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

by Pale Gray for Guilt(lit)

  At a few minutes before eleven, Preston LaFrance came along the dock at a half lope. He looked rumpled. He hadn't shaved. He came to a lurching halt and stared up at us.

  "Doctor Mey..." It came out falsetto, so he coughed and tried again. "Doctor Meyerl"

  "Hidey, Press," I said. "How you, old buddy? Come on aboard. Ladderway up here is on the port side." He came clambering up and came over and stood beside us. We studied the chess pieces.

  "Doctor Meyer!"

  "Just Meyer," he said. "Plain old Meyer."

  "But don't you work for-"

  "Work? Who should work? I'm an economist. I live on a little cruiser that has a case of dry rot lately. If I decide to get out the tools and go to work on it, then I'll be working."

  "Then there isn't any... offer for the land?"

  We both looked up at him: "Offer?" I said.

  "Land?" said Meyer.

  "Oh Jesus, you two were in this lousy racket together. You are a stinking pair of con men. Oh Jesus God!"

  "Please!" said Meyer. "I'm trying to figure out why he moved his bishop."

  "I'm going to have you two bastards thrown in jails."

  "McGee," said Meyer, "let's finish the game after the noise stops." He stood up and leaned against the rail. Meyer in his white swim trunks reminds me a little bit of a man who is all dressed to go to a masquerade as a dancing bear. All that is left to do is put on the bear head and the collar. He stared at LaFrance? "Jail? For what?"

  "You two took a hunnert thousand dollars away from me! More than that! That Bannon place isn't worth half the mortgage on it!"

  "Mr. LaFrance," I said, "the records will show that I paid a legitimate fifteen thousand for Mrs. Bannon's equity in the Bannon Boatel, and then I turned around and sold that same equity to you for forty thousand. And I think that your banker will remember how anxious you've been to get your hands on Bannon's ten acres on the river."

  "But... but... damn it, that was because you said..." He stopped himself and took a deep breath. "Listen. Forget the forty thousand. Okay. You suckered me. But the sixty thousand I gave this man last night, that's something else again. I've got to have it back."

  "You gave me sixty thousand dollars!" Meyer said in vast astonishment. "Look. Stop standing in the sun. Get some rest."

  He stood there, blinking, clenching and unclenching his boney fists. His color was bad. He smiled what I would imagine he thought was an ingratiating and friendly smile. "You took me good, boys. Slick and perfect. You made a nice score off ol' Press LaFrance. And I guess you're not going to give it back just because I say pretty please with sugar. But you don't understand. I had to put up the Carbee option to get the sixty thousand. Now, if I had it back, I could go ahead and make my deal with Santo. That's what I got to trade with, boys. We'll draw it up legal. You'll get the sixty thousand back that you stole off me, and twenty more to sweeten the pot."

  "If I had sixty thousand," said Meyer, "would I be hanging around with such riffraff? I would be riding around in a white convertible with a beautiful woman in furs and diamonds."

  "How can you lose?" LaFrance said. "There's no way you can lose."

  "No thanks," I said. "What shape does that leave you in, buddy?"

  He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "I just plain can't afford to get left in the kind of shape I'd be in. Why I would be worse off than dead broke. I would be a mile underground, boys. I would be attached and garnisheed the rest of my natural life. I would never have dime one to call my own the rest of my days."

  "Now you know how it feels, Press."

  "How what feels?"

  "How some of the people felt who got in your way. Like Bannon."

  He peered at me. "You bleeding for Bannon? That was straight-out business. He was squattin' right in the way of progress, and he was so dumb it took him a long time to catch on, is all."

  "It would have helped him a lot if he'd had a brother-in-law on the County Commission."

  "What in the wide world is eating on you, McGee? My God, there's a whole world full of Tush Bannons stumbling around, and they get et up left and right, and that's what makes the world go 'round. I put Monk onto some good things and he owed me a favor."

  "And you and Monk let Freddy Hazzard know you'd appreciate him leaning a little hard on Bannon any chance he had?"

  "Now, we never meant anything like that!" He smiled. "You're just trying to sweat me up a little. Isn't that right? Look boys, it won't improve the deal any. Twenty more on top of the sixty is the best I can do."

  He was such a weak miserable, unsatisfying target. He still thought he was one of the good guys. I tried to reach him, just a little.

  "If you could bring in a thousand-percent profit a day, LaFrance, I wouldn't throw pocket change on the deck there in front of you. If I was on fire, I wouldn't buy water from you. I came prowling for you, LaFrance. If the thing you cared most about in the world was that face you wear, I would have changed it permanently, little by little. If your most precious possession was a beautiful wife, she'd be right down there below in the master stateroom waiting for you to leave so I could get back to her. If you juggled for a living, friend, you'd now have broken wrists and broken elbows."

  "What the hell is the matter with you?"

  "Get off the boat. Go ashore. Tush Bannon was one of the best friends I ever had. All you give a damn about is money, so that's where I hit you."

  "Best... friend?" he whispered.

  And I watched the gray appear. That gray like a wet stone. Gray for fright. Gray for guilt. Gray for despair. His mouth worked. "You... rooned me, all right. Ever'thing I worked all my life for is gone. You finished me off, McGee."

