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

by The Dreadful Lemon Sky(lit)

  "Current girl friend?"

  "He hasn't got any particular person at the moment that I know of. He goes over and sees Betty Joller. You know, she's alone in the cottage now. Unless she can get somebody to come in with her, a couple of girls, she can't swing the rent and upkeep."

  "Wasn't there another girl there?"

  "Two. Nat Weiss and Flossie Speck. After the bombing, Nat went back to Miami and Floss decided to try it out in California. She was bored with her job here anyway. She was working for the phone company."

  "Didn't Jason have something going with Carrie and with Joanna?"

  "Probably. Sure. It wouldn't be any great big deal in either direction. It would just have to be the right time and place is all, and it would just happen."

  "Would Carrie have confided in him?"

  "What about?"

  "Anything that might have bugged her."

  "I don't see why not. People talk to Jason about the goddamnedest things. He doesn't pass it along. You know you can tell him things. Funny, come to think of it, how he never tells things about himself to other people. I guess he's had a hard life. He was in foster homes. They took him away from his own folks because they nearly killed him beating him. He wasn't even two years old. That's the only thing he did ever tell me. He had about six broken bones. Maybe more. I forget."

  "Did the storms wake you up last night?"

  "Hell, yes!"

  "Was Jason in this bunk?"

  "Let me think. No, he wasn't. I could see in the flashes of lightning. I mean it wasn't anything unusual. He's always roaming around by himself. Or visiting people. He's a very restless person."

  "But he's been here two years, ever since they opened."

  "I don't mean restless like that. We've talked about moving on, but we never do. You get kind of hooked. Boats and water and working outside mostly."

  "But now he's packed his gear and moved on."

  "I can't believe he'd just go without a word. But maybe he would. Maybe he would. He'd have pay coming. I don't know why he'd leave without picking up his pay. Maybe he figures on sending for it. Or maybe he didn't leave. Maybe he moved into the cottage."

  "Want to check that out for me?"

  "For myself too. Sure."

  As I walked slowly back to the office, alone, I could guess at what would convince Jason Breen it was time to pack and leave. If he had been under the open awning windows, crouched a couple of feet from the bed, he would have heard a conversation about Cal's murder. A little bonus for the restless voyeur of the marina. A little lead time on the blue bike. I wondered if he had sheathed his guitar in rain-proof plastic.

  I briefed Cindy and we waited for Oliver. He came back panting for breath, overheated. "Not there," he said. "Betty hasn't... gone to work yet. She said... she hasn't... seen Jason."

  After Oliver left Cindy said, "You don't suppose Jason... could have listened?"

  "Could be. He'd know you were going to talk to Scorf."

  "But does a person... flee on a bicycle?"

  "A person flees on what they have at hand, if they are anxious to flee."

  "It makes me feel... sort of rotten to think anybody could have been listening."

  "Ollie says Jason did a lot of prowling."

  "But he seemed so nice!"

  "We like the people who like us."

  "I suppose. Rats. Phone call? Sure. Here's the book."

  I phoned the offices of Frederick Van Harn, Attorney-at-Law, in the Kaufman Building. A soft-voiced girl answered by speaking the number I had just dialed.

  "May I speak to Mr. Van Harn, please?"

  "Who is calling?"

  "A certain Mr. McGee, my dear."

  "Is it a business call or a personal call?"

  "Let's say business."

  "He won't be in the office today."

  "Out of town?"

  "No, sir. He won't be in today."

  "Where can I get in touch with him?"

  "You could phone here tomorrow, Mr. McGee."

  "What if I said personal instead, of business?"

  "You already picked one, sir."

  "Is he out at the ranch? What's the number there, please?"

  "Sorry, sir. That is an unlisted number. You can reach him here tomorrow morning."

  I thanked her and hung up. I wondered vaguely if Freddy was stupid enough to be making another run to Jamaica and decided he wasn't. I asked Cindy if she could aim me toward the Van Harn ranch. She was blank on that, but she knew the road to take to get to Jane Schermer country, out amongst the grapefruits, and Meyer had told me they were adjacent.

  I threw jacket and tie into the back seat of the bright little oven, opened all windows, and headed a little bit south and then turned west on Central Avenue. At first it was a six-lane avenue fringed with motels, the Colonel's chicken, steak houses, gift shops, dress shops, savings and loans, and small office buildings. After a few blocks of this, I was in used-car country speckled with tired old shopping centers and convenience stores. After a mile or so of that, the road became divided and I went through a long expanse of decaying residential. The pseudo-Moorish and old frame houses had once been impressive-and expensive.

