"She'll be right out," the nice lady said. "What kind of work does she do here?"
"Oh, she's our manager! She's the boss."
Anne Renzetti appeared a few minutes later, looking unlike a boss. I had forgotten what a vivid little woman she was. Black black hair, dark eyes, black brows, a slash of red mouth. She wore a beige suit, white crisp shirt, green silk scarf knotted at her throat, very high heels. She walked trimly, swiftly, toward us, giving Meyer a smile of genuine pleasure at seeing him again, holding her cheek up for a kiss, favoring me with a quick handshake and a dubious look.
"McGee?" I said. "Travis McGee?"
"I think I remember you.... Meyer, how are you? You look absolutely wonderful. Gentlemen, perhaps you will join me for a drink? I was getting ready to leave. Marie? I'll be at my place if anything comes up."
We followed her out the west doors, through the pool area past a thatched outdoor beach bar, and down to the farthest cabana. It was on pilings six feet high. We went up the stairs to a shallow porch with a broad overhang. A nice breeze was coming off the Gulf. The tubular chairs were comfortable. We approved her suggestion of vodka and grapefruit juice, and she declined any help. When she came back with the drinks on a small tray, she had changed to white shorts and a pink gauze top.
Meyer said, "Congratulations on your exalted position, Anne."
She made a face. "It was sort of an accident, actually. First, I was secretary to Mr. Luddwick and then the company moved him to Hawaii, to a bigger hotel. His replacement was driving from Baltimore, and he got into a really bad accident. He was alone and fell asleep and went off the road. They thought he might be laid up for six weeks to two months, and they asked me if I could carry on alone herewith a small raise in pay, of course. I said sure. They had to pin the man's broken hip, and he got an infection, and finally, when he was ready to report, somebody had the good sense to look at the results for the three months I had been running it, and they decided they shouldn't change a thing. I owe getting the top job to Ellis Esterland."
"You do?" Meyer said, astonished.
"I cover every inch of this place at least once a month. I know what every employee is doing and what they are supposed to be doing. I know where every penny of expense goes. I listen personally to every gripe. Ellis taught me that there are people who try to look as if they are doing a good and thorough job, and then there are the people who actually damn well do it, for its own sake. I'm proud of myself, damn it. And I love being the boss. I really love it! Everything you do in life is worth infinite care and infinite effort, Ellis said. He said that in a half-ass world the real achiever is king. He used to make me do things over if I made the tiniest mistake. He used to make me cry. But, wow, I really owe him."
"Nice-looking place," I said.
"Why have you looked me up?" she asked.
Meyer left it up to me. "We were talking with Ronald Esterland yesterday night in Lauderdale, Miss Renzetti."
"With Ron! You were? How is he? What is he doing?"
"Fine, apparently. He had a big show of his work in London and he sold most of it. He is beginning to get a lot of attention."
"I'm so glad! You know, I thought Ellis had really gutted him. I really thought Ron would never amount to anything. His father thought Ron's ambition to be a painter was absurd. He thought it was a cop-out, an excuse for not working. I tried in little ways to get Ellis to get in touch with Ron. But he wouldn't. I felt... maternal about Ron, which is strange because he's a little older than I am. I think Josie felt that way, or feels that way, about him too, and though she is older than he is, she certainly isn't old enough to be his mother. It really crushed Josie, losing Romola the way she did.... What does Ron have to do with your looking me up?"
"His attitude toward his father has mellowed, Miss Renzetti."
"Please call me Anne."
"Thank you, Anne. Ron realized that he lost some of the fun of success because his father wasn't alive to see it happen."
"Ellis would have been totally astonished. He used to say to people, 'I've got a middle-aged son living abroad making funny daubs on canvas, trying to live in the wrong century'."
"He isn't satisfied with the story of his father's death."
"Who is? They never found out a thing. Not a single thing. And it happened in such a public place. It doesn't seem possible they couldn't find out something."
"So I'm poking around."
"Are you some sort of police officer?"
Meyer answered, "No, he's just a private citizen. But he's had a lot of luck finding things for people, answering questions people have had. You can trust him, Anne."
"With what? I don't know anything I haven't told the police long ago. It wasn't too pleasant, you know. I was a single woman living aboard a fancy boat with a rich old dying man. They were less than polite. They wanted to know what boyfriends I had on the side. They wanted to know, if Ellis was so sick, why I hadn't driven him up there. Was he getting a divorce from Josephine? Did I plan to marry him if he got a divorce? Had we quarreled before he drove up there? Finally I had enough and I told them I wasn't answering any more questions. They tried to bully me, but I had been bullied by one of the world's greatest, so it didn't work. Look, tell Ron I'm so glad he's making it. And tell him I feel quite certain Ellis would have come around and been proud of him too. Will you do that?"
"Of course we will," Meyer said. "Did Ellis go off on trips like that often, without telling you why?"
