Cinnamon Skin

by John D. MacDonald

  “Damn you, Meyer. I thought you looked cuddly. You’re a smart-ass son of a bitch. You tricked me.” She worked herself around to face him. “You could set fire to my feet, I’d never tell you. You could pull out my fingernails, I wouldn’t say a word.”

  “I don’t think you know where Cody is.”

  “You’re right! I don’t have no idea at all.”

  “So you would write to this intermediary, or maybe phone when there’s a change of address, and then when Cody phoned the intermediary he would get the information.”

  “Smart-ass!”

  “He needs the address because he sends you money.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “You and he are family. He did a terrible thing. He wants to take care of you, so you’ll think well of him. As you obviously do.”

  “He sends it because he’s my kid brother and, until Coralita came along, we always looked out for each other. He doesn’t have to buy my feeling for him.”

  “How does he send it?”

  “He ties it onto a pigeon.”

  “Come on, Helen June,” Meyer said in a wheedling tone. “If you don’t know where he is, and I don’t believe you do, then the way he sends the money can’t tip us off as to where to find him. He’s a very clever man. I’m just curious as to how he would go about sending cash to you. It must be cleverly done.”

  “He’s smart.”

  “We know. He’d have to be to stay at liberty so long.”

  “I nearly messed up the first time he sent any. It was a kind of messy old package that came for me. I was still living with Sonny. Thank God he wasn’t around when I opened it. On the outside it said BOOKS. My name was typed on the label. The return address was a box number in New Orleans. Inside were three paperback books with two rubber bands around them, one going one way and the other going the other way. I read the titles and decided it was some kind of sales gimmick. I’m no reader. Maybe the newspaper sometimes. So I unsnapped the rubber bands and leafed through the first one looking for the sales letter. And when I opened the second one, a bunch of hundred-dollar bills fell out onto the floor. There was forty of them. I damn near fainted. The middle book had been hollowed out, probably with a razor. Kind of a messy job. I guess it didn’t have to be real neat. There was a typed note with it. And it said, ‘Happy birthday, Helen June. Whenever you move, let so-and-so know right away. Get rid of this note and don’t talk about the money.’ Isn’t that great? Here I am talking about the money.”

  “How many packages have you gotten?” Meyer asked.

  “I don’t know. What do you care? You with the IRS? Maybe a dozen, maybe more. They were mailed from Miami, Tampa, Houston, New Orleans, Los Angeles. Big cities. Sometimes with a little note. Birthday or Christmas or something. The biggest was eighty-five hundred. And the smallest was the first one. I never know when they’re coming. He cares about me, that’s all I know. That’s all I care. It keeps me alive. I told you this just to show you that he’s a good person.”

  When we got to the place where Jesse had died, a tow truck was backed up to the Bronco. The winch was grinding and they were gently picking it out of the small trees. There were no other cars there. Two little farm kids were watching.

  Helen June got out and trotted to the tow truck. “This is my car!” she shouted over the sound of the winch. “Where are you going with it?”

  He turned off the winch. “Hi, Helen June. Sorry about Jesse. His own damn fool fault. Bound to happen some day. We’re taking it down to the Village Garage. Okay?”

  “What’s it costing me for you to take it, Jimmy?”

  “Forty bucks, to you.”

  “Is that a discount or are you hiking the price?”

  “A discount, damn it. Sixty otherwise.”

  “I got it right here and I want a receipt. Just a second.”

  She came back to the car.

  “Thank you for coming to tell me, and thank you for the ride. I talked too damn much. I don’t know what got into me. I don’t tell people my private business. Not to a couple of strangers. Meyer, you came up on my blind side.”

  “I’m sorry that we … caused all this.”

  “If you hadn’t it would have been somebody else. Or something else.” Her mouth twisted, the smile bitter. “He was a real sorry man, but he was the only one I got.”

  “I know you don’t want to talk about your brother,” Meyer said, “but …”

  “You are so right.”

  “… you might want to see a recent picture of him.”

