The Dreadful Lemon Sky

by John D. MacDonald

  I think he tried to smile again. It gave his mouth an odd look. “Are you quite mad? Why are you saying such terrible things? What do you want from me?”

  Rhetoric, all by itself, is too abstract. It needs punctuation. Show and tell. I stood up, smiling. I moved slowly. He watched me with some agitation. I walked slowly around to the back of his chair. He leaned forward and craned his neck around to watch me. I knew he was wondering whether or not to get up out of the chair.

  It takes a reasonable amount of precision. In the clavicle area, where the muscle webs of the trapezius and deltoid are thinned out, the descending brachial plexus, which includes a big ulnar and radial nerves to the arm, is close to the bone. I chopped down, a short swift smashing blow, and hit him just as he started to move, hit him on target, mashing the nerves against bone with the bone ridge of my knuckles.

  Walter J. Demos screamed in a very aspirated hissy way and came floundering up out of the chair. His right arm hung dead. He clasped his right shoulder in his big left hand. He stared at me with bulging eyes and roared with pain. Tears ran down his face.

  There was a flurried rapping at the door. “Walter?” a woman cried. “Are you all right? Walter?”

  “Tell her to call the cops,” I suggested. “We can all sit around and talk about how much pot you moved out of this place.”

  “Walter?” she yelled.

  “Everything is fine, Edith,” he called. “Go away!” He sat down again and said, “You broke my shoulder!”

  “It isn’t broken. It will be okay again in a week.”

  “But I can’t move my arm. It’s numb.”

  “The feeling will come back, Wally.”

  “Nobody ever calls me Wally.”

  “Except me. I can call you Wally, can’t I?”

  “What do you want of me? Were they really killed? Really?”

  “What we want is an established outlet in Bayside. Your previous source has dried up, Wally. Now tell me how you got into it and how you’ve been operating.”

  He found a hanky with his left hand and patted his eyes and blew his nose. He rubbed his numb arm. He talked and talked and talked.

  He had always purchased supplies for apartment repairs and redecorating from Superior. He became friendly with Jack Omaha and they would have coffee together at a diner near the industrial park, within walking distance. One day he told Omaha that a lot of his tenants had become ill from smoking grass adulterated with some unknown compound. Jack said that his personal supplier, his milkman, had recently been busted, and he was buying it at a gas station and paying too much. Omaha had taken a lot of his vacation time in Jamaica. Half joking, he had told Demos he was tempted to go get his own, but it wasn’t worth the risk unless he arranged to have a lot of it brought in, and he couldn’t see himself peddling it. Demos told Omaha that quite a bit could be absorbed at 1500 Seaway Boulevard, and some of his tenants could probably get rid of a lot more at the offices where they worked.

  It wasn’t long before they had talked themselves into it. Omaha came back from Jamaica with guarantees, having talked to local hustlers named Little Bamboo, Popeye, Hitler, John Wayne, and so on.

  At that point it was decided that Walter would be better off if he did not know any of the details of the smuggling operation, and if Omaha did not know a thing about his wholesale operation. The first shipments were small. As they got bigger, Demos brought in his most trusted tenants and it became a cottage industry, taking the bulk and weighing, measuring, and bagging it for the smaller wholesalers and the retail trade.

  “We thought we’d be able to avoid getting mixed up with any—excuse the expression—hoodlums. We didn’t see that there was anything terribly sinister about it. We were filling a demand at a fair price. We tried to cut our risks. Bringing Carrie here to live was part of the risk-cutting. She’d tip me in advance as to when a shipment would be coming in. I’d get my people ready. On those nights she’d be driving one of the little panel trucks from Superior instead of her own car. When it was unloaded, checked, and weighed, I’d give her the money. We’d work all night. I wanted it all out of here by the following morning. Except personal supplies, of course.”

  “When was the last shipment?”

