McNally's Bluff

by Vincent Lardo

  “When did you learn to navigate a big ship?” I asked Alex.

  “All the men in my family have taken instructions in navigating boats of all sizes, and we’re licensed,” he said, proudly reiterating the achievements of the Gomez y Zapata clan as the dinghy plowed through the blue water. “I encourage all the boys and men of Cuban extraction here in Miami to do the same. We must be prepared for the invasion.”

  Connie and Carolyn looked at Alex, who stood tall in the dinghy like Washington crossing the Delaware, with great admiration. He did resemble a swashbuckler of vintage Hollywood fare as the sea breeze blew his dark mane roguishly across his forehead while his eyes looked hopefully into the wild blue yonder.

  We boarded on a lift that rose at the press of a button, depositing us at the ship’s rear (forecastle?) that was furnished with all the comforts of an upscale cocktail lounge. Blue-and-white pin-striped sofas, teak captains’ chairs, bar, television, stereo equipment and a telescope, slightly smaller than the Hubble, that did not contain a coin slot.

  “Tally-ho,” Georgy exclaimed as she stepped onto the well-appointed deck.

  “You’ve got the wrong sport,” I upbraided my fair lady. Turning to the others I apologized, “You can’t take a policewoman no place.”

  They all laughed, none more heartily than Carolyn. It was remarkable how quickly she had established a rapport with Georgy, as I’m sure she had done when first meeting Alex and Connie. Carolyn Taylor, nouveau millionaire, had not forgotten her roots and reminded us of the fact, saying, “When I was a hostess on a luxury liner catering to the rich and infamous, I would order the grenouille every time it appeared on the menu. One evening the waiter asked me if I was going to have the frog legs as usual and I told him I never ate the awful things.”

  More laughter, except for poor Billy who didn’t get it.

  Alex and Billy had toted hampers they now stored in a refrigerator behind the bar. “Sandwiches and salads for lunch,” Carolyn announced, “from Sandy James, don’t-you-know. The bar is fully stocked with beer and booze and even champagne if you can take the bubbly before sunset. It also comes with a real live captain and a wine steward, whom I imagine is also alive, but for our purposes they’re not necessary.”

  And just what were our purposes? I thought, fearing we might be the forerunners of Alex’s Spanish Armada. We all went to the bridge and gathered around Alex who, with an assist from Billy, turned on the engines and we were off—where? Why?

  A huge compass under glass told me we were headed south which, I believe, would put us on a collision course with Cuba. “How far are we from Havana?” I asked our captain in the silk shirt.

  “Two hundred miles as the crow flies,” he answered.

  “How close can we get before they start shooting?”

  “Relax,” Billy advised. “We go about five miles and turn off the engines.”

  “Then what do we do?”

  “Fish,” Billy said, winking at Alex before they burst into laughter. I did not like this.

  Carolyn hustled the girls back to the lounge to start lunch and as soon as they were gone Alex, his eyes on the endless expanse of sea and his hands on the huge wheel, said, “When we reach our mark I can let it drift while we have a drink and lunch. Then I’ll tell you our mission.”

  “Fair enough,” I acquiesced, but what else could I do? Swim to shore?

  Leaving Billy and Alex to count miles, I joined the ladies, taking a comfy chair and ordering a Campari and soda. Connie played bartender, Carolyn fussed with plates and silverware, Georgy, sitting beside me, took a deep breath and exhaled, “It’s so beautiful I want to cry.”

  “Go right ahead,” Carolyn called, “I did my first night on that liner. There was a full moon as I recall.”

  “It makes me think of the night we fled Cuba, not knowing if we would make it to Miami,” Connie reminisced.

  It made me think of werewolves.

  Connie served my Campari in a tall tumbler, its rim decorated with a slice of lime. “To go with your shirt,” she remarked maliciously, and began singing, in Spanish, “The day that I left my home for the rolling sea, I said, Mother, dear, O pray to thy God for me...”

  “Can you get us some proper music on that stereo?” I requested of our hostess.

  Carolyn, emerging from behind the bar with a tray holding three drinks, said with a wry smile, “Alex told me you two were old friends.”

  “They go back ages,” Georgy chimed in, getting a scowl from our homegrown Carmen Miranda.