  She stared at him. “You got one? How?”

  “It’s back at the motel in Utica,” he lied.

  “I sure would like to see how Cody turned out,” she said.

  “It’s a little past noon now,” he said. “We could go get it and come back.”

  The Bronco had been plucked out of the shrubbery, and they had it ready to roll. “Hey, Helen June!”

  She turned and yelled, “Hold it a minute, okay?”

  She turned back to us.

  “I hafta see about my car. I hafta find out where they took Jesse and tell his people. He’s got folks in Gloversville. You want to come out to my place late this afternoon? Four thirty?”

  When we agreed, she turned and loped off toward the tow truck in a clumsy, pigeon-toed trot.

  As she climbed in, Meyer said, “I better come back alone. I think it will work better.”

  “Then we better check back into the motel.” I headed south. “You got more than I ever thought you’d get.”

  “When people have something they don’t want to think about, they’ll talk about other things, sometimes too much. One time, long ago, I visited a friend in the hospital one afternoon and found out that they had told him that very morning he wasn’t going to make it. He babbled at me for two hours. He was quick and funny and intense. He told me the dirty details of his failed marriage. I suspected he had never intended to tell all that to anyone. It was a strange and uncomfortable period for me. Then he started to cry and ordered me out. I went to see him again, but he resented me because he had told me too much. I took advantage of the way she was feeling. She didn’t want to think about Jesse.”

  Meyer left me in the motel with some magazines and the Saturday afternoon television. I took a late-afternoon walk, but the heat was still too intense. It made you feel as if you could not breathe deeply enough. I phoned Annie’s private line, but there was no answer. I watched a portion of a bad ball game. I took a nap. I read the magazines. I tried television. Lawrence Welk had replaced the ball game. He had a batch of very old citizens there, playing old music very well on shiny horns. They had doubtless come out of the big band era and were happy to find work playing the same old stuff.

  Meyer got in at ten fifteen. He looked grainy and old. I knew he’d tell me about it when he was ready, so I didn’t push him. Inexpensive bourbon has its own aroma, and he smelled as if he’d had more than two. He took a shower and came out and stretched out on his bed, fingers laced behind his head.

  “I think that what we had was a two-person wake, without the body. She thinks she’s glad he’s dead, but she isn’t sure. She couldn’t stop looking at the picture of the grown-up Cody. She said he had turned out to be a really good-looking man, like his father. I let her keep the picture. All right?”

  “Of course. We’ve got three left. Anyway, why ask me? This is your parade.”

  “Every time I’d try to ease in on the identity of her correspondent in Eagle Pass, she’d sidestep. Nothing else was going to work. So I told her some stories. I told her all about Doris Eagle and Isobelle Garvey and Norma Lawrence. I told her about Larry Joe and Jerry and Evan. You see, Travis, Cody was her hero. The little brother, corrupted by the stepmother, had escaped and had made a successful life somewhere and was able to send money to his beloved big sister. She pictured him in a big house with a wife and kids and two cars. She couldn’t stand what I was telling her. When she finally came to believe that the photogr
aph she held in her hand had been positively identified by all concerned as Cody T. W. Pittler, her next line of defense was that Doris Eagle had died in a legitimate accident, that Izzy Garvey had gone off with Cody and run out on him later, and that he had been blown up aboard my boat. I asked her why all the names, and she said it was because the police still wanted him for what had happened at Eagle Pass. I had showed her the Doris Eagle clippings and the clippings about Norma’s death. I told her about Norma’s life, what kind of a woman she had been. She kept drinking. I kept drinking. We wept. I kept asking her why she wanted to protect such a man, even if he was her brother. She kept saying he was all the family she had.

