“Ask him. If he’s home, I’ll introduce you.”
“No kidding.”
“But let’s do some work first.”
“You bet,” he said. He looked earnestly out the side window at the camps and the palm trees and the oaks hung with Spanish moss. “What are we looking for, anyway?”
“If you see a dead person facedown on the beach, that’ll be a clue.”
I parked the cruiser on the roadside, and we walked down to the water’s edge. The tide was on its way out, the strip of sandy beach slick and rilling with water and tiny crustaceans in the sunrise, the bay glittering like a bronze shield. We walked to the end of the Point, then five hundred yards back north. I saw a tennis shoe floating upside down in the froth. I picked it up and shook out the sand and water. It was lime green, with blue stripes on it, size seven.
“Bag it?” Sean asked. He was slender, over six feet, his shoulders as rectangular as coat-hanger wire inside his shirt, his stomach as flat as a plank. There was an innocence in his face I hoped he would never lose.
“Why not?” I said.
We walked into Desmond’s yard and mounted the double flight of wood steps to his front door. I had not seen Desmond in years and wondered if it was wise to invite the past back into my life or into his. I rang the chimes. In retrospect, I wish I had not.
• • •
THE HOUSE WAS L-shaped and built of teak and oak, with spacious rooms and sliding glass doors and a widow’s peak and a railed deck like the fantail on a ship. The sun was a red ember in the west, the clouds orange and purple, a water spout twisting as brightly as spun glass on the horizon. Desmond shook my hand, his grip relaxed and cool, with no sign of the power it actually contained. “You look good, Dave. I have a roast on the rotisserie. You and your young friend, please join me.”
“I’m a big admirer of your films, Mr. Cormier,” Sean said.
“Then you came to the right place,” Desmond replied.
Sean could not have looked happier. Desmond closed the door behind us. There were potted plants all over the house. The rug was two inches thick, the furniture made from blond driftwood, the chairs and couches fitted with big leather cushions, an onyx-black piano by the sliding glass doors, a Martin guitar and a golden tenor sax propped on stands. But the most striking aspect of the decor were the steel-framed photos extracted from the films of John Ford. They ran the length of the corridor and one wall of the living room.
“We got some 911 calls about a woman screaming early this morning,” I said.
“Some kind of domestic trouble?” Desmond said.
“Could be. Maybe the scream came from a cabin cruiser,” I said. “Know anybody with a cabin cruiser who likes to knock women around?”
“At Catalina Island I do. Come out on the deck. I want to show you something.”
I started to follow him. Sean was staring at a black-and-white still shot from the last scene in My Darling Clementine. “That makes me dizzy.”
The still shot showed Henry Fonda in the role of Wyatt Earp, speaking to Cathy Downs, who played Clementine Carter, on the side of a dirt trail that led into the wastelands. In the distance was a bare mountain shaped like a monument or perhaps a rotted tooth, its surface eroded with perpendicular crevices. The antediluvian dryness and immensity of the environment were head-reeling.
“The woman is so pretty and sweet-looking,” Sean said. “Is he saying goodbye to her?”
“Yes, he is,” Desmond answered.
“I don’t get it. Why don’t he take her with him?”
“No one knows,” Desmond said.
“It makes me feel sad,” Sean said.
“That’s because you’re a sensitive man,” Desmond said. “Come outside. I have some soft drinks in the cooler. I’d offer you more, but I guess y’all don’t drink alcohol on the job.”
“That’s us,” Sean said. “Damn shooting, it is.”
Desmond smiled with his eyes and slid open the glass door and stepped out onto the deck, into the wind and the warmth of the evening. A telescope was mounted on the deck rail. But that was not what caught my attention. A barefoot and virtually naked man, his genitals and buttocks roped with a knotted white towel, was performing a slow-motion martial arts exercise, silhouetted against the sunset, his slender physique sunbrowned and shiny with baby oil, his iron-gray hair combed back in a sweaty tangle.
“This is my good friend Antoine Butterworth,” Desmond said.
“Ciao,” Butterworth said. His eyes lingered on Sean.
“We can’t stay,” I said to Desmond. “We found a lime-green tennis shoe with blue stripes up the beach. Does that bring anyone to mind?”
“Afraid not,” Desmond said.
“Are we looking for a body, something of that sort?” Butterworth asked. The accent was faintly British, smelling of pretense and self-satisfaction.
“We’re not sure,” I said. “You know a woman who wears green tennis shoes?”
“Can’t say as I do.”
“Hear a woman scream early this morning?” I said.
“I wasn’t here early this morning, so I’m afraid I’m of no help,” Butterworth said.
“From the UK, are you?” I said.
“No,” he replied cutely, his mouth screwed into a button.
I waited. He didn’t continue, as though I had violated his privacy.
“You do mixed martial arts?” Sean asked.
“Oh, I do everything,” Butterworth replied.
“You an actor?” Sean said, not catching the coarse overtone.
“Nothing so grand,” Butterworth said.
Sean nodded in his innocent way.
I heard Desmond pop two soda cans. “Take a look through my telescope,” he said.
I leaned down and gazed through the eyepiece. The magnification was extraordinary. I could see Marsh Island in detail and the opening into Southwest Pass, which fed into the Gulf of Mexico. In the fall of 1942, from almost this same spot, I saw the red glow on the horizon of the oil tankers that had been torpedoed by German submarines. I also saw the bodies of the burned and drowned American seamen who had been dredged up in shrimp nets and dumped on the sand like giant carp.
“The sharks will be coming soon,” Desmond said.
“Sure about that?” I said.
“Big fellows. Hammerheads, maybe.”
I straightened up from the telescope. “They usually don’t come into the bay. It’s too shallow, and there’s not enough food.”
“You’re probably right,” he said.
That was Desmond, always the gentleman, never one to argue.
I bent down to the eyepiece again. This time I saw a fin slicing through a wave. Then it disappeared. I rose up from the telescope.
“I take it back.”
“Told you,” he said, smiling. “Mind if I look?”
He bent down to the eyepiece, his denim shirt ballooning with wind, his wispy hair blowing. “He’s gone now. He’ll be back, though. They always come back. Predators, I mean.”
“Actually, they’re not predators, at least no more than any other form of fish life,” I said.
“You could fool me,” he said. “Let me fix you and your friend a plate.”