The Lonely Silver Rain

by John D. MacDonald

  It was the coldest morning I could remember in Fort Lauderdale. I dug out my old black leather jacket, rock-climbing trousers and watch cap. The tops of my ears felt good tucked into the watch cap. People were standing around in wonder looking at the frost on the bushes, and huffing so they could see their breath before the wind whipped it away. And the wind had also whipped all the urban smutch out to sea, all the stink of diesel, gasoline, chemicals and garbage fires, leaving a sky so blue it was like the sky of childhood.

  Ever since I had awakened I had a picture that flashed into my mind and winked out, over and over, a slide projector inside my head with but one slide. It showed Browder with his right cheek against the tile, his mouth and eyes half open. It showed the pattern of his hair in the left sideburn and at the nape of his neck. It showed the shape of his ear, and it showed my hand reaching into the frame to rest my fingertips against the left side of his throat. It is a very quick way. It snaps a man from life into death. When the heart is stopped with such brutal precision, blood flow ceases and the brain stops making its electrical images and all the muscles go slack. So he was Browder walking and three seconds later he was dead meat on the floor and somebody, in a hurry, was leaving the terminal with his carryon.

  If I were king of the country I would decree that on a certain date, three months hence, all green money in denominations of twenty dollars and up would become valueless. Everyone possessing that money could, during the three months, bring it in and exchange it for orange-colored money. One exchange per person. Bring in all your cash, and if you have more than one thousand dollars, fill out a form explaining where you got it and how long you’d had it. There’s untold billions of sleezy money out there. Untold billions that would never be turned in because possession of it cannot be explained. Bureaucracy gone quite mad, of course. But then we would be starting over, and because the gangster types would be afraid it could happen again, they would be wary about too much accumulation. By simple bookkeeping you could compute the unreturned green money and figure it as a deduction from the federal deficit, as though it had been a contribution to the government. Which, of course, it would be—as any piece of currency is a claim against the government, against society.

  I tried this on Meyer at Sunday breakfast. He peered across the table at me as if he thought I had lost my wits. As an economist, he was appalled. “Please stick with what you know. Please,” he said.

  “If Archimedes had stuck with what …”

  “McGee, listen. It is the anticipation of the declining value of money that triggers inflation. If the public anticipated that money would be worth nothing in three months, they would spend it. And they would make it come true. Too much money after too few goods.”

  “But …”

  “Please. Your motives are pure. Your monetary knowledge is infantile. Don’t spoil my hash browns. If you want to be serious about it, I will loan you some texts.”

  “I just stopped being serious.”

  “Good. Now let’s get back to what you were talking about before. You have a target. The young Marino. Or his father. Or both. They are public people. I read about them from time to time, mostly about the young ones. Four children?”

  “Two boys and two girls. Ruffi is the eldest.”

  “So you can reach them, approach them, whatever. Luckily, before anybody reaches you again. But is that what Browder would have done? If we are going to make moral judgments, take what we conceive to be moral actions, then we should set in motion what Browder hoped to set in motion.”

  “I don’t know how he was going to do it.”

  “You mean you don’t know what particular pipeline he was going to use. But is it important to know that? I would think that your Mr. Jornalero would get the information to the right people. If Browder’s guess was right, you can then lay back until the fireworks are over, and if young Marino survives it, you have your target. But after the fireworks, if indeed they happen, no one will be coming after you anymore. So you could quit right there.”

  “If I should happen to want to.”

  “But you won’t?”

  “No. If I read about that boat in the paper, maybe I could quit. But I was there. I saw them. I didn’t know them, but I think I owe them. If they were garbage, they were young garbage. Whoever did it, it ought to be hung around his neck like a sign. Unclean. He ought to have to carry a little bell to warn people he’s coming.”

  “The white knight rides again.”

  “With rusty armor, bent lance and swaybacked steed. Why not? Billy was a friend. I had good luck and the two little thieves had bad luck. So I’ll follow your suggestion. I thank you for it. Browder thanks you. I’ll buy the breakfast.”

