Great Point Clear

By Robert Willis

A fast-paced work of hardboiled fiction, Great Point Clear tells the troubled tale of Tyler Ganzy.

As a young field hand in Sweet Bend, Alabama, Tyler fell in love with Baltimore beauty Iry Tuttle during the summer of 1942. Everything was picture perfect-until the couple witnessed a mu

• Language: English
• Publisher: WordHouse Book Publishing
• Release date: Jul 8, 2022
• ISBN: 9781685471101

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Great Point Clear

Copyright © 2022 Robert Willis

This book is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the products of the authors imagination. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or historical events, are purely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without prior written permission from the publisher or author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

ISBN

Paperback 978-1-68547-108-8

Hardcover 978-1-68547-109-5

eBook 978-1-68547-110-1

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022911049

Printed in the United States of America

101 Foundry Dr,

West Lafayette, IN, 47906, USA

www.wordhousebp.com

[phone]

ALSO BY ROBERT WILLIS

Crossing Clayborn

Barlow and Other Stories

This book is dedicated to my wife,

Carole, who went the distance, who

stuck it out through rain and shine.

The characters and events in this book are

fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons,

living or dead, is, unfortunately, coincidental.

CHAPTER ONE

Being the only surviving eyewitness to an unsolved murder long since past has its challenges. I knew I couldn't forget but I thought the murderer might, since he’d grown rich and powerful in the meantime while I’d stayed away — lying low, out of sight, out of town, out of state, and, thanks to my job, sometimes out of country.

Evidently my logic was flawed. When the rat found out I worked for the Associated Press in New York City, he sent one of his spooks all the way from Sweet Bend, Alabama, my home town, to prove a point, to booger up my life with an invisible presence that left ominous messages around the places I frequented. Bobo's Restaurant on Pell Street, to mention one off-and-on spot, the name bearing a touch of Southern significance which the owner, of course, didn't understand but the spook obviously did. Folks around Sweet Bend called the county sheriff Bobo. Bobo saved us from certain death in 1942, me and Iry Tuttle. Iry was the love of my life back then. In a way she still is. Sometimes it seems ancient, seventeen years ago, then other times like yesterday. Unfortunately, saving us turned out to be a big mistake for Bobo. Parker Webb killed him. This spook up here in New York City now had to know about Sheriff Wallace Bobo Pollard. Most everybody in Balday County did.

The spook also made sure to leave conspicuous signs of breaking and entering scattered all over the office, even my apartment. Who else but a hick with a grudge would impale a dead possum on a note stand? The Big Apple does have a way of magnifying things, but these Southern fellows were something else. My boss, a veteran New Yorker with above-average bravado for his size, was terrified. He wanted me to call in the police. I refused. There were reasons to make me choose a more private strategy. My folks still lived down there, for one, in easy rifle distance from the murderer's country estate. For two, family and friends of Bobo had recently persuaded the current sheriff to request state support for another investigation of the case. I was worried about one, curious about two.

My mind daily sifted through the options, including one offered by Murray Gholson, my editor. He wanted to send me on an out-of-town assignment. Every time he passed my desk, he'd snap his milk-white, delicate fingers, then stop and gaze at me over the top of his cutaway spectacles with an air of inspiration.

A few weeks in Nassau — or San Francisco even — will obliterate the image of that opossum, he said, effecting a pensive, compassionate face on behalf of the marsupial.

Murray's suggestion sounded okay and opened up another option, one which a prudent guy hesitates to share with a boss who would either object, meddle or demand daily reports. Actually, I didn't have much taste for it myself. Should I go back home and confront my nemesis face to face? Unfortunately, no one could prove a thing, not even me — an eyewitness! Just his word against mine, and he held considerably more status in the community than an ex-field hand who was holed up in New York, arguably the racket capital of the new world.

Then, out of the blue, a rash of sightings of mysterious spacecraft along the Gulf from Mobile to New Orleans set the stage, played to rising Sputnik hysteria in Washington, attracted the attention of the press and offered me the push needed to call a murderer's bluff in spite of the odds, perhaps even write a few features along the way for the Sunday supplements. Another coincidence, only I didn't have to volunteer. My boss was a master of the art of killing two birds with one stone.

