So I scribbled her a list of my overnight needs and sent her off to a shopping plaza winking and glittering in the distance. I checked the marina office and got the name and location of a place that could lift the Munequita out and tractor it over and put it on a shelf. He phoned for me and said they had space. I ran her over and took out all the stuff I did not want to leave aboard. A boat you can check as if it were a 4,300-pound suitcase is a vast convenience for people who never know what they'll be doing tomorrow.
I watched them hose down the hull and put Little Doll tenderly on her shelf, and soon a rental sedan arrived for me, tow-barring the little three-wheeled bug that would get the delivery man back to the rental headquarters. I accomplished the red tape on car and boat, locked the gear in the trunk of the maroon two-door, and got back to the cavelike cocktail bar ten minutes before Puss came striding in with a new genuine imitation red alligator hatbox, a blue canvas zipper bag advertising an obscure airline, two suitboxes and a big shopping bag full of smaller parcels.
By five thirty we were making good time up State 710, aimed like a chalk line at the town of Okeechobee, and Puss was in the back seat, happily unwrapping packages, admiring her own good taste, and packing the items in the oversized hatbox. At last she came clambering over the back of her bucket seat, plumped herself down, latched her belt, lit her cigarette and said, "Now about a few little things aboard the Busted Flush, friend. Like the little ding-dong when anybody steps aboard. Like the way it is wired for sound, not the pretty music, but for tape pickup. And how about that cozy little headboard compartment with loaded weapon therein? Also, you have some very interesting areas that look as if you'd have a nice collection of purple hearts, if you got them in a war. And how about the way you go shambling mildly about, kind of sleepily relaxed, beaming at your friends and buddies, kind of slow, rawboned, awkward-like, and you were ten feet from Marilee Saturday night when she stepped on that ice cube on the sun deck and was going to pitch headfirst right off the top of that ladderway, and in some fantastic way you got there and hooked an arm around her waist and yanked her right out of the air? More? How about the lightning change of personality for the benefit of the phone man with the old-timey glasses, the way you turned into a touristy goof so completely I didn't even feel as if I knew you? How about this con you almost worked on me about being retired. How about the way I tried to pump Meyer about you, and he showed speed and footwork like you couldn't believe? How about that kind of grim professional bit with the camera and the hoist and the wire and all, so totally concentrated I could have been walking around on my hands with a rose in my teeth without getting a glance from you? How about my gnawing little suspicion that you aren't going up to Frostproof to comfort this Janine, but to go pry information out of her? Enemy country, you said. Maybe for you the whole world is enemy country McGee. But somehow it would sort of fit one lousy guess, which would be a batch of official cars screaming up and the boys in blue jumping out, and a big loudspeaker yammering for you to come out quietly or they lob in the tear gas."
"You are a warm broad. You are a warm nosey broad."
"So I have this eccentricity, maybe. You know, a social flaw. Some kind of insecurity reaction or something. I started sleeping with somebody and I get this terrible curiosity about them."
"So? I could have the same trouble too. But I haven't asked questions. Or tried to find out things I could find out, without much trouble, probably"
She was quiet for a long time. I glanced at her. Her hands were folded in her lap and she was biting at sucked-in lips.
"Fair is fair," she said. "When it's time to tell you, I will tell you. Not in words, but in writing, so that I get it down exactly right. Not that it is so earthshattering or anything. But for now, for reasons I think are pretty good reasons, I want to keep it to myself. Fair being fair, if you have good reasons, okay, I ask no more."
So I told her the retirement was accurate, except I am taking it in little hunks whenever I can afford it. "It's a tricky, complex, indifferent society, Puss. It's a loophole world. And there are a lot of clever animals who know how to reach through the loopholes and pick the pockets of the unsuspecting. Carefully done, the guy who has been plucked clean has no way of getting it back. There are a thousand perfectly legal acts that can be immoral, or amoral, acts. Then the law officers have no basis of action. Attorneys can't help. The pigeon might just as well have dropped his wallet into a river full of crocodiles. He knows right where it is. And all he can do is stand on the muddy shore and wring his hands. So I'm the salvage expert. And I've "own a lot of crocodiles. So I make a deal with him. I dive down, bring it up, and split it with him, fifty-fifty. When a man knows his expectation of recovery is zero, recovering half is very attractive. If I don't make it, I'm out expenses:"
"Or you are a dainty dish for the crocs, man." "So far I've been indigestible. Now Janine Bannon is a client. She doesn't know it yet. Tush would have been. A client in the classic sense of the legal squeeze. I don't understand the killing. They didn't need that. I know one thing. I have to watch myself on this one. Strangers make the best clients. Then -I can play the odds and stay cold. Here I'm too emotionally hung up. I'm too angry, too sick at heart. A dirty, senseless act. So I have to watch it."
She pondered it for a time. "Just one thing that bothers me, darling. How do you find... enough new clients?"