  They were cut up into apartments and rooming houses. The yards were rank and littered, and the palms in the medial strip looked sickly. The road became two lane, and I went through an area of huge new shopping centers and small dreary-looking developments where, on the flat-lands, the developers had peeled off every tree and had big bonfires before putting in the boxy little houses. As these dwindled I saw For Sale signs on raw acreage, and at about nine miles from where I had made my turn, I came to the first ranchlands, with some Brahman, some Black Angus, some Charolais. Windmills flapped near the water holes. Salt blocks were set out in little open sheds. Where there were trees, the cattle had eaten the bottoms of the boughs off in a straight line, so that at a distance it had something of the look of African landscape.

  There was more contour to the land on the right of the road, and more of that was used for geometric groves, laid out with a painful precision. I saw some spray trucks working in the groves, tall booms hissing white into the trees, agitating the leaves and the young fruit.

  Big trucks used the narrow road and used it fast. Their windy wake snapped at my little rental. The landscape was beginning to turn a rich and glorious green with the heavy rains. Kingfishers sat on high wires, looking optimistically down into the drainage ditches. Grease-fat bugs burst on my windshield.

  The entrance was so inconspicuous I nearly missed it. The narrow driveway was marked with two gray posts. A varnished sign not much larger than a license tag was nailed to one post, saying V-H Ranch. The entrance drive was lumpy and niuddy. Wire fencing was snugged close on each side of it. Ahead was a distant grove of pines. On either side was a hell of a lot of empty space, flat as a drafting table, with some faraway clots of cattle wavering in the heat shimmer. The fencing on both sides turned away from the road just befare the grove. The grove was a huge stand of ancient loblolly, home for hawk and crow and mockingbird and some huge fox squirrels which menaced me with fang and gesture of profane chatter. Once through the grove I could see the house a couple of hundred yards away, spotted in the middle of giant live oaks hung with moss.

  It was squarish, two stories, with two broad verandas which encircled it completely, one at each level. Steep tin roof, big overhand. Porch furniture. The house looked rough and comfortable. A pair of dogs came around the corner of the house at a full run, arfing toward me. They were part German shepherd, but broader across chest and brow. One put his feet up on the side of the yellow Gremlin and grinned at me, tongue lolling. He lifted his lips to show me more tooth and made a sound like a big generator running in a deep basement. My window was up before he could draw breath.

  An old man came out onto the porch, shaded his eyes, and then put fingers in his mouth and blew a piercing blast which silenced birds and dogs and could possibly have stopped traffic on the distant highwa
y. The dogs backed away and dwindled. They walked sideways, knees bent, tails tucked under. They swallowed, lapped their jowl, and looked apologetic.

  "Git on out back!" he yelled, and they did git, in scuttling fashion. Then he stood on the porch, feet planted, arms crossed, and waited for me to approach, and waited for me to say the first word. He was a tall scrawny bald man with tufts of white over his ears. He was all strings, except for his watermelon belly, and he wore crisp khakis and new blue sneakers.

  "It's nice to see animals pay attention," I said.

  "They know I kicks their ass nine feet in the air ef'n they don't. State your business."

  "I would like to see Mr. Van Harn."

  "Sorry."

  "He isn't here?"

  "I didn't say that, did I?"

  "Then he is here?"

  "He could be."

  "My name is Travis McGee. To whom am I speaking?"

  "I'm Mr. Smith."

  "Mr. Smith, your loyalty is commendable. I would like you to take a short message to Mr. Van Harn. I think he will want to talk to me."

  "I don't know as I want to do that. He's in a real bad temper this morning. He had to shoot Sultan. Busted his fool leg. Fifteen-thousand-dollar horse. He don't want no help with it. He's got a backhoe down there, and a jeep with a blade, and he's burying that fool horse by himself. He sent Rowdy and the boys off to string fence. Wants to be alone with the fool dead horse. I don't want to mess into that, Mister McGee."

  "The message is very important to him." Smith studied me for long long seconds. This was a character reading. "You say you snuck by here after I told you to git?"

  "I put my car back in the pines and snuck by. Where did I go to when I snuck by, Mr. Smith?"

  "You followed the ruts there to the side of the house. Two hundred yards, you came to a plank bridge. Cross it and turn left past a stand of live oaks and you can see the stables and some storage sheds, and past that the hangar and the landing strip. He'll be on high ground right across from the stables. You'll see the backhoe and jeep before you can make him out."

  "Mr. Smith?"

  "Yes."

  "What about those dogs?"

  He took me around the house. The dogs crawled forward and I extended my hand. They both snuffed my hand. "Leave him alone, hear?" Smith roared. The dogs nodded. "They won't bother you none," he said.

  Smith was right. I saw the vehicles first. The yellow jeep with a front-end blade was crawling slowly across the infield of a rough track, dragging the glossy red-brown body toward the slight rise and the cabbage palms at the far side, where the backhoe stood near a large mound of dirt.

  Van Harn saw me walking toward him and stopped the jeep.

  "What are you doing here, McGee? How'd you get past the house?"

