John D MacDonald - Travis McGee 13 - A Tan and Sandy Silence

by A Tan

  "I... I have to talk to her before the thirtieth."

  "Why the deadline?"

  "It's a business thing. Some things to sign. To protect my interest in SeaGate. Of course, if I'd shot you, what difference would it make whether I kept my share of SeaGate or not?"

  "Will it make a lot of difference when I sign the complaint against you?"

  "Complaint?"

  "Assault with a deadly weapon. Attempted homicide?"

  "You wouldn't!"

  "What's to stop me? My undying affection for you?"

  He pulled himself together visibly. He wrapped up the emotions and put them on a high shelf. I could almost see the nimble brain of the entrepreneur take over. "We'll both have versions of what happened here, McGee. I'm essentially a salesman. I think I can sell my version far easier than you can sell yours."

  "What's your version?"

  "I'll let that come as a surprise to you."

  I could think of several variations that could leave him looking pretty good. And, of course, there was the usual problem of believability. Does one believe Harry Broll, pillar of the business community, or a certain Travis McGee, who seems to have no visible means of support, gentlemen?

  "A man as shrewd as you, Harry, should realize that the guy who gave you the bad information made an honest mistake."

  "I know Mary. She'd get in touch with you."

  "Would that she had."

  "What?"

  "A troubled friend is a friend in trouble. I'm right here. She could have come around, but she didn't."

  "She made you promise not to tell where she is."

  I shook my head. "Broll, come with me. I will show you that rental convertible, and I will show you the lady who rented it and who went to Miami with me and came back with me."

  "It's a nice try. You've got a lot of friends. They'd all lie for you. Every one. Think it over. Tell her what I said. She has to get in touch with me."

  We stood up. I picked up his little automatic, released the catch and eased the slide forward and handed it to him. He took it and looked at it, bounced it on his big hand, and slipped it into his side pocket. "I better get rid of it," he said.

  "If you think you might get any more quaint ideas, you better."

  "I was going to scare you. That's all."

  I looked him over. "Harry. You did."

  "Tell her to call the office. I'm not living at home. It was too empty there."

  "If after all these years I should happen to see your wife, I'll tell her."

  Two

  MEYER CAME aboard the Busted Flush at twenty minutes to six, five minutes after Harry Broll left. He was dressed for the small festival at six o'clock aboard Jillian's great big motor-sailer trimaran. He wore pants in a carnival awning pattern and a pink shirt that matched one of the myriad stripes in the awning

  "Goodness gracious," I said.

  He put a hand on a bulky hip and made a slow 360-degree turn. "Plumage," he said. "And have you noticed it's spring?"

  "If you'd carry a camera around your neck and walk fifty feet ahead of me, nobody would know we were together."

  "Taw," he said. "And tush." He went toward the bottle department, saying, "About Mr. Harry Broll... ?"

  "Who? Oh, yes. Of course. Mr. Broll."

  "McGee, don't try me, please."

  "You are supposed to walk in here, and instead of giving me a fashion show, you are supposed to snuff the air, look about with darting glances. Then you are supposed to find those six cartridge cases in that ash tray and snuff at them. Then you prowl around and find where all six hit, including the one that's hard to find. It hit right smack in the middle of my model 18 Marantz and killed it as dead as Harry tried to kill me."

  Meyer backed to the chair nearest and lowered himself into it. "Six shots?"

  "Six."

  "With serious intent?"

  "Damn well told."

  I explained the situation. Meyer listened, looking very troubled.

  "Don't sit there looking like an old beagle," I told him. "Harry won't be back."

  "Maybe somebody else will."

  "What is that supposed to mean?"

  "Travis, are you just a littler slower than you were a few years ago? Half a step, maybe?"

  "I don't know. Probably."

  "Why should you get slower and get careless at the same time?"

  "Careless?"

  "Don't try to kid yourself. You would have stumbled against him or spilled something on him and brushed it off. You would have checked him out and located the gun and taken it away from him."

  "This was just old Harry Broll."

  "And you are just old T. McGee, trying to pretend you don't know what I'm saying. You could be on the floor with a leaking hole in your skull."

  "I can't go around acting as if everybody was going to-"

  "You used to. And you are alive. What has given you this illusion of immortality of late?"

  "Lay off, Meyer."

  "Staleness? People are very good at things they are very interested in. If you lose interest, you are dead. If a Harry Broll can damned near kill you, Travis, what about somebody with a more professional attitude and background?"

  "Wouldn't I be more alert?"

  "Don't some of them look and act as innocuous as Harry Broll?"

  "What are you getting at?"

  "If you just go through the motions, Travis, maybe it's time to give the whole thing up. What good is a way of life if it turns out to be fatal?"

  "Are you going to support me?"

  "Not a chance. Anyway, isn't Jillian first in line?"

  "Come on!"

