The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper

by John D. MacDonald

  Bobby Guthrie got his funny-looking pump going. It throbbed, smoked, and stank, but it pulled water up through the intake hose dangling over the side and pumped it down and into the wreck and out through dozens of small openings here and there. Palacio was very nervous. His hands shook as he clamped the small hoses that led from three drums of separate kinds of gunk to the brass nipples on a fitting on the big hose that led down to the wreck. He had flow gauges and hand pumps on each drum. As Meyer had explained it to me, Gunk One reacted with the water, raising its temperature. Then Gunk Two and Gunk Three interacted with the heated water as they went swirling down, and when they were released inside the hull down below, they separated into big blobs and, in the cooler water, solidified into a very lightweight plastic full of millions of little bubbles full of the gases released through their interaction on each other and the heated water. Palacio had the three of us manning the hand pumps and he hopped back and forth from one flow gauge to the other, speeding one man up, slowing another down. There was, after about ten minutes, a sudden eruption about forty feet down-current, and a batch of irregular yellow-white chunks the size of cantaloupe appeared and, floating very high on the water, went moving swiftly away in the slight breeze.

  Palacio stopped us and cut the flow. Guthrie turned off the big pump. We went down and found that the ventilator on the forward deck had blown out. By the time it was secure, it was time to quit. All day Wednesday there was pump trouble of one kind or another. We thought Palacio would break down and start sobbing.

  By midday Thursday everything seemed to be working well for about forty minutes. My arm began to feel leaden. Palacio was gnawing his knuckles. Suddenly Guthrie gave a roar of surprise. The hose began to stand up out of the water like a snake and a moment later the big cruiser came porpoising up, so fast and so close that it threw a big wave aboard, drenching us and killing the pump. She rocked back and forth, streaming water, riding high and handsome. We stomped and yelled and laughed like idiots. She was packed full of those lightweight brittle blobs of foam, and I tried not to think of how damned foolish I had been to never even think of what could have happened if she had come up that fast and directly under the Flush.

  We wasted no time rigging for towing. We were getting more swell and I did not like the feel of the wind. Between periods of dead calm there would come a hot, moist huff, like a gigantic exhalation. I set it up with short towlines, the Flush in the lead, of course, the salvaged ’Bama Gal in the middle, and Bobby Guthrie aboard the Muñequita in the rear. I broke out the pair of walkie-talkies because the bulk of the ’Bama Gal made hand signals to Bobby back there impossible. The system was for him to keep the Muñequita’s pair of OMC 120’s idling in neutral, and if our tow started to swing, he could give the engines a little touch of reverse and pull it back into line. I knew the inboard-outboards could idle all day without overheating. Also, when I had to stop the Flush down for traffic, Bobby could keep it from riding up on our stern.

  It was early Saturday afternoon before we got her to Merrill-Stevens at Dinner Key, and we had to work her in during a flat squall, in a hard gray driving rain, the wind gusting and whistling. I’d phoned a friend via the Miami marine operator earlier in the day, so they were waiting for us. We shoved the ’Bama Gal into the slings and they picked her out of the water and put her on a cradle and ran her along the rails and into one of the big sheds. Palacio wore a permanent, broad, dreaming grin.

  The dockmaster assigned me a slip for the Flush and space in the small boat area for the Muñequita. By the time we were properly moored, hooked into shoreside power, and had showered and shaved and changed, heavy rain was drumming down, and it was very snug in the lounge aboard The Busted Flush, lights on, music on, ice in the glasses, Meyer threatening to make his famous beef stew with chili, beans, and eggs, never the same way twice running. Guthrie had phoned his wife and she was going to drive down from Lauderdale to pick him up Sunday morning. They were tapping the Wild Turkey bourbon we’d found aboard the Gal, and I was sticking to Plymouth on ice. Meyer kept everybody from going too far overboard in estimating profit. He kept demanding we come up with “the minimum expectation, gentlemen.”

