A Tan And Sandy Silence

A Tan And Sandy Silence

John D. MacDonald

Travis McGee #13 A Tan And Sandy Silence

John D. MacDonald

In northern Manitoba a man saw a great bald eagle- hanging from its neck, teeth locked in skin and feathers, the bleached skull of a weasel.

by Jim Harrison

(From ‘A Year’s Changes’)

One

ON THE most beautiful day any April could be asked to come up with, I was kneeling in eight inches of oily water in the cramped bilge of Meyer’s squatty little cabin cruiser, the John Maynard Keynes, taking his automatic bilge pump apart for the third time in an hour.

The socket wrench slipped, and I skinned yet another knuckle. Meyer stood blocking out a sizable piece of the deep blue sky. He stared down into the bilge and said, “Very inventive and very fluent. Nice mental images, Travis. Imagine one frail little bilge pump performing such an extraordinary act upon itself! But you began to repeat yourself toward the end.”

“Would you like to crawl down in here and-” He backed up a hasty half step. “I couldn’t deprive you of the pleasure. You said you could fix it. Go ahead.”

I got it apart again. I spun the little impeller blade and suddenly realized that maybe it turned too freely. Found the set screw would take a full turn. Tightened it back down onto the shaft Reassembled the crummy little monster, bolted it down underwater, heaved myself up out of the water, sat on the edge of the hatch, and had Meyer flip the switch. It started to make a nice steady wheeeeeeng, gouting dirty bilge water into the Bahia Mar yacht basin.

Meyer started to applaud, and I told him to save it until we found out if the adorable thing would turn itself the hell off like it says in the fine print. It took a good ten minutes to pump the water out. Then it went weeeeeeng-guggle-chud. Silence.

“Now cheer,” I said.

“Hooray,” he said mildly. “Thank you very much and hooray.” I looked at him with exasperation and affection. My mild and bulky friend with the wise little blue eyes, bright and bemused, and with the bear hair, thatch black, curling out of the throat of his blue knit shirt.

“Another half inch of rain last night,” I told him, “and you could have gone down like a stone.”

He had stepped out of his bunk in the dark after the rain stopped and into ankle deep water. He had sloshed over to my houseboat, the Busted Flush, and told me he had a small problem. At three in the morning we had toted my auxiliary pump over and set it on the dock and dropped the intake hose into his bilge. His home and refuge was very low in the water, the mooring lines taut enough to hum when plucked. By first light the Keynes was floating high again, and we could turn the pump off and carry it back. Now the repaired automatic bilge pump had taken out the last of the water, but he was going to live in dampness for quite a while. “Perils of the sea,” he said.

I stepped up onto the dock and squatted and began to rinse the grease and bilge water off my hands under the hose faucet. Meyer shaded his eyes and looked toward the Flush. “You’ve got a visitor, Travis. Isn’t that what’s-his-name?”

I stood up and stared. “It sure is. Good old what’s-his-name. Harry Broll. Do you think that son of a bitch has come to try me again?”

“After the showing last time… Was it two years ago?”

“At least.”

“I think he’s at least bright enough not to try again.”

“Not the same way. But he did catch me with one very nice left. True, he broke his hand, but it was one to remember.”

“Want company?”

“No thanks.”

Harry turned and saw me when I was about fifty feet away. He was big, and he had gotten bigger since I’d seen him last. More gut and more jowls. Not becoming. He wore a pale beige suit, a yellow shirt, and he had a chocolate-colored neckerchief with an ornate, gold slip ring.

He raised his hands in the most primitive gesture of reassurance. Palms out. Sickly smile to go with it. As I came up to him he said, “Hi, McGee.” He put his hand out. I looked at it until he pulled it back. He tried to laugh. “Jesus, are you still sore?”

“I’m not sore, Harry. Why should we shake hands?”

“Look. I want to talk to you. Are you busy or anything?”

“What about?”

“About Mary. I know you’ve got no reason in the world to do me any favors. But this concerns… Mary’s well-being.”

“Is something wrong with her?”

“I don’t know. I don’t really know.”

I studied him. He seemed concerned and upset. He had the pallor of desk work. His black hair had receded since I had seen him last. He said, “I couldn’t think of anybody else to come to. I can say please if it’ll help. Please?”

“Come on aboard.”

“Thanks. Thanks a lot.”

We went into the lounge. I had on an old pair of denim shorts and nothing else. The air-conditioning cooled the sweat on my shoulders and chest. He looked around, nodding and beaming, and said, “Nice. Real nice. A nice way to live, huh?”

“Want a drink?”

“Bourbon, if you’ve got it.”

“Got it.”

“On the rocks.”

I put out the bottle and the glass and said, glancing down at my soiled hands, “Ice is in the bin there. Help yourself while I clean up, Broll.”

“Thanks. You sure keep yourself in shape, McGee. Wish I had the time. I guess I better make sure I have the time one of these days.”

I shrugged and went forward, dropped the shorts into the hamper and stepped into the oversized shower, thinking about Mary and wondering about her as I sudsed and scrubbed away the rest of the grime from the repair job. Miss Mary Dillon when I had known her. Then abruptly-maybe too abruptly-Mrs. Harry Broll. When I put my watch back on I saw that it was nearly four o’clock. Meyer and I were invited for drinks at six aboard the Jilly III. I put on fresh slacks, an oyster-white sailcloth sports shirt, my ancient Mexican sandals. On the way back to the lounge I stopped in the galley and put some Plymouth on the rocks.

He was sitting on the yellow couch, and he had lit a small cigar with a white plastic mouthpiece. “It must really be something, being able to just take off any time you feel like it.”

I slouched into a chair facing him, took a swallow of my drink, and put it on the coffee table. “You’ve got a problem, Harry?”

“About that time I made such a damn fool of myself…”

“Forget lt.”

“No. Please. Let me say something about that. Like they say, the first year of marriage is the hardest, right?”

“So they say.”

“Well, I knew you and Mary were old friends. I couldn’t help knowing that, right? I mean, you and Meyer came to the wedding and all. I wondered how good friends you had been. I couldn’t help wondering, but I didn’t want to really know. Do you understand?”

“Sure.”

“The way it happened, we got into a hassle. It was the first real one we’d had. People shouldn’t drink and fight when they’re married. They say things they don’t want to say. I started saying,some pretty ugly things about her and you. You know Mary. She’s got a lot of spirit. She took it and took it, and finally she let me have it right between the eyes. I deserved it. She blazed right up at me. She said she’d been cruising with you alone aboard this houseboat, down through the Keys and up the west coast to Tampa Bay, and she’d lived aboard for a month and cooked your food and washed your clothes and slept in your bed, and you were kind and decent and gentle and twice the man I am. So that Sunday afternoon I slammed out of the house and got in the car and came over here to beat on you. I could always handle myself pretty good. I wasn’t drunk enough for that to be any excuse. Jesus, I never hit so many arms and elbows and shoulders in my life.”

“And the top of my head.”

“That’s what popped the knuckles. Look. This knuckle is still sort of sunk in. How many times did you hit me? Do you know?”

“Sure I know. Twice.”

“Twice,” he said dolefully. “Oh, shit.”

“I waited until you ran out of steam, Harry. I waited until you got arm weary.”

He looked at me in an appraising way. “I wish I’d done more good.”

“I had a pair of sore arms. You bruised me up, Harry. And a three-day headache.”

“I guess I had to get it out of my system. Do you understand it’s still pretty hard for me to come to you to ask for anything?”

“I suppose it might be.”

“Mary kept telling me to grow up. Okay. I’m trying to grow up. I’m trying to be a mature, rational human being. Like they say I’ve been examining my priorities and my options.”

“Good for you. But where do I fit in?”

“Here’s what I want you to tell Mary.”

“But I-”

“Give me a chance. Okay? Tell her that as soon as the SeaGate project is all set up, I think we ought to get away, just the two of us. A cruise or fly over to Spain, whatever. And tell her that the Canadian girl didn’t mean a damn thing to me, that I didn’t bring her back down here or ask her down, that she came on her own. And tell her to please get in touch with me so we can talk.”

“Hold it! I don’t know where Mary is.”

His face turned red. “Don’t give me such crap. You willing to let me search this houseboat?”

“She isn’t here, you damn fool:”

“I’ll find something of hers. Clothes, lipstick, something.”

“Harry. Jesus. Look around all you want.”

He settled back in the chair. “Okay. You and Mary knew I’d come here sooner or later. So you haven’t been having your fun aboard this boat.”

“That’s called paranoia, old buddy. When did she leave you?”

“January fifth.”

I stared at him in disbelief. “This is the fourteenth day of April. You have a slow reaction time.”

“I’ve been hoping she’d come back or get in touch. Tell her how much I’ve been hoping. She caught me dead to rights. She went around the house with a face like a stone for nearly two weeks, then when I got home that Tuesday, she’d packed and left. No note, even. I went down the list of her friends and called them. It was humiliating for me.”

“I bet.”

“Now just one damn minute-”

“What makes you think she’d come to me?”

“I thought about it I mean, back in January. It seemed like the most likely thing for her to do. I spent a whole weekend hanging around here. You had… another friend. So I decided if Mary had come here, she’d found you were busy, gone someplace else.”

“She didn’t come here, Harry.”

“Not right away.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

He leaned forward. “Okay. Where were you at ten o’clock on Friday morning, April second?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea.”

“You and Mary came off this houseboat at ten that morning, and you went out to the parking lot and got into a white Ford LTD convertible with rental plates. A friend of mine happened to be here and happened to see the two of you get in and drive off. This friend followed you. You went over to the Parkway and turned south toward Miami, and he came back, and he phoned me about it.”

“Are you willing to listen a minute? Are you willing to try to listen?”

“All I know is my wife left me and she’s sleeping with you, McGee, and I’d like to see you dead.”

“The woman I was with is about Mary’s height, and her figure is just as good, at least as good as Mary’s used to be. Her hair is dark like Mary’s. The woman is an old friend. That’s her rental convertible, and it’s still out there on the lot. With her hair in a scarf and dark glasses, she was all prepared for a trip in an open car. She’s here aboard her boat. Her name is Jillian Brent-Archer. I haven’t seen Mary since the wedding. Not once, Broll. And that was better than three years ago.”

He looked at me. “You’re real cute, McGee. Jesus, you’re cute. Most of the damn fools in this world would believe you. Are you going to tell Mary what I told you to tell her, what I’ve begged you to tell her?”

“How can I, when I don’t even know…”

And the dumb little weapon came out from under his clothes somewhere, maybe from the waist area, wedged between the belt and the flab. A dumb little automatic pistol in blued steel, half-swallowed in his big, pale, meaty fist. His staring eyes were wet with tears, and his mouth was twisted downward at the corners. The muzzle was making a ragged little circle, and a remote part of my mind identified it as.25 or.32 caliber, there not being all that much difference between a quarter of an inch diameter and a third of an inch. There was a sour laugh back in another compartment of my skull. This could very possibly be the end of it, a long-odds chance of a mortal wound at the hand of a jealous husband wielding something just a little bit better than a cap gun. The ragged circle took in my heart, brain, and certain essential viscera. And I was slouched deep in a chair facing him, just a little too far away to try to kick his wrist. He was going to talk or shoot. I saw his finger getting whiter, so I knew it was shoot.

I shoved with my heels and went over backward in the chair. The weapon made a noise like somebody slapping shingles together. My left heel went numb. I rolled to my right, knocked over a small table, fielded the chunky glass ashtray on the first bounce, rolled up onto my knees, and slung it underhand at his head as he came up out of the depths of the yellow couch. I missed him shamefully, and was caught there too close to him as he aimed at the middle of my face from five feet away and tried to pull the trigger. But the slide was all the way back, the clip empty.

I got slowly up onto very wobbly knees as Harry Broil lowered the gun to his side, relaxed his hand, let it fall. My heel tingled. A slug had grooved the hard leather on the bottom of the heel. The lounge smelled like the Fourth of July.

Harry’s big face wrinkled like a slapped baby, and he took a half step toward me, arms half reaching out for comfort and forgiveness, and then he plumped back down on the couch and bellowed once, a walrus on a lonely strand.

My drink was gone, spilling when the table went over. I moved cautiously, checking myself for any area that might feel dead and damp. That is the bullet feel, dead, damp, and strange, before the torn nerves and muscles catch up and begin screaming. No such areas. I made tall careful steps into the galley, made a new drink. I went back in. Harry Broll sat with face in hands, snuffling drearily. The paper had kept me aware of him over the years. Broll plans new condominium complex. Broll given zoning board exception. Broll unveils shopping plaza concept. Chamber lauds Broll.

I sat opposite him again after putting the chair back on its legs. Looking around, I could count five ejected cartridge cases.

“How old are you, Harry?”

He sighed and mumbled it into his hands. “Thirty-five.”

“You look fifty.”

“Get off my back.”

“You’re too soft and too heavy. You sweat a lot, and you’re short of breath, and your teeth need cleaning.”

He lifted his mottled face and stared at me. “Why are you saying these things?”

“Maybe if you hadn’t gotten so sloppy, Mary could have given you a second chance. Or maybe it was already a second chance.”

“Oh, no. I don’t play around. Jesus, I haven’t had the time or the energy. This was the first time, I swear.”

“You don’t play around, and you don’t go around killing people.”

“You pushed me too far and-”

“You always carry that thing?”

“No I-”

“You brought it along in case you felt like killing me?”

“Thank God I missed you. I’m not thinking right lately. Everything would have gone down the drain. Everything.”

“It would sort of spoil my day, too.”

“You know, when a man takes a good look at himself, he begins to wonder why. You know? I’ve been pushing myself. Hard. Drinking too much, smoking too much. Late nights. Conferences. For what? Damned if I know. For the sake of winning? How did that get to seem so important? But you shouldn’t have tried to lie to me, McGee.”

“Your friend is an idiot. Mary never came near me. She hasn’t phoned me or written me. I didn’t know she’d left you. Look, I knew her a long time ago. She was at one of those crisis points in her life. She’d never met you, Harry. Never seen you, never heard your name, never knew she’d marry you. We were friends. We took a cruise down through the Keys and up the west coast, and she got things sorted out. We made love. Not for the first two weeks of the cruise. That wasn’t the purpose of it. Once all the knots and springs began to loosen up, then it seemed like a natural thing to have happen. It made pleasure. It was a way of saying hello. Nobody was a victim. She was a very sweet lady, and what I remember best is that we laughed a lot.”

“I… I have to talk to her before the thirtieth.”

“Why the deadline?”

“It’s a business thing. Some things to sign. To protect my interest in SeaGate. Of course, if I’d shot you, what difference would it make whether I kept my share of SeaGate or not?”

“Will it make a lot of difference when I sign the complaint against you?”

