“I would think that if Wilma was alive, she would have been in touch with Calvin Stebber, and if she’s dead, he’d be wondering about her. It would be a way to make sure. After all, this Boo Waxwell could maybe have gotten money somewhere else. And maybe Wilma told him to lie about her being there.”
“And,” I said, “Stebber might be the one to decoy Boo away from his cave.” I stood up. “It’s gone past the point where we need an imitation pigeon.”
“How about the money of mine that Mr. Stebber has?” Arthur asked.
“I want to get a chance at it. So now let’s unhook this beast and get out of here.”
We brought the bow anchors aboard, worked the Flush out by hauling on the stern anchor lines. When we coasted close enough they pulled free. I hoisted the dinghy up by the stern davits and made it fast, as, under dead slow speed, Arthur took us out through the wide entrance of Hurricane Pass. We towed the Ratfink astern, motor tilted up and covered with a tarp. When we were clear, and headed north up the Gulf, I put it up to cruising speed and went aft and adjusted the length of the tow line until the Ratfink was riding steadily at the right point of our wake. The bright afternoon was turning greasy, sky hazing, big swells building from the southwest, a following sea that began to give the old lady a nasty motion, and made it impossible to use the automatic pilot. The little solenoids are stupid about a following sea. They can’t anticipate. So you have to use the old-timey procedure of swinging the wheel just as they begin to lift your back corner, then swinging it back hard the other way when the bow comes up. You labor for long seconds apparently dead in the water, and then you tilt and go like a big train. Chook brought sandwiches to the topside controls, and I sent Arthur to dig out the bible on coastal accommodations.
The Palm City Marina, thirty miles north of Naples, had the sound of what I wanted. And from the way the weather was building, it was far enough. We’d begun to get enough wind to pull the tops off the long swells and the sun was gone in haze, the water changing from cobalt to gray-green. The Flush heaved and waddled along, setting up a lot of belowdecks creaking, clinking, clanking and thumping, and about every tenth swell the port wheel would lift out and cavitate, giving us a shuddering vibration. At least I never had to slow her down. Her cruising speed was what other boats slow down to when the seas build. When the driving rain came, I sent them down to take over on the sheltered controls. As soon as I felt the wheel being taken, I pulled the lever that freed it, put a loop over a spoke, snapped the big tarp down over the topside panel and throttles and padded below, soaked through.
They had the wipers going, were peering earnestly into the rain curtain, and Arthur was misjudging the seas enough to bounce pans off their galley hooks. They let me take over with an obvious relief. Soon, as the heavy rain flattened the swells, she began to ride much easier.
“They put those little signs in boats,” Chook said with a nervous laugh. “Oh Lord, thy sea is so vast and my boat is so small. Trav, you don’t have any funny signs around.”
“And no funny flags to hoist. I almost fell for one little brass plaque though. It said that marriages performed by the captain of this vessel are valid only for the duration of the voyage. Arthur, go see how the Ratfink rides. Chook, go make coffee. Busy yourselves. Stop peering over my shoulders. Then check all ports to see if rain or sea is coming in. Stow any loose gear you come across. Then, as a pagan rite I recommend—after you’ve brought me the mug of coffee—you people get bars of soap, go aft and strip down and try that warm hard rain out on the afterdeck.”
