The Lonely Silver Rain

by John D. MacDonald

  He stopped and looked to see where she was. She was over at the far corner of the big terrace, working the flower beds. The breeze was from the sea, so his chance of being overheard was very slight. But he lowered his voice so that I had to lean toward him to hear. “After the way Sadie was,” he said, “I have one hell of a time getting used to Millis’ ways. She was over there shelling, naked as an egg. She’s big on nature things, Trav. Jogging and roughage and workouts and so on. The few houses I could see were far away and there were a couple of boats way out, so I climbed down to the rear platform there and eased into the water in my trunks and went ashore to where she was shelling, knowing she would have something to say about people being too modest for their own good. But damn it, Trav, being outdoors naked makes me walk kind of hunched over. I keep waiting for a wasp to come along, or an airgun pellet or a thorn bush. And I don’t like being naked in the water either. Crabs, stingrays, jellyfish.

  “She showed me the stuff she’d been picking up. She had some little purple shells and she wanted me to help find her enough more so she could string a necklace. So all of a sudden I heard the Sundowner kick over. She caught right away. The way I figured it, the damn bastards had come out of that inlet in an outboard skiff, seen us hunting shells, seen my cruiser, then circled out around so they could come up on it on the blind side, where they boarded her, snuck forward and cut the anchor line, then started her up. They didn’t start her from the fly bridge where I could have seen them, but from the pilothouse. All I ever saw was the beat-up old aluminum boat they had in tow, with the motor tilted up. It had a milky look the way old aluminum gets in salt water. He took off, swinging way out and heading north, keeping it slow and steady so as not to swamp his skiff. Know what the insurance son of a bitch said to me? He said leaving the keys in the panel was contributory negligence. My God, it was sitting there in front of us! What kind of idiot would have locked it up?”

  Billy and Millis swam to the beach on the narrow spit that lies east of the Waterway. He parked her in some scraggly brush, walked down to where some people were picnicking, told his sad story and traded his gold seal ring for a red and white poolside cover-up for Millis. Her gold bracelet guaranteed the taxi ride back to the Dias del Sol, where the resident manager let them into their penthouse.

  “I’m still damned mad,” Billy said. “Millis and me, we put a lot of thought and love into that boat, getting it just like we wanted it. Shit, I can afford more boats, but it won’t be the same. And I was humiliated, standing there watching some young punk go grinning off with the boat, cash, wine, food, credit cards, car keys and boat keys and house keys, and some of the finest boat rods made. Nobody has done a damn thing. And I’ve been told you can do things when the law gives up.”

  “I’ve been known to strike out.”

  “You want to take a shot at it? You get thirty big ones cash in hand the day I set foot on her again.”

  “Lots of pleasure boats have been disappearing these last few years, Billy. And very few have ever been recovered. I don’t work on a fee basis. Anything I can recover, I keep half, or half the value.”

  His thick gray eyebrows went halfway up his red forehead. “Isn’t that a little heavy, McGee? I put seven hundred and twenty into that sucker.”

  “It isn’t heavy because I’m talking about the value of what I recover. That sucker isn’t a seven-hundred-and-twenty-thousand-dollar boat anymore, not after three months. Also, stolen cruisers usually end up in the drug business, where people don’t play pat ball. Also, I swallow my own expenses, win or lose. And it gives me a lot of incentive to look for something that’s half mine. I find it in fair shape and it will pay for another piece of the retirement I keep taking now and then. Or, look at it this way. Let’s say the odds against any recovery are about five hundred to one. A flat fee would start me out pretty listless.”

  “If you get it back, how do we put a value on it?”

  “Get it surveyed as is by a licensed marine appraiser.”

  He frowned, and then stuck his beefy paw out. We shook hands and he said, “Done. Tell you a secret. I’d almost give you full value just to get one back at the scum that took it away and left me nothing but a hundred-and-ninety-dollar Danforth anchor and ten feet of rubber-coated chain.”

  Millis had finished gardening. She hosed off her tools and shut them up in a little blue locker and then came and sat with us. “Billy told me you did find a boat for someone, Mr. McGee.”

