John D MacDonald - Travis McGee 16 - The Dreadful Lemon Sky

by The Dreadful Lemon Sky(lit)

  The silence between us was comfortable-and then uncomfortable. The awareness grew, tangible as that ringing in the ears. She looked down, flushing again. When she got up I reached for her and caught her wrist, then tugged her gently around the corner of the table toward me. She came with an unwillingness, looking away, murmuring "Please." I pulled her to stand by me, against my thigh, and slid my hand to her waist, slid it under the edge of the pink blouse to clasp the smooth warm flesh where the waist was slimmest.

  "No," she said in a soft dragging voice, far away.

  "I have been losing girls," I said. "It has to stop."

  "I'm not a girl. Not any more, I'm not."

  I stood up and put my hands on her shoulders, felt a gentle shuddering that was awareness, not revulsion.

  "Cindy I could say an awful lot of dumb things. What it would boil down to is, I'm alive, glad to be alive, and I want you."

  "I... I just can't quite... "

  And I steered her slowly and gently to the relative darkness of my connecting unit, through the door ahead of me, arm around her waist, blundering together to the bed.

  At the bed, after she sat and I began to undo the buttons of her blouse, she pushed me away and said, "I have to say something first. Before anything happens. Listen to me. Wait. Please. When I heard he was dead there was... some kind of dirty joy in me. I cried and carried on because people expected me to."

  "It's like that sometimes."

  "I don't want it to be like that for me." Her voice was uneven. "I know what they think. It was all just dandy great until he got on the booze. Well, it wasn't all that great. It wasn't even half good between us. He wanted it to be great. I couldn't really love him. I tried to imitate loving him, but he knew it had all gone away for me. He knew I felt empty. That's why he started drinking like that. People got it all backward. And I feel so... so rotten. So sick. So really terrible about... what I did to him."

  It was all the confession she could handle. Guilt broke the dam inside her. I held her and she rocked herself back and forth in her inner agony. Guilt is the most merciless disease of man. It stains all the other areas of living. It darkens all skies.

  I held her and eased her and soothed her. When she was nearly quiet, except for the occasional hiccup sob, I wondered if she was too spent for love. I peeled her gently and quietly out of her clothes. When we were naked and enclasped, facing each other on the motel bed, there seemed to be a great deal of her, long and firm and rich, with a body heat degrees above mine.

  We were the wounded, she from all the trauma of her tears, me from the concussion and the five lost days. So it was not a physical, sexual greed that motored us.

  It was an affirmation, a way to be less alone. In fact for quite a long time it seemed as if it would be love-making without climax, with only slowness, tenderness, and affection.

  With the first of morning light she found a slow and lasting release and faded from that crest into the downslope of sleep. I eased out of bed to close the slats of the blinds and shut out the increasing brightness. As I went back to bed I carried an uneasy afterimage of something, some shadow or substance, flickering swiftly away from the space under the window, out of sight.

  On Saturday afternoon I left Meyer and Oliver to finish stapling the Pliofilm over the ports and over the smashed doorway, and went back to the motel, feeling pleasantly tired, and curious as to how she would accommodate herself to this new fact of her life.

  She wore a brief yellow sun dress. She came, toward me and looked cautiously beyond me to see if we were observed. Then she kissed me quickly on the lips and pulled me inside her quarters for a more emphatic kiss after the door was shut.

  She was smiling. She said, "I don't know what I ought to say. But what I want to say is, Thanks for a lovely evening, for a lovely late date."

  "You are most very certainly absolutely welcome, ma'am."

  "Can you eat beef stew?"

  "Indefinitely."

  "I want you to keep your strength up."

  "That's the best invitation I've had today. You're blushing."

  "The stew is canned, dammit. I had to spell Ritchie at the office and didn't have time to fix anything special. But I added a couple of things to make it taste better."

  It was excellent stew. We sat across the table from each other, by the window. We could see most of the marina from the window.

  I said, "Cindy, my darling, I want to ask you some things. You might wonder why I have to ask them. But it would be a very long story, and I will tell you that long story some day but not right now. Okay?"

  "Questions about what?"

  "About a lot of things. First question: When Cal went off before dawn on those boat trips with Jack Omaha, where were they going?"

  She tilted her head, frowning. "Off Grand Bahama island after billfish, dear. Sometimes little Carrie Milligan went too. Jack's secretary and... well, playmate. I think it was a chance for them to play while. Cal ran the boat. The other times they were after tuna and marlin and so on."

  "Was Cal getting any extra money from anywhere, in large amounts?"

  "Cal? God, no! He was good at spending it, not making it."

  "Did you think those trips were strange in any way?"