  So we kept going over what would probably have to be done and came up with a maximum fifteen thousand to put her in shape, and a minimum forty-five thousand return after brokerage commission.

  That is the best kind of argument, trying to figure out how much you’ve made. It is good to hear the thunder of tropic rain, to feel the muscle soreness of hard manual labor when you move, to have a chill glass in your hand, know the beginnings of ravenous hunger, realize that in a few hours even a bunk made of cobblestones would feel deep and soft and inviting.

  They wanted me to come into the fledgling partnership, with twenty-five percent of the action. But struggling ventures should not be cut too many ways. Nor did I want the responsibility, that ever-present awareness of people depending on me permanently to make something work. They were too proud—Guthrie and Palacio—to accept my efforts as a straight donation, so after some inverted haggling we agreed that I would take two thousand in the form of a note at six percent, payable in six months. They wanted to put their take back into improved equipment and go after a steel barge sunk in about fifty feet of water just outside Boca Grande Pass.

  I was sprawled and daydreaming, no longer hearing their words as they talked excitedly of plans and projects, hearing only the blur of their voices through the music.

  “Didn’t we make it that time in an hour and a half? Hey! Trav!”

  Meyer was snapping his fingers at me. “Make what?” I asked.

  “That run from Lauderdale to Bimini.”

  They had stopped talking business. I could remember that ride all too well. “Just under an hour and a half from the sea buoy at Lauderdale to the first channel marker at Bimini.”

  “In what?” Guthrie asked.

  I told him what it had been, a Bertram 25 rigged for ocean racing with a pair of big hairy three hundreds in it, and enough chop in the Stream so that I had to work the throttles and the wheel every moment, so that when she went off a crest and was airborne, she would come down flat. Time it wrong and hit wrong, and you can trip them over.

  “What was the rush?” Bobby asked.

  “We were meeting a plane,” Meyer said.

  And I knew at that moment he too was thinking of Helena Pearson and a very quick and dirty salvage job of several years back. We were both thinking of her, with no way of knowing she had been dead two days, no way of knowing her letter was at Bahia Mar waiting for me.

  Even without the knowledge of her death, Helena was a disturbing memory …

  Two

  Five years ago? Yes. In a winter month, in a cold winter for Florida, Mick Pearson, with his wife, Helena, and his two daughters, aged twenty and seventeen, crewing for him, had brought his handsome Dutch motor sailer into Bahia Mar, all the way from Bordeaux. The Likely Lady. A wiry, seamed, sun-freckled, talkative man in his fifties, visibly older than his slender gray-blond wife.

  He gave the impression of somebody who had made it early, had retired, and was having the sweet life. He circulated quickly and readily and got to know all the regulars. He gave the impression of talking a lot about himself, not in any bragging or self-important way, but by amusing incident. People found it easy to talk to him.

  Finally I began to get the impression that he was focusing on me, as if he had been engaged in some process of selection and I was his best candidate. I realized how very little I knew about him, how little he had actually said. Once we began prying away at each other, showdown was inevitable. I remember how cold his eyes were when he stopped being friendly sociable harmless Mick Pearson.

  He wanted a confidential errand done, for a fat fee. He said he had been involved in a little deal abroad. He said it involved options on some old oil tankers, and some surplus, obsolete Turkish military vehicles, and all I needed to know about it was that it was legal, and he wasn’t wanted,
at least officially, by any government anywhere.

  Some other sharpshooters had been trying to make the same deal, he said. They refused to make it a joint effort, as he had suggested, and tried to swing it alone. But Pearson beat them to it and they were very annoyed at his methods. “So they know I’ve got this bank draft payable to the bearer, for two hundred thirty thousand English pounds, payable only at the main branch of the Bank of Nova Scotia in the Bahamas, at Nassau, which is the way I wanted it because I’ve got a protected account there. I didn’t want them to find out how I was going to handle it, but they did. It’s enough money so they can put some very professional people to work to take it away from me. Long, long ago I might have taken a shot at slipping by them. But now I’ve got my three gals to think of, and how thin their future would be if I didn’t make it. So I have to have somebody they don’t know take it to the bank with my letter of instructions. Then they’ll give up.”

