Cinnamon Skin

by John D. MacDonald

  I did not know the relationship was in any difficulty until after our showers, after we were dressed and I was ready to drive back to Lauderdale and she was ready to go back to work. It was a banquet night for some fraternal order and she wanted to watch it very closely, as it was their first arrangement at the Eden Beach.

  I said, “When can I come back? When can you drive over? Seems to me I’ve asked before.”

  “It’s pretty damn convenient for you, Travis.”

  “I’m not sure how you mean that.”

  “I’m not really sure either. It just seems to me you’re kind of a lucky chauvinist.”

  “Now hold on! We are pretty damn convenient for each other, if you want to put it that way. I wouldn’t exactly call you unfulfilled, lady.”

  “Bragging about your work?”

  “Jesus, Annie!”

  “I’m sorry. I’m trying to hurt you, I guess, but I don’t know why.”

  “I thought we got on together pretty well.”

  “We do, we do. Of course we do. Maybe it’s some kind of chronic guilt. I used to have the guilts when I worked for Ellis and lived with him. Everybody is supposed to have the right to live as they please these days. Oh, hell, I know what it is, but I hate having to try to explain it to you.”

  “Please do.”

  “We’ve talked a lot, Travis. That’s been such a big part of us, all the good talk. And you’ve told me about the loves you’ve had and the way you lost them. But … I sense a kind of reserve about you. You seem to be totally open with me, but some part of you is holding back. Some part of you doesn’t really believe that you are not going to lose me also. So you cut down on the amount of loss by not getting as deeply involved as … as we could be involved. Do you understand?”

  “I’m trying to. I’m not holding back. I don’t think I am. I tell you I love you. Maybe oftener I should tell you?”

  “It isn’t words or deeds, dear. We’re never part of each other. We are each of us on the outside of the other person.”

  “And this is no time for a bawdy comment.”

  “No, it is not!”

  “Are you talking about marriage, for instance?”

  “No, dammit! But I would like it if we lived closer together and saw each other oftener.”

  “Hell, I wish you’d pick up your life savings, separation pay and all that, and move aboard the Flush.”

  “You know better than that. I really really love it here. I’m doing one hell of a job. It shows in the figures I send in, and in the appreciation they’re giving me. I’m just about the best manager in the chain. I like working with people, finding the way to approach each one to make him or her do a better job, to motivate them. Because of me this resort hotel is clean and profitable and fun.”

  “Okay, already. Why can’t you just settle for what we have? I think it’s a little better than what most people settle for.”

  She sighed and leaned against me, then reached up to kiss the side of my chin. “Okay, McGee. I’ll try, but something about us hasn’t quite meshed yet. Maybe it never will. Who can say? Run along. Drive carefully. Phone often.”

  Two

  The fifth of July began with heavy rain from a tropical depression in the Atlantic east of Miami, a warm rain accompanied by random gusts of wind.

  By ten in the morning, the rain had diminished to a misty drizzle and Meyer’s stubby little cruiser, The John Maynard Keynes, had left the gas dock at Pier 66, Fort Lauderdale, proceeded under the bridge, past the cruise ships tied up at Port Everglades, out the main channel and past the sea buoy, and had headed on an east-southeast course, the blunt bow lifting with the chop, mashing out small sheets of spray each time it fell back.

  An old man in a condominium apartment facing the sea was looking out his sixth-floor window at the time of the explosion and was able to fix the time of it at precisely 10:41 Eastern Daylight Time.

  A cabin cruiser was inbound from Nassau, heading for the channel and wallowing a little in the following sea. It was the Brandy-Gal out of Venice, Florida, owned by a Mr. and Mrs. Simmons Davis. Mrs. Davis was in one of the two fishing chairs, the one on the starboard side, and her husband was at the wheel up on the fly bridge. They both testified that when the two cruisers passed each other, a slender dark-haired woman in an orange string bikini had waved and Mrs. Davis had waved back. They had both seen a bulky man at the wheel and a blond man in the cockpit, coiling and stowing a line.

