Jaws

TWO

Patrolman Len Hendricks sat at his desk in the Amity police station, reading a detective novel called Deadly, I’m Yours. At the moment the phone rang the heroine, a girl named Whistling Dixie, was about to be raped by a motorcycle club. Hendricks let the phone ring until Miss Dixie castrated the first of her attackers with a linoleum knife she had secreted in her hair.

He picked up the phone. ‘Amity Police, Patrolman Hendricks,’ he said. ‘Can I help you?’

‘This is Jack Foote, over on Old Mill Road. I want to report a missing person. Or at least I think she’s missing.’

‘Say again, sir?’ Hendricks had served in Vietnam as a radio man, and he was fond of military terminology.

‘One of my house guests went for a swim at about one this morning,’ said Foote. ‘She hasn’t come back yet. Her date found her clothes on the beach.’

Hendricks began to scribble on a pad. ‘What was the person’s name?’

‘Christine Watkins.’

‘Age?’

‘I don’t know. Just a second. Say around twenty-five. Her date says that’s about right.’

‘Height and weight?’

‘Wait a minute.’ There was a pause. ‘We think probably about five-seven, between one twenty and one thirty.’

‘Colour of hair and eyes?’

‘Listen, Officer, why do you need all this? If the woman’s drowned, she’s probably going to be the only one you have – at least tonight, right? You don’t average more than one drowning around here each night, do you?’

‘Who said she drowned, Mr Foote? Maybe she went for a walk.’

‘Stark naked at one in the morning? Have you had any reports about a woman walking around naked?’

Hendricks relished the chance to be insufferably cool. ‘No, Mr Foote, not yet. But once this summer season starts, you never know what to expect. Last August, a bunch of faggots staged a dance out by the club – a nude dance. Colour of hair and eyes?’

‘Her hair is . . . oh, dirty blonde, I guess. Sandy. I don’t know what colour her eyes are. I’ll have to ask her date. No, he says he doesn’t know either. Let’s say hazel.’

‘Okay, Mr Foote. We’ll get on it. As soon as we find out anything, we’ll contact you.’

Hendricks hung up the phone and looked at his watch. It was 5.10. The chief wouldn’t be up for an hour, and Hendricks wasn’t anxious to wake him for something as vague as a missing-person report. For all anybody knew, the broad was off humping in the bushes with some guy she met on the beach. On the other hand, if she was washed up somewhere, Chief Brody would want the whole thing taken care of before the body was found by some nanny with a couple of young kids and it became a public nuisance.

Judgement, that’s what the chief kept telling him he needed; that’s what makes a good cop. And the cerebral challenge of police work had played a part in Hendricks’ decision to join the Amity force after he returned from Vietnam. The pay was fair: $9,000 to start, $15,000 after fifteen years, plus fringes. Police work offered security, regular hours, and the chance for some fun – not just thumping unruly kids or collaring drunks, but solving burglaries, trying to catch the occasional rapist (the summer before, a black gardener had raped seven rich white women, not one of whom would appear in court to testify against him), and – on a slightly more elevated plane – the opportunity to become a respected, contributing member of the community. And being an Amity cop was not very dangerous, certainly nothing like working for a metropolitan force. The last duty-related fatality of an Amity policeman occurred in 1957 when an officer had tried to stop a drunk speeding along the Montauk Highway and had been run off the road into a stone wall.

Hendricks was convinced that as soon as he could get sprung from this God-forsaken midnight-to-eight shift, he would start to enjoy his work. For the time being, though, it was a drag. He knew perfectly well why he had the late shift. Chief Brody liked to break in his young men slowly, letting them develop the fundamentals of police work – good sense, sound judgement, tolerance, and politeness – at a time of day when they wouldn’t be overtaxed.

The business shift was 8.00 a.m. to 4.00 p.m. and it called for experience and diplomacy. Six men worked that shift. One handled the summertime traffic at the intersection of Main and Water Streets. Two patrolled in squad cars. One manned the phones at the station house. One handled the clerical work. And the chief handled the public – the ladies who complained that they were unable to sleep because of the din coming from the Randy Bear or Saxon’s, the town’s two gin mills; the homeowners who complained that bums were littering the beaches or disturbing the peace; and the vacationing bankers and brokers and lawyers who stopped in to discuss their various plans for keeping Amity a pristine and exclusive summer colony.

