“Nonsense fascinates lots of people.”
“You do have rather a nice voice. You know, if you aren’t too busy for nonsense, you could break up my afternoon with more of it. Why don’t you mystify me again, say, at three fifteen?”
“It will be my pleasure. I’ll be the one with the red rose in his teeth.”
“And I shall be wearing a girlish smirk. Goodbye, sir.”
I stepped out of the booth. “What are you grinning at?” Chook demanded.
“The good ones are always a pleasure. She couldn’t contact Stebber so quickly. But without giving away one damn thing, she lined me up to call back at three fifteen. Then if Stebber is interested, they open a door. If not, she gives me the girlish chitchat, and I hang up never really knowing for sure. Very nice.”
She pulled herself taller. “It means you’re outclassed, doesn’t it, sweetie? Stebber has this terribly keen girl, and you’re making do with a big dull dancer.”
“Oh for God’s sake, why should a little impersonal admiration raise your hackles?”
“Feed me,” she said. “All women are at war all the time, and when I’ve got hunger pains, it shows a little more.”
We went to the upper level where she ate like a timber wolf, but with more evidences of pleasure than any wolf would exhibit. There was so much of her, and it was so aesthetically assembled, so vivid, so a-churn with vitality that she faded the people for ten tables around to frail flickering monochromatic images, like a late late movie from a fringe station. She provided me, in certain measure, with a cloak of invisibility.——Okay, fella, but describe the guy she was with.——Just a guy. Big, I think. I mean, hell, I don’t think I really looked at him, Lieutenant.
She sipped coffee and smiled, sighed, smiled again.
“You look like a happy woman, Miss McCall.” I reached across the table and touched her with a fingertip right between and a little above those thick black brows. “There were two lines here.”
“Gone now? Son of a gun. Gee, Trav, I don’t know. I talk. I talk my fool head off. There in the dark with him holding me, mostly. Things I’ve never told anyone. He listens and he remembers. I skip around, back and forth through my dumb life. I guess I’m trying to understand. I’m talking to myself at the same time, about Frankie, about how my mother made me ashamed of growing too big to fit into her dream, about running off and getting married at fifteen and annulled at sixteen, knocking around, and then buckling down and really working hard and making it and saving money so I could go back in style and knock their eye out. I knew just how it would be, Trav. I would wear that mink cape into that house and my mother and my grandmother would stare, and then I would let them know I hadn’t gotten it the way they were thinking, and show them the scrapbook. Nineteen years old. God!
“There were strangers in the house, Trav. An impatient woman, and kids running all over the place. My grandmother had been dead over a year, and my mother was in the county home. Premature senility. She thought I was her sister, and she begged me to get her out of there. I got her into another place. A bill and a half a week for a year and a half, Trav, and then she had one big stroke instead of continuous little ones, and she died without ever knowing. Arthur asked me how I really know that. Maybe she had some lucid spell when she knew and was proud.” Her eyes swam and she shook her head. “Okay. He’s good for me. Like my head was full of little knots. I talk and talk and talk, and he says something, and a little knot loosens.” She scowled. “The thing about Frankie, when he finds out something bugs you, a long time later he’ll say something that’ll make it bug you more. I explained that to Arthur. He says maybe that’s why I need Frankie, so he can punish me and I don’t have to punish myself.
“Trav, you really have to give Arthur something to do. I can only hoist him up so far. You treat him like a tanglefoot kid, and when I make him into a man it doesn’t hold. It doesn’t last. Maybe, Trav, that’s a more important part than the money. He talks about those jobs at Everglades. Wistful, sort of. When he ran the store it was all kind of set. The buyers knew what to buy for that city. And he had good display and advertising people, and the merchandising was kind of all established before he got into it. But he said if you can put up rough studding and it stands true and the foreman comes around and says okay, then you think people are going to live there for years, and winds won’t blow it down. I can’t say it like he does. But you see, except for the store which was all set anyway, everything he ever did got botched up. Everything except those crummy little jobs. If you trust him to do something, he’ll trust himself more.”