  Mrs. Davis said she remembered being amused at the unusual name on the cruiser, The John Maynard Keynes; she knew that any mention of Keynesian economic theory tended to make her husband very cross. And she remembered thinking that the chunky little cruiser did not take the chop very well, and that if it were hers she would head back to the Inland Waterway. Also, she thought it seemed to ride too low in the water.

  She estimated that it was two hundred and fifty to three hundred feet from the Brandy-Gal when it blew up. It was there, and then suddenly the only visible thing was a white bright glare, larger than the cruiser, with small objects arching up out of it. There was a sound she described as being both sharp and heavy, a kind of cracking whump that made her ears ring, and she felt heat on her face. Simmons Davis wheeled the Brandy-Gal about and went back in a hopeless search for survivors. He knew he was in eighty to a hundred feet of water. He rigged a small spare anchor to an orange float with ample braided nylon line and flipped it overboard. Then he and his wife, using scoop nets, picked up the few floating bits of debris. Half a scorched life ring. A soiled white cap with a blue bill, part of it still smoldering. The lid from an ice chest.

  He called the Coast Guard on his radio and reported the incident and then headed in, with his wife, Brandy, vomiting over the side.

  An anonymous call was made to the Fort Lauderdale police a few minutes after the explosion. The call was recorded. It was a muffled male voice, heavy and deep, with an accent which could have been Spanish or Portuguese.

  “The Liberation Army of the Chilean peoples hass executed the pig dog Dr. Meyer. Death to all who geev help to the fascist military dictatorship.”

  I knew nothing about it until I got back to Bahia Mar a little after six that Monday evening. I was walking from the parking area over to Slip F-18 where my houseboat, the Busted Flush, is tied up, when Captain Johnny Dow came trotting up to fall in step with me and say, “Hey, they got Meyer.”

  I stopped and stared at him. “What do you mean?”

  “Hell, they blew him up.”

  “In Toronto?”

  “What do you mean, Toronto? In that stupid-looking little cruiser of his. Out past the sea buoy, this morning. They blew him up and took the credit.”

  “Who is they?”

  “One of those bunches of terrorists. You know. The red army of liberation, truth, and justice. One of those.”

  Suddenly I felt hollow and sick. “Johnny, don’t you know who was aboard the Keynes?”

  “How should I know? I just got back from Key West.”

  I explained it to him patiently. “Meyer is doing a series of lectures at a seminar in international banking at Queen’s College in Toronto. His niece and her husband were on vacation. They were living aboard for the two weeks he’d be gone. And Meyer had arranged with Hack Jenkins to take them out fishing or cruising if they wanted to go, because neither of them could operate a boat. Hack was free because his boat is having the engines replaced.”

  Johnny Dow looked stricken. “I knew about the work he was having done on the HooBoy. Jesus! What they say, it was one hell of a big explosion. Anybody aboard got blown to little tiny bits. Jesus! I better go see Hack’s wife. This is terrible, Trav.”

  He went trotting off through the light rain. I unlocked the Flush, checked out my alarm system, and heard the phone ringing as I went in. “Did he get back early?” Annie asked. “Tell me he didn’t come back early, please.”

  “No, dear. He’s due to give the last lecture tomorrow, and he’s booked on a flight that gets i
nto Miami tomorrow night at eight.”

  “They said on the news that a woman on another boat saw three people aboard Meyer’s boat before it blew up. And I thought—”

  “No, the third person was a captain from Charterboat Row here. A friend of both of us. I think you met him once over here. Hacksaw Jenkins. Hack.”

  “Oh, yes! That big rubbery guy that looked like a Japanese wrestler. With the very nice little wife. How terrible! Didn’t you hear any of it on the news on the way back?”

  “I avoid news whenever possible. I was playing tapes all the way across.”

  “Have you got a phone number for Meyer?”

  “I know what hotel he’s in. I could call him, but I don’t know what to say. It’s very sad and very ironic, Annie, after all the trouble we went to, trying to get Meyer out of the dumps.”

  “Look, let me know how it goes. Let me know how he reacts. I love that funny old bear.”

  “I’ll be in touch.”

  I didn’t have to phone Meyer. As I was unpacking toilet articles, he called me.

