John D MacDonald - Travis Mcgee 18 - The Green Ripper

by The Green Ripper(Lit)

  "Go right ahead."

  He put the tape in, put it on Record and counted to ten, rewound, played it back, rewound again, and said, "December fifteenth, one ten P.M., initial interview by Toomey and Kline with Travis McGee aboard his houseboat moored at Slip F-Eighteen, Bahia Mar Marina, Fort Lauderdale, Florida"

  Toomey took over. "Please describe your relationship to the decedent. Wait. Excuse me. Where and when did you meet her?"

  "Earlier this year. May. At a beach shack where her brother was living. John Tuckerman. South of

  Timber Bay, over on the west coast of Florida. The northwest coast. Her brother died a little while later. I went with Gretel when she flew out to California to have his ashes buried in a little cemetery in Petaluma We flew back to Timber Bay and, sometime in June, we left Timber Bay in this houseboat and came down around the peninsula and back up here to Lauderdale. We made it a leisurely trip. We got here in August. She lived aboard until she located the job at Bonnie Brae in early November and moved out there, to one of the model houses."

  With great delicacy Toomey asked, "Would you say that you and she had a... a significant relationship?"

  'I didn't care what rules we went by, as long as we both agreed that it would be a permanent thing. Why do you have to know stuff like this?"

  "We want to know whether the relationship was such that she would confide in you."

  "Confide what?"

  'met us just say details of her workday, her life out there. That sort of thing."

  "Are you looking into something fishy at Bonnie Brae?"

  "Did Mrs. Howard say something fishy is going on at Bonnie Brae?"

  'No. No, she didn't. I mean, she called up last Saturday morning before she got sick, to tell me about one of the owners, Mr. Ladwigg, dying in an

  The Green Ripper accidental fall his bicycle, if that's what you mean."

  Kline took over. "Let me set up a hypothesis, Mr. McGee, and see if that helps. Suppose Mrs. Howard, in the course of her employment out there, learned that something curious was going on. Say that part of the operation was a cover for something else, like gambling or smuggling or something of that nature. Would she have confided in you?"

  '`Of course."

  '~Would she have confided something like that to anyone other than you? Or as well as you?"

  'I can't see that happening."

  "And she talked to you about her work?"

  "Certainly. About her exercise classes of raffles, and the tennis lessons she was giving to children, and the forms she had to complete on each sale of land, houses, and so forth. She liked her work."

  The two men looked at each other, and Kline reached over and punched the key to turn off the recorder. Toomey said, "We do appreciate your cooperation, Mr. McGee."

  'wouldn't you say you owe me some kind of explanation... why you are interested in Gretel Howard?"

  Toomey smiled sadly. 'I wish we could. I really wish we could. There was a possibility she could have acquired some information which would have been useful to us. Unfortunately she became ill before we had a chance to speak with her."

  "If I happen to remember something later on, how do I get in touch with you?" I asked. 'Tm pretty upset right now and I'm not thinking too clearly."

  Kline tore a sheet out of a small spiral notebook and wrote a number on it: (202) 661-7007. I thanked him. They put the recorder away in the dispatch case, smiled politely, put on their hats, and marched off, down my little gangplank and off toward the parking area, in step, arms swinging in unison.

  Three minutes later Sue Sampson arrived, bearing a casserole of hot beef stew. She apologized for having to miss the service and tools off just as Meyer arrived.

  I made the delayed drinks. Meyer put the stew over low heat while we sat and he listened to the saga of Toomey and Kline.

  "All right," he said, "so you sidestepped. You left out Brother Titus and the blue airplane and the twenty-acre sale to a syndicate in Brussels. But you make them sound very authentic."

  "While they were boring in, I was deciding several things. First, that I am not in very good emotional shape to spar with anybody about anything. Second, that I could get in touch with them later. Third, that they were almost too perfect Too cold and clean. They had no regional accent that I could detect. They said they did not usually go out into the field. That implied some importance to

  The Green Ripper talking to me. But it never came off as important. They wanted some hearsay about what might be going on at Bonnie Brae. Colloquial American pronunciation, but a stilted kind of sentence structure. Almost like you when you are at your most professorial."

  "Didactic is a better word. The tendency to lee" lure."

  "Kline made those little continental crossbars on the sevens in the phone number. See?"

  "But that came after you had decided to hold off."

  "Before that, their pants were too long. Long enough almost to step on the back of the cuffs. Like Kissinger. The necktie knots were wrong. Frenchmen tie them that way. When Kline cleaned his glasses and held them up to the light, I looked through them too, and I saw no distortion."

  "So the glasses were a very minor correction. So both of them have lived and worked abroad. So they spoke another language before they learned English."

  'I know. I know. But, dammit, it seemed like such an invasion of my personal privacy to have strangers here asking me to talk about Gretel. I am not ready to talk about Gretel to anybody. I am not impressed by official credentials. Nor by Mr. Robert A. Toomey or Mr. Richard E. Kline, on the staff of the Select Committee on Special Resources in the Senate Office Building."

