John D MacDonald - Travis McGee 09 - Pale Gray for Guilt

by Pale Gray for Guilt(lit)

  "So?"

  "Maybe I should have been the one to set up the investment thing."

  "It would take the joy out of it. He might never make the connection. I need the chance to look him in the eye, laugh at his jokes, share some booze with him, and then sting him where it hurts. Then he can find out why it happened to him. I'll tell him, given the chance. For the rest of his life, the name Bannon is going to make him feel sick."

  "Maybe he has some people who will make you feel sick in other ways."

  "And sometimes they almost make it."

  "This time they could."

  "You always worry. It's nice. If you stopped, I'd worry."

  He sighed. "Okay. So look at my expert, specialist, impressive kit. Meyer, the big industrialist."

  He had the aerials of the Shawana River area, and the series of overlays marked as planned. He had soil surveys, water table data, labor supply data. He had business cards on expensive buff- stock, engraved, turning him into G. Ludweg Meyer, Ph. D., Executive Vice President of Barker, Epstein and Wilks, Inc. Management Engineering Services.

  "Let us sincerely pray," he said, "that one of these cards never finds its way back to that very sound and good firm."

  "It might be therapeutic. It might stir them up. Let me see the correspondence file."

  The letterhead startled me. It looked totally authentic. One of the giant corporations that have become household words in these days of electronic fantasy. I stared at him and he beamed at me and said "It was a bit of luck So wonder about it. Note that it is from the office of the President of the corporation. That is his name, truly. Note that it is marked confidential. Note the very impressive carbon ribbon type face. See the secretarial initials at the bottom. Those are the initials of his actual private secretary. The signature is not great. I copied it from a copy of their annual report. The top letters are background. The key letter is about the fourth one down. There. That's the one. Is it what you had in mind?"

  The president called him My dear Ludweg: The first paragraph acknowledged the receipt of reports and recommendations, and then the letter went on to say,

  I tend to agree with your appraisal of the competitive implications and possible danger to our industry position in that particular manufacturing division should Calitron establish a branch facility in such close proximity to Tech-Tex Applications, Inc. Though the branch facility we now have in the final planning stage is smaller, one could logically assume that proximity to TTA would benefit profit margin to the same extent percentagewise.

  In view of the necessity of moving quickly, and the favorable report our people brought back, you are authorized to make a firm commitment in the name of the Corporation for from 200 acres minimum or 260 maximum either in general area A, or general area B. A separate letter of authorization is appended hereto In In view of the other interest in these industrial lands, you are authorized to bid up to $2 thousand per acre, or a maximum of between $400 thousand and $520 thousand, at your discretion.

  "Very nice," I said.

  "What should my approach be up there? How should I act?"

  "Self-important, influential, crooked, and careful of being caught at it. Great letters, Meyer. You are showing more and more talent every time you get into one of these things."

  "And getting more and more scared. Isn't this a conspiracy to defraud?"

  "Let's say to highjack. Now let me tell you how it is supposed to work."

  He buried his face in his hands and said, "I can hardly wait to hear." After I explained it, it took him a long time to smile.

  When I phoned Mary Smith at four on Friday, she said, "Mr. McGee, would it be possible for you to have a drink with Mr. Santo this evening at seven at the Sultana Hotel on Miami Beach?"

  "I can arrange it."

  "The Out-Island Room, then, at seven. Just ask for Mr. Santo's table."

  I arrived at the arched doorway a few minutes after seven. A lackey with a face like a Rumanian werewolf slunk out of the gloom and looked at me with total disdain, as if Central Casting had sent the wrong type with the wrong clothes. It was a cold day, and I had put on the Irish jacket. After five or six years, twigs still occasionally fall out of the dark coarse weave.

  "Mr. Santo's table; please."

  "And your name?"

  "McGee."

  He lit up with joy at beholding me. He popped his fingers and a waiter trotted over, bowed several times, and led me back through the labyrinths of partitions and alcoves to a deep corner, to a semicircular banquette big enough for six, and a semicircular table to fit. He pulled the table out, bowed me in, put it back and bowed and asked for my drink order. At ten after he came on the run and pulled the table out again as the Santo party arrived. Gary Santo, Mary Smith, Colonel Burns, Mrs. Von Kroeder. I measured Santo as we shook hands. He was not as tall as he looked in his pictures, but with all the shoulders and chest so frequently mentioned in his publicity. He was shading fifty, but fighting it and winning the same way those more directly in show business win it, with the facials, the luxuriant hairpiece touched just enough with gray, the laborious hours in the home gym, and the sessions on the rubbing table, and the hefty shots of vitamins and hormones, and a hell of a good dentist. He came on all virility, white teeth, wrestler's handshake, and the knack of looking you squarely in the' eye and crinkling his eyes as if you and he shared a joke on the rest of the world.

