The Scarlet Ruse

by John D. MacDonald

  I laid the Flush close in, close enough to spit into the mangroves, killed the engines, and threw over a bow hook and a stern hook, planning to go over the side and walk them into better position and make them firm, but something changed my mind quickly. Three somethings. A sky darkening cloud of ravenous mosquitoes, sand flies and stinging gnats.

  As I bounded down the ladder way, Mary Alice came put onto the stern deck, knuckling a sleepy eye. Then suddenly she began dancing, hollering, flailing her arms and slapping herself heartily. We both tried to get through the doorway at once. We got in, and I slammed it and went looking for any open, unscreened port.

  They were coming into the galley. I slid that screening across and got out the bug spray and gave them a taste of civilization.

  "This is your goddamn paradise?" Mary Alice yawped.

  "This is where we are supposed to wait for good weather?" She looked down and whacked herself on the thigh.

  "You are some kind of dummy, you know that?"

  There were little ones coming through the screening. I told her to shut up and close all the ports while I started the air-conditioning.

  Soon, after we had killed off the last of the invaders and the moving air began to feel cool, it began to seem better to her. I told her we were lucky there were no dive bombers, a kind of fly half as big as a mouse that folds its wings on high and comes arrowing down to take an actual piece of flesh out of your body, leaving a hole and a trickle of blood. He takes it away with him and sits in a tree and eats it like an apple. She wanted to believe I was kidding. I was, but only by about ten percent.

  I explained to her that the wind had died, and when it came up again, it would be out of the north, and we could go out on deck without being dragged away and eaten. But for now I was going to assume the anchors did not need moving and the Munequita did not need attention. I was not going out there. No.

  Her disposition began to show considerable improvement, and suddenly it was time to gear up and listen for Meyer. She followed me into the pilot house, asking too many questions.

  "Okay," she said, "so what good does it do if you know that somebody has come around looking for you?"

  "Or you. Wouldn't you want to know who?"

  "Knowing why is all I need to know. Anyway, what makes you think you can trust that harry son of a bitch?"

  "I don't think about it. I just trust him."

  "If you've got somebody under the hammer, you can trust him. Otherwise, forget it."

  "Another of Mary Alice Mcdermit's delicate aphorisms."

  "Afor what?"

  "Hush."

  I tuned the channel another hair and got rid of some of the blur. We listened for the full fifteen minutes. There were calls for other boats and calls from other boats, but no traffic for us. She'd had a nap. She was getting hungry again. She was bored. She wanted a drink but didn't know what. There was a whiny sub-tone in her voice. I let her play with the radio, and she found some country music and turned it too high. It wasn't worth trying to get her to turn it down. She sat cross legged on the floor, swaying back and forth, singing the lyrics she knew, scratching her bites.

  He didn't phone on the second segment either. She was tired of the radio. She went in and changed her clothes and came back in a yellow terry thing like a body stocking that she said was too tight in the crotch. She kept tugging at it. It made her cross. She rummaged through the cabinet over the wall desk and found some cards. The only game we both knew was gin. She didn't give a damn what I might be holding and paid no attention to what I picked, so she constantly discarded right into my hand, and she constantly lost. She turned the radio on again and played solitaire on the floor in front of it. I don't know what her rules were, but she went out every time.

  On the third and final fifteen minutes of monitoring, the marine operator came up with a call for "the motor yacht Busty Flush." She had a short list, and I came in and identified and took the call. Meyer sounded as if he were calling from the bottom of a big laundry bag. As soon as he'd start to come in clear, they'd dump in more laundry. But I managed to extract from the blur that there had been a fellow looking for me. I felt my pulse give a hefty bump. I waited for the next part of our little code. Mary Alice stood at my elbow, listening to the in sectile low fidelity of my tin speaker and, with her thumb, trying to relieve the undue stricture of the nether end of her yellow garment.

  It was sick excitement to know that I had placed a bet on a three-legged horse and every other horse had fallen down on the clubhouse turn and my choice was lumping home at historic' odds.

  Yes, the fellow had a beard.

  "His name is George Sharsh. He said you know him. Do you know him?"

  "George who?" This was beyond the limit of our code, and I was puzzled.

  "Sharsh. S as in sniper. T as in telescope. A as in arson.

  R as in rage. C as in careful. H as in hide. Sharsh."

  "Starch?"

  "Right!"

  "Sure, I know him." "He said he'd be back tomorrow in the late afternoon or early evening."

  "Tomorrow? Thursday?"

  "Right. What will I tell him?"

  "Stall him." I hesitated. That was wrong. Meyer might think I wanted him to try to delay Sprenger.

  "No. Just find out what he wants and see if you can take care of it." Out of the depths of the laundry he said goodbye. I hung the Bakelite mike back on the hook and flipped the set off.

  "Who is this George Starch guy?" Mary Alice asked.

  "Oh, he comes around with a problem now and then."

  "Like what?"

  "Well... like a disposal problem."

  "I don't get it."