  "Smith told me to get lost. I parked in the pines and snuck around. Sorry about your horse." He had wrapped chain around the hind legs and fastened it to the tow hook on the back of the jeep. The great head of the horse was at rest. I had seen it bobbling across the stubble. The visible eye bulged nastily from the socket. The shot had been perfectly centered, above and between the eyes, making a caked mess of the brown gloss. A swarm of bluebottle flies settled onto the horse when the jeep stopped. He was a grotesque parody of a horse at a full run, front legs reaching, back legs extended, head high. "What do you want?"

  'I tried the office first."

  "What do you want?"

  "Why don't you go ahead and bury the horse and then..."

  "What do you want?"

  He wanted the leverage right away, right in the blazing sun of midmorning, in the infield of his little track. He wore big oval sunglasses, aviator type, and a white canvas cap. He was stripped to the waist. He wore dirty khaki pants and old white boat shoes. I was surprised at how tanned his body was, and how slender and fit he looked. Thin tough musculature made ridges and knots under the tan hide at each slight move. He had a medallion of black hair in the middle of his chest, big as a saucer, turning into a thin line of black hair that disappeared behind his brass belt buckle.

  Plausibility is the key. I said, "When we had our little talk in the limousine, there was an area we didn't get to."

  "Such as?"

  "Uncle Jake offered me twenty-five thousand to pack and leave. I wanted to talk to you about whether it is all the traffic will bear."

  "It sounds like too much as it is. What can you do?"

  "I can put things together. Carrie gave me enough to go on. It's a case of filling in the blanks."

  "Blanks?"

  "Such as who decided to fasten ballast to jack Omaha and drop him in the sea after he got hit by the bag of grass when you and Carrie were air-dropping the stuff to Cal and Jack aboard the Christina III."

  He opened his mouth and closed it, opened it again, and said, "You lost me on the first curve, McGee."

  "I think you waited too long."

  "Maybe I did. I've got to bury Sultan." He started the jeep up and once more the big head bounced along the ground, tongue protruding between the big square teeth. I followed along at walking speed. He went to the left of the big hole, as close as he could get to it, and cut to the right as soon as he was past it. When he stopped, the horse lay with his back at the edge of the hole. He backed to slack off on the chain, got out and unfastened it from the jeep and the horse's legs, and dropped it into the jeep. Next he bent and picked up the hind legs and pushed at them, rolling the horse onto its back. It slipped over the edge of the hole and fell four feet, turning the rest of the way over, gases bursting out of its body as it thudded against the bottom.

  I backed out of the way when he got back into the jeep, after setting the blade to its low position, and began shoving dirt into the hole. It was pale dirt, a mix of sand, topsoil, and surface limestone which contained billions of small fossil shells.

  A buzzard began a big lazy circle overhead. I squinted up at it against blue sky, wondering how it knew. The abrupt roaring of the jeep shocked me out of my stupid trance. The onrushing blade was a yard from my legs by the time I took a frantic sideways leap, like a man going into second base in a headlong slide. I sprawled and rolled and came up onto my feet with the jeep right behind me. I feinted one way and dived the other way, came to my feet, and ran around to the other side of the horse grave.

  He idled down and stopped. Oval lenses looked at me from under the stubby bill of the white cap.

  "You move good for the size of you," he said.

  "Thanks. And what's one more dead person?"

  "At this point in time, not very much."

  "But you can't make it, not the way you've tried to make it, Freddy. You dropped the rock in the water, and you can't move around fast enough to flatten out all the ripples."

  "I can give it a goddamn good try. I didn't know if you had a gun. I guess you don't."

  "I should have. It was an oversight."

  "Final mistake."

  "What was Carrie's final mistake?"

  He seemed puzzled. "Mistake? Walking in front of a truck?"

  "Didn't you close her mouth for good?"

  "Didn't have to. Carrie was bright. She was involved in Jack's death too, you know. And she had less leverage than I have."

  It was convincing. I felt confused. I couldn't see him as the murderer of Cal Birdsong or the builder of the bomb which killed Joanna. So why was he so obviously intent on doing away with me?

  "I think we ought to talk," I said.

  "Make your move."

  "What move? Run for it? How far would I get?" He gunned the jeep toward the right. I lunged to the left, dipping to scoop up a handful of ancient oyster shells from the pile of dirt. They were thick, calcified and heavy, dating back to the time when the V-H Ranch had been on the bottom of a shallow sea. I wound up quickly, stuck my leg in the air, threw a shell with a follow through that brought my knuckles to within an inch of the ground. I really whistled it, but it curved low and outside, missing his right shoulder narrowly. He backed away quickly and,
out of range, stood up and pulled the windshield up and fastened the wing nuts before rolling back to position.

  "That was very cute," he said.

  "Freddy I've talked to a lot of people about you."

  "I'm sorry about that. But it doesn't change anything."

  "Your odds are impossible already."

  "You don't know how bad they really are, McGee. But they are the only odds I've got, and it's the only game there is."