Cinnamon Skin

by John D. MacDonald

  On the way back to Bahia Mar, Meyer said, “I never really got to know Norma. One summer I stayed out there in Santa Barbara with my sister, Glenna, for a couple of weeks, helping each other remember things, good and bad. I think Norma must have been about fourteen. She was in a school for exceptionally gifted children, and that summer she was going on some sort of series of field trips with a batch of kids. Overnights, with sleeping bags. She had a rock hammer and a closet full of labeled samples. Her eyes danced and shone with the pure excitement of learning things. Her world was four and a half billion years old, and she had a vocabulary newly full of strike-slip faults, cactoliths, andesite, and monzonite, and she made tilting slipping shapes with her hands to show us how the mountains came about. Strange the way how a bright young brain, exposed to a certain kind of knowledge at just the right time, bends in the direction of that knowledge, sops it up, relishes it. Glenna concealed her dismay at having her only child aimed toward a life of bounding from crag to crag with a lot of rough people, carrying a rock hammer, a sample bag, and a chemistry set. I thought I would get a chance to know her better, after Toronto. Did you see much of them?”

  “Not much. They came aboard a few times. She was picking up a good tan. He had a tendency to burn. The obvious thing about them was they were in love. There was between them a … I don’t know the word for it.…”

  “An erotic tension?”

  “Right. Tangible. You could almost see it. Like smoke.”

  “I didn’t realize she would ever get to be so handsome,” Meyer said. “She was in fact a very homely young girl, all knees, elbows, and teeth. Glenna thought it would be useful for her to have a profession, and she told me Norma would probably end up in the world of academe, taking students on geology field trips. I’m talking around and around and around what I’m trying to say.”

  “Take your time.” We were at a light. I looked over at him. He was scowling.

  “Travis, suppose a drunk came across the center line and killed the two of them while I was in Toronto. It would be the same degree of loss. The obligation would be the same. To go to Houston and … tidy up. So, in that process, which I want to accomplish by myself, I may or may not come upon anything which might be related to what happened. If I do come upon anything, I’m not sure I’ll take the right steps. Do you understand?”

  “Of course.”

  “You’d come help out if I come upon anything like that?”

  “Gee, I don’t really know. I have these tennis matches with the ambassador’s daughter, and I’ve been thinking of getting my teeth capped. You know how it is.”

  “I’ll pay all expenses.”

  “For Christ’s sweet sake, Meyer!”

  “I’m sorry. It’s just that I’m not at home in the world the way I was. The same as it would be, I suppose, for a person who had been in a coma for a year.”

  “You holler, I’ll come running.”

  When the big swells flattened in a couple of days, they were able to anchor a work barge out beyond the sea buoy, and divers went down and located what was left of The John Maynard Keynes.

  It wasn’t much. The heavy metal parts of the old cruiser were scattered over a half acre of sloping sand, mud, and weed, with a lot of the stuff already covered or partly covered by sand drift. All the lighter stuff was gone—wood, paper, flesh, plastic, and bone—pulled up and down the coast, in and out of the pass, by tides and currents. From the amount of damage done to the metal remains—engines, anchors and chain, refrigerator, galley stove, wheels and rudder, hatch frames, and transom rail—the borrowed expert estimated that the amount of explosive used was from four to six times the amount necessary to kill three people aboard and sink the vessel. He called it “interesting overkill.” Because of the submersion in seawater, his tests for the kind of explosive used were inconclusive. He found nothing which could have been any part of a detonating device.

  All the Bahia Mar boats that could make it, and were interested enough to make it, went out in a twilight procession. Meyer and I dropped our separate wreath for Norma and Evan on an outgoing tide. The minister brayed words of destiny and consolation over the bull horn. We bowed heads for the final prayer and headed back, in convoy, with the running lights winking on in the gathering darkness, moving aside to let the Royal Viking Sea come easing out, a giant hotel, golden lights aglow, full of holiday people on their way to the islands and the tour buses.

