Beneath Still Waters Page 5
He loved watching her dress and undress. Slowly.
And she knew that too.
“Hey, I’ve gotta go, sweetheart. I’ll probably catch hell,
anyway.”
“Sure, Max. Go ahead before you turn into a pumpkin
or whatever.”
He hesitated. “Need any cash? If—”
“No,” she answered quickly, sharply. “I’m fine.”
A touchy moment navigated. “Right. Okay, I’ll run,
then.” He walked over to her and kissed her cheek, sud-
denly feeling almost paternal.
Or maybe this one was running out of steam.
He opened the door and walked out to the parking lot,
looking back and forth, checking to see if anyone was lurk-
ing about who might spot him.
But then again, who’d be coming or going at a motel
at this hour? It would have to be another pillar of the
community like he was. Still, this was a moment when
his stomach tightened. He had to walk to his Porsche (parked
discreetly around the back, near the overfilled dumpster),
and calmly, casually get in (Don’t run, man!) without some
local yokel spotting him and screaming out—
“Jesus H. Christ! There’s our ever-lovin’ mayor! Now
what in the hell do you think he’s doing here? You don’t
suppose . . .”
Step, step. A hot-rod Camaro took the nearby corner too
fast, tires squealing and screaming in protest, before the
driver straightened out and gunned the car. Step. Step. The
low, throaty hum of a truck echoed out of the distance and
grew in intensity. Step. Step. He turned the corner of the
motel just as the truck passed.
Now all the driver could see was the back of his head.
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m a t t h e w j . c o s t e l l o
And there was his cream-colored Porsche, waiting for
him, mottled by the dark shadow made by the fat old maple
tree standing right next to it.
Made it. Safe and sound. Yeah, folks, once again Max
Wiley risked his fame, fortune, and an upcoming shot at a
congressional seat for his number-one passion in life.
He unlocked his car, opened up the door, and saw the
car phone flashing.
A dozen creepy thoughts went through his head. His
house was burned down, maybe, and his family trapped.
Sure, happens all the time. (Wouldn’t that make for some
wopping guilt? Oh, yeah. Wouldn’t that be fun to live with?)
He quickly slid into the black Leatherette seat and
pressed the button. The phone buzzed briefly and he picked
it up.
“Hello.” His throat felt tight and dry.
“Max, it’s Paddy Rogers. I’m at the Kenicut Dam, and I
thought I should let you know what happened. Besides, I
think I’ll have to call the New York police for some help.”
It was rare for Ellerton’s police captain—six months
away from retiring, thank God—to call him. Only one call
in the past four years, just once when that crazy Henderson
kid locked himself in the high school and began destroying
it room by room.
“What happened, Paddy?” The captain was one of the few
people he respected. No, respect was not quite the right word.
He was nothing less than a local version of J. Edgar Hoover,
with the meaty head of an Irish cop on the beat. Rogers
knew, it was rumored, everything about everyone in town.
Which meant he probably knew how the mayor spent
his free time.
“Tommy Fluhr went for a swim . . . at the reservoir.
Emily Powers was there.”
“Yeah.” Max knew Tommy Fluhr’s dad. They both were
good for two martinis. No more, no less—at the Embassy
Club.
b e n e a t h s t i l l w a t e r s
43
“Something happened to him. Our best guess is he got a
cramp and went under. Emily Powers was with him, but
she didn’t see anything.”
Wiley started the car. No point sitting at the motel wait-
ing for someone to come cruising by and spot him. He
lodged the phone in his shoulder, backed the car to the left,
and pulled it out of the lot. Gravel sprayed backward as he
eased onto the road.
“What do we have to do, Paddy?”
“What we have to do, Max, is get a N.Y.P.D. diving
team up here. We can use two Westport cops I know, but
they don’t have any electronic equipment. If he drowned,
we need a body.”
“What do you mean, ‘if ’?”
He heard the cop pause.
“Nobody saw him drown, Max. Nobody knows what
happened to Tommy. He wasn’t drunk. They hadn’t eaten
yet. And he was a champion swimmer.”
Then Wiley thought of the celebration. The biggest
event in Ellerton. The fiftieth-anniversary celebration of
the dam and the reservoir. Speakers, parades, all ending in
a grand celebration on Saturday night with fireworks, pic-
nics, and—
The perfect way to launch his congressional bid.
This, though, was bad news. Nasty news. A mysterious
drowning in a local lake. He didn’t want his name con-
nected with the drowning.
Dammit. Something had to be done. It had to be . . .
contained.
“Paddy, let’s hold off a bit. I’ll be right there and we’ll
see what’s what. Maybe the body’s floated to the top, some-
where off to the side. Do you have some boats coming?”