“Complaint?”

“Assault with a deadly weapon. Attempted homicide?”

“You wouldn’t!”

“What’s to stop me? My undying affection for you?”

He pulled himself together visibly. He wrapped up the emotions and put them on a high shelf. I could almost see the nimble brain of the entrepreneur take over. “We’ll both have versions of what happened here, McGee. I’m essentially a salesman. I think I can sell my version far easier than you can sell yours.”

“What’s your version?”

“I’ll let that come as a surprise to you.”

I could think of several variations that could leave him looking pretty good. And, of course, there was the usual problem of believability. Does one believe Harry Broll, pillar of the business community, or a certain Travis McGee, who seems to have no visible means of support, gentlemen?

“A man as shrewd as you, Harry, should realize that the guy who gave you the bad information made an honest mistake.”

“I know Mary. She’d get in touch with you.”

“Would that she had.”

“What?”

“A troubled friend is a friend in trouble. I’m right here. She could have come around, but she didn’t.”

“She made you promise not to tell where she is.”

I shook my head. “Broll, come with me. I will show you that rental convertible, and I will show you the lady who rented it and who went to Miami with me and came back with me.”

“It’s a nice try. You’ve got a lot of friends. They’d all lie for you. Every one. Think it over. Tell her what I said. She has to get in touch with me.”

We stood up. I picked up his little automatic, released the catch and eased the slide forward and handed it to him. He took it and looked at it, bounced it on his big hand, and slipped it into his side pocket. “I better get rid of it,” he said.

“If you think you might get any more quaint ideas, you better.”

“I was going to scare you. That’s all.”

I looked him over. “Harry. You did.”

“Tell her to call the office. I’m not living at home. It was too empty there.”

“If after all these years I should happen to see your wife, I’ll tell her.”

Two

MEYER CAME aboard the Busted Flush at twenty minutes to six, five minutes after Harry Broll left. He was dressed for the small festival at six o’clock aboard Jillian’s great big motor-sailer trimaran. He wore pants in a carnival awning pattern and a pink shirt that matched one of the myriad stripes in the awning

“Goodness gracious,” I said.

He put a hand on a bulky hip and made a slow 360-degree turn. “Plumage,” he said. “And have you noticed it’s spring?”

“If you’d carry a camera around your neck and walk fifty feet ahead of me, nobody would know we were together.”

“Taw,” he said. “And tush.” He went toward the bottle department, saying, “About Mr. Harry Broll…?”

“Who? Oh, yes. Of course. Mr. Broll.”

“McGee, don’t try me, please.”

“You are supposed to walk in here, and instead of giving me a fashion show, you are supposed to snuff the air, look about with darting glances. Then you are supposed to find those six cartridge cases in that ash tray and snuff at them. Then you prowl around and find where all six hit, including the one that’s hard to find. It hit right smack in the middle of my model 18 Marantz and killed it as dead as Harry tried to kill me.”

Meyer backed to the chair nearest and lowered himself into it. “Six shots?”

“Six.”

“With serious intent?”

“Damn well told.”

I explained the situation. Meyer listened, looking very troubled.

“Don’t sit there looking like an old beagle,” I told him. “Harry won’t be back.”

“Maybe somebody else will.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“Travis, are you just a littler slower than you were a few years ago? Half a step, maybe?”

“I don’t know. Probably.”

“Why should you get slower and get careless at the same time?”

“Careless?”

“Don’t try to kid yourself. You would have stumbled against him or spilled something on him and brushed it off. You would have checked him out and located the gun and taken it away from him.”

“This was just old Harry Broll.”

“And you are just old T. McGee, trying to pretend you don’t know what I’m saying. You could be on the floor with a leaking hole in your skull.”

“I can’t go around acting as if everybody was going to-”

“You used to. And you are alive. What has given you this illusion of immortality of late?”

“Lay off, Meyer.”

“Staleness? People are very good at things they are very interested in. If you lose interest, you are dead. If a Harry Broll can damned near kill you, Travis, what about somebody with a more professional attitude and background?”

“Wouldn’t I be more alert?”

“Don’t some of them look and act as innocuous as Harry Broll?”

“What are you getting at?”

“If you just go through the motions, Travis, maybe it’s time to give the whole thing up. What good is a way of life if it turns out to be fatal?”

“Are you going to support me?”

“Not a chance. Anyway, isn’t Jillian first in line?”

“Come on!”

“There are worse ways to live.”

“Several hundred thousand worse ways, Meyer, but just because Harry Broll… Consider this. Six shots in a very confined space. What’s the matter with my reaction time?”

“The trouble is that they were fired at all. He came here once to try to beat your face flat. So two years later he comes around again, and you invite him in to try his luck with a gun. What are you going to dodge next time? A satchel charge?”

“I have to depend on instinct. I did not sense any kind of murderous intent on his-”

“Then your instincts are stale. Listen. I don’t want to lose a friend. Go where I can visit once in a while. Exchange Christmas cards. Better than putting a pebble on your gravestone.”

“Just because…? ”

“Don’t talk. Think a little. And we should be going.”

I shrugged and sighed. When he gets into one of those moods, there is nothing one can do with him. He smells doom. I buttoned up the Flush, making certain my little security devices were in operation. The sun was low enough to make a yellow-orange glow across all the white gleam and brightwork of a vulgar multimillion dollars’ worth of seagoing toys. Hundreds of millions, in truth. As we walked over I saw the sixty-plus feet of a big new Bertram, grumbling, bubbling, sliding elegantly into a slip. Six thousand dollars a foot. It doesn’t take too many of those, too many Matthews, Burgers, Trumpys, Huckins, Rybovitches, and Strikers, to make a row of zeros to stun the mind.

I stopped and leaned my crossed arms atop a cement piling and looked down at a rainbow sheen of oil on twilight waters.

“What’s the matter now?” asked Meyer.

“Harry is right, you know.”

“To try to kill you?”

“Very funny. He’s right about Mary getting in touch. I get the feeling she would. Emotional logic. The last time her world ruptured, I helped her walk it off, talk it off, think it off.”

“So maybe she had enough and said the hell with it.”

“She is one stubborn lady. Harry is no prize. She married him a little too fast. But she would really bust a gut to make the marriage work. She wouldn’t quit. She wouldn’t run.”

“Unless he did something that she just couldn’t take. Maybe it got to her gag reflex. Wouldn’t she run then?”

“Yes. I guess so. And maybe she’s a stronger person than she was back when I knew her. All Harry said was that he had gotten mixed up with some Canadian girl, a first offense. I know that wouldn’t make Mary give any ringing cheers. But I think she’s human enough to know it wouldn’t be the end of the world or the marriage. Well, he has to locate her before the end of April, or he has big business problems.”

“Hmm?”

“Something about signing something so he can keep his interest in SeaGate, whatever the hell that is.”

“It’s a planned community up in the northeast corner of Martin County, above Hobe Sound where there’s no A-1-A running along the beach. It’s a syndicate thing, way too big for anybody like Broll to swing by himself!”

“How do you know all that stuff?”

“There was a feature story about planned communities in the Wall Street Journal a month ago. The local papers have had articles about it for over a year. I believe Newsweek had a-”

“Truce. Could a guy like Broll do well in a deal like that?”

“Depends. The ownership structure would be the important consideration.”

“Could you find out where he fits and how, and why Mary would have to sign something?”

“I imagine I could. But why?”

“Harry’s nerves are bad. He looks bad. He has a money orientation. If he misses out on large money because Mary runs and hides and won’t sign, it somehow doesn’t sound like Mary. It would be a cheap shot and a dumb shot. She isn’t dumb. Whether she stays with him or leaves him, it would be better for him to have money. She’s been gone for two months. If he was so certain she’d run to me, where has he been for two months? Time is running out in two weeks. So he comes around with shaking hands and a sweaty shirt and a couple of places he missed while shaving. Time is running out not on the marriage, on the money. It makes me wonder.”

“I’ll look into it,” he said as we walked.

End of discussion. We had arrived at the area where they park the showboats, the ones too big to bring around inside, and thus have to leave them on the river, not far from the fuel pumps, where two out of every three Power Squadron types who cruise by can whap them against the cement with their curling wash. The Jilly III is a custom motorsailer trimaran out of St. Kitts, owned by Jillian, the widow of Sir Henry Brent-Archer. It is seventy feet long with a beam that has to be close to fifty feet. It rides a bad sea with all the stability of a brick church. Minimal superstructure to emphasize an expanse of teak deck as big as a tennis court, with more than half of it shaded by the big colorful awning tarp her crew of three always strings up as soon as they are at dockside.

The bar table was positioned, draped in white damask. A piano tape was playing show tunes with muted discretion over the stereo system I’d helped her buy the last time she was in Lauderdale. There were a dozen guests assembled, three conversational groups of elegant folk sipping the very best booze from the most expensive glasses. Jilly saw us approaching the little gangplank and came a-striding, beaming, to welcome us aboard.

A lady of unguessable years, who made damned well certain she gave you no clues at all. If she turned up as a Jane Doe, DOA, traffic, a hasty coroner could not be blamed for penciling in-the apparent age as plus or minus twenty-seven. Tall, slender brunette of such careful and elegant grooming, such exquisitely capped teeth, it seemed safe to assume she was in some area of entertainment. But she had such a much better tan and better physical condition than most show business people, one might safely guess her to be, perhaps, a model for beachwear? A lead in a commercial water ballet?

But a coroner less hasty, more sophisticated, who searched the scalp and elsewhere for the faintest of traces left by superb Swiss surgeons, who slipped the tinted plastic lenses off and studied the eyes closely as well as the backs of the hands, base of the throat, ankles, wrists… He might add a quotient of years in direct ratio to his quality of observation and his experience.

Jilly had a lively and animated face peering out from the careless spill of black hair, all bright questing eyes, black brows, big nose, broad and generous mouth. Ever since I had known Jilly, her voice had cracked like that of a boy in early adolescence, changing from the piercing, songbird clarity of the Irish upperclass countryside to a burring baritone honk and back again. It was so effective it seemed contrived. But a small sailboat had foundered one night in a bad sea, and she had clung to a channel buoy, permanently spraining her vocal cords shouting at the boat traffic until finally she was heard and she and her injured friend were rescued.

“Meyer!” she cried. “My word, darling! You’re of a surpassing radiance. Travis dear, what happened to him? Did he molt or something?” She linked her arms through ours and croaked, “Come on, dears. Meet the ones you don’t know and get smashed soon as you can because I am gallons ahead of you.”

The introductions were made. Jillian slipped away to greet more guests. We drank. The sun went down. The night breeze was gentle but cool, and ladies put their wraps back on. The party lights strung from the rigging were properly dim, flatteringly orange. The buffet materialized, as if the table had risen up out of the teak. The music tape was more lively, the volume louder than before.

I found myself inadvertently paired with a smallish, withered Englishwoman with a shrunken face the color of weak tea and hair dyed the color of raspberry ice. A Mrs. Ogleby. I had seen Meyer talking to her towering and cadaverous husband, pumping him about the latest Common Market difficulties. We carried our buffet plates forward where she could sit on a narrow sheltlike bench built out from the bow where the rail was solid. I sat crosslegged on the deck with my plate atop the massive bow cleat.

“I understand that you are one of dear Jillian’s very favorite Americans, Mr. McGee.”

She managed to load the comment with sweetly venomous insinuation. I beamed up at her. “And she’s one of my favorite foreigners.”

“Really! How terribly nice for her. Actually Geoffrey and I were old friends of poor Sir Henry long before he married Jillian.”

“Then Jillian isn’t one of your favorite people, eh?”

She clinked her fork against the plate and leaned forward and peered down at me. “Whatever gave you such an odd idea? She is very dear. Very dear to both of us.”

“I knew Sir Henry, too.”

“Really! I wouldn’t have thought you would have known him.”

I was a houseguest at St. Kitts for a few weeks.“

“But that would have been after he was quite ill, I take it.” Her smile was thin and knowing in the light of the nearby party lantern. A truly poisonous little woman.

“No. As a matter of fact, Mrs. Ogleby, Henry and I swam our three miles every morning, went riding or sailing every afternoon, and played chess every evening.”

She paused and regrouped. “Before he became ill, Sir Henry had really fantastic energies. How strange we all thought it that he would marry someone that young, after being a widower so long. It seemed odd. But, of course, that was so awfully long ago it is rather difficult to think of Jillian as-”

“Just think of me, dears, no matter how difficult it may be,” said Jilly. “Hmmm. What is this you have, Lenore? I didn’t see it at all. May I? Mmmm… Shrimp, and what a deliciously fiery sauce! Difficult to think of me as what, Lenore darling?”

When Mrs. Ogleby hesitated, I said, “She was about to pinpoint the date when you and Sir Henry were married.”

“Were you, dear? It slips my mind, you know. Was it just before or just after that fuss with the Spanish Armada?”

“Don’t be absurd! I was only-”

“You were only being Lenore, which is part of the trouble, isn’t it? Travis, I was married to Henry long long ago. Matter of fact, I was but three years old at the time, and most of the people in the church thought it was some sort of delayed christening. There was talk that it was an unwholesome relationship, but by the time I was fourteen-eleven years later-I looked twenty, and everyone said that it had probably been all for the best. And it was, of course. Lenore, you seem to be finished. Dear, come with me and show me just where you found the shrimp, will you please?”

“But if there is any left, it should be quite obvi-”

“Lenore!”

“Quite. Of course. I shall be happy to show you, my dear Jillian.”

“I knew it would make you happy to have a chance to be nice to me, Lenore.”

Off they went. Old friends, smiling and chattering.

Twenty minutes later as I was moving away from the bar with some Wild Turkey straight, instead of brandy, Jilly intercepted me and moved me into relative shadow.

“Travis, if you are a truly thoughtful and understanding man, you have your toothbrush hidden away on your person.”

“I had the idea the party girl would need her eight hours.”

“Have a little mercy, dear. There’s but one way to settle down from this sort of bash. You shall divert me.

“I can leave and then come back. You know. Like a house call.”

“Is its tender little romantical pride bruised because the party girl thinks lovemaking is therapeutic? To say nothing of being a hell of a lot of fun. Just stay on, dear. Stay by me. Smile like a tomcat with a little yellow feather caught in his whiskers, and soon now we can smile them off and sing out our merry farewells.”

“Giving Lenore more food for thought?”

“Thought? Christ, that poisonous bitch doesn’t think. She slanders, because she has her own terrible hunger she can’t ease in any way. She burns in fire, my darling, and hates and hates and hates. Poor thing. Brace yourself, pet. I want you horribly.”

