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

by Pale Gray for Guilt(lit)

  She twinkled up at him and sighed and said, "Just lucky, I guess."

  Mary Smith took a deep and shivering breath and said, "There is a steak, darling, and it is not frozen and never has been, and it is in the meat-keeper thing in my apartment, which is, God help us, a condo-min-i-um, which will never cease to sound like a dirty word, and the apartment is twelve and a half minutes away, give or take ten seconds, and the steak will keep for us, darling, until three A.M., or until twelve noon tomorrow for a Texan's breakfast for us because I don't have to tend the store until Monday morning, and that twelve and a half minutes might just be the longest twelve and a half minutes in my life up till now."

  The temptation was to accept the whole con. But there is an immense perversity in the male animal at the most unexpected times. And why didn't you climb Mount Everest, Sir Hillary? Because it was there, fellow. And I could see her in memory in an other bar, by daylight, teeth set in that meaty little underlip, eyes half closed, listening to Tush, and turning her head slowly from side to side in a denial as definite as the slam of a door and clack of the lock. She would be exquisite in all detail, from earlobes to cute little toes to the dimples at the base of the spine. She would be fragrant, immaculate, prehensile and totally skilled, and she would ring all the changes, and pace herself beautifully, and draw me to her pace, and inflate my ego with her breathless astonishment at how it had been the most fantastic and lasting that had ever happened to her and how she had thought it could never even be equaled again, but lo and behold, when it had happened again, it was even more so, and if it ever got to be any more than that, she just couldn't stand it at all; it would blow her out of her mind, and how did we get to be so great, darling, so that really and truly it is as if it was the very first time ever with anybody.

  The temptation was to take the man's Ferrari around the track a few times, just to prove to yourself you couldn't get hooked on a great piece of machinery or on the whole speed competition bit.

  But it was right there and it was buzzing with it, and how do you sidestep without creating some unhappy suspicions about the whole approach? It would have to be some fancy footwork, and it would have to be on her terms, something she could comprehend immediately.

  I slipped into my elk-hide ring-shoes just in time, just as her eyes narrowed and she said, "You're not exactly overwhelming the girl with enthusiasm, old buddy."

  "Decisions, decisions, decisions," I said. "I seem to have this hex lately."

  She let my hand go. "What's to decide?"

  "There is this very pigheaded man sitting in a hotel suite and looking at the phone and getting madder and madder by the minute. I have been trying to unload this and that for cash money so I can get the maximum out of our little gem of opportunity. And he flew down from Chicago because this particular item happens to be worth about twenty thousand more to him than to anybody else in the world, for reasons I will not go into at the moment. So I told him I had to delay our meet because of something that came up, and I would try to get there by eight. And right now it is quarter to nine, and he is the type who feels unsure of who he is right down in the gut where it matters most, the type who to prove he is who he thinks he is might wait about one minute more and cut off his nose to spite his face, or he may have cut it off already and be on his way to the airport. I have been looking at you and trying to get a little controlled piece of amnesia about him, but it doesn't seem to work so good."

  She sat taller and gave a little shake like a toy poodle who has just been lifted out of her doggy-bath, and gave her hair a few pats, and gave a hitch at her complicated sweater and said, "Darling, you are an absolute idiot! Why didn't you say something? Didn't you think I'd understand? I'm all grown up and everything."

  "Let's say I was enjoying myself. I was listening to the message of the Poo Bear Smith."

  She reached and patted my arm and with a crooked little smile and a bawdy wink said, "Let's put it Us way. The twenty grand won't keep. You hustle and phone him. There's a phone at the end of that hallway over there that goes to the biff."

  I went to the phone and lit a match and looked up a random number and dialed it and asked a nasal woman if I could speak to Mr. Bannon. She told me

  I had a wrong number and hung up, and so I talked for a while over the empty wire to Tush and told him the news of the moment, with a few comments on the weather. He didn't have a thing to say.