  "There are worse ways to live."

  "Several hundred thousand worse ways, Meyer, but just because Harry Broll.... Consider this. Six shots in a very confined space. What's the matter with my reaction time?"

  "The trouble is that they were fired at all. He came here once to try to beat your face flat. So two years later he comes around again, and you invite him in to try his luck with a gun. What are you going to dodge next time? A satchel charge?"

  "I have to depend on instinct. I did not sense any kind of murderous intent on his-"

  "Then your instincts are stale. Listen. I don't want to lose a friend. Go where I can visit once in a while. Exchange Christmas cards. Better than putting a pebble on your gravestone."

  "Just because... ? "

  "Don't talk. Think a little. And we should be going."

  I shrugged and sighed. When he gets into one of those moods, there is nothing one can do with him. He smells doom. I buttoned up the Flush, making certain my little security devices were in operation. The sun was low enough to make a yellow-orange glow across all the white gleam and brightwork of a vulgar multimillion dollars' worth of seagoing toys. Hundreds of millions, in truth. As we walked over I saw the sixty-plus feet of a big new Bertram, grumbling, bubbling, sliding elegantly into a slip. Six thousand dollars a foot. It doesn't take too many of those, too many Matthews, Burgers, Trumpys, Huckins, Rybovitches, and Strikers, to make a row of zeros to stun the mind.

  I stopped and leaned my crossed arms atop a cement piling and looked down at a rainbow sheen of oil on twilight waters.

  "What's the matter now?" asked Meyer.

  "Harry is right, you know."

  "To try to kill you?"

  "Very funny. He's right about Mary getting in touch. I get the feeling she would. Emotional logic. The last time her world ruptured, I helped her walk it off, talk it off, think it off."

  "So maybe she had enough and said the hell with it."

  "She is one stubborn lady. Harry is no prize. She married him a little too fast. But she would really bust a gut to make the marriage work. She wouldn't quit. She wouldn't run."

  "Unless he did something that she just couldn't take. Maybe it got to her gag reflex. Wouldn't she run then?"

  "Yes. I guess so. And maybe she's a stronger person than she was back when I knew her. All Harry said was that he had gotten mixed up with
some Canadian girl, a first offense. I know that wouldn't make Mary give any ringing cheers. But I think she's human enough to know it wouldn't be the end of the world or the marriage. Well, he has to locate her before the end of April, or he has big business problems."

  "Hmm?"

  "Something about signing something so he can keep his interest in SeaGate, whatever the hell that is."

  "It's a planned community up in the northeast corner of Martin County, above Hobe Sound where there's no A-1-A running along the beach. It's a syndicate thing, way too big for anybody like Broll to swing by himself!"

  "How do you know all that stuff?"

  "There was a feature story about planned communities in the Wall Street Journal a month ago. The local papers have had articles about it for over a year. I believe Newsweek had a-"

  "Truce. Could a guy like Broll do well in a deal like that?"

  "Depends. The ownership structure would be the important consideration."

  "Could you find out where he fits and how, and why Mary would have to sign something?"

  "I imagine I could. But why?"

  "Harry's nerves are bad. He looks bad. He has a money orientation. If he misses out on large money because Mary runs and hides and won't sign, it somehow doesn't sound like Mary. It would be a cheap shot and a dumb shot. She isn't dumb. Whether she stays with him or leaves him, it would be better for him to have money. She's been gone for two months. If he was so certain she'd run to me, where has he been for two months? Time is running out in two weeks. So he comes around with shaking hands and a sweaty shirt and a couple of places he missed while shaving. Time is running out not on the marriage, on the money. It makes me wonder."

  "I'll look into it," he said as we walked.

  End of discussion. We had arrived at the area where they park the showboats, the ones too big to bring around inside, and thus have to leave them on the river, not far from the fuel pumps, where two out of every three Power Squadron types who cruise by can whap them against the cement with their curling wash. The Jilly III is a custom motorsailer trimaran out of St. Kitts, owned by Jillian, the widow of Sir Henry Brent-Archer. It is seventy feet long with a beam that has to be close to fifty feet. It rides a bad sea with all the stability of a brick church. Minimal superstructure to emphasize an expanse of teak deck as big as a tennis court, with more than half of it shaded by the big colorful awning tarp her crew of three always strings up as soon as they are at dockside.

  The bar table was positioned, draped in white damask. A piano tape was playing show tunes with muted discretion over the stereo system I'd helped her buy the last time she was in Lauderdale. There were a dozen guests assembled, three conversational groups of elegant folk sipping the very best booze from the most expensive glasses. Jilly saw us approaching the little gangplank and came a-striding, beaming, to welcome us aboard.

