I crooked a finger at Muggsie. She nodded and followed me out and closed the hatch against the noise. We sat on the wide transom and Muggsie said, "She's good for five more minutes, if that. I just as soon not be in there. They're waiting for her to fall down, and she's a stubborn kid and she'll keep going until she does drop. I just don't like to see them fall down like dead."
"A favor?"
"Depends. Probably yes, McGee."
"I'm going away for a couple of days. A very very nice little package is going to come right here looking for me. I'm having her steered here. The name is Mary Smith."
"No kidding!"
"Tell her I was here with the group but I went away and you think I said I was going to come back, so it would be best for her to wait. Meanwhile, has Hero been around?"
I was interrupted by a yell from the group. The door burst open and somebody stopped the tape. The Junebug came out, yelling Ya HAA, Ya HAAA, and jumping into the air with every third stride. Through the open door I could see the bunny face-down on the deck trying to push herself up, with people reaching to help her. Junebug gave a great leap to the dock, spun the valve on the dock hose and held the nozzle aimed right at the crown of her head. After it had streamed down her face and across her smile and pasted her dark hair flat, she stuck the nozzle under the bildni top for a few moments and then under the elastic of the bikini bottoms and, with an ecstatic smile, worked it slowly all the way around to the back and around the other side of that muscular body to the front again.
"Anybody else?" she yelled. "Any new pigeon, step up and put your bread on the decki The old Junebug is ready."
"I'd watch her fall," Muggsie said grimly. "I'd watch her fall and hope for a couple of good bounces. What's this with Hero? What are you asking about Hero?"
"Has he been around?"
"Who can stop him? You know Hero. Every hour, cruising in and seeing if there's any new stuff he hasn't seen before. With him it's a dedication. Are you saying aim Hero at this Mary Smith? What's the matter? You hate the girl?"
"Let's say they deserve each other. As soon as he starts trying to snow her, Muggsie, you go back to her and say you just heard that I came here in a bad mood and there was girl who wanted to cheer me up and we went off together, so maybe there's no point in waiting."
"Why don't I just chunk her on the head and help Hero carry her back to his pad?"
"Because at is entirely possible she'll chunk him on the head and take him back to hers."
"Oh. One of those. Anyway, Hero certainly is a handsome guy, and he certainly has enough charm for a whole charm school, and he certainly has given an awful lot of lady tourists a vacation they'll never forget. I was saying just the other day I could really go for that guy, if only he just wasn't a real rotten person through and through."
"You mean if you didn't know him."
"That's what I must mean. Wherever you're going, have fun, Trav. I'll unite the happy couple and get her off your hands for good."
As I left I walked by Junebug on the dock, toweling herself dry. "Hey you, McGee," she said, with the big white mocking grin. "Hey, you never tole me when we're gonna start to go steady. How about it?"
I looked at all that brown rubbery, arrogant vitality. "I told you, Junebug, the very next time I get a death wish, I'll look you up."
"Some coward!"
"You can believe it."
"Aww. Poor fella. I wouldn't kill you. Just cripple you up pretty good, hah?"
"I think your trouble is that you're too shy. You lack self-confidence. Get out and meet people." When I was a long way away I could still hear Junebug cawing with laughter.
I made good time and got to the Groves an hour after nightfall. We had drinks by the fire of fat pine, and a good dinner, and good talk. Janine got up and came over to me, hesitated, then leaned and touched her lips to the side of my face, and went off to bed. Connie asked me what I thought of how Jan looked and acted.
"Listless. Thinner. More bones in her face." "She's not eating well or sleeping well. She'll start to read or sew and end up staring into space. I hear her wandering around the house in the middle of the night. She's not coming out of it the way she should. I don't know what to do to snap her out of it. She's a damned fine girl, Trav. She's turning into a ghost."
"It's good of you to have her and the kids here." "Don't be a jackass! I told her she can stay forever and I mean it. Those are three good kids. Five kids make a good kind of noise to have in the house. It's been quiet around here too damned long."
She asked about my redhead, and why I hadn't brought her along. When I said we'd called it off, she was suddenly furious, saying she thought I had more sense than that. I had to explain that it wasn't my idea and I'd been given no chance to make her change her mind. Then she was merely puzzled, saying it didn't make any sense at all.
On Sunday the three of us went fifty miles in Connie's Pontiac at her customary Indianapolis pace up to Rufus Wellington's law office. He had had his elderly secretary come in, and she was just finishing the typing of the deed and other documents pertinent to my sale of the Bannon property to Preston LaFrance. I had the power of attorney with me that Meyer had given me, which, when signed by Janine and witnessed, would authorize him to buy and sell securities in her name in the margin account he was establishing for her at the brokerage firm he used in Lauderdale.
Rufus eyed me and said, "You sure LaFrance will pay forty for an equity that isn't even there? Young man, do me the favor of not telling me what kind of persuasion you're fixing to use on him. I don't think I would like to know. I don't even want to know who this Meyer is, thank you. Any member of the bar is an officer of the court."
