Cinnamon Skin

by John D. MacDonald

  “Did you—”

  “Let me finish. I found lots of people named Lawrence and lots of people named Tobin. I could not match them up in any productive way. I made the assumption that he may have attended without graduating, so I have been poring over the group photographs in all the yearbooks, one hundred and twenty-five, to be precise. One from East Texas Baptist, an unlikely place and an unlikely year, was missing. If it is possible to wear out a rather large magnifying glass, I have done so. I have had the picture of the man at hand to constantly refresh my memory. Have you ever realized how much most young men look like one another? Just as we, I suppose, look rather alike to them. I have made some reference notes as to certain possibles. Such and such an institution, yearbook for such and such a year, page fifty-six, football squad, second row from rear, fifth fellow from the left. There are about fifteen possibles, and I want to go back to them once I have gotten some transparent plastic for overlays, and a grease pencil to add facial hair in the same pattern as the possibles. I don’t expect to be able to eliminate them all. Whatever number is left out of the fifteen, I will assemble vital statistics for each.”

  “That sounds like a lot of drudgery.”

  “It is, it is. Research is part of my basic training. The accumulation of facts. One expects it to be dull. When enough facts are assembled, a conclusion can be drawn. That’s the interesting part.”

  “Have we got a choice of conclusions?”

  “I will find him, and we will learn who he really is, or was. I will not find him and we can conclude he did not graduate from a Texas institution and probably did not attend one or, if he did, was inactive in extracurricular activities.”

  “You find that exciting?”

  “Interesting, I said. My impression of him was that he had some education. A smattering. About what you’d get if you graduated from a state university after attending on an athletic scholarship, or if you had gone to one of the technical schools.”

  “How soon will you be done?”

  “I might finish up tomorrow. I would be done by now if they’d let me work evenings. But they close up at five, lock the doors, and set the alarms.”

  “Makes for long evenings.”

  “Travis, I have learned a very curious thing about television. The sponsors seem to be paying advertising agencies to create commercial spots which criticize competing products. The Lincoln is better than the Cadillac. California Cellars is better than Gallo or Inglenook or Almadén. Headache remedies, stomach acid remedies, deodorants—all of them are claiming to be better or stronger or more lasting.”

  “So?”

  I heard the little sniffing sound he makes when he is impatient at not being understood. “Travis, as an economist with a reasonable grasp on reality, I can tell you that the manufacturers who permit such obvious nonsense are guilty of monumental stupidity. One expects a kind of fumbling inanity from advertising account executives, but not from the men who are paying the bills.”

  “I’m not following.”

  “Merchants from the days of prehistory have known that the practice of knocking the product or service of the competition is self-defeating. When Jones, Smith, and Brown own stores on Main Street, and each tells customers that the other two merchants are thieves, within a reasonable period of time it will occur to the customers that all three are selling inferior goods and performing inferior services, and so their businesses will inevitably decline. And, on television, the average consumer pays so little attention to commercials, I would suspect that when a competing product is mentioned by name, it is lodged as firmly in the consciousness as the name being advertised. I am sorry to bring it up, but I am appalled at such expensive stupidity. It could only occur in a culture based upon administration by consensus, by committee. One can express resentment only by never buying a product which is held up as being better than another competing product. If enough of us would do that.… Forgive the digression. What about Hack’s boat?”

  “I walked down and took a look. It isn’t back in the slip yet. I asked around and they said it was still at the yard.”

  “How’s Anne?”

  “Just fine and dandy.”

  “Is something wrong?”

  “I said fine and dandy. What’s wrong with that?”

  “A forced blitheness. A hollow cheer.”

  “She’s going to be offered a better job, she thinks. Running a much bigger complex in Hawaii.”

  “And if it is offered, she’ll take it.”

  “Yes.”

  “Hence the hollow cheer?”

  “I guess so.”

  “I plan to catch a midday flight back to Houston Saturday. Would it be convenient for you to—”

  “I’ll be there in the afternoon, and see you at the apartment.”

  “Find out when your flight will be in and call me back, and we can probably meet at the airport.”

  By four o’clock on an almost bearable Saturday afternoon, we were back in the apartment. The interior air smelled hot, stale, and lifeless. Meyer turned on the air conditioning. The emptiness of the place was a further confirmation of the death of the niece. There was a collection of small pottery cats on a bookshelf, a closet still packed with her clothes.

  Meyer had bought himself a shirt in Austin. Gray, in a western cut, with short sleeves and pearl buttons. His black pelt curled up out of the open neck. He sat and read the Xerox copy of the clipping about the death of Miss Doris Eagle.

  “No doubt of its being the same man?” he asked.

  “None. It really hit Eagle very hard.”

  “And so that man is out there somewhere,” Meyer said, with an all-inclusive wave of his arm. “Eating, sleeping, washing his hands, thinking his thoughts, remembering his women. Let me show you what I’ve got.”

  He had narrowed it down to four faces and had photocopies of the groups in which they appeared.

