The Scarlet Ruse

by John D. MacDonald

  So tonight Mcgee smuggled a woman aboard the Flush. You didn't see her.

  You don't know who she is. But from something I said while drunk, you think she came to the Contessa late last night and stayed with me in my room overnight. Tonight I told you your trip was off. I got ugly about it. I said I had better company. I said Frank Sprenger was almost as dumb as Hirsh Fedderman."

  "Sprenger... and Mary Alice!"

  "I don't know what he'll do. Maybe there'll be no reaction at all.

  Right now I'm... trying to work out a jigsaw puzzle where every piece is square, and when I get them in the right places, they make an abstract painting. But they also make an abstract painting any way I fit them together."

  "If he's interested?"

  "Remember No Name Island?"

  "Of course."

  "Find it by yourself?"

  "No problem."

  "You are going to tell Me that my plan, when the two of us were going, was to take the Flush down into Florida Bay and lay behind No Name and wait for a good five-day forecast before running across to Nassau. You can take him to the place. For a fee. Just him. The two of you can drive down to the Keys and rent a skiff and go on out to No Name. Are you sure you can find it?"

  "My God, Travis. It's "

  "All right. You can find it. It isn't on any chart, so he can't find it alone. Of all the ways I can read this puzzle, if I'm right at all, he'll be willing to come alone. If it's a mob scene, forget it. Be sure you aren't tailed by his people or anybody."

  "How do I let you know if "

  "I'll listen to Miami Marine tomorrow afternoon from three-fifteen to three-thirty, four-fifteen to four-thirty, five-fifteen to five-thirty.

  If you don't come through with a call, I'll come in and come after you."

  "But won't she be able to " "Once we're well out of here, I'll tell her I asked you to keep tabs on anybody who might come looking for me. If he doesn't bite, just tell me everything is quiet. If he reacts but the time isn't set yet, tell me you heard somebody was looking for me but you didn't get a chance to see them or talk to them. If you are set up with him and know about when he might come visiting, say a man with a beard came by and wouldn't give his name, but he's going to come by again at such and such a time."

  "And come back at you the next day when it's definite?"

  "I'll monitor at the same times. This is a big tricky bastard, Meyer.

  Don't listen to any lullaby from him. I think he might make you sit while he goes and gets a description from the night man at the Contessa, the night bell captain."

  "Isn't that a little too tricky, the part about the hotel?"

  "Suggestion?"

  "I didn't see her, but I saw her car and went and wrote down the plate number, and I know where it's parked." I thought it over.

  "I like it better. What I don't like is the way I keep thinking of reasons why, if I'm right, Sprenger would like to leave all three of us in deep blue water."

  "If it works out and we drive down there, the two of us, and get the skiff from... what's that place by the draw bridge?"

  "Regal Marine."

  "On the way out I can mention I gave somebody a letter to mail for me if I don't reclaim it by such and such a day. Who would I be writing to, Travis?"

  "Two letters. Our friend Captain Matty Lamarr, who has never been bought or scared, and to General Samuel Horace Lawson at the Doral." I thought about my luck.

  Our imminent eviction from what I had begun to feel was safe sanctuary had torn a hole in the bottom of the luck feeling. I sensed emptiness and a cool feeling at the nape of the neck.

  "Have you got paper and envelopes?"

  "When this noble vessel, The John Maynard Keynes, sinks, it will be because of an overburden of paper bound and unbound. Here you are. May I read over your shoulder?"

  "Meyer, will you accept the premise that the less you know, the more plausible Sprenger will find you?"

  "A subjective judgment. But okay. Who will I leave these with?"

  "Jenny Thurston. Allow room for delays."

  Two short letters. All I had to give was my guess as to who and why.

  The combination of Matty's professionalism and the general's massive leverage would open up all the rest of it. I put them in the envelopes and handed them, unsealed, to Meyer.

  "You were reluctant," I said.

  "Chance to overrule." He sighed and licked the flaps and sealed them tightly.

  He said, "Interesting analogy, about the jigsaw with square pieces and nonobjective art. So you put them together in a way, I suppose, that pleases you, and so you call it the only logical arrangement."

  "That's what I seem to be doing."

  "It is also an analogy for a madman's view of reality.

  No rules restrict his assemblage, because they're all square pieces. So he makes a pattern that pleases him, and then he tries to impose it on the world, and they lock him up."

  "Thanks, Meyer."

  He put his hand lightly on my arm, his wise eyes very sober and quiet.

  "Quixote, my friend. It has been too long for you, too long since there was a woman who moved you, who made magic. It started to be very good, and some automatic relays in that skeptical skull broke the connection.

