Cinnamon Skin

by John D. MacDonald

  And maybe it had been stowed aboard weeks before Norma and Evan arrived. Maybe a fake factory rep inspecting the new sniffer Meyer had installed had brought it aboard back in January, tucked it into the recess aft of one of the tanks.

  When the mind starts that kind of spinning, sleep becomes impossible. So I wrenched my thoughts away from explosives and thought about Annie Renzetti, about all her sweetness and unexpected strength. I reinvented her, bit by bit, portion by portion, and went trotting down after her, into sleep.

  Four

  The next morning came with a black sky low enough to touch, and about the time I heard Meyer in the shower, the two men from Washington returned. The big natty one with the white hair and red cheeks was Warner Housell, and he called himself a staff person on Senator Derregrand’s Anti-Terrorist Committee, and the terrier type with the hair-piece and the hearing aid was Rowland Service, a specialist from the Treasury Department.

  They both carried dark brown dispatch cases with brass hardware. I told them Meyer would be out in a few minutes, and would they like coffee, and they said they would, no sugar no cream. They were less friendly with each other than they had been the previous afternoon.

  Meyer came out wearing a bathrobe and a headache, and after I had introduced him, he poured himself some coffee and put a chip of ice in it so he could get to it quicker.

  Warner Housell asked the questions. Since he had last called on me, he had briefed himself on Meyer’s career, and he was properly respectful. He just took a few quick dabs at Meyer’s background and then said, “How did you get involved in the Santiago conference?”

  “I was invited by the chairman. Dr. Isling from the London School of Economics. I imagine there was some sort of selection process, but I don’t know what it was. It was an interesting group.”

  “Had you been associated with any of the members before?”

  “Only very indirectly. Good people. Academics with a good sense of what is practical, of what might actually work.”

  “Are you aware of and have you expressed any opinions in your speeches or your writings about the way the military regime treats dissidents?”

  “I’ve expressed no opinions except to friends, like Travis McGee here. Yes, I’ve been aware of the reports of violations of human rights.”

  He turned to me. “Can you recall any such opinions expressed by Dr. Meyer?”

  “Not in his exact words. We’ve discussed what he calls the Shah of Iran paradox. When you crush a rebellion by killing people who are trying to over-throw your government and install their own, at what point are you violating their human rights, and at what point are they violating yours? The Shah let Khomeini escape to Paris. And Batista let Castro leave the country. At what point on the scale are people dissidents, and at what point does it become armed rebellion?”

  Meyer nodded at me approvingly. Warner Housell took notes. “Now then,” he said, “are you aware of any threat on your life as a result of the Santiago conference? Any threat, no matter how indirect?”

  “I didn’t expect any, so I really wasn’t being observant. No strange letters, phone calls, confrontation. Nothing.”

  “Mr. Service, for reasons of his own, considers this a fruitless line of interrogation. Your turn, Mr. Service.”

  Rowland Service took out a small notebook and, in silence, leafed through page after page, his forehead furrowed. It is a tiresome device.

  “What is your source of income, Dr. Meyer?”

  “Please, I do not like doctor used as a form of address except for brain surgeons and such. I am used to being called Meyer. My income comes from lecturing, from consultant work, and from dividends, interest, and capital gains from my investments.”

  He snapped his ferret head around to stare at me from those two pale close-together eyes. “And you, sir?”

  “Me what?”

  “What is your source of income?”

  “A little of this and a little of that.”

  “Impertinence makes me uncomfortable, McGee.”

  “Me too, Service.”

  Housell broke in. “Please, let me explain what he’s trying to establish—”

  “Dammit, I’ll ask my own questions!”