Four to midnight was the trouble shift, when the young studs from the Hamptons would flock to the Randy Bear and get involved in a fight or simply get so drunk that they became a menace on the roads; when, very rarely, a couple of predators from Queens would lurk in the dark side streets and mug passersby; and when, about twice a month in the summer, enough evidence having accumulated, the police would feel obliged to stage a pot bust at one of the huge waterfront homes. There were six men on four to midnight, the six largest men on the force, all between thirty and fifty years old.

Midnight to eight was usually quiet. For nine months of the year, peace was virtually guaranteed. The biggest event of the previous winter had been an electrical storm that had set off all the alarms linking the police station to forty-eight of Amity’s biggest and most expensive homes. Normally during the summer, the midnight-to-eight shift was manned by three officers. One, however, a young fellow named Dick Angelo, was now taking his two-week leave before the season began to swing. The other was a thirty-year veteran named Henry Kimble, who had chosen the midnight-to-eight shift because it permitted him to catch up on his sleep – he held a daytime job as a bartender at Saxon’s. Hendricks tried to raise Kimble on the radio – to get him to take a walk along the beach by Old Mill Road – but he knew the attempt was hopeless. As usual, Kimble was sound asleep in a squad car parked behind the Amity Pharmacy. And so Hendricks picked up the phone and dialled Chief Brody’s home number.

Brody was asleep, in that fitful state before waking when dreams rapidly change and there are moments of bleary semiconsciousness. The first ring of the phone was assimilated into his dream – a vision that he was back in high school groping a girl on a stairwell. The second ring snapped the vision. He rolled over and picked up the receiver.

‘Yeah?’

‘Chief, this is Hendricks. I hate to bother you this early, but – ’

‘What time is it?’

‘Five-twenty.’

‘Leonard, this better be good.’

‘I think we’ve got a floater on our hands, Chief.’

‘A floater? What in Christ’s name is a floater?’

It was a word Hendricks had picked up from his night reading. ‘A drowning,’ he said, embarrassed. He told Brody about the phone call from Foote. ‘I didn’t know if you’d want to check it out before people start swimming. I mean, it looks like it’s going to be a nice day.’

Brody heaved an exaggerated sigh. ‘Where’s Kimble?’ he said and then added quickly, ‘Oh, never mind. It was a stupid question. One of these days I’m going to fix that radio of his so he can’t turn it off.’

Hendricks waited a moment, then said, ‘Like I said, Chief, I hate to bother . . .’

‘Yeah, I know, Leonard. You were right to call. As long as I’m awake, I might as well get up. I’ll shave and shower and grab some coffee, and on my way in I’ll take a look along the beach in front of Old Mill and Scotch, just to make sure your “floater” isn’t cluttering up somebody’s beach. Then when the day boys come on, I’ll go out and talk to Foote and the girl’s date. I’ll see you later.’

Brody hung up the phone and stretched. He looked at his wife, lying next to him in the double bed. She had stirred when the phone rang, but as soon as she determined that there was no emergency, she lapsed back into sleep.

Ellen Brody was thirty-six, five years younger than her husband, and the fact that she looked barely thirty was a source of both pride and annoyance to Brody: pride because, since she looked handsome and young and was married to him, she made him seem a man of excellent taste and substantial attraction; annoyance because she had been able to keep her good looks despite the strains of bearing three children, whereas Brody – though hardly fat at six-foot-one and two hundred pounds – was beginning to be concerned about his blood pressure and his thickening middle. Sometimes during the summer, Brody would catch himself gazing with idle lust at one of the young, long-legged girls who pranced around town – their untethered breasts bouncing beneath the thinnest of cotton jerseys. But he never enjoyed the sensation, for it always made him wonder whether Ellen felt the same stirring when she looked at the tanned, slim young men who so perfectly complemented the long-legged girls. And as soon as that thought occurred to him, he felt still worse, for he recognized it as a sign that he was on the unfortunate side of forty and had already lived more than half his life.

