Mad Max Murphy

Chapter One
The Boat

       ​Mad Max Murphy saw it coming from a long way off, down by the Beach Club, in fact; a big boat, probably forty feet long, a yacht with a fly bridge over the main cabin. But what caught his eye was the great curling bow wave, and the huge roll of the wake. And while that wasn't so unusual with a boat that size, this boat had come between the rocks and the Beach Club at full throttle and there was nothing normal about that. The wake, rolling out like ocean waves, had set all the small sailboats rocking onto their beam ends, their masts whipping like the wands on energized metronomes, and you didn't have to live near Long Island Sound for long to know that there were no-wake laws around every mooring.
       Max shrugged and shook his head. There was never a water cop around when you needed one. Too bad. It'd have been a hoot to see that big yacht overhauled. What nobody needed was another big-boat crazy, probably drunk and ignoring the laws because he was rich enough to afford such a big boat. Guys like that never thought the laws applied to them. It was really too bad Starchy wasn't on patrol. A pinch like this would have made his day ... especially if the guy had been drinking.
       Max sat back into his beach chair and stretched his legs into the full roar of the sun. Man, he was glad summer had finally gotten here. Not only was it warm, but his days were wide open. School was out, he hadn't been able to find a job (his mother didn't want him working in the family restaurant), and all he had to think about was how well he'd play in the Shoreline Summer Soccer League, summer girls, his project, and the road part of his driving lessons. Soccer and the project he could handle but the other two ... well, not so easy. Girls were unpredictable and the driving lessons had him rattled. But no matter how you looked at it, all four had a lot to do with his future and the truth was that anything which had to do with his "future" made him as nervous as a bird on open ground.
       Four things and he could fail at any one of them. And adults thought they had pressure to face. It was nothing like this. They could mess up and hardly anybody ever knew. But if he screwed up everyone knew. And then he grinned to himself, knowing that he would have it no other way. Life was a matter of taking risks. And what was he really risking here? The only one he could fail at that would be really embarrassing was not getting his license. Truly ugly. Having some girl put him down would reach an awesome level of nastiness, but, on the other hand, stuff like that happened to every guy he knew. They were always getting put down by girls of some kind, not to mention teachers. Still, try as he might, he couldn't think of any guy who hadn't gotten his license on the first shot.
       At five-eleven and a hundred and seventy-two pounds, he was a little on the large side for fifteen but he didn't think he'd grow much more. He was already an inch taller than his father and taller than any of his uncles and cousins. In fact, he was the tallest guy in his whole family, and he was easily tall enough to play in goal, especially since he had kind of long arms, not like knuckle draggers or anything, but he had to get shirts with extra long sleeves. After summer league he'd be ready to make a run at the Varsity in the fall. Preston Watkins was an okay goalie, but he locked up on penalty shots and he couldn't read the kicker well enough to cheat left or right. Every time he had to face a kick it was as if someone had nailed his feet to the ground, and by the time he reacted the ball had flown past into the net. It was hard to win when your goalie couldn't stop the tough shots.
       To play in goal you had to have imagination and you had to think fast. Then you had to make your body do what you wanted. Sometimes that meant nothing more than leaping, but to stop the tough shots, the ones that got redirected close to the goal, you had to change direction or even reverse direction in a split second. There was no time to think, you either reacted or you didn't. Pure instinct. And that was what he did best. But it only worked if you kept your focus on the ball. Any break in concentration and the ball went past. And maintaining that focus was hard because most of the time you waited, watching the plays develop and keeping track of the opposing players as they moved toward the goal. It meant you had to turn it on when you needed it, to go from just watching to being the critical player on the field. Nothing could match that feeling.
       He grinned as he lay with his eyes closed, picturing the penalty shots he'd stopped in the past. It was still hard to believe he had gotten to some of them, especially the high shots in the far corners. He was getting pumped just thinking about them. There was nothing like soccer, though he supposed he felt that way because he was good at it. And he was truly good at it. Man, he ate up penalty shots the way school teachers gobbled pastries.