  I went back to the table and told the chicklet that my man was very frosty, very frosty indeed, but still available for negotiation. She said, "Darling, if you'd lost him on account of me, I was sitting here deciding I was going to make one hell of a try at being worth the whole twenty big ones, but no broad in the world carries a tag like that. I might have choked up and blown the whole match."

  "I like a practical woman." "Can I drop you at his hotel?"

  "Thanks, but I gave myself time to go pick up my car at the Sultana, if you want to drop me there."

  "And wait for you, I hope, I hope?"

  "I guess you better wait at your place, because I am not exactly together on price with this clown yet." She lifted her purse onto her lap, opened it and dug around inside and took out a little flashlight. She gave it to me and I held it for her while she took out a little golden notebook with a snap fastener. She opened it and slipped the little gold pencil out of the little gold loop and said, "I just realized I'm absolutely starving, dear, so let's say it'll be ten before I get home. This is the unlisted number. And this is the address, on Indian Creek Drive, on the west side going north. Look for a raspberry-colored thing with a white canopy and white awnings and white balconies. Call me first, love, because I want the delicious feeling you're on your way 'to me."

  Again she drove the little red car. She whirred into the Sultana parking area, cutting off her lights as she did so to keep the front boys from noticing us and whistling her up to the entrance. She unstrung her bead, put her hat on the shelf in back, said, "Um" and splayed her little fingers on the nape of my neck and impacted a kiss with sufficient know-how to leave my knees feeling loose and fragile as I strode to my rental car after she had driven away.

  At twenty to midnight, aboard the Busted Flush, after I had washed up after my plate of scrambled eggs and onion, I got the little sheet she had torn out of her notebook. It was oyster-colored parchment, thin and stiff, with tear-out perforations down the left side. And in the bottom right-hand corner was imprinted, in the plainest imaginable type face, in gold: Love, Mary Smith.

  I direct-dialed her number.

  It rang five times, and then her muffled, silky voice said, "Mmmmm?"

  "T. McGee, ma'am."

  I heard a small yowly yawn. "W'time zit, sweetie?" "Quarter to Cinderella, almost."

  "Mmm. I was having the most interesting dream about you. And I have on this interesting little yellow night garment I bought in Tokyo. And I dumped this and that in the big hot tub, and so I smell interesting, sort of like between sandalwood and old rose petals, and something else mixed in. Some kind of spicy smell that makes me think of Mexico. Do you like Mexico as much as I do? How soon will you be here, my darling?"

  "That's a very good question."

  "I don't like the sound of that, somehow." "That makes two of us."

  "You sound so depressed. Troubles?"

  "Out of the blue. Now we've ordered up some food and we're waiting for a third party, and by dawn's early light my guess is that we'll be a. hundred miles from here looking at the property in question, on the Tamiami Trail, just this side of Naples."

  "Oh poo!"

  "I think I'd use a word with a little more bite to it."

  She gave a long sigh. "Well," she said, "down, girl. Bear me in mind, will you?"

  "Get all the rest you need. And I will phone you precisely at twelve noon tomorrow and we'll get out the old starting blocks again."

  "The old track shoes. Bang. They're off. Anyway, as long as you might have some faint idea what you're missing, dear, drive a very hard bargain
. You should be motivated, God knows."

  After I hung up, I packed a pipe and took it topsides and stretched out on a dew-damp sunpad, down out of the bite of the breeze, and looked at the cold stars.

  Where is the committee, I thought. They certainly should have made their choice by now. They are going to come aboard and make their speeches and I'm going to blush and scuff and say, "Shucks, fellas." The National Annual Award for Purity, Character, and Incomprehensible Sexual Continence in the face of an Ultimate Temptation. Heavens to Betsy, any American Boy living in the Age of Heffner would plunge at the chance to bounce that little pumpkin because she fitted the ultimate playmate formula, which is maximized pleasure with minimized responsibility. What a nice build, Charlie. With a lot of class, Charlie, you know what I mean. A broad that really goes for ft, and she had a real hang-up on me, Charlie. You never seen any chick so ready, Charlie buddy, to scramble out of her classy clothes and hop into the sack. Tell you what I did, pal. I walked away. How about that?