  "Are you sure you remember that accurately?"

  'Y'm sure."

  Meyer wrote it down on Kline's piece of paper. "No great problem to check it out on Monday, if you'd like."

  "Ed like."

  Ready for stew?'9

  "Right after the next drink. If it all checks out, 111 forget my paranoia and phone them and tell ally'

  "And what if it doesn't checlc out? What if your instincts were accurate?"

  '.Then Em going to have to try to figure out what they were really after. The cover story was very elaborate. I wouldn't think they'd have gone to all that trouble just for me. I would be incidental to something more important to them, or to someone.9'

  I had one drink more than I needed. Meyer dished out the stew. I managed almost half of what he served me. He wanted to clean up, but I shooed him out, sent him home.

  After I washed the dishes, I locked up and went over the pedestrian bridge to the beach. A high gray overcast had moved in, pushed by a cool fitful breeze off the sea. I had put on good shoes for walking, and I headed north on packed damp sand, lunging along, carrying with me my sorrow, my mild headache, my sour stomach, and the dull pain in my right thigh which cold and damp will cawe. I plodded along the beach all the way up to Gait

  The Green Ripper

  Ocean Mile, and from there on I alternated between the beach and A-1-A, depending on obstacles. The cold and the oncoming dusk had emptied the beaches. The glassy facades of the condominiums glittered down at me.

  I pushed hard, but even so it had been dark a long time when I crossed back over to the mainland on the Atlantic Boulevard bridge at Pompano Beach. I walked the seven short blocks to North Federal Highway. They were promoting Christmas carols at the big shopping center, pumping them out into the night wind. Jangle bells. And the silent stars go by.

  When I found a saloon, I had a small draft beer and phoned a cab. One Oscar Lopez amved in a ratBe-bang rig that smelled strongly of cigar and faintly of vomit. He was dubious about The length of The trip compared width the appearance of the passenger, and I had to show him that I had money. Though he played loud rock and drove badly, he did not have to be told to turn east at Sunrise. He let me off at the marina. I walled to my houseboat, let myself in. It was empty. I had gotten used to a certain amount of emptiness after she had moved way out There to Bonnie Brae. But it had b
een a conditional emptiness. She could and would return. But now it was a hollowness beyond belief. Even the promise of life and warmal had been drained out of chat clumsy old hull. She was hollow, brittle, tacky, and old, sighing in a night wind, smelling faintly of onion, unwilling to admit that Gretel had ever lived here with me. My legs were leaden with fatigue. The small beer was caught in the back of my throat. Gretel was turned to ash and confined in bronze. The green ripper sailed by on the night wind, looking for more customers. I suggested, politely, that I would give him no big argument this time. But there were others with a higher priority tonight.

  I got through Sunday with a little help from my friends. It was a day of cold December rain. I uncrated and hooked up my new speakers. They had been delivered ten days ago. Once they were positioned and adjusted, I tied them down. I had been going to give the old ones to Gretel to give to a friend, but I couldn't remember the friend's name.

  The new ones had a great big full rich sound for such small enclosures. They worked all day long. Big music and Bloody Marys. People came by and brought bottles and food and stayed for a time and left again. When it would begin to get too noisy, somebody would remember that too much merriment was probably in bad taste, and things would quiet down, but not for long. It was a party related to a wake.

  At the bitter end of the day there was but one guest left aboard. I had heard about her but had never met her. She was the third or fourth wife of some old party from Long Island whose hundredand-twenty-foot ocean-going yacht was moored at one of the big berths, with a permanent crew of five. The Madrina, meaning "godmother," a nice enough name for a ship. The Madrina had been at the marina for a month because her owner had a very bad stroke the day before they were to sail for Bermuda. I did not know who brought the wife aboard my vessel, or left her there with me. Smallish, dark-haired, and very nice to look upon, she was a creature of many subtle perfections. Named Anna. An accent I could not place. Some Portuguese, she said, and Chinese, and a lot of White Russian, born in Hong Kong, and with a degree in engineering from the University of Alabama.

  Anna wore a woolly white jump suit with a turtleneck, a heavy-duty gold zipper all the way down the front of it, and some little marine flag signals embroidered over the pocket At five of midnight, after the others had left, there we were. She was curled into a corner of my yellow sofa, brandy glass in hand, looking over at me out of dark eyes under dark brows under the wing of smooth jet hair across her forehead. She stared with a total focus of her attention, watchful as a cat. The white outfit

  The Green Ripper fitted so closely no one with figure flaws could have managed it. I couldn't remember who had brought her into the group.

  "We have very much the same kind of trouble, Travis," she said.

  "We do?"

  "They told me the day before yesterday, at the hospital, that Harvey won't live."

  'Em sorry to hear it."

  "Just two short years. That's all we had."