  "Listen, darling, I didn't much care if they were strange or not. I didn't think very much about what Cal did or. didn't do. There was very limited communication between us. Before I met him I had been going with someone and I was in love with him, very deeply in love. We had the most horrible fight ever, and he went off and got married. So I went off and got married. He showed me and I showed him. I married Cal, and it was a lousy reason to get married. It was sort of okay in a limited way. The physical part was okay at first, and then it didn't hold up very well, especially not when he was drinking. About his trips, if I thought about them at all, it was to wish they'd happen oftener and last longer. And there was no extra money from anywhere. I guess I ought to tell you that these are almost the same questions our lawyer asked me."

  "Fred Van Harn?"

  "Yes. He was very solemn and insistent. He said that he wanted to make certain I wasn't mixed up in anything that Cal might have been doing that was against the law. I told him exactly what I've been telling you. He said that he couldn't protect me unless I was frank and open with him. He said that anything I told him was privileged information. I had to say I just didn't know anything, and that it had been a long time since Cal and I had talked much about anything. It wasn't exactly the friendliest conversation in the world."

  "What do you mean by that?"

  "Oh, it's just that Fred is... well, constantly horny. About a year ago he made a pretty startling pass at me. It was in his office. He came up behind me and hugged himself up against me and had both hands roaming all over me. I'm a very strong person."

  "I noticed."

  "Hush. I picked his hand up and set my teeth in his thumb. He screamed. He had to have a tetanus shot. He got over his problem very quickly. So we haven't been very chummy with each other."

  "I wouldn't think so."

  "Men like that have an instinct about wives, when they might be vulnerable. Something must show, somehow. For one little instant when he was doing what he was doing, I thought, Well, why not, what the hell? But then I realized that if I was going to say what the hell with somebody, it wouldn't be with Freddy. He's too conscious of those long black eyelashes of his. So I bit him to the bone."

  "That pleases me."

  "What was Cal doing on those trips?"

  "Smuggling narcotics."

  She stared at me."You've got to be kidding! You really have got to be kidding!"

  "Jamaican marijuana."

  "Oh. Just grass. Well..."

  "What's the matter?"

  "That's where he got that stuff. He insisted I try it. A sloppy cigarette, twisted at the ends. A toke, he called it. A joint. He showed me how you're supposed to do it. Then we made love after he knew I was feeling it a lot. Love was strange and dreamy. I coul
d hear the sound his hand made on my skin, a little brushing sound. Things went on forever, and I knew every part of it while it was going on. And I started crying and couldn't stop. It was so sweet and sad I couldn't stop crying. That made him angry and he went storming out. That was the last time we ever made love together, and that was... months ago. I guess that was part of what he was smuggling, he and Jack?"

  "Probably."

  "I liked it and I didn't like it. I would like to try it with somebody I really love sometime, but not until I'd tried everything else first with that person."

  She got up and took the dishes to the sink.

  I watched her, appreciating the way the brief yellow dress made her legs look uncommonly tan and uncommonly long.

  Yet I had the curious feeling that I had not really made love to her. We could make small, bawdy jokes together. We could kiss in excellent imitation of new-found lovers. I could look upon her in happy memory of the last time and steamy anticipation of the next time, but at the same time feel as if we were theater people, trained to give a convincing imitation of desire. We were close. We knew all the motions. Yet in a way I could not define we were insulated from each other, not quite touching in some deep and important way.

  As a test I went up behind her and put my arms around her and pulled her close. She tilted her head back and said, "You risk a tetanus shot, sir."

  "Worth it, ma'am."

  "Listen. Where did the money go? If he was taking risks like that, where is the money?"

  "I don't know. Maybe he hid it in some safe place, or somebody was holding it for him."

  As I turned her around she said, "He used to worry so much about the money we owe on the marina. He used to fret and fume. Hey! What are we doing now?"

  "It's siesta time. This is called getting you ready for your three o'clock nap."

  "Don't you think you better move back onto your houseboat?"

  "Right now?"

  "Well.. , not exactly right now, okay?"

  By Sunday afternoon the air conditioning was making good headway against the dampness aboard the Flush. A milky light and blurred outlines of nearby boats shone through the Pliofilm. The carpeting had been jettisoned, and Meyer had samples to study, before rendering advice.

  The ninth day of June. I hadn't adjusted to the five-day gap in my memory. I was being hustled along too fast into the time stream. Ears ringing. A sweet and greedy lady to be with.

  "Make some sense of things," I asked Meyer. He stopped playing solitaire with his carpet samples. "I cannot come up with an overview," he said. "I can sense no paradigm that later events will prove out. I can construct no model from what we have."

  "Thanks."

  "Believe me, it's nothing."

  "I know. I know."

  "How about this blue? Indoor-outdoor. Won't fade."

  "It's truly lovely, Meyer."

  "Come on. Don't you care how it's going to look?"

  "Intensely."

  "All things considered, you should be jollier, Travis."

  "Than whom?"