  “Travis? A reporter from the Miami Herald tracked me down. Is it true? They’re dead?”

  “I didn’t know a thing about it until about fifteen minutes ago. Johnny Dow told me. He thought you were aboard.”

  “Would that I had been,” he said. It was not dramatics. He meant it.

  “What can I do here?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. I can’t think. What is there to do anyway? Where have they taken the bodies?”

  “Meyer, from what I hear it was a very big explosion. Very violent. Out past the sea buoy. Out in the open ocean. Who handles your insurance?”

  “I can’t think. You know him. Tall.”

  “Sure. Walter. So he probably knows about it by now.”

  “Before I phoned you, I checked with the travel desk here at the hotel, and I can’t get out any earlier than the flight I’m already booked on tomorrow.”

  “I’ll pick you up. Ten after eight. Anybody I should let know about it?”

  “There’s an address book in the … oh, dear God, that’s gone too, of course. Anyway, under Amdex Petroleum Exploration in Houston I had the name of her immediate superior. Hatcher, Thatcher, Fletcher … one of those names. Travis, what I don’t understand is this grotesque nonsense about Chile. I was in Santiago for one week, three years ago. It was a small conference. Yes, we were invited to make recommendations to the military government about controlling inflation. And they took the recommendations, and their inflation is under control, unlike the situation in Brazil, Argentina, and Peru. It was a small international conference; Britain, France, Canada, the U.S.—a dozen of us. I didn’t write the final report or any part of it.”

  “Meyer, listen. It’s a crazy world. You were there. You got on somebody’s hit list.”

  “And so Norma and Evan and Hack die. Can you find whoever did it?”

  “There are going to be lots of very competent people trying to find whoever did it.”

  “They never seem to find terrorists.” His voice was lifeless, dulled by loss.

  At ten o’clock the next morning, local time, I got through to a brisk switchboard person at Amdex in Houston.

  “You had a woman working there, a geologist named Norma Lawrence.”

  “Sorry. There’s no one here by that name, sir.”

  “Look, I know she worked for Amdex. She was on vacation.”

  “Oh, you mean Norma Greene! Miss Greene.”

  “Okay. Sure. I want to talk to her boss.”

  “That would be Mr. Batcher. Sorry, but he’s out of the country, sir. If you want to leave a message, we expect him Friday.”

  I sighed with moderate exasperation. “Who on your team there, besides Mr. Batcher, would be interested in being informed that Norma Lawrence, your Miss Greene, is dead?”

  “Oh, God! No! To whom am I speaking?”

  “My name is McGee. Travis McGee. An acquaintance. Her uncle suggested I inform her employer. That’s what I’m doing.”

  “Mr. Dexter will want to know the details. He should be in any minute now. Where can he reach you, Mr. McGee?”

  I gave her the area code and the number. She said she was sorry about the whole thing, and I said I was too.

  “Automobile accident?” she asked.

  “Explosion on a boat.”

  I heard her gasp. “Geez, you know I heard that on the news this morning and didn’t make the connection. I mean I didn’t listen to the name, you know? Her and her new husband and a fishing guide? The news said it was maybe some kind of Cuban terrorists. Why would they—oh, Mr. Dexter just came in. Shall I ring him now?”

  “Please.”

  In a few moments he said, “Mr. McGee? What can I do for you.”

  “Hardly anything. Mrs. Lawrence’s uncle suggested that I call her employer and say that she was killed yesterday in an explosion aboard a boat off Fort Lauderdale, along with her husband and a local charterboat captain.”

  “Lawrence? Norma Greene Lawrence?”

  “That’s right.” There was a silence that lasted so long I said, “Are you there? Hello?”

  “Excuse me. That’s a terrible shock.”

  “I was trying to get hold of Mr. Batcher. I didn’t think you’d know her.”

  “Mr. McGee, this is a small company. A little over two hundred people. The smartest thing we ever did was take on Norma Lawrence when she’d been out of Cal Tech a year. We hired her away from Conoco. She’s … she was going to be one of the best geologists in the business.”

  He said something else, but a sudden rumble of thunder drowned him out.

