“Huh? I don’t get it.”
“As if something could be hidden in the house?”
“Huh? No. Nothing like that. But I sure God stay clear of the grove there back of the shed. One time, back in March I think, it got hot unexpected like. He’d come by and give me a blast on the horn pretty late. At like three in the morning, him asleep and snoring by then, I was there smelling some stinking fish he’d forgot about and left on the porch maybe since that noon. Redfish. They turn fast when it’s hot. It got my stomach rolling over finally, so I up and pull my dress on and go out and pick them up by the stringer, get a shovel from the shed and go off back into the grove to bury them holding my breath mostly. I hardly dug half a hole and he come at me, running flat out, grunting, that belt knife of his winking in the moonlight, charging bareass crazy right at me. Me, I take off through the grove and hear him hit a root or something and go down hard. Then he’s coming on again, yelling he’s going to kill me, and I’m yelling I was burying his stinking fish before the stink made me snap my lunch.
“Then he was quiet, so I snuck in a circle and see him back in the open part of the grove, finishing digging the hole. He dabbed the fish in and covered them over, then he hollers for me to come on in, saying it was okay, he was just having a funny dream and he woke up. Hell he did. A long time after he went back in the house I get the nerve fin’ly to sneak back in, and the way I got grabbed sudden in the dark from behind, it like to kill me. But what he wanted to do was just horse around. You know. Laughing and tickling. And he got me all turned on prakly before I got over being scared. And I tell you one thing. I never seen any shovel anywhere around his place since. But he isn’t so dumb he’d bury that dwarf woman onto his own place. Not with a couple million acres of ’glades close by, where he could put a little dead woman back in there so far and so deep, the whole army and navy couldn’t find her in a hundred years. Why, he could just float her into a gator pool and them gators would wedge her down into the mud bottom for ripenin’ and have her et’n to nothing in a couple weeks. Maybe they can catch him killin’ somebody, but they’ll never get him for it afterwards. I’ll tell you one more thing for sure. If’n you mess him up good, and he knows who done it, you’re best off leaving him dead your own self. That’s the thing about that tobacco work. I get maybe up past Georgia someplace and the bus stops and there he is, leanin on that white Lincoln grinnin, and I pick up my suitcase off’n the rack and get off that bus, because that’s all there’d be to do. And he knows it.”
On one of her notebook sheets I drew a crude sketch of the cottage and shed and road, and she made an X where she had started digging, and drew in some lopsided circles to indicate where the trees were standing.
As I let her off, she looked at me for a moment, eyes squinty and her lips sucked in. “I’d hate for you to say I told you this stuff.”
“Cindy, you’re fifteen years old, and you’re going to get out of this mess and in another couple of years you won’t remember much about it.”
There was a bleak amusement in her woman’s eyes. “I’m three weeks from sixteen, and it’ll keep right on going on until Boo gets tired of it, and there won’t be a day in my life I don’t remember some part of it or other.”
I drove into Naples, on the alert for Land Rovers and white Lincoln convertibles. I found a hardware store several blocks along Fifth Avenue, parked in their side lot, bought two spades and a pick and put them in the trunk. Then I thought of another device that might be useful, a variation of the way plumbers search for buried pipes. I bought a four-foot length of quarter-inch steel reinforcing rod, and one of those rubber-headed mallets they use for body and fender work. Naples was drowsy in the heat of the off-season, prenoon sun. I phoned Crane Watts’ office number, and hung up when he said hello. Next I phoned his home number. It did not answer. I tried the club and asked if Mrs. Watts was on the courts. In a few moments they said she was and should they call her to the phone. I said never mind.
When I arrived at the club the parking lot was nearly empty. There were a few people down on the beach, one couple in the pool. As I walked toward the courts I saw only two were in use, one where two scrawny elderly gentlemen were playing vicious pat-ball, and, several courts away, the brown, lithe, sturdy Mrs. Watts in a practice session. The man was apparently the club pro, very brown, balding, thickening. He moved well, but she had him pretty well lathered up. There were a couple dozen balls near the court. He was feeding her backhand, ignoring the returns, bouncing each ball, then stroking it to her left with good speed and overspin. She moved, gauged, planted herself, pivoted, the ball ponging solidly off the gut, moved to await the next one. The waistband of her tennis skirt was visibly damp with sweat.