  “After I explain the background. Two organizations in Washington have contacts within the underground groups in Chile, with information contacts arranged through our embassy. The regime has an information network as well. Mr. Service here spent most of yesterday and yesterday evening drawing a complete and total blank not only on the so-called Liberation Army of the Chilean People but on any antipathy toward any economist who attended the Santiago conference three years ago. Things have quieted down a great deal there. There has been enough economic progress to make people look with more favor on the generals. Within the context of everything those groups know, the attack upon Dr. Meyer here is incomprehensible to them. And so the—”

  “I’ll take it,” Service said. “The way we see it, that phone call claiming responsibility was a cover story, intended to mislead. It is far more likely that the explosion was connected to the drug traffic that has proliferated along the Florida coast.”

  Meyer set his coffee aside and stared at the man. “Drug traffic!” he said incredulously. “Drug traffic! My niece was a respected geologist who worked for—”

  “Don’t get agitated. She checked out clean as a whistle. We are wondering about her husband”—he turned a page in his notebook and read off the names—“Evan Lawrence, and the boat captain, Dennis Hackney Jenkins, a.k.a. Hacksaw Jenkins.”

  “Not likely in either case,” I said. “Evan Lawrence came over here with his wife from Houston because she wanted to have him meet her uncle, her only living blood relation. Hacksaw was a successful charterboat captain. He had a long list of people who wouldn’t fish with anybody else. He had a talent for finding fish. He kept that fishing machine of his in fine shape at all times. He was booked solid every season at premium rates. Once upon a time he was a professional wrestler. Once upon a time he spent a year in a county jail. He was raised down in the Keys. There are dozens and dozens of Jenkinses there, all related to him. He settled down when he met Gloria. He was fifty a couple of months ago. I went to the birthday party. They have three sons. The youngest is fifteen. Neither Hack nor the kids would be into drugs in any way, shape, or form.”

  The ferret looked bleakly at me. “We’ll check all that out, of course.”

  The big florid staff person said, “Please forgive my temporary associate here. He has an unfortunate manner.”

  “I’m here to do my job,” Service said, “not beat the bushes for votes.”

  “Do it elsewhere,” Meyer said.

  They both looked at him. “What was that?” Service asked.

  “That was the end of cooperation. No more questions and no more answers. End of interview. Leave.”

  “I know all about you high-level experts,” Service said angrily. “Next time you come sucking around the government for a consultant contract, maybe you’ll find—”

  Housell stood up abruptly. “Come on, Rowland, for God’s sake. You’re acting like a jackass.”

  “And you don’t know the first thing about interrogation!” Service yelled.

  Housell led him off, still protesting, and turned to smile apologetically at us. The door closed. The bell bonged as they stepped on the mat at the head of my little gangway to the dock. Meyer went over to the galley and poured himself fresh coffee. I saw the cup tremble slightly as he lifted it to his lips for a cautious sip.

  He sat and frowned down into the cup. “I wanted them out of here so I could think. They were a distraction.”

  “An incompetent distraction?”

  “That too.” He sipped again and set the cup aside. “Of course it could have something to do with drugs. Somebody cheated somebody or turned them in, and a bomber was hired and he hit the wrong boat. But the anonymous phone call rules that out. The caller knew my name. I’m thinking out loud, using rusty equipm
ent, Travis. Forgive me.”

  “Keep going.”

  “The phone call came about eight minutes after the explosion. So the caller knew it was going to happen and had a vantage point where he could watch for it and then make his call. So the explosive had to be placed just before Hack took the boat out.”

  “I’d agree with that.”

  “If the caller knew that much about what was going on, wouldn’t he have known I wasn’t aboard?”

  “Reasonable assumption.”

  “Then the call was intended to deflect attention from the real motive and the real victim. Somebody wanted to kill Hack, or Evan Lawrence, or Norma. So there was one victim and two innocent bystanders, not three.”

  “Hack Jenkins?”

  “It’s possible, I suppose,” he said. “I keep wondering why he wanted to go on out into that chop.”