  "Wait a minute," Meyer said. "Maybe I've got an idea."

  LaFrance came to point like a good bird dog. "Yes? Yes? What?"

  Meyer smiled at him benignly. "The answer was staring us right in the face all the time. It's so simplel What you do is kill yourself!"

  LaFrance stared at him, tried to comprehend the joke, tried even to smile, but the smile fell away. Meyer's smile stayed put. But not one gleam of hunior touched Meyer's little bright blue eyes. And I do not know many people who could have stared into that smile for very long. Certainly LaFrance couldn't. In the same soft persuasion a lover might use, Meyer said, "Do yourself a favor. Go kill yourself. Then you won't even know or care if you're broke. Maybe it hurts a little, but just for a split second. Use a gun or a rope, or go jump off something high. Go ahead. Die a little."

  It is a kind of rat-frenzy I suppose, that dreadful and murderous fury of the weak ones when the door of the trap slams shut. With a mindless squalling he plunged at Meyer, long yellowed ridged thumbnails going for the meat of the eyes, knees jacking at belly and groin. The squalling and flailing and gouging lasted perhaps two and a half seconds before I clamped my forearm across his throat. I pulled him back away from Meyer, spun him and let go. He ended up against the far rail.

  Obscenities are tiresome. He kept repeating himself. I cuffed him quiet and he went down the ladderway and I helped him along the way and onto the dock.

  He stayed there perhaps three minutes. He was going to come back with a gun. He was going to bring friends. He was going to have my boat blown up. He was going to have it burned to the waterline. He was going to hire some boys from back in the swamps to come with their knives some dark night and turn us into sopranos. We were going to be awful sorry we'd ever messed with Preston LaFrance and you can by God believe it.

  His eyes bulged and his voice had hoarsened and the saliva shone on his chin. And finally he hitched up his pants and walked away. His walk was that of a man wearing new bifocals and not being very sure of how far away the ground might be. Meyer was able to stand up straight without much discomfort, and I dabbed iodine on the thumbnail gouge under his left eye. He seemed troubled, thoughtful, far away. I told him LaFrance wouldn't make any trouble. I asked him what was bothering him.

  Meyer, scowling, pinched the bridge of his nose. "
Me? Did you hear me? On the sidewalk if there is a bug, I change my step and miss him. For me the business of the hooks almost spoils fishing. Me! I don't understand it. Such a rotten anger I had, Travis! Thick in the throat like a sickness. Oh, he won't kill himself. Not that one. He'll live on and on so he can whine. But it was like changing your step to squash the bug, not flat, just a little squash so he can crawl a little bit, slow, leaking his juices. McGee, my friend, I am ashamed of that kind of anger. I am ashamed of being able to do something like that. I said to myself when I first got into your line of... endeavor, I said forgive me for saying this to you-I said I will go only so far into it. There are things McGee does that somehow hurt McGee, hurt him in the way he thinks of himself. I talked to Muggsie. This business of the pretty little woman who just somehow happened to go off with Hero, that wasn't pretty, and you were punishing something in yourself. Now I find myself a little bit less in my own eyes. Maybe this is a bad business you're in, Travis. Is there this kind of ugly anger in a man that waits for some kind of virtuous excuse? Was it there in me, waiting for a reason only? Travis, my friend, is this the little demonstration of how half the evil in the world is done in the name of honor?"

  He wanted help I couldn't give him. One does not pat a Meyer on the head and give him a lollypop. He had overturned one of the personal stones in my garden too, and I could watch leggedy things scuttling away into comforting darkness.

  I said, "You still didn't figure out why I moved my bishop."

  He sat down and fixed a total concentration on the board. He gave a little nod at last and pushed a pawn one space forward, spoiling the sequence I was planning. He pinched at the bridge of his nose again, then smiled across at me, a hairy Meyer-smile, and said, "You know, I think I must have taken some sort of a dislike to that fellow."

  Two days later, Friday afternoon, Meyer came aboard the Flush at four thirty, just after I got back from the beach. A mass of that arctic air that Canada sends down free of charge had begun to change the day a little before noon. It had come down so swiftly I knew the grove people would be worried. There were frost bulletins on all the broadcasts. An edge in the crisp northeast breeze had cleaned the long beaches of everybody except diehard Yankees and one masochistic beach bum named Travis McGee. I had been taking out all the kinks, in the muscles in both body and brain, of too many sedentary days, swimming parallel to shore, in and out of the surf line, for all the distance, endurance and occasional speed sprints I could manage. It had been hard work to even stay warm, and I had ground away at it, breaststroke, backstroke, crawl, until on my chattering lope back to the Flush I felt as if I had pulled most of the long muscles loose from the joints and sockets and hinges they were supposed to control.