Summers were bad times for Ellen Brody, for in summer she was tortured by thoughts she didn’t want to think – thoughts of chances missed and lives that could have been. She saw people she had grown up with: prep school classmates now married to bankers and brokers, summering in Amity and wintering in New York, graceful women who stroked tennis balls and enlivened conversations with equal ease, women who (Ellen was convinced) joked among themselves about Ellen Shepherd marrying that policeman because he got her pregnant in the back seat of his 1948 Ford, which had not been the case.

Ellen was twenty-one when she met Brody. She had just finished her junior year at Wellesley and was spending the summer in Amity with her parents – as she had done for the previous eleven summers, ever since her father’s advertising agency transferred him from Los Angeles to New York. Although, unlike several of her friends, Ellen Shepherd was hardly obsessed by marriage, she assumed that within a year or two after finishing college she would wed someone from approximately her own social and financial station. The thought neither distressed nor delighted her. She enjoyed the modest wealth her father had earned, and she knew her mother did too. But she was not eager to live a life that was a repetition of her parents’. She was familiar with the petty social problems, and they bored her. She considered herself a simple girl, proud of the fact that in the yearbook for the class of 1953 at Miss Porter’s School she was voted Most Sincere.

Her first contact with Brody was professional. She was arrested – or, rather, her date was. It was late at night, and she was being driven home by an extremely drunk young man intent on driving very fast down very narrow streets. The car was intercepted and stopped by a policeman who impressed Ellen with his youth, his looks, and his civility. After issuing a summons, he confiscated the keys to Ellen’s date’s car and drove them both to their respective homes. The next morning, Ellen was shopping when she found herself next to the police station. As a lark, she walked in and asked the name of the young officer who had been working at about midnight the night before. Then she went home and wrote Brody a thank-you note for being so nice, and she also wrote a note to the chief of police commending young Martin Brody. Brody telephoned to thank her for her thank-you note.

When he asked her out to dinner and the movies on his night off, she accepted out of curiosity. She had scarcely ever talked to a policeman, let alone gone out with one. Brody was nervous, but Ellen seemed so genuinely interested in him and his work that he eventually calmed down enough to have a good time. Ellen found him delightful: strong, simple, kind – sincere. He had been a policeman for six years. He said his ambition was to be chief of the Amity force, to have sons to take duck-shooting in the fall, to save enough money to take a real vacation every second or third year.

They were married that November. Ellen’s parents had wanted her to finish college, and Brody had been willing to wait until the following summer, but Ellen couldn’t imagine that one more year of college could make any difference in the life she had chosen to lead.

There were some awkward moments during the first few years. Ellen’s friends would ask them to dinner or lunch or for a swim, and they would go, but Brody would feel ill at ease and patronized. When they got together with Brody’s friends, Ellen’s past seemed to stifle fun. People behaved as if they were fearful of committing a faux pas. Gradually, as friendships developed, the awkwardness disappeared. But they never saw any of Ellen’s old friends any more. Although the shedding of the ‘summer people’ stigma earned her the affection of the year-round residents of Amity it cost her much that was pleasant and familiar from the first twenty-one years of her life. It was as if she had moved to another country.

Until about four years ago, the estrangement hadn’t bothered her. She was too busy, and too happy, raising children to let her mind linger on alternatives long past. But when her last child started school, she found herself adrift, and she began to dwell on memories of how her mother had lived her life once her children had begun to detach from her: shopping excursions (fun because there was enough money to buy all but the most outrageously expensive items), long lunches with friends, tennis, cocktail parties, weekend trips. What had once seemed shallow and tedious now loomed in memory like paradise.