  Carolyn cheerfully served the drinks, “Bloody Marys, ladies, with a spicy blend of tomato and celery sticks for swizzle sticks. Original, no?”

  “No,” we replied in unison.

  Settling down with our drinks we silently took in our briny, and very privileged, milieu. The Miami skyline was slowing sinking into the ocean as seaworthy crafts of all genres drifted in our wake. The sparkling water accommodated water-skiers, scuba divers and fishermen. Sailboats, leaning precariously into the wind, performed their aquatic ballet with a chorus line of catamarans, to the annoyance of the scullers. Saturday traffic, I was amazed to learn, is not confined to the highways and byways of this great nation.

  The sea was exceedingly calm, the swells hardly more than ripples, which may have accounted for the fact that none of us had come down with mal de mer—so far, that is. Georgy looked a little pale around the gills but it could be the sun block she lavished so generously on her fair skin. As our captain pushed southward our fellow seafarers, as well as the comforting Miami skyline, began to diminish. I could hear Coleridge’s ancient mariner wailing, “Alone, alone, all, all alone, Alone on a wide, wide sea!” and searched the sky for an albatross.

  “Mack Macurdy,” Carolyn said, giving me a start. “What a loathsome business. Is it true, Archy? I mean the witch’s mark and all that rot?”

  “I’m afraid it is,” I said. “Did you know him?”

  “Not personally. Only from his show. Didn’t he make the goal the night of the party? He and Penny.”

  “Lady C is furious,” Connie gossiped. “Mr. Macurdy was supposed to bring a camera crew to the Halloween extravaganza and air it on his show.”

  “Just like that dreadful woman,” Carolyn accused. “Me, me, me. Did she express one word of sympathy for the poor man and his wife? I don’t know how you put up with her, Connie.”

  “It’s a living,” Connie answered, “but I’m looking to retire in the near future.” To make her meaning clear she began to stroke the ring Alex had given her as if it were a household pet. Far be it from me to be catty, but you needed a jeweler’s loupe to see the stone, and I’ve extracted more precious gems from a box of Cracker Jacks.

  The girls ooohed and aaahed as women do in the presence of incipient brides.

  “Have you set a date?” Carolyn questioned.

  “Not exactly,” Connie confided, “but Alex’s mother told me she favors spring weddings.”

  I will fly to the nuptials of Alex and Connie on the back of a pig, but I kept my mouth shut on that score. Carolyn just repudiated any association with Macurdy and I believed her, which left Hayes as the prime suspect of Macurdy’s blackmail—if he was blackmailing anyone, and if he wasn’t killed by a lunatic, acting on his own.

  I also think it was evident that Carolyn saw no link between Macurdy and Marlena Marvel and as much as I’d like to, I didn’t dare press the issue. Carolyn’s association with Marlena was known to me and the police, and she might suspect I had told Georgy, but that’s as far as it went.

  Georgy knew better than to raise the point and Connie, engrossed in wedding bells, couldn’t care less.

  Shortly thereafter we were joined by Captain Courageous and Billy Budd. I guess we had gone the required five miles. Looking around I could make out some craft on the horizon, but the shoreline was gone. In fact I would be hard-pressed to say where the shoreline had been. It was disorienting and scary.

  The boys drank beer, the girls brought out the
sandwiches, salads, pickles and slaw, and our floating picnic was underway. The conversation ran the gamut from the sublime to the ridiculous, avoiding politics, religion and the reason we were lunching on a luxury yacht rental, five miles from our home base. When we were down to the brownies and almond cookies, I spoke my mind. “Now will you tell us what this is all about?”

  Alex looked at Carolyn who looked at Billy, who volunteered, “I’ll tell them, but first they must swear they’ll never repeat this to anyone.”

  “Not in blood, I hope,” I protested, and got a laugh. “But I give my word as a gentleman.”

  “Can’t you do better than that?” Connie heckled, and got a laugh.

  “My word as an officer of the law,” Georgy joined in.

  It all seemed rather silly and sophomoric until Billy enlightened us.