I told her how I had found the last one, by combing very carefully through all the local items in the fat Sunday edition of a Miami paper. Of the items I marked that looked interesting, one was an apologetic announcement from a stamp collector's club that Mr. So-and-So, a very long and complicated Greek name, the well-known restauranteur had, at the last minute, decided to withdraw from the exhibition and not show his complete and extremely valuable collection of Greek postage stamps, which had included the famous 1857 Dusty Rose, which had brought $21,000 at a New York auction house in 1954:
I'd called an officer of the Philatelic Society who said the old gentleman was not mad at anybody, that he took a lot of pleasure in exhibiting his collection and having it admired, and that though he had sounded upset, he had not given any reason for withdrawing.
It had taken a little more research to find out what company insured the collection. An agent who said he had never met the old gentleman gave me his card. So I took his card and his name and presented myself to the old gentleman and said we wished, to make a new appraisal of the collection. He stalled. The collection was in the vault at the bank. He was very busy. Some other time. So I said we had reason to believe he had disposed of some of the collection.
He broke down. He had been remounting the collection under glass for the exhibition. He had to leave his home for a doctor's appointment. He returned. Twenty-two of the most valuable stamps, including the Dusty Rose, were missing.
"So he was the patriarch of a big family, all very close, all sensitive to scandal, and his wife had died, and he had been remarried for two years to something of the same coloring, general impact and impressive dimension of the late Jayne Mansfield, a lassy big enough to make two of the old boy, and he was so certain she had clouted his valuable toys he'd been afraid to make a report to the cops or claim insurance. So I followed the lady to an afternoon assignation with the hotel beachboy who'd blackmailed her into heisting the stamps, and after I got through shaking him up and convincing him that the old gentleman had arranged to have her last two male chums dropped into the Florida Straits wired to old truck parts, he produced eleven stamps, including the gem of the collection, and was so eager to explain where and how he had fenced the other eleven he was letting off a fine spray of spit. I helped him pack, and put him on a bus and waved good-bye and had a nice little talk with the big blonde about how I had just barely managed to talk two tough old Greek pals of her husband's from hiring local talent to write a little warning with a hot wire across her two most obvious endowments. A cop friend shook the missing items out of the fence, and I told the old man it hadn't been his wife
at all, and he had every reason to trust her. So he hopped around and sang and chuckled and we went to the bank and he gave me thirty thousand cash, a generous estimate of half the value, and he gave me a note that gives me free meals for life in the best Greek restaurants in four states, and the whole thing took five days, and I went right back to my retirement, and maybe three weeks later one Puss Killian came along and enriched it considerable."
"Pull over," she ordered. I found a place where there was room to park on the grass between the two-lane road and the canal. She unsnapped the seat belt, lunged expansively over, a big hug, a big kiss from a big girl whose eyes danced and sparkled in the fading daylight.
"Drive on," she said, snapping the belt. I did. "Whatever it was for, it was nice."
"Well, this is a very long day, and it was partly for way way back, having that coffee-with. And it was for getting so damned scarey furious-because maybe there isn't much real anger around any more. It's for appreciating mistletoe. It's mostly for being what you are, doing the nutty things you do, and letting me for once be... Sancho Panza."
"Please! Sancha."
"Of course."
Five
THE ENTRANCE gate was very wide, very high, with a floodlight shining on the clean white paint and on the sign that hung from chains from the top of the arch. To-Co Groves, Inc.
It was nine fifteen. We had stopped in Okeechobee for a hasty meal of some fresh bass, fried in corn meal and bacon fat. I turned into the graveled drive and `a figure stepped out of the shadows into the headlights, raising a casual hand to stop me. Ranch hat, faded blue denim work jacket and jeans. She came to my side of the car and said, "McGee? I'm Connie Alvarez."
I got out, leaving the door open, shook hands, introduced Puss. Connie leaned in and shook her hand, then straightened again. In the glow of the courtesy light I had my first good look at her. A strong-looking woman, chunky, with good shoulders, a weathered face, no makeup, very lovely dark longlashed eyes.
"You would have helped them if they'd hollered, McGee?"
"All I could."
"Me too. Pride. Their lousy, stiff-necked pride. How many good people has pride killed? She's up there at the house thinking the roof has fallen in on her. She doesn't know it's the roof and the chimney and the whole damn sky, and it is a lousy time to have to tell her. What happened?"
"He was on his back on the ground and about five hundred pounds of scrap iron dropped on him from ten feet in the air. Head and chest, I'd imagine. I haven't seen him, and probably wouldn't know who I was seeing if I did."
"Jesus Christ, man, you don't tiptoe around things, do you?"
"Do you want me to?"
"I think already you know me better than that. Are they trying to call it an accident?"
"Suicide. He's supposed to have run a wire to the ratchet stop, lay down and yanked it loose. They found it still fastened and wound around his hand. Yesterday morning."
Suddenly her brown strong fingers locked onto my wrist. "Oh my dear God! Had he gotten the note she left him?"
"No."
I heard the depth of her sigh. "That could have done it. That could have been the one thing that could have made him do it. I think I got to know him that well. I think I know how much Jan meant to that poor big sweet guy."