After an hour, as I had anticipated, the wind direction had shifted to the west. I made an estimate of my position along the line I had penciled on the chart, put an X at that spot, then changed to a more westerly course so I could take it as a quartering sea on the port bow rather than rocking along in the trough. She steadied, and I put it into automatic pilot, read the compass course, figured the deviation and drew a new line on my chart. According to my computations, another eighty minutes would put us at a point offshore from Palm City where we would turn and run on in. The rain was coming down harder than before, and with less wind. I prowled, looking for my companions of the storm. The clues were obvious. The closed door to the master stateroom. And, in the main lounge on the rug, a damp blue bath towel. It made me remember a line from a story of long ago, written, I think, by John Collier, about when the kid finds the foot, still wearing sock and shoe, on the landing of the staircase leading to the attic. “Like a morsel left by a hasty cat.” So make this a towel left by a hasty morsel. Hard warm rain, soap, giggles and the tossing and pitching of a small boat are aphrodisiacs vastly underrated. I eeled up through the forward hatch with my soap so I could keep a watch ahead. It was a cool abundance of water, sudsing as only rainwater can. I had a few discernible bruises on my arms where Boo’s fists had sledged, and a round one on the short ribs. When I took a deep breath there was a twinge there, sign that the blow had probably ripped a little of the cartilage between the ribs. Fatuously I admired the new flatness of the belly, and the absence of the small saddle bags over the hip bones. Narcissus in the rain. I dropped back below, re-dogged the hatch, toweled in a hurry, hopped into dry clothes and trotted back to the wheel house, peering through the windshield arcs for the collision course you always anticipate when a bunch of little gears are steering your boat.
Chookie, in a crisp white dress, black hair pinned high, came bearing a tray with three cocktails and a bowl of peanuts, Arthur bringing up the rear. They were elaborately conversational. Rain made a dandy shower. A little chilly but real stimulating. Then both rushed in to find a safer word than stimulating, and managed merely to underline it, giving Arthur such a steaming red face he turned away to stare out the side ports saying, my, it certainly is coming down, isn’t it?
And, my, it certainly was still coming down when we got to my estimated destination. It always seems a waste when all that nice useful rain whishes down into the salty sea. I pulled it back until we barely had seaway, and turned on the little whirling red bulb of the depth finder. The Gulf has such a constant slope, the bottom is a good location guide. We had twenty-one feet under the hull, twenty-five total, and if other things were right, that would put us three and a half miles off Palm City, according to the depths on the chart. I looked up the frequency of a commercial radio station in Palm City, with a tower almost in line with the harbor. When I had picked it up on AM, a baseball play-by-play, I changed our heading to zero degrees and rotated the direction finder loop until I had a good null. I was about a sea mile short of my estimated point. I put it on the new course, again with a following sea, and we waddled and rocked on in until the sea buoy appeared out of the murk, giving me a course on the chart for the channel between the keys. Inside, we were in flat water, and it was no trick finding the private markers for the marina channel.
It was, as I had hoped, loaded with big cruisers. Two airhorn blasts brought a kid out of the dock house wearing a plastic raincoat with hood. He directed us with hand signals and ran around to the slip. I worked it around and backed it in, went forward in a hurry and got a loop on a piling and around a cleat and snubbed us down. In fifteen minutes we were all set, lines, fenders and spring lines in place, gangplank onto the dock, all identified and signed in. And the rain was slacking off.
I was damp, but not enough to change again. Chook distributed dividends from the shaker and said, “Okay. I bite. Why here?”
“Multiple reasons. If you want to hide a particular apple, the best thing you can do is wire it onto an apple tree. Lots of these big lunkers around us are in wet storage for the summer. We’re one face in the crowd. We’re not far from Fort Myers, where they have air service to Tampa. We’re a half hour by car from Naples, a little better than an hour from Marco. If he finds out we anchored off by our lonesome once, he’d expect us to do it again. And if he does find us, and if he does have any violent ideas, it’s a damned poor place for him to get away with them. Also, it would reassure Stebbe
r if it turns out I can fix up a meeting here.”
Arthur said, “I think it was across that causeway over there, over on the beach on that key where they found me stumbling around. Should … should I sort of stay out of sight?”
Chook said to me, black brows raised in query, “With your fishing hat and those fly-boy dark glasses?”
“See no reason why you should,” I said.
Chook leaned to pat Arthur on the knee. “You have a dear face and I love you, but darling, forgive me, you aren’t terribly memorable.”
“I guess one of us is enough,” he said, making one of his rare little jokes, waiting then with no confidence anyone would laugh.