  A lady of unguessable years, who made damned well certain she gave you no clues at all. If she turned up as a Jane Doe, DOA, traffic, a hasty coroner could not be blamed for penciling in-the apparent age as plus or minus twenty-seven. Tall, slender brunette of such careful and elegant grooming, such exquisitely capped teeth, it seemed safe to assume she was in some area of entertainment. But she had such a much better tan and better physical condition than most show business people, one might safely guess her to be, perhaps, a model for beachwear? A lead in a commercial water ballet?

  But a coroner less hasty, more sophisticated, who searched the scalp and elsewhere for the faintest of traces left by superb Swiss surgeons, who slipped the tinted plastic lenses off and studied the eyes closely as well as the backs of the hands, base of the throat, ankles, wrists.... He might add a quotient of years in direct ratio to his quality of observation and his experience.

  Jilly had a lively and animated face peering out from the careless spill of black hair, all bright questing eyes, black brows, big nose, broad and generous mouth. Ever since I had known Jilly, her voice had cracked like that of a boy in early adolescence, changing from the piercing, songbird clarity of the Irish upperclass countryside to a burring baritone honk and back again. It was so effective it seemed contrived. But a small sailboat had foundered one night in a bad sea, and she had clung to a channel buoy, permanently spraining her vocal cords shouting at the boat traffic until finally she was heard and she and her injured friend were rescued.

  "Meyer!" she cried. "My word, darling! You're of a surpassing radiance. Travis dear, what happened to him? Did he molt or something?" She linked her arms through ours and croaked, "Come on, dears. Meet the ones you don't know and get smashed soon as you can because I am gallons ahead of you."

  The introductions were made. Jillian slipped away to greet more guests. We drank. The sun went down. The night breeze was gentle but cool, and ladies put their wraps back on. The party lights strung from the rigging were properly dim, flatteringly orange. The buffet materialized, as if the table had risen up out of the teak. The music tape was more lively, the volume louder than before.

  I found myself inadvertently paired with a smallish, withered Englishwoman with a shrunken face the color of weak tea and hair dyed the color of raspberry ice. A Mrs. Ogleby. I had seen Meyer talking to her towering and cadaverous husband, pumping him about the latest Common Market difficulties. We carried our buffet plates forward where she could sit on a narrow sheltlike bench built out from the bow where the rail was solid. I sat crosslegged on the deck with my plate atop the massive bow cleat.

  "I understand that you are one of dear Jillian's very favorite Americans, Mr. McGee."

  She managed to load the comment with sweetly venomous insinuation. I beamed up at her. "And she's one of my favorite foreigners."

  "Really! How terribly nice for her. Actually Geoffrey and I were old friends of poor Sir Henry long before he married Jillian."

  "Then Jillian isn't one of your favorite people, eh?"

  She clinked her fork against the plate and leaned forward and peered down at me. "Whatever gave you such an odd idea? She is very dear. Very dear to both of us."

  "I knew Sir Henry, too."

  "Really! I wouldn't have thought you would have known him."

  I was a houseguest at St. Kitts for a few weeks."

  "But that would have been after he was quite ill, I take it." Her smile was thin and knowing in the light of the nearby party lantern. A truly poisonous little woman.

  "No. As a matter of fact, Mrs. Ogleby, Henry and I swam our three miles every morning, went riding or sailing every afternoon, and played chess every evening."

  She paused and regrouped. "Before he became ill, Sir Henry had really fantastic energies. How strange we all thought it that he would marry someone that young, after being a widower so long. It seemed odd. But, of course, that was so awfully long ago it is rather difficult to think of Jillian as-"

  "Just think of me, dears, no matter how difficult it may be," said Jilly. "Hmmm. What is this you have, Lenore? I didn't see it at all. May I? Mmmm... Shrimp, and what a deliciously fiery sauce! Difficult to think of me as what, Lenore darling?"

  When Mrs. Ogleby hesitated, I said, "She was about to pinpoint the date when you and Sir Henry were married."

  "Were you, dear? It slips my mind, you know. Was it just before or just after that fuss with the Spanish Armada?"

  "Don't be absurd! I was only-"

  "You were only being Lenore, which is part of the trouble, isn't it? Travis, I was married to Henry long long ago. Matter of fact, I was but three years old at the time, and most of the people in the church thought it was some sort of delayed christening. There was talk that it was an unwholesome relationship, but by the time I was fourteen-eleven years later-I looked twenty, and everyone said that it had probably been all for the best. And it was, of course. Lenore, you seem to be finished. Dear, come with me and show me just where you found the shrimp, will you please?"

  "But if there is any left, it should be quite obvi-"

  "Lenore!"

  "Quite. Of course. I shall be ha
ppy to show you, my dear Jillian."

  "I knew it would make you happy to have a chance to be nice to me, Lenore."

  Off they went. Old friends, smiling and chattering.

  Twenty minutes later as I was moving away from the bar with some Wild Turkey straight, instead of brandy, Jilly intercepted me and moved me into relative shadow.