  "Than whom has not such a handsome lady tending his convalescence."

  "I feel disoriented. I have a dull ache in the back of my head, and I live in a motel."

  Further discussion of my melancholy was terminated by the arrival of Jason-Jesus with Susan Dobrovsky. She looked sallow and subdued, with smudges under her eyes and a listless manner. Jason was being very firm and forthright. The protector. No social strokes. No discussion of the weather. He planted his feet and got right into it. "Susan and I have been developing a useful dialogue about her situation here. We've decided that it is more important for her to get away, to get back to Nutley, than it is to hang around while Van Harn takes care of the last little legal details regarding Carrie's death."

  She sat on the edge of the yellow couch which was going to have to be recovered. "I want to leave," she said, in a very small voice. "Everything here has been so rotten."

  "Mr. McGee, Susan told me that you told her that you owed Carrie some money. You paid off the funeral home in cash. Is there more money Susan should have?"

  "Yes."

  "How much?"

  "What's your special interest in this, Jason?"

  "Somebody has to care about situations like this. People have to take care of people."

  "Granted. Let me talk to Susan alone. Meyer, why don't you go topside with Jason?"

  When they had left and the Pliofilm curtain had fallen back into place, I went over and sat beside her on the couch. She became very still, quite rigid. It seemed a curious reaction. I touched her arm and she made a huge flinching motion, ending up two feet farther away from me.

  "Hey" I said. "Whoa. Settle down."

  "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. It's just that I'm not reacting to things... normally. To being touched by anybody. I can't help it."

  "What happened to you?"

  She gave me a wide, bright terrible smile. "Happened? Oh, I was a guest at the V-H Ranch yesterday and the day before. That's all. Mr. Van Harn raises Black Angus and breeds horses. He has twelve hundred acres out there, and the old Carpenter ranch house was built out of hard pine in nineteen twenty-one and it's still as solid as a rock. I... nothing... can't...."

  She bent abruptly forward, face in her hands, hands resting on her knees. I reached to touch her and pulled my hand back in time.

  "Were you forced?"

  Her voice was muffled. "Yes. No. I don't know. I don't know what to say. He kept after me and after me and after me. It went on and on. I got so tired. So I thought... I don't know what I thought. Just that if I let him that would be the end of it."

  "Susan, I have to know something. Did he ask you anything about Carrie?"

  "There wasn't much talking."

  "Did he ask you anything at all about Carrie?"

  "Well, he wanted to know the last time I'd talked to her, and so I told him about the long phone call, the one I told you about too. He made me remember everything she said. One part that I told him was about you. You know. Carrie said to me that if a person named Travis McGee got in touch with me I was to trust him all the way."

  "Did he seem interested in that?"

  "Not any more than in any of the rest of it. He just kept me going over it and over it until he saw there wasn't any part of it I hadn't told him. That was the only talking there was, mostly."

  "When did this conversation take place?"

  "Yesterday, I think. Yes, yesterday. Early in the morning, I think. I remember the sounds the birds were making. Early sounds."

  "How did you get back?"

  "He drove me in and let me off at the Inn. He had a meeting. Maybe it was three o'clock yester day afternoon. Jason came over this morning. I... told him about it. I wanted to tell somebody about how damned dumb I was."

  "How did Jason react?"

  "He wants to go kill him. What good would that do anybody? I shouldn't have gone out there with him. Joanna told me enough about him so I should have been careful, more careful. Mr. McGee, is there any more money? And you still have Carrie's rings. I remember Mr. Rucker giving them to you. He tried to give them to me and I couldn't take them then. I can now. Is there any money?"

  "A lot of money."

  "A lot?"

  "Ninety-four thousand dollars in cash."

  Her face went quite blank as she stared at me. She rubbed the palms of her hands on her forearms, one and then the other, "What?"

  "Ninety-four thousand two hundred, less six hundred and eighty-six fifty that I paid Rucker. Ninety-three thousand something."

  She rubbed the palms of her hands together. She narrowed those tilted gray-green eyes. She swung her hair back with a toss of her head. "Where would... Carrie get that?"

  "From something she was involved in."

  "From smuggling marijuana?"

  "Did someone suggest that to you?"

  "Betty Joller. It had something to do with why she left the cottage and went to live at that Fifteen Hundred place, Betty said.
Would she make that much all for herself?"

  "It's possible."

  "She always wanted to have a lot of money."

  "On the other hand, maybe the money is Van Harn's."

  Her sallow round face looked stricken. "Would she be mixed up with him in anything? I wonder if he ever... made love to my sister. Jesus! That word doesn't fit. Love!"

  "I wouldn't know."

  She looked thoughtful. "She was always a stronger type person than me. I mean she could probably handle that kind of a man better than I could. Being older and married and so on. I never knew about men like that. He just kept confusing me. I guess I want that money now. Where is it?"