Oh, Tyler, do me a favor, he said. My cottage in Mobile — only a minute's drive from Bellingrath Gardens — use it. I'll call my caretaker and tell him you're coming. Just don't go near Sweet Bend. Deal?

That's my home, Murray. My folks live there for Christ's sake!

Being Jewish, he merely smirked when I mentioned the Savior in my rebuttal. Murray Gholson had the perfect face and quick mind to command respect, if not the body. He was not much taller than the average woman, which caused him to stretch himself with overly-erect postures to gain that all-important sense of height. The texture of his skin was fine, unblemished, and most too pallid for anyone other than an office junkie. His small beady eyes equally matched the darkness, if not the well-mannered set, of a substantial head of hair.

Wait and let the police do their work first. Okay? Judging from what little you've told me, Tyler, this mess should’ve been settled long ago.

Sure, Murray, I answered in a sulky, reluctant tone, then smiled impishly through the crowded streets along my route to the Lexington Avenue subway, knowing I was actually going home and getting paid for it, too. Meeting Murray's deadlines wasn't all that tough, either. I had a great boss.

My first mystery craft story came out on August 23, 1959, less than two years after Sputnik made its chilling debut in our skies. The Russians were up there all right, giving my mission a definite military flavor. Those so-called close encounters with extraterrestrial beings, though, zipping around the earth in phantom space ships hadn't yet caught on with my imagination. Maybe they were real, maybe not. All the arguments sounded rather far-fetched and didn't excite me much past a soft rub across my chin. But an assignment near home for a change was more than welcome, more than a junket. It was an omen. Why should Webb’s threats keep me away forever? That scalawag wasn't even born in Sweet Bend. I was — and grew up there as well. I had as much right to walk those streets as the biggest daddy in town, not to mention a cold-blooded killer.

Funny how the notion of exile gets to you every now and then and makes you want to play some brain games with a baseball bat. Not so funny, though, how an old thread kept coming loose in my private story, mine and my summer sweetheart's from Baltimore. Iry Tuttle deserved better — and much better from me, not seventeen years of silence, of flight, of lying low as a mudskipper in Bangladesh. Danger was not even relevant any more. The most they could do was kill me. Big deal. Yeah. Time to wrap it up once and for all, to fish or cut bait, as the good ol’ boys from back home are fond of saying.

Murray Gholson's cottage in Mobile was one of those water-front vacation retreats that well-heeled Yankees use to escape from cold weather, the Northern grind. It was near Bellingrath Gardens, a famous tourist attraction for those who love flowers. Mama Y always talked about Bellingrath and built it up in my mind as some kind of azalea heaven. Murray suggested that it would be safe on his side of the bay and insisted that I stay in his cottage. As further inducement, he gave me the key to his private bar. One would expect to find a bunch of people around, knowing Murray, but the place was battened down, hurricane ready, and from all appearances hadn't been used for several months. What a spot to shack up for a spell and write the great American UFO piece! Prime view, too, and plenty of Southern comfort all about.

Across Mobile Bay the village of Clarity Cove, or rather its water tank, glistened as bright as ever in the afternoon sun. Beneath it lay the squat but expanded presence of the Grand Bay Hotel, the centerpiece of the community. Recently Governor Wallace had held a press conference there. It was pleasing to learn how the old landmark's fortunes had steadily grown since we — my winter love and I — used to stroll by and mumble through the fence about all the splendor. Too bad she had to wind up in Baltimore instead of over there. Sometimes I see myself in a dream standing out on that fragile bit of land we called Great Point Clear (but nobody else did), yelling her name, yelling and waiting, praying she would come swimming — not floating — out of the darkness of the bay, buck naked, coaxing me to jump in with her and me yelling, Iry Tuttle, put on yo' dress and let's go way f’om here fo’e they comes back wid some dawgs!

First she’d correct my speech then we'd laugh like Halloween pranksters, feeling so good and brave every time we'd pull something crazy like that — crazy enough to get us thrown in jail for trespassing on private property. Or worse, as we found out later.