  “Years ago,” I told her. “Five at least. It belonged to one of the Cuban buddies of Batista who got out just before Castro removed his head. And he bought a house, a motor sailer and the good life with money he’d squirreled away in Chase Manhattan while he was still a Cuban politico. Those particular immigrants aren’t my favorite people. Anyway, he used a Cuban crew, and the wrong batch of Cubans took it right out of its slip at a Miami yacht club and sailed it away. There was joy and rejoicing in the Cuban community.”

  “How did you get it back?” she asked.

  The question was mild, but it had a contentious sound. Just a little too much emphasis on the “you.” How could you do anything so difficult? And a faint expression of disdain, a challenge in her flat stare. New wife in the long, dogged process of detaching her husband from all prior friendships.

  “Somebody told me where I could find the Aliciente. She’d been renamed the Priscilla. Two months after Calderone got her back, she blew up one night twenty miles off Key West with him aboard.”

  “Somebody just happened to tell you where to find it?” She wore an expression of vivid disbelief. “Why would anyone do that?”

  “If you’ve got about a day and a half to spare, Millis, we could sit around and I could try to explain what I’ve learned about Cuban refugee politics in Miami.”

  “I’m sure you have better things to do.”

  “I’d guess we both do.”

  “What’s with you two?” Billy asked angrily. “How’d you both get off on the wrong foot so fast?”

  She stood up. “Sorry, Billy. I guess I’m just fascinated by people who can accomplish impossible things.” She headed for the doorway into the apartment and turned and said, “What does Aliciente mean, Mr. McGee?”

  “Temptation,” I told her. She nodded, without surprise, as if she had known the meaning of the name and wondered if I did. I saw something in the back of her eyes, something that moved and challenged, creating awareness. We were in a silent communication inaccessible to the husband sitting heavily beside me.

  When she was gone, Billy said, “Sorry about that. She always tries to keep me from being taken by some con artist. She thinks I’m too trusting. Hell, I’ve followed my instinct all my life and it hasn’t hurt me more than three or four times. You’re giving me a proposition where I can’t lose. I pay you nothing, or I buy my boat back for half its market value.”

  Two

  On that Wednesday afternoon I drove on up to where the cruiser had been stolen. The town inside the inlet and on the far side of the bridge over the Waterway was named Citrina. New condos and malls were being built at all four corners of it, and parking was a serious problem. The police chief was a happy fat man with several fingers missing from each hand.

  I gave him one of my Casualty-Indemnity cards and said it looked as if we were going to have to pay off on the Sundowner that got stolen out there at the inlet last fourth of July, and I didn’t want to take up his time but just needed to find out if they’d made any progress at all since we last checked with him. Because if there was any progress at all that meant a chance of recovery, and—winking at him—the longer we hold the money, the more money the money makes.

  He beamed and told me I was in a rotten line of work, and he lumbered over and got the folder and brought it back.

  “Nothing to add,” he said. “We got the same two missing persons as before, with no way of knowing if they’d anything to do with it. They were going together and they could have just run off elsewhere.” He laid the
two glossies in front of me. Even in black and white I could tell that the boy was a buck-tooth redhead. He had a long neck, a prominent Adam’s apple and a squint. The girl was cuddly blonde, with an imitation show biz smirk and some acne pits. They were posed pictures.

  “High school yearbook,” he said, “from two years back. Howard Cannon and Karen McBride. He’s a bad kid, comes from trashy stock—drunks and wife beaters. Lots of trouble with the law. She’s a dentist’s daughter. Her people tried hard to break it up. Too hard. Sometimes you let it go on, and it wears itself out. They sent her off to an aunt in Wisconsin and she hitched all the way back. I’ve distributed copies to all the interested parties. Got some extras here if you want a set. Physical description and history on the back of each one. Nobody has heard from either of them. Friends or families. Got everybody alerted to get in touch first thing if they hear anything.”

  “Is it likely they could have done it?”