"Not even that, Connie. At least not that way. He was murdered. But we've got to swallow the suicide story. All of us. We've got to act as if we believed it."
"Why?"
"Why do you think?"
"I think why use amateur talent when you can hire professionals."
"Rest your mind, Mrs. A."
"We'll talk after we get this sad thing done." She leaned abruptly into the car again. "You, girl. Do you dither? Do you bleat and snuffle and carry on?"
"Go grow yourself an orange, lady."
She threw her head back and gave a single bark of humorless laughter. "Maybe you'll both do." She pulled my seat back forward and scrambled into the back seat, rustling the discarded wrapping paper. "Let's go, McGee. The gate light turns off up at the house."
I wasn't prepared for a full half mile of drive, nor for the house at the end of it, big and long and low, with upswept drama of roof lines, something by Frank Lloyd Wright out of Holiday Inns. She had me park around at the side. "I'll have my people take care of the car and bring your gear in. You people use one bedroom or two."
"Two, please," said Puss.
"Well, at least the thundering herd is sacked out by now. Her three and my two." She looked up at the stars. And we squared our shoulders and went in to drop the sky down upon Janine, to change the shape of her world and the shape of her heart forever.
It was one thirty in the morning when Puss came walking slowly into the big living room, yawning. Connie and I had been sitting for a long time in the dark leather chairs near a small crackling of fat pine in the big fireplace of coquina rock. We'd done a lot of talking.
"I think she's good until midmorning anyway," Puss said.
"But Maria better sit there by her just in case." "She's there, Connie. If Jan wakes up, she'll wake us up. But it isn't likely."
Puss went over to the little bar in the corner, put two cubes in a squat glass, poured some brandy over them and then came over and shoved the footstool closer to me, sat on it and leaned her head against the side of my knee and yawned again. "She was trying to be so damn brave," Puss said. "She wouldn't let go, and she wouldn't let go, and then she did. And that's the best thing. Did you get the calls through, Connie?"
"I got that Sheriff and told him she knew and she was resting, and I'd call him back tomorrow and let him know what she's going to do next. I got her people and got them calmed down. She'll have to phone them tomorrow. And the boys have to be told."
"Jan said not to tell them," Puss said. "She said it's her job. She keeps asking how we can be sure he never got her note."
Connie swirled the ice in her drink and then slugged it down. "Know what I can't forget? Can't and never will? Five years and it's still so clear in my mind. Every word that was said. Oh, it was a typical brooha. Tommy and I had hundreds of them. Yell and curse, but it never really meant anything. We both had strong opinions. What we quarreled about that morning doesn't matter. After he went crashing out, I ran and yanked the door open and called after him. 'And don't be in a great big hurry to come back!' Maybe he didn't hear me. He had his jeep roaring by then. He never did come back. He didn't see the sinkhole and drove into it, and he stayed alive in the hospital two days and two nights without regaining consciousness, and he died there." She stood up, wearing a crooked smile, and said, "The guilts. That's what they leave you. Tomorrow is going to be a long rough day too, people. 'Night."
I was on the downslope into sleep when the bed tipped under Puss's stealthy weight and she slipped under the sheet and blanket to pull herself long and warm against me, fragrant and gentle, with some kind of whisper-thin fabric between my hands and her flesh.
"Just hold me," she whispered. "It just seemed like such a dark, dark night to be alone." Her words were blurred, and in a very little while her breathing changed and deepened and her holding arms went slack and fell away.
The four of us arrived in Sunnydale three days later, at a little before noon on Thursday. Connie Alvarez drove the lead car, a mud-caked black Pontiac convertible of recent vintage and much engine. Janine was beside her. When the road was straight, I had all I could do to keep them in sight. Puss mumbled now and again about Daytona and Sebring.
"The whole thing sounds so nutty," she said. "Do you really think that funny-looking little old judge knows what he's doing?"
"That funny little old Judge Rufus Wellington knows what everybody is doing. And he'll have had the whole morning to pry around." I braked at the last moment, pulled the rental around a bend and peered ahead for the distant dot that would be the Pontiac. "Have you got any questions at all about your little game?"
"Hah! Can the gaudy redhead from the big city dazzle the young, earnest attorney
with her promissory charms? Will Steve Besseker, the shy counselor from the piney woodlands reveal the details of local chicanery to yon glamorous wench? I might have a question at that."
"Which is..."
"You were a little vague about the details, McGee. Do I give all for the cause? Do I bed this bumpkin if it seems necessary, or don't you care one way or the other?"
I risked a high-speed glance at her and met the narrowed quizzical eyes of sexual challenge. I said, carefully, "I've always had the impression that if the string on the carrot was too long, and if the donkey snapped at it and got it, he'd lose his incentive and stop pulling the load."
"I resent the analogy and approve the sentiment, sir."
But challenges have to go both ways or there is no equality among the sexes. "On the other hand, I imagine that you're the best judge of your own motivations, and you would be the best judge of the appropriate stimulus and response. Such situations vary, I imagine."
John D MacDonald - Travis McGee 09 - Pale Gray for Guilt Page 6