Speaking of something, there was something about the Grand Bay Hotel the stockholders never knew. We adopted it for our secret home during the Great Depression and, later, the war. How could we trespass then? Iry and I fancied ourselves the rightful owners. We engaged shamefully in make-believe. It belonged to us and we just let the government — a patriotic gesture — use it as a clandestine haven for generals and admirals and agents of the allied forces who came and went in the darkness of our imagination, often by submarine. On fair moonlit nights we supposed we sighted a few of them off Great Point Clear. It was fun to pretend we did anyway, even knowing the bay might not be deep enough for big submarines. We pointed toward channel buoys and ships in the evenings as we passed the hotel and made up elaborate stories of intrigue before we reached our real homes over on Sunfish River a few miles east.

We were just kids then. It started back in the roaring twenties, as they say, and lasted more than a decade before I joined the Army. Our means were limited, but our creative visions soared above most adult levels and handily supplied whatever tools and excuses our youthful adventures required.

Doing a spacecraft story in this day and age already had its precursors in mystery. The assignment, as I sat and reflected on the porch of my boss's cottage and stared across the bay, seemed perfectly sensible all of a sudden. Ol' Murray was right. Who but Tyler Ganzy, after all, was better qualified to investigate, to locate the mystery ships if there were any? Maybe the so-called official job, the one that he cooked up to get me out of New York, wouldn't be so lackluster as his reluctant journalist first thought. The main job, the one Murray didn't figure on and therefore didn't include in my itinerary, offered plenty of thrills if things got too dull, plenty of excitement, plenty of zoom — the cool zoom of any human high reached with a bottle of moonshine in one hand and a stick of dynamite in the other.

But there was still another side, a darker side filled with hangover and a seventeen-year-old nightmare. Up in New York — after the war, after college, when easier circumstances allowed me time to think of the past — a sense of wonder took hold of my mind, a gnawing curiosity, not just hurt. Then the wonder increased, day by day, until every time I drove past a courthouse, the lie, the blunder, the don't-give-a-damn attitude — whatever it was — made me shout over the steering wheel, Natural causes my ass!

For some reason the murderer seemed to want me alive, not dead, at least not until he could personally get his big paws around my neck and find out if I was more dangerous dead than alive. Some moniker, too — Parker Webb. It sounded clean, friendly, innocent, upscale. No one would ever suspect that this pillar of society had sent one of his thugs to chase me around New York, gangster style. Gory intentions, of course, but he also meant to keep me off balance — on the run, afraid to talk to the law, afraid to show my face back home, even though scarcely anybody would recognize me on the street now, including him. I was just a bumpkin kid then, never more in his eyes than a dim figure in the night. At the outside, Webb knew my name but not my face. Maybe his spook had connected the two, had taken some pictures on the sly for later use.

But it was easier to see why they had become so vigorous in their chase after all these years. The scare in New York aroused my old suspicions. Had I become the fugitive? Did he plan to deliver me to the State of Alabama, me, Tyler Ganzy — the only witness still alive — for the murder he committed? Was it paranoia on my part or had something fallen out of plumb in Sweet Bend now that the victim's family wanted the State of Alabama to reopen the case?

CHAPTER TWO

Early the next morning I phoned the caretaker as instructed. A gent appeared within the hour whose looks and manners squarely matched my expectations — inquisitive, suspicious, middle-age, minimum wage.

Who is you? he grunted, surprised to find me inside the cottage when he opened the door.

Tyler Ganzy, the fellow Mr. Gholson phoned you about. I stayed here last night. Your boss wants you to get the boat ready, open up the rest of the place, show me all the cottage secrets — you know. I'll be here a week. Maybe longer.

The caretaker's eyes rolled lazily as he scanned the interior, settling on me for a brief time before saying, Sho.

His reticence and wary attitude put me on the defensive, forcing a stream of small talk. He clearly wasn’t expecting the likes of me.

So you're Randolph? Mr. Gholson says you're top dog with a fishin' pole....

His body stiffened. He stood silent, erect, stony-faced, and let me run on for a bit. His aloofness spurred me deeper into embarrassing chatter until, finally, my own face froze.

After a lengthy silence, Folks calls me Redgum, he mumbled. And that was all for hours.