  “Finally she said that whenever she had changed her address, she had phoned the best friend she ever had, a woman in Eagle Pass named Clara Chappel. They had been all through the grades together back when she had been Clara Pitts. Because seating was alphabetical, they always sat near one another. They had double-dated, and they had both gotten drunk on tequila on the same date and lost their virginity the same night. They had been married at the same time, she to Sonny Fox, and Clara to Sid Chappel. Clara had always told her she wished Cody was a little older so she could marry him. She said she had moved seven times, since she had gone north with Sonny Fox, and had phoned Clara each time. Cody stayed in touch with Clara. She didn’t know how. Clara never told her. She said it proved Cody was smart. He knew that if his sister knew how to get in touch with him, the police could find out from her. And she would never tell anyone about Clara. Then she seemed to realize she was telling me and shouldn’t be. She drank more. It became difficult to understand what she was saying.

  “At one point she led me out into that dreadful junkyard and reached into the bottom of an old iron stove and took out a tiny candy box and opened it, shone the flashlight into it, onto a wad of hundred-dollar bills. Jesse had never found out about the money. She said he would have just taken it and left. She said Jesse wasn’t good about money. Then she told me it had arrived early last month, early June. Seven thousand two hundred. You realize of course, Travis, that it was Norma’s money. I told her it had been Norma’s money. She wanted me to take it. I wouldn’t. She put it back in the stove and clanged the old door. We were both crying. We supported each other back to the house. She said her head was aching terribly from being hit by Jesse. She called it his last love tap. She tripped on the top step and fell heavily into the trailer. I pulled her to her bed and lifted her onto it, half of her at a time. I drove back here with one eye shut so there would be one center line instead of two, one pair of oncoming headlights instead of two. It is a criminal act to drive in such a condition. I could have killed innocent people. I feel very sad and soiled and old. She really hasn’t anything left now.”

  “I’ll see if I can reach Paul Sigiera.”

  “You do that.”

  He kept his eyes shut while I tried. His breathing became heavier. He produced a long rattling snore. I finally reached Sigiera despite the efforts of two other officers on duty.

  “Ah so,” he said. “The Consultant and the Professor. What are you all consulting and professing?”

  “Cody sends money to his sister at irregular intervals. Cash. From four to ten thousand in hundreds. Over a dozen shipments since he took off. He keeps track of her through a woman named Clara Chappel. She used to be Clara Pitts. Married to a Sid or Sidney Chappel. She phones Clara her changes of address and Clara relays them to Cody. So you know a Chappel family?”

  “Hope to spit. There is no place in Maverick County high enough to stand on and see everything Sid Chappel owns.”

  “I have the feeling that when sister Helen June sobers up tomorrow, she is going to get to a phone and let Clara know that McGee and Meyer know about Cody’s pipeline. So I thought if you got to Clara Chappel first—”

  “And leaned on her? You’ve got to be kidding. Maybe I can do it with footwork and fancy talk. How’s Helen June?”

  “Living among junk with a piano player until today; then he rolled his Bronco over on himself and squashed his head.”

  “Just a coincidence?”

  “You could call it that.”

  “Why in hell did Helen June tell you people anything?”

  “The Professor talked nice to her. And she was in kind of a shocked condition. I would appreciate it if you would do what you can and let me know.”

  I gave him my phone number aboard the Flush. He said he would give it a try, but not right now, not on a Saturday night. There was too much action going on among the lower classes, such as cops, he said. Meyer slept on. I walked to the restaurant and had a bowl of chowder and a hot dog. A leggy sixteen-year-old girl with blond hair black at the roots, wearing a quarter pound of eye makeup, gave me the fixed challenging stare of the seasoned hooker while she ate her strawberry cone. There’s no VD any more. Now it is all STD, Sexually Transmitted Diseases, and there are a lot more of them than there used to be, and a lot more people have them than used to, and some of them are resistant to all known antibiotics. I walked back through the hot night, thinking sad bad thoughts.

  Nineteen

  When we finally got into Lauderdale, late on Sunday afternoon, after bad flight connections, I took a long hot shower and then phoned Annie. She sounded cross and overworked. The comptroller was down from Chicago. There were conferences about updating the computer system.