It seemed, for her, a strange and intense ritual, a curious sublimation of tension and combat. Her face was stern and expressionless. She glanced at me twice and then ignored me. Gave no greeting.
Finally as he turned to pick up three more balls she said, “That’ll do it for now, Timmy.”
He took a handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his face. “Righto, Miz Watts. I make it three hours. Okay?”
“Anything you say.”
As Timmy was collecting the balls in a mesh sack, she walked to the sidecourt bench, mopped her face and throat with a towel, stared at me with cold speculation as I approached.
“Pretty warm for it, Vivian.”
“Mr. McGee, you made an excellent first impression on me the other night. But the second one was more lasting.”
“And things might not have been what they seemed.”
She took her time unsnapping the golf glove on her right hand, peeling it off. She prodded and examined the pads at the base of her fingers. “I do not think I am interested in any nuances of legality, Mr. McGee, any justification of any cute tricky little things you want to involve my husband in.” As she spoke, she was slipping her rackets into their braces, tightening down the thumb screws. “He is not … the kind of man for that kind of thing. I don’t know why he’s trying to be something he isn’t. It’s tearing him apart. Why don’t you just leave us alone?”
As she gathered up her gear, I picked the words that would, I hoped, pry open a closed mind. “Vivian, I wouldn’t ask your husband’s advice on a parking ticket, believe me.”
She straightened up, those very dark blue eyes becoming round with surprise and indignation. “Crane is a very good attorney!”
“Maybe he was. Once upon a time. Not now.”
“Who are you? What do you want?”
“I want to form a little mutual aid society with you, Vivian. You need help and I need help.”
“Is this … help I’m supposed to get, is it just for me or for Crane too?”
“Both of you.”
“Of course. I get him to do some nasty little piece of crooked work for you, and it will make us gloriously rich and happy.”
“No. He did his nasty little piece of crooked work last year, and it didn’t do either of you any good.”
She began to walk slowly, thoughtfully, off toward the distant entrance to the women’s locker room, and I walked beside her. She had been laboring in the sun for three hours. Under the faded cosmetic and deodorant scents of a fastidious woman was an animal pungency of work-sweat, a sharpness not unpleasant, the effluvium of ballet school and practice halls.
“What I can offer, if things can be worked out, is a long odds chance and a suggestion. I think he’s whipped himself here. I think you’re both whipped. If you had some cash, right now, you should settle up what you owe around here and get out. Try it again in a new place. What is he? Thirty-one? There’s time. But maybe he’s lost you along the way, and you’re not interested.”
Under the shade of big pines the path narrowed and I dropped behind her. Her back was straight and strong, and the round of her sturdy hips, in tempo with the smooth brown muscular flex of her calves, gave the tennis skirt a limber sway. She stopped suddenly and turned around to face me. Her mouth, free o
f the tautness of disapproval, was softened and younger. “He hasn’t lost me. But don’t play games. Don’t play cruel games, Travis. I don’t know what’s been going on. He says he got into something and he didn’t know it was a bad thing until too late.”
Sometimes you have to aim right between the eyes. “He knew from the start. He knew it was fraud, with a nice little sugar coating of legality. They paid him well, and he helped them screw a man named Arthur Wilkinson out of a quarter of a million dollars. It got around, Vivian. Who’d trust him now? He’s terrified that somebody is going to wipe off the pretty icing and expose the fraud. He consorted with con artists and trash like Boone Waxwell, went into it with his eyes open for the sake of what he thought was going to be twelve thousand five. But he doesn’t have the nerve to be a good thief. He began to shake apart. They kissed him off with seven thousand five, knowing he didn’t have the nerve to get hard-nosed about it. And if he keeps dithering around spilling his guts to strangers like me, maybe they’ll get so tired of him they’ll send somebody around to put a gun in his hand when he’s passed out, and stick the barrel in his ear.”