"If I have any trouble with the bank approving of the transfer of the mortgage to LaFrance, can you help?"
"I can phone Whitt Sanders and remind him of something that would make him approve transferring it to a little red hen. But I don't want to use it less I have to, just like I didn't have to when Connie went on the note with you. I have the feeling LaFrance is going to have trouble making those payments on the mortgage."
"If you don't want me to tell you anything, Judge, why do you make leading statements and then wait for me to explain?"
"Because I guess I figure you're not likely to tell me, son. But I do have a couple of clients here. You, Connie, and you, Miz Janine, and it would rest my mind to feel sure that nothing would come back on these ladies from anything too cute you are figuring on working on some of those folks down there in Sunnydale."
"Rest your mind, Judge," I said.
He leaned back, looked beyond us into the misty places of memory and said, "When I was a rough, wild young man, which seems like it was all in a different world than this one, I ended up down in Mexico one time, near Victoria, on a horse ranch. You had to prove you were all man. There was a thing they did, called the paseo de muerte. Maybe I don't have the lingo just right, but it's close. It was just riding full out, a full hard run over rocky land on halfbroke horses, and the one who wants to test you, he comes up on you on one side, and he grins and you grin back and kick your feet free of the stirrups and you change horses right there, risking the way the footing is, and spooking one of the horses, or losing ahold. Once you'd show them you were ready to do it anytime, then they'd leave you be, because they weren't any more anxious deep inside to keep doing it than you were. Any fool could see that every time a man did it, his odds got shorter." He shook his head and smiled. "Long hours and short money, and one day out of noplace I could imagine came the idea I could start reading for the law. Why dad I start all this? There was some point I was going to make. Oh. You keep in mind, Travis McGee, that the money game is one wild horse, and the vengeance for murder is another wild horse, and you try riding them both, you can fall between and get your skull stamped with an iron shoe. Bannon was your friend, and Connie's friend, and he was your husband, Miz Janine, daddy of your boys. Murder can come in when the money game goes bad. But don't think of it as being black
dirty evil, but more of it being sick and sad, of some stumbling jackass that didn't mean it to come out that way, and he wakes up in the night and thinks on it and he gets sweaty and he hears his heart going like mad. Well, you folks have refused my kind offer to come on home with me for kitchen whisky and side meat and fancy conversation, so you will forgive me if I tell you all to be careful, and speed you on your way."
I phoned Press LaFrance in the late afternoon and arranged to meet him in Sunnydale the next morning. He sounded cautious and nervous and he gave me the impression of a certain evasiveness. He assured me the forty was still waiting, and he was anxious to listen, but I had the uneasy feeling that something had changed.
I went out to the sheds and sat on the truck dock, feeling dispirited. I finally admitted to myself that I felt guilty about Mary Smith. I could rationalize it as an adroit defensive maneuver. Gary Santo had aimed her at me. Maybe the little code word had been "steak." He had evaluated me and decided there was enough chance of additional useful information to turn her loose. So I had sidestepped her and aimed her at Hero.
But, after all, she knew her way around. She was about as gullible, innocent and vulnerable as those limey lassies who had starred in the Profumo affair. It was a good chance that she would case Hero in about forty seconds and turn him off, because he could certainly never be a business assignment.
I wished, however, that one little comment about Hero had not lodged itself so firmly in my memory. He looked like the big, gentle, slow-moving, kindly star of a hundred Westerns, and he had the charm to make a woman feel admired, protected and cherished, until he could ease her back to his pad, or back to her place, or any nearby nest he could beg, borrow or rent.
And there he would tirelessly demonstrate that degree of satyriasis that stopped short of landing him in various kinds of corrective institutions. He cruised the festive areas and cut his quarry out of merry packs with easy skill and monomaniacal determination. The comment that lingered in my mind came from a weary man who came aboard Meyer's boat one hot Sunday afternoon and said, "Knowing Hero this long, I sure God should have had the good sense never to let him bring a woman aboard my ketch last evening, but with Myra and the kids off visiting her folks, and the forward cabin empty, and me a little smashed, I said okay and what he had was some young schoolteacher he'd found right over at the Yankee Clipper in a big batch of schoolteachers having a party before going on a five-day cruise to the islands out of Everglades. The ship left this morning and she sure God isn't going to make that cruise. Giggly woman, kind of mousy and trying to get along without her glasses, and built real good, especially up front. His angle was showing her a Bahama-built ketch on account of she was going to the Bahamas. I left them aboard and that was nine or ten o'clock and I came back at midnight or later thinking they'd be gone. Honest to God, I'm dead for sleep, men. It would get quieted down and I'd be drifting off and it would start up again. With all that whinnying and squeaking and thrashing around, the nearest thing it sounds like, and it's still going on from time to time, is like somebody beating carpets with a shoat. One day Hero is going to nail him one with heart trouble and she just isn't going to last it out. I should have had more sense last night Meyer, what would you say to me going below and getting a little nap?"