  "Yes. That's too bad."

  "Any day now."

  'Those things happen."

  "I need advice about the Madnna."

  '~What kind of advice?"

  '@They told me you know all about boats."

  '] don't know anything about ships. Over a hundred feet is a ship, unless it is a submarine, and then it's still a boat."

  "Advice about selling it. If I should sell it here or have them take it back home. I don't trust Michael."

  "Who is Michael?"

  YIe is the captain. Maybe if it is best to take it home to sell it, you could help me."

  "A boat is a hole in the water into which you throw money. A ship is a bigger hole into which you throw more money. If you don't want it, move off it right now. Get rid of the crew and all perish ables, cancel the telephone hookup, and turn it over to one of the brokers. There are good ones here."

  "I really can't do that until after all that will and executor thing is taken care of."

  "And he isn't even dead yet."

  "The way you say that, you make me sound... terrible."

  'Dot intended."

  "I didn't think it would be unreasonable, Travis, to suggest that we might help each other. And comfort each other." She added a slight arching of the back, for emphasis. A very subtle movement of her left hand indicated that I should come over and sit by her.

  I stood up and said, "I'm dead, Anna. I'll walk you back around to the Madnna."

  She tossed off the rest of the brandy, frowned, shrugged, and let me walk her home. She hung onto my forearm with both hands and contrived to bump a hip into me every now and again.

  'what if I want to fire Michael and he won't let himself be fired by me?"

  I was supposed to volunteer assistance. 'Then you'll have to let the executor ilre him, I guess."

  '~e's worked for Harvey for twenty-three years."

  We stopped at the gangplank. She said, "Would you like to come aboard and look around?"

  'Dot really."

  "You're not very gracious, are you?"

  "Not very."

  The Green Ripper

  'Novell... if you feel terribly lonely and want someone to talk to who... faces the same }rind of sorrow, I'll be nearby. Okay?"

  "Okay, Anna. Sure. Uptight."

  I walked slowly home to The Busted Ftush. There was a sour smell in the night air, like a broken drain. Anna was a very tidy little biscuit, with her old dark eyes set in that child's face. She exuded a tantalizing Savor of corruption, of secret, unspeakable experience. There had been times in my life when I would have been happy to help her pass the time until old Harv died and then talked her into letting me help her take the Madana home, by way of a lot of nice islands.

  But I had seen the crocodile tears bulging in her dark eyes when she had said, "Any day now." And I had seen the greed behind the tears, the impulse to break into laughter. Everything old Harv had is now mine, fella. All, all mine. During those past two years she had probably been dreadfully afraid that he would live forever.

  When you see the ugliness behind the tears of another person, it malces you take a closer look at your own.

  We are all at the mercy of the scriptwriters, directors, and actors in cinema and television. Man is a herd creature, social and imitative. We learn the outward manifestations of inner stress, patterning reaction to what we have learned. And because the visible ways we react are so often borrowed, we wonder about the truth of what is happening underneath. Do I really feel pain, grief, shock, loss?

  It is as if we look inside and take a tentative rap at some bell that hangs in there. I had the horrid feeling that maybe my pain was tempered by some sick measure of relief, that I had escaped the trap of a permanent twoness.

  Take a rap at that bell, dreading a possible fiat, cracked, dissonant sound of self-pity, of a grubby selfishness.

  But it rang true. It rang for her, for my lost girl. The loving and the losing were still larger than life. Than my life. The sound of the bell was almost unbearable. I was like a rat in a cage, subjected to su- personic experimentation. They run back and forth and roll at last onto their backs, chewing their paws bloody. I wanted to swim straight out into the sea. Or go visit Anna and help her into bed. Each was a form of drowning.

  64

  5 - On Monday morning I awoke glum, got up glum' dressed glum. The sky was a bright pewter, a radiance that cast no shadow but made people squint and walk hunched over, as if searching for something. It would be windless and silent one moment, then a hard blast would come slamming past, picking up dust devils and scraps of paper before sub" siding into stillness. At sea on a day like this I would have been laying a course to the nearest shelter and checking the fuel level to see how fast I dared go to get there. It is the kind of weather Mat makes people cross.

  Meyer was cross when he arrived at eleven for reheated coffee.

  "How are you?" he asked, peering at me.

  "Peachy."

  "I'm sorry. It is the standard question one asks. How did
you get rid of little Anna?"

  'walked her back to her personal ship. What made you jump to the conclusion I got rid of her?"

  "Not such a big jump. Why shouldn't you get rid of her? There'd be no reason to keep her around."

  "Who brought her and dumped her on me?"

  "Lilt MacNair. And it wasn't her fault She just couldn't get the Farmer woman to leave."

  "Farmer?"

  "Anna Farmer.',

  "Don't look so exasperated, Meyer. I never caught her last name. Is she worth talking about, even? And does it matter a damn one way or another what I do or don't do with my days or with my nights?"