  “Possible. Howie did fool things on impulse. He was with the McBride girl that day. His tin skiff is missing. They had the feeling the whole world was against them. Howie’s spent most of his life on the water. He worked at Tyler Marina and she wouldn’t let them send her off to school, and she worked at the K-Mart. Maybe he just swung around close to look at that new boat. Climbed aboard and found it was empty. Saw the keys, checked the fuel, talked her into it. Tied the skiff off, cut the anchor line and left. Could have been that way. Could just as easy been some other way too.”

  “They probably went right on over to the islands,” I said. “Safer for dockage and fuel over there.”

  “Owner left over nine hundred dollars aboard, and it was all provisioned for a long cruise. Nice honeymoon for those kids. Find themselves some little cove down in the Exumas. All fine until the day you have to pay for your fun.”

  Meyer came over to my houseboat, the Busted Flush, that warm October evening to find out how things had gone with old Billy. We sat in the lounge and I told him, and spread the photographs of the boat and the suspects out on the tabletop.

  “I think I was working my way around to changing my mind and telling Billy it would be a waste of time, but that bride of his rubbed me the wrong way. So I am stuck with taking some kind of a shot at it. Chances vary from very slim to none. Where did he find that Millis?”

  “She was working for him.”

  “I know that. She went to work for him, what was it, two years or three years before Sadie died.”

  “From what you say about the way he looks and acts, Travis, she’s good for him. So why care about her prior activities?”

  “Something just a little out of focus there, Meyer. She’s a beautiful woman. She’s living well. But she has her guard up.”

  He examined the color shots of the Sundowner. “Distinctive. Certainly no mistaking it for a production boat. Beamy. Lots of range. Displacement hull?”

  “Yes. Twelve knots top cruising. Fifteen-hundred-mile range.”

  “Probably been repainted by now. Not too useful for the drug trade. Too small to lay around offshore as a mother ship, and too slow to make night runs to the beaches. All in all, a little too conspicuous to be useful.”

  I opened a pair of beers and took them back to the table.

  “Humpf!” said Meyer.

  It is his declaration of surprise and satisfaction. It is what he would have said were he to have discovered the theory of relativity.

  “What’s with the humpf?”

  “I was looking for a recognition factor which would probably remain the same. Take a look.”

  He held up the photo taken from about two hundred feet above the vessel, running at cruising speed across a calm blue sea. He held it so the bow was at the top of the picture, the wake at the bottom.

  For a moment I didn’t see it, and then it jumped out at me. The bow made a pointed hat. The life rings on the aft corners of the super-structure made the eyes. The half circle of padded bench around the aft of the cockpit made the clownish grin. “A face!” I said. “A damned face!”

  “Which can be looked for from the air.”

  Which was worth a humpf from Meyer. His little blue eyes were bright with satisfaction. Meager as it was, it was still more of a starting point than I’d had before. The profile of a boat can be easily altered by someone intending to deceive. But that someone would not be thinking about how it looks from directly overhead.

  So I locked away the photography, and we went out to eat. Meyer waited while I locked my old houseboat and activated my inconspicuous little security devices which would let me know when I returned if there was a stranger aboard, or if a stranger had been aboard while I was gone. In the old days Meyer seemed mildly amused by all this caution. But in recent years he has seen things in a different light, and now uses similar precautions, even though the chance of harm coming to that hairy economist is considerably less than of it coming to me.

  Once you have made enough people sufficiently unhappy with your activities and the effect on their lives and fortunes, it is wise to live as though there is a small deadly snake in every shower stall, cyanide in the tastiest cookie. You can solve the problem by becoming a drifter, changing your base at random intervals. But my home is aboard the Busted Flush at Slip F-18, Bahia Mar Marina in Fort Lauderdale, and there I intend to stay until finally no one is able to either drink the water or breathe the air.