  “Didn’t hear you. Sorry.”

  “I was saying what a loss it is. What happened?”

  “It looks as if somebody put a bomb aboard, some nut trying to kill her uncle. But he was in Toronto. They were going to dive at the site this morning, but the weather is very bad: eight- to ten-foot waves out there, lots of white water. There was a marker buoy at the site dropped off by a pleasure boat, but it was washed loose during the night.”

  “I don’t know what to say. Maybe her uncle would know what her personal estate arrangements are. We have an insurance program, of course. And there would be other funds payable to her, or her estate.”

  “I’ll have him get in touch. What’s your whole name?”

  “D. Amsbary Dexter,” he said. Hence, I supposed, the Amdex. His company. I wrote down his addresses and phone numbers, and he thanked me for calling him. He said it was a terrible thing, and I said it certainly was. He had one of those thin fast Texas voices. Not a good-old-boy voice, a hustler voice. Hurrying to sell you.

  By nine o’clock Tuesday night, in the very last of the watery daylight, I was heading back toward Lauderdale from the airport in the Mercedes station wagon I’d borrowed from the Alabama Tiger’s highest-ranking girlfriend, the one who has charge of his floating playpen while he is back in Guadalajara having his big old face lifted again. Wind gusts whacked the occasional rain against the right-hand windows. Meyer sat damp and dumpy beside me, radiating bleakness, speaking only when spoken to.

  “Were they annoyed you didn’t give the final lecture?”

  “I was there. I’d taken their round-trip ticket, hotel room, and food. I gave the talk. Only because it was easier than not giving the talk.”

  “The weather has been rotten.”

  “Um.”

  “The tropical storm has moved closer and picked up a little. But they don’t think it will reach hurricane force.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Conversation wasn’t working, so I tried silence. After fifteen minutes he said, “These last few months I’ve gotten into the habit of watching television.”

  “Meyer!”

  “I know, I know. A laxative for the mind. Thinking makes lumps in the mind. Bad memories make lumps. Television flushes them away. At five o’clock, alone there aboard my boat, I’ve been able to get a rerun of M*A*S*H on one channel and then switch to
another rerun on another. Old ones. Trapper, Hawkeye, Radar, Hot Lips. You know, the introduction has stayed almost exactly the same. The helicopters come around the side of the mountain. Then you get a shot from on high of the hospital complex. Then an ambulance, a closer shot of the choppers, and then people running up a hill toward the camera. In the left center of the screen a young woman runs toward you, slightly ahead of the others. You see her for four and a half running strides. Dark hair. Face showing the strain of running and her concern for the wounded. A pretty woman, maybe even beautiful, with a strong, lithe, handsome body. She is in uniform. A gleam of dog tags at the opening of her shirt. I’ve thought about her often, Travis. That shot of her was taken years ago. She’s probably in her thirties now. Or even forty. I wonder about her. When they filmed that introduction she had no way of knowing that she would be frozen there in time, anxious and running. Does she ever think about how strange that is? Multiply viewers times original episodes and the countless reruns on hundreds of stations, and you can see she has been looked at a billion times. What do you pay a person to be looked at a billion times? How many thousand miles has she run? It’s the fly-in-amber idea, plus a paradox of time and space. Maybe she never thinks of it these days. Or yawns when she sees herself. Last night I saw her again, late, in a Toronto hotel room. And she became Norma: dark hair and vitality. Now she is caught in some eternal time lock. Death is an unending rerun until the last person with any memory of you is also dead.”

  I had not heard him say this much since that bloody June day when Desmin Grizzel had so totally terrified him that he had, in his fear, violated his own image of himself. I did not make any response because I wanted him to keep talking. I was afraid that anything I might say would make him clamp shut again, like an endangered clam.

  “I went through the long list of all the things I should have done and didn’t do,” he said. “Go to the wedding. Or at least pick out a present and send it instead of a check. She was my very last blood relative. It’s like a superstitious fear, having no one left in the world directly related to you by blood. As if you had started somehow to disappear. She wasn’t at all pretty, but being in love made her beautiful. I noticed that. And I haven’t been noticing much lately, have I?”