  “Try me tomorrow,” she said. “I don’t know what tomorrow will be like, but it won’t be any worse than today. Any luck on your quest?”

  “Quest? Nice word for a series of blind alleys. I got kicked in the ear. Otherwise fine. Take care of yourself. Happy computing.”

  When I tried her on Monday on her private line, I got a solemn and heavy masculine voice saying, “Eden Beach, Howard Pine speaking.”

  “May I speak to Anne Renzetti, please?”

  “I’m the new manager. Perhaps I can help you.”

  “This is personal, thanks.”

  “Oh. She flew back up to Chicago this morning out of Fort Meyers with the comptroller. I would say she’ll probably be back Wednesday. But it might be Thursday. I can give you a number where—”

  “No thanks. I’ll try again.”

  Meyer had gone over to B-80 to look at the thirty-one-foot Rawson. After that he had an appointment with the insurance agent. Then he was going to go buy clothes. And get a haircut.

  I roamed around the houseboat, seeking out small chores, trying not to notice the big ones that needed doing. Restless, restless. I knew too much about Cody T. W. Pittler, and at the same time not nearly enough. I wanted to bounce what we knew about him off some knowledgeable person, and I suddenly realized that the ideal person would be Laura Honneker. About eleven years ago, after she had been practicing her profession of psychiatry in Fort Lauderdale for a little over two years, an unstable patient had broken into her office and made off with a batch of patient files. Though in the files she had referred to the patients by initials other than their own, she had foolishly left her cross-index in the same file cabinet and he had taken that too.

  Her patients had begun to complain. They were outraged at the calls they were receiving from the thief. Along with all the usual dirty words, he was telling them details of their lives known only to them and to Dr. Honneker.

  She did not want to take the matter to the police. She did not want the responsibility of what that would do to the patient who had taken the files. A mutual friend told her about me, and she asked me to come see her. I explained that I attempted to recover things of value which could not be recovered in any normal manner, and I usually kept half the value. She said that in one sense the files had no value, but in another sense, if the misuse of them destroyed her in Fort Lauderdale professionally, they were very valuable. So we agreed that I would bill her according to the difficulty I encountered.

  She was about my age, maybe two years younger. She was a big Norse-looking woman, fair and well scrubbed, with a trick of establishing very direct eye c
ontact, her eyes a skeptic green. She was tall and aglow with health. I found out that she ran miles on the beach at first light every day, back when it wasn’t dangerous.

  I phoned in and brought her crazy man to the office the next day, files and all. He was a heavy little man who believed the world was out to get him, and the best defense was to be offensive. He sat in the corner like a naughty child while she went through the files to be certain they were all there. She asked me if it had been a lot of trouble, and I smiled at the heavy little man and said, “No trouble at all.”

  She ordered him into the next room, and he trudged in and closed the door without making a sound.

  “What would be a fair fee for your trouble, Mr. McGee?” she had asked.

  The question seemed to be put in a challenging way. So I had replied, “We should set up an appointment and negotiate it, don’t you think?”

  “What did you have in mind?”

  “We could negotiate over dinner.”

  She thought that over, smiled, agreed. We set a date. I picked her up at her place. It was a pleasant evening. We had a lot of attitudes in common. The way we negotiated it, she bought the dinner and I bought the wine. I sensed that she had all her defenses ready in case I threatened to presume too much. When we said good night at her door, I said I would give her a ring sometime. She said that would be nice. But we both knew it wouldn’t happen.

  About six months later I went to a big party at a conspicuously large and expensive house on the bay. I do not generally go to cocktail parties. I forget why I went to that one. Some people named Hunter gave the party. I arrived late and found, among the celebrants, one Dr. Laura Honneker, solemnly, quietly smashed. She walked and talked very very carefully. She told me in a slow and precise speech pattern that she did not drink, but that the previous night, at 3:00 A.M., a woman she thought she was helping had put the bedside gun in her mouth and pulled the trigger, thus awakening her husband in the ugliest possible way. So she had decided to have a cocktail. Or two.