Free Blunt Darts by Jeremiah Healy Page B

She whirled. “And you! Goddamn you for reminding me of them!” She slammed the inner door.
    “What the...” began Valerie.
    “Face it, Val. You blew it. You’re just not cut out for this kind of work.”
    I was back in the car and had it started by the time a frowning, frustrated Valerie tired of knocking at the Doucettes’ door and began walking down to me.
     
    Valerie had gotten over my teasing by the time we reached the parking lot of the swimming beach. We respectively entered a rustic, large cabin, “Men” on one side and “Women” on the other.
     
    Coming out of the women’s side of the locker building, Val’s legs looked a little thicker than they had in the other outfits I’d seen her wear to date. The rest of her looked triple A, however. I got a slight flush when she flickered an appraising eye over my new physique. This was the first time I’d worn a pair of trunks in quite a while, and I decided I liked sporting the results my conditioning had produced. We walked toward the water.
    The long, manmade swimming beach edged into trees and picnic tables at one end and into a parking lot at the other. The beach was nearly empty, most people being under the trees at the tables. Owning no sandals, I toughed out the blistering sand in bare feet. We finally pitched our blanket at what looked like a quiet spot about fifty feet to the left of a perfectly. tanned elderly couple sitting and reading in half-legged sand chairs.
    We talked around Mrs. Kinnington for a while before I brought her up.
    “You know, Val, I’m on the verge of leaving this case.”
    Her face was stricken. “Oh, please, John—please don’t!”
    I rearranged my legs Indian-style on the blanket. “Look, I won’t be violating any confidence by telling you that my client did not mention word one about Miss Pitts and the scene with Stephen and Blakey. That could be an important link in the chain of Stephen’s disappearance, and if Mrs. Kinnington knew about it, she should have told me.”
    She faked casualness by stretching out on her stomach, longways to the just-past-zenith sun. “Is the reason he left really that important to your finding him?”
    I leaned back. “Possibly, yes; probably not, if he’s gone voluntarily.”
    “But Mrs. Kinnington said she told you that the things he took were only things he’d know to take.”
    I closed my eyes. “Yeah, but that suggests only that he voluntarily decided to leave. It doesn’t go far in suggesting what might have happened twenty feet from his back door.”
    She came up to her knees with a start. “Do you really believe something happened to him?”
    “That’s just the problem, Val. I’m not being helped by anybody in this case, or even permitted to gather the facts I could use to reach a decision like that.” She put her hand on my right forearm and squeezed, a little too long and a little too hard. “John, you know that—”
    The moment was broken by a loud and worthy curse from the elderly man next to us. Three boyish ruisers, built like college football players, were laugh-”8 at him and his wife. He rose from his chair and ftook a book-clutching fist at a sign I could barely ad while he and his wife brushed sand off themselves.
    “The goddamned sign says no goddamned ball playing on the beach!” he yelled.
    The biggest of the three, cradling the ball professionally in the crook of his arm, replied, “Fuck you.”
    “We’ll get the cops!” yelled the old man.
    “And the lifeguard!” yelled the old woman.
    “The fuckin’ cops are off drinking and the fuckin’ lifeguard knows I’ll kick his ass if he lets his shadow fall on me.” The other kids laughed, and they continued their running and passing drills up the beach. The big boy had the right moves; the other two were barely adequate. The old man sat down sputtering.
    “Nice kid,” I said to Val.
    “Craig Mann,” she said disgustedly. “His father’s a selectman, so nobody will do anything about him.