Paddy grunted affirmatively.
“Yeah, we’ll just sit tight a bit until we can look things
over.” A disturbing thought crossed his mind. “Any reporters
there?”
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m a t t h e w j . c o s t e l l o
“No. It’s a bit late for them to be listening to the police
radio. By tomorrow morning, though, we should have a
crowd of them.”
“Right. Well, by tomorrow everything might be all ex-
plained. I’ll be there in a few minutes, Paddy.”
He hung up and quickly dialed his home number.
After three rings the answering machine clicked on, and
Wiley left a message, glad that no one was waiting up for
him.
With no one waiting, there was so much less guilt.
By the time he pulled off Kenicut Drive to the small park-
ing lot near the dam wall, he saw that Paddy Rogers had
two enormous klieglike lights scanning the surface of the
dark reservoir. He stopped his car, pulling right next to the
captain’s personal patrol car (a jet-black Chrysler with a
blue bubble light spinning around). There were two boats
in the water, each with small lights swinging this way and
that. A faint fog seemed to be slowly rolling off the nearby
hills, and Wiley felt cool, with just the thin sport coat to
keep the damp chill off.
He looked around for the captain and saw him standing
near the open gate leading down to the water, talking to
two of Ellerton’s finest.
“Captain,” he called. Rogers finished his instructions
and walked, not too quickly, over to Wiley.
“Find anything yet?”
Roger
s shook his head. “No, Max, I’ve got two boats out
there, going back and forth looking for the body. And there’s
teams of cops circling the reservoir, checking the shore.” He
looked right at Wiley. “So far, Max, they’ve found nothing.”
Wiley nodded. Got to contain this. Keep our cool. Just
an unfortunate drowning. A tragedy. Nothing, though, to
get bent out of shape over. Happens at the Jersey Shore
every summer. Right, it’s just a freak accident.
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45
“It . . . I mean, the body, will pop up eventually, right,
Paddy?”
Rogers rubbed his cheek and looked to his left. One of
the klieg lights seemed to pause a moment, as if its trolling
of the surface had picked up something.
“Got something?” Rogers called out to the guy operat-
ing the light.
“No, Captain, just a funny wave. Water’s a bit choppy.”
Wiley looked at the reservoir. It looked positively sinis-
ter. He never liked it. Big, black, now with a whispery fog
starting to creep over the surface. The boats, with their
small lights, seemed alien, probing. And the water was un-
believably choppy, the wind whipping over the surface,
causing tiny whitecaps to appear.
He pulled his jacket tighter.
“Sure, the body will probably surface tomorrow,” he
repeated.
Rogers looked at him, and Max could feel the captain’s
withering glance. And he wondered, What does this red-
nosed bastard know about me?
“Bodies tend to pop up pretty quickly, Max. You see,”
he said, turning away and walking down toward the shore,
“they’re buoyant. They float. Unless something else hap-
pens. If they’re punctured, then water can get in and weigh
them down. They get soggy . . . like a piece of bread. Or
sometimes, like in a plane crash, they get snagged on some
metal. Or they just stay strapped to their chairs.” He
laughed. “Especially if the fasten seat belts sign is on.”
“Then sometimes they pop up later, all filled with gas, a
puffy human raft. I saw one once when I was a rookie in
New York.” Rogers looked right at him, apparently enjoy-
ing telling the story. “Yeah, somebody reported a body in
the East River, and we went there with these long poles
with hooks at the end for pulling it in. They reached out,
Max, and punctured it, and pulled the fucking thing in. It
popped like a balloon.”
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“Nice.”
“One of the young cops said, joking, ‘Look what I
caught.’ But nobody laughed. Not when the damp body
balloon rolled over, eyes wide open, Max, and some green
shit was lodged in its mouth—”
Wiley felt the evening’s steak au poivre begin to rumble
around, eager to begin a return journey up his gullet.
“And I had to get my ass down near the water and haul
the thing up, actually grab an arm and lift the bloated thing
onto the dock.”
Rogers paused, rubbed his lips back and forth (as if get-
ting rid of an unwanted taste or flavor, Wiley thought), and
looked out at the reservoir and his boats.
“If Tommy Fluhr had a cramp and drowned, we should
see his body soon. But—”
The captain started walking away from Wiley, along the
shore, and Wiley followed. “I don’t think that’s going to
happen here.” He followed Rogers around the reservoir’s
edge until they came to the remnants of a cozy little shore-
side picnic. A checkered tablecloth. A six-pack of Heinekens
(minus one). A crumpled bag of chips.
Tommy Fluhr’s clothes were scattered around, probably
growing damp now just sitting on the ground. A heavy-
duty lantern was stuck in the crotch of a tree, aimed down
at the scene.
