The Dreadful Lemon Sky

by John D. MacDonald

  I parked and told Meyer to see what he could pick up at the neighbor establishments, a heating and air conditioning outfit, a ladder plant, and a boatbuilder.

  I went into the front office of Superior Building Supplies. A slender and pretty girl in a dress made of ticking was taking file folders out of a metal file and putting them into a cardboard storage file. She straightened and looked at me and said in a nasal little voice, “It isn’t until Monday.”

  “What isn’t?”

  “The special sale of everything. They’re taking inventory over the weekend. And right now.”

  “Going out of business?”

  She went over to her desk and picked up a can of Coke and drank several swallows. She gave me a long look of appraisal.

  “We sure the hell are,” she said finally. She shook her gingery hair back and wiped her pretty mouth with the back of her hand, then belched like any boy in the fifth grade.

  A man came through the open door that led back to the warehouse portion. He had a clipboard in his hand. He was sweaty and he had a smudge of grease on his forehead. Lots of red-brown hair, carefully sprayed into position. Early thirties. Outdoor look. Western shirt with a lot of snaps and zippers. Whipcord pants. Boots. A nervous harried look and manner.

  “We’re not open for business, friend. Sorry. Joanna, find me the invoices on that redwood fencing, precut, huh?”

  “Cheez, I keep telling you and telling you, it was Carrie knew where all that—”

  “Carrie isn’t here to help us, goddammit. So shake your ass and start looking.”

  “Listen, Harry, I don’t even know if I’m going to get paid for this time I’m putting in, right?”

  “Joanna, honey, of course you’ll get your pay. Come on, dear. Please find the invoices for me?”

  She gave him a long dark stare, underlip protruding. “Buster, you’ve been talking just a little too much poremouth. Just a little too much. And you’ve been getting evil with me too often, hear? I think you better go doodle in your hat. I’m going to go get my hair done. I might come back and I might retire. Who knows?”

  She slung her big leather purse over her shoulder. He tried to block her way to the door. He was begging, pleading, insisting. She paid no attention to him. There was no expression on her face. When he took hold of her arm she wrenched away and left, and the glass door swung shut.

  Harry went over to a big desk and sat in the large red leather chair. He closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. He sighed and looked at me and frowned. “Friend, we are still not open for business. We are even less open than we were. Let me give you some sound advice. Never hump the help. They get uppity. They take advantage.”

  “I came by to ask about Carrie Milligan.”

  “She used to work here. She’s dead. What’s your interest?”

  “I heard she was killed. I’m a friend of hers from Fort Lauderdale.”

  “Didn’t she used to live there?”

  A bare-chested young man in jeans came out of the warehouse area and held up two big bolts. “Mr. Hascomb, you want I should count every damn one of these things? There’s thousands!”

  “Hundreds. Count how many in five pounds and then weigh all we got. That’ll be close enough.”

  The boy left, and Harry Hascomb shook his head and said, “It’s hard to believe she’s dead. She worked day before yesterday. That’s her desk over there. It happened so sudden. She really held this place together. She was a good worker, Carrie was. What did you say you want?”

  “She came to see me two weeks ago. In Fort Lauderdale.”

  He was so still I wondered if he was holding his breath. He licked his lips and swallowed and said, “Two weeks ago?”

  “Does that mean anything?”

  “Why should it mean anything?”

  I did not know where to go from there. The loan of money seemed all at once frail and implausible. I needed to find a better direction. “She came to see me because she was in trouble.”

  “Trouble? What kind of trouble?”

  “She wanted to leave something with me for safekeeping. It happened it wasn’t the best time for me to try to take care of anything for anybody. There are times you can, and times you shouldn’t. I hated to say I couldn’t. I was very fond of Carrie Milligan.”

  “Everybody was. What did she want you to keep?”

  “Some money.”

  “How much?”

  “She didn’t say. She said it was a lot. When I heard about her being killed in that accident, I began to wonder if she’d found anybody to hold the money. Would you know anything about anything like that?”