"Never! Here's all I know about that trip. He was feeling better. He'd been-regaining lost ground for a month. He had picked up some of the weight he had lost, and his color was better. He was talking about being strong enough to fly out to Los Angeles to see Romola and talk to Josie and the doctors. He wanted to see Romola, but at the same time he dreaded it. He had talked to the doctors on the phone. They said there was no hope at all for her. I was a terrible thing for him. I think he really loved Romola. I don't think there was ever any other person in his life he had loved. Not me. Not anyone. So, okay, when I came back from shopping on Monday, the day before he was killed, he was talking on the phone. Mostly he was just saying 'Okay, okay, okay.' I had the feeling it was a long distance call. They checked the phone records afterward, and if it was long distance, it wasn't an outgoing call. He, seemed thoughtful that afternoon and evening, and before we went to bed he told me he was going up to Citrus City the next day. He said he would go alone. He wouldn't tell me why he was going. He told me to stop asking questions."
"Do you have any idea why he didn't want to tell you?"
"It wasn't like him not to. Not that he was so very open with me. It was just that he didn't care what I knew about him. I wasn't in any position to disapprove of anything he might do. I don't know why I didn't walk out. It just didn't occur to me that I could. Does that make any sense? I was in a cage with the door open, and I never even noticed the door. Now here is the only dumb guess I could come up with. He had a scientific mind. He started as a research chemist, you know. The one thing he hated above all else was doing something ridiculous and being found out. He knew how sick he was. We told each other that the remission was holding, and maybe he had licked the cancer. But he knew better than that. It had metastasized before it was first diagnosed. Chemotherapy had knocked it down for a little while, long enough for him to recover from most of the effects of the therapy, but when the remission ended, the next series of chemotherapy treatments would, if they suppressed the cancer at all, knock him back further than the previous set. And the pain would be back too. The only thing I can think of that would make him keep a secret from me was the idea I might ridicule him. Hope can be a dreadful thing, I guess. If he was going off to track down some sort of a quack cure, I don't think he would have told me."
"Is there some kind of miracle cure available in Citrus City?"
"I never tried to find out. But I would think that if there was, the police up there would have checked to see if he made contact, once they knew of his conditi
on."
Meyer cleared his throat and looked uncomfortable. We looked at him and he said, "There's always the remote possibility that he didn't tell you because he thought you would try any means of stopping him if you knew."
"Knew what?"
"That he knew exactly what was in store for him with what was left of his life, and he had been arranging to get himself killed."
She stared at him wide-eyed. "No," she said firmly. "No, Meyer. Not Ellis. Not like that. This might sound sick, but I think he was enjoying the battle too much. He was a very gutsy man. All man. Cancer was challenging him. It pushed and he pushed back. He would delay taking pain pills, and keep track of how bad the pain was. No. To him it would have been like some kind of dirty surrender. He was building himself up to give it another battle."
"Suggestion withdrawn," Meyer said.
"Would it have had anything to do with Romola?" I asked.
"If that was so, he would have told me."
"Could he have been going to buy a present of sorne kind?"
"He wasn't much for presents and surprises. On my birthdays he would give me money to go out and shop for myself."
"Was there any clue as to what he was going to do in what he picked to wear?" I asked.
"Not really. He wore gray slacks and a pale blue knit sports shirt with short sleeves. He took a seersucker jacket along to wear if he was in very cold air conditioning. I think he wore it in that hotel, from what the police said. But he wasn't wearing it when he... when they killed him."
She hitched her chair forward and hooked her bare heels over the porch railing. Her legs were well-formed and slender. The skin, moderately tan, looked flawless as plastic.
"I've been over it ten thousand times. It seems so pointless, dying like that. I wouldn't admit it to myself at the time, but I did later: I was relieved. I'd been bracing myself to go all the way with him. Through all the pain. Caring for him when he became helpless. I was getting myself charged up to really do a job. But at the same time I dreaded it. Which is natural. He didn't love me. He sort of liked me. I had good lines and I was obedient, like a show dog. And I sort of loved him.
"There can be a habit of love, I think. You justify the way you are living by telling yourself that love leaves you no other choice. And so you are into love. Women stay with dreadful men. You see it all the time. You wonder why. You know they are wasting their lives. You know they are worth far more than what they have. But they stay on and on. They grow old staying on and on. They say it is love so often to themselves, it does. become love. I can't understand the Anne Renzetti I was then. I look back and I don't understand her at all. We're all lots of people, I guess. We become different people in response to different limes and places, different duties. Maybe in a lifetime we become a very limited bunch of people when, in fact, we could become many many more-if life moved us around more. "Well, it moved me here and I know who I am now, and I will stay with this life for as long as I can. I never even suspected who I might really be. If it hadn't been for that new manager falling asleep at the wheel, I might never have known about this Anne. You can't miss what you don't know, can you? Maybe that's why we all have that funny little streak of sadness from time to time. We are missing something and don't even know what it is, or whether it will ever be revealed to us."