  She followed me back to the lounge. I had an urge to experiment.

  "George is sort of an agent. Somebody might be holding stock certificates that don't belong to them.

  George finds a way to unload them."

  "He comes to you with stuff like that?"

  "Once In a while."

  I stretched out on the yellow couch. She leaned on the back of it, standing behind it, looking down at me.

  "I got this idea you were straight, sort of. What do you do, work both ends?"

  "I do favors for friends."

  "But Meyer wouldn't get involved in anything like that."

  "Like what?"

  "Fencing anything."

  "Last night before I came aboard, I saw Meyer. He had a suggestion about your car. By now some friends of ours are baking a different color onto it, and they'll put Alabama tags on it and sell it right in Miami.

  Alabama tags make it easy. There's no title certificate. Meyer will probably clear three hundred." "He suggested it? I'll be damned! Gee, you never know, do you? Whyn't this George Starch move things through you know, regular channels?"

  "That's like selling to a supermarket, MA. They're so big they beat the price way down. I'm a corner grocery store, and I can make better deals."

  "Unless they find out you're making better deals."

  "I'm not a total damn fool, honey. If some hungry clown contacted me with a problem about a couple of barracks bags full of grass from Jamaica or Barbados, fresh off somebody's Piper Apache, I would route him to Frank."

  She swallowed and licked her mouth and started to speak and had to speak again, the first attempt was so ragged.

  "Frank? Frank who?"

  "Frank Sprenger. What Frank do you think?"

  "How would I know what Frank? How would I know?"

  I reached up and patted her hand. It felt damp and cold.

  "Sorry. That's right. How would you know? He isn't in operations.

  He's just a guy who's acceptable to all parties at interest, and he works as a sort of traffic manager and resident auditor. I guess because you saw him those times at the bank, I had the idea you would know what he did."

  "Investments," she said in a small voice.

  "All kinds, dear. All kinds. I never got to ask you this question.

  It's been in my mind. Frank is ver
y very heavy with the ladies. You are far from being dog meat. I imagine he made his move. What happened?"

  "He... isn't the sort of person who appeals to me." I laughed. She asked me what was so humorous. I said it was like a deer in deer season refusing to be shot by a hunter in the wrong shade of red hat.

  "Okay, so maybe he doesn't like girls as big as me.

  Some men are really turned off by tall girls."

  "If everything else is in the right place, I think Frank might start to get turned off if a girl was fifteen feet tall and weighed four hundred lovely pounds."

  "Well... he never tried anything. I had no idea you knew him at all.

  You never said anything about knowing him."

  I stretched and yawned.

  "It was sort of a confidential relationship. He gave me a little fee to sort of represent him in the Fedderman problem. I wouldn't have fooled with it otherwise."

  She gasped and stood erect. She ran around the end of the couch and came thumping down onto her knees on the floor beside me, sat back on her heels, and stared at me.

  "He paid you!"

  "A token. Two round ones for expenses. What's the matter with you anyway?"

  She thumbed her hair back.

  "Exactly what did he tell you to do?"

  "Why are you getting so churned up?"

  "This could be very important. Please." "He told me he heard that Meyer wanted me to help Fedderman, who thought that the properties in Sprenger's investment account had been switched.

  He said he heard that it didn't appeal to me. I told him that it didn't appeal because I thought he could handle his own problems better than I could. He asked me, as a favor to him, to check it out. To keep my eyes open and keep his name out of it, insofar as our private agreement was concerned. I'd say he took care of it himself without my help. You and I know who made the switch."

  I waited for a reply, but I had lost her. She was still there, but her eyes were focused on something further than the horizon. She was chewing her underlip. Her eyebrows went up over the bridge of her nose, separated by two new deep wrinkles.

  I wondered if I was wearing an identical pair of wrinkles. Good op Meyer had found a Meyer-like way of imparting ugly information. Frank Sprenger was enraged.

  And I had better be very careful and do an efficient job of hiding, because Sprenger was planning to take care of things with a rifle with telescopic sights and then burn my house to the ground. I could not imagine Sprenger, no matter how enraged he might be, confiding his battle plans to Meyer, no matter how much Meyer encourages confidences.

  But I could imagine Sprenger asking specifics of the location of the Flush, the terrain, the cover, and asking details of her construction and fuel, enough to enable Meyer to make one of his intuitive yet logical series of guesses.

  "So he knows you then," she asked.

  "He knows where you live and how you live?"

  "Certainly. Dave Davis and Harry Harris have been aboard this houseboat.

  You wouldn't know them, I guess.

  They work for Frank."

  "If he came looking for you or sent somebody, would they ask Meyer where you are and if anybody is with you?"

  "I would imagine so. But Meyer would say he doesn't know."

  "Would Frank know Meyer would probably know?"

  "I guess so."

  "Oh dear Jesus God."

  "You better tell me your problem, girl."

  "He can make Meyer tell him."

  "If Meyer sees that Frank is serious about it, he'll tell him. He'll tell him the Flush is set for long cruising and you're aboard with me."