  “I tried to get the original negatives,” he said, “but because yearbooks are not reordered or reprinted, after the press run the artwork and photographic work and dummy pages are discarded. I’ve circled the possibles in red grease pencil. Look at them through the glass. You have to think of them as being Evan Lawrence, twenty years earlier. These seem to match the coloring, shape of the head, placement of the ears and eyes.”

  I looked at the four. A baseball squad, an intramural track team, members of the theatrical club, and the members of a fraternity. I looked up at Meyer standing over me. “These could all be the same person.”

  He handed me four file cards. Warren W. Wyatt from Lubbock, Cody T. W. Pittler from Eagle Pass, Coy Lee Rodefer from Corpus Christi, and B. J. Broome from Waco.

  “Those were their addresses when they enrolled. Not one of these four got a degree from the universities they were attending when the photographs were taken. If the pictures were larger and clearer, maybe I could eliminate one, two, or all of them. Incidentally, all four went to the University of Texas—Wyatt at Austin, Pittler at El Paso, Rodefer at Austin, and Broome at Arlington. And there is no guarantee that the people in the pictures are correctly identified by name. The lists of names can be incorrect due to transpositions, deletions, and so forth. For example, in this fraternity picture there are thirty-two faces, thirty-three names.”

  “And maybe he didn’t go there.”

  “I’m inclined to believe he did. Or at least had some connection with it. If I went around saying I went to the University of Heidelberg, sooner or later I would come upon someone who either went there or who knew the city well. It’s easier to know than to lie. Dumb persons tell dumb lies. Evan Lawrence didn’t strike me as being dumb.”

  “And he could be one of these four?”

  “Say at twenty-to-one odds. Or more. But what were the odds against your learning that he probably was not aboard the Keynes? What were the odds against that woman from Venice coming along with her camera and taking a picture which happened to show with sufficient clarity Pogo’s left hand? Odds such as that are beyond c
alculation. Except for coincidence, we would have believed him blown to bits, even after finding out about Norma emptying out her trust. What do we do next, Travis? You’re better at this sort of thing than I am. Do we start checking these people out?”

  “I think I’d rather see about those Japanese stone lanterns. He said he worked for a man named Guffey who had a place north of Harlingen. He gave the impression it was after he got out of school, but a lot longer ago than when he worked for Eagle Realty. Remember, he said that they won’t be needing any Japanese stone lanterns down in that end of Texas for a long time.”

  “Look for the lanterns?” he said, eyebrows high.

  “They’re conspicuous. A ranch wife would probably put one in her flower garden. Coarse gray stone, and they usually come in three parts. The four legs, and then the middle part where the candle or light bulb goes—it usually has four openings, about fist size—and then an ornate cap on top, like a pagoda roof, too heavy for anything but a hurricane to blow off. They’d still be at the places where he sold them. Harlingen sounds likely enough; I’ll assume Guffey was a name he made up at the moment. But if we go poking around the back roads, we want to try to be a little less conspicuous. What’s her van look like? Roger Windham said it was old.”

  And it was. A heavy-duty GM originally painted a dark blue. Where the paint hadn’t been knocked off by the stones of rough roads and the branches of overgrown trails, it was a faded patchy blue. Where it had been knocked off, it was rust. Big steel-belted Michelins, eight ply. I rolled the door up and tried it. The battery was weak, and I didn’t think it would ever catch, but it finally did, ragged at first, and then with a healthy roar. The speedometer said five thousand and something, and, guessing it at ten or eleven years old, I didn’t know whether it had been all the way around once or twice. It had a dual battery system, a cot, a DC icebox, heavy-duty air conditioning, and a wooden crate of tools. It had an empty water tank, a tiny sink, and a Porta Potti.

  We went out while the motor was still running and took it ten miles west and ten miles back to give the alternator a chance to pick the batteries up. It was almost full of gas in both tanks, and the oil was up to the line, and the batteries needed no water. But it was loud and rough, with a slight tendency to wander.

  After we got back, Meyer said we probably should ask Windham if it was all right to use it, to take it down past Victoria and Corpus Christi into the valley. The papers on it were in the side pocket. The owner was Norma Greene, not Norma Lawrence. He said he had the lawyer’s home number.

  He caught Windham just as he was heading out for a cocktail party. Windham told Meyer that it was his truck to do with as he pleased, but there might be a question of insurance. The insured was deceased. And insurance companies, in the event of accident, leap upon any excuse to refuse to accept a claim. Just drive very very carefully until Monday afternoon or, better yet, not at all, and by that time he’d have it covered.

  Meyer said it would probably be better not to drive it at all. He was tired. His eyes were tired. His mind felt fatigued. He said he felt older than usual. There was little daylight left. He fell asleep in a chair. I thought of going out and getting something to eat, but realized I would set off the alarm system if I went out without knowing the right numbers to punch into the control panel. I went foraging through the cupboards and icebox. I found some wine and some vodka under the sink, a can of chili in the cupboard, and a wrapped slab of rat cheese in the refrigerator. Had a vodka on the rocks, heated the chili with a lot of thin slices of cheese. Roused Meyer and we ate same, in silence. He trudged up to bed. I cleaned up, looking around, and found a paperback by Stephen King about a big weird dog. Took it to bed and read a lot longer than I’d planned to. Very scary dog. Very scary writer. Wondered if he would be able to guess what kind of person Evan Lawrence was: as scary as King’s dog, but in a different way.

