Cinnamon Skin

by John D. MacDonald

  “Seen Pogo around?” I asked casually.

  “Come to think of it, no. Maybe not for a week. Got something for him to do?”

  “If he’s available. Where does he stay anyway?”

  “Here and there. Here and there. After Roy got hisself all busted up that time last year when the kid ran into his truck, Pogo slept aboard the Honeydoo and worked mate while Stub was taking the contracts Roy had set up. For a while there I think he bunked in the supply room at Castle Marine until it got sold. Pogo is okay. He does a better job of work than some brighter people around here I could name. And he isn’t ever grouchy.”

  I changed the subject, and a little later I unchained my bicycle and rode over to Pier 66 and walked out to the gas dock. I don’t buy fuel there, so I don’t know the attendants. There were two on duty, a narrow-faced redheaded man in the office and a young Cuban with a shaved head filling the tanks of a Prowler from Georgia. The redhead had been on duty the morning of the fifth.

  They remembered gassing The John Maynard Keynes only because it had blown up soon afterward, and the police had questioned them after somebody reported having seen the Keynes at their gas dock at about ten that morning.

  They had noticed the woman in the string bikini but not much else. There were three people on the boat. Or maybe four. It had been a busy morning. The woman had paid cash. She had gone below to get her purse. Ninety-five gallons of regular. A hundred and twenty-nine dollars and twenty cents. She’d asked for a receipt.

  “Sure, I’ve seen Hack Jenkins around,” the redhead said. “I remember wondering what he was doing with that boat instead of his own.”

  Neither of them knew anybody called Pogo who worked around the docks over at Bahia Mar. As all the charterboat captains would customarily buy fuel at Bahia Mar, that wasn’t unexpected. Every large marina seems to acquire its own village of regulars.

  As I biked on back to Bahia Mar, I kept tugging at the minor improbabilities, hoping something would come loose. Norma Lawrence had not impressed me as the kind of take-charge lady who would jump up and pay the bills. It would be more likely she would get the money from her purse and give it to Evan to pay the bill with. And why had Evan stayed below when they went out past the sea buoy into the chop building up from the offshore storm? That was when the customers were always on deck, holding on, peering into the wind like dogs leaning out of car windows.

  I carried the bike aboard and locked it to the ring I had bolted to the aft bulkhead, under the overhang, unlocked the Flush, and went into the lounge, into the air-conditioned coolness that chilled the sweat the ten-speed generated.

  So what if Evan Lawrence wasn’t aboard for the big bang?

  It was an idea that offended my emotional set. A very likable guy with a good grin, a man of warmth, of funny stories, a newly wedded man in love with his wife. And if he hadn’t been aboard, and hadn’t made known the fact of his survival, then it was a possibility he had engineered the explosion and made the anonymous call to deflect any possible suspicion.

  So if he was that sort of man, he would have left a special scent along his back trail. I did not know enough about him, and neither did Meyer. Dinner aboard is not an excuse for an inquisition. He had seemed open about himself, but I could recall no talk of family. Funny stories of things which had happened to him here and there along the way. How they had met. How he had pursued her. Strange jobs he had held. Nothing more than that. They were in love. And there was that physical attraction so strong it was tangible, a musk in the air.

  In the evening I went over to Charterboat Row during the interval after the customers have had their pictures taken with their fish, that time when the boats are cleaned up, the gear put back in shape, the salt hosed off. I had some heavy work I wanted done, and I was looking for Pogo.

  Finally Dan List, skipper of the Nancy Mae III, told me I might try the construction shack over behind that big sign I had seen which said SHORE VIEW TOWERS, 200 ELEGANT CONDOMINIUM APARTMENTS, $165,000–$325,000, READY FOR OCCUPANCY SOON. MODEL READY FOR VIEWING. Phone so-and-so for appointment. But the construction cranes had stopped when the structure was about four stories high. They stood silent against the sky, like huge dead bugs. Somebody had run out of something essential: money or time or life. One of those things.