Three

I DRIFTED in and out of a placid and amiable doze. Water slapped the triple hulls, whispering lies about how big the seas could really get. I cocked an eye at an upward angle at the battery digital clock fastened to the bulkhead over Jillian’s bed. Watched 4:06 turning magically to 4:07. There was a single light on in her stateroom, a rose-colored globe of frosty glass, big as a cantaloupe, standing next to its twin reflection in the dressing table mirror.

It was warm in her stateroom, not unpleasantly so, just enough to leave a humid dew, rosy highlights on our entangled flesh, sprawled and spent, atop a wrinkled dampness of custom sheets in a pattern of green vines with yellow leaves against white.

Jilly lay oddly positioned, her upper torso diagonally across my chest, face in a pillow, cheek against my right shoulder, her slack right arm hooked around my neck. Her long tanned legs were sprawled down there, off to my left. My right arm was pinned, but my left arm was free, my hand resting on the small of her back.

I traced the velvet geographies of that small concave area of the country of Jilly and then made a coin-sized circle of fingernails and thumbnail and made a slow circling motion against her there, a circle as big as a teacup. In time the pattern of her breathing changed. She shifted. She exhaled through slack rubbery lips, making a sound like a small horse.

“Is someone mentioning my name?” she said in a sleepy voice.

“Pure telepathy.”

She raised her head, clawed her hair out of the way, and peered up at the clock. “Gawd! What year is it? Don’t tell me.”

She heaved herself up, tugging her arm out from under my neck. She sat up and combed her hair back with the fingers of both hands, yawning widely as she did so. She shook and snapped her head back, settled her hair, then curled her limber legs under her and smiled down at me. “Been awake long, Travis?”

“Off and on.”

“Thinking? About what?”

I hitched myself higher on the pillows. “Random things. This and that.”

“Tell me about them.”

“Let me think back. Oh, I was wondering how it’s possible to make this bed up. It’s shaped to fit perfectly into the curves of this middle hull right up at the bow and-”

“There are little lever things on the legs down there, and when you push them down, then you can roll the bed back and make it up. You certainly think about fascinating things.”

“Then I heard a motor go on, and I was wondering if it was a bilge pump or a refrigeration compressor or-”

“You are trying to be tiresome. Didn’t you think about what I asked you?”

“Maybe I did. A little bit. Like wondering why it has to be me.”

“If one could know why a person settles upon a particular person, one would know one of the mysteries, wouldn’t one? I think it was because of four years ago. I think it started then.”

A friend of a friend had put Sir Henry Brent-Archer in touch with me. A problem of simple extortion. I had gone down to the British Virgins and spent three weeks at their spacious and lovely home and found exactly the right way to pry the two-legged lamprey loose, file its sharp teeth off, and send it unhappily on its way. And during the three weeks I had become ever more sensuously aware of Sir Henry’s handsome and lively wife. She made sure of that awareness.

“Because I kept it from starting?”

“Was I all that distasteful to you, my darling?”

“Not you. The situation. I liked Sir Henry. In spite of the fact I was working for him on a special problem, I was still a guest in his home. In a man’s home you live by his code. It does not have to be typed out and glued to the guest suite door. He did not want me to kick his dogs, overwork his horses, bribe his servants, read his diary, filch his silverware, borrow his toothbrush, or lay his wife. I accepted the obligation when I moved in.”

She snickered. “Would you believe that was the only time in the years I was his wife that I ever tried to be naughty?”

“There’s no reason not to believe it.”

“I was very grateful to Sir Henry. He came along at just the right time in my life. My whole dreadful family was sliding into the pit, and through him I could save them, so I snatched him up quickly. I liked him well enough for half the marriage, liked him a great deal for the rest of it, and started loving him after he was buried. Anyway, on that stupid night I lay and listened to my heart going bump, bump, bump. Then I got up and drenched myself with that lovely scent and put on the little froth of nightgown and crept through the night like a thief and slipped into your bed. And suddenly got lifted out bodily, carried to the door, given a great whack across my bare behind, and shoved out into the hall. I did not know whether to laugh or cry. I did both.”

“It was closer than you’ll ever know, Jilly.”

“So it’s you, dear man. The chosen. Relax and enjoy it. Why not?- Am I trying to nail you down permanently? Of course, but through your own choice and decision. I give you full disclosure, dear. I have something over eight hundred thousand pounds, carefully managed by nice little Swiss elves. The income is about a hundred and fifty thousand of your dollars a year, and taxes take hardly any. There is the lovely house with the beach, the bay, and the view, and the boats and cars and horses. I am not exactly a junior miss, but I work very hard at myself, and I come from healthy stock. I suspect I shall go on about the same for years and years and years and suddenly one morning wake up as a shriveled, cackling little old witch. All I ask of you is that you come back home with me, darling. Be my houseguest. Be my love. We laugh at the same things. We enjoy the same things. Last trip and this trip we’ve certainly established… physical compatibility. Darling, please! We’ll travel when you want to and go where you want to go. We’ll be with people when you want to, and they will be the people you want to be with. Please!”

“Jilly, you are a dear and lovely lady-”

“But! I know, dammit. But! Why not? Do you even know?”

I knew but did not want to tell her. You see many such couples around the yacht clubs and bath clubs and tennis clubs of the western world. The man, a little younger or a lot younger that the moneyed widow or divorcee he has either married or is traveling with. The man is usually brown and good at games, dresses youthfully and talks amusingly. But he drinks a little too much. And completely trained and conditioned, he is ever alert for his cues. If his lady unsnaps her purse and frowns down into it, he at once presents his cigarettes, and they are always her brand. If she has her own cigarettes, he can cross twenty feet in a twelfth of a second to snap the unwavering flame to life, properly and conveniently positioned for her. It takes but the smallest sidelong look of query to send him in search of an ashtray to place close to her elbow. If at sundown she raises her elegant shoulders a half inch, he trots into the house or onto the boat or up to the suite, to bring back her wrap. He knows just how to apply her suntan oil, knows which of her dresses have to be zipped up and snapped for her. He can draw her bath to the precise depth and temperature which please her. He can give her an acceptable massage, brew a decent pot of coffee, take her phone messages accurately, keep her personal checkbook in balance, and remind her when to take her medications. Her litany is: Thank you, dearest. How nice, darling. You are so thoughtful, sweetheart

It does not happen quickly, of course. It is an easy life. Other choices, once so numerous, disappear. Time is the random wind that blows down the long corridor, slamming all the doors. And finally, of course, it comes down to a very simple equation. Life is endurable when she is contented and difficult when she is displeased. It is a training process. Conditioned response.

“I’m used to the way I live,” I told her.

“The way you live,” she said. With brooding face she reached and ran gentle fingertips along the deep, gullied scar in my thigh, then leaned, and touched the symmetrical dimple of the entrance wound of a bullet. She hunched closer to me, bent, and kissed the white welt of scar tissue that is nearly hidden by the scruffy, sun-faded hair at my temple. “The way you live, Travis. Trying to trick the tricky ones. Trying to make do with bluff and smiles and strange lies. Filching fresh meat right out of the jaws of the sharks. For how long, dear, before finally the odds go bad and the luck goes bad once and for all?”

“I’m sly.”

“Not sly enough. Maybe not quick enough anymore. I think you’ve been doing it for too long, darling. Too many years of getting things back for silly, careless people who should not have lost them in the first place. One day some dim little chap will come upon you suddenly and take out a gun and shoot you quite dead.”

“Are you a witch? Do you so prophesy?”

She fell upon me, hugged me tight. “Ah no, dear. No. You had all the years when that was the thing you had to do. Now the years belong to me. Is it such a sickening fate you can’t endure the thought of it?”

“No, Jilly. No, honey. It’s just that…”

“Give us a month. No. One week. One insignificant little week. Or else.”

“Or else?”

She burrowed a bit, gently closed her teeth onto the upper third of my left ear, then released it. “I have splendid teeth and very strong jaw muscles. If you say no, I shall set my teeth into your ear and do my best to tear it right off your head, darling.”

You just might at that.“

You love to bluff people. Try me.“

“No, thank you. One week.”

She took a deep breath and let it out. “Lovely! Time in transit doesn’t count, of course… Can we leave… day after tomorrow?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why don’t you know?”

“I just found out that an old friend might be in trouble. It just seems to me that if she was in trouble, she’d come to me.”

Ally wiggled and thrust away from me and sat up. “She?”

“Frowning makes wrinkles.”

“So it does. She?”

“A respectable married lady.”

“If she’s so respectable, how is it she knows you?”

“Before she was married.”

“And I suppose you had an affair with her.”

“Gee, honey. I’d have to look it up.”

I caught her fist about five inches from my eye. “You bahstid,” she said.

“Okay. An affair. A mad, wild, glorious liaison which kept us in an absolute frenzy of passion.”

Her look was enigmatic. “You are perfectly right, of course, darling. It is none of my business. What’s she like? I mean, what physical type?”

“In general, a lot like you, Jilly. Tall, slender brunette. Dark hair, takes a good tan. Long legs, short waisted. She would be… twenty-eight or -nine by now. Back when I knew her, she didn’t race her motor the way you do. More of a placid, contented person. She really enjoyed cooking and scrubbing and bed-making. She could sleep ten or twelve hours a night.”

“You damned well remember every detail, don’t you?”

I smiled up into her leaning, earnest face-a small face but strong of feature in the black, bedsnarled dangle of hair. I looked at her limber, brown body in the rose glow of the lamp ten feet away, noting the way the deep tan above and below her breasts decreased in ever more pallid horizontal stripes and shadings down to that final band of pale and pure white which denoted her narrowest bikini top.

“Why are you laughing at me, you dull sod?”

“Not at you, Lady Jillian.”

“I am not Lady Jillian. That usage is improper. If you are not laughing at, then you are laughing with. And if you are laughing with, why is that I am not amused?”

“But you are, darling.”

She tried to keep her mouth severe but lost the battle, gave a rusty honk of laughter, and flung herself upon me.

“I can’t stay angry with you, Travis. You promised me a week. But I’ll punish you for that dark-haired lady.”

“How?”

“On our way to St. Kitts there will be at least one day or night when we’ll spend hour after hour quartering into an ugly, irregular chop.”

“I don’t get seasick.”

“Nor do I, my love. It would spoil it if either of us became ill.”

“Spoil what?”

“Dear man, when the chop is effective, one cannot stay on this bed. You are lifted up, and then the bed and the hull drop away from you, and when you are on your way down, the bed comes up and smacks you and boosts you into the air again. It is like trying to post on a very bad horse. When that happens, dear, you and I are going to be right here, making love. We’ll see how well you satisfy a lady in mid-air. I shall have you tottering about, wishing you’d never met Mrs. Whatever.”

“Mrs. Broll. Mary Broll. Mary Dillon Broll.”

“You think she should have come to you if she’s in trouble? Isn’t that a little patronizing and arrogant?”

“Possibly.”

“What sort of trouble?”

“Marriage trouble. Her husband cheated, and she caught him at it and left him back in January.”

“Good Lord, why should she come galloping to you?”

“It’s an emotional problem, and when she had one sort of like it years ago, we got together, and she worked her way out of it.”

“And fell in love with you?”

“I think that with Mary there would have to be some affection before there could be anything.”

“You poor dumb beast. You’re so obvious.”

“What do you mean?”

“You can’t for the life of you comprehend why she doesn’t come scuttling back to Dr. McGee’s free and famous clinic. Your pride is hurt, dear. I suspect she’s found some other therapist.”

“Even if she had, I think she’d have let me know the marriage had soured. I get the feeling something happened to her.”

She yawned and stretched. “Let me make one thing abundantly clear, as one of your grubby little political types says or used to say. Once we have our design for living, if we have any doleful visits from one of your previous patients, my dear, I shall take a broom to them and beat them through the garden gate and down the drive.”

“Don’t you think you ought to type all these rules up and give me three copies?”

“You’re so damned defensive! Good Christ, am I some sort of dog’s dinner?”

“You are a lively, sexy, lovely, sexy, well-dressed, sexy, amusing, sexy, wealthy, sexy widow lady.”

“And some very tidy and considerate men come flocking around. Men with all the social graces and very good at games. Not knuckly, scabrous, lazy, knobbly old ruins like you, McGee.”

“So grab one of those tidy and considerate ones.”

“Oh, sure. They are lovely men, and they are so anxious to please me. There’s the money, and it makes them very jumpy and nervous. Their hands get cold and damp. If I frown, they look terrified. Couldn’t you be more anxious to please me, dear? Just a little bit?”

“Like this, you mean?”

“Well… I didn’t exactly mean that… I meant in a more general sense… but… now that you bring it up… God, I can’t remember now what I did mean… I guess I meant this. Yes, darling. This.”

The narrow horizontal ports above the custom bed let a cold and milky morning light into the stateroom at the bow of the center hull of the Jilly III. As I looked up, 6:31 became 6:32. Jillian’s small round rump, her flesh warmer than mine, was thrust with a domestic coziness into my belly. My chin rested against the crown of her head. Her tidy heft had turned my left arm numb. My right h d lay upon the sweet inward curve of her waist.

Worse fates, I thought. A life with Ally BrentArcher wouldn’t be dull. Maybe it is time for the 0lands. In spite of all good intentions, all nervo’s concern, all political bombast, my dirty two-legged species is turning the lovely southeast coast into a sewer. On still days the stinking sky is bourbon brown, and in the sea there are only the dwindling runty fish that can survive in that poisoned brew.

It happens slowly, so you try not to notice it. You tell yourself it happens to be a bad day, that’s all. The tides and the winds will scrub it all clean. But not clean enough anymore. One life to live, so pop through the escape hatch, McGee. Try the islands. Damned few people can escape the smudge and sludge, the acids and stenches, the choking and weeping. You have to take care of yourself, man.

Nobody else is going to. And this deft morsel, curled sleeping against you, is a first-class ticket for all of the voyage you have left. Suppose you do have to do some bowing and scraping and fetching. Will it kill you? Think of what most people have to do for a living. You’ve been taking your retirement in small installments whenever you could afford it. So here’s the rest of it in her lovely sleep. The ultimate social security.

I eased my dead arm out from under her and moved away. She made a sleep-whine of discontent. I covered her with the big colorful sheet, dressed, turned out the rosy light, and made sure the main hatchway locked behind me when I left.

Back aboard the Flush I put on swim trunks and a robe to keep me warm in the morning chill. The sun was coming up out of the sea when I walked across the pedestrian bridge over the highway and down onto the public beach. Morning birds were running along the wet sand, pecking and fleeing from the wash of the surf. An old man was jogging slowly by, his face in a clench of agony. A fat girl in a brown dress was looking for shells.

I went in, swam hard, and rested, again and again, using short bursts of total energy. I went back to the Flush and had a quart of orange juice, four scrambled eggs along with some rat cheese from Vermont, and a mug of black coffee.

