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

by The Dreadful Lemon Sky(lit)

  "Then I better not tell you Freddy was flying the grass from Jamaica and air-dropping it to Omaha's boat off Grand Bahama."

  "No, you shouldn't tell me because it would fit too close with the arithmetic I've worked up about Freddy. He dresses fancy, drinks fancy, drives fancy. He's got the ranch and the airplane and forty pair of boots. But then you got to remember that Miss Janie has ten thousand acres of grove, and under management it must turn her sixty dollar an acre a year net, on which she can afford Fred Van Harn as a play toy, but if I were Jake I wouldn't be hoping my niece would marry up with a fellow with some kind of wrong twist in his head. Two years ago something got hushed up. They got delay after delay so by the time it was ready to go to court that girl had grown some inches taller. It's said he claims he never had any idea she was only fourteen. Anyway, she got taller and older and smarter, and settled for the money. They've been grooming him for politics, first the State Senate, then maybe Governor. They really don't give a damn what kind of a man he is. What they care about is that, he goes on local television on a public issue, you never seen such mail as comes in. Begging him to run for office. That's all they care about. In fact the other stuff kind of helps them out because it makes it easier to control him. Oh, they'll have him married to Miss Janie, and she'll be a good hostess, and she'll bear him some healthy kids, and there you are. He can turn that charm on. He can charm a five-thousand-dollar fee out of a five-hundred-dollar case and make the sucker come back for more advice. What did he tell you?"

  "He told me he didn't kill anybody."

  "My hunch is he probably didn't. But he sure got into the pants of just about ever' woman involved in it. You got a list?"

  "Carrie Milligan. Joanna Freeler. Betty Joller. Chris Omaha. He made a try at Miz Birdsong, but she bit him."

  "Good for her."

  "And Susan Lobrovsky."

  He stared at me, registering shock. "That girl too? Son of a bitch!"

  "He took her out to the ranch. She was supposed to leave for home this morning. Jason was going to see her off."

  "Ever since that boy was fourteen damn years old, he's been lifting every skirt he sees. There's stories about him. He goes after ever' one as if there was never going to be any more. And there's something about him, they say. The ones you'd never expect, their eyes cross and they lay back and put their heels in the air for him. There's no law against it, at least no law anybody enforces. And he doesn't seem to ever get tired of looking for it. And he finds it places you wouldn't even think of."

  I had to admit to myself there were, indeed, a lot of places I would never think of. And a fair portion of every day when I did not think of it at all, at all.

  "Vote for Van Harn," I said.

  "They'll do that. Senator Van Harn. They need a man up there riding point on what they want around here. Deepwater port for the phosphate down in the south county. Refinery. And all the goodies that go along with it that only a few fellows get a piece of."

  "The Judge offered me twenty-five big ones to go away and forget all about Freddy."

  Harry Max Scorf looked mildly startled. "What do they think you know?"

  "No more than I've told you. That he's a kink. He rapes people and kills people and spends too much money and flies grass in."

  He stood up and carefully fitted his white hat back over the pointy skull, tugging it to the right angle. He gave me a sharklike smile. "What the hell do they want for a front-runner? Some kind of nance fellow? See you around, son."

  When I went into the office, Cindy looked up with her customer face, cool and polite. Then the great warm smile came. "Hello," she said. It was just one word, but it was about fifteen words long. "And hello to you. Books balance?"

  "They do now. What I did, I wrote a hundred and sixteen dollars when it was supposed to be a hundred and sixty-one. I saw you out there. Captain Scorf has been around forever, and they say he's always looked exactly the same. Was he being rough with you?"

  "No. He says I've got cop sense."

  "Is that a good thing to have?"

  "They have finished the noisy parts of repairing the Flush. I think I better pay my motel bill and move my toothbrush back to the boat."

  She showed quick sharp dismay and disappointment before she caught herself. "Anything you wish, dear."

  "If you want to bring a small portable fire extinguisher, I'll talk Meyer into cooking some of his renowned chili tonight."

  "That would be nice," she said, forcing it.

  "Anything wrong?"

  "Nothing at all, thank you."

  "Are you sure?"

  "Certainly I'm sure!"

  There is no going past that point. All the roads are barricaded and all the bridges are blown. The fields are mined and the artillery has every sector zeroed in.

  So I went and moved my toothbrush and accessories out of the unit, went to the front, and paid a fat lady my accumulated charges. She asked me if I was feeling better, and I said I was feeling just great. She said, "It's so nice that Mrs. Birdsong has a friend nearby in her time of need. Have you known her long?"

  "A very long time."

  "He drank, you know."

  "Yes. Cal drank."

  "In a way, it's a blessing."

  "There are a lot of ways of looking at everything, I guess."

  "Oh, yes, that's so true."

  A small fire fight, with no decision. Both sides retreated.