  There was an old man in a blue uniform living in the construction shack. In the fading daylight I could see the cot in there, neatly made up. The old man had a big belly, and a badge, and a revolver in a black holster.

  “You see that half-wit Pogo, friend, you tell him the only reason he should come back here is to get his stuff. It’s in a suitcase and a cardboard box. What clothes he owns and those filthy dirty picture books. I’m only filling in until they can get somebody for next to nothing, like they paid Pogo. I’m a licensed security guard, and my old lady is nervous alone at night in the apartment while I’m here in this stinking heat to keep vagrants and Haitians and trash from sneaking into that there building and messing up. You tell him he doesn’t show up soon, I’m putting his stuff out in the weather. There’s no agreement we got to store it for him. You tell him that.”

  “Is there anything of value?”

  “There’s a gray metal lockbox. It’s locked and there’s no key I could find around here. And the little television set I’m using, to keep from going nuts. The picture starts rolling and there’s no way to stop it. You just have to wait until it stops. Feels like it would pull your eyes out on sticks.”

  He kept slapping the black leather holster. It was shiny from being slapped ten thousand times. It was a habit that could get him killed. I said if I saw Pogo, I’d tell him.

  Even when a missing person is reported, nothing much happens. Local police forces have higher priorities. Nobody would report Pogo, and I saw no reason why I should. There would be a lot of interviews, a lot of forms to fill out. Transients flow back and forth across the country, and up and down the coasts. They are of little moment. They become the unidentified bones in abandoned orchards. Dumb, dreary, runaway girls are hustled into the dark woods, and their dental-work pictures go into the files. As the years do their work, shallow graves become deep graves, and very few of the thousands upon thousands are ever discovered. Burial without the box, without the marker, hasty dirt packed down onto the ghastliness of the ultimate grin. Old Fatso would eventually pry open the box, take anything of value, and destroy the rest. The trash truck would pick up the suitcase and the cardboard box, sodden with rainwater. And years down the road somebody would say, “Hey, remember that Pogo that used to work around here? Kind of a dimwit but a good worker?”

  And somebody else would say, “Guess that was before my time.”

  Nobody remembers very long any more. Like the half owner of the Nancy Mae III, which Dan List skippers. Three seasons ago, as a defensive lineman for the Dolphins, he made thirteen sacks in the regular season before they smashed his knee. And now I can’t remember his name. Six-five, about two fifty-five, quick as a weasel. And I can’t remember any part of his name.

  Intimations of mortality often make me lonesome. I went back to the Flush and stretched out and called Annie Renzetti on the new private line that rings in her office and in her beach bungalow over there in Naples. Four rings and hang up. If she was alone she could catch it on four rings. If not alone, she could call me back. If she wasn’t in, nobody else would answer that line. It was known to be private.

  I tried again at nine fifteen, and she answered from the bungalow. “How’s with you, Annie?” I asked her.

  “This day has just about flattened me, love. They start arriving tomorrow before lunch.”

  “Who?”

  “My convention, dummy. Did you forget? Fifty-three specialists and their wives, or husbands, or special close friends. Proctologists.”

  “I forgot it was this week.”

  “By Monday afternoon when they all leave, my smile is going to feel as if it was nailed on my face. Tomorrow, early, some computerized little snit fr
om company headquarters will be here to double-check my arrangements. This group doesn’t strike bargains. They want it nice. They’ll get it nice. Management wants them back here every year. What I have paid out for beef you wouldn’t believe. Lobsters and clams are coming by air express. Orchids for the ladies. A really good trio in the lounge. And by the time they arrive I will have personally inspected every room, every suite, every bath towel, tested every lightbulb. The thing I resent, Trav, is their thinking they have to send somebody down to backstop me. I’ve proved I’m a damn good manager here. I get the printouts from the whole chain every month. I’m always in the top ten on the ratio of gross profit to gross sales, percentage occupancy, personnel turnover. They hired me to manage so they should let me manage, right?”

  “Right!”