  It was a pleasant night, so we walked the long mile to Benjamin’s and had the good Irish stew at a table in the back. As we were finishing, two of Meyer’s newest friends moved in on us. Denise and Frieda, visitors from England. He had met them on the beach that morning when one of them had asked him to identify something horrid which had washed up on the sand. Meyer is always being asked questions by strangers. He looks reliable. It was a sea slug. Both women were celebrating simultaneous divorces, and it was easy to see they would look splendid in beachwear. I managed to detach myself, and walked back to the marina alone.

  When I opened the little panel in the port bulk-head outside the lounge, the fail-safe bulbs were all glowing, telling me everything was secure. I turned the system off and reactivated it once I was inside. I got out the photographs and sat and studied them.

  It struck me that the young man and woman in the pictures—Cannon and McBride—looked dead. When you look at pictures of people you know are dead, there is something different about the eyes. As if they anticipated their particular fate. It is a visceral recognition. These two young lovers had that look. I told myself I was getting too fanciful, and went to bed.

  It had been an oddly aimless year for me. Old friends had died in faraway places. In the spring of the year there had been some weeks shared with a lonely woman. We liked each other. We laughed at the same things. The sex was good. Nothing electric. More like cozy. Lois came down to manage a new health spa, one of a chain. What we tried to do, out of mutual loneliness, was make more out of the relationship than it could support. Then it becomes pretend, and you are both saying things cribbed from half-forgotten books and plays. So the structure slowly topples over, like vanilla ice cream piled too high. At the end of it there was an obscure impulse to shake hands.

  So I had a few thousand stashed in my bulkhead bank forward, and the only recent expense of any moment was when I pulled out all the old music equipment, the tuner, amplifier, tape deck, turntable and speakers, and replaced it all with mostly Pioneer and Sony. The state of the art had left me far behind, and last summer I kept myself busy putting the best parts of the record collection onto cassettes, and the best parts of the reel-to-reel tapes onto cassettes as well. I set up a filing system. I was like a combination accountant, librarian and music director. I kept the editing function going for sixteen hours a day, and when everything was all neatened up and labeled, I found myself so sick of the sound of music I didn’t want to hear any at all, even from a boat moored three slips away. I knew I would get back into it later, carefully. After I’d given the records and the reel-to-reel tapes away to the local jazz
appreciation society, along with the equipment I’d discarded, I had twice the fidelity in half the space, very clean sound, crisp as bread sticks. And tired ears.

  The only other expense was another Syd Solomon painting. I drove up to a gallery in Boca Raton where he was having a show and picked out a strong little one, twelve inches by sixteen inches, all storm fury and tidal race. He’d put a lot of energy into a small painting. If you want to screw paintings to the bulkheads of boats, you have to pick little ones.

  I couldn’t think of anything else I wanted to buy. The Flush was running well. My old blue Rolls pickup, Miss Agnes, was docile and obedient. And there was still a few thousand down below in the waterproof box.

  The search for the Sundowner didn’t promise to elevate anyone’s blood pressure. Except maybe Millis’. I knew that if the vessel was in the hands of the drug smugglers, I wanted no part of trying to yank it away from them. Maybe it could have been done six or seven years ago when there was still an innocence about it and the big money item was cannabis. That’s when preppies and dropouts and commercial fishermen were going into business in competition with unaffiliated batches of Jamaicans, Colombianos, Cubans and poachers from the Everglades. It was a wild time, often turning ugly, but then the professionals came in and organized it. Those who wanted to stay in business for themselves were dropped into the Atlantic and the Caribbean wearing anchor chain, or they were given to the customs agents and Coast Guard as free gifts, along with their boats and gear. Once the import business was organized, the shoreside distribution was revised, along with the cash flow. The big money product became cocaine. Pot was too bulky. They pushed cocaine nationwide, and controlled the supply to keep the price up. A lot of it could be brought in by mules who could pass customs looking innocent. The Navy, Coast Guard and special agents made the small boat runs too risky for amateurs. The fun lads went under, and the business fell into the hands of fellows from the several Mafia families who, having always tried to keep Miami as a neutral zone, teamed up to run the money machine smartly and efficiently, corrupting and paying off enough customs agents of the DEA to reduce losses to an acceptable percentage.