So I promised I would, and I told her we had time, before three fifteen, to get a little better set. I bought a newsstand map of Tampa and I rented a pale gray Galaxie. They are turning Tampa into the customary nothing. It used to be memorable as one of the grubbiest and most infuriating traffic mazes south of the Chelsea area of Boston. Now they are ramming the monster highways through it, and one day soon it will become merely a momentary dinginess. They’ve opened up the center of the city into a more spacious characterlessness, and, more and more, they are converting Ybor City into fake New Orleans. In some remote year the historians will record that Twentieth Century America attempted the astonishing blunder of changing its culture to fit automobiles instead of people, putting a skin of concrete and asphalt over millions of acres of arable land, rotting the hearts of their cities, so encouraging the proliferation of murderous, high-speed junk that when finally the invention of the Transporlon rendered the auto obsolete, it took twenty years and half a trillion dollars to obliterate the ugliness of all the years of madness, and rebuild the supercities in a manner to dignify the human instead of his toys.
I left Chook in the car and went into the reference section of the library and looked up the Buccaneer in Lloyd’s Register of Yachts. There were a slew of them, and I found the one registered out of Tampa that was a hundred and eighteen feet long, a converted Coast Guard cutter, owned by Foam-Flex Industries. I phoned them and was shunted up through the pyramid to the Vice President in Charge of Sales and Promotion, a Mr. Fowler with a little trace of Vermont in his speech.
“On anything like that,” he said, “you’d have to check with Mr. Robinelli at the Gibson Yards where we keep her. The way it works, we set up an advance schedule for executive use of the vessel, and empower Mr. Robinelli to charter her when such charters will not interfere with company plans in any way. These charters, and I wish there were more of them, help with maintenance, dockage, insurance and payroll of the permanent crew. I don’t have a copy of the advance schedule handy, but I could have someone get it. I happen to know she is at the Yard right now. If you …”
I told him not to bother, and that I would check with Mr. Robinelli. I looked up the address of the Yard, and went back to the car and found it on the city map. There was enough time to go check it out. It was over in the big busy commercial harbor where a dozen freighters were loading and off-loading, where industrial smog hung low and heavy in the heat, where the air stank of chemicals, and where, in that manufactured haze, some huge piles of sulphur gleamed a vivid and improbable yellow. I parked by the office of the Gibson Yards, and I could see the Buccaneer at a dockside mooring. Two men in khakis were working topsides. She had a lot of brightwork, and I didn’t envy anyone the housekeeping chore of sluicing the local grime off her every day.
Robinelli was chunky and brusque, a three-telephone, four-clipboard, five-fountain-pen man, a trotting fellow with no time for small talk. I represented myself as spokesman for a group interested in chartering the Buccaneer for a cruise to Yucatan, say twenty days. Ten in the party. Would she be available anytime soon? At what rate?
He jumped in his desk chair and scribbled on a pad. “Call it an even three thousand. Includes food, steward service. Crew of four. Bring your own booze. Everything else laid on.” He spoke more loudly, with a whip-crack in his voice, and a thin woman with a limp came at a halting half-trot to hand him a clipboard. He snapped thro
ugh the top pages. “She’s open as of July 10th for thirty-two days. Have to know by June 30th the latest. Certified check in full two days before departure. No charter passengers sixty-five or older. Insurance provision. Cruises at fourteen knots. Sixteen hundred mile range. Radar, salt water conversion unit, draws nine feet, seven passenger staterooms, three heads with tub and shower. Anti-roll fins. Go look at it.” He scribbled a note, handed it to me. “Let me know. In writing.”
I took Chook down to the dock with me. A husky kid with a blunt indifferent face, big freckled biceps, a khaki shirt tailored to fit as tightly as his young hide, looked at the note, said the Captain had gone ashore for the day and we were welcome to look around. We took a quick tour. The conversion was well done. She had become luxury transportation without losing her businesslike flavor.
Topside again, I said, “Thanks.” Stuck my head in the engine room. “Solid old lunkers,” I said. “With that big slow stroke, they should live forever. But in the conversion, didn’t they put in a different precombustion system?” I had read the dirt under his nails accurately. Pleased alertness washed away the air of indifference, and in about four minutes he told me more that I cared to know about the brute diesels in the Buck.