I fell asleep seven and a half inches above my oversized bed in the master stateroom, falling toward the bed, long gone before I landed.

Four

THURSDAY, WHEN I got up a little before noon, the remembered scene with Harry Broll and his little gun seemed unreal. Six loud whacks, not loud enough to attract the curious attention of people on the neighboring craft. The Flush had been buttoned up, the air-conditioning on. No slug had gone through glass.

I found where five had hit. At last I spotted the sixth one in the overhead. It had hit tumbling and sideways and had not punched itself all the way out of sight, so by elimination it was the one that had grooved the leather sole of my sandal and nummed my heel.

I had rolled to my right after going over backward in the chair. It gave me the chance to kick a small table over, creating more distraction and confusion, and it also forced him, being right-handed, to bring his arm across his body to aim at me, which is more difficult than extending the arm out to the side. Two into the deck, one into the chair, one into the table, one into the overhead, and one into my stereo amplifier.

So maybe the clip held six, and he had not jacked one into the chamber until he got to the parking lot at the marina. If he’d put one in the chamber and filled the clip all the way, there would have been one left for the middle of my face.

Dead then or a long time in the institutional bed with the drains in place and the pain moving around under the sedatives like a snake under a blanket.

Don’t give yourself any credit, Mr. Travis McGee. The fates could have counted to seven just as easily. You had an easy shot at him with the ashtray, but your hand was sweaty and the fingertips slipped. You missed badly.

Meyer could be right. I had depended on instinct. It had been my instinct that Harry Broll had not come to kill me. Then he had done his best, and I had lucked out. So was instinct becoming stale? When it stopped being a precision tool, when it ceased sending accurate messages up from the atavistic, animal level of the brain, I was as vulnerable as if sight or hearing had begun to fail. If soft, sloppy, nervous Harry Broll could almost do me in with a pop gun, my next meeting with professional talent could be mortal.

There was another dimension to it. Once I started doubting my survival instinct, I would lose confidence in my own reactions. A loss of confidence creates hesitations. Hesitation is a fatal disease-for anyone in the salvage business.

There are worse careers than houseguest. Or pet gopher.

Too much solitary introspection started to depress me. I was ready for Geritol and cortisone.

I pulled all the plugs and connections on the Marantz and lugged its considerable weight all the way to where I’d parked Miss Agnes, my ancient and amiable old blue Rolls pickup. I drove over to town to Al’s Musicade. He is lean, sour, and knowledgeable. He does not say much. He took it out back himself and found bench space in his busy service department. I watched him finger the hole in the front of it. He quickly loosened the twelve Phillips screws that hold the top perforated plate down, lifted it off, found more damage, reached in with two fingers, and lifted out the deformed slug. “Somebody didn’t like the programing?”

“Bad lyrics.”

“Week from today?”

“Loaner?”

“Got a Fisher you can use.”

We walked out front, and he lifted it-off the rack a used one in apparently good condition. He made a note of the serial number and who was taking it out.

I put the borrowed amplifier on the passenger seat beside me and went looking for Harry Broll’s place of business. I had seen it once and had a general idea where to find it. I had to ask at a gas station. It was west of Lauderdale, off Davie Road, over in an industrial park in pine and palmetto country. All of it except the office itself was circled by high hurricane fencing with slanted braces and three strands of barbed wire on top. There was a gate for the rail spur and a truck and equipment gate. I could see a central mix concrete plant, a block plant, big piles of sand, gravel, and crushed stone.

I could see warehouses, stacks of lumber, piles of prestressed concrete beams, and a vehicle park and repair area. This was a Thursday at one thirty in the afternoon, and I could count only ten cars. Four of those were in front of the office. The office was a long, low concrete-block building painted white with a flat roof. The landscaped grass was burned brown, and they had lost about half the small palm trees planted near the office.

There were too many trucks and pieces of equipment in the park. It looked neat enough but sleepy. BROLL ENTERPRISES, Inc. But some of the big plastic letters had blown off or fallen off. It said: ROLL E TERP ISES, Inc.

I cruised slowly by I was tempted to turn around and go back and go in and see if Harry was there and try once more to tell him I’d had no contact whatsoever with Mary for over three years. But he was going to believe what emotions told him,to believe.

I wondered how Meyer was doing, using his friends in the banks, brokerage houses, and investment houses to find out just how sweaty Harry Broll might be. The tight-money times and the over-building of condominiums and the pyramiding costs had busted quite a few able fellows lately. Harry probably hadn’t come through that bad period without some ugly bruises. I could tell Meyer how idle Broll’s place of business looked, if he hadn’t found out already.

When I got back to Bahia Mar, Meyer was still missing. I felt restless. I set up the Fisher, hooked up the tape decks, turntables, and the two sets of speakers. It checked out all right. I turned it off and paced. The itch you can’t quite reach. Familiar feeling. Like the name you can’t quite remember.

I looked up the number for Broll Enterprises and phoned. The girl answered by reciting the number I’d just dialed.

“Maybe you can help me, miss. I’m trying to get a home address for Mrs. Harry Broll.”

“In what regard, please.”

“Well, this is the Shoe Mart, and it was way back in November we special-ordered a pair of shoes for Mrs. Broll. It took so long she’s under no obligation to take them, but they’re more a classic than a high-style item, so I figure she probably wants them, but I been drawing a blank on the home phone number, so I thought maybe they moved or something.”

“Will you hold on a moment, please?”

I held. It took her about a minute and a half. “Mr. Broll says that you can deliver them here to the office. Do you know where we are?”

“Sure. Okay. Thanks. It’ll probably be tomorrow.” I hung up, and once again, to make sure, I dialed the home phone number for Harry Broll, 21 Blue Heron Lane.

“The number you have dialed is not in service at this time.”

I scowled at my phone. Come on, McGee. The man is living somewhere. Information has no home number for him. The old home number is on temporary disconnect. The new number of wherever he’s living must be unlisted. It probably doesn’t matter a damn where he’s living. It’s the challenge.

Okay. Think a little. Possibly all his mail is directed to the business address. But some things have to be delivered. Booze, medicine, automobiles. Water, electricity… cablevision?

The lady had a lovely voice, gentle and musical and intriguingly breathy. “l could track it down more quickly, Mr. Broll, if you could give me your account number.”

“I wish I could. I’m sorry, miss. I don’t have the bill in front of me. But couldn’t you check it by address? The last billing was sent to 21 Blue Heron Lane. If it’s too much trouble, I can phone you tomorrow. You see, the bill is at my home, and I’m at the office.”

“Just a moment, please. Let me check the cross index.”

It took a good five minutes. “Sorry it took me so long,” she said.

“It was my fault, not having my account number, miss.”

“Broll. Bee-are-oh-el-el. Harry C.?”

“Correct.”

“And you said the bill went where?”

“To 21 Blue Heron Lane. That’s where I used to live.”

“Gee, Mr. Broll, I don’t understand it at all. All billing is supposed to be mailed to Post Office box 5150.”

“I wonder if I’ve gotten a bill that belongs to someone else. The amount doesn’t seem right either.”

“You should be paying $6.24 a month, sir. For the one outlet. You were paying more, of course, for the four outlets at Blue Heron Lane before you ordered the disconnect.”

“Excuse me, but does your file show where I am getting the one-outlet service? Do you have the right address?”

“Oh, yes sir. It’s 8553 Ocean Boulevard, apartment 42 I’ve got the installation order number. That is right, isn’t it?”

“Yes. That’s right. But I think the billing is for eleven dollars and something.”

“Mr. Broll, please mail the bill back in the regular envelope we send out, but in the left bottom corner would you write Customer Service, Miss Locklin?”

“I will do that. I certainly appreciate your kindness and courtesy, Miss Locklin.”

“No trouble, really. That’s what we’re here for.”

Four o’clock and still no Meyer, so I went out and coaxed Miss Agnes back to life and went rolling on up Ocean Boulevard. I kept to the far right lane and went slowly because the yearly invasion of Easter bunnies was upon us, was beginning to dwindle, and there was too little time to enjoy them. They had been beaching long enough so that there were very few cases of lobster pink. The tans were nicely established, and the ones who still burned had a brown burn. There are seven lads to every Easter bunny, and the litheness and firmness of the young ladies gamboling on the beach, ambling across the highway, stretching out to take the sun, is something to stupefy the senses. It creates something which is beyond any of the erotic daydreams of traditional lust, even beyond that aesthetic pleasure of looking upon pleasing line and graceful move.

It is possible to stretch a generalized lust, or an aesthetic turn of mind, to encompass a hundred lassies-say five and a half tons of vibrant and youthful and sun-toned flesh clad in about enough fabric to half fill a bushel basket. The erotic imagination or the artistic temperament can assimilate these five and a half tons of flanks and thighs, nates and breasts, laughing mouths arid bouncing hair and shining eyes, but neither lust nor art can deal with a few thousand of them. Perceptions go into stasis. You cannot compare one with another. They become a single silken and knowledgeable creature, unknowable, a thousand-legged contemptuous joy, armored by the total ignorance of the very young and by the total wisdom of body and instinct of the female kind. A single cell of the huge creature, a single entity, one girl, can be trapped and baffled, hurt and emptied, broken and abandoned. Or to flip the coin, she can be isolated and cherished, wanted and needed, taken with contracts and ceremonies. In either case the great creature does not miss the single identity subtracted from the whole any more than the hive misses the single bee. It goes on in its glistening, giggling, leggy immortality, forever replenished from the equation of children plus time, existing every spring, unchangingly and challengingly invulnerable-an exquisite reservoir called Girl, aware of being admired and saying “Drink me!,” knowing that no matter how deep the draughts, the level of sweetness in the reservoir remains the same forever.

There are miles of beach, and there were miles of bunnies along the tan Atlantic sand. When the public beach ended I came to the great white wall of high-rise condominiums which conceal the sea and partition the sky. They are compartmented boxes stacked high in sterile sameness. The balconied ghetto. Soundproof, by the sea. So many conveniences and security measures and safety factors that life at last is reduced to an ultimate boredom, to the great decisions of the day-which channel to watch and whether to swim in the sea or the pool. I found 8553. It was called Casa de Playa and was spray-creted as wedding cake-white as the rest of them. Twelve stories, in the shape of a shallow C, placed to give a maximum view of the sea to each apartment even though the lot was quite narrow. I had heard that raw land along there was going at four thousand a foot. It makes an architectural challenge to take a two-hundred-foot lot which costs eight hundred thousand dollars and cram 360 apartments onto it, each with a view, and retain some elusive flavor of spaciousness and elegance.

Economics lesson. Pay eight hundred thou for the land. Put up two hundred thousand more for ylte preparation, improvement, landscaping, covured parking areas, swimming pool or pools. Put up a twelve-story building with 30 apartments on each of the floors from the second through the eleventh and 15 penthouse apartments on top. You have 315 apartments. The building and the apartrnent equipment cost nine million. So you price them and move them on the basis that the higher lit the air they are and the bigger they are, the ntore they cost. All you have to do is come out with about a thirty-three hundred net on each apartrttent on the average after all construction expanses, overhead expenses, and sales commissions, and you make one million dollars, and you are a btuiden millionaire before taxes.

But if the apartments are retailing at an average tarly thousand each and you sell off everything in that building except ten percent of the apartments. Own instead of being a million bucks ahead, you are two hundred thousand in the red. It is deceptively simple and monstrously tricky. Meyer says that they should make a survey and find out how many condominium heart attacks have been admitted to Florida hospitals. A new syndrome. The first symptom is a secret urge to go up to an unsold penthouse and jump off your own building, counting vacancies all the way down.

As I did not care to be remembered because of Miss Agnes, I drove to a small shopping center on the left side of the highway, stashed her in the parking lot, and walked back to the Casa de Playa.

On foot I had time to read all of the sign in front.

NOW SHOWING.

MODEL APARTMENTS.

CASA DE PLAYA.

A NEW ADVENTURE IN LIVING.

FROM $38,950 TO $98,950.

PRIVATE OCEAN BEACH. POOL.

HOTEL SERVICES. FIREPROOF AND SOUNDPROOF CONSTRUCTION.

SECURITY GUARD ON PREMISES.

NO PETS.

NO CHILDREN UNDER FIFTEEN.

AUTOMATIC FIRE AND BURGLAR ALARM.

COMMUNITY LOUNGE

AND GAME AREA.

ANOTHER ADVENTURE

IN LIVING

BY

BROLL ENTERPRISES, INC.

The big glass door swung shut behind me and closed out the perpetual sounds of the river of traffic, leaving me in a chilled hush on springy carpeting in a faint smell of fresh paint and antiseptic.

I walked by the elevators and saw a small desk in an alcove. The sign on the desk said: Jeannie Dolan, Sales Executive on Duty. A lean young lady sat behind the desk, hunched over, biting down on her underlip, scowling down at the heel of her left hand and picking at the flesh with a pin or needle. “Sliver?” I said.

She jumped about four inches off the desk chair. “Hey! Don’t sneak up, huh?”

“I wasn’t trying to.”

“I know you weren’t. I’m sorry. Yes, it’s a sliver.”

“Want some help?”

She looked, up at me. Speculative and noncommittal. She couldn’t decide whether I’d come to deliver something, repair something, serve legal papers, or buy all the unsold apartments in a package deal.

“Well… every time I take hold of something, it hurts.”

I took her over to the daylight, to an upholstered bench near a big window which looked out at a wall made of pierced concrete blocks. I held her thin wrist and looked at her hand. There was red inflammation around the sliver and a drop of blood where she had been picking at it. I could see the dark narrow shape of the splinter under the pink and transparent skin. She had been working with a needle and a pair of tweezers. I sterilized the needle in her lighter flame, pinched up the skin so that I could pick a little edge of the splinter free. She sucked air through clenched teeth. I took the tweezers and got hold of the tiny end and pulled it out.

“Long,” I said, holding it up, “Trophy size. You should get it mounted.”

“Thank you very very much. It was driving me flippy,” she said, standing up.

“Got anything to put on it?”

“Iodine in the first aid kit.”

I followed her back to the desk She hissed again when the iodine touched the raw tissue. She asked my advice as to whether to put a little round Band Aid patch on it, and I said I thought a splinter that big deserved a bandage and a sling, too.

She was tan, steamed-up; a quick-moving, fast-talking woman in her late twenties with a mobile face and a flexible, expressive voice. In repose she could have been quite ordinary. There was a vivacity, an air of enjoying life about her that made her attractive. Her hair was red-brown, her eyes a quick, gray-green, her teeth too large, and her upper lip too short for her to comfortably pull her mouth shut, so it remained parted, making her look vital and breathless instead of vacuous. She used more eye makeup than I care for.