Yes, my presence at the cottage added a familiar layer of puzzlement. The wily, grim-visaged caretaker went about the yard all morning, eyeing me on the sly but never asking any of the questions that must’ve sloshed around behind the heavy beads of sweat puddled on his forehead.

I discreetly left him to his wonders. Later, well into the afternoon, while sitting outside in a lawn chair examining a new map of the area, I heard the rake behind me draw ever closer. Suddenly Redgum’s voice sounded.

Tha's the Grand Bay Hotel, he said with a strong first syllable accent. He’d noticed my studied look in that direction and evidently decided it was okay to talk.

Yes, I answered. Spent the night there once. It's a jim-dandy place.

He stared at me for a longer time as fresh puzzlement streamed back into his face. The guv’nuh stayed ovuh there las’ week, Redgum uttered behind a tentative smile.

Quite a convention spot now, I hear.

My remark brought another layer of glumness to his already-glum face.

Yeh. Tha's sho the truf, he groaned, wiping his big sweaty brow back and forth, as if he'd found a hole in his head that needed some caulk. This side's wussuh. Can't help but wish some a the traffic ‘ud go way. Bellingrath keeps too many 'zaleas.

Is the boat down there? I pointed to a shed over the water.

It still on them davits.

Will it be ready tomorrow?

The caretaker nodded and shifted his hat backward. Sweat beads clung to his brow like raindrops on a waxed car hood. He bent into the rake for a few strokes before saying, and with an economy cooler than he looked, Fish uh play?

I thought. Maybe both. How’re the specks biting?

No good. Bettuh aftuh cold weather sets in. They still comes through Pelican Bay, though. And a heap a flounder.

Well, maybe just play. How far across to the Sweet Bend pier?

Oh, half hour lessen the bay be rough. Redgum mumbled to himself briefly then went on, elevating his pitch, You got friends ovuh there?

I do, yes. I was born near Great Point Clear.

Yeh? Well suh. Somebody drove by here las’ Sad’day, lookin' round. He axed ‘bout a mane look sump’m lak you. Showed me a pitcha.

Oh? Local guy?

Uh-uh. He didn’t talk lak folks talks round here.

You get his name?

He never sayed one. Fast talker though. Claimed he knowed you f’om way back.

What did you tell him?

Nothin'. Didn't have nothin' to tell ‘im. Ain't heard a peep ‘bout a soul bein' here ‘til Mr. Gholson called me yestiddy. My telefoam's been out.

Look, Redgum, do me a favor and keep my visit just between the two of us. I want to surprise a few people.

Yeh? Tha's whut this white mane sayed too.

I already felt surprised — and leery. Sounded like the New York spook had gotten ahead of me. Then again, Mama Y might’ve said something to Captain Lige, my godfather and idol who worked at the Grand Bay Hotel. He was a great surpriser. The old man reminded me of Iry Tuttle almost as much as Tooney Boyd reminded me of her. Not in looks, of course, just style.

If he drops by again, I said to Redgum, walking down toward the boat shed, try to get his name.

Sho.

A swell of excitement rushed through me as thoughts about old times began to take hold. How impossible not to want Iry Tuttle here to help. Together we possessed all the experience required to make a great press team. I needed Iry to help me deal with the other mystery, too. What happened to her? Why did she go to Great Point Clear that night by herself? Then there was still another mystery, the one that got us both in trouble. How could this murder go unsolved for so long? She went with me on another ill-fated night seventeen years ago. She was standing beside me when Parker Webb pulled the trigger. We were lucky to escape with our lives. So was Parker Webb. Later, stories began to spread about two coloreds heisting stuff out of hotel rooms and getting away in a stolen boat right after the murder took place. Iry and I kept quiet. Nobody would have believed us anyway. Nobody wanted to believe anything else; it was too convenient. The real killer stood tall in Balday County. Three of his friends let it be known that he was in New Orleans with them at the time, joining up to fight the Japs. The police never even questioned Parker Webb. No reason to. His word was bond.