  He looked dispirited. He nursed his shoulder. He sighed. I could feel a certain satisfaction in having diagnosed him so precisely. But with satisfaction there was also regret. Demos had been full of himself, full of a big-bellied confidence, sure of his place in his world. But in had come the pale-eyed stranger who had said terrifying things and who had sickened him with pain. His world had become fragile all of a sudden. His heart was heavy. He was not a bad man, everything considered. He had been a jolly sly man, a manipulator, a greedy chap, overconfident. He had changed.

  “Do you want me to annoy you some more, Wally?”

  “No! No, I was trying to remember exactly. A Tuesday night. That would make it May fourteenth. Yes. I can’t remember the exact time, but it was before midnight.”

  “How much was there?”

  “An average shipment. Ten sacks, I think. Forty kilos each. Over eight hundred and fifty pounds. I think I gave her about ninety thousand dollars.”

  He described, by request, the way the money was wrapped. It fit the way it had been packaged when Carrie gave it to me. The adding-machine tape was from his office machine. He handled the money, figuring the commissions to his peddlers.

  I pressed him to find out how well he had done. He was evasive. In the beginning he had plowed everything back into increasing the shipments. He guessed Jack Omaha was doing the same. They were on a cash-and-carry basis with each other. When they got to maximum weight coming in, he had started to skim, and he guessed that Omaha had started too. He said he was having a problem legitimizing the cash, trying to work it out in such a way that he could apply it to the outstanding mortgages on Fifteen Hundred. He guessed that probably Jack Omaha was having the same problem, but he hadn’t discussed it with him. He started to ask me about Jack Omaha and changed his mind. He didn’t want to know anything about Omaha. Or Carrie.

  I asked to see Carrie’s apartment. He said that a Miss Joller and a Miss Dobrovsky, Carrie’s sister, had gone through everything and packed up some things for shipment to New Jersey, and had called Goodwill to come pick up the rest. It had been cleaned and the new tenant was moving in tomorrow morning. So there was nothing to see.

  He said he had a headache and would like to lie down. I told him we had some more ground to cover first. I asked him what Carrie did with the money.

  He said he had the impression she took it down to Superior and put it in the safe. It seemed logical that she would have some safe place to put it.

  “What do you want from me?” he asked again.

  “You have a nice operation, Wally. It’s cleaner than some loft or old warehouse or a trailer parked in the woods. And you have those nice clean little clerks and bank people doing the pushing and being very careful because they don’t want to mess up this great life-style you created for them. I don’t have to put you out of business because you’re already retired. You’ve got no supply, right? Do you know what I’m going to recommend? I’m going to say you should be our exclusive distributor in Bayside. How about that?”

  I couldn’t detect any genuine enthusiasm in his response.

  “What does … it entail?”

  “We’ll guarantee top quality. We’ll guarantee no hassling by the law. We’ll expect you to absorb, say, a ton a month, cash on the line, half again what you were paying Omaha. In time we’ll have you broaden the line. Coke and hash.”

  “Oh, I just couldn’t handle that, Mr. McGee. I really couldn’t. That quantity and price.… This has been just a small operation. An amateur thing. You know. I just couldn’t.…”

  I stood up, smiling at him. “It’s all settled.”

  “Don’t I have any choice?”

  “Choice? Of course! You stay right here and hang onto that cash, because when we make a delivery, you h
ave to be able to pay. You have to accept what we send you. Don’t try to look for another supply source. You just wait. If you want to fuss and bob and weave and make trouble, that’s your choice. If so we’ll kill you and make our deal with whoever takes over this place. It might be a couple of months before we set you up as a distributor, Wally. Hang in there.”

  He didn’t move. I let myself out. I was a little depressed by my own childishness. It was a fair assumption it could work exactly as I had outlined it to Demos. The contact would probably be a lot less melodramatic than I had made it. Actually the setup would probably not appeal. It was too unusual. Hoodlums are the true conservatives. When you are winning, never change the dice. Distribution would be limited to the candy-store, horse-room, bartender, cocktail-waitress, coin-machine, call-girl circuits. Demos’s arrangement was too fancy and made too much sense.