  Once again Harry went into his motionless trance, looking over my shoulder and into the faraway distance. It took him a long time. I wondered what he was sorting, weighing, appraising.

  At last he shook his head slowly. “My God, I wouldn’t have believed it. She must have been in on it.”

  “In on what?”

  He undid a snap and a zipper and fingered a cigarette out of his Western pocket, popped it against a thumbnail, lit it and blew out a long plume of smoke. “Oh, shit, it’s an old story. It happens all the time. You never expect it to happen to you.”

  “What happened?”

  “What’s your name again?”

  “McGee. Travis McGee.”

  “Don’t ever go partners with anybody, McGee. That’s my second piece of advice for you today. Jack and I had a good thing going here. My good old partner, Jack Omaha. It wasn’t exactly a fantastic gold mine, but we lived very well for quite a few years. And then the ass fell right off the construction business. We had to cut way back. Way way back. Trying to hold out until conditions improve. I think we might have made it. Things are looking a little bit better. I’ve always been the sales guy and Jack was the office guy. Anyway, he took off two weeks ago last Tuesday. On May fourteenth. Know what he was doing before he took off? Selling off warehouse stock at less than cost. Letting the bills pile up. Turning every damned thing into money. The auditors are trying to come up with the total figure. I’m a bankrupt. Good old Jack. Come to think of it, I guess he had to have Carrie’s help to clean the place out. She only worked two days that week. Monday and Friday. Went out sick Monday afternoon. Came back in Friday. That was the day I finally decided Jack hadn’t just gone fishing, that maybe he was gone for good. When did you see Carrie?”

  “Thursday.”

  “It figures. I never figured her for anything like that. Even though she and Jack did have something going. No great big thing. It was going on for maybe three years, like ever since she started working for us. Just a little something on the side now and then. An over-nighter. What we used to do, we’d send the girls, Carrie and Joanna, on another flight up to Atlanta, and then Jack and me would go up to catch the Falcons and stay in the HJ’s next to the stadium. Just some laughs.”

  “And you think that was the money Carrie wanted me to keep for her?”

  “Where else would she get it? Maybe Jack wanted her to run away with him. He was more hooked than she was, you know. Think of it this way. She helps him and gets a nice piece of change, and everybody thinks Jack took it all. When the dust settles, she can get the money and who’d know the difference?”

  “Except she’s dead.”

  “Yes, there’s that. I want to make one thing clear, McGee. If you come across that money it belongs right here in this business. It was stolen from this business. It was stolen from me, and if you find it, it belongs right here.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  He squashed his cigarette out. “None of this had to happen,” he said softly. “I wake up in the night and think about it. If I’d had the sense when the money was rolling in, I would have put it in a safe place. Instead I farted it away on boats and cars and houses. If I’d kept it, I could have bought Jack out when things got slow. I could have squeaked through. In the night I think about it and I get sweaty and I feel like my gut was full of sharp rocks.”


  “What will happen?”

  “I have to sell off what we’ve got left and throw it in the pot. It gets divided up among the creditors. I guess I’ll lose the house too, maybe the cars. Then I’ll start hitting my friends for a job. That son of a bitch said he was going fishing Tuesday and he’d be in Wednesday, and he said he had some money lined up to tide us over. I wanted to believe him. By Friday I got worried. I got some phone calls about bills I thought were paid. I called Chris. Jack’s wife. She didn’t know where the hell he was. She thought he was off in the boat somewhere. I phoned the marina and the boat was tied up there, nobody aboard. You know what? I just remembered. I had Carrie check out the bank accounts. She acted like she hated to tell me he had cleaned them out. He’d left ten bucks in each of them. He’s a wanted man. I brought charges. I signed papers. It was on the news. I hope they find the son of a bitch, and I hope he has a lot of money left when they find him.”

  “You never thought Carrie was involved?”

  “Not until you told me about her being in Lauderdale when I thought she was sick in bed. Not until you told me she wanted you to hold a lot of money for her. I swear. I mean I thought Jack was smarter than let some girl in on a thing like that. I wouldn’t ever give Joanna any kind of leverage. I guess it was just that she kept a close enough eye on the books, he couldn’t work it without her help. And, knowing that, she cut herself in pretty good. Maybe she was afraid Jack might come back to her for the money.”