  “I think you should. Anyone who can carry that much money into Mexico and bring it all back out can always buy my breakfast.”

  “When I counted it, I was down two thousand. Browder took out expenses, I think.”

  “Strange man. He didn’t sound persuasive. He didn’t look persuasive. But he was.”

  In the afternoon I tried to get in touch with Jornalero. There was no listing for a home phone. I phoned Millis. Her voice was subdued and listless.

  “How are you making it?” I asked her.

  “It isn’t easy. And the cold in the night killed my whole garden. Everything is black and sagging and ugly. Like some kind of message. All of a sudden this place seems huge. I want to get out of it and yet I don’t.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Frank keeps asking me to come in and sign things but I make excuses and he has to bring the papers here, and bring a notary and witnesses along. It’s a terrible nuisance for him.”

  “He’ll bill you for it.”

  “Of course. McGee, I kind of thought I’d hear from you sooner than this.”

  “I was out of town.”

  “Oh?”

  “I was out of the country.”

  “Really? All I wanted, I wanted a chance to tell you that I tried to feel guilty and ashamed of us, but I couldn’t manage that either. And then I’ve been worried about somebody trying to hurt you again.”

  “I had to do some scrambling about four days or so after I last saw you. But they didn’t try hard enough.”

  “I hate to even think about it. Can you come see me today?”

  “I called you to ask if you have any phone number for Jornalero. For his home?”

  “Let me go look. I doubt it.”

  She took so long I got tired of waiting and switched the speaker phone on. I was pouring myself a cup of coffee I didn’t need when she came back on the line. She told me I sounded as if I was in the bottom of a well. I told her that was because I have a cheap speaker phone. She said she found Jornalero’s home address, but no phone number. He lived at 22 Sailfish Lagoon, Miami. As, I remembered, did the elder Marino.

  “Are you going to stop by, Travis?”

  “Let me have a rain check, Millis. I’ve got some people coming over.”

  “Sure you have. Okay. Forget I asked.”

  “Maybe after they leave. I’ll phone first.”

  No one was coming over. Sometimes I lie well, with hearty conviction. I probably hadn’t lied well to Millis because I didn’t want to get involved with her, but I couldn’t help wondering if just a little bit of involvement would hurt anything.

  So of course, to punish bad lying, some people came over. Two people, two men in their thirties, conservative tweed jackets, neckties, a look of desks and offices. Wisner and Torbell. Employed by the DEA. Polite, impassive, with the cop air of habitual disbelief. Nothing the world had told them had been totally true, and would never be true, here or in the hereafter.

  “Browder gave us a pre-operational report by phone. We’d like to check it out with you, Mr. McGee,” Wisner said.

  Fourteen

  In the lounge I got Wisner into the big chair and Torbell onto the curved yellow couch. I brought the desk chair closer and sat in it, thus making myself a foot taller than they were.
If you suspect someone wishes to give you a hard time, never arrange yourself so that he or she can look down at you.

  They refused a drink. Torbell cleared his throat and took out a small notebook. He leafed back and forth through the pages, wearing a frown of self-importance which made a little knot between his brows.

  I let them have their silence. So they gave up finally and Torbell said, “May we assume that you phoned in the report of his death?”

  “You may so assume.”

  “You took fifty thousand dollars down there with you?”

  “I did.”

  “And brought it back?”

  “I brought forty-eight back. Browder took out expenses, I think.”

  “Where did you get the money?”

  “That’s irrelevant.”

  “We have the power to make arrests.”

  I held both fists out toward him. “Be my guest.”

  Wisner took his turn, saying, “Your attitude isn’t getting us anywhere.”

  “Our attitudes, let’s say.”

  “All right. Did you go down with Browder to buy cocaine?”

  “No.”

  “Then for God’s sake, man, why were you carrying all that money around?”

  “Browder carried it into Mexico. I asked him at one point why his employers couldn’t provide the money. He said the government was cutting back on expenses.”

  “Why did you provide it?”