I got the evening weather news. As I had expected, the wind was swinging around into the north, and by dawn they expected it to be out of the east at three to five knots, clear weather, occasional afternoon thunderstorms. It meant that by early morning, with the Ratfink bailed and fueled, I could make a good fast run close in shore down to the little marina in Naples, tie it up there at that handy and useful location, then take the rented car back to Palm City. The evening was laundered bright, the air fresh, and Chook declined a chance for a dinner ashore, saying she had a serious attack of the domestics, a rabid urge to cook. After dinner, while the two of them were policing the galley, I took the little battery-operated Mirandette tape recorder into the stateroom I was using and closed the door. For some reason, I cannot perform the feat with people listening, and sometimes I cannot perform it at all. The little machine has astonishingly good fidelity, considering its size.
Try, playback, erase. Try, playback, erase. I learned that to get Waxwell’s tone quality I had to pitch my voice higher, and put a harder and more resonant edge on it. The slurs and elisions were easier to manage, along with that slight sing-song cadence of the swamplands. When I got a reasonably satisfying result, I left it on the tape.
I went up on the sundeck for the long slow evening pipe. When one is down to this mild reward for abstinence, there is only one way to cheat. I found an oversized pot in the pipe drawer, a massive Wilke Sisters product, and nearly sprained my thumb packing Black Watch into it. We all sat up there in the warm night, marina lights sparkling on the water, traffic moving across the distant causeway. They sat together, about ten feet from me, off to my right. They rustled a little now and then. And whispered. And several times she made a furry and almost inaudible chuckle, as sensuous as a slow light stroke of fingernails. It began to make me so edgy I was grateful when they said their early, husky goodnights. I think it was becoming a little more for her than she estimated. I hoped it would get big enough to pry her loose from Frankie Durkin. But any kind of future for Chook and Arthur would depend on my making a pretty solid recovery for him. If she had to support him, or share the job of supporting the two of them, it wouldn’t work out so well. It would make him restive. And this was her time to have kids. And it wouldn’t mix well with her strenuous brand of professional dancing. She had the body for kids, the heart for them, the need for them, and love enough for a baker’s dozen.
So if you don’t recover enough, do you need to clip a full fifty percent of it, McGee?
Next there will be a choir of a thousand violins playing “I Love You Truly.” Or perhaps, “Paddlin’ Madelin’ Home.”
Back in my empty lonely nest, I turned the recorder on, and with the larynx memory of how I did it before, became Boo Waxwell giving a sour little talk on the joys of love and marriage. Then I played the tape from the beginning. The part I had previously approved sounded just about the same as the new addition. That meant I had it nailed well enough to risk it.
Eleven
It was a little after nine in the morning when I tied up the Ratfink as before in the little marina. I went over into town in the green sedan, ordered drugstore coffee, and, as it was cooling, shut myself in the phone booth and called Crane Watts’ office number.
He answered directly, sounding remarkably crisp and impressive and reliable. “Crane Watts speaking.”
“Watts, this Boo Waxwell. How about you give me that number for Cal Stebber in Tampa. Caint lay my han on it.”
“Now I don’t know as I’m authorized to …”
“Lawyer boy, I git it fast, or in five minutes I’m right there, whippin yo foolish ass down to the bone.”
“Well … hold the line a moment, Waxwell.”
I had a pencil ready. I took down the number he gave me, 613–1878.
“Address?” I asked.
“All I’ve ever had is a box number.”
“Nev mind. Lawyer boy, I plain don’t like the way you give that McGee the whole story.”
“Don’t you think you made that plain enough last night, Waxwell? I told you then and I’m telling you now, that I didn’t tell him half the things he claims I told him.”
“Too dog drunk to know what you told him.”