  After I was properly secure again at Slip F-18, with the phone and electric plugged back in, we went out and ate and came back to the Flush and went topside into the warm bright night, leaned back in the deck chairs up on the sun deck to look at stars too bright to be totally obscured by the city glare and the city smog. But we could smell the smog underneath the scents of the sea, a sad acid, mingling burned wine and spoiled mousse.

  “I keep thinking I’ll look something up and suddenly realize that I can’t,” Meyer said. “I don’t even have a picture of her. There was a wedding picture, a Polaroid print she had duplicated.”

  “I think they can make a print from a print. In fact, excuse me for stupidity. That’s what they would have to do. So somebody else will have a print and you can get another made.”

  “Somebody in Houston,” he said. “Very probably. You know, all the pictures I had of the Keynes were on the Keynes.”

  “I’ll look in the drawer where I throw pictures. There’s probably one there, if you want it.”

  “I can’t get used to being a guest. I want to have a boat and live on it just where I’ve been living all these years.”

  “We can go shopping, if you want.”

  “Not yet. That is, if I’m not getting on your nerves.”

  “So far you’re only a minor irritation.”

  “Somebody around here must have taken pictures of Norma and Evan.”

  “Sure. But who? They’d be in tourist shots, mostly by accident. Of course there was a very fuzzy picture taken by the woman from Venice, the one that was reproduced in the paper two days after the … the accident.”

  “Maybe if we call it the murder, it will be more accurate.”

  I went below and looked for the old newspaper, but it had been tossed out.

  So on Saturday morning, I called a man I knew in the city room of the paper, Abe Palinka, and asked about the photograph. Abe checked and called me back.

  “What it was, it was one of those little tiny negatives from one of those little Kodak cameras that take the cartridge. It was on Kodacolor, and maybe you know you get a pretty dim-looking black-and-white off of that, worse in repro in the paper, but Clancy thought it was good enough to use because it was like, he said, dramatic: the scene before it went boom. What we did, we got a rush job on development, made a set of prints, picked the one we wanted, made a black-and-white, and sent the rest back to the lady—got a pencil?—Mrs. Simmons Davis of eight four eight Sunrise Road, Venice, three three five nine five. How come you haven’t given me any kind of a hot lead in a hell of a while, McGee?”

  “Nothing has been going on.”

  “I bet. Okay, if that’s what you want me to believe.”

  “Thanks, Abe.”

  I dialed information for that area and got the Davis number. After the fourth ring a low, warm, husky, slightly-out-of-breath voice said, “Hello?”

  “Mrs. Davis?”

  “This is Brandy Davis.”

  “I’m calling from Fort Lauderdale. My name is McGee. Travis McGee.”

  “Mr. McGee, when I hear the name of your city, why, my stomach just sort of rolls right over. It’s been five days now, but the whole thing is just as vivid in my mind as if it happened five minutes ago. Excuse me, I’m a little out of breath. I was just locking the door when I heard the phone, and I ran back.”

  “I don’t want to hold you up.”

  “I was just going to the drugstore is all.”

  “What I’m calling about, a dear friend of mine owned that little cruiser.”

  “I heard he wa
s out of town when it happened.”

  “That’s right. And the pictures he had of his boat and of his niece all were blown up with the boat. We saw the one you took they used in the paper.…”

  “That was a terrible job they did! My goodness. They paid me twenty-five dollars for the right to use it. I wish they hadn’t said who took it, even. I take much better pictures than that!”

  “I would think so.”

  “What I did, you see, I took two. It was an uggo little old boat and so I wouldn’t have taken any at all except that Sim and I, we collect weird boat names, and you need a picture to prove it. I guess our, or at least my, favorite this cruise was a Miami motor sailer we saw in Nassau called Estoy Perdido. Meaning, I Am Lost. Well, I took two because it looked to me, looking through the little finder, that a wave slopped up and maybe hid part of the name on the transom just as I clicked it. But it turned out they both came out with good shots of that fancy gold lettering. You mean that poor man would like a picture of his boat and his niece?”

  “He would indeed.”