  “There was a Jack Benny skit years ago where a robber jumped out at him with a gun and said, ‘Your money or your life!’ And it was the long, long silence that got laughs.”

  “Are you saying Browder threatened you?”

  “I’m saying there have been two unsuccessful attempts on my life lately and Browder heard about them from the other end. He also heard, from the other end, that the orders to kill Billy Ingraham came from Miami. Browder seemed to think that if I sat still, they’d finally get to me.”

  “Was this Ingraham a smuggler?”

  “Why don’t you people do some homework before you come out of the office to hassle somebody? Ingraham was a retired millionaire developer killed in Cannes in a hotel last month by somebody shoving a wire into his brain.”

  Wisner and Torbell looked at each other and Torbell said, “I think I read about that. He was the one owned the yacht three people were killed on.”

  “And I’m the one who found the yacht with the bodies aboard and notified the Coast Guard. I had a deal with Billy to try to find it. And I did. And one of the bodies was of a young Peruvian girl from an important family. Her uncle is in the drug business. He demanded that the Miami group find out who killed his niece. They decided it was easier to nominate Billy and me than look for the right one. I’d found out the cruiser had come across from the Yucatan. So Browder found a way to make contact over there, and I could provide the money to make it look real, and he had me rigged out to impersonate a dead smuggler named Bucky, the Estanciero.”

  “Who?”

  “Forget it. Forget the whole thing.”

  Torbell’s face got red. “It took a long time to plant Browder on the inside, to plant him at a level where he could provide us now and then with some very useful information on delivery systems. It’s a giant step backward to have him taken out.”

  “He wouldn’t think so.”

  “What do you mean?” Wisner asked.

  “He implied that all he was doing was help nail the replaceables. He was more interested in the men behind the scenes.”

  “I know he was,” Torbell said. “The impossible dream. The men who run things never put anything on paper. They never say anything usable on a telephone. They deal strictly in cash, and by the time it is in hand, it has a history that is squeaky-clean. It has been through the big laundromat.”

  I almost said, “Run by Jornalero,” but stopped in time. That would have led to the unlikely connection between Jornalero and Billy Ingraham, something that would have creased their bureaucratic brows with new suspicions.

  Torbell perused his notebook again. He verified the date we had flown to Cancún. I took him through the travelogue, step by step. I was pleasantly surprised to find they knew about El Brujo. I told them I did not know exactly how Browder had made contact with him, and I could not remember the name of the man we met who drove us down the coast road to see the wizard.

  I told them that a man had been flying into the airstrip at Tulum and buying from Brujo and flying back to a ranch strip in Florida. But each flight was more dangerous than the last, so he had brought in the kids who had stolen Ingraham’s boat, and they took a shipment back in the boat in August. They came back in September and paid Brujo seventy-five thousand in counterfeit money. Brujo said he would not deal with the Florida people until somebody reimbursed him for his loss. He said he was dealing with Canadians, who were taking all he could offer.

  “Browder told me it was his guess that the man who had been flying the product out of Yucatan to Florida arranged to pick up the shipment in the Keys from the kids. When he got there he learned they had paid off Brujo in counterfeit, thus cutting off the source. So he killed them and took back his seventy-five thousand along with the shipment.”

  “Who was this person?”

  I had been turning the dilemma over and over in my mind, knowing they would come to that key question sooner or later. I became ever more convinced that this pair would blow it. Better they should be back in the office reading the computer screens.

  “We never did get his name. I don’t think Brujo knew it. We got a description. He was a thin man, prematurely bald, deeply tanned, wearing glasses with gold rims.”

  Torbell wrote this neatly in his little book.

  Wisner asked, “Who killed Browder?”

  “The light was strange in there. We were far from the windows and doors. The line was dense, jam-packed, and it was so long that people kept edging through it from both directions, because it was blocking the way to the airline check-in stations. It was very quick. Nobody noticed who did it.”

  “And they took his carryon bag?”