  I kept trying not to think about Anne Renzetti, but the instant I turned the light out, there she was. The thought that kept flashing on and off right in the front of my mind was YOU BLEW IT. YOU BLEW IT. Later on there was another sign, farther back and not as bright, which kept saying YOU’LL NEVER GET A BETTER SHOT AT IT.

  At what? Home and fireside? A riding mower for Christmas? A golden retriever who’d ride with his head out the car window, panting?

  As the old spinach eater said, “I yam what I yam.”

  Thirteen

  There was some red tape to be arranged about the estate and the vehicle registration, so we didn’t get out of town in the van until so late on Monday, the twenty-sixth, we got only as far as a place called Robstown, about ten miles west of the Corpus Christi city line. We holed up at a motel on the far side of Robstown, on U.S. 77, and as soon as we got in the room, Meyer started looking up Rodefer in the Corpus Christi phone book.

  He found nine Rodefers, but none of them were Coy Lee or C. L. or even C. So Meyer wanted to go right down the list. “We’re right near the city. Why not? Why does it have to be lanterns first when we can eliminate this one right away? Or maybe find out it is the right one.”

  There was no answer at the first Rodefer. As he started to call the next one, I realized I should be doing it. To his obvious relief I took the phone and placed the second call.

  “Hello?” A female voice, hesitant, neither young nor old.

  “This Miz Rodefer?”

  “Well … the way you say it, it isn’t Rod, it’s like Road.”

  “Ro-defer. Sure, I knew that. It’s just, I guess, ma’am, I haven’t rightly said it in so long, I said it wrong. Mebbe you can h’ep me, ma’am. Long long time back I went to school up to Austin with Coy Lee Rodefer, and I’m over here in a motel next to Robstown, and I was looking in the book to see if old Coy Lee was in the book and he isn’t. But there is a bunch of Rodefers and I thought, Well, why not take a chance and see if he’s related to them, and so they’d know where he is today. Him and me were on the same runnin’ team together.”

  “Coy Lee, he’s my husband’s first cousin! What did you say your name is?”

  “Travis McGee, ma’am. Just passin’ through the area.”

  “Well, if you were up there in the college with him, then you’d know why he had to drop out.”

  “I just purely don’t know, Miz Rodefer. You see I had to drop out too on account of bad sickness in the family, and I had to go home to take care. I’ve always promised myself I’d go back someday and finish up, but I somehow just never did.”

  “What happened was he got so tired and run down and wore out, they thought up there he had that … what do they call it? That kissing sickness. I can’t think of the name.”

  “It doesn’t come to me either right at the moment.”

  “Anyway, after they gave him a lot of blood tests it turned out he had the leukemia.”

  “That’s too bad! He was such a strong fella.”

  “He came on back here and moved into his old room with his folks. He was in and out of the hospital I can’t remember how many times. He’d go into revision … that doesn’t sound right.”

  “Is it remission, ma’am?”

  “That’s it! Anyway, it was pure hell on his mama, and I think it was what really turned his daddy to drink. His daddy was my Ben’s father’s brother. He didn’t last a year after Coy Lee died.”

  “Oh, he died!”

  “They both did, Coy Lee and his daddy, not quite a year to the day. His daddy died drunk, rolling the pickup over hisself at three o’clock in the morning. With Coy Lee it was pitiful. He went down to no more than ninety pounds, and he died in the hospital with his mama holding his hand and telling him everything was going to be real fine. I’d just started going with Ben, and he was broke up about it more than I realized he would be. It’s sure some terrible sickness, but I hear they can do a lot more for people that get it than they used to be able to do. The thing that was so pitiful was it was the only child they had. His mama she married a man with seven grown children about two years after Coy Le
e’s daddy killed hisself. What I’ll do, I’ll tell her a fellow that was a friend of Coy Lee’s up in Austin, he called to locate Coy Lee, and I had to tell you what happened to him.”

  “You tell his mama he was a good boy. He was a good friend, and I’m sure sorry to hear what happened. You tell her that everybody that knew him up there in Austin, they liked him just fine.”

  “She’ll be glad to hear that, and I’ll be telling her tomorrow.” “Thanks for helping me out.”

  “Sorry it had to be such bad news. But that’s how it goes.”

  “It surely does. Good evenin’.”

  Meyer had been sitting close on the side of my bed to hear both sides of the conversation. He moved away, shaking his head, as I hung up.

  No matter how many times you do it, how many times you pretend to be someone you aren’t, and you get the good-hearted cooperation of some trusting person, you feel a little bit soiled. There is no smart-ass pleasure to be gained from misleading the innocent. In the country places of the Sun Belt, friendship has a lot of meaning. And when you want to know something, you find out the quickest way you can, even to trading on something that never existed.

  We looked into the motel restaurant and decided to try almost anything else we could find. We drove over into the city and found a steak house where they guaranteed they would not, under any circumstances, fry the steak. Over coffee Meyer finally said, “That was depressing, talking to that woman.”