  A sense of what-might-have-been can make a man very vulnerable.

  Suspicion can become one hell of a big windmill. And some kinds of windmills can break your ass." "Contents noted," I said.

  There was a pale pink scrap of day left when I unlocked the Flush, noting with approval that Meyer had unhooked the shoreside umbilical cords for phone, water, and electric and had taken off the spring lines and the heavy weather fenders. I didn't want to use any interior lights unless I was on engines or on the alternate one hundred and ten system off my generator.

  In the gloom Mary Alice rose up from behind the far end of the big yellow couch and said, "Where the hell have you been?"

  "Taking care of this and that."

  "Don't you know you've got to get me out of here!"

  I moved closer to her and checked on the validity of her anxiety by saying, "Settle down, honey. We'll be on our way in the morning."

  Her voice got very thin.

  "In the morning! I can be dead by morning! Now. Please. Can't we just go a little way?

  Please."

  I saw the dark shape in her right fist, pointed down at the deck. I took her arm and pulled it out of her hand. She resisted and then let go of it. I took it over to the light of a port. A little Colt.25 automatic, about as small as you can get and stay reasonably lethal.

  "Where'd you get this?"

  "Can we talk about where I got things when we're moving?!"

  I handed it back to her. Maybe it would make her feel a little bit better. Her anxiety was genuine, or she was a great loss to the theater.

  I went to the topside controls and cranked her up.

  When she settled down from the indigestion and flatulence that afflict her whenever I rouse her from indolence, I went down and cast off the lines, moved her ahead a bit, and left her teetering against a piling.

  I brought the Munequita close with a boat hook, jumped onto her bow, took her lines off the dock, and scrabbled back aboard with her bow line, snubbed her close and bent the line around a stern cleat. I cut the tuning very close. By the time I got back to the controls the bow was swinging very very near the bow of an old and very well maintained Consolidated in the next door slip. The unfriendly old man who owned her stood by his railing with a big fender, ready to lower it to where I might crunch into him.

  "Watch it!" he bawled, just as I gave it hard right rudder and gave my port diesel a hard quick jolt of reverse. It held me against the piling and stopped the swing of the bow and started it moving out.

  "Sorry," I called to him as I eased out of the slip. No point in trying to reply in kind. He had enough trouble in the form of a wide wife with a voice like a bearing about to go. He worked on the boat all week long with her telling him
how to do what he was already doing.

  On Sundays they took a picnic cruise of three hours, and you could hear that voice of hers all the way out to the channel, telling him to watch out for the things he was already watching out for.

  After I was under the bridge and past Port Everglades, heading south inside, in the Waterway channel with the running lights on, a healthy arm snaked around my waist, and the big lady pulled us close together and said, "Wow."

  "I'll put it in the log. One heart-felt wow."

  "You better believe it."

  I showed her a distant marker to aim at and gave her the wheel and went aft and gave the Munequlta a little more line until she towed steadily without wallowing.

  Mary Alice was very anxious to give the wheel back to me.

  "Makes me too nervous," she said.

  "Where are we going?"

  "I know a good place about an hour and half down the line. We can anchor out. It's good water and out of the traffic."

  "You tell me how I can help, huh?"

  "You might be able to find your way below and come back with a pair of drinks."

  It took a while. She had to hunt for things. She apologized. It was full dark. I was using the hand spot to pick up the reflectors on the unlighted markers. I was aware of her near me in darkness, sitting in the starboard chair, aware of how quiet she was.

  "And about that automatic?" I said.

  "Oh, a friend gave it to me. He was worried about me.

  He thought it would be a good thing for me to have."

  "Ever fire it?"

  "I drove way out into the country one time, to sort of ranch land. I found a beer can in the ditch and put it on a rock. I had a box of fifty shells. It didn't make as much noise as I thought it would, but I kept flinching. I had a newspaper in the car, and I stuck it onto a stub sticking out of a big pine tree. Then I could see where the bullets were going, and I figured out how to work it. If I didn't know when it was going to go bang, I flinched after it happened. Then they went where I was aiming. Then I could hit the can pretty good. Every other time at about twenty feet."

  "That's pretty good."

  "If I had to shoot somebody, I'd imagine his head is a big beer can."

  "The torso is a bigger target."

  She was quiet for about thirty seconds and finally said, "I'd shoot somebody who wanted to hurt me, right? So I think it would be better to shoot him in the part that does the thinking."

  "I can't fault you for logic."

  "What?"