Meyer looked approvingly at her. "When you know who you really are, you fit more comfortably into your skin. You give less of a damn what kind of impression you make on people. My friend McGee here has never been at all certain of his identity."
She gave me a quick, tilt-eyed, searching glance. It had an unexpected impact. "Thinking of himself as some kind of rebel?" she asked.
"Something like that," Meyer agreed. "A reluctance to expend emotion, and a necessity to experience it. Cool and hot. Hard and soft. Rattling around in his life, bouncing off the walls."
"Would it make you two any more comfortable if I went for a walk?" I asked. "Then you can really dig Into my psyche. Meyer, for God's sake, what kind of friendship and loyalty are you showing me?"
"Sorry," he said. "I keep thinking of Anne as an old friend of both of us. As a matter of fact, we only really talked one time, didn't we?"
"For a couple of hours one night, aboard the Caper, after Ellis went to bed. But it made me feel as if I'd always known you. All the way back to childhood."
"The way he can do that," I said, "could have made him one of the world's greatest con men. But he has scruples. And they get in the way of the con."
"So you are sort of a team of con men, conning me?" she asked.
"Let's say we share your interest in finding out more about how Ellis Esterland died," I told her.
"Perhaps I haven't got a hell of a lot of real interest left? No. That's unfair. He was an important part of my life. I worked for him for six years. I can say I never really understood the man."
"Did any of his wives?" I asked her.
"I don't know about the first one, Ron's mother. Her name was Connie, and I've heard she was a real beauty. I've never seen a picture of her. Ellis didn't keep pictures of people around. Of course Judy Prisco and Josie Laurant were-are-both handsome. He liked to be seen in the company of women who make heads turn. I would suspect I was low on the list. But in the right light I've had my moments. Whenever we went out together he would look me over first. Very critical of the color and design of clothes, the shape of a hairdo, the right jewelry: The marriage to Judy ended very quickly. And she did very well; she walked away with a bundle. Of course, at his death; he was still married to Josie, even though they were legally separated. Maybe she understood him, I don't really know. I like her."
"You've met her?" Meyer asked.
"Oh, yes. When Ellis went downhill so fast, in the beginning, she flew out. I don't really know if it was genuine concern or a feeling of obligation. He was sending her almost five thousand a month as support. She spent a lot of time with him during the ten days she was in Stamford. She and I talked a lot, after visiting hours were over. That was after the exploratory. We were wary with each other at first. You can understand that. After all, she was still married to him, and I was the quote other woman close quote. She's an unusual person. She's very emotional. I don't think she knows what she's going to do or say next. And I will tell you, she at that time was just about the best-looking mother of a twenty-year-old I have ever seen. Wow. Fantastic. And she used to be such a marvelous actress."
"She gave it up?" I asked.
"Or it gave her up. Ellis talked about it a few times. Too much temperament. Or temper. Too hard to handle."
"Have you seen her since?" I asked.
"No. But we talked, after Romola was hurt. She would call me up and we would talk. It seemed to help her to talk to me. It seemed to settle her down. She'd be practically hysterical when she would place the call."
"Did Ellis know how bad off he was?" Meyer asked. "Did the doctors level with him?"
"Oh, yes. They had to. He was quick to detect any kind of evasion. It was almost impossible to lie to him. He had an excellent specialist. Dr. Prescott Mullen. Prescott flew down several times to check him over when we were living on the Caper. We became very good friends, actually. He's a fine man." There had been a subtle stress on the qualifying word "very" "As a matter of fact," she continued, "I'm expecting him here tomorrow, to stay for a week. He said on the phone he's been working too hard and needs a break."
"I wonder if he could add anything," Meyer said.
"Like what?" Anne asked.
"Well, if Esterland was facing a very untidy end, a highly unpleasant finale to his life; he might not have told you, Anne. I still wonder about his arranging his own death. Was there insurance?"
"Yes. Quite a large policy. But it would have been good even if he had killed himself with a gun. He'd had it a long time."
"You knew his personal financial affairs?"
"I was his secretary, Meyer. I kept the books, balanced the checkbooks, dealt with the brokers and the lawye
rs. That was my job. There was a lot to do because he changed his legal residence to Florida and established new banking and trust department connections in Fort Lauderdale. The bank and I were co-executors of his will, so I got a fee for that as well as the money he left me. I can see you both wondering. Was it very much? I'll tell you. It was twenty thousand dollars. It fooled me. I guessed it would be lots or nothing. I thought it would be nothing because I wasn't in the will. It was a codicil he'd added a month before he was killed. But to repeat myself, Ellis would never never arrange his own death."
John D MacDonald - Travis McGee 19 - Freefall in Crimson Page 2