  “Did you case her as a thief?”

  “Her! I thought I was surrounded by friends. I guess they decided that since the business was going to fold no matter what anybody did, the thing to do was grab the goodies and run. Like maybe running into a burning motel and grabbing a wallet. Shit, maybe I would have cleaned the place out first if I’d thought of it before Jack did. And if I knew how. I wonder where Jack is now. Brazil?”

  For once Meyer followed my standing instructions. He came in and folded his arms and leaned against the wall beside the door. He didn’t say a word.

  “We’re closed,” Harry told him.

  I said, “He’s with me.”

  Harry stared at him. Meyer stared back, letting his underlip and his eyelids sag. With all that hair and with that inch of simian forehead he looked so baleful as to be almost subhuman. Of course the effect is ruined if he opens his professorial mouth.

  Harry swallowed and said, “Oh. Uh … what kind of work are you in, Mr. McGee?”

  He rolled a yellow pencil under his palm, the flat sides clicking against the top of the desk. I let him roll it four times before I said, “Oh, I guess you could call it investments.”

  He smiled too brightly. “Want to buy a nice building-supply business?”

  I gave it a slow four count while the smile faded.

  “No.”

  The kid came out of the warehouse again. “For Chrissake, there’s supposed to be almost two dozen wheelbarras and I can’t find a good goddamn one out there.”

  “Wait a second,” Harry said. He took a sheet of letterhead, turned it over, and with a marking pen printed CLOSED on it, and put pieces of Scotch tape on the corners. He stood up and said to me, “Nice to have met you, Mr. McGee.”

  “I’ll stay in touch,” I said. It didn’t seem to make him happy.

  After we left I looked back and saw him tape the sign to the inside of the glass door.

  Meyer said, “What kind of fantasy were you selling him in there?”

  “I was making it up as I went along. I was throwing in stuff to keep him talking. I dropped the loan idea.”

  As I drove slowly back toward town, I briefed Meyer on what I had learned. Then it was his turn. He gave it such a long dramatic pause, I knew he had done well. Why shouldn’t he do well? I have busted my gut to learn how to make people open up. Meyer was born with it. A loving empathy shines out of those little bright-blue eyes. Strangers tell him things they have never told their husband or their priest.

  He said that the secretary to the president of the Bayside Ladder Company, Inc., was one Betty Joller and, being Carrie Milligan’s best friend, Betty was all racked up over the accident. Once upon a time Betty and Carrie and girls named Flossie Speck and Joanna Freeler had shared a little old frame house on the waterfront, at 28 Mangrove Lane. When Carrie moved out, they had gotten another girl to share rent and expenses. Meyer couldn’t recall the new girl’s name.

  Anyway, Carrie Milligan was at the Rucker Funeral Home on Florida Boulevard, and there was to be a memorial service for her tomorrow, Saturday morning, at eleven o’clock. The sister, Susan Dobrovsky, was down from Nutley. She had arrived late last night. Betty Joller had picked her up at the airport and taken her to the Holiday Inn.

  “You did well!” I told him. “Very very well.”

  It made him beam with pleasure.

  I found 1500 Seaway Boulevard. I reminded him that Carrie had lived in 38B. I dropped him off and told him to see what he could get from the neighbors, and then work his own way back to Westway Harbor, and wait for me there if I wasn’t back yet.

  Five

  The Omaha House was in a fairly new subdivision called Carolridge. The developer had bulldozed it clean in his attempt to turn it from flatlands to slightly rolling contours. The new trees were all growing as fast as they could. In twenty years, when the block houses were moldering away, the shade would be pleasant and inviting. But in the mid-afternoon heat, all the houses sat baking white in the sun, and the spray heads made rainbows against immature gardenia bushes.

  There were two cars in the carport at the Omaha place, and a fairly new cream-colored Oldsmobile in the driveway. A little wrought-iron sign was stuck into the parched grass, spelling out THE OMAHAS.