       But for now, at ten in the morning, with practice not until one, he could work on his tan and see who turned up to hang out with. He'd brought a book with him but he wasn't much of a beach reader. Too many things to keep track of. Winter and rainy days that's when he read books. Every Christmas he got four books and one of them was always a Dick Francis novel and for the past two years, novels by Kenneth Roberts ... a writer you could really get your teeth into. He opened his eyes and looked at the little kids playing in the water, watched closely by their bikini-clad baby sitters, girls in their twenties and most of them from Europe. Too bad they were so much older, because they sure were pretty and every one of them was put together like the girls in the Victoria's Secret catalog.
        He looked out over the water at the boat. It was still a long way off, but coming steadily closer, hammering through the water at full throttle, and the bow hadn't turned. He chuckled to himself. If it held steady it would wind up in his lap.
       In fact ... he stood up to get a better look. Yup. Headed right at him and everybody else who sat on the small sandy beach just inside the great stone jetty. In the breeze coming at him over the water he could hear the engines howling and he wondered what the guy could be thinking.
       Off to the left lay several blubbery whale-like women flopped out on the beach as if they had washed ashore and been stranded by the outgoing tide. Was he the only one who had noticed the boat? Should he holler? No. Things like this just didn't happen ... except that they did, and especially they happened to him. He looked out at the boat. How close would it have to get before people couldn't get out of the way? He glanced at the women with the children. They all looked like they could scamper pretty fast but the blubber balls would be real slow off the mark.
       The boat showed no sign of changing course as it rushed toward them, and he tried to gauge the speed. Thirty knots, at least. He checked the position of the boat against the row of big cottages along the shoreline, glanced quickly back at the boat, and threw his arms into the air. "EVERYONE GET OFF THE BEACH!" he shouted, "GET OFF THE BEACH!"
       Only the baby-sitters reacted, grabbing their wards and rushing up the narrow beach to where a solid masonry wall divided the parking lot from the sand.
       Max shouted again, louder this time and slowly the heads came up, turned toward the boat, and suddenly people were screaming and running every which way as they scrambled to avoid the oncoming yacht.
       The fat ones began to stir, reacting so slowly you'd have thought they'd been harpooned. "HEY!" Max shouted. "GET OFF THE BEACH!" The boat was about half a soccer field away. "GET OFF THE BEACH!" he shouted again, and finally the whales began to move with some urgency. Getting the bodies to follow was another matter. They rolled to a sitting position and then rolled again and, using their hands, began jackknifing upward. Even on their feet they could only waddle and just then the boat knifed on through a sailboat and then sliced into a big outboard as it drove past into the shallow water and the props began to scour the bottom.
       That slowed the momentum some, but not enough to keep the yacht from running right up onto the beach and coming to rest with its bow just touching the wall. Now the engines were screaming and Max ran to the back of the boat, leaped up onto the swim platform, and then dashed up the ladder to the fly bridge where he jerked back on the throttles and then shut off the engines.
       The quiet that followed would have challenged the silence in a math class after a big lunch. People looked stunned as they walked around, staring at the yacht, its rails some ten feet from the ground. Out in the water, the sailboat had sunk and now only the top of its mast showed. The outboard had been sliced in half and the two halves, full of flotation, were bobbing along in the gentle waves, the bow still attached to its mooring line.
       He looked up as he heard the police sirens in the distance, shrugged, and climbed down to the main deck of the boat. He opened the door and stepped into the cabin, glanced around, and then quickly stepped back out and closed the door. It looked like the aftermath of a video game. No. It was a whole lot worse.
       "Is there anyone in there?" one of the women called.
       He nodded.
       "What happened?"
       Max shrugged. And then he did what cops do when faced with horror, he tried to find a way to laugh. "Kinda hard to say. It looks like he lost his head."
       "Well, we know that," one of the whale women said. "Why else would he drive his boat up onto the beach?"
       "Because his head's on one side of the cabin and his body's on the other." Max shook his head.                    "Makes it hard to see where you're going."
       He could see they thought he was lying. He decided not to mention the bloody machete lying on the floor.
       "You can't be serious," the whale-woman said.
       "Do you think I'm making this up? Look, somebody cut the guy's head off and set the boat on autopilot."
       Disbelief gave way to belief and then horror, and the crowd voted with their feet, drawing back to leave plenty of room between themselves and the boat.