  There had to be a nice medal to go with the National Annual Award. With the insignia of the society. A shield with a discarded bunny tail, and an empty bed, and a buttock rampant of a field of cobwebs, with the Latin inscription, "Non Futchus."

  A nice pink and white old gentleman would pin the medal to the bare hide of the chest, as recommended by Joe Heller, while a violin would play, "Just Friendship, Friendship."

  The ceremonial kiss on the stalwart, manly, unsullied cheek and...

  A huff of wind came and flipped the point of my collar against my throat. It ruffled the canvas laced to the sundeck rail. The collar was the tickle of the brisk red hair of Puss, and the canvas sound was her chuckle, and without warning I had such an aching longing for her it was like long knives in my bowels, and my eyes stung.

  You never do anything for no reason at all, and you never refrain from doing something for no reason at all. Sometimes it just takes a little longer for the reason to get unstuck from the bottom of the brew and float to the top where you can see it.

  I rapped the pipe out and went below. So it wasn't righteous denial at all. Or a lofty, supercilious disapproval. It was the monogamous compulsion based on the ancient wisdom of the heart. Puss had made of all of herself an abundant gift, not just the giving of the body or the sating of a physical want. And no matter how skilled the erotic talents of a Mary Smith, sensation would not balance out that privacy of self that she could not give, nor would want to, nor perhaps could ever give even if she wanted to.

  And I knew just how it would have been with Mary Smith, because Puss was all too recent and all too sadly missed. All the secret elegancies of Mary Smith would merely have told me of wrong shapes, wrong sizes, wrong textures, wrong sounds from her throat, wrong ways of holding, wrong tempos and tryings and wrong oils of a wrong pungency. So it would have become with her a faked act of memory and mourning, to end in an after-love depression that would make the touch of her, the nearness of her, hugely irritating.

  Puss was too recent.

  After I was in bed, I went back and forth across the same old paradox: Then if Puss gave of herself so totally, opening up all the girl-cupboards in the back of heart and mind, how could she leave? Why did she leave?

  There was a little chill that drifted across the back of my mind and was gone, as before, still unidentified.

  There had been one cupboard unopened, all those months.

  But at least I could now stop making wistful fantasies about the little garden of delights in its yellow garment from Tokyo.

  Hogamus, Higamus. Mary's polygamous. Higamus, Hogamus. Trav is monogamous.

  For a while. It won't be any good until big Red wears off more. It will be a drag. And when it seems time to begin to expect something of it, and the opportunity comes along, don't risk it with a Mary Smith, whose involvement would be about on the same order as all other kinds of occupational therapy.

  Eleven

  ON SATURDAY before noon I looked through the stowage areas for fifteen minutes before I found my gadget. It is called the McGee Electric Alibi. The two D cells had expired, so I replaced them with fresh ones and tested it. Once upon a time it was a doorbell, but I removed the bell and replaced it with a piece of hardwood that has exactly the right timbre and resonance.

  I direct-dialed my love and hunched over the desk top so I could listen to the earpiece and hold the mouthpiece at the pretested and precalculated distance from the mouthpiece. It only rang twice before she picked up the phone, but twice was enough to give me the duration and interval of the rings.

  "Darling?" she said. It was exactly noon, as promised.

  I pressed the button, transmitting the raucous clatter of a phone that keeps trying to ring after you've picked it up.

  Between the first two imitation rings I heard her say, "... dammit to..." and in the next gap, "... stinking thing.... " I heard the clicking as she rattled the bar. "... n of a bitch..." I gave it eight fake rings and that made ten in all, as they instruct you in the yellow pages, and hung up.