  "Do you think Jane Lawson switched the stamps in any of the other investment accounts?"

  "Darling" can I make a new rule for us?"

  "Such as?"

  "You come to a point when... you want one life to end and another life to begin. I don't want to talk about any of that. It's all over now. I'm somebody else. So are you. We're both new people."

  "What are these new people going to live on, MA.?"

  "I haven't seen you hurting for money. Not the way you live. You certainly had the sense to bring along a bundle, didn't you?"

  "Even what they call a goodly sum runs out."

  "In cash?"

  "How else? And safely aboard."

  "And we can get to the islands, can't we?"

  "Slowly, in the very best weather. Sure."

  "We can make the money last a long long time in the islands, living on this boat, can't we?"

  "What islands did you have in mind?"

  "You practically have to go to the Bahamas first, don't you?"

  "Correct."

  "Well then?"

  "Well what?"

  "We can just sort of poke along down the Islands to the end of them and then wait for good weather, like you say we need, and go across to the next batch. If we kept doing that, where would we end up some day?"

  "Trinidad. Venezuela."

  "Is there anything wrong with that?"

  "These two new people are going to have a long and intimate relationship."

  "From the samples, you haven't anything against that, have you? As any fool can plainly see, i like the idea. A crazy man has run my life for the past five years, and now he'll never find me again. He'll never have a chance to kill us, will he?"

  "When we run out of funds, we'll seek honest work?"

  "You're getting stuffy, you know that? What you should do now is just live. Right? It's a big adventure, and we're together, lover. We'll be in love and have fun and swim and eat and laugh and all that. You're the captain. You can marry us. Let's think up a new last name for the happy couple."

  "Mcworry?"

  "Mister, I am really going to cure you of that."

  I found my little parking lot, circled on three sides with mangrove. I checked the time and the tide chart and laid her just where I wanted her, cross-hooked so she would swing properly on the tide change. I pulled the Muhequita up onto the starboard quarter and made her fast there against fenders so she would not nudge us all night. I started the generator and checked the bilges and put Mary Alice in charge of the galley. I sat In the lounge with my drink, moving those square pieces around atop the game table in my mind, finding damned little to please me.

  Sixteen.

  We got an early start in mist that soon cleared, and by eleven in the morning we were well down the length of Biscayne Bay in the most oppressive heat I could remember.

  We were making a stately six knots, but there was a steady six knot breeze from behind us, so we moved in a pocket of airlessness, in a reflected dazzle that stabbed up into the shade of the tarp I had rigged over the topside controls.

  I kept it on automatic pilot most of the time, taking it out now and again to make a correction for tide drift. She sat in the white copilot seat in a salmon-colored bikini, slumped, with her heels propped atop the instrument panel, her legs apart, her fanny on the edge of the seat, the nape of her neck against the top of the back. She had piled her black hair into a half-knotted wad on the top of her head. Sweat trickled down between her breasts, down her belly, and into the top edge of the bikini bottom, darkening the fabric. She had exposed almost every optional inch of skin area to the breeze that never happened.

  The heat made her cross.

  "Jesus, Mcgee, is it always like this?"

  "This is very unusual weather we're having."

  "Ha, ha, ha. Can we stop and swim or something?"

  "Not through here. Have another cold beer."

  "I don't want another cold beer. Heat makes me feel sick."

  "When we change direction, we'll get some breeze."

  "Like how soon?"

  "Hour. Hour and a half."

  "Dear Jesus. I just can't take much of this."

  "Complain, complain, complain."

  She snapped her head around and stared at me, her eyes narrow and furious.

  "Do you want me to make a list of everything I want to complain about?"

  "If it would make you feel better, go ahead."

  "Maybe my nerves are on edge for a lot of reasons."

  "Could be," I said. No argument. I let the discussion die. It wasn't going to do either of us any good to talk about it.

  Last night she had decided we would have a very busy bed, and she began to do a lot of flapping and roaming and rambling, changing from here to there, and changing back, apparently trying to express a special gratitude with a lot of extra-strenuous work. I stayed with her for a time, and suddenly it was all rubbery fakery, smack and slap, grunt and huff, like a pair of third-rate wrestlers in some lunch-bucket town practicing for the evening's performance for the nitwits who think it quite real.

  As soon as I got that image of it, both the spirit and the flesh became weak. She settled down, still breathing hard.

  "Did I do something wrong, darling?" she asked.

  "Did I move wrong and hurt you or anything?"

  "No. No, it wasn't that."

  "What then?"

  "I don't know. It just happened."

  "Does it happen often like
this with you?"