She wobbled on those good legs, and her color went sick under the tan. She moved off the path and sat, quite heavily, on a cement and cypress bench, staring blindly through the shade toward the bright sea. Her mouth trembled. I sat beside her, watching that unhappy profile.
“I … I guess I knew that he knew. Sunday night, after Waxwell left, he swore on his word of honor Waxwell had been lying, trying to needle us by all those little hints that Crane had been in on something all along.”
She turned and looked at me in a pleading way, her color getting better, and said, “What makes him so weak?”
“Maybe what’s left of your good opinion of him is the only thing he has left, Vivian. Would you still want to try to save it?”
“His best friend at Stetson, his roommate, wanted Crane to quit here and go in with him in practice in Orlando. He might still … I don’t know. And I don’t know about me even. I think if I could get him straightened out again, then it would be time to decide about me.”
“If what I want to ask you to do works out, I want you and your husband to be ready to leave any moment, to get ready so you can leave. Arrange the big things later, like getting rid of the house and so on.”
“Right now our equity in that might buy one day’s groceries,” she said bitterly. “One way or another, I can make him do it.”
“How much would it take to clean up your bills here and give the two of you say a month or six weeks a good long way from here, in some hideout. Don’t look so skeptical. You wouldn’t be hiding from the law. It would be a chance to get him dried out. And then he might begin to make more sense to himself, and you.”
“My father left me a cabin on a couple of acres of ridge land near Brevard, North Carolina. On Slick Rock Mountain. It’s so lovely up there. You can look out across ridge after ridge, all gray-blue in the distance. Wood fires on summer nights.” Her mouth twisted. “We honeymooned there, several thousand lifetimes ago. How much to settle up here? I don’t know. He’s been so secretive. Maybe we owe more than I know. I’d think three or four thousand dollars. But there might be other debts.”
“And getting started in Orlando later on. Call it ten.”
“Ten thousand dollars! What could I do that would be worth ten thousand dollars to anyone? Who do I have to kill?”
“You have to be bait, Vivian. To lure Boone Waxwell out of his cave and keep him out for as long as you can, a full day minimum, more if we can manage it.”
Those good shoulders moved slowly up. She locked her hands, closed her eyes and shuddered. “That man. God, he makes my flesh crawl. The few times I’ve ever seen him, he’s never taken his eyes off me. And he acts as if he and I have some special secret we share. All those little smirks and chuckles and winks, and the way he struts around me, puffing his chest and rolling his shoulders, laughing with a little snorting sound, like a stallion. And he puts double meanings in everything he says to me. Honestly, I freeze completely. He makes me feel naked and sick. That pelt of hair sticking out of the top of those ghastly shirts, and all that black hair on the backs of his hands and fingers, and that sort of … oily intimacy in his voice, it all makes my stomach turn over. Travis, if what you have in mind involves his … even touching me in any way, no. Not for ten thousand dollars, not for ten thousand dollars a minute.” She tilted her head, looking at me in a puzzled way. “It isn’t because I’m … prissy or anything. No other man has affected me that way. I am certainly not … unresponsive.” And the wryness around her mouth. “Of course I haven’t been able to check that in some time. When one becomes a very infrequent convenience for a drunk, an accommodation, the opportunity for any kind of response is very goddam rare.”
A dime of sunlight came through the pine branches overhead, glowed against the firm and graceful forearm, showing the pattern of fine golden hair against the dark skin. She shook her head. “It’s like nightmares when you’re a kid. I think that if Boone Waxwell ever … got me, I might walk around afterwards and look just the same, but my heart would be dead as a stone forever. Oh, I guess I’d make nifty bait all right. He did everything but paw the ground Sunday night.”