  Any persistent idiot, like Hero, can strain away at the door-frame isometrics and build impressive wads of chunky fibrous muscle with which you can lift the front end of any sedan to make the girls say Oooo. But if you want the kind of muscle structure that will move you from here to there very very quickly, that will enable you to slip a punch, snatch a moving wrist, turn a fall into a shoulder roll that will put you back on the balls of your feet, balanced and ready, then you'd better be willing to endure total expenditure over long, active and dogged periods. I was going to be slowed down by time and attrition, and maybe it had begun, but not to a degree as yet for me to notice, nor to a degree to make me doubt myself-and doubt, of course, is more fatal than slowed reflexes.

  I had the heat going aboard. Meyer drank coffee and worked on his investment figures while I hotshowered the salt away, dressed in ancient, soft, treasured, threadbare checked shirt, gray Daks, and a pair of Herter's Two-Point woodsman's shoes, of oiled, hand-treated bull hide, worn to a condition as flexible and pliable as an Eskimo wife. In the shower I had begun to raise tentative voice in song, but had remembered another day, another shower, when that same song had been interrupted by a lady named Puss handing me in a well-made sample of the drink known as a McGee. So that song clogged and died, and I dressed and made the drink myself and took it into the lounge.

  Meyer looked up from his work and said, "You look grotesquely healthy Travis."

  "And your eyes look grainy, and you look tired, and how long do you have to go five days a week and sit and watch the board like a great hairy eagle?"

  "Not as long as I thought."

  "Indeed?"

  "Sit and listen. Without a glaze in the eyes, please."

  "Proceed. I'll try to understand."

  "These Fletcher Industries earnings statements. Look, accounting is flexible. There are choices. Each one is legal. However, say there are fifteen ways to handle different things to make earnings look a little bit better. So this outfit uses all fifteen, right up to the hilt. The last published quarter, it looks like they made forty percent more money than the quarter before that. I rework the statement and I come out with earnings not even flat. But down a little, even."

  "So?"

  "At fifteen dollars a share it looked as if Fletcher was a bargain for a growth stock, selling at maybe twelve times anticipated earnings for this year. So on top of that which you call the fundamental picture, then there is the technical picture of the stock in the market. This buying pressure improves the technical picture. It becomes very desirable. Big volume attracts attention. Today I saw how it was going, how it was reacting, and so I took the risk, and I committed her all the way. Here is where her account stands. She's got seventy-four hundred shares. Average cost per share is eighteen dollars. Today it closed at twenty-four and a quarter. So, right now, a short term gain of forty-six thousand dollars."

  "Of what!"

  "She holds shares worth right now a hundred and eighty thousand, less the margin account debit. The supply is shrinking and the demand is increasing. It is moving too fast. The Wall Street Journal yesterday had a statement from management saying they don't know why all the big interest in their stock all of a sudden. It got out of hand too fast. I made this projection about where it is going to go next week. I have a used crystal ball an old gypsy gave me. I say a minimum eight points next week, so it will close between thirty-two and a half and thirty-seven. Traders will grab profits and get out. Usually I would wait, buy on the correction, and ride up with it again. But we get a trading suspension, maybe an investigation of corporate books. I think they used all the accounting gimmicks they could, and then they lied a little. It went up too fast and next week will be faster. So I start moving her over into that nice one I found for her to keep."

  "You're telling me or asking me?"

  "Telling you. What else? You are the expert on pigeon drops. I am the expert on the biggest crap game in the world."

  "But you have to talk to her and explain all this."

  "I do? Why?"

  "Because she ought to come down here."

  He cocked his head. "Connie suggested?" I nodded. "I should discuss all this with her. It is only fair to her."

  "And she should sign some papers, maybe?"

  "Very important-looking documents." He scratched his chin, tugged at his potato nose. "One part of your thinking I don't understand. That lousy fellow, that LaFrance, it makes some sense he should go to Santo to see if he can get bailed out by maybe peddling him the option he's got on the Carbee land. So doesn't he mention you?"

  "If he mentioned me, it's the same as telling Santo that he was a damned fool. If he admits he's smashed and trying to salvage something; the price from Santo will go way down."

  "How can you be sure of how that idiot will react?"

  "I can't be sure. I just make my guess and live with it."

  The freeze hit low spots well to the west and north of the To-Co Groves, hit them hard enough so that all the smudge pots and airplane propeller fans and bonfires of old truck tires failed to save the dreams of a lot of the smaller growers. They expected the same on Saturday night, but the upper winds changed and a warm, moist breath began coming up from the lower Gulf and the Straits of Yucatan, moving across the peninsula from
out of the southwest, and after some unseasonable thunderstorms, the afternoon was clear and warm and bright on Sunday when Janine Bannon arrived in the car Tush and I had fixed a quarter of a year ago.

  I was watching for her, knowing when she had left the groves, and went and took her small suitcase from her and brought her aboard. She had been aboard before, when I had taken the Flush up the Shawana River, back when the Boatel was doing well, and they had told me their plans with an air of pleasure and excitement, so she knew the layout.

  She looked trim and attractive in her green suit and yellow blouse, but thinner than she should have been. The difference in her was the way the vitality had gone out of her, deadening her narrow and delicate face, making her move like a convalescent, takIng the range and lilt and expression out of her voice. Even her dark hair had lost luster, and there were deep stainings under her eyes, fine lines around her mouth.