Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Vol. 38, No. 13, Mid-December 1993

He almost missed the tiny office as he walked by with his head down, but the caustic smell of new paint made him follow his nose back.

No light inside.

Door shut and locked; he jiggled it to make sure. Hours listed said ten A M. to five P.M. It was only a few minutes past five. Rube started to walk off, then thought better of it. He stepped back to the door and took out his notepad and pen, scribbled on it, and slipped the note beneath the door. No sense irritating the authorities any more than he had to. Sheriff Boggert looked like a man who was anxious to jail someone — like a man hard put by the demands of a one-man job. Rube didn’t want to be his victim. Being new to a small town was a lot like a kid’s first day at school. The bullies and the big guys had a tendency to pick on you.

Go home, he told himself. Go back to your little place and turn on the TV and shut the front door and let it all pass.

And he started to, had turned on the sidewalk and was heading back for the east side of town, when the horn beeped and made him turn his head. Boggert’s big dog face stared at him from his big black and blue sheriff’s Jeep.

“You’re blocking traffic like that,” Rube said, still walking as the Jeep followed him down Main Street.

“Don’t matter,” Boggert called through the window. “They can go around.”

They moved on like that, a pair of old dogs sizing each other up. And in the city where Rube grew up, the people would have gone around. Here, though, in this tiny beach town, people just stayed behind the sheriff’s Jeep, forming a line of cars back to the last street.

“I left you a note,” Rube called, still walking.

“I ain’t got time to go get it.” The Jeep lurched ahead and pulled over, half blocking the sidewalk. The door popped open. “Get in, Rubekowski.”

Rube stared at the open door as though it were the open mouth of a shark.

But Rube got in. He pulled the big door shut after him, but he left his seatbelt undone in protest.

The sheriff turned a corner, still cruising, his eyes moving left and right over the shops and people. “What the note say?”

“I know how she died,” Rube said.

Boggert leaned his head back and chuckled, the sound as deep and vibrant as breakers against the sand.

“Something put a big damned hole in her, Rubekowski. That’s how she died.”

Rube shook his head in irritation. “Somebody harpooned her.”

Boggert looked angry. He glared at Rube like he might at a precocious child. “The hell you say.”

Rube stayed with the big sheriff’s eyes: they locked like lovers in an ugly embrace.

“It’s not a wound I’d forget,” Rube said. “I saw it once before.”

“You saw someone harpooned before?”

Rube hesitated. “Not exactly a person, no, but—”

“Yeah, sure,” Boggert said. He shook his big dog head. “You know, Rubekowski, we got coroner’s reports for this, and that’s what we’re waiting for.”

Rube looked away, through the big windshield. The sun was lower now, dark plucking at the buildings, and the wind had picked up. A Dixie cup splattered against the glass and Rube twitched an inch in his seat.

“Won’t the trail get cold, sheriff?”

Boggert’s eyes stabbed at Rube from across the seat. “We don’t even know, to begin with, how long she was in the water. Coulda been a couple of days. The trail is already cold.” The sheriff let it go with a tiny shake of his head, as though castigating himself for talking to this man at all.

“Besides, what do you care, Rubekowski? What’s your interest in all this?”

Rube continued to stare through the windshield. It was a Friday evening, and the tourists were starting to pack the sidewalks again. As though L.A. and San Francisco had emptied their streets, had set the wanderers loose to rape and pillage... the way Rube felt Mercer Chemical had raped and pillaged, with methods too insidious to bring to trial. Subtle hurts upon the public. Subtle acts against nature. And what was his interest in the case? What answer could he give this bulldog of a man who worked for the public good?

“It’s the indecency of it.” Rube moved his hands in the air as though he could draw a picture the sheriff could understand. “The way someone just punctured her body with a harpoon, as if she were a fish — something less than human.”

For the first time, Boggert smiled. It wasn’t a smile that Rube would have liked over a friendly lunch, was more of a contemptuous sneer. “You think death is pretty, all wrapped in neat motives and easy death? Some sigh where the actress turns her head left and quietly passes away?” The big man snorted and burst into a quick but nasty laugh of derision.

Maybe Rube did. Maybe that’s what he expected. Something from a TV tube or big screen where the blood was makeup and the actress opened her eyes and walked away. But this lady wasn’t walking, had lain bloated and violated, and no one even knew her name. Rube remembered her tattered green dress, a sheath that was torn too badly even to serve as a shroud.

“Do you know yet... who she is?”

Boggert snapped his gaze back to Rube’s. “Was, you mean?”