  I asked him what made him so sure I wouldn’t just set up my own account and stuff the six hundred and forty thousand into it.

  His was a very tough grin. “Because it would screw you all up, McGee. It would bitch your big romance with your own image of yourself. I couldn’t do that to anybody. Neither could you. That’s what makes us incurably small-time.”

  “That kind of money isn’t exactly small-time.”

  “Compared to what it could have been by now, it is small, believe me.” So he offered me five thousand to be errand boy, and I agreed. Payable in advance, he said. And after he had given me the documents, he would take off in the Likely Lady as a kind of decoy, and I was to start the day after he did. He said he would head for the Bahamas but then swing south and go down around the Keys and up the west coast of Florida to the home he and his gals hadn’t seen for over a year and missed so badly, a raunchy sun-weathered old cypress house on pilings on the north end of Casey Key.

  That was on a Friday. He was going to give me the documents on Sunday and take the Likely Lady out to sea on Monday. At about noon on Saturday, while Helena and her daughters were over on the beach, they came aboard and cracked his skull and peeled the stateroom safe open. It would have been perfect had not Mick Pearson wired his air horns in relay with a contact on the safe door, activated by a concealed switch he could turn off when he wanted to open it himself. So too many people saw the pair leaving the Likely Lady too hastily. It took me almost two hours to get a line on them, to make certain they hadn’t left by air. They had left their rental car over at Pier 66 and had gone off at one o’clock on a charter boat for some Bahamas fishing. I knew the boat, the Betty Bee, a thirty-eight-foot Merritt, well-kept, Captain Roxy Howard and usually one or the other of his skinny nephews crewing for him.

  I phoned Roxy’s wife and she said they were going to Bimini and work out from there, trolling the far side of the Stream, starting Sunday. At that time, as I later learned, the neurosurgeons were plucking bone splinters out of Mick Pearson’s brain.

  I knew that the Betty Bee would take four hours to get across, so that would put her in Bimini at five o’clock or later. There was a feeder flight from there to Nassau leaving at seven fifteen. A boat is a very inconspicuous way to leave the country. Both Florida and the Bahamas have such a case of hots for the tourist dollar that petty officialdom must cry themselves to sleep thinking about all the missing red tape.

  It was two thirty before, in consultation with Meyer, I figured out how to handle it. If I chartered a flight over, it was going to be a sticky problem coping with the pair on Bahama soil. Meyer remembered that Hollis Gandy’s muscular Bertram, the Baby Beef, was in racing trim, and that Hollis, as usual, had a bad case of the shorts, brought on by having too many ex-wives with good lawyers.

  So it was three when we banged past the sea buoy outside Lauderdale, Bimini-bound. Meyer could not hold the glasses on anything of promising size we spotted, any more than a rodeo contestant could thread a needle while riding a steer. And if I altered course to take closer looks, I stood the risk of wasting too much time or alerting a couple of nervous people.

  We got to the marker west of the Bimini bar at four thirty, and after a quick check inside to make certain the Betty Bee hadn’t made better than estimated time, we went out and lay in wait five miles offshore. I faked dead engines, got aboard, alerted Roxy Howard, and we took them very quickly. Roxy was easily alerted as he had become increasingly suspicious of the pair. An Englishman and a Greek. It was useful to do it quickly, as the Greek was snake-fast and armed. We trussed them up and I told Roxy what they’d been up to as I went through their luggage and searched their persons. The envelope with the bearer bank draft was in the Greek’s suitcase and with it was the signed letter to the bank identifying me, authorizing me to act for Mick Pearson, with a space for my signature, and another space for me to sign again, probably in the presence of a bank officer. The Greek had two thousand dollars in his wallet, and the Englishman about five hundred. The Englishman had an additional eleven thousand plus in a sweaty money belt. It seemed reasonable to assume that that money had come out of Mick’s stateroom safe. As far as I knew, Mick had taken a good thump on his hard skull and certainly had no interest in bringing in any kind of law. Roxy was not interested in tangling with the Bahamian police authorities. And I did not think the Englishman or the Greek would lodge any complaints. And it was obvious that trying to get word out of either of them would call for some very messy encouragement, something I have no stomach for. Theirs was a hard, competent, professional silence.