“I’m doing my level best to get a line on him, and as soon as I learn anything useful, I’ll get in touch with you. But I don’t know why you’re upset about it. It was a perfectly legal business arrangement. Another thing, Waxwell, I don’t want you ever coming to my house again, like last night. You upset my wife, the way you acted. See me here if you have to see me at all, but I’m telling you now, I’m no more anxious to have any future association with you than you are with me. Is that quite clear?”
“Think I’ll come by anyways and bounce you some.”
“Now wait a minute!”
“Talk sweet to ol’ Boo.”
“Well … maybe I did sound a little irritable. But you see, Viv knew nothing about … that business arrangement. You said too much in front of her. She cross-examined me half the night before I could get her quieted down. And she still isn’t satisfied. I’d just rather you wouldn’t come to the house again. Okay?”
“I swear, lawyer boy, I never will. Never again. Less something comes up all of a sudden.”
“Please, just listen to reas …”
I hung up, sweating lightly, and went back to my coffee. Boone Waxwell had wasted very little time getting to the only man who might know anything about me. And had charged that man with digging up information. Watts could get my Bahia Mar box number from the club records. That wouldn’t be much help. But there was a new factor. Waxwell did not seem like a patient man. Perhaps no later than this afternoon he would be phoning Watts to find out what he’d learned. And he would be very intrigued to know it was his second call of the day, and interested to know that he had asked for Stebber’s unlisted number earlier. He would work that out in short order.
I aimed the Chev north up 41 through light traffic, keeping a watch front and rear for State Police, who object violently to any speed approaching three numbers. I pulled into a marina parking space at Palm City at ten o’clock. The Flush was locked. A note on the rug inside the rear door to the lounge said they’d gone grocery shopping. I went hunting and found them in a Food Fair two blocks away, Arthur trundling the basket, Chook mousing along, picking out things, wearing that glazed look of supermarket autohypnosis. Eleven minutes after I located them, I had a protesting Arthur locked aboard with instructions to stay put and out of sight, and I was backing out of the parking space with Chook beside me, hitching at her skirt and buttoning the top buttons of her blouse.
If the feeder flight out of Fort Myers hadn’t been ten minutes late coming in from Palm Beach, we would have just missed it. And I had been too busy driving to do more than fragmentary briefing. I bought two round-trip tickets to Tampa. With stops at Sarasota and St. Pete, the ETA was twenty past noon.
Once aboard, I gave it to her in more detail. “But with just a phone number?” she asked.
“And a little jump. And a prayer for luck. And the name of a yacht.”
“Golly, suppose you worked all this hard at something legitimate, McGee. No telling how big you might be.”
“A state senator, even.”
“Wow!” She checked in her mirror and fixed her mouth. “What goo
d am I going to be to you?”
“I’ll figure that out as we go along.”
At Tampa International, with Chook standing outside the booth looking serious, I tried the number. As I was just about to give up and try again, a cool, careful, precise female voice said, “Yes?”
“I would like to speak to Mr. Calvin Stebber.”
“What number were you calling, sir?”
“Six one three–one eight seven eight.”
“I am sorry. There is no Calvin Stebber here, sir.”
“Miss, I suppose that it’s one of the oldest code situations in the world. You always ask for the number to be repeated, and the party calling is supposed to change one digit. But I don’t happen to have the code.”
“I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about, sir.”
“No doubt. I am going to call you back at exactly quarter to one, twelve minutes from now and in the meantime you tell Mr. Stebber that somebody is going to call who knows something about Wilma Ferner, Wilma Wilkinson, take your choice.”
She hesitated a half breath too long before saying, “I am terribly sorry that all this means absolutely nothing to me, sir. You’ve made a mistake, really.”
She was very good. So good the hesitation seemed to lose significance.
I tried it again at the promised time.
“Yes?”
“Is Mr. Stebber interested in Wilma? This is me again.”
“Actually, you know, I shouldn’t be so childish as to let this nonsense fascinate me, whoever you are. I suppose it’s because I am having a dull and boring day. Do you think that could be it?”
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