  “He had the strap over his right shoulder. I think they hit him and slipped it off in the same motion. They thought they had a clean fifty thousand. He was the one trying to make the buy, so he was the one logically to rob. The bulk is too big for a money belt.”

  “One of Brujo’s people?”

  “Sure. Who else knew? But my guess would be it was an independent action, not directed by El Brujo. Whoever did it had all the necessary skills.”

  So then, of course, being bureaucrats, they took me through it again, in greater detail. They were not in operations. They were in reports. When they left, they did not thank me. After all, they were making me do my duty as a law-abiding citizen. They said they might be back if they thought of something else to ask.

  Funny how your body keeps tricking your brain. Mine seems to do it far oftener than I would care to admit. I began to think there probably was a lot more about Jornalero that Millis knew and had not had a chance to tell me. And the more I could learn about Jornalero, the more useful he would be.

  And maybe the thing to do—without getting involved with her, of course—was to give her a ring and sort of drop on by and chat. It could be important, I thought, to tell her she might also be in danger. But she wouldn’t buy that and neither could I. Arturo Jornalero would provide a certain amount of insulation, and even had she never known him, Latino pundonor would not countenance the vengeance slaying of women. I decided to stop giving myself vapid excuses for seeing her.

  It was a chill and early dusk when I walked into the foyer of Tower Alpha, Dias del Sol, and said, “Hi, guys,” to the security personnel on duty. Their response was bleak. I understood. They were entitled to their own fantasies. So I rode to the top. Were I to guess the amount of time we spent in discussing the life and times of Arturo Jornalero, I would say it was probably eleven or twelve minutes.

  The first reprise was as hasty and hungry as the t
ime before. But the next was slower, longer and far more inventive. She had pink night lights which showed her lovely face pulled tight with straining, teeth set in the plump lower lip. She was as quick, sleek and graceful in movement as a dolphin.

  She fell gasping beside me, hanging on to keep from falling off the planet. She burrowed her head into my neck and when her heart and her breathing had slowed, she said, “I made some phone calls Friday.”

  “What about?”

  “To my friendly travel agent.”

  “Going somewhere?”

  “Maybe we are.”

  “We?”

  “Us. The two of us. Millis and Travis. The choice I like best, we fly to Los Angeles about February fifth—I think that’s the date—and we get on the Royal Viking Sky and take it all the way across the Pacific, to wonderful ports, and up through the Suez Canal and the Mediterranean to London, and we fly back to Miami on the Concorde.”

  “We do all that? I hardly know you.”

  “It can be our getting-acquainted cruise. It’s like eighty days, I think.”

  “This is so sudden.”

  She shook me. “Are you in there? Are you awake? Listening? A penthouse suite, man, and I buy all the goodies.”

  “I’m not that kind,” I said.

  She laughed and then said, “Seriously, do you ever think you’ve worn it all out around here?”

  It hit a little too close to home. Too many had gone away and too many had died. Without my realizing it, it had happened so slowly, I had moved a generation away from the beach people. To them I had become a sun-brown rough-looking fellow of an indeterminate age who did not quite understand their dialect, did not share their habits—either sexual or pharmacological—who thought their music unmusical, their lyrics banal and repetitive, a square fellow who read books and wore yesterday’s clothes. But the worst realization was that they bored me. The laughing, cleanlimbed lovely young girls were as bright, functional and vapid as cereal boxes. And their young men—all hair and lethargy—were so laid back as to have become immobile. Meyer was increasingly grumpy, and sometimes almost hostile. I couldn’t remember the last time I had tried to stop laughing and couldn’t. I could hang around while the rest of the old friends slid away. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had twenty people aboard the Flush at the same time. When the green ripper dropped around and took the Alabama Tiger off for permanent and much-needed rest, the heirs had sold the ’Bama Gal to a fellow who moved her around to Mobile. For a time ladies of an overwhelmingly female persuasion had stopped by to ask me where the hell the Tiger had gone. I told them he had died smiling, and they had toted him off to the family plot, and the longest floating house party in the world had at last ended. Always, they wept. The party was over.