  When I got to the boat, the glass people had arrived. There were four of them, in white coveralls, with the pieces all cut to size, tempered glass for marine use. The foreman said they would be through by four at the latest. Jason and Meyer were celebrating the completion of the vinyl job on the sun deck by having a cold beer in the shade of the canopy over the topside control panel. I inspected the job and gave my approval. I am skeptical of all of the so-termed marvelous advances of science. And I am suspicious of anything which tries to look like something it isn't. Thus it would seem that a coal-tar derivative patterned to look like bleached teak would turn me totally off. But it is so damned practical. If you should ever have an artery which can't be repaired, it can be replaced with woven Dacron. And, wearing that in your gut, it would be unseemly to go about muttering about the plastic world full of plastic people.

  So I stand on my plastic deck and mutter whatever I please. When did I make any claim about being consistent? Or even reasonable?

  I went below and checked out my stereo set. I put on the new record, Ruby Braff and George Barnes. It is nice to have one that is just out and know that it is destined to become one of the great jazz classics. I knew I had lost one speaker. I suspected I had lost more. Delicate microcircuitry cannot take that kind of explosive compression. When the noise came out, sounding like someone gargling a throatful of crickets, I snapped it off in haste.

  Back to the shop. No new components. Get the Marantz stuff fixed. I did not think I could placidly endure another gleaming salesman tell me that I had to have quadraphony sound, coming at me from all directions. I have never felt any urge to stand in the middle of a group of musicians. They belong over there, damn it, and I belong over here, listening to what they are doing over there. Music that enfolds you, coming from some undetectable set of sources, is gimmicky, unreal, and eminently forgettable.

  Jason went back to work his turn in the office. Meyer and I made some sardine sandwiches. He was glad to learn I was back aboard for good. We out at the booth in the galley and ate. And compared notes and reports.

  "We are absolutely nowhere," Meyer said.

  "A perfect summary."

  "Are you sure you feel okay?"

  "Don't I look okay?"

  "Glassy. You stare at me in a... goggly way."

  "Come to think of it, I feel goggly and glassy."

  "Just this minute. Or..."

  "Most of the time. The light seems too bright."

  "When the windows are done-"

  "The ports."

  "When the windows are done, we could go."r />
  "Home?"

  "And forget this whole mess, Travis."

  "Tempting. Who are we supposed to be, going around finding out who did what and why?"

  "That's why they have police."

  "Right!"

  We beamed at each other, but we both knew we were talking nonsense. The habit of involvement is not easily broken. It is even more pervasive than the habit of noninvolvement, the habit of walking away when the action starts.

  I told him we couldn't leave because we had a guest coming for dinner. I told him he was cooking chili.

  Fourteen

  WE THREE had sat with tears running down our cheeks and told each other in choked voices that the chili was truly delicious. She and Meyer had cleaned up, telling me that I was still on semiinvalid status.

  By the time they were through, there was a large dark night outside, wide as a country, high as the stars, and hot with the night winds of June.

  We killed the lights and went topside to a shadowed part of the sun deck, out of the reach of dock lights. The sky was pink orange over Bayside, all its outdoor advertising glowing against a mist made of hydrocarbon fartings of trucks and other vehicles. We aligned deck chairs on the newly repaired decking so as to look out at the stars over the Atlantic. We were into the rainy season now. The night of June tenth. Bulbous black lay low to the southeast, sullenly flickering an unseen artillery of lightning.

  She on my left, Meyer on my right, the night alr stirring across us and then fluttering back to stillness. Her hand had crept over to my thigh, wtealthily, nudged a welcome, and was enclosed my my hand, unseen by Meyer, as if we were children in church. With my thumb I rubbed the thick warm pads at the base of her fingers. I wondered if she had been told or had guessed that her husband had not died of natural causes. They would have to tell her, sooner or later, no matter how pessimistic the law felt about catching whoever had done it. Harry Max Scorf had indicated quite plainly that she was on his list of suspects. Though I knew her very well in certain limited ways, I knew her not at all in many aspects. But I could not imagine her killing in that stealthy way, jabbing a wire into the great chest while the king slept.

  Harry Max Scorf, in a dogged and plodding pattern, would have long since established the identity of every person who could have gotten close to Cal Birdsong long enough to do him in.

  "It always seems such a waste when it rains way out there," she said. "Sort of badly managed, to rain into the sea."

  "It's moving this way," Meyer said. "But your average thunderstorm has a total life span of fifty-five minutes."

  She sat up and looked across me at Meyer. "You've got to be kidding."

  "Believe him," I said.

  "When the conditions are right a pod will be forming in the area as the older pod is dissipating its energies. Thus we get the impression of one single storm lasting for hours. Not so."

  She settled back and made a small sound of mirth and wryness. "The rest of my life," she said, "I'll see a thunderstorm and say to myself they only last fifty-five minutes."