So maybe, I thought, Hero never came back to the Tiger's, or maybe Mary Smith never drove up from Miami to try to find me, and if she did, maybe Meyer missed her. Or little Muggsie could have decided she deserved better.
Janine came walking slowly from the house, hands deep in the pockets of a borrowed gray cardigan worn over white ranch jeans. She hadn't seen me, and when I called to her, she turned and came over.
"Have a good nap?"
"I slept a little." She sat on an upended cement block and reached and picked up a piece of lath and started drawing lines in the dirt with the sharp end. She tilted her head and stared up at me, squinting against the brightness of the sky.
"Trav," she said, "I keep wondering about one thing. It keeps bothering me. I keep trying to figure out what happened, but I can't seem to think of anything logical. It's sort of strange."
"Like?"
"How did Tush get out there? I had the car. He was going to come into Sunnydale by bus and phone me to come get him. Did somebody give him a ride, or what?"
"I never thought about that."
"Then, whoever gave him the ride could tell when he got there. They... found him at what time was it?"
"A sheriff's deputy found him at nine o'clock approximately. The medical examiner estimated he had been dead from one to four hours at the time he was found."
"From five thirty to eight thirty, then. In there somewhere, somebody... killed him. But he was so strong, Trav. You know how powerful he was. He wouldn't just stretch out and let somebody... He was dead when they put him there. Maybe whoever drove him out there saw somebody hanging around."
"We're going to get to all that, Jan. Believe me, we're going to do our best to find out. But first we've got to do some salvage work for you."
She made a bitter mouth and looked down and drew a dollar sign. She reached a foot out and slowly scuffed it out. "Money. It got to mean so damned much, you know. Getting pinched worse and worse, and snapping at each other about it, and being so scared we were going to lose the whole thing we started with. And now it doesn't mean anything. Nothing at all."
"With those three kids to bring up? Shoes and dentists and school and presents?"
"Oh, I suppose it will be something I'll have to think about. But right now I'm just... nowhere. You're sure you can fix it so I'll end up with thirty thousand clear, and you seem so sure you can make me a lot more out of that stock stuff I don't understand at all. I ought to sound grateful and pleased and delighted and so on."
"Not for my sake. Or Meyer's."
"Everybody is doing things for me. But I ran. Everybody knows that. I'm a lousy person. I don't like myself. Trav, I used to like myself well enough."
I slid off the dock and took her hand and pulled her up. "Let's walk for a while." We walked and I gave her some dreary little sermons about how never quite matching up to what you want of yourself is the basic of the human condition. She heard, but I don't know if she believed. I was trying hard to believe my own hard sell, because I kept thinking of carpets and shoats and wide wide emerald eyes and a delicately provocative little pressure of teeth against the knuckles of my stupid right hand.
Twelve
I ARRIVED IN downtown Sunnydale at nine o'clock on Monday morning and parked in the bank lot, and walked toward the Shawana River Hotel, where I had arranged to meet LaFrance in the coffee shop.
When I went into the lobby, two men in green twill uniforms moved in from either side to position themselves with an unhurried, competence between me and the glass double doors. A cricket-sized man of about sixty planted himself spread-legged in front of me and said, "Nice and easy, now. You just lay both hands atop your head. You're a big one, all right. Freddy?"
One of the others came in from behind and reached around me and patted all the appropriate pockets and places. I had recognized the sheriff's voice from having heard it over the phone. He wore a businessman's hat wadded onto the back of his head. Straight gray hair stuck out in Will Rogers style. He wore an unpressed dark suit with a small gold star in the lapel. The suit coat hung open, exposing a holstered belly gun small enough to be an Airweight. Small enough to look toylike, but in no sense a toy.
The legal papers, billfold and keys were handed to Sheriff Bunny Burgoon. From his voice I had thought he would be all belly, with porcine features. He opened the wallet, flipped through the pliofilm envelopes. He stopped at the driver's license and studied it.
"Your name Travis McGee? You can put your hands down, boy."
"That's my name."
"Now we're going on over to my office and talk some."
"Can I ask why?"
"It's my duty to tell you that you got no obligation to answer any questions 1 or any
of my officers may ask you without the presence of any attorney of your choice, and you are in your rights to request the Court appoint an attorney to represent your interests in this matter, and anything you say in response to interrogation, with or without the presence of your legal representative, may be held in evidence against you."
He had run all the words together, like a court clerk swearing a witness.
"Is there a charge?"
"Not up to this minute, boy. You're being taken in for interrogation in connection with a felony committed in the county jurisdiction."
"If I'm being taken in, Sheriff, then it is an arrest, isn't it?"
"Boy, aren't you coming along willingly and voluntarily like is the duty of any citizen to assist law officers in the pursuit of their duty?"
John D MacDonald - Travis McGee 09 - Pale Gray for Guilt Page 16