  “While you were in Toronto, Hack took them outside after fish. Your niece developed a taste for it. She and Evan were good sailors. Some of it was in fairly heavy weather, so I guess Hack learned how much the Keynes could take, and he had some confidence in the boat. If he had word there was something working a little way out into deep water, I think Evan and Norma, especially Norma, would have urged him to take a shot at it and then come running back in if it started to get a little too rough.”

  “She really liked it?” he said, eyebrows raised.

  “Hack put them into some small tarpon about two days after you left. She hooked a forty-pounder that jumped into the cockpit green, smashed a tackle box, and flipped on out again, and she managed to keep it on the line and bring it to gaff. She told me all about it, with lots of gestures, lots of energy. So, I can understand his heading out past the buoy.”

  “Evan liked it too?”

  “Whatever Norma wanted was fine with him.”

  “It seemed like a good marriage,” Meyer said. “Never knew what hit them. Hell of a phrase, isn’t it? Nothing can happen so fast that there is not a micro-instant of realization. Each nerve cell in the brain can make contact with three hundred thousand other cells, using its hundreds of branches, each branch with hundreds of terminals, and with electrical impulses linking cell to cell. Ten trillion cells, Travis, exchanging coded information every instant. The brain has time to release the news of its own dissolution, time to factor a few questions about why, what, who … and what is happening to me? Perhaps a month of mortal illness is condensed into one thousandth of a second, insofar as self-realization is concerned. We’re each expert in our own death.”

  And I knew that strange last statement was correct. We’re experts. We get it done the first time we try it. And we spend too much time thinking about it before we do it.

  “Hack’s two older boys are back in town,” I said. “They’re waiting for the sea to flatten out and one of these evenings, about seven thirty, all the charter boats will go out and they’ll drop a wreath on the water, and the Reverend Sam John Hallenbee of the First Seaside Baptist Church will give the memorial service on a bull horn, consigning to the deep and so on.”

  “I’d like to have that done for Norma and Evan too. But all her friends are in Houston. I’ll have to go over there and see what shape her affairs are in. I would suppose I’d be her heir, but I’m not sure.”

  “Want any breakfast?”

  “Thanks. I don’t think I could keep it down yet.”

  “Why don’t you get dressed and we’ll go talk to one or both or all of the Jenkins boys.”

  “And Gloria,” Meyer said. “I have to face that. She’s going to feel bitter toward me. I asked Hack as a personal favor to take Norma and Evan out in the Keynes a few times. He said he was glad to do it. With the HooBoy laid up, he felt restless unless he could get out on the water once in a while.”

  He went trudging off to put on some clothes. He didn’t have much choice. All his treasured old shirts and pants and jackets had blown up along with his boat.

  Five

  Dave Jenkins was twenty-two, and he was a guide down in the Keys, an expert at fly-rod fishing for tarpon, at stalking the wily permit, at outsmarting bonefish. I had heard he was beginning to pick up a reputation after surviving the early attempts of the locals to run him off. They play rough down there. He had come up as soon as he heard. And Bud Jenkins, the twenty-year-old, had come down from Duke University. He was there on full scholarship.

  Hack and Gloria lived in a two-bedroom frame bungalow on a county road a long way east of the city. They had an acre of flatland, two big banyan trees near the house, a pond with Chinese white geese, and an electrified fence around the pond area to keep the predators away from the geese. There were almost a dozen vehicles parked in the drive and in the yard, several of them the big glossy pickups that charterboat captains favor, with tricky paint jobs and all the extras. A gabble of small children was racing about in the mud. Miss Agnes, my ancient blue Rolls pickup, looked odd parked with the modern machines, like an old lady in a bonnet at a rock concert.

  The small house was packed with people. I could see them through the windows, moving around. The intense competition of the fishing folk was dropped whenever tragedy struck.

