"Was it the person he had the appointment with?"
"I've got no gut feeling about that at all. Maybe yes, maybe no. When you try to figure out the odds on whether a man setting up a secret meet is going to get killed by somebody else who just happened to be there, you can tend to say it had to be the one he was meeting. On the other hand, it could be just another one of those damn coincidences that screw up the work I do forty times a year."
"I appreciate your cooperation. And when you see Mrs. Banks, you give her my best wishes."
"I surely will. Dallas McGee? Is that right?"
"Not quite. Travis. Tell her it's been ten or twelve years. I was at their house for supper. With them and those three pretty daughters."
"My Debbie was the middle one. Here, I'll drop you on back at your car. Seems like a quiet night around here, thank the good Lord. I better knock wood. Soon as I say quiet, those grove workers start sticking knives in each other. Or rolling their pickups over and over, dogs and shotguns flying every whichaway."
He drove me back to the jail. We shook hands. He went off down the dark streets, a man alone in a county car on an overcast evening, waiting for somebody to do some damn fool thing to himself or to somebody else, wondering, as he made his patrol, if he was going to have to peddle the Suzuki to be able to help out with his mother-in-law's new schedule of dialysis.
Five
I CHECKED out of the motel after breakfast and headed southwest in my little dark blue rental Dodge, a Mitsubishi, I think, with a VW engine and almost enough legroom. I took it over to Interstate 4 and made the mistake of staying on 4 all the way to the outskirts of Tampa before turning south on 301.
It had been a couple of years since I had driven that route, and I found all north-south highways clogged full of snorting, stinking, growling traffic, the trucks tailgating, the cowboys whipping around from lane to lane, and the Midwest geriatrics chugging slowly down the fast lanes, deaf to all honkings. Bradenton, Sarasota, Venice, Punta Gorda, Fort Myers-all the same. Smoggy vistas and chrome glitterings down the long alleyway between the fast food outlets, the sprawl of motels, car dealerships, shell factories, strip shopping centers, gas stations, and gigantic signboards. It is all that bustling steaming growth that turns the state tackier each year. Newcomers don't mind at all, because they think it has always been like this. But in two years, they all want to slam the door, pull up the ladder, and close the state off. Once in a great while, like once every fifty miles, I even got a look at a tiny slice of the Gulf of Mexico, way off to the right. And remembered bringing the Flush down this coast with Gretel aboard. And wished I could cry as easily as a child does.
I had phoned ahead to the Eden Beach, and they had a second-floor single for me, with the windows facing inland. After I put the duffelbag in the room, I went over to the lobby to find Anne Renzetti.
I saw her coming diagonally across the lobby, walking very swiftly, her expression anxious and intent. Today she wore an elegant little dress: a cotton dress in an unusual shade of orange coral, which fitted her so beautifully it underlined the lovely fashioning of hips, sweep of waist, straightness of her back and shoulders. The color was good for her too. A small lady, luxuriantly alive.
"Hey, Anne," I said.
She came to a quick stop and stared at me, an instant of puzzlement and then recognition. "Oh, hello there. Mr. McGraw."
"McGee. Travis McGee."
She was looking beyond me. "Yes, of course. I'm so sorry. Travis McGee. Is Meyer with you?"
"He had to get back."
She started to sidle away. "You will have to excuse me. I really have to-"
"I was hoping you would introduce me to Dr. Mullen. I want to ask him about Ellis Esterland's condition at the time he-"
Even the sound of his name made her glow. It seemed almost to take her breath away. Her smile was lovely. "That's why I'm so busy at the moment. He didn't get in yesterday. He's due any minute. I just checked the room I set aside for him, and the damned shower keeps dripping and dripping. Excuse me just a moment, please."
I followed her to the desk. She told Marie about the leak, and Marie picked up the phone to get the maintenance man on it. Anne turned back to me and looked beyond me toward the entrance. Her smile went wider, and she flushed under her tan and slipped past me, quick and cute as a safety blitz. She half ran toward the entrance, arms outstretched, and I heard her glad cry of welcome.
The man was in his middle thirties, with a russet mustache, blow-dried hair, tinted glasses with little gold rims. He had a likable look about him. Strong irregular features, a good grin. And he wasn't very big. He was a dandy match for Anne Renzetti. Five foot two fits pretty well with five foot seven. He put his hands on Anne's shoulders, kissed her on the cheek, and then with a gesture very much like a magician's best trick, he reached behind him and pulled a large glowing blonde. She topped the good doctor by an inch or two. They both wore the same jack-o'-lantern toothy grin, and over the lobby sounds I heard a portion of his introduction of her: "... my wife, Marcie Jean..."
Anne's shoulders did not slump. I'll give her that much. And I think her smile stayed pretty much in place, because she was still wearing it when she turned around and came back, leading them toward the desk. I sensed that this was no time to ask for an introduction to the doctor and his bride. Anne kept smiling while the doctor registered. She pointed out the location of his room on a chart. A bellhop went with them to cart their luggage through the gardens to their room.