  I took a small detour to go around by the pool. The after-work residents crowded the pool area. They made a youngish, attractive throng in their brown hides and resort colors. The scene looked like a commercial for swimming pools.

  They made gay little cries of glee and fun. A game of water tag was in progress.

  Wally’s Paradise. There was one thing wrong with it, and that was what probably created the slightly frantic gaiety. They all loved it here. They were all going to stay. They were going to obey all the rules, and pay the rent, and stay and stay and stay.

  It was a life-style designed for the young. Twenty years from now it was going to look a lot less graceful and productive. Unless all leases were canceled at age thirty-five, and your family throws you out. It was a pretty problem for Wally, and a dreadful one for his tenants.

  I skirted the jolly crowd and walked back to the marina. I needed the long walk in order to sort out everything I had learned from Walter Demos and fit it into the facts and inferences I had acquired before chatting with him.

  Nine

  The day was darkening prematurely by the time I got back to the marina. As I passed the office there was a bright blue click of lightning, a white dazzle, and an enormous crash of thunder. I ran through the first heavy drops and boarded the Flush.…

  It was still locked, the security system still operative. Meyer was not back yet. My note to him was still where I had left it. He arrived, soaking wet, ten minutes later.

  After he had changed, we sat in the lounge and exchanged information.

  “Frederick Van Harn is a very impressive young man,” Meyer told me. “In a very short time he has built up a very wide-ranging and profitable practice of law. He has been pulling together the shattered remnants of the Democratic Party in this county. He will very probably run for the state legislature and very probably make it, after he marries Jane Schermer. Her Uncle Jake is the power and money behind the party. Van Harn can speak very persuasively in public. A lot of people don’t care for him personally, but they have a grudging respect for the way he came back and started building a career right on the top of the ruin his father made of his life. About two years ago Van Harn bought the Carpenter ranch twelve miles west of town. The Schermers live out that way. Jane has extensive grove land out there.”

  “From what Joanna said, I’d think his reputation as a womanizer would get in the way of his electioneering.”

  “The general feeling around the area seems to be that he has a way with the ladies, but he’ll settle down after he marries Jane. It isn’t doing him any harm that I could see. And I spent my time drinking beer in a place across from the courthouse. Bail bondsmen. An investigator for the state’s attorney. Bartender. A lady from the tax office. There was just one questionable area that turned up.”

  “Such as.”

  “Gossip. About money. It just seems to the spectators that Freddy has bought too much too fast. They wonder if maybe Freddy’s father killed himself because he couldn’t avoid being caught, but left a stash of cash around somewhere. They say the ranch he bought is twelve hundred acres, high and dry. It had to be at least a million one, even without the ranch house and the man-made lake and the airstrip and hangar. So even if he made out well in the law, how could he pay his taxes and still have enough left over for his life-style? He’s about thirty years old, and he’s been at it here just six years, but he started slow and small.”

  “Did you get any information on how well his father lived?”

  “Oh, very well, apparently. Cars, boats, hunting lodges, women.”

  “You’ve come back with a lot.”

  Meyer smiled. “It’s a cozy bar. The conversation was general. Everybody joined in. Freddy has charisma. He’s one of the people that other people like to talk about. So it was easy. Besides, due to constant pressure from you, I’m getting better at being a sneak.”

  “That isn’t a word I would have chosen.”

  “Once you face up to reality, everything is easier.”

  From time to time the rain came down with such a roar we couldn’t hear each other. Wind buffeted the Flush, thudding her against the fenders I had put out and made fast to the pilings. Then the rain steadied down into a hard, continuing downpour. I opened two cans of chili, and Meyer doctored the brew with some chopped hot pickled peppers and some pepper seeds. He does not approve of chili unless the tears are running down his cheeks while he eats. His specialty, Meyer’s Superior Cocktail Dip, is made with dry Chinese mustard moistened to the proper consistency with Tabasco sauce. The unsuspecting have been known to leap four feet straight up into the air after scooping up a tiny portion on a potato chip. Strong men have come down running and gone right through the wall when they missed the open doorway.