  There was a shallow front porch with a slanted roof, an obvious afterthought. Two steps led up to the porch level. As we approached the steps, the screen door burst open and Rowland Service, the T-man, our recent visitor, came out at a dead run, with big Dave Jenkins so close behind him it took me a half second to realize, as I was stepping back out of the way, that Dave was running him out, with one hand on the slack of the seat of the pants, the other on the nape of the neck. Service’s eyes and mouth were wide open. Dave gave him a final giant push and stopped at the edge of the steps. Service landed running, but leaning too far forward for balance. He made a good effort, though, and galloped about thirty feet from the steps before diving headlong into the wet grass.

  Warner Housell, the staff person, came sidling out, carrying both dispatch cases and trying to look inconspicuous. An ingratiating smile came and went, over and over, very swiftly. Dave made a feint at him and stamped his feet. Housell made a bleating sound and sprang off the porch and trotted out to where Service was getting up, dabbing at the mud stains on his knees.

  “Hey, Trav,” Dave Jenkins said. “Meyer.”

  Housell and Service got into their economy rental. Service was apparently talking angrily and Housell was shaking his head no. They drove off.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “They came a couple minutes ago. The big one was trying to hush up the little one, but the little one, he asked my mom if maybe Daddy was blowed up on account of he was mixed up in some kind of drug action. He asked her a little bit mean and a little bit loud, and I got my hands on him before one of the other men tried to kill him. It broke her up some. Miserable little scut. Drugs! It took Daddy seven months to set aside enough for the engine work on the HooBoy, so he wouldn’t have to borrow at no high rate. Drugs? Daddy was dead against it. Remember, Trav? He came on those three bales of pot floating out there near Sherman Key over a year ago, and he picked them up and brought them in and turned them over to the narcotics guys. He had no charter aboard. Who was to know? Mom said he hadn’t even had a taste of booze since he got born again twenty years ago.”

  “Is there any chance of talking to Gloria?” Meyer asked.

  “This wouldn’t be too good of a time, not right now. She’s in the bedroom with a couple of her women friends, and they’re in there praying and crying and hugging.”

  “Does she blame me?” Meyer asked.

  Bud came out of the house in time to hear Meyer’s question. “I don’t think she’s thought of it that way. I suppose she could get around to it in time,” he said. He was the small-boned son, the one who was most like his mother physically, with delicate features and steel-rimmed glasses.

  “Just tell her, when you get a chance, that it appears as if somebody was trying to make it look like a terrorist act,” Meyer said. “There would be no reason to go af
ter me. And nobody has ever heard of the organization that claimed credit. It was a cover for something. We think that if they were in close enough touch to make the phone call so soon after the explosion, they must have known I wasn’t aboard. They were after somebody else. After one or both of the Lawrences, or after Hack.”

  Both boys shook their head, and Dave said, “Nobody would up and kill my daddy. Maybe by accident if it come to a fight, something like that. He was sometimes mean. But not planned ahead. Not that way. Mom said he really liked that couple, liked showing them places along the Waterway, liked putting them into fish. But he kept saying what a terrible boat you had, Meyer, and how much work it needed.”

  Bud said, “If they ever find out, I think they’ll discover that somebody came over from Texas, following that couple, and killed them, and it didn’t matter to them who else they killed in the process. Maybe it was somebody who didn’t like the idea of your niece marrying that man. Or maybe it was something to do with the oil business, something she knew that somebody wanted covered up for good. If you get any clue at all, me and Dave and Andy would be most grateful to know who did it. Dave and Andy and me wouldn’t like it to be one of those things where it takes three years to come to trial, and finally they call it second-degree, and then there’s a bunch of appeals and the guy gets out a couple of years later. We’d surely like the chance to save him the fuss of waiting around all that time for his trial.”

  I looked at their eyes. Hack’s eyes looking out at me. The same amber brown with golden glints, one pair behind lenses, one pair squeezed by the wrinkled squint of a few thousand hours searching the sun riffles for fish sign. A fierce independence.

  “What we find out,” I said, “you’ll get to know.”

  There was a look of satisfaction diluting the intensity, and Bud said, “We’ll tell Mom it doesn’t look like it was anybody after you, Meyer.”

  • • •