“The point is to make him think you have gone to a place where he can get at you. A far place, that’ll take him a long time to get to. And a long time to get back when he finds it was a trick, and when he gets back, both of you will be gone. But you can’t let your husband in on it. Because in his present condition, Waxwell can spread him open like a road map. We have to make Crane believe you have gone to a specific place, and somehow give Waxwell the idea of prying it out of him.”
“Then you can get the money, while he’s gone off after me.”
“I had the idea you’d be just this quick and bright, Vivian.”
“The money … Crane helped steal?”
“A good part of it.”
“But then it’s still stolen money, isn’t it?”
“Not when, this time, you get it with the blessing of the man they took it from.”
“The man you’re working for?”
“In a sense. Arthur Wilkinson. And I think he should tell you in person that he approves the arrangement. You think of how we can best set it up, this decoy operation. Maybe Arthur and I can meet you tonight.”
“I could have some specific plan by then, I think, Travis. You could come to the house at eleven.”
“What about your husband?”
“The big suspense in my life every evening is whether he’ll pass out in his big leather chair or totter to bed first. I try to cut down the intake. I make his drinks, on demand. It is a delicate problem. If I make them too weak, he comes blundering out into the kitchen and snarls at me and puts another big slug in the glass. He stares at television and doesn’t see a thing or remember a thing. It’s no problem, really. Tonight I’ll make them strong, and frequent. And by eleven you could march a fife and drum corps through without him missing a snore. When he passes out, I’ll put the light on over the front door.” She took a very deep breath, let it out in a sigh. “Maybe it can work. Maybe people can go back and start the race a second time.”
Back aboard the Flush I was in time for lunch only because Chook had delayed it until there was an improved chance of Arthur keeping it down. He was wane and humble, reeking of guilt, his eyes sliding away from any direct glance.
“All these empty boats around us,” he said. “I don’t know. I kept hearing things. A little creak or a thump, after it got dark. Each time I knew he was sneaking aboard. And I knew what he has to do, Trav. He has to get rid of everybody who can link him with Wilma. And I saw her there. I went back and forth in the lounge in the dark, with the loaded gun, and I’d peer out the windows and see things, see some shadow duck across an open space over there, coming closer. I felt I could empty the gun right into him and he’d come right on at me, laughing. He certainly found out the name and descriptio
n of this boat, and I just knew he’d hunted until he’d found it. Then I thought a drink would give me some confidence. And one didn’t. But the second one worked so good, I thought three would be even better. Hell, I can’t even remember what I did with the gun. We hunted all over. Chook found it. In a corner up against a locker. I must have dropped it and kicked it. I’m a lot of help to everybody.”
Chook stepped from the galley to the dining booth and glowered down at him. She wore pale blue stretch pants that rode low on her hips, and a red bikini top so narrow that only a perfect adjustment, which she attained but seldom, kept the umber nipple areas entirely covered. Half-leaning over the booth in that cramped area, in the glow of sun off the water shining through the ports, it seemed an almost overpowering amount of bare girl.
“Why don’t you go sit in the garden and eat worms, lover?” she demanded. “Your self-pity rends my girlish heart. You got drunk, a condition so rare you can find it only in medical books. God’s sake, Arthur!”
“I got terrified.”
“That man beat you within an inch of your life, with Wilma watching it and enjoying it, and if that railing hadn’t broken, maybe he would have killed you. Do you think a thing like that shouldn’t leave a mark?” She hissed with exasperation. “Since when is it a sin to be scared? Am I going to move out of your bed because you can get frightened? Are people going to spit on you on the street? Drop this boy scout bit. Every day in every way, nine out of ten people in this big fat world are scared pissless. You have some obligation to be different? Even the mighty McGee isn’t immune, believe me. God’s sake, Arthur!”
She strode back into the galley area, made a vicious banging of copper pots.
“Wow,” Arthur said in a low tone of awe.
“She’s right,” I said. “And tonight you get another chance to get a little jumpy, Arthur. You and I are going calling.”
His throat slid up and down in a large dry swallow. He put his shoulders back. “Fine!” he said heartily. “Just fine! Looking forward to it.”
Bright Orange for the Shroud Page 18