  “I got them back in the mail day before yesterday, and I took them right down to the camera shop and ordered an eight-by-ten of the best one, the one that was nearest when I took it. That usually takes forever, but I do have the small prints the newspaper made up, or had made up. Maybe you think it’s a little creepy, me ordering the enlargement, but nothing like that ever happened to me before, never in my life. I have no need for these two prints, so I’d just as soon put them in the mail to you when I go to the drugstore, okay?”

  “You’re very kind.” I waited while she got a pencil, then gave her the address.

  “Aboard the Busted Flush?” she said. “Maybe I should come over and take a picture of that! What is it?”

  “Kind of an old barge-type houseboat. Fifty-two foot, two diesels. It’ll go six knots if the wind isn’t against it.”

  “It sounds quaint. The name is really odd. Does it mean … some kind of broken toilet?”

  “No. A poker hand. That’s when—”

  “I know poker. I know about a flush and a straight flush. And I know how, like in stud, a hand can get busted.”

  “I had a black card facedown and four hearts showing.”

  “You mean you won the whole houseboat on—”

  “No, I won a pretty fair pot on that bluff and kind of by accident let the hole card show after I’d pulled the pot in and everybody else had folded. From then on they kept staying in, to keep me honest. And I had a lot of good hands.”

  Her voice dipped a half octave. “You sound really kind of adventurous, Mr. Travis McGee. Maybe you could sort of whip over here and pick up the prints in person? I’m getting a little stir crazy with Sim away at one of those weird conferences about setting up trusts in Liechtenstein.”

  “It certainly sounds like an attractive idea, Mrs. Davis, and I would really take you up on it like a shot, but on Monday I’m being fitted for a new prosthesis.”

  “Uh. Well, maybe some other time,” she said briskly.

  “The other one never hurts at all,” I said.

  “How nice for you. I’ll put these in the mail right away. Nice to talk to you. Good-by, Mr. McGee.”

  Meyer flew to Houston on Sunday and phoned me at four o’clock on Monday afternoon, the twelfth. His voice sounded tired.

  “A progress report. Or a no-progress report. The traffic in this city is monstrous. They are maniacal. I’ve checked out of the hotel and moved into Norma’s apartment. Want to write this down?” After he gave me the address and phone number, he said, “It’s quite nice. It’s a rental, in what they call a garden complex, nothing over two stories, jammed in close but angled very cleverly to give the illusion of privacy. All her stuff is here, so I thought it would be easier to work if her lawyer set it up for me to move in. She left a will, leaving everything to me. It’s dated soon after Glenna died. She was probably going to change it again in favor of Evan. They were married on a Saturday, the seventeenth of April. He may have moved in here with her before then. Probably did. I’ve started going through her papers. Her lawyer is pleasant enough. It’s a small firm. He handled her tax matters and apparently advised her on investments. Windham, his name is. Roger Windham. Did I say he seems pleasant? I’m probably repeating myself. I find I seem to get tired easily. There’s a lot to do. Windham thinks she had some things in a storage warehouse somewhere. And a lockbox at the bank where she did her checking. He’ll have to arrange with the tax people about opening the safety deposit box with them present.”

  “Want me over there yet?”

  “Not yet. I’ll get the chores done, and if anything comes to light that might be a hint as to anybody wanting to kill her, then, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble …”

  “Come off it! That Mrs. Davis is mailing me one print each of the two pictures she took. She took them because of the name. They collect boat names.”

  “It still seems like a bad dream. There’s a picture of her parents standing with me somewhere in front of a lot of trees. It’s in a silver frame on her dressing table. I haven’t any memory of its ever being taken. I usually remember things like that.”

  “Meyer. Get some sleep tonight.”

  “Did I tell you about my mail?”

  “I forged your name on the change of address card. It’s coming here. Today you got a fat publication from the Federation of Concerned Economists, a bill from American Express, a catalogue from the Vermont Country Store, and a bank statement. Also, I talked to Irv. There’s a thirty-one-foot Rawson made in Panama City, Florida, moored over at B-Eighty. Apple-pie shape. They went out of business a few years ago because they made them too good. GE diesels, air, recording fathometer. The old couple that lived aboard, he went into the hospital in March, and then into a nursing home, and he died last week, and she is looking to sell privately before she puts it in the hands of a broker. She wants thirty days to move out and go back to South Dakota. She’s talking fifty-eight five. Walter says you’ll get thirty-nine or forty out of the insurance.”