“So what do we do?” Wiley knew his voice sounded
distant, hollow.
“With your permission I’m going to request a diving
team, Ed Koch’s best, complete with sonar and dredge
equipment, though what good it will do, I don’t know.”
“What do you mean . . .‘what good it will do’?”
The captain’s walkie-talkie crackled, and he picked it up.
One of the boat teams reported finishing its crisscrossing
search of the reservoir.
“Then do it again,” Rogers ordered. He looked back at
Max. “There’s not much of a muddy bottom for us to dredge,
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47
Max,” he explained. “There’s no way to do much digging for
Tommy’s body. There’s a fuckin’ town down there, under the
water, Max. A town . . . with streets, buildings, . . .”
Wiley looked out at the water, the other shore almost in-
visible now as the fog became even more dense. Rogers
put a hand on Wiley’s shoulder—not a friendly gesture,
Wiley thought. “And if that’s where his body is, the divers
will have to go down there to find it.”
Wiley looked at his watch. One a.m.
And he hoped the body popped to the surface. Before
sunrise. Before the reporters came.
Before the divers had to go down to look for it.
Already Dan was behind schedule.
Thanks to sleeping too late at the fabulous Ellerton Mo-
tor Inn (due, no doubt, to his last and totally superfluous
Jack Daniel’s double), he barely had enough time to crawl
into yesterday’s clammy clothes and rub a toothbrush across
his teeth.
Breakfast was a lost cause (with tantalizing images of
pancakes, syrup, and melting pats of butter, of course, very
clear), and he was still going to be late to meet Susan Sloan.
He didn’t need a map to get back to the reservoir. Years
of shooting photographs in dense forests and honest-to-
God jungles where a wrong turn could mean more than a
missed deadline had taught him to pay real close attention
to signs, directions, and broken twigs.
Still, when he arrived at the site engineer’s office, he
thought he might have made a mistake.
The gravel pull-off—that’s all it really was—was filled
end to end with police cars, both state and local. Braces of
dogs were barking hungrily, eager to give chase to some-
thing. And he saw boats in the reservoir, long, squat things
almost like the lobster boats that he spent a week shooting
in Stonington, Connecticut.
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Something, quite obviously, was up.
He slowed, then noticed a narrow space just wide
enough for his Land Rover. He pulled in and hopped out,
looking around for Susan.
He saw her, down near the open gate to the reservoir,
steno pad dutifully out, talking to some middle-aged cop.
He waved to her and she smiled. (Just a small smile but a
smile nonetheless.) He walked over to her, brushing his
mustache with his fingers, trying to arrange it into some
kind of orderly conf
iguration.
“By this afternoon, maybe even at the latest. We’re still
not too sure—” The police captain (or maybe general, for
all Dan knew, judging from all the decorations on his coat
pocket) stopped talking.
“Oh,” Susan said, smiling. “Captain Rogers, this is Dan
Elliot. He’s writing a magazine article about the dam and
the town of Kenicut.”
The captain looked at him, not exactly a friendly stare.
“What happened?” Dan asked.
Susan quickly filled him in on the details of Tom
Fluhr’s disappearance.
The only thought he had then was a guilty one. Was this
going to screw up his story somehow? Already he saw po-
lice barriers going up, and it probably wouldn’t be too long
before the whole areas was closed down tight.
No story. No sale. No money.
“That’s terrible.” He looked at Susan. “We were hoping
to tour the dam today, as background to my story. I even
wanted to dive in the res—”
“That’s out of the question. For now, anyway. Not until
we find the body.”
A young cop came up and said something quietly to
Rogers. “I have to go. If we find out anything more, Susan,
I’ll be sure to let you know.” He gave a small nod to Dan,
turned, and started to walk away.
“Captain . . . sorry, but do you have any objection to our
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49
going on with the tour?” Dan gave his most cooperative
grin. The future of his story lay in the captain’s hands.
“No . . . that’s okay. Just keep away from the shore . . .
for now, at any rate.” He walked away.
“Great timing,” Dan said.
Susan brushed some stray hairs off her forehead. Unlike
himself, she looked fresh and professional. “Don’t tell
me,” he said. “I look like shit.”
“You don’t look great. Did you have some trouble get-
ting back to your motel last night?”
“Sort of. Look, I know you’ve probably got to file some-
thing on this, but can you still help me with this Fred Mas-
setrino? He might prove a bit more cooperative with a real
live local reporter along.”
“No problem. There’s nothing much to report on the
story, anyway. Some divers will be coming this afternoon,
but that’s about all the news. I’m still doing background on
the celebration.”
“Divers. From where?”
“New York. A special police team. The crew that nor-
mally gets the plum East River jobs. You know, floating