  Her hand still rested on mine, her hand warm and dry. I thought of lies and polygraphs and biofeedback. One type of biofeedback machine requires strapping a pair of electrodes to the palm of your hand. When you are tense and nervous, your palm is moist and cool and the conductivity of your skin is increased. The machine has a dial and a little electronic tone, thin and insectile. As you make yourself more calm your hand becomes more dry, the dial needle swings slowly downward, and the electronic note moves down the scale. By giving you the visible and audible results of different mental and emotional postures, in time you learn, without the machine, how to impose a great calm upon yourself, an alpha state, if you will.

  Soon she would be told her husband had been murdered. The required Grand Jury hearing could not be delayed indefinitely. I rubbed my thumb back and forth across the pads of the palm of her hand, and tried to think of how to word my trick remark, and felt disgusted with myself. A rotten game to play with this woman.

  Suddenly, without a word being said, I felt her palm go cold and wet. She tugged her hand away and got up and moved over to the rail and turned to lean against it, her arms folded, her rlioulders hunched forward.

  "What's wrong, Cindy?"

  "I guess somebody walked over my grave." She was silhouetted against the intermittent glow of distant lightning.

  "Did you think of something that upset you?"

  "I think I'll go home now," she said.

  "I'll walk you."

  "I'm okay."

  "No trouble!"

  I tried to make conversation as we walked to the motel, but she gave one-word responses. She unlocked the door and pushed it open and turned to me. I took her in my arms. Her lips were cool and firm. There was no response in lips or body, and then there was a lot. A hungry lot.

  We went in and the door clicked shut. "No lights," she said. "Don't let me think about anything. Don't give me time to think about anything. Please."

  The bed was by big windows. The draperies were open. The storm moved closer. The lightning flashes were vivid. Each one made a still picture of her in black and white. Black eyes and lips and hair and nipples and groin. White, white, white all the rest of her. The lightning arrested movement. It caught her in a fluid turning, mouth agape with harsh breath and effort. It froze a leg, lifting. It stopped her, astride, arms braced, halting the elliptical swing of hips, turning her into a pen and ink drawing of greatest clarity. I kept her for a long time within the prison of her own tensions, though she escaped to partial release from time to time. Each lightning stroke seemed to be brighter, each stroke bringing the thunder closer and sharper. At last the lightning made a ticking sound, filled the room with a strange hard blue light, and the great following bang of thunder made her gasp and leap. The ensuing crashing downpour of the rain was like a signal to us.

  We lay damp and slack in a close and sweaty embrace, content, heavy-breathing, detumescent. The storm air moved across us, cooling our bodies. The intensity of the downpour began to slacken, but it was still a heavy tropic rain. "Ruthie took those pills," she said.

  "What?"

  "You didn't know her. It was a long time ago. Bud-he was her husband-ran off a curve and hit a big tree. They gave her pills to make it easier. God, she took so many pills you couldn't talk to her, hardly. Huh? She'd say. Huh? Wha'? And sleep? She'd sleep twenty hours a day. Toby-you didn't know him either-his wife went back to see her sick mother and the airplane fell out of the sky. For Toby it was booze. After a year they had to put him away and dry him out. People use things, don't they? I'm using sex. I want it to be more and more, every time with you. It was more this time than ever. When it's so much, I can't think about anything else. The thing about me is, I'm not like this. Not really. I told you Cal hadn't touched me in ever so long. But it didn't make me feel... deprived. I mean it was okay. I guess I'm the way I am now, with you, because I try so hard to get my mind turned off. I try so hard, I get way way into the sex thing, like I couldn't before. I always felt a little odd about it. Ashamed, almost. I mean being so big and strong and healthy and looking... as if I would like it."

  "You need never feel odd again."

  "I won't. I won't."

  "And you've got a talking jag."

  "I know. And you have to listen, don't you? We don't really know each other. It's strange. I guess the way men think about these things, without me sounding like an egomaniac, what you did was luck out. You came along at the time when any presentable and sympathetic guy would be right where you are right now, doing what you were doing."

  "Flattery will get you everywhere."

  "Trav, please don't make flip little remarks. What our relationship is, it's backassward. It started at the end, and I want to find our beginnings. I want to know you as a person, not just want you terrible for the way you can turn my head off. It's a genuine compulsion; really."

  "Okay. No flip remarks. No bedroom comedy. I saw the vulnerability and I took
advantage. So that makes it seem unreal to me too. But it's more than pure physical hunger."

  "What else is it?"

  "Liking you. Wanting things to be right for you. Wanting the world to be a special place for you. Also, there's guilt."

  "About what?"

  "About knowing that Cal was murdered. Harry Max Scorf told me. I don't know if he knew I'd tell you."

  She sat up, with sharp hissing exhalation. "How?" she whispered.

  I told her. She made a sick sound and closed her fingers around my arm with impressive force.

  "Jason," she whispered.

  "Are you sure?"