  In resonant boyish baritone he told me I knew Mary Smith, of course, and presented me to Halda Von Kroeder, who had as much thin, pale, graceful neck as I have ever seen, a small, pert head, a tall, slat-thin body, a cascade of emeralds, and a set of breasts so awe-inspiring she gave the impression of leaning slightly backward to keep herself in balance. "So bleezed," she said in a Germanic rasp, then hiccuped.

  Colonel Dud Burns had the look of eagles... defeathered, earthbound, and worried about cirrhosis. Gary Santo arranged the group with himself in the middle and, at his left, first Mary Smith and then me at the end, and with Halda and Burns in that order at his right.

  Mary Smith was at that daring outer limit where style becomes comedy. There was more eye makeup, and the mouth more frosted. She wore a gray sweater with a great deal of complex stitchery and welts and seams. It came down to within six inches of her knees. Showing under the sweater was two inches of blue tweed skirt. Below the skirt were sheer blue stockings that were a perfect match for shoes with stubby heels and high, stiff tongues. On her head was a wide-brimmed hat shaped much like the hats the novilleros wear in the bullring. It was of a stiff eggshell fabric in a coarse weave. She had it perched aslant on the gloss of the brown-auburn spill of hair, with a white thong under her chin, a blue wooden thong bead at the corner of her little jaw. The sweater sleeves came midway down her forearms. Her gloves and purse matched the eggshell hat When she pulled her gloves off, she uncovered nails painted a thick, pearly, opalescent white.

  She sat bolt upright like a bright and obedient child and smiled at me with wide eyes and careful mouth, and told Santo she would have the regular, which turned out to be a straight shot of Wild Turkey with water, no ice, on the side. When she got it, she went at it with frequent little sippings, each of which must have been three or four drops by volume.

  Santo turned finally, after some in-group jokes and conversation I couldn't follow, and faced me across Mary Smith, his back squarely toward the kraut lady.

  "Our little Poo Bear here gives you a good mark, MCGee."

  "Poo Bear Smith?" I asked.

  "It's an office thing," she said. "I have this instinct or something. He says what about this one and I say Poo. And that one, and I say Poo. Then the next one I say okay for brownie points."

  "She's got a nose for it. Questions, McGee. If I go for it, if I like the flavor of it, how much do you have to know?"

  "The day you start and how much you are going to spring for altogether."

  "Have you taken a position in it?"

  "About the same way porcupines make love, but I'm now
here near as far in as I want to be. It's been moving in a narrow range and I've been buying on the downs."

  "Will you need to know my orders?"

  "No. I'll have a man tape-watching it."

  "There's one place where we have to be coordinated on it, and that's getting off it."

  "As carefully as we get on, I hope."

  "And the last thing, of course, is the name of it."

  "Right here?"

  "The other two can't hear, and Mary is the best you've ever seen at keeping her mouth shut. About anything."

  "Fletcher Industries. American Exchange."

  "Want to brief me a little?"

  "Why should I? It's a duplication of effort If your people can't see why it's as good as it is, you need new people."

  "You have your full complete share of mouth, McGee."

  "Have you gotten too accustomed to total humility on all sides, Santo?"

  "Hush, now!" said Mary Smith. "You both hush. You're both right. Don't you two go all ballsy and wicked when you're going to be helping each other."

  Santo threw his head back and laughed his boyish laugh. "Her biggest trouble is making sense. By Wednesday... that will be..."

  "The tenth," said Mary Smith.

  "... phone her and she'll have the Yes or No on it, and give you a probable figure."

  "Will do," I said.

  He smiled down into her face. He said to her, "I think I like your new friend, Mary. I think he's maybe brought us another winner." He took out his bill clip, slipped some bills out of it, and put them quickly into her purse. "I'm so sure, here's an advance on your bonus. Use it to take him to where the steaks are."

  She looked at her watch. "Yes, you'd better start moving it, Gary. Ben will be out there with your luggage. Kiss Bonnie Bea for me."

  He made the smallest of gestures and people came on the run to pull the table away, hand him the check for signature, bow the three of them out and away.

  We went up the beach in her little red car to what she called one of "her" places, a little bar dark as pockets. Once we were sitting across a very low and narrow little table from each other, so that we had to hunch over it in intimate arrangement, she figuratively rolled up her sleeves and went to work. She had awaited the pass, and for once there hadn't been one.

  She had put the strange hat aside. She shook out her gleaming hair. A stray pattern of light rested on a long diagonal across her face, from eyes to lips.

  She dipped into her shot like a moth, put it down, picked up the stray lip-drop with tongue tip. "Want to know, Travis? Want the crazy message?" It was half whisper, her voice dragging.

  "Message by special delivery. Sure, Mary Smith." She made her eyes very wide and solemn. Her lips parted. She reached and took my hand in both of hers and pulled it slowly to her side of the table. She turned my slack fist over, then put the nails of her right hand high on the inside of my wrist, and slowly drew her nails along my wrist and over my palm, uncurling my slack fingers as she did so. Holding my fingers down, she dipped her head suddenly, pressed the mouth moist against my palm, lifted her head very quickly and stared at me, her face both sly and fake-frightened.