  “My, my, my, how I do go on. Why should I take it out on you?”

  “I’m your friend. Remember?”

  “But if you were thinking of driving over about now …”

  “Forget it?”

  “Yes. Look me up after the convention. I fought it, you know. I don’t think we should have conventions here, even in the slack season, even at top rates. I’ve had to turn away reservations good old customers wanted to make, just to accommodate these … these …”

  “Careful.”

  “Are you okay, love? You sound kind of down.”

  “Lonesome, sort of. Meyer phoned from Houston. He got permission to stay in her apartment while he takes care of the details. He sounded depressed, but he seems to be coping. But I know something he doesn’t know, and I don’t know whether I should tell him. I’m going over there soon. Maybe tomorrow.”

  “Whether you should tell him what?”

  “I won’t go into how I found out, but if only three people were blown to bits on Meyer’s boat, one was his niece, one was Hacksaw Jenkins, and one was a local retard, an itinerant worker everybody called Pogo, actual name unknown.”

  “What do you mean, if only three?”

  “The photo taken showed three. Maybe Evan Lawrence was below. But I have the queasy feeling he was on shore. I have the feeling that maybe he was where he could watch the Keynes and push a button on a transmitter. I have that feeling in spite of believing he was not the kind of person to do something like that. I really liked him. He had a good face, good laugh lines. You know?”

  “I know what you mean. How would he arrange to stay ashore?”

  “I don’t know. Back out at the last minute. Plead an upset stomach. And Hack would have picked up Pogo to help with the fishing because he’d be busy at the wheel out there in that chop. The Lawrences had been living aboard for almost two weeks. Time enough for him to poke around in Meyer’s files and pick up enough information so he could make a convincing phone call about the Chilean connection.”

  “But what are you going to do?”

  “Annie, I can dig into his life and find out if he was what I believed him to be. If so, he blew up too. If the back trail is rancid, he didn’t die, and we have a new kind of ball game.”

  “In either case, you’ll have to start in Houston, and you’ll have to tell Meyer what you are thinking, won’t you? So no need to worry. Tell him the whole thing.”

  “He’s had so much—”

  “Look. Trust him to be able to accept that immortal truth, dear, that life is unfair. And unpleasantly abrupt at times.”

  “It would be a lot easier to talk this all over if you had your head on my shoulder, and my left arm around you, and—”

  “Hush. Please hush, McGee. I’d be of no use to you at all.”

  “Let me be the judge of that.”

  “No way.”

  “And so I am separated from my own true love by fifty-three proctologists?”

  “That’s one way to put it. Say hi to Meyer for me. Extend my love and affection and sympathy and so on. And phone me from Houston or wherever you may be—but not before Monday night next, which will be … the nineteenth. Look, if things turn ugly, don’t take any dumb chances, okay?”

  “No dumb chances.”

  “I had sort of an idea. There’s a place on the waterway where they are condominiumizing boat slips: in other words, selling the slip itself with the dock, pilings, and overhead roof, like for forty or fifty thousand for a slip big enough for the Busted Flush. I haven’t worked out the arithmetic yet, but I suspect that I could talk management into letting me invest in that as an adjunct facility to the Eden Beach. Then we could work out a lease arrangement, a sort of contract with you, to have a kind of permanent party-boat setup whereby the guests at the hotel here could sign up ahead and there could be sightseeing cruises, or cocktail cruises, or maybe even dinner cruises if we could work out the service details. What I mean to say, it could be a very nice little living for you, dear. It wouldn’t be a killing but it would be steady, and you would practically be your own boss. And we would … see each other oftener.”

  “And I wouldn’t be charging around taking dumb chances?”

  “Something like that.”

  “On the dinner cruises, could I wear one of those great huge tall white chef’s hats?”

  “Don’t be such a bastard, McGee.”

  “Look into your heart of hearts and see if you can really see me doing that.”

  “Hmm.… Oh, shucks. No.”

  “Thanks anyway for the concern.”

  “You’re welcome indeed. Good night, McGee. I love you.”