       The first cop there was Peter Smith's older brother Sean, and he leaped out of the cruiser, ran to the back of the boat, and climbed up onto the deck. "What happened?" he asked. "Were you on the boat, Max?"
       "No. I just climbed up to shut off the engines." He nodded his head toward the cabin. "It's really ugly, Sean. Somebody cut the guy's head off."
       "Whoa," Sean said, "now that is ugly." He opened the door, took one look, and closed the door.
       "You okay?" Max asked him.
       "Yeah," he said but he looked pretty pale. "Seeing that didn't bother you?"
       Max shrugged. "Looks like something from a video game. I guess he couldn't beat the Boss." Max shook his head. "It's nothing to laugh at, huh?"
       But Sean laughed, in part because the stuff Max said was always kind of funny, but mostly because it was either laugh or puke and he sure didn't want to puke in front of all these people after he'd been on the force only three months. And he was not going back into that cabin, if he could avoid it.
       "Did you see this?" Sean asked.
       "Saw the whole thing," Max said.
       "You'd better climb down and talk to Sergeant Grub."
       "Grub? Like the worm? When did he come on?"
       Sean laughed. "I wouldn't say that in front of him."
       "One of those ... sensitive guys?"
       Again Sean laughed. "Just go talk to him, Max."
       "Gotcha." Max climbed down and walked toward the next cruiser as it pulled into the crowded lot, followed by yet another cruiser. I didn't know we had so many cruisers, he thought, and then, farther up the road he saw two more town cruisers and a state police cruiser behind them.
       He walked over to Sgt. Grub, watching him climb out of his car, square his narrow shoulders, and hitch his gun belt up onto his stomach. The guy was short and plump and his skin was white as porcelain clay. "Sergeant, I'm Max Murphy. Sean said I should talk to you because I saw the whole thing."
       "Not now," Sgt. Grub said, "can't you see I'm busy here? I've got an investigation to run. I've got to find out what happened."
       Max grinned. "I'm a witness."
       It made no impression. "Look, we'll get to you later, okay? First, we gotta find out what happened." He marched off like a politician, puffed up with his own self-importance.
       Max walked to the back of the boat and stood off to the side, watching Grub walk around to the stern. He grabbed hold of the swim platform but he was too short and too plump and too weak to pull himself up. "Hey, Sean, give a hand here!"
       Sean, who spent a lot of time lifting weights, reached down with one brawny arm, caught hold of the sergeant's wrist, and hauled him up onto the platform. "It's pretty nasty, Sergeant."
       "How bad can it be?" He shook his head. "You rookies are all alike. You have to get used to this sort of thing in police work." He pushed past Sean, opened the door, then whirled around and rushed to the rail of the boat and began puking up his morning doughnuts, to a chorus of moans and groans from the crowd.
       "Whoa," Max said to the woman standing next to him. "He hadn't even digested the rainbow sprinkles."
       She looked around into his droll grin, ready to rip him a new lower outlet, or at least display how badly she'd been offended, and stopped. There was no way you could not grin back when Max Murphy grinned. It was as infectious as the flu. His black hair flopped down onto his forehead and his eyes were big and blue and they twinkled with irony. And when he smiled, big dimples broke out in his cheeks.
       "Not the way to build confidence in our local police," Max said. "Now if he'd puked off the starboard side hardly anybody would have seen him. Not that we wouldn't have heard him, of course, but it would have been easier on the crowd."
       "You have to be Max Murphy," the woman said.
       "Yup."
       "I thought so. I'm Tommy Simon's mother."
       "Nice to meet you," Max said.
       Chief Carl Murphy stepped onto the beach and walked toward the boat, spotting Max. He shook his head, took off his baseball cap, ran a hand over his thinning hair and replaced the cap. "I'm guessing you saw this, Max, is that right?" he asked.
       "Sure did," Max said.
       "How is it that every time something odd happens you're there?"
        Max shrugged.
        The Chief looked around, sniffing the air and wrinkling his nose. "What's that smell?"
       "Grub evicted his morning doughnut ration," Max said.
       Everyone standing nearby laughed nervously.
       "Okay, Max, what's going on here?"
       He stepped closer to his uncle. "The guy in the boat," he said very softly, "somebody cut his head off."
       "What?"
       "There's a machete covered with blood."