  They give the development houses names. This was probably called The Executive or The Diplomat. It looked like eighty to ninety thousand, the top of the line for the neighborhood. Purchase would guarantee membership in the Carolridge Golf and Country Club. You could read the house from the outside. Three bedrooms, three and a half baths, colonial kitchen, game room, cathedral ceilings, patio pool, fiberglass screening.

  I pushed the button and heard the distant chimes inside. Bugs keened in the heat. Some little girls went creaking and grinding past on their Sears ten-speeds, giggling. Somebody was running some kind of lawn machinery three houses away. A cardinal was sitting on a wire, saying T-bird, T-bird, T-bird—cool, cool, cool. I pushed the button again. And finally again. Just as I was about to give up, a woman opened the door. She had a broad, coarse, pretty face. She wore fresh lipstick, a sculptured blond wig, tie-dye jeans, and a white sunback blouse with no sleeves.

  “Mrs. Omaha?”

  “Yes. We were out in the back. I hope you haven’t been ringing the doorbell long?”

  “Not very long.”

  “I didn’t know you’d come so soon. What happens is I keep getting a dial tone all the time, even when I’m trying to talk to somebody.” She had a thin little-girl voice. She had the dazed glazed manner of someone awakened from deep sleep. Her mouth was puffy, her eyes heavy. The fresh lipstick missed its mark at one corner of her mouth. The sculptured wig was slightly off center. There was a red suck mark on the side of her throat, slowly disappearing as I looked at it.

  “I’m not from the phone company,” I said.

  Her gaze sharpened. “Oh, boy, you better not try telling me you’re selling something. You just better not try that.”

  “My name is McGee. Travis McGee from Fort Lauderdale. A friend of Carrie Milligan.”

  She was puzzled. “So what? What do you want here?”

  “Did I come at a bad time?”

  “Brother!”

  “Suppose I come back later?”

  “What for? Carrie is dead, right? Jack took off. Let’s say they were very very good friends and I couldn’t care less.”

  “I was talking to Harry over at Junction Park. He says Jack cleaned out the partnership accounts on May fourteenth. Carrie came down to Lauderdale to see me
on the sixteenth. She was jumpy. She thought she was being followed. She gave me some money to keep for her.”

  “How much?”

  “Maybe some other time would be …”

  “Come on in, Mr. Gee. It’s real hot this afternoon, isn’t it?”

  I followed her through the foyer to the long living room. She filled the rear of the stretch jeans abundantly. As she walked she reached up and patted the wig. The draperies were pulled shut. The subdued daylight came from the outdoor terrace area where, through the mesh of the drapery fabric, I could see a screened swimming pool as motionless as lime Jell-O in the white glare.

  A tall and slender man stood in front of a mirror, combing his dark hair down with spread fingers. He wore a pair of quiet plaid slacks and a white shirt. His necktie hung untied. Over the back of a nearby chair I saw a dark blazer with silver buttons.

  He said, “Honey, I’ll get in touch again about the …”

  He spotted me in the mirror. He whirled and said, “Who the hell are you?”

  “This is Mr. Gee, Freddy.”

  “McGee,” I said. “Travis McGee.”

  “This here is Fred Van Harn, my lawyer,” Chris explained.

  I put my hand out. He hesitated and then shook hands and gave me a very pleasant smile. “How do you do?”

  “Honey, I asked him in because he says he’s got some of the money. Maybe he’s got all of it. Tell him he has to give it to me, dear. Mr. McGee, it’s my money.”

  I looked at her in astonishment. “I haven’t got any money!”

  “You said Carrie gave it to you to keep for her!”

  “She did, but I gave it right back. I couldn’t accept the responsibility.”

  “How much was it?” Chris Omaha demanded.

  “I’m sure I wouldn’t have the slightest idea. She said it was a lot. She didn’t say how much. What is a lot to one person is not a lot to another person.”

  Chris said, “Oh, God damn everything.” She plumped herself down on a fat hassock which hissed as she sat on it.

  Freddy said, “Do you know who did agree to keep the money for her?”