“Before I ask question one, Miss Dolan-”

“Mrs. Dolan. But Jeannie, please. And you are…?

“John Q. Public until I find out something.”

“John Q. Spy?”

“No. I want to know who you represent, Jeannie.”

“Represent? I’m selling these condominium apartments as any fool can plainly-”

“For whom?”

“For Broll Enterprises.”

“I happen to know Harry. Do the skies clear now?”

She tilted, frowned, then grinned. “Sure. If a realtor was handling this and you talked to me, then there’d have to be a commission paid, and you couldn’t get a better price from Mr. Broil. There used to be a realtor handling it, but they didn’t do so well, and I guess Mr. Broil decided this would be a better way. Can I sell you one of our penthouses today, sir? Mr. Public, sir?”

“McGee. Travis McGee. I don’t know whether I’m a live one or not. I’m doing some scouting for a friend. I’d like to look at one with two bedrooms and two baths just to get an idea.”

She took a sign out of her desk and propped it against the phone.‘“Back in ten minutes. Please be seated.” She locked her desk and we went up to the eighth floor. She chattered all the way up and all the way down the eighth floor corridor, telling me what a truly great place it was to live and how well constructed it was and how happy all the new residents were.

She unlocked the door and swung it open with a flourish. She kept on chattering, following a couple of steps behind me as I went from room to room. After quite a while she ran out of chatter. “Well… Don’t you want to ask anything?”

“The floor plan is efficient. The equipment looks pretty adequate. But the furniture and the carpeting and the decorating make me feel sort of sick, Jeannie.”

“A very expensive decorator did all our display apartments.”

“Yeck.”

“A lot of people are really turned on by it.”

“Yeck.”

“We’ve even sold some with all the decor intact, Just as you see it. The buyers insisted.”

“Still yeck.”

“And I think it is absolutely hideous, and it makes me feel queasy, too. It looks too sweet. Cotton candy and candy cane and ribbon candy. Yeck.”

“Got one just like this that hasn’t been messed with?”

“Down on five. Come along.”

We rode down three floors. The apartment was spotlessly clean and absolutely empty. She unlocked the sliding doors, and we went out onto the balcony and leaned against the railing.

“If the answers to the other questions make sense, Jeannie, my friend might be interested, provided you don’t show her that one up on eight.”

I asked the right questions. Was it long-term leasehold or actual ownership with undivided interest in the land? How much a year for taxes? How much for the maintenance contract? What were the escalation provisions in the maintenance contract? How much did utilities run? Would the apartment be managed, be rented if you wished when you were not using it?

“How many apartments are there all told?”

“Counting the penthouses-298.”

“How many unsold?”

“Oh, very few, really.”

“How many?”

“Well… Harry might cut my throat all the way around to the back if I told anybody. But after all, you are my surgeon, and I have the scar to prove it. We’ve got thirty-six to go. I’ve been here a month and a half, and I get free rent in one of the models and a fifty-buck-a-week draw against a thousand dollars a sale. Between the two of us, Betsy and me, we’ve sold two.”

“So Harry Broll is hurting?”

“Would your friend live here alone, Travis?”

“It would just be more of a convenience for her than anything. She lives in the British Virgins. St. Kitts. She comes over here often, and she’s thinking about getting an apartment. I imagine she’d use it four times a year probably, not over a week or two weeks at a time. She might loan it to friends. She doesn’t have to worry about money.”

Jeannie Dolan made a small rueful face. “How nice for her. Will you be bringing her around?”

“If I don’t find anything she might like better.”

“Remember, this floor plan is $55,950. Complete with color coded kitchen with-”

“I know, dear.”

“Wind me up and I give my little spiel.” She locked up, and we rode down in the elevator. She looked at her watch. “Hmmm. My long, exhausting day has been over for ten minutes. I read half a book, wrote four letters, and got operated on for a splinter.”

“There’s some medication I want to prescribe, Mrs. Dolan. If there’s an aid station nearby, I can take you there and buy the proper dosage and make sure you take it.”

She looked at me with the same expression as in the very beginning speculative, noncommittal. “Well… there’s Monty’s Lounge up at the shopping center, behind the package store.”

Five

MONTY’S WAS no shadowy cave. It was bright, sunny, and noisy. Terrazzo floor, orange tables, a din of laughter and talk, shouts of greeting, clink of ice. Hey Jeannie. Hi, Jeannie, as we found our way to a table for two against the far wall. I could see that this was the place for a quick one after the business places in the shopping center closed. There was a savings and loan, insurance offices, a beauty parlor, specialty shops all nearby.

The waitress came over and said, “The usual, Jeannie? Okay. And what’s for you, friend?” Jeannie’s turned out to be vodka tonic, and friend ordered a beer.

In those noisy and familiar surroundings Jeannie relaxed and talked freely. She and her friend Betsy had come down to Florida from Columbus, Ohio, in mid-January to arrange a couple of divorces. Their marriages had both gone sour. She had worked for an advertising agency, doing copy and layout, but couldn’t find anything in her line in the Lauderdale area. Betsy Booker had been a dental hygienist in Columbus but hated it because no matter what kind of shoes she bought, her feet hurt all the time. Betsy’s husband was a city fireman, and Jeannie’s husband was an accountant.

She seemed miffed at her friend Betsy. There was tension there, and it had something to do with Harry Broll. I tried to pry, but she sidestepped me, asked me what I did. I told her I was in marine salvage, and she said she knew it had to be some kind of outdoor work.

Finally I took a calculated risk and said, “If my friend likes the apartment, then I’ll see what I can do with Harry Broll. Hope you don’t mind hearing somebody badmouth him. Harry is such a pompous, obnoxious, self-important jackass, it will be a pleasure to see how far down he’ll come on the price.”

“You said you were friends, McGee!”

“I said I knew him. Do I look like a man who needs friends like that?”

“Do I look like a girl who’d work for a man like that?”

We shook hands across the table, agreeing we both had better taste. Then she told me that Betsy Booker’s taste was more questionable. Betsy had been having an affair with Harry Broll for two months.

“Betsy and I were in a two bedroom on the fourth on the highway side, but she has gradually been moving her stuff up onto six into his one bedroom, apartment 61. I guess it hurt her sore feet, all that undressing and dressing and undressing and walking practically the length of the building.”

“Bitter about it?”

“I guess I sound bitter. It’s more like hating to see her be so damned dumb. She’s a real pretty blonde with a cute figure, and she just isn’t used to being without a guy I guess. It isn’t a big sex thing going on. Betsy just has to have somebody beside her in the night, somebody she can hear breathing. She makes up these weird stories about how it’s all going to work out. She says he’s going to make a great big wad of money on some kind of land promotion stock and because Mrs. Broll deserted her husband, he’s going to be able to get a divorce and marry Betsy.”

“Couldn’t it happen like that?”

“With him? Never!” she said and explained how she hadn’t liked Harry’s looks and had checked him out. Her best source had been the housekeeper at the apartment building. Last November when the place had been finished, Harry Broll had taken over apartment 61. He had an unlisted phone installed. He did not get any mail there.

“It’s obvious what he was setting up,” Jeannie said. “The world is full of Harry Broll-type husbands. The housekeeper said some Canadian broad moved into the apartment a week later. Harry would take long lunch hours. But he must have slipped up somehow, because Mrs. Broil arrived one day about Christmas time and went busting in when Harry was leaving, and there was a lot of screaming going on. His wife left him, even though Harry had gotten rid of his girlfriend. Then Harry moved out of his house and into the apartment. Betsy saw his house once. He took her there and showed it to her. She said it’s big and beautiful. She won’t ever get to live there. He’ll dump her when he gets tired of her.”

She said two drinks would be plenty. I paid the check and took her out and introduced her to Miss Agnes. Jeannie was so delighted with my ancient Rolls that I had to drive her up to Pompano Beach and back. I let her out across from the Casa de Playa. I wondered if I should caution her about mentioning my name to Betsy, who might in turn mention it to Harry Broil, and turn him more paranoid than ever. But it seemed to be too long a chance to worry about and too little damage from it even if it did happen.

She gave me an oblique, quick, half-shy look that said something about wondering if she would ever see me again. I discovered that I would like to see her again. We said cheerful and conspiratorial good-bys. She walked around the front of Miss Agmes, waited for a gap in traffic, and hastened across the highway. Her legs were not quite too thin, I decided. The brown-red hair had a lively bounce. From the far curb she turned and waved, her smile long-range but very visible.

It was dark when I parked Miss Agnes. I walked to F Dock and on out to Slip 18 and made a ritualistic check of the mooring lines and spring lines, then checked to see how the Munequita was riding, tucked in against the flank of the Busted Flush, fenders in proper placement to prevent thumps and gouges.

“Don’t pretend you can’t hear my foot tapping, you rude, tardy son of a bitch,” Jilly said with acid sweetness. She was at the sundeck rail, outlined against the misty stars with a pallor of dock lights against her face.

I went aboard, climbed up, and reached for her but she ducked away. “What did I forget, woman?”

“The Townsends. I told you I accepted for both of us. Don’t you remember at all?”

“What did we accept?”

“Drinks aboard the Wastrel and dinner ashore. They’re over at Pier 66. Old friends, dear. She was the heavy little woman with the good diamonds.”

“Oh.”

“You’re drawing a blank aren’t you?”

“I seem to be.”

“Hurry and change and we can join them at dinner. And, dear, not quite as informal as you were at my little party, please?”

“Is she the woman who kept talking about her servant problem? No matter what anybody else was talking about?”

“Yes. That’s Natalie. And Charles is hard of hearing, and he’s too vain to admit it or buy one of those little electronic things. Please hurry, Travis.” She eeled into my arms, pressed herself close to me. She smelled very good, and she felt springy and useful. “The sooner we go, dearest, the sooner we can leave their party and come back and have our own little party.”

I gave her a good solid whack on the behind and said, “You go ahead and make excuses.”

“Ouch! That was too rough, really. You’ll be along soon?”

“Ally honey, I don’t know those people. I can’t talk to them, and they can’t talk to me. I could use up my life with people like that and never know where it went.”

“They’re my friends! I won’t permit you to be rude to my friends. You accepted, you know.”

“You accepted.”

“But I expect you to have some consideration for-”

“Don’t expect anything from me, Jillian. Sorry I forgot. Sorry you had to hang around waiting for me. Now go to your party and have a good time.”

“Do you mean it?”

“Why shouldn’t I want you to have a good time?”

“I have had it with you, you bahstid!”

“Sorry, Jilly. I just don’t go to parties unless I like the people.”

She went clicking down the outside ladderway and clacked her way aft and off the Flush and down the dock and away into the night. I went below, turned on a few lights, built a drink, ran a thumb down the stack of tapes, picked Eydie, and chunked her into the tape player and fixed volume.

Eydie has comforted me many times in periods of stress. She has the effortlessness of total professionalism. She is just so damned good that people have not been able to believe she is as good as she is. She’s been handed a lot of dull material, some of it so bad that even her best hasn’t been able to bring it to life. She’s been mishandled, booked into the right places at the wrong time, the wrong places at the right time. But she can do every style end do it a little better than the people who can’t do any other. Maybe a generation from now those old discs and tapes of Eydie will be the collectors’ joy, because she does it all true, does it all with pride, does it all with heart.

So I settled back and listened to her open her throat and let go, backed by the Trio Los Panchos, Mexican love songs in flawless Mexican Spanish. She eased the little itch of ru+ilujrnhcrrlng just how good my Irish lady had smelled, tasted, and felt.

A lot of the good ones get away. They want to impose structure upon my unstructured habits. It doesn’t work. If I wanted structure, I’d live in a house with a Florida room, have 2.7 kids, a dog, a cat, a smiling wife, two cars, a viable retirement and profit-sharing plan, a seven handicap, and shortness of breath.

God only knows how many obligations there would have been once we were living in the British Virgins. Sing to me, Eydie. I just lost a pretty lady.

Through the music I heard the bong of my warning bell. I put on the aft floods and trapped Meyer in the white glare, blinking. I turned them off and let him in. I could not use Eydie for background music, so I ejected the tape and put a nothing tape on and dropped the sound down to the threshold of audibility.

Meyer said, “I was here an hour ago, and there was a beautiful, angry lady here, all dressed up, with someplace to go but nobody to go with.”

“Fix yourself a knock. She decided to go alone.”

“I bet.”

“I am a crude, selfish bastard, and she is through with me.”

He came back with a drink. He sat and said, “They tell me that a ring in the nose bothers you for the first week or so and then you never notice it again.”

“Until somebody yanks on the rope.”

“Oh, she wouldn’t do that without good cause.”

“Who the hell’s side are you on?”

“She’ll be back.”

“Don’t put any money on it.”

“Speaking of money…”

“Harry Broll?”

“Yes, indeed. I had a long, tiring day. I talked to twenty people. I lied a lot. This is what I put together. It is all a fabric of assumption and supposition. Harry Broll is a small- to medium-sized cog in the machine called SeaGate, Inc. It is Canadian money, mostly from a Quebec financier named Dennis Waterbury and New York money from a syndicate there which has been involved in other land deals. They needed Broil because of his knowledge of the local scene, the local contacts, legal shortcuts, and so on. It is a privately held corporation. They are going public. The offering price has not been set yet, but it will be about twenty-six or twenty-seven dollars a share. Most of the shares will be offered by the corporation, but about a third of the public offering will be by the present shareholders. Harry will be marketing a hundred thousand shares.”

Cause for a long, low whistle. Old Harry with two and a half mil before taxes was a boggling picture for the mind to behold.

“How soon does he get rich?”

“Their fiscal year ends the last day of this month. The national accounting firm doing the audit is Jensen, Baker and Company. They will apparently get a guaranteed underwriting through Fairmont, Noyes. I hear that it is a pretty clean deal and that SEC approval should be pretty much cut and dried after they get the complete audit report, the draft of the red herring.”

I stared at him. “Red herring?”

“Do you know what a prospectus is?”

“That thing that tells you more than you care to know about a new issue of stocks or bonds?”

“Yes. The red herring is the prospectus without the per share price of the stock on it or the date of issue. And it is a complete disclosure of everything to do with the company, background of executives and directors, how they got their stock, what stock options they may hold, what financial hanky panky, if any, they’ve ever been involved in. Very interesting reading sometimes.”

“Nice to see an old acquaintance get rich enough to afford a hell of a lot of alimony.”

“When a company is in registration, they get very secretive, Travis. Loose lips can sink financial ships.”

“What would he want Mary to sign? He said it was to protect his interest in SeaGate.”

“I wouldn’t have any idea.”

“Can you find out?”