Some good things happened in 1942 in spite of Parker Webb. That was the year she put me on the bus for Camp Shelby. It turned out that volunteering may have saved my life. The killer wanted desperately to silence the witnesses, only he didn't really know who we were. At least I thought so until he tracked Iry down. I guess he couldn’t get over how pretty she was, how much he wanted his big arms around her, which must’ve made finding her easy. Anyway, Iry agreed to go on back to Baltimore and wait for me to come for her after the war. In the meantime, what better place for a scared man running from a murdering slacker to hide than in the United States Army, especially with a big world calamity going on? It gave me the perfect reason to exit Sweet Bend in a hurry.

In 1942 Iry was never prettier, either, which happened to be the hardest part about leaving. Nineteen is a lovely year in a woman's life. How perfect in mind and body she was then, a real lady just brimming with noble ideals, brainy talk. She always looked like a beauty queen, too, even when she was a little girl, but the sight of her that year topped them all. And tough — God! — tough as whitleather, yet soft as a ripe blueberry when she wanted to be soft.

After I slipped off to Mobile and joined the Army, she added tears to her list of charms and touched me deeper than ever. We were both sentimental nuts. She seemed bent on making up for every bitterness out of our youth in one last week, as though she sensed tragedy behind the first glimpse of my uniform. Until then it never occurred to me that I might be killed in the war. We were too young to think about it, too much in love, too bounded in our minds by the vast and elegant property we’d already convinced ourselves we owned — the Grand Bay Hotel at Great Point Clear. Her impassioned voice still rings in my ears at times, full of its honey-smooth female timbre, rich with a resonance more akin to music than talk. She'd say things like, One day, Tyler, my love. One day, after the war, the government will turn it back over to us and we'll make our home here...and live here forever!

In the meantime, we’d sigh over our sacrifice as we strolled by on our way to our real homes over on Sunfish River.

Near the edge of Great Point Clear, within sight of the hotel, a little spot set back in the woods took special hold on our fancy. We'd hide out there and keep an eye on things. Nobody ever seemed to notice; we seldom had visitors. Late at night we'd strut out to the tip of the point after most of the hotel workers had left and the guests were asleep. Often we cavorted up and down the sandy beaches and pretended the whole bay shore belonged to us.

Our properties grew as we gazed about. Our dreams seemed sufficient. There were not so many folks in those days. It hardly mattered what titles or deeds we held. Besides, Iry's lush, fecund soul kept me happy enough. I never had time or inclination or need to expand my wishes past seeing her every summer and expanding in love together. Everything else stood out almighty puny against that reality, even the Grand Bay Hotel and all its sparks of magic forever teasing us into innocent bits of coveting, which we tolerated in ourselves as we tolerated most of the world's bounties that tickled our hopes from a distance. With each other in hand, we usually had greater needs than wants.

But the fickle finger of fate, as my G.I. brothers used to say, screwed us over, Iry and me. Hard luck stayed on a roll for too great a while. Times got dangerous — the war, that killer, the fire, and on and on. We had to run, and run in separate directions unfortunately. Which twist, which turn made the difference? I often wondered about that. A man could go crazy, though, trying to squeeze all the what if scenarios out of it. Wishes and regrets didn't help much either. One thing still continues to trouble my mind: the natural causes story they put in the newspaper about her never made sense. Never made sense to me anyway, not a word, even if everybody else did buy it. Natural causes? Baloney! How does a healthy girl just hitting her twenties die of natural causes? If I hadn't been in Europe fighting the war she never wanted me to fight, if I’d been with her then, maybe the love of my life would be with me now.

This little wad of ifs still wakes me up at night. The ifs don't knock as often in New York any more but down here in Sweet Bend, Alabama, where it all started, sound sleep has been hard to come by lately. Down here the old questions were renewing themselves all over again, as if they'd been lying in wait for my return. Why did an innocent man who loved an innocent woman let Parker Webb scare him away for so long? Was I really afraid of him or just afraid of finding a different truth than the one I'd learned to live with? These questions, among others, were almost as troubling as where to find the answers and, of course, how to bell the Webb cat.

CHAPTER THREE

The lights across the bay flickered at me through the night with a bittersweet, haunting nostalgia. Great Point Clear kept many secrets. Too well, some of them. The next day I drove into Mobile and checked with the news service for additional leads. A few other journalists had come down from Chicago and Philadelphia, probably for their own private reasons, like me. One came from Cincinnati. He turned out to be a real stinker, a big burly joker who made sarcastic cracks and couldn't stand up straight without breaking a little wind. Even Jack Simmons, the coordinator of our special project, avoided him whenever possible. Iry certainly would have.