At first she tried to re-establish bonds with friends she hadn’t seen in ten years, but all commonality of interest and experience had long since vanished. Ellen talked gaily about the community, about local politics, about her job as a volunteer at the Southampton Hospital – all subjects about which her old friends, many of whom had been coming to Amity every summer for more than thirty years, knew little and cared less. They talked about New York politics, about art galleries and painters and writers they knew. Most conversations ended with feeble reminiscences and speculations about where old friends were now. Always there were pledges about calling each other and getting together again.

Once in a while she would try to make new friends among the summer people she hadn’t known, but the associations were forced and brief. They might have endured if Ellen had been less self-conscious about her house, about her husband’s job and how poorly it paid. She made sure that everyone she met knew she had started her Amity life on an entirely different plane. She was aware of what she was doing, and she hated herself for it, because in fact she loved her husband deeply, adored her children, and – for most of the year – was quite content with her lot . . .

By now, she had largely given up active forays into the summer community, but the resentments and the longings lingered. She was unhappy, and she took out most of her unhappiness on her husband, a fact that both of them understood but only he could tolerate. She wished she could go into suspended animation for that quarter of every year.

Brody rolled over towards Ellen, raising himself up on one elbow and resting his head on his hand. With his other hand he flicked away a strand of hair that was tickling Ellen’s nose and making it twitch. He still had an erection from the remnants of his last dream, and he debated rousing her for a quick bit of sex. He knew she was a slow waker and her early morning moods were more cantankerous than romantic. Still, it would be fun. There had not been much sex in the Brody household recently. There seldom was, when Ellen was in her summer moods.

Just then. Ellen’s mouth fell open and she began to snore. Brody felt himself turn off as quickly as if someone had poured ice water on his loins. He got up and went into the bathroom.

It was nearly 6.30 when Brody turned on to Old Mill Road. The sun was well up. It had lost its daybreak red and was turning from orange to bright yellow. The sky was cloudless.

Theoretically, there was a statutory right-of-way between each house, to permit public access to the beach, which could be privately owned only to the mean-high-water mark. But the rights-of-way between most houses were filled with garages or privet hedges. From the road there was no view of the beach. All Brody could see was the tops of the dunes. So every hundred yards or so he had to stop the squad car and walk up a driveway to reach a point from which he could survey the beach.

There was no sign of a body. All he saw on the broad, white expanse was a few pieces of driftwood, a can or two, and a yard-wide belt of seaweed and kelp pushed ashore by the southerly breeze. There was practically no surf, so if a body was floating on the surface it would have been visible. If there is a floater out there, Brody thought, it’s floating beneath the surface and I’ll never see it till it washes up.

By seven o’clock Brody had covered the whole beach along Old Mill and Scotch Roads. The only thing he had seen that struck him as even remotely odd was a paper plate on which sat three scalloped orange rinds – a sign that the summer’s beach picnics were going to be more elegant than ever.

He drove back along Scotch Road, turned north towards town on Bayberry Lane, and arrived at the station house at 7.10.

Hendricks was finishing up his paperwork when Brody walked in, and he looked disappointed that Brody wasn’t dragging a corpse behind him. ‘No luck, Chief?’ he said.

‘That depends on what you mean by luck, Leonard. If you mean did I find a body and if I didn’t isn’t it too bad, the answer to both questions is no. Is Kimble in yet?’

‘No.’

‘Well, I hope he isn’t asleep. That’d look just dandy having him snoring away in a cop car when people start to do their shopping.’

‘He’ll be here by eight,’ said Hendricks. ‘He always is.’

Brody poured himself a cup of coffee, walked into his office and began to flip through the morning papers – the early edition of the New York Daily News and the local paper, the Amity Leader which came out weekly in the winter and daily in the summer.

Kimble arrived a little before eight, looking, aptly enough, as if he had been sleeping in his uniform, and he had a cup of coffee with Hendricks while they waited for the day shift to appear. Hendricks’ replacement came in at eight sharp, and Hendricks was putting on his leather flight jacket and getting ready to leave when Brody came out of his office.

‘I’m going out to see Foote, Leonard,’ Brody said. ‘You want to come along? You don’t have to, but I thought you might want to follow up on your . . . floater.’ Brody smiled.