“I can try to find out. I suppose the place to go would be West Palm. That’s where the administrative offices of SeaGate are. That’s where they are doing the audit, starting early so that they can close the books as of April thirtieth. It would be futile to try to pry anything out of the Jensen, Baker people. But maybe somebody in the SeaGate organization might talk. What did you do today?”

I told him. It was complicated and a lot of it was wasted time and effort, so I kept to the things that had worked.

Then I got to my big question. I had been bouncing it off the back of my mind for an hour, and it was going to be a pleasure to share the trauma with someone else.

“Here is this distrait husband, Meyer. He says he doesn’t chase women. The Canadian girl was an exception, a big mistake. He wants me to tell Mary he wants her back. They’ll go on a nice trip together. He is so rattled and upset he takes out his little gun and tries to kill me. Suppose he had. His two and a half mil would do him no good at all. And Mary could do him no good by coming back. Okay. He stashed his Canadian tail in apartment 61 at his Casa de Playa, and it was right there that Mary caught him. Harry got rid of the girlfriend. Mary gloomed around for a time, and then she left him. He wants her back. He’s sending messages through me, he thinks, to get her to come back to him. Let’s say she decides to go back. She goes to their house and finds it closed up. She knows he has the apartment. So she’d go there next, and she’d find him all cozied up there with a blonde named Betsy Booker. Draw me some inferences, please.”

“Hmmm. We’ll assume that the Booker woman is living in Broll’s apartment with him, and the signs of her presence are too numerous to eliminate with short warning. Thus, when Broll came to see you, he either was very sure that Mary would not come back to him or that Mary could not come back to him. Or, possibly, if Mary could come back to him and decided to come back to him, he would have an early warning system to give him ample time to get the Booker woman out of the apartment and maybe even move back to Blue Heron Lane. This would imply that he knows where she is and has some pipeline to her. In either case, there would be considerable insincerity in his visit to you. Yet a man playing games does not pause in the middle of thp game to murder someone out of jealousy. So we come to a final postulate which is not particularly satisfying. We assume that he is and was sincere but is too comfortable with his current living arrangement to want to think it through and see how easily it could spoil his second chance with Mary.”

“He’s not that dumb. Dumb, but not that dumb.”

“Logic has to take into account all alternatives.”

“Would you consider eating Hungarian tonight?” I asked him.

“Considered and approved.”

“Poker dollar for the tab?”

“Food and drink, all on one.”

Six

THE WAY you find Mary is the same way you find anybody. Through friends and neighbors. And patience. Through shopping habits, money habits, doctor, dentist, bureaucratic forms and reports. And more patience.

You reconstruct the events of three and a half and four years ago and try to remember the names and places, the people who could be leads. You find out who Mary used to be, and from that maybe you find out where she is.

To start with, she was Tina Potter’s friend. Came down to see Tina and Freddie. Came down from Rochester, New York. It was just a visit, and then she got her own place. Had some money, some kind of income. Didn’t have to work. Came down because she had just been through a jolting and ugly divorce action. She’d gotten her maiden name back by court order. Mary Dillon. Dillon and Dolan. I seemed to be working my way through the Ds. D for divorce.

A quiet young woman. We all got to like her. She had been putting the pieces of herself back together very very nicely. Then something happened. What the hell was it?

At last I remembered. Tina Potter had come over to the Flush late one afternoon and asked me if I could sort of keep an eye on Mary. Freddie had a special assignment in Bogota, and Tina would go with him only if she was sure somebody would watch over Mary. The incident which had racked her up had been the accidental death of her divorced husband a few days before. A one-car accident on a rainy night somewhere near Rochester. Left the road and hit a tree.

I remembered Tina’s earnest face as she said, “Two-bit psychology for whatever it’s worth, McGee. I think Mary had the idea, hidden so deep she didn’t even realize it, that one day her Wally would grow up and come back to her and then they’d have the kind of marriage she thought they were going to have the first time around. So with him dead, it can’t ever be. She’s trying to hang on, but it’s very white-knuckle stuff. Would you mind too much? She trusts you. She can talk to you.”

So I had spent a lot of time with Mary. Beach walking, driving around, listening to music. But if she laughed, she couldn’t be sure it wouldn’t turn into tears. She had no appetite. The weight loss was apparent. A drink would hit her too hard.

I suggested the aimless cruise. Get away. No destination. Mary knew by then it wasn’t a shrewd way of hurrying her into the sack, because had that been the target, it would have happened one of the times when her guard was way down. She agreed without much enthusiasm, provided she could pay her share of the expenses and do her share of the chores aboard.

After two weeks she had really begun to come out of it. At first she had slept twelve and fourteen hours a night, as if her exhaustion was of the same kind that happens after an almost mortal wound. Then she had begun to eat. The listlessness had turned to a new energy. She could laugh without it turning to tears.

One day when we were anchored a dozen miles north of Marathon, among some unnamed islands, I took the little Sea Gull outboard apart, cleaned it, lubricated it, reassembled it, while she zipped around out there in the sailing dinghy, skidding and tacking in a brisk bright wind. When she came back aboard the Flush she was wind blown, sun glowing, salty, happy, and thirsfiy. Before she went off to take her very niggardly freshwater shower, she brought me a beer. She told me she hadn’t felt so good in a long long time. We clinked bottles in a toast to a happy day. She looked, smiling, into my eyes, and then her eyes changed. Something went click. They widened in small shock and surprise, then looked soft and heavy. Her head was too heavy for her slender neck. Her mouth was softer. Her mouth said my name without making a sound. She got up and left me, her walk slow and swaying, and went below. It had been awareness, invitation, and acceptance all in a few moments, all without warnlng. I remember hastily fastening the last piece of the housing back onto the small motor and deciding that I could test it and stow it later. The lady was below, and there was a day to celebrate, a cruise to celebrate, a recovery to celebrate.

So try Tina and Freddie Potter. Long gone, of course. Scrabbled around in the locker where I throw cards and letters. Found one a year old. Address in Atlanta. Direct-dialed Atlanta information, then direct-dialed the Potter house. Squeals of delight, then desolation that I wasn’t in Atlanta. Freddie had just gone off to work. She had to quiet the kids down, then she came back on the line.

“Mary? Gee, I guess the last I heard was Christmas time, Tray. She wrote kind of a short dreary note on the back of a New Year’s card. She sounded pretty depressed, so I wrote her, but I didn’t hear from her. What’s the matter? Why are you looking for her?”

“She left Harry Broll early in January.”

“That doesn’t surprise me much. I never could understand why she married him. Or the first one, Wally, either. Some women seem to have to pick losers every time. Like some women pick alcoholics every time. But… I’d think she’d get in touch with you or with us. But you know Mary. Doesn’t want to be a burden to anyone.”

“How about family?”

“Well, there was just her mother up in Rochester, and she died two years ago. That was all she had, Trav. Gee, I can’t think of who you could ask. But I’d think she’d have some friend she’d talk to. A neighbor or something.”

She couldn’t contribute anything more. She wanted me to let her know when I found out where Mary was, and she wanted me to come to Atlanta and stay with them and tell them all the news about everybody around the marina.

I couldn’t use the Rolls pickup to visit the neighbors along Blue Heron Lane. There aren’t any cover stories to fit that set of wheels. And housewives are very edgy these days. They have little peep holes set into the doors and outdoor intercom speakers and little panic buttons to push if they get too nervous. Respectability is essential. Nothing eccentric please.

So I borrowed Johnny Dow’s Plymouth sedan, and I wore pressed slacks, a sincere jacket, an earnest shirt, and a trustworthy necktie. I carried a black zipper portfolio and a dozen of my business cards. I am Travis McGee, Vice President of CDTA, Inc. It is no lie. Meyer incorporated the company a few years ago, and he keeps it active by paying the tiny annual tax. CDTA means nothing at all. Meyer picked the letters because they sound as if they have to mean something. Commercial Data Transmission Authority. Consolidated Division of Taxes and Audits. Contractors’ Departmental Transit Acceptance.

In my sincere, earnest, trustworthy way I was going to hit the neighborhood on this hot Friday morning with a nice check which I had to deliver to Mrs. Harry Broll in settlement of her claim and get her to sign a release. I used one of the checks Meyer had ordered. It was on an actual account. Of course, the account was inactive and had about twelve dollars in it, but the blue checks were impressively imprinted with spaces for his signature and mine. He borrowed a checkwriter from a friend in one of the shops, and we debated the amount for some time before settling on a figure of $1,093.88.

“Good morning, ma’am. I hate to bother you like this, but I wonder if you can help me. My name is McGee. Here is my card. I’ve got, out a check payable to Mrs. Harry Broll in full payment of her claim of last year, and I have a release here for her to sign, but the house looks as if they’re off on a long trip or moved or something. Could you tell me how I could find Mrs. Broll?”

It was not a long street. Three short, curving blocks. Large lots, some of them vacant, so that the total was not over twenty-five homes right on Blue Heron Lane. The Broll house was in the middle of the middle block on the left. The canal ran behind the houses on the left hand side, following the curves. Dig a canal and you have instant waterfront.

I made the logical moves. I parked the Plymouth in the Broll driveway, tried the doorbell, then tried the neighbors, the nearest ones first.

“I can’t help you at all. We moved in here three weeks ago, all the way from Omaha, and that house has been empty since we moved in, and from any sign of neighborliness from anybody else around here, all the houses might as well be empty, if you ask me.”

“Go away. I don’t open the door to anyone. Go away.”

“Mrs. Broll? Someone said they split up. No, we weren’t friendly. I wouldn’t have any idea where you could find her.”

At the fourth front door-the fifth if you count the place where nobody answered-there was a slight tweak at the baited end of my line.

“I guess the one to ask would be Mrs. Dressner. Holly Dressner. She and Mrs. Broll were all the time visiting back and forth, morning coffee and so forth. That’s the next house there, number 29, if she’s home. She probably is. I didn’t hear her backing out.”

After the second try on the doorbell I was about to give up. I could hear the chimes inside. No answer. Then the intercom speaker fastened to the rough-cut cypress board beside the front door clicked and said, “Who is it? And, for God’s sake, just stand there and talk in a normal tone of voice. If you get close to the speaker and yell, I won’t understand word one.”

I gave my spiel, adding that the lady next door told me she would be the one to ask. She asked me if I had a card, and she had me poke it through the mail slot. I wondered why she sounded so out of breath.

I heard chains and locks, and she pulled the door open and said, “So come in.” She wore a floorlength terry robe in wide yellow and white stripes, tightly belted. Her short, blond, water-dark hair was soaked. “I was in the pool. Daily discipline. Come on out onto the terrace. I’m too wet to sit in the living room.”

She was a stocky woman with good shoulders and a slender waist. She had a tan, freckled face, broad and good humored, pale lashes and brows, pretty eyes. The terrace was screened, and the big pool took up most of the space. Sliding glass doors opened the terrace up into the living room. The yard beyond the screening and beyond the flowerbeds sloped down to a small concrete dock where a canopied Whaler was moored.

She invited me to sit across from her at a wrought iron table with a glass top.

“Try that on me again, Mr. McGee. Slowly. Is this the check?”

She picked it up and put it down and listened as I went through it again. “A claim for what?” she asked.

“Mrs. Dressner, it’s company policy not to discuss casualty claims and settlements. I’m sure you can understand why.”

“Mr. McGee, may I ask you a personal question?”

“Of course.”

“How come you are so full of bullshit?”

I stared at her merry face and merry smile. But above the smile the hazel eyes were expressionless as poker chips.

“I… I don’t quite understand.”

“Go back to Harry and tell him that this didn’t work, either. What does he think I am? Some kind of idiot, maybe? Good-by, Mr. McGee.”

“This isn’t for Harry. This is for me.”

“So who the hell are you?”

“How friendly are you with Mary anyway?”

“Very very very. Okay?”

“What happened to her when Wally got killed?”

She frowned at me. “She came apart. She flipped.”

“And a man took her on a boat ride?”

“Right. And the way she talked about him, that’s the one she should have played house with instead of Harry Broll.”

“I almost thought about it seriously.”

“You?”

“Travis McGee. The Busted Flush. Cruised the Keys and up the west coast to Tampa Bay. Taught her to sail. Taught her to read a chart. Taught her to navigate.”

She put her determined chin on her fist and stared at me. “That was the name. You, huh? So what’s with the funny games, coming here with your funny card and your funny check? If you knew we’re close friends, why not start honest?”

“I have not seen her or talked to her in over three years, Holly. And don’t jump on my knowing your first name and try to make anything out of it. The woman next door clued me.”

“Hitting the whole neighborhood?”

“One at a time. Mary is… low-key intense. She hides a lot of herself. She doesn’t make friends easily. But she needs people, so I thought she’d have to have a friend in the neighborhood. A friend, not an acquaintance. Right?”

“So right, McGee. Coffee and tears. Most women bug me. Mary doesn’t. I… still don’t feel right about you. About taking you for granted. It could be some kind of a trick. I want to ask you things, but I can’t think of anything to ask that you couldn’t have gotten from Harry.”

“He’s trying to find her.”

“You know it! I thought the silly son of a bitch was going to try to shake it out of me.”

“When was this?”

“A couple of weeks ago. He’d had a couple. He got all weepy. He insisted I had to know where Mary is.”

“Do you know where she is?”

“McGee, I know why Harry wants to find her. He wants her to come back to him and sign something and live happily ever after.”

“It might be an ugly shock if she did come back.”

“How?”

“She’d find the house empty, and she’d go look for Harry at the Casa de Playa, where he just so happens to be shacked with a divorcing blonde named Betsy Booker. In apartment 61.”

I couldn’t read her expression. “So?”

“So isn’t that where Mary found him with the Canadian?”

“Only two people could have told you that. Or three. Harry, Mary, or Lisa-the Canadian quiff.”

“Wrong.”

“The hell you say.”

“I got it out of Betsy Booker’s best friend, Jeannie Dolan, also from Columbus, who got part of it from Betsy and part of it from the housekeeper. Jeannie and Betsy take turns manning the sales desk at the Casa de Playa.”

I saw her buy it and give a small nod. “So help me. That rotten Harry. Jesus! The way I read it, Lisa was not the first. Just the first she caught him with. He really is one sorry bastard.”

“How did she find out?”

“She thinks it was one of the girls in his office or a girl he’d fired, trying to make things rough for him. She got a phone call. The person on the other end whispered. Mary said it was spooky. Something very much to the point. ‘Mrs. Broll, your husband has loaned apartment 61 in his new building to Lisa Dissat, and he’ll be taking another long lunch hour today so he can drive out there and screw her.’ So she drove out and hid somewhere until he arrived and went upstairs. Then she went up to the sixth floor and waited around until the door opened and he started to come out. She took a quick run at the door and knocked it open and charged past him and found the bareass Canadian getting ready to take a nice nap. I take it there was a certain amount of screaming going on for a while.”