The two girls behind the desk had arranged to disappear. They recognized the storm warnings. Anne leaned back against the counter, her arms crossed, staring at me and through me, a glare that pierced me through and through, at chest level.
"Honeymoon!" she said in a half whisper. "Big dumb blond dumpling comes out of nowhere and nails him. And I put two bottles of chilled champagne up there in the room. Shit! Hope the shower never stops dripping."
"Pretty hard to stop a good drip in a shower." She slowly came back to here-and-now and focused on me. She tilted her head a little bit to one side and looked me over with great care. She moistened her lips and swallowed. "What did you say your damn name is? McGee? You are a sizable son of a bitch, aren't you?"
"Wouldn't try to deny it."
She looked at me. She was all a-hum with ready. She was up to the splash rails with electric ready. Everything was working: all the blood and juices from eyeballs to polished toenails.
"You better comfort me with apples, fella. Or is it roses? And stay me with flagons, whatever that means. Always wondered. And for God's sake you better be discreet or it'll undermine any authority I have left around here."
"Appointing me an instrument of revenge?"
"Do you particularly mind?"
"I'm thinking it over."
"Thanks a lot! Take your time. Take four more seconds, damn it."
"Three. Two. One. Bingo."
"My place," she said. "Nineish."
"Try to remember my name."
She tried to smile but the smile turned upside down, the underlip poked out, the eyes filled, and she spun and darted away toward her office, the proud straight back finally curving in defeat.
I was on time, after wondering all the rest of the day whether to show up or not. It made me feel ridiculously girlish. Despite all the new freedoms everybody claims they have, I still feel strange when I am the aggressee. One wants to blush and simper. I was dubious about my own rationalization. She seemed a nice person, and her morale had taken one hell of a scruffing whem the Doc had walked in with his surprise bride. What would be the further damage if even the casual semi-stranger didn't want her as a gift?
Anyway, it seemed to me that after a day of thinking about it, she would have cooled on the whole idea. It had been an abrupt self-destructive impulse that had made her proposition me so directly. She might not even be at her cabana on stilts. And if she was there, and if she said she had reconsidered and it was a dumb idea and all, then it would be time for
both of us to disengage gracefully.
She was there. A thread of light shone out under her cabana door. When I knocked the light went out, and she came out onto the porch, shaded from the starlight, carrying two glasses and the ice bucket, and a towel with which to twist out the champagne cork. She wore dark slacks and a white turtleneck against the night-breeze off the Gulf. She said, in too merry a voice, "Champagne for you too, pal, so you shouldn't feel everything is a total loss."
"Second thoughts, eh?"
"Definitely. I don't know what the hell I was thinking of. I mean I do know what I was thinking of, and it wasn't my very best idea. I was wondering a little while ago, what if you arrived all eager and steamy? Would she or wouldn't she?"
"You'll never know. I guessed you'd have second thoughts."
"Thank you. Any friend of Meyer is a friend of mine. Meyer has pretty good taste in friends. Open that good stuff."
I unwound the wire and stood the glasses on the rail, where the starlit sand beyond gave enough light for me to fill them properly. Poured. We clinked glasses.
"To all the dumb dreams that never happen," she said. "And the dumb women who dream them."
"To all the dumb dreams that shouldn't happen, and don't," I said.
She sipped. "You are probably right. Ellis was dying. Prescott Mullen was an authority figure. He was comforting. When you lean on strength, I think you can get to read too much into it."
"I thought you seemed very very happy with your job here."
"Oh, I am! I wouldn't think of giving it up. He was going to come down and go into practice here. Another segment of the dumb dream."
We drank chairs close together. Silences were comfortable. I told her portions of my life, listened to parts of hers. We had some weepy chapters and some glad ones. About five minutes after she had snugged her hand into mine, I leaned over into her chair and kissed lips ripe and hot as country plums, and when that was over she got up, tugged at my wrist, and said in a small voice, "I think I , have been talked into it somehow."
We lay sprawled in the soft peach glow of a pink towel draped around the shade of her bedside lamp, sated and peaceful and somnolent. Big wooden blades of a ceiling fan turned slowly overhead, and I could smell the sea. A passel of marsh frogs were all yelling gronk in a garden pond, voices in contrapuntal chorus.
She propped herself on an elbow and ran her fingertips along the six-inch seam of scar tissue along my right side, halfway between armpit and waist.
"How many wars did you say you were in?"
"Only one, and that wasn't done there. That was an angry fellow with a sharp knife, and if I could have had it stitched right away, there wouldn't be hardly any scar."
"You should put out a pocket guidebook."
"Some day I'll arrange a guided tour. Meyer says there isn't enough unblemished hide left to make a decent lampshade."
"Are you accident-prone, darling?"
"I guess you could say that. I am prone to be where accidents are prone to happen."
"Why do you want to ask Prescott about Ellis?"