       "No wonder Grub lost his breakfast."
       "Probably not suicide," Max said. "Guy's got real short arms."
       Carl chuckled. "Guess I better go take a look." He stepped to the stern just as Sgt. Grub decided to climb down, lost his footing, and with a great whoop, went flailing backward off the swim platform and into the water with a splash worthy of a giant squid. He lay, spread-eagled in the shallow water, his belly mounded upward like a dead fish bloated by the sun.
       "Get me out! Get me out! I can't swim! I can't swim!"
       Chief Murphy stood looking down at him in disbelief. "For God's sake, Grub, the water's only six inches deep!"
       Grub was having none of it. "Help! Help!" he called. "I'm going down for the last time!" And because water generally gets deeper as you go out from the shore, Grub's head was just far enough out to go under, and he blew a spout worthy of a whale. His head came up and he gulped for air and down he went again.
       Finally, Carl dropped off the swim platform, grabbed Grub by the front of his shirt and pulled him onto his feet. "Get ahold of yourself, man! Get ahold of yourself. The water's only six inches deep!"
Grub looked down at the water which reached just above his ankles. "My head was under, Chief! I know my head was under!"
       "Get a grip, man," Carl said as softly as he could. "Half the town is watching!"
       Slowly, sheepishly Grub looked around. Then he reached down, grabbed his belt, and hiked up his pants. "I'm okay now," he said. "I'm okay. Thanks for saving me."
       Carl shook his head. "Sergeant, go ask the trooper to put in a call to the state crime lab." He shook his head. "Then help the rest of the men organize the traffic. And get on the bull horn and ask for witnesses and take some statements."
       "But Chief, I'm soaking wet."
       "It's summer, Sergeant. You'll dry off."
       "But what if my uniform shrinks, what'll ..."
       "Sergeant!"
       "Yes, Chief. Right away!"
       Carl shook his head again, turned, and climbed easily up onto the boat where Sean was waiting. Max watched Sgt. Grub, curious now, wondering how anyone could behave like such a complete idiot. He was like the character in a movie who's only there to give the audience someone to laugh at.
       "I offered to help him get down," Sean said.
       "Never mind that. Let's have a look."
       "It's pretty ugly, Chief." He stood back out of the way as Carl opened the door and stepped into the broad cabin.
       He looked around carefully, not wanting to disturb anything until the crime lab got there, and then stepped back outside. "I've seen worse," he said, "but only in the war. Guess I'll have to agree with Max. Sure doesn't look like a suicide." He looked around. "In fact, at first blush, I'd say we're gonna have a murder to investigate." He took a deep breath. "You recognize him by any chance?"
Sean shook his head. "Don't even recognize the boat and the home port is Westbrook where I keep my boat."
       Carl shrugged. "Oh well, no use to standing up here. I'll go see if there are any other witnesses besides Max, you see if you can't help Sgt. Grub with the traffic. We want to get as many people out of here as we can."
       "Won't be easy, Chief. Kind of a strange sight."
       "That it is. Post Henry up at the crossroad and tell him to divert the traffic. The rest of you tell everyone to leave, unless they saw what happened." He climbed over the gunwale and stood on the swim platform.
       "Watch your footing there, Chief," Sean said.
        Carl looked up and grinned. "Made it up, guess I can make it down." He jumped off the platform into the shallow water, then waded ashore and stopped when he came to Max.
       He took out his notebook and a pen. "Can you tell me what happened? Exactly what happened?"
       "Sure. Great big boat came up on the beach and ..." he pointed to the bits of ripped canvas and splintered wood sticking from beneath the hull of the boat ... "smashed my beach chair."
        Carl shook his head and looked at his nephew. "No, Max. Tell me what really happened."
       "Looks like a murder doesn't it," Max said.
       Carl sighed. "Max, this is serious."
       "It sure is," Max said, looking very somber. "That beach chair cost forty bucks. Mom is gonna be pretty unhappy."
       "Max, you're trying my patience here."
       "I told you what happened. I saw the boat coming, I hollered, and everyone got out of the way ..." He grinned and Carl looked at him warily. "But I won't lie to you, Uncle Carl, it was a close call with the porkers." He tipped his head toward the size 60s gathered like sows at a country fair.

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