  "Is there more?" I asked.

  She turned my hand over and formed it into a fist and, holding it in both her hands, lifted it, held it, her elbows braced on the table. She bumped her chin into the knuckles, closed her eyes.

  "Pow," she whispered. "Like right off, the first minute. Pow. I'm never like that."

  "Comes a time," I said.

  "There does indeed, Mr. Travis McGee." She tilted my fist slightly for a better angle, and went across the knuckle ridge with her warm little mouth, taking a gentle little bite at each knuckle and kissing the space between each knuckle. With each kiss, her tongue tip flicked at the closed apace between fingers.

  "When it's going to be what it's going to be, there's that message, don't you think? An old-timey thing, way deep, that's been waiting for it special. So very rough crazy everlasting special. And you know it too. Don't you? Don't you?"

  She sat back there someplace behind those swarming eyes, listening to herself pant, in such a soft little wondrous way. She watched herself work herself up, no doubt measuring the bra-tickle of the nipples becoming erectile, sensing the new softness of thigh and belly. This was one of the new breed who assist the manipulators. Gary Santo, being a manipulator in a large way could be expected to have one who would know her business backward and forward and upside down. He might have two, three or a dozen in the retinue. He would keep them loyal not only with money but with the feeling of being part of an operating team and performing a function for the team.

  Sex with a particularly skilled and desirable woman who could convince you that you were the greatest thing since fried rice was a marvelous gadget for one of the manipulators: The bedazzled male is incautious, mazed, thunderstruck. In that condition he can provide the maximum benefit to the manipulator and the least problem. He will come trundling along in the entourage just to be near his brand-new love-light. He will tell her all he knows and all he hopes, and in a frenzy of team spirit and accomplishment, she will bang him out of his mind and drop him right back where she found him when the manipulator has the last crumb of information he can use. But while he's getting the treatment, he tags along with the team, with the group but not really a part of the group, aware that the team knows the basis for the attraction, aware of a team attitude of kindly contempt for him but so enthralled in his doggy, lolling, bitch-trailing way he will endure the little humiliations to keep getting what becomes more instead of less necessary to him the more he gets of it.

  The role requires a woman exceptionally confident and decorative, a woman of a hearty and insistent sexuality, a woman who understands that serving the manipulator in this way is part of the price of the ticket on all the best flights to the best places, and if you want to be coy, or choosy or chicken, you can drop right back to the posture chair and the old electric and the girl's room scuttlebutt about who might get promoted to what. It takes special gals to travel with the team, so dig in and enjoy the special assignments, because between the romps the guy will talk and you tote the crumbs back to Gary and he fits them together.

  The manipulators are the brash gamblers putting little corporations together to make big ones, and they are the talent packagers who stick a half dozen special abilities together and end up with the percentage off the top of the network serial show, and they are the showboaters who take on the tax cases of the mighty and fight the Fed to a draw-or a cheap compromise-and they are the inventive money men who direct the conversion of hoodlum funds into legitimate enterprise, and they are the whiz kids who tear down the honest old buildings and stick up the glittery new boxes on the leaseback, write-off, tax shelter kick, and they are the ones that boost the market price of a stock up and unload and then kick it back down and buy back.

  They buzz around the country and the world in little groups, where everybody is always laughing, and at the resorts and airports and executive dining rooms, at the padded bars and the swinging casinos, in the groups there are always the Mary Smiths, pert, tidy, high-style, voracious and completely with it, eyes a-dance, freed by The Pill to happily pull down the game the manipulator fingers for her, the new Gal Friday who has become the Gal Friday Night.

  It is a new breed that did not exist a few years back, but cultures seem to have an uncanny way of spawning creatures to fill any need. So situation ethics, plus profitable manipulation, brought this merry regiment out of the wings, as if they had been waiting there all along. It would be pointless to conjecture about immorality or amorality, or make analogies about whoredom, that word with the ring of biblical accusation. A Mary Smith would not even be upset, merely puzzled.

  In the diagonal light she rested her chin against my fist, her two warm and shapely little hands holding it there, elbow-braced, and made her eyes huge, then dipped and turned her head first one way and then the other, to slowly drag first one sheaf of the
dense and fragrant hair across the back of my hand and then the other.

  I remembered the shaggy and ancient joke of the young man in the strange city who had arrived with the phone number of a hundred-dollar girl. He called her up and was invited up to her luxurious apartment, where she cooked him a gourmet meal, recited French poetry, played the piano for him and sang with professional skill. She mentioned that she spoke six languages, had a master's degree in psychology, and had designed and made the gown she wore on her lovely body. At last as she led him in toward the canopied bed he had to ask. And so he said, "Please would you tell me how a girl like you got into... a business like this?"