"I haven't really got anything specific to go on. It's what I do, the way I go about things. If I can get enough people talking, sooner or later something comes up that might fit with something somebody else has said. Sometimes it takes longer than other times, and sometimes it doesn't happen at all. Like finding out last night that whoever beat Esterland to death might have been a motorcyclist, a biker."
"Why would you think that? I don't understand." So I went through it for her, editing it just enough to take out things that were obviously meaningless. Her arm got tired and she snugged her face into the corner of my throat, her breath warm against my chest. I slowly stroked her smooth and splendid back as I talked, all the way from coccyx to nape and back again.
When I finished, she said, "Well, I guess it is interesting, but I don't see what a motorcycle would have to do with anything, really. The only person I ever met who knew anything at all about motorcycles is Josie's weird friend Peter Kesner."
It startled me. "He rides them?"
"Oh, no! He's what they call out there a genius. He's a double hyphenate."
"A what?"
"No, darling, it is not some form of perversion. He made a couple of motion pictures where he was the writer-director-producer. He made them years ago on a very small budget, and they were what is called sleepers. They made a lot of money, considering what they cost. Maybe you heard of them. One was called Chopper Heaven and the other was Bike Park Ramble. It was all a kind of realism, you know. He used real tough bike people and handheld cameras. And they were sort of tragic movies. The critics raved. I saw one of them, I can't really remember which. It was too loud and there were too many people getting hurt."
She sat straight up and combed her dark hair back with her fingers and smiled down at me. "Dear, I'm getting chilled. Can you reach the fan switch?" I turned it off. She reached down and got the end of the sheet and pulled it up over us when she stretched out again.
"You said Kesner is Josephine's weird friend."
"He came to Stamford with her when Ellis was in the hospital the first time. That's when I met him. He's big, maybe about your size, and from what I could gather from Josie, he's been on every kind of pill and powder and shot ever invented. He was treating Josie like dirt, and she didn't seem to mind a bit. It's hard to carry on a conversation with him. I can't describe it. It's just... frustrating. And he's weird-acting. Really weird."
She kicked at something, then ducked under the sheet and came up with her discarded briefs. She held them to the light and said, "One of my romantic little plans for the good doctor." They were white, with a regular pattern of bright red hearts the size of dimes.
"Glad he didn't get a chance to appreciate them."
"You didn't appreciate them. I got shuffled out of them too quickly."
"Protesting all the way?"
"Well-not really. Did you notice how fat her face is?"
"What?"
"The bride. A fat face and piggy little eyes."
"I didn't particularly notice because I was watching you, Annie. I lay there in my trundle bed in the Groveway Motel last night and thought about your pretty legs hiked up on that porch railing until I had to get up and take a cold shower. And then I came dashing down here in my domesticated Mitsubishi. Meyer had told me you had eyes for the doctor, but I didn't want to believe it."
"Come on! Really?"
"Cross my heart. Hope to spit."
"You know, that makes me feel a lot better about this whole-uh-happenstance."
"I've really enjoyed happenstancing with you, Miz Renzetti."
"Always before I felt squeamish about big tall men."
"And little dark women have not exactly figured large in my erotic fantasies, kid."
"They might from now on?"
"Front and center."
"You said enjoyed?"
"I did."
"Past tense?"
"My dear lady, it is quarter past three in the morning."
"So?"
"My ramparts are breached, my legions scattered, my empire burned to the ground, my fleet at the bottom of the sea. And you would-"
"Hush," she said softly.
And so in time the impossible became at first probable and finally inevitable. As before, I found that through her response she led us into the way she most enjoyed. She was not, as I would have guessed, one of the twitchy ones with tricky swiveling, kinky little tricks and games, contortionist experimentations. What she wanted, and got, was to be settled into the unlauded missionary position, legs well braced, arms hanging on tight, and there exercise a deep, strong, steady, elliptical rhythm.
She lay sweat-drenched and spent, small face bloated and blurred, mouth puffed and smiling. "There!" she said. She pulled my mouth down for a sisterly kiss. "Everybody to his own bed, darling. Be sneaky, huh?"
By the time I was dressed she was snoring softly. I pulled the sheet and the thin blanket over
her and turned off the light. When I went out the door, I made certain it locked behind me. I walked out to the edge of the water, where the small waves lisped and slapped against the sand. A seabird flapped up, honking, startling me.
The hours before dawn are when the spirits are supposed to be lowest. That is when most hospital deaths occur. That is when the labored breathing stops, with a final rattle in the throat. I tried to heap ashes on my head. McGee, your handy neighborhood stud. Always on call. Will provide references. I tried to summon up a smidgin of postcoital depression. But all I could tell about myself, in spite of all introspection, was that I felt content. I felt happy, satisfied, relaxed-with an overlay of a kind of sweet sadness, the feeling you get when you look at a picture of yourself taken with someone long gone on a faraway shore long ago.
John D MacDonald - Travis McGee 19 - Freefall in Crimson Page 5