  Her face crumpled. She toppled onto her side and wound her arms around her head. She began to sob.

  I sat up and reached down and patted her.

  "Heyl Hey, what's wrong?"

  She sat up, snuffling, eyes streaming.

  "Wrong! I'm dead, that's what's wrong. You killed me, you dumb son of a bitch!"

  She scrambled up, stumbled and nearly fell, and ran back to the stateroom and slammed the door behind her.

  I leaned back and closed my eyes. Now I could sit at the game table and take some of the square pieces and turn them the way they belonged and glue them to the table. Too few to be able, from them, to discern all of the pattern.

  The brain is a random computer. Fragments of experience, sensation, distorted input, flicker across multiple screens.. The last time I felt I had lost my luck, I made some bad moves which should have cost me more dearly than they did.. None of Fedderman's older investment accounts would have been likely to know Sprenger or to put him in touch with Fedderman. Sprenger could have used a name given to him by someone else.. Meyer's first instinct was that Frank Sprenger had been setting Fedderman up, using the inventory lists Fedderman gave him as a basis for buying substitute junk, using a double for Fedderman to make the switch easily.. Willy Nucci had been very emphatic about how eager Sprenger would be to cover up any personal goof before it became public knowledge. When Meyer and I had talked about Sprenger at the steak house that night after I saw Willy, we had agreed that, on second thought, it did not seem to be Sprenger's style to try to go for a double by cheating Fedderman, when it would be easier to play the tricks and games he was used to. Easier and safer. "I like people. I really do." Mary Alice had said that as we walked to the bank. The people who really like people are so genuine about it they are unable to imagine how it would be not to like people. And so they don't go about proclaiming.. Mary Alice had leafed back through the book, looking for the page which had Barbados stamps to see if there would be room for more from the same island on that page. She did not have her glasses.

  Hirsh often bragged about his vision. She knew he could see the pages.

  Hirsh was volatile. Was he expected to react, to reveal the discrepancy then and there, so that Sprenger could demand that Hirsh live up to his guarantee? In the store last Thursday, I had believed her declaration of honesty. But she had wept more readily than I would have guessed. Meyer had called her amiable and gentle.

  She had become just what I wanted her to be. For just long enough..

  Had her explanation at lunch that day, of how long it would take to switch the stamps from book to book, been designed to induce me to have the brilliant thought that maybe the whole book had been switched? If so, I struck out. My decision at lunch that day, to trust her and believe her, had been based upon my assumption that if she had the art, the guile, and the energy to project a false image so skilfully, she would not have spent five years in that little store.. Had she sensed when I was vulnerable enough so that she could play that old game across the table, the blue eyes which become trapped in the silence of the stare of realization, widening in a kind of alarm, then, with obvious effort, breaking contact?. Why would Jane Lawson wait fourteen years before stealing anything? Why would she wonder about the authenticity of the items in the other investment accounts when Mary Alice didn't, not until much later? Jane Lawson was a very bright woman.

  If she had planned the action and made the switch the one and only time she filled in for Mary Alice, she would know that eventually I would find out about it. I would ask the right question of Hirsh or Mary Alice, and they would remember. So wouldn't she look a lot better if she casually volunteered the information? If she had done nothing wrong, she might not think of bringing it up.. After five years of working with Mary Alice, it was Jane Lawson's diagnosis that Mary Alice would rather work with her hands than make decisions. They were close during working hours, but after working hours Jane never saw her. In the politest way possible, Jane had said she thought Mary Alice to be a little bit on the dumb side.

  Today I could agree. But not until today. Jane had called the device of putting a hair from her head under the rubber band around Judy's books one of her "sneaky spy tricks." It showed a certain talent for subterfuge. Would she mention the rubber band trick if she had used that same talent more profitably? Harris and Davis got to me much too fast, much too soon
after I became involved. And their first objective was to sideline me, to pay me to back away from Fedderman's problems and wait for word from my anonymous employer. I remembered Harris being silenced by Davis. Harris had said, "That was one of the questions. To find out if Mcgee was " Was what? Susceptible to being scared off? Too committed to the Fedderman problem already?

  Apparently if I couldn't be bought off or scared off, the third step was to clue me in by saying their boss was interested in the Fedderman situation which was the same as naming him and wanted to be certain I was not going to help somebody pull something dumb and fancy which would leave Sprenger on the short end. I could not have let them go back and report that I knew how to keep a good scorecard and I'd refused the money. To Sprenger that would have been tantamount to saying I was out to try to clip him. Mary Alice had reacted all too greedily to the ripe and pungent smell of money within the restricted tailored gardens of the Key Biscayne Yacht Club. She had almost visibly salivated. And when she got over believing I was probably the caretaker on the Flush, the touching began. Hand on my shoulder, hip bumping into me. People establish private space around them and do not move into yours or let you into theirs unless you establish intimacy or the promise of it. She had abruptly diminished the spaces we both maintained, moving into mine, letting me into hers.