“Then Harry got rid of the girlfriend?”

“She was packed and out of there the next day. Back to Canada, Harry told Mary. He confessed his sad story. He had gone to Quebec for business conferences with his Canadian partners. He had to dictate new agreements. They sent the secretary to the hotel. They worked very late. He was too tired to think clearly. She was pretty and available. It went on for the three days he was up there. He came back. Two days after he was back, she phoned him at his office from Miami. She had quit her job and followed him back to Florida. So he told Mary that while he was trying to talk Lisa into going back, he put her up at the apartment. I guess he was having a hard time convincing her. He talked from the end of November till two days before Christmas. That’s a lot of long lunches and a lot of evening conferences.”

“But Mary didn’t leave him until January fifth.”

“Harry told you that?”

I laughed. “I thought the silly son of a bitch was going to try to shake it out of me, too. This was just the other day. And he got weepy.”

“So you’re finding her for him?”

“May I ask you the same personal question you asked me?”

“Okay. Okay. I’m sorry. Why then?”

“For myself. Pride, I guess. Harry thought if she was really in trouble, she would come running to me. And the more I think about it, the more logical it seems. That she would. Besides-” I stopped suddenly.

“What’s the matter?”

“When was Harry here, did you say?”

“Oh, two weeks ago.”

“Can you pin it down to a day?”

“Let me go take a look at my kitchen calendar and see.”

She came back and said, “Less than two weeks ago. It was a Monday morning. April fifth.”

“He told me someone had seen Mary with me on April second. He was wrong, of course. Why would he come after you instead of me if she was seen with me?”

“Maybe he hadn’t been told about it before he came to see me,” she said.

“And maybe he was trying to get you to admit she’d moved in with me or some damn thing. What difference does it make anyway? He didn’t act as if he was thinking very clearly.”

“Mary was thinking about getting in touch with you. She was sitting in my kitchen wondering out loud if she should. That was after she’d decided to take off. Then she decided it would be better to have some breathing space in between, some time to herself first. I thought she would have written you long before now. It’s over three months.”

“She writes you?”

“Don’t get too cute, McGee.”

“Okay. Do you know where she is?”

“Yes.”

“And she is okay?”

“I have no reason to think she isn’t. If I was Mary I would be relishing every damn moment. The farther from Harry, the better.”

“That’s all I wanted to know, Mrs. Dressner. That she is okay. I had to hear it from somebody I could believe.”

“Hey! You’re spoiling the fun. You’re supposed to worm the whole story out of me. Or try to.”

“It’s Harry who has to know where she is. Not me.”

“Friend McGee, I am not about to get you two men confused, one with the other.”

“So she is a long distance from here. And should be relishing every moment. Right?”

“I’ve gotten some comedy postcards.”

“I believe you. There are people you believe and people you don’t. I don’t need to know any more than I know right now.”

She looked rueful. “Everybody believes me. Everything I’m thinking shows. I’ve got one of those faces. I’d make a rotten spy. Hey, sit down again. I haven’t offered you anything. Coffee, tea, beer, booze? Even some lunch?”

“No thanks.”

“Believe me, I’m glad to have anybody show up here. This is one of the days when the house gets empty somehow. David-my husband-has been gone all week. He’ll be home tomorrow, probably about noon. He’s gone a week or more out of every month. Our two little gals are tennis freaks, so who sees them at all when the weather is like this? I miss hell out of Mary I really do. You could choke down some terrible coffee at least. Pretend it’s delicious, and I’ll tell you where Mary is. Even if you don’t have to know.”

She brought coffee from the kitchen to the glasstop table on the screened terrace. Moving around had loosened the hitch in the terry belt, and when she bent to pour my coffee, the robe suddenly spilled open. She spilled coffee, clutched frantically, put the pot down, and gathered herself together and tied the robe firmly, her face dark red under the freckles. It was obvious she had not contrived it.

“Some people are solitary drinkers. I’m a solitary skinny dipper.”

“It’s habit forming,” I said.

She got paper towels and mopped up the spilled coffee and filled my cup the rest of the way. She sat and stared at me, lips pursed. Finally she said, “Thank you.”

“For?”

“For not jumping to any conclusions, for which I could not exactly blame you. Good God, I tell you my husband is away, my kids are playing tennis, I’m lonesome. I beg you to stay for coffee and then damn near drop my robe on the floor.”

“Some days are like that.”

“I like the way you can smile without hardly changing your mouth at all. It’s kind of all in the eyes. Mary said you’re a doll. She said big and brown and sort of beat-up looking. But you’re bigger and browner than the idea I had of you. About Mary. That was a sordid scene at the Casa de Playa. It shook her. Friendship is friendship, but you don’t tell your friends what to do when it comes to big emotional decisions. Through Christmas and the rest of December she spent a lot of time over here. I let her bounce it all off me. She was thinking aloud, arguing it out. Taking one side and then the other, while all I did was say ‘um.’ But I could tell which side was winning. Finally she said that if she hadn’t already had one divorce, she would definitely decide to leave Harry. It was a lousy reason to stick around, just to avoid being divorced twice, which has a kind of ring of failure to it, failure as a person or as a woman. So she was going to leave him and go away and, to be real fair, think it all through. But the way she felt, she’d probably sue for divorce after the waiting period. I waited for her to really make her mind up, and then I questioned her to make certain she was sure, and finally I told her about a little problem I had once with her husband. There’d been a party down the street and the four of us, the Brolls and the Dressners, had walked back together, a little tight. They came over here for a nightcap. There were supposed to be falling stars. It was in the paper. I wanted to see them. We put out the lights on the terrace, and I stretched out on a sun mattress beside the pool, right over there, to watch up through the screening overhead. David went to the kitchen to fix drinks, and Mary changed her mind about what she wanted and went in the kitchen to tell him. Harry was on a sun mattress near mine. All of a sudden he rolled over and put his big old cigar mouth on mine and pressed me down with his big belly and ran his big paw up under my skirt and started groping me. I froze with shock for about one second, and then I gave a big snap of my back like a huge fishing shrimp and bucked him into the pool in all his clothes. It turned into a big joke. He said he’d gotten up and tripped and fallen in.

“When I told Mary about it, she was furious with me for not telling her sooner. I told her I hadn’t told David, because he would have tried to beat Harry to death. I said that now she’d made her mind up, I could tell her about what Harry pulled that time. Frankly, what I was doing was trying to lock her into her decision to drop that jerk forever. Having her own money made it easy for her to get away. She got it from her trust officer at the Southern National Bank and Trust in Miami. Cash. A lot, I think. She didn’t want Harry tracing her through credit cards or personal checks. She told me she didn’t want to hear his voice or see his face once she left. Not for a long time anyway. We sat right out here one afternoon, a warm day for early January, and we looked at the travel folders she’d picked up from some little travel agency where she wasn’t known. She wanted to go to the islands. Between the two of us we decided that Grenada looked the best, and it was certainly far enough, way down there at the bottom of the West Indies, almost as far as Trinidad. So the travel agency sent wires and cables and got her set up at what looked like a very plush place, the Spice Island Inn. She’s sent me those joke greetings. Four or five, I guess. Airmail takes eight days! That place is a real hideaway.”

“Harry told me she left on January fifth. He said he came home from work and she was gone.”

“I think it was an impulse. She wasn’t going to leave until Thursday or Friday. I was out most of that afternoon. Maybe she tried to say good-by. I guess she probably drove down to Miami and stayed in a hotel or motel until her flight left.”

“I wonder what she did with her car?”

“I think she was going to leave it at Miami International.”

“Which is two fifty a day, no matter how many days, so she is up to a two-hundred-dollar parking charge.”

“McGee, the lady had decided to go first class all the way. That is what ladies do when they get mad enough.”

“What would Harry be wanting her to sign?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea.”

“Good coffee.”

“Come on! It tastes like stewed tire patches.” She walked me to the door. She got ahead of me and leaned back against the door and looked up quizzically. She stood a little taller than my elbow. “McGee, I just wondered. It seems like a, hell of a lot of trouble you went to. The business cards and the funny check and the sales talk.”

“No big thing, Holly. The cards and the checks were in the cupboard. I have to hunt for people sometimes. You learn to use something that works.”

“Why do you hunt for people?”

“I do favors for friends.”

“Is that a line of work with you?”

“I really wouldn’t know how to answer that question.”

She sighed. “Heck, I thought I could solve a problem for Mary. She never was able to figure out what it is that you do for a living.”

“Salvage consultant.”

“Sure. Sure.”

When I glanced back, she was standing on her shallow front steps, arms crossed. Her hair was beginning to dry and to curl a little. She smiled and waved. She was a sturdy, healthy woman with a very friendly smile.

Seven

I WAS ON THE beach by three o’clock that Friday afternoon and that was where Meyer found me at a few minutes to four. He dropped his towel, sat upon it, and sighed more loudly than the surf in front of us or the traffic behind us.

There were nine lithe maidens, miraculously unaccompanied by a flock of boys, playing some game of their own devising on the hard sand in the foamy wash of the waves. It involved an improvised club of driftwood, a small, yellow, inflated beach ball, one team out in the water, and one on the beach. Either you had to whack the ball out over the heads of the swimmers before they… or you had to hit it past a beach player who then… Anyway, it involved a lot of running, yelping, and team spirit.

“A gaggle of giggles?” Meyer said, trying that one on me.

My turn. “How about a prance of pussycats?”

“Not bad at all. Hmmm. A scramble of scrumptious?”

“Okay. You win. You always win.”

He slowly scratched his pelted chest and smiled his brown bear smile. “We both win. By being right here at this time. All the strain of a long, difficult, and futile day is evaporating quickly. Meyer is at peace. Play on, young ladies, because from here on out life will be a lot less fun for most of you.”

“Grow up and be earnest and troubled?” I asked. “Why does it have to be that way?”

“It doesn’t. It shouldn’t be. Funny, though. They take all those high spirits, all that sense of fun and play into one of the new communes, and within a year they are doleful wenches indeed. Somber young versions of American Gothic, like young wagon train mothers waiting for the Indians to ride over the ridge. And their men look like the pictures of the young ones slain at Shiloh. Idealism in our society is pretty damned funereal.”

One of the players looked up the beach and gave a quick wave and then went churning into the water to capture the yellow ball.

“One of my constituents,” Meyer said comfortably.

“You are a dirty old man.”

“You have a dirty mind, McGee. I could not bring myself to ever touch the child. But in all fairness it does enter my mind. Lovely, isn’t she?”

“Exquisite.”

“Her last name is Kincaid, and I do not know her first name. She is known to everyone as Breadbox. She has an incredible appetite. She’s an economics major at Yale. Quite a good mind. Her father grows tobacco in Connecticut. She drove down in a five year-old Porsche with two other girls. This summer she is going to work in a boutique aboard a cruise ship. She has a dog at home named Rover, which seems to have come full circle and is now an ‘in’ name for a dog. She is getting over a romance which ended abruptly and does not want to become interested in another man for years and years, she says. Tennis used to be her sport, but now she prefers-”

“So all right already Meyer. Damn it.”

“I think she was waving at someone behind us.”

“What?”

“I never saw the child before in my life. I was just putting together into one package some of the things the other young ladies have told me.”

“Have you been drinking?”

“No. But if you’d like to… ”

With as little warning as a flock of water birds, the nine maidens dropped the club and went jogging north along the beach, one of them clutching the yellow ball.

Meyer said, “I did not do well today, Travis. Just a few small items. Dennis Waterbury is in his mid thirties, bland, shrewd, tough, quick, merciless, and completely honest. He gives his word and keeps it.”

“Listen. I was able-”

“Let me deliver my few crumbs first. Harry Broll’s cost on his one hundred thousand shares was ten dollars a share, and his money and the money the others put in was used to acquire the land, prepare sites, build roads, start the utility construction, water, waste processing, and so forth. A very golden opportunity for a man like Broll to get his foot in the door with people like Waterbury and friends. But in order to make it big, he had to pluck himself pretty clean, I imagine, and borrow to the hilt. Put up one million and drag down two million and a half. The odds are splendid, the risk low enough.”

“About Mary, I-”

“I can’t seem to find out what she would have to sign. She wouldn’t have to sign anything in connection with the stock. It’s in his name. She isn’t on his business paper.”

“Mary is alive and well and living in Grenada.”

“In Spain?”

“No. The island.”

“Dear chap, the one in Spain is Gran-AH-duh. The island is Gre-NAY-duh. The British corrupted it with their usual mispronunciation of all place names.”

“You’ve been there?”

“No.”

“But you know a lot about it?”

“No. I happen to know how to pronounce it. One has to start somewhere.”

“Let’s swim.”

After about ten minutes Meyer intercepted me fifty yards from the beach, to ask, “How come you could find that out and Harry can’t?”

“I found the only person who might really know for sure, aside from the travel agent. A neighbor lady, who shows her good taste by disliking the hell out of Harry Broll. She thought for a while Harry sent me. I softened her up. She makes terrible coffee.”

“Did Harry try to pry it out of her, too?”

“Yes. Nearly two weeks ago. With tears. Without the gun. But rough. She said she thought he was going to try to shake it out of her.”

Meyer nodded and went gliding away, head up, in that powerful, slow, and tireless breaststroke that somehow makes me think of a seal when I see his head moving by.

When I came out of the water, he was sitting on his towel again, looking petulant, a rare mood for Meyer.

“Something bothering you?”

“Illogical actions and illogical emotions bother hell out of me, Travis. His wife had been gone over three months. How about checking accounts, credit cards?”

I explained about the trust account and her taking cash so that she couldn’t be easily traced by her husband. He said he knew one friendly face in the trust department of Southern National, but of course it would be Monday before he could learn anything there.

“Why bother?” I asked him. “I’m satisfied. We know where she is. I don’t give a damn how jittery Harry Broll gets.”

We walked back across the bridge together, squinting toward the western sun setting into its usual broad band of whisky soup. “I guess it doesn’t matter in any case,” Meyer said.

“What doesn’t matter?”

“What happens to anybody. Look at the cars, McGee. Look at the people in the cars, on the boats, on the beach, in the water. Everybody is heading toward their own obituary notice at precisely the same speed. Fat babies, and old women like lizards, and the beautiful young with long golden hair. And me and thee, McGee. At tick-tock speed moving straight, toward the grave, until all now living are as dead as if they had died in Ancient Rome. The only unknown, and that is a minor one, is how long will each individual travel at this unchanging, unchangeable pace?”

“Good God, Meyer! I was going to buy you dinner.”

“Not today. This is not one of my good days. I think I’ll open a can of something, go walking alone, fold up early. No need to poison somebody else’s evening.”