  So I gave five hundred to Roxy. He said it was too much, but he didn’t argue the point. We off-loaded them into the Baby Beef, and Roxy turned the Betty Bee and headed for home port. I ran on down to Barnett Harbour, about halfway between South Bimini and Cat Cay, and put them aboard the old concrete ship that has been sitting awash there since 1926, the old Sapona that used to be a floating liquor warehouse during prohibition. I knew they’d have a rough night of it, but they would be picked off the next day by the inevitable fishermen or skin divers. They had their gear, their identification papers, and over twenty-five hundred dollars. And they would think of some explanation that wouldn’t draw attention to themselves. They had that look.

  I ran back outside and into Bimini Harbor and found a place to tie up, where the boat would be safe. We caught the feeder flight to Nassau, and I called old friends at Lyford Cay. They refused to let us go into the city, and as they had what they called a “medium bash” going, they sent one of their cars to bring us over from the airport. We spent most of Sunday sprawling around the pool and telling lies.

  Monday morning I borrowed a car and went into the city to the main offices at Bay Street at Rawson Square. The size of the transaction made it something to be handled in a paneled office in the rear. I was given a receipt that gave the date and hour and minute of the deposit, gave the identification number of the bearer draft rather than the amount, and gave the number of the account maintained by Pearson rather than his name. The receipt was embossed with a heavy and ornate seal, and the bank officer scrawled indecipherable initials across it. I did not know then how good my timing had been.

  Meyer and I caught a feeder flight back to Bimini in the early afternoon. The day was clear, bright, and cool. The Stream had flattened out, but even so, a two-and-a-half-hour trip was more comfortable than trying to match our time heading over.

  The Likely Lady was all buttoned up when I walked around to D-109 to give Mick the receipt. The young couple aboard the big ketch parked next door said they had talked to Maureen, the elder daughter, at noon, and she had said that her father’s condition was critical.

  I told Meyer and went over to the hospital. When finally I had a chance to talk to Helena, I could see that there was no point in trying to give her the bank receipt or talking about the money. The receipt would have meant as much to her at that moment as an old laundry list. She said with a white-lipped, trembling, ghastly smile that Mick was “holding his own.”

  I remember th
at I found a nurse I knew and I remember waiting while she went and checked his condition out with the floor nurses and the specials. I remember her little shrug and the way she said, “He’s breathing, but he’s dead, Trav. I found out they’ve got the room assigned already to somebody coming in tomorrow for a spinal fusion.”

  I remember helping Helena with the deadly details, so cumbersome at best, but complicated by dying in an alien place. He died at five minutes past one on Tuesday morning. Had he died, officially, seventy minutes sooner, the whole bank thing would have been almost impossible to ever get straightened out. I remember the gentle persistence of the city police. But she told them repeatedly that the safe had been empty, that she could not imagine who had come aboard and given her husband the fatal blow on the head.

  She and the girls packed their belongings, and I assured Helena that I would see to the boat, get the perishables off her, keep an eye on her. I offered to drive them across the state, but she said she could manage. She was keeping herself under rigid and obvious control. When I gave her the cash and the bank receipt, she thanked me politely. They left to go to the funeral home and, from there, follow the hearse across to Sarasota County. A very small caravan. Prim, forlorn, and quite brave.

  Yes, I knew that Meyer was remembering her too. I knew he had probably guessed the rest of it, perhaps wondered about it, but would never ask.

  The rain came down and Meyer cooked his famous specialty, never-twice-alike. We ate like weary contented wolves, and the yawning began early. Yet once I was in the big bed in the master stateroom, the other memories of Helena became so vivid they held me for a long time at the edge of sleep, unable to let go …