  “I don’t want to think about it yet.”

  “It’s a good price and a roomy hull.”

  “When I do get another boat, I’ll have to think of a name. I couldn’t call it the same thing.”

  “Well … stay in touch.”

  So I walked over to B-80 and met the old lady from South Dakota. She showed me the boat. She was proud of it. She said she knew one of them would have to die, sooner or later, and they had each hoped it would be themself instead of the other one. “But George won, I guess,” she said. “Tell your friend how nice it is, how nice we kept it.”

  Six

  When I got the mail on Wednesday, there was a buff envelope with Brandy Davis and her address embossed on the flap. It was heavy stock, with a bright yellow tissue lining, and the two prints were inside, with no note or comment.

  I glanced at the two prints just long enough to see the transom and the name and the stubby vessel tilting under a lead-colored sky, white crests rolling on a dishwater sea.

  When I was back aboard the Flush I looked at them more carefully in bright sunlight. The first print showed the Keynes at fifty or sixty feet, going away, and the second at about a hundred feet. Assuming an average six knots on each vessel, they were diverging at about fifteen miles an hour, or a little better than twenty feet per second. So about ten seconds after the second picture was taken, the three people were blown to bits: the tall slender woman with the brand-new tan and the vivid orange string bikini, standing at the starboard side near the rail, one hand braced against the bulk-head, waving and smiling, teeth white, black hair snapping in the wind; the burly figure of Hacksaw Jenkins at the sheltered wheel, in silhouette against the sea beyond the windshield, Greek captain’s hat on the back of his head; and Evan Lawrence, bent over so far in the cockpit, working on a line, that in the first picture only his back and denimed rump showed, then caught in the second picture beginning to straighten up, beginning to turn. />
  I accepted it as Evan Lawrence, the man with whom I had broken bread, drunk wine, told the tales. And suddenly it was not Evan Lawrence. In the act of starting to straighten up, starting to turn, it became a different person, younger, not as broad, with skin that took a better tan, hair longer, tangled, sun-streaked. Once it became someone else, I could not by any exercise of imagination or will turn it back into Evan Lawrence. But it did turn into somebody I knew from somewhere. I looked at the line of the brow, and the slant of the jaw as seen from the back, from off to the left side. The print was sharp. There was a glint of something on the left wrist, a watch or a bracelet. I found the magnifying glass in the drawer, but I couldn’t make it out. I looked at the hand, then, and I could make out something very specific. The pinky and the ring finger of that left hand were stubs little better than a half finger long.

  And then I knew who it was. Along Charterboat Row he was known universally as Pogo, God only knows why. Maybe because he was as cheerful as that immortal possum. Meyer had once pointed him out to me as an example of the perfectly happy fellow. He had a functioning IQ, Meyer guessed, of seventy-five. He loved the sea. He grew terribly excited when fish were being caught. His body seemed to thrive on cola and junk food. He could sew bait, rig lines, net little fish, gaff big fish, wash down the boat, clean up the mess, serve the Coke and beer, swarm up to the tuna tower to search the sea for fish sign. He was cheerful, smiling, quick in his motions, polite to everyone. His face had a fat bland look at odds with his tough body. He had a little thin high voice. He filled in when any one of the captains needed a hand for a day or a week. They paid him off in cash. He had some learning defect which kept him from ever being able to read and write.

  I walked down to Charterboat Row and found the Key Kitty with her cockpit hatches open, Captain Ned Rhine staring gloomily down at an electrician working in there.

  Ned gave me a beer and we sat on the side of the dock and talked about the memorial service with the wreaths, and how Gloria was bearing up, and how his wife said Gloria would probably get married again someday. Nobody would ever guess she had those three hulking sons.