer the population jumped to nearly 10,000. And those 9,000 summer visitors kept the 1,000 permanent residents alive for the whole year.
Merchants — from the owners of the hardware store and the sporting goods store and the two gas stations to the local pharmacist — needed a boom summer to support them through the winter, during which they never broke even. The wives of carpenters, electricians, and plumbers worked during the summer as waitresses or real estate agents, to help keep their families going over the winter. There were only two year-round liquor licenses in Amity, so the twelve weeks of summer were critical to most of the restaurants and pubs. Charter fishermen needed every break they could get: good weather, good fishing, and, above all, crowds.
Even after the best of summers, Amity winters were rough. Three of every ten families went on relief.
Dozens of men were forced to move for the winter to the north shore of Long Island, where they scratched for work shucking scallops for a few dollars a day.
Brody knew that one bad summer would nearly double the relief rolls. If every house was not rented, there wouldn’t be enough work for Amity’s blacks, most of whom were gardeners, butlers, bartenders, and maids. And two or three bad summers in a row — a circumstance that, fortunately, hadn’t occurred in more than two decades — could create a cycle that could wreck the town. If people didn’t have enough money to buy clothes or gas or ample food supplies, if they couldn’t afford to have their houses or their appliances repaired, then the merchants and service firms would fail to make enough to tide them over until the next summer. They would close down, and Amity’s citizens would start shopping elsewhere. The town would lose tax revenue. Municipal services would deteriorate, and people would begin to move away.
So there was a common, though tacit, understanding in Amity, born of the need to survive. Everyone was expected to do his bit to make sure that Amity remained a desirable summer community. A few years ago, Brody remembered, a young man and his brother had moved into town and set themselves up as carpenters. They came in the spring, when there was enough work preparing houses for summer residents to keep everyone busy, so they were welcomed. They seemed competent enough, and several established carpenters began to refer work to them.
But by midsummer, there were disquieting reports about the Felix Brothers. Albert Morris, the owner of Amity Hardware, let it be known that they were buying cheap steel nails instead of galvanized nails and were charging their customers for galvanized. In a seaside climate, steel nails begin to rust in a few months. Dick Spitzer, who ran the lumberyard, told somebody that the Felixes had ordered a load of low-grade, green wood to use in some cabinets in a house on Scotch Road. The cabinet doors began to warp soon after they were installed. In a bar one night, the elder Felix, Armando, boasted to a drinking buddy that on his current job he was being paid to set supporting studs every sixteen inches but was actually placing them twenty-four inches apart. And the younger Felix, a twenty-one-year-old named Danny with a stubborn case of acne, liked to show his friends erotic books which he bragged he had stolen from the houses he worked in.
Other carpenters stopped referring work to the Felixes, but by then they had built enough of a business to keep them going through the winter. Very quietly, the Amity understanding began to work. At first, there were just a few hints to the Felixes that they had out-worn their welcome. Armando reacted arrogantly. Soon, annoying little mishaps began to bother him. All the tires on his truck would mysteriously empty themselves of air, and when he called for help from the Amity Gulf station, he was told that the air pump was broken. When he ran out of propane gas in his kitchen, the local gas company took eight days to deliver a new tank. His orders for lumber and other supplies were inexplicably mislaid or delayed. In stores where once he had been able to obtain credit he was now