“I heard about her from a friend of mine who had her on charter. Cal Stebber.”
“Who?”
“A very important man. Short, heavy, very friendly. He was on her last summer in Naples. He was down there on a land deal.”
“Oh, him! Yeah. Nice guy. But it wasn’t a charter, exactly. We had a three-week layover at that Cutlass Yacht Club on account of one job ended there, and we had to pick the next bunch up there, so Mr. Stebber made a deal with Captain Andy to stay aboard for a while. Sort of a dockside charter. Captain Andy got hell from Robinelli. Hell, if he hadn’t turned in the money, Robinelli wouldn’t have known a damn thing about it. I think it was fifty a day they settled for. And the deal was that Mr. Stebber had some people he wanted to look real good for, so we were briefed to say, if anybody asked us, friends had loaned it to Mr. Stebber.”
“I know Cal lives right here in Tampa, and I had his unlisted number and didn’t bring it. Forgot his address. One of those cooperative apartments on Tampa Bay. You wouldn’t have it aboard, would you?”
“Golly, I don’t think so. He got on and he got off at Naples, and we were tied up the whole time. He paid cash. There wouldn’t be any reason to …” He stopped and tugged his ear, looking into space. “Wait a minute. There was something. Yeah. Bruno found it when he was sweeping up after Mr. Stebber left. One cuff link under something. Solid gold with some kind of gray-looking jewel in it. Captain Andy had that phone number, or got it somehow, and when we got back to Tampa he got hold of Mr. Stebber and …” He turned to face forward, and yelled, “Hey, Bruno. Here a minute.”
Bruno, lanky and unprepossessing, came shambling aft, wiping soapy hands on his thighs, staring with great glint-eyed approval at Miss McCall.
“Say Bru, you remember the guy you took that gold cuff link back to last year?”
“Give me twenty bucks, man. I remember pretty good.”
“Where was it you had to go?”
“West Shore Boulevard, below Gandy Bridge, like near McDill. Some number, I don’t remember. Pretty nice place, man.”
“Could you tell this man something so he can find it?”
“Don’t lean or I come up empty. Give me room to think. It had a number, and it had a name. Pale-color building, and like four buildings hooked together, him in the one closest to the water, top floor. Maybe seventh floor, eighth floor. Anyhow, the top one. Something about the name, it didn’t make sense. I got it! West Harbour. Even spelled wrong. Oh-you-are instead of oh-are. And no harbor there, man, no matter how you spell it. Docks and a half-ass breakwater and more little sailboats than they had little cruisers, but nothing I’d call a harbor.”
As we headed away from there, Chook said, “Half the time I don’t know what’s on your mind. I have to just stand there, looking relaxed. It’s a weird way to come up with his address, McGee.”
“There are probably other ways. Maybe not too many, if he’s quiet and careful. People leave tracks. You don’t know where they left them. If you range back and forth across territory where you know they’ve been, then you have a better chance of blundering across something. You just saw good luck. I’ve had a lot of bad days too. If Stebber wants to play, or if he doesn’t want to play, either way I’m glad to know where he is. I think we’ll call him right from there.”
It was almost three thirty by the time I located West Harbour. It was rich and tasteful, the grounds spacious and landscaped, the architecture styled to avoid a cold and institutional look, without severe geometry or mathematical spacing. The main entrance drive split into three separate drives—delivery, guests and residents. I left Chook in the car, the keys in the ignition.
“I am going to be out of there by four thirty or sooner. I won’t send word. If I want to take longer, I’ll come down and tell you myself. So at four thirty, you drive right out of here, stop at the first pay phone you can find, tip the police, anonymously, that something very strange is going on at the Stebber apartment, West Harbour, the tower nearest the waterfront, top floor. And then find your way back to the airport. Turn this car in. Here’s your airplane ticket. If I don’t show for the seven o’clock plane, get on it anyway. Take the other car back to the marina. Here are the other car keys. Check Arthur off the boat, lock it up, go check into a motel. Make it … Mr. and Mrs. Arthur McCall. Tomorrow morning, find the Chamber of Commerce. They all have visitors’ books. Sign in under that name, with the motel address, including the unit number. Get it?”