  Poor guy calls up all steamed up, right on time, and she isn't even home. Fine thing. So he thinks maybe her clock is wrong and she ran out for a paper or a loaf of bread or something. Five minutes later I tried again, and she answered, and I rattled her eager, frustrated, infuriated, helpless little eardrum and this time heard her cry over and above the racket, "Goddamn it to hell!"

  So on the off chance, the guy would call the office, so I phoned at once before she would decide I might, and a subdued voice said, "Three one two one. "Is Mary Smith there, please? Extension sixty-six."

  "Miss Smith is not in today, sir."

  "Well... if she should come in or phone in, would you tell her that Mr. McGee has been trying to reach her, and he'll phone her at home again at three o'clock."

  "Is there a number where she can reach you, sir?"

  "No. I don't expect to be here much longer, thanks."

  She would know I had the right number, as I had reached her before. I had the bell on my phone switched off. I could make outgoing calls, however. So I tried her at twelve thirty. She hung up on the second rasp. At one her line was busy when I tried it. I had been hoping for that. It would be a help. A few minutes later it wasn't busy. She caught it on the first ring. "Hello?" Raaaasp. Cry of pure despair. Clunk as she hung up.

  Snoopy the dog wears a guilty and evil grin from time to time. I couldn't work one up.

  Meyer and I were in the lounge going over final details when I suddenly realized it was exactly three. I had no time to prepare him for the Electric Alibi. I heard a distinct sob before she hung up.

  He stared at me as I came back to the chair. "Sometimes you worry me, Travis. It's something about the way your mind works."

  "I often find it depressing." I stood up again. "Hell, we're all set. I'm going to drive up and see Janine and Connie. I'll stay over, and drive down to Sunnydale early Monday. You get there about noon and get a motel room somewhere, and go to the hotel I told you about for lunch. I'll show up with our pigeon. I think that sometime about maybe five or six o'clock Miss Mary Smith will show up and beat on the doors. I think I've described her well enough. Keep an eye out for her and intercept her and tell her you think I'm on the Alabama Tiger's cruiser and point the way."

  "Consolation prize?"

  "Who for?"

  He gave up and sighed and left. I phoned To-Co Groves and Connie's cry of pleasure at my coming was convincing enough. I buttoned up,, switched the Sentry on, and put my gear in the car. Then I walked to the Tiger's permanent floating housepariy. Even with the boat closed up, the Afro-Cuban beat was loud. When I opened the door to the big main cabin area the sound nearly drove me backward. The big Ampex system was blasting, and the regulars were all around the perimeter because Junebug had herself a new challenger. She is a rubbery brown solid chunk of twenty-something-year-old girl, a sturdy mix of Irish, Gypsy and Cherokee. She wore a pink fuzzy bikini, and she was a go-going dervish, black short hair snapping, face and e
yes a blur, body flexing and pumping to the beat, which Styles was sharpening with a blur of hands on the battered old bongos. The challenger was one of the king-sized beach bunnies, one of the big young straight-haired blondes about nineteen who look so much alike lately they should wear numbers on the side like stock cars. The money was in three piles on the deck by the Tiger's big bare feet. The big bunny was beginning to lag and flounder, miss the beat and catch up. Her mouth hung open. Her hip action in her zebra bikini was getting ratchety. The Tiger sat in a high glaze, swaying on the stool, smiling to himself, glass in hand. Muggsie Odell gave me her big smile, and I pointed at my watch and raised an eyebrow. She checked her watch, then flashed me seven sets of ten fingers plus four. Except for being so sweaty her body looked oiled, the Junebug looked absolutely fresh after seventy-four minutes of it. Maybe the challengers, can go all day long to the beat they're used to, but they don't realize the additional demand on stamina of the Afro-Cuban tempo. One of them is reputed to have lasted over two hours before hitting the deck, but the Junebug wasn't even close to her own limit.