How strange it was, feeling her presence everywhere, seeing her proud head bobbing above the crowd at times as she shoved her way toward me, waving from her shoulders, flashing seductive smiles and gazing out of eyes full of dark, amorous provocation. All of her was there in my imagination, all of my summer sweetheart, my winter love, all packaged so incredibly in a body equally incredible. She played games with me. She ducked in and out of crowds, disappeared around corners and through doorways. In some respects it really was like old times. From the moment I arrived in Mobile she seemed to be with me. She flagged me at the city limits, perched elfishly on the hood of my little Austin-Healey Bugeye and hailed patrol cars all the way down Government Street. Visions of her floated around me like ghosts. A voice out of the past sometimes caught in my ear — it happened only yesterday in a restaurant out on the causeway — absurdly squeaking an absurd order as Iry often did in her pretensions of dining at the Grand Bay Hotel. It made me laugh out loud and set heads to turning at nearby tables.

Wake up, Ganzy! Jack Simmons shouted.

The man's raucous tone startled me out of my reverie. He came into the tiny workroom assigned to me waving another list, a log of persons he later explained who’d called in the week before. Simmons was senior reporter with the Mobile Press and had been appointed liaison by the local host. His eyes, wide open and smoky gray, peered officiously across the page as he handed me the sheet and stood hovering over my desk with his jaws puffed out like Dizzy Gillespie's when he's blowing the horn.

Did you talk to any of them? I asked.

His jaw relaxed. Simmons exhaled loudly out of a mouth foaming with sibilants. Sure. Several — except some of them sounded a smidge silly, he answered. An intimidating stare replaced the Dizzy Gillespie look.

What do you think?

What do you think I think? Take it from me, these sounded decent enough. We weeded out the kooks.

Have you seen one yet?

He glanced sharply at me. One what?

What are we doing here, Jack? A UFO of course.

Jack Simmons chuckled. You're funny, Ganzy. He chuckled again and stepped away in a rush.

Behind his chipper tone one could sense a firmness of opinion that denied him a reporter's objectivity, so I was quite happy to be going out alone. A dozen years ago a younger Tyler Ganzy might have tried to open Jack’s brain and maybe press against those rooted centers. But this was 1959. I was tired of arguing with people about their prejudices. Besides, he wouldn't know about Great Point Clear the way it was when Iry and I used to play around on the beach over there. What could that white man tell me? If my childhood chum, Tooney Boyd, ever surfaced, he'd know how it was. A face from the past, especially his, might help clear the air, because that old ugly ooze out of my mind had begun to blow its cold funky breath against the back of my eyeballs. Like Lady Macbeth, I wanted those spotty visions to be damned and begone! Conscience, though, wanted me to confront the oracle again, to find answers to the questions that continued to roil inside. Maybe another run around the mulberry bush wouldn't change anything this time either. Maybe the long-ton weight in my memory would just grow heavier.

But one needs to try, needs to face his dragons head-on at some point. It would be a holy comfort to get that land-grabbing fugitive and his spooks off my back, if not in prison where they belonged. Better still, to find out the truth about Iry Tuttle, not that natural causes crap they put in the newspaper. Or was it true after all? Was the diagnosis still confirmable? She should’ve stayed in Baltimore and waited for me to get out of the Army. What really did happen to Iry? They say it was the Negro's sickness but somehow that didn't compute, not any more, not with Parker Webb dogging me again. How could those close to her let the years swallow up that mystery so completely? Why didn't someone in the family — a friend even — see back then that something was eating on her? Would it have mattered? What could I do from Germany? Nothing except continue to love her. And I loved her — yes Lord I loved her! The old feeling was coming back, too, was taking over again — the passionate hunger for a woman whose last kiss seventeen years ago still made my lips burn with desire and, above all, my heart ache for the rest of her.

CHAPTER FOUR

As late afternoon approached, restlessness and a little Jamaica rum began to stir in my gut. The interviews were going well but I didn't care to lie