‘Sure, I guess so,’ said Hendricks. ‘I got nothing else going today, so I can sleep all afternoon.’

They drove out in Brody’s car. As they pulled into Foote’s driveway, Hendricks said, ‘What do you bet they’re all asleep? I remember last summer a woman called at one in the morning and asked if I could come out as early as possible the next morning because she thought some of her jewellery was missing. I offered to go right then, but she said no, she was going to bed. Anyway, I showed up at ten o’clock the next morning and she threw me out. “I didn’t mean this early,” she says.’

‘We’ll see,’ said Brody. ‘If they’re really worried about this dame, they’ll be awake.’

The door opened almost before Brody had finished knocking. ‘We’ve been waiting to hear from you,’ said a young man. ‘I’m Tom Cassidy. Did you find her?’

‘I’m Chief Brody. This is Officer Hendricks. No, Mr Cassidy, we didn’t find her. Can we come in?’

‘Oh sure, sure. I’m sorry. Go on in the living-room. I’ll get the Footes.’

It took less than five minutes for Brody to learn everything he felt he needed to know. Then, as much to seem thorough as from any hope of learning anything useful, he asked to see the missing woman’s clothes. He was shown into the bedroom, and he looked through the clothing on the bed.

‘She didn’t have a bathing suit with her?’

‘No,’ said Cassidy. ‘It’s in the top drawer over there. I looked.’

Brody paused for a moment, taking care with his words, then said, ‘Mr Cassidy, I don’t mean to sound flip or anything, but has this Miss Watkins got a habit of doing strange things? I mean, like taking off in the middle of the night . . . or walking around naked?’

‘Not that I know of,’ said Cassidy. ‘But I really don’t know her too well.’

‘I see,’ said Brody. ‘Then I guess we’d better go down to the beach again. You don’t have to come. Hendricks and I can handle it.’

‘I’d like to come, if you don’t mind.’

‘I don’t mind. I just thought you might not want to.’

The three men walked down to the beach. Cassidy showed the policemen where he had fallen asleep – the indentation his body had made in the sand had not been disturbed – and he pointed out where he had found the woman’s clothes.

Brody looked up and down the beach. For as far as he could see, more than a mile in both directions, the beach was empty. Clumps of seaweed were the only dark spots on the white sand. ‘Let’s take a walk,’ he said. ‘Leonard, you go east as far as the point. Mr Cassidy, let’s you and I go west. You got your whistle, Leonard? Just in case.’

‘I’ve got it,’ said Hendricks. ‘You care if I take my shoes off? It’s easier walking on the hard sand, I don’t want to get them wet.’

‘I don’t care,’ said Brody. ‘Technically you’re off duty. You can take your pants off if you want. Of course, then I’ll arrest you for indecent exposure.’

Hendricks started eastward. The wet sand felt crisp and cool on his feet. He walked with his head down and his hands in his pockets, looking at the tiny shells and tangles of seaweed. A few bugs – they looked like little black beetles – skittered out of his path, and when the wavewash receded, he saw minute bubbles pop above the holes made by sand-worms. He enjoyed the walk. It was a funny thing, he thought, that when you live all your life in a place, you almost never do the things that tourists go there to do – like walk on the beach or go swimming in the ocean. He couldn’t remember the last time he went swimming. He wasn’t even sure he still owned a bathing suit. It was like something he had heard about New York – that half the people who live in the city never go to the top of the Empire State Building or visit the Statue of Liberty.

Every now and then, Hendricks looked up to see how much closer he was to the point. Once he turned back to see if Brody and Cassidy had found anything. He guessed that they were nearly half a mile away.

As he turned back and started walking again, Hendricks saw something ahead of him, a clump of weed and kelp that seemed unusually large. He was about thirty yards away from the clump when he began to think the weed might be clinging to something.

When he reached the clump, Hendricks bent down to pull some of the weed away. Suddenly he stopped. For a few seconds he stared, frozen rigid. He fumbled in his pants pocket for his whistle, put it to his lips, and tried to 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-grey, 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 thing? What do you mean it’s her?’

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 grey 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.