  In his days as a bartender in South Beach, Billy Gilbert had befriended many Cubans who, like Alex, still had family and friends in Cuba. Most were political activists. One of them told Billy he had a contact in Cuba (in effect, a spy) who had been outed and had gone into hiding. He now had to defect to Miami and planned to do so in a small speed boat, leaving Cuba in the dead of night and arriving off the coast of Florida the next day. He would travel as far as the fuel he could carry would take him.

  This man, himself a covert operator between Cuba and Miami, asked Billy if he would rent a boat on the appropriate day, rendezvous with the man at sea and smuggle him into the country.

  “He asked me,” Billy explained, “because I’m an American with no connections to Cuba or the movement in Miami to oust the Cuban regime.”

  “We are under constant scrutiny by the CIA and the Coast Guard,” Alex said, not sounding too thrilled with either branch of our government. “It is most important that the man be brought in without fanfare. He is to go underground on his arrival and those in charge will see that he is at some point assimilated into the Miami Cuban community.”

  Billy said, “I went to Alex because of his column in the Miami paper, and his outspoken opposition to the present Cuban regime.”

  “Why didn’t the man who came to you go to Alex?” I asked Billy.

  It was Alex who replied, “Because he’s an operative and must never reveal himself, even to those who are active in the cause. If any of us are questioned by the authorities, as we sometimes are, we can swear on the holy book that we don’t know any names. He took a chance on confiding in Billy because he had no choice. His counterpart in Cuba must get out or he will be killed.”

  Like the tale of the ancient mariner, they had us all enthralled.

  It was Alex’s idea to rent a pleasure boat for their purpose, for what is more common out of a Miami marina than a pleasure boat, preferably carrying some rich man or woman out for a lark on the high seas. Alex’s first thought, because of his association with Connie, was enlisting the help of Lady Cynthia Horowitz.

  “I nipped it in the bud,” Connie got in, “because Lady C can’t keep a secret if her life depended on it. With someone else’s life, it would be twice as risky.”

  “So I turned to Carolyn,” Billy said with a grateful look at his live-in patroness.

  “Isn’t it thrilling?” Carolyn maintained ecstatically, taking Billy’s hand in hers.

  Thrilling? Perhaps. But even more satisfying to have usurped her competition from the running and emerge in the history books as the Mrs. Miniver of the Cuban counterrevolution.

  Thus began the weekly rentals of the Bonnie Belle to establish themselves as regulars at the marina so that on the day of the rendezvous it would appear to be business as usual.

  “I told Carolyn to invite others before the crucial run to establish our aim as revelers and so that it would not always be just we four the pilot ferried,” Alex told us. “When the four of us go out that day and return with an extra passenger the pilot will he less likely to take notice.”

  “In fact,” Carolyn said, “I spoke to Alex the morning you came to see me, Archy, so it was you who got the invitation. Aren’t you pleased?”

  I wasn’t sure if I was pleased, but as I recall Billy was not pleased to have me along. Was it because he knew I was in some way connected with the law? And now here was Georgy, who was the law. Billy didn’t seem upset by our intrusion into his mission of mercy, but then what could he do about it?

  It was all most edifying—but did I believe it? “Shouldn’t you have gone to the proper authorities?” I questioned.

  “Never,” Alex raged, “they have their spies here as well as we have in Cuba. Another Bay of Pigs we don’t need, Archy.”

  “When is D-day?” Georgy asked.

  “That we will not tell you,” Alex said, standing. “The man we pick up will be a stranger to us and we will not ask his name or recall what he looks like. We will deliver him to a safe house and adios, the job is done.” With that, our captain rose and commanded, “And now it’s time to return.”

  “It’s been such fun,” Connie piped up with the zeal of a cheerleader at a pep rally. “Alex is coming north, so why don’t we all go to the Pelican for dinner?”

  I could have fed her to the fishes.

  Connie and Alex got into Carolyn’s Benz, leaving Georgy and me alone in my Miata. As we started north I asked, “Well, what do you think?”

  “About what?” Georgy said. “Connie’s chapeau, Carolyn Taylor or mission improbable?”

  “The only thing bigger than Connie’s hat is her mouth. You know who’s going to pay for this dinner? Connie and I are the only chartered members of the Pelican and I can’t ask her to split the tab. That would be gross.”