  It was a good night to stay aboard. It was a good night to conjecture, to try various possible patterns of human behavior and see how well they fit, much like kids in the attic trying on old uniforms, wearing old medals.

  I got out charts of the Caribbean and worked out alternate routes from Bayside to Kingston and to Montego Bay. It was easier to route back in pre-Castro days. (Maybe everything was easier.) I made it 650, if you were a straight crow. But avoiding Fidel’s air space with enough of a margin of comfort made it 1,000 miles. No great problem for the huskier variety of private aircraft, provided fuel was available at the Jamaica end.

  So add in the Bertram. From predawn to after dark would give you, say sixteen hours. Allowing for variations in wind and weather and the size of the seas, call it an outside distance of 120 or 130 out and the same back. That would also allow some time at the far end, for rendezvous.

  As I had to start somewhere, I picked 220 mph for the aircraft cruising speed. Give it an hour at the far end for gassing and loading. Ten hours would do it. Leave in daylight, return by daylight. Okay, so why push the boat so hard? Probably two reasons. First, because the seas close to Florida are so full of small craft, you have to go a long way to get out of the traffic. Second, once you are in open empty water, you are too hard to find from the air. So you have to head for some distinctive land mass that the aircraft can find without too much trouble.

  I drew a 130-mile half circle on the chart, with the point of the compass at Bayside. Of the areas included, I was willing to vote for the north side of Grand Bahama, over away from the folks and the casinos, where the water is tricky. Big stuff goes way north to come around into the Tongue of the Ocean. Little stuff stays inside, south of Grand Bahama. If they picked a tiny island off the north shore, a pilot could orient himself by the configuration of Grand Bahama, head for the tiny island, and the rendezvous point could be, for example, a mile north of that crumb of land.

  If they had a source in the Bahamas for the Jamaican weed, then I was wrong. But that was not likely. Too much risk and too low a margin.

  And our Freddy Van Harn had an airstrip and a hangar. And he was Jack Omaha’s lawyer. Chris Omaha’s lawyer. Lawyer for Superior. Lawyer for Carrie, and Susan, and the marina.

  “The invisible mass,” Meyer said, “distorting the orbits.”

  “Distorting the orbits, or removing the planets
?”

  “But why?” Meyer asked.

  “You know, that’s really a rotten question.”

  “It has to be answered. Otherwise there’s nothing.”

  “Let’s find out first if he has an airplane.”

  “How?”

  “The direct approach. Let’s go look. Very very early tomorrow.”

  Somebody came hurrying out of the rain and boarded the Flush. We both heard the warning bell. I snapped on the aft floods, and through the rain curtain we saw Joanna scuttle close to the door for shelter. She was holding a package.

  I let her in. She was one very damp lady.

  “Hey!” she said. “This is such a rotten Saturday night, all things considered, I decided we ought to have some kind of celebration. Okay?” She turned and put her package on the table, her back to me. “And it just so happens—”

  There was a huge white ringing crash, blinding light, deafening sound, and I was spun and dropped into darkness, hands out to break the fall that never ended.…

  I opened my eyes and looked up at a white ceiling. There was an annoying whining ringing sound going on which made it difficult to think clearly. I looked back up over my head and saw the familiar white tubular headboard of your average hospital bed and thought, Oh, Christ, not again! A quarter millimeter at a time I rolled my head to the left and saw a narrow solitary window with the venetian blinds almost but not quite closed. A white floor lamp beside the window was turned on. The chair in front of the window was empty. My head made a funny sound against the pillow as I rolled it back into place. I brought up from beneath the covers a slow brown enormous hand and willed it to feel of my head. It felt bandage and then moved dumbly back to lie inert against my chest. So. The other arm worked. Both legs worked. I wished somebody would turn off the ringing. I rolled my head to the right and saw a closed door. A long sigh ended in sleep.