“I got it.”
“Need money?”
“No. I’ve got enough.”
I used a pay booth in the West Harbour lobby to phone Stebber’s unlisted number. “Yes?” the same voice said, in the same cool modulation.
“Me again, smirking girl. A little off schedule.”
“The gentleman you were asking about before, sir, would be happy to meet you at the bar at the Tampa Terrace Hotel at five o’clock.”
“Couldn’t he see me now, as long as I’m right here?”
“Here?”
“At West Harbour, dear. In the lobby.”
“Would you please hold the line a moment, sir.” It was a very long moment. She came back and said, “You may come up, sir. Do you know the apartment number?”
“I know where it is, but not the number.”
“Four dash eight A. Four is the tower, eight is the floor.”
I took the walk to the tower nearest the water. The path had a screen of shrubbery. There were curves, stairs up and stairs down, little public courts with benches and some curious cement statuary. The lobby of Tower Four was spacious and empty. You can equate expense with the space they are willing to waste. Two small self-service elevators. At eight the door hissed open and I walked into a small foyer, indirectly lighted. B on the right; A on the left. I pressed a stainless steel button. There was a three-inch circle of mirror set into the door. I winked at it.
The girl behind the voice opened the door and said, “Do come in, sir.”
I did not get a really good look at her until she had led me through a short entrance hallway and down two carpeted steps into a large living room, where she turned and smiled her greeting again. She was medium height, and very slender. She wore pants carefully tailored to her slenderness, of a white fabric worked with gold thread in ornate and delicate design. With it she wore a sort of short coolie coat of the same fabric, with three-quarter sleeves and a wide stiffened collar which stood up in back and swooped down around her shoulders, making a theatrical frame for a slender, pale, classic, beautiful face. Her hair, a very dark and rich chestnut brown, was combed smooth and straight, falling to frame her face, soft parentheses, to chin level, with copper glints where daylight touched it. But the eyes were the best of her. Crystal mint, that clear perfect green of childhoo
d Christmas, the green you see after the first few licks have melted the sugar frost. In walk and smile and gesture she had all the mannered elegance of a high fashion model. In most women who have that trick, it is an irritating artifice. Look, look, look at gorgeous incomparable me! But she managed, somehow, to mock herself at the same time, so the effect was of elegance shared. It said: Having it, I might as well use it.
“I’ll tell him you’re here. It would be nice to tell him a name, wouldn’t it?”
“Travis McGee. You have a name too.”
“Debra.”
“And never never Debbie.”
“Never indeed. Excuse me.” She swayed off, closed a heavy door softly behind her. And for the first time the room came into focus. Probably thirty by fifty. Twelve-foot ceiling. Window wall with a spectacular view of the bay, terrace beyond it with a low wall, chunky redwood furniture. An almost transparent drapery had been pulled across to reduce the afternoon glare, and there was a heavier drapery racked at the side of it. Giant fireplace faced with coquina rock. Deep-blue carpeting. Low furniture, in leather and pale wood. Bookcases. Wall shelves, built in, with a collection of blue Danish glassware, and another, glassed in, with a collection of the little clay figures of Pre-Columbian Latin America. The cooled air was in slight movement, scented very faintly with pine.
It was a very still room, a place where you could listen to the beating of your heart. And it seemed to lack identity, as though it might be a room where executives waited to be called into the board meeting beyond the dark and heavy door.
After long minutes the door opened and Calvin Stebber came smiling into the room, Debra two paces behind him and, in her flat white sandals with gold thongs, maybe an inch taller. He marched up to me and stared up at me, smiling, and I could feel the impact of his superb projection of warmth, interest, kindliness, importance. You could be this man’s lifelong friend after ten minutes, and marvel that he found you interesting enough to spend a piece of his busy life on you. It was the basic working tool of the top grade confidence man.
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