  Georgy laughed. “You can write it off, sport.”

  After our dinner at Capri the other night and now this, Mrs. Trelawney would go into cardiac arrest at the sight of my expense report. “Mission improbable,” I mused aloud. “You think Billy’s story is malarkey? Alex doesn’t think so.”

  “Alex is such a zealot for his cause he would believe anything,” Georgy stated, and rightly so. Billy’s story was tailor-made for Alex’s bombastic ego. “But spy stories, the real ones, are the fodder of novels and films—hard to believe, but true. Then I think of that little boy, remember?, the only survivor of a Cuban exodus, clinging to a piece of wood for days before he was rescued. It gives me the chills. Those people are desperate and men here, like Alex, are their only hope.”

  That gave us both pause to reconsider Billy’s tale, and count our blessings. “What about Carolyn?” I finally ventured.

  Georgy dubbed Carolyn Taylor “A nice lady. Certainly not a killer, Archy, and if she knows anything about Mack Macurdy’s murder, I’ll eat Connie’s hat.”

  Priscilla, the Pelican’s maître d’/waitress, welcomed us to the club with “The wrecks of the Hesperus. Do come in. Mr. Longfellow will be so pleased that not all of you went down with the ship.”

  “Do we look that bad?” Georgy cried.

  With a provocative glance at Billy, Priscilla said, “Not him.”

  “You can’t afford him,” Georgy quickly remonstrated.

  From the look on Carolyn Taylor’s face, I would say she thought it was all very funny. This was born out when Connie asked her, “What do you think of the Pelican?”

  “It’s not the Everglades, but it’s most amusing,” Carolyn offered.

  And it’s a tad classier than the Cockatoo Lounge, I was tempted to rebut, but instead turned on Priscilla who had wrapped her perfect form into a flowered sarong, stuck a gardenia in her hair and looked breathtakingly lovely—as always. One thought of a South Seas princess. What Billy and Alex were thinking I’d rather not say.

  Taking charge of a fast-deteriorating situation, I ordered, “We would like a table for six, young lady, and no lip, if you please.”

  “Yes, sir, Master Legree. Right this way.”

  The Pelican, which is a converted clapboard house of generous proportions, was surprisingly quiet this evening. Despite the fact that it was Saturday, we were late diners. The ear
ly evening rush had most likely been and gone.

  By the time we were seated, everyone was in a jovial mood. “I want to join the Pelican,” Carolyn announced as Priscilla passed out the menus.

  “Good idea,” Billy encouraged, eyeing Priscilla. Seeing his gaze, Carolyn did not pursue the subject of membership.

  “I think we should have champagne,” Alex suggested. “Yes?”

  Before I could shout NO!, everyone applauded the idea, including Georgy. I would put lye in her bath salts. My wallet was hemorrhaging and no one seemed to care.

  “Tonight’s dinner is the traditional ribs of beef,” Priscilla recited, “avec mashed potatoes, French style beans and Leroy’s famous brown gravy.”

  “And the appetizer?” I asked the princess.

  “The appetizer is red herring.”

  23

  “HAVE YOU EVER FLOWN in a chopper?” Smilin’ Tom shouted.

  “No,” I shouted back.

  “It can be scary,” Tom shouted.

  “It can also be noisy,” I shouted back.

  “Oh, that. You get used to it. Check your belt and don’t look down. Here we go.”

  Naturally I looked down as we went up and the mal de mer I had been spared on the Bonnie Belle threatened to make up for lost time. Unlike a conventional plane, we didn’t appear to be rising as much as the earth seemed to be pulling away from us. It was more than scary, it was nauseating.

  This, I had told my pilot, was my test run before taking aboard my imaginary clients. “Let’s fly over the A1A and that maze,” I had instructed, “just for the hell of it.”

  “Could be bad luck,” he warned me. “Look what happened to Mr. Macurdy.”

  “I’ll chance it, Tom.”

  He took a string of beads from his jacket pocket and hung them around his neck. “Seminole worry beads,” he said. “They ward off evil spirits.”

  Is that so? I thought they made you worry.

  “I keep a four-leaf clover in my wallet,” I told him, “and so far I’ve never had a mishap in a chopper.”