Away he trudged, not looking back. It happens sometimes. Not often. A curious gaiety, followed by bleak, black depression. It was a Meyer I seldom see and do not know at all.

Friday night. I took my time building a drink, showering, dressing, building a refill. Dark night by then, and a wind building up, so that the Flush moved uneasily, creaking and sighing against her lines, nudging at her fenders. I felt restless. I was wondering where to go, who to call, when Jillian came aboard.

She clung tightly and said she had been utterly miserable. She looked up at me with two perfect and effective tears caught in her lower lashes, her mouth quivering. The Townsend party had been desperately dull, really. She shouldn’t have tried to force me to go. She shouldn’t try to force me to do anything. She realized that now. She would not do it again, ever. Forgive me, Travis darling, please. I’ve been so lonely and so ashamed of myself etc., etc., etc.

Once forgiven, all the lights came on behind her eyes, and the tears were flicked away. Mood of holiday. She had been confident of reconciliation, she had brought hairbrush and toothbrush. And all the urgencies a girl could muster.

In the morning a rare April rain was coming down hard, thrashing at the ports beside the half acre of the captain’s wrinkled and rumpled bed, bathing us in gray ten o’clock light.

“Is your friend in trouble?” she asked.

“Who?”

“That respectable married lady friend, of course.”

“Oh. No, she’s fine. It turns out she’s hiding from her husband. She went down to Grenada.”

She lifted her head. “Really? Henry and I went down there on the first really long cruise we took in the Jilly III. The Grenadines are one of the great sailing areas of the world. And the yacht basin at St. George’s is really marvelous. You see people from everywhere, really. Yacht Services is very helpful.”

“She’s staying at the Spice Island Inn.”

“Quite expensive. Is she alone down there?”

“Apparently.”

“She can get into all kinds of delicious mischief if she wants. If she’s even half attractive, she won’t be lonely. The air is full of spice and perfume down there, dear. It’s a fabulously erotic island. Always so warm and lazy, with the hot hot sun and the hills and jungles and the beaches. Quite near the equator, you know.”

“I didn’t know.”

“Well, it is. Don’t you think we should go there one day?”

“I guess so.”

“You don’t seem exactly overwhelmed with enthusiasm.”

“Sorry.”

“Are you going back to sleep, you wretch?”

“Not with you doing what you’re doing.”

“This? Oh, it’s just a sort of reflex thing, I guess. Darling, if you’re no longer worried about your friend, could we be ready to aim the Jilly toward home on Tuesday? I can get her provisioned on Monday.”

“What? Oh, Tuesday. I guess so.”

“You don’t seem to keep track of what I’m saying.

“I guess I’m easily distracted.”

“You’re easily something else, too.”

“What did you expect?”

“I expect, my dear, if we put our minds to it, we might make the Guinness Book of Records. Cozy? A nice rain always makes me very randy.” After a moment she giggled.

“What’s funny?”

“Oh, I was thinking I might decide we should go to Grenada during the rainy season, dear.”

“Ho ho ho.”

“Well… it amused me. When I feel this delicious, I laugh at practically anything. Sometimes at nothing at all.”

The unusual cold front which had brought the rain ahead of it moved through late on Saturday afternoon. She went back to the Jilly III. She said she had a thousand things to do before we sailed on Tuesday. She said to come over on Sunday, sometime in the afternoon. She said I could bring along some of my clothes and toys then, if I wanted.

She left and I locked up again, hot showered, and fell into a deep sleep. I woke at ten on Saturday night, drank a gallon of water, ate half a pound of rat cheese, and dropped right back down into the pit.

I woke with a hell of a start at four on Sunday morning, and thought there was somebody coming aboard. Realized it had been something happening in a dream. Made a grab for what was left of the dream, but it was all gone too quickly. Almost a nightmare. It had pumped me so full of adrenaline there was no hope of going back to sleep. Heart bumped and banged. Legs felt shaky. I scrubbed a bad taste off my teeth, put on jeans and boat shoes and an old gray sweatshirt, and went out onto the deck.

A very silent night. No breeze. A fog so thick the nearer dock lights were haloed and the farther ones were a faint and milky pallor, beyond tangible gray. I could hear slow waves curl and thud against the sand. The craft on either side of the Flush were shrouded in the fog, half visible.

Meyer’s gloomy message had been delivered none too soon. Everybody else had been tick-tocked to the grave, leaving one more trip to complete-mine. Then, far away, I heard a long screeeeee of tormented rubber and a deep and ugly thud with a small accompanying orchestration of jangles and tinkles. The thud had been mortal, tick-tocking some racing jackass into his satin-lined box, possibly along with the girl beside him or the surprised folk in the other car.

A few minutes later I heard the sirens, heard them stop at what seemed a plausible distance. So stop thinking about this and that, McGee, and think about what you don’t want to think about, namely the lush future with the rich widow.

I climbed to the sun deck and went forward and slouched behind the wheel and propped my heels atop the instrument panel, ankles crossed.

That old honorary Cuban had simplified the question all to hell when he’d said that a moral act is something you feel good after. Conversely, you feel bad after an immoral act. But what about the act that is neither moral nor immoral, Papa? How are you supposed to feel then?

Look, we are very suited to each other. There is a lot of control either way on both sides, so timing is no problem at all. She pleases me. She knows how to intensify it. I like the textures and juices, spices and rhythms of her, all her tastes and tastings. We truly climb one hell of a hill, Papa, and when we fall off the far side together, it is truly one hell of a long fall, Papa, and we land truly and well and as zonked out as lovers can get. We laugh a lot. We like to hold each other afterward. We make bawdy jokes. She has a lot of body greed and finds me a satisfying stud. In her gratitude she takes a lot of extra effort to keep things varied and interesting. So?

There’s this little problem. I go into the head, Papa, and look at this battered and skewed beachbum countenance of mine, reflected in the mirror, and my eyes look- dull, and my mouth looks slack, and I am wearing the remnants of a doggy little smirk. I know she is in there, a-sprawl on the bed, drifting in and out of her little love doze, and I look truly and well at myself in the mirror, and I do not feel good about anything or bad about anything. I just feel as if I had made one of those little diagonal lines you use to keep track. You know-four little vertical lines side by side and then the diagonal that crosses them out and ends the group.

In the mirror my nose looks too big, and my skin looks grainy. I wear the doggy little grin. The smells of her cling to my body. There is the feeling of marking something off on a long score sheet. Something well and truly done that will have to be well and truly done for whatever years we both have left, because that is the bargain. Chop that cotton, tote that bale, plow that little acre of God.

What about it when you don’t feel good and you don’t feel bad? When you just feel that it’s done for this time and done reasonably well, and later on the slack dangle of flesh will turn tumescent, and it will and can be done again, just as well as the last time? With proficiency, determination, patience, understanding, power and skill. Isn’t lovemaking as good a way as any to pass the time for the rest of your life? It tones the body, and it’s acceptable exercise, and it makes two people feel good.

If I don’t grasp the opportunity, somebody will find some quick and dirty way to let the sea air through my skull.

I’m overdue. That’s what Meyer says, and that’s what my gut says in a slow cold coil of tingling viscera. Overdue, and scared, and not ready for the end of it yet. The old bullfighters who have known the famous rings and famous breeds despise the little country corridas, because they know that if they do not quit, that is where they will die-and the bull that hooks their steaming guts out onto the sand will be a poor animal without class or distinction or style.

An animal as ordinary as Harry Broll.

I shifted position, dug the keys out of the pocket, and found the keyholes in the instrument panel. It is one of the tics of the boatman, turning on the juice without starting up, just to check fuel levels, battery charge. By leaning close, I could read the gauges in the pallid light.

Maybe it isn’t just the woman. This woman. Or a passing of time. It is the awareness, perhaps, of the grasshopper years, of always pushing all the pleasure buttons. The justification was a spavined sense of mission, galumphing out to face the dragon’s fiery breath. It had been a focus upon the torment of individuals to my own profit. Along with a disinterest in doing anything at all about all those greater inequities which affect most of us. Oh, I could note them and bitch about them and say somebody ought to do something. I could say it on my way to the beach or to the bed.

Who will know you were ever around, McGee? Or care?

Wait a minute! What am I supposed to be doing? Making up the slogan I shall paint on my placard and tote in the big parade? A parade is a group, and I’m not a group animal. I think a mob, no matter what it happens to be doing, is the lowest form of living thing, always steaming with potential murder. Several things I could write on my placard and then carry it all by myself down empty streets.

UP WITH LIFE.

STAMP OUT ALL SMALL AND LARGE INDIGNITIES.

LEAVE EVERYONE ALONE TO MAKE IT WITHOUT PRESSURE.

DOWN WITH HURTING.

LOWER THE STANDARD OF LIVING.

DO WITHOUT PLASTICS.

SMASH THE SERVOMECHANISMS.

STOP GRABBING.

SNUFF THE BREEZE AND HUG THE KIDS.

LOVE ALL LOVE.

HATE ALL HATE.

Carry my placard and whistle between my teeth and wink and smirk at the girls on the sidewalk watching the nut with his sign.

Am I supposed to go out with my brush and yellow soap and scrub clean the wide grimy world? If you can’t change everything, why try to change any part of it, McGee?

The answer lit up in the foggy predawn morning, right over my head. A great big light bulb with glowing filaments, just like those old timey ones over in Boca Grande in the Edison place.

Because, you dumbass, when you stop scrubbing away at that tiny area you can reach, when you give up the illusion you are doing any good at all, then you start feeling like this. Jillian Brent-Archer is another name for giving up your fatuous, self-serving morality, and when you give it up, you feel grainy, studlike, secure, and that doggy little smirk becomes ineradicable.

You are never going to like yourself a hell of a lot, T. McGee, so what little liking you have must be conserved. To become Jilly’s amiable useful houseguest and bedguest would turn you into something which you are not, yet have an uncomfortable tendency to become.

You retain the fragile self-respect by giving Them the increasingly good chance of ventilating your skull or scragging you through the heart. There have been some rotten little scenes with Ally but the next one will be the most memorable of all.

So Mary Broll is okay. And there is a good lump of cash money stashed behind the fake hull in the forward bilge of the Flush. But it would be a good time, a very good time, to go steaming out and find the plucked pigeon and clean up its little corner of the world by getting its feathers back-half of them, anyway. Get out there on the range and go down to the pits and stand up for a moment and see if they can pot you between the eyes. If they miss, maybe you’ll get your nerve back, you tinhorn Gawain.

Eight

SUNDAY I did not feel up to facing the predictable fury of Lady Jillian. She wanted me aboard for drinks Monday evening. Time enough, I told myself.

Meyer came over to the Flush on Monday morning at about ten thirty. I was punishing myself for recent sensual excess by polishing some neglected brighiwork on the instrument panel, using some new miracle goop that was no more miraculous than the old miracle goop.

Without preamble he said, “I phoned the trust department of the Southern National Bank and Trust Company and told the girl to put me through to somebody who could give me a trust account number. When another girl answered, I said that my name was Forrester, and I was with Merrill Lynch. I said we had received a dividend which apparently should have been sent to Mrs. Harry Broll’s trust account. I wanted to advise New York and mail the check along, and to prevent further confusion, I wanted the trust account number and the name of the trust officer handling that account. Mary Dillon Broll or Mrs. Harry Broll, 21 Blue Heron Lane, and so forth. She told me to hold, and in a minute or two she came back and said the number was TA 5391, and the trust officer was Mr Woodrow Willow.”

“Interesting, but-”

“I asked her to put me through to Mr. Willow. When he came on the line I introduced myself correctly and told him that I was a personal friend of Mrs. Broll, and she had told me before going away on a trip that he handled her account TA 5391. He said that was correct. He sounded guarded. Properly so. I told him that Mrs. Broll had asked me to give her some advice regarding rephasing her accounts to provide a maximum income, as she anticipated some possible change in her personal status.”

“You are getting very crafty lately, Meyer.”

“Please stop rubbing those damned dials and look at me. Thank you. He sounded huffy then and said they were perfectly competent to give all necessary investment advice. I told him I knew that and that was why I had called him. I certainly didn’t want to usurp their authority and responsibility. I said I seldom make portfolio recommendations any more, only for old friends and at no fee, of course. I said that women often become confused about the way a trust account is set up. I said I understood she had discretion over it, that she could determine what she wanted bought and sold and so direct them. He said that was indeed the case. He sounded wistful, as if he wished it weren’t true. I said that I had been trying to get in touch with her in order to clear my ideas with her before coming in to discuss them with him. I said her husband had been unable to help me. I said her house was closed, and her neighbors did not know where she had gone. I asked if he could help me. He said she had phoned him early in January and had come in and drawn out all the accumulated interest and dividends, a sizable amount, and told him she was going away for a month or six weeks. She did not know where. He said he wished he could help me.”

“A month or six weeks?”

“Yes. Over three months ago.”

“She could have decided to stay longer, you know.”

“That’s what Woodrow Willow said. He said she was quite upset when she came to see him. He said he could guess why she might be thinking in terms of independent income. So I said that, of course, maximizing income would enable her to live comfortably, but with a woman that young, inflation protection was important.”

“Did it work?”

Meyer displayed an uncommonly wolflike smile. “He hesitated and I heard a desk calculator rattling and humming, and then he said that with her equities reinvested in income holdings, she’d have a pretax income of from twenty-five to twenty-seven thousand. So I told him that we should probably think in terms of eighteen to twenty or, in case of substantial alimony, consider tax exempts. He said he’d be delighted to talk to me about it, but of course he would have to have clearance from her to discuss her affairs. I said I realized that. He said he expected to hear from her very shortly, before the end of the month. Travis, I couldn’t push him any further.”

“I can see that. He was all set to snap shut at any moment. You got a hell of a lot out of him. Congratulations.”

“I braced myself and took a risk. I said, ‘Oh, yes, of course. To sign those things for Mr. Broll.’ He hesitated and then said, ‘It’s inconvenient for her to come here in person. So she told me when she came in what Mr. Broll was asking of her. It’s something that they did once before, and it was paid off. I had her sign the note. The loan was later approved by the loan committee and the board. A sizable loan, secured by the assets in her trust, with her signed authorization to me to deposit the loan proceeds in Mr. Broll’s personal checking account. The effective date of the loan was to be April fifteenth, last Thursday. He requires the funds before the end of the month. She requested me to get it all set up but not to go ahead with it until she gets in touch with me and tells me to proceed or to destroy the signed documents and forget it. That’s why I expect her to be in touch with me soon.’ Travis, I remember you telling me to always press the luck when it is running your way. So I told him that I had heard that Broll was getting very agitated about getting the note and the authorization signed, so I imagined that Mr. Broll had been in touch with him. Mr. Willow has a very