  Seven

  On Thursday morning as I was washing up after breakfast, Dave Jenkins came by to see me. Old-looking for twenty-two. Burned to a brick bronze by the summer sun down in the Keys. Muscles rolling under the parched hair on his big arms. Sloping powerful shoulders, just as Hack had.

  You have to wait the locals out. Nothing is done without a reason, and sooner or later they either get around to it or change their minds and leave. The quickest way to change their minds is to press them to find out what they want.

  He looked around the lounge and said, “Changed it some.”

  “You haven’t been aboard in a while.”

  “I guess I was about fourteen. You and Dad arm-rassled to a draw, maybe forty minutes, with the sweat popping out and one or the other of you groaning from time to time, your faces like beets. He was a little bit stronger, and you had a little bit better leverage, having a longer arm.”

  “I remember.”

  “Then it was Meyer stepped in and called it a draw, and you both fell off the chairs and lay on the floor there, panting like dogs in the summertime.”

  “I remember it well. Want a beer?”

  “I won’t ever forget it, not ever. I’d never seen anybody ever rassle my dad to a draw, arm-rassling or any other kind. Little early for me for a beer, I guess.”

  “Carta Blanca?”

  “Well, not all that early.”

  He drifted out to the galley with me, and I took two cold ones out of the locker and uncapped them. We went back into the lounge, and he dropped into a chair and took long swallows, wiped his mouth on the back of his brown hand. “Real good. Thanks. You and my dad were friends.”

  “Pretty good friends.”

  “I come onto something, I don’t know how I should handle it, and there’s nobody I can rightly ask. I don’t want to bring Bud in on it. He’s back up at Duke in that summer program. Andy’s too young. And I can’t ask Mom.”

  “What’s it all about?”

  There was a long final hesitation, and then he shrugged and sighed. “Like this. I’ve been building up a fair trade down there below Marathon, but it’s nothing like Dad had here. I’ve been over his list for the season coming up, and he’s booked nearly solid. I know his kind of fishing. I can do it, but not as good as he did. He could smell fish. The HooBoy would be mine to use or sell, whatever. I went prowling around among the charterboat guys, trying to find out if I could make some kind of a deal for his boat plus the bookings. Everybody acted just a little funny. You know? There was something going on I couldn
’t figure out.

  “So I went over to the boatyard, to Dalton and Forbes, where the engine work is being done. And they acted funny over there too. It’ll be ready in one more week. I climbed up the ladder and went aboard her. I looked at the work sheets. The work is all paid for. Thirty-eight thousand dollars’ worth, and he paid in cash.”

  “To rebuild a couple of old diesels?”

  “Rebuild, hell. A new pair of high-speed jobs, with every kind of booster you can think of. They reinforced and cross-braced the whole front end of the hull. High-speed props. New controls. Outside it isn’t changed. It was always just a little bit underpowered. He could have gone bumbling around in it, looking the same as always, but when anybody jammed those throttles forward that thing would take off like a big-assed rabbit.”

  “Isn’t that a displacement hull?”

  “No. It’s kind of a modified deep vee, and they’ve put a new kind of step thing on the hull that will pop it right up into planing position. I remember when it was new, if we were heading downwind and he gave it full throttle on both engines, and we had a lot of room ahead of us, it would get up onto the plane and scoot. But it took too much gas to get it there. Jerry Forbes told me they think it will do a little better than forty knots once they get the step adjusted just right. I don’t even like to think about it. He told Mom he had to get five thousand together to get the engines rebuilt. I’ve been through his papers, and there’s nothing there to show where any thirty-eight thousand came from or where it went to. What do you think was going on, Trav?”

  “Did they enlarge fuel capacity?”

  “Bigger tanks, and they set them so the center of balance is a little more forward of where it used to be. When he got that boat, I was six and Bud was four and Andy wasn’t born yet. We were so proud of the HooBoy. It was so pretty!”

  “Your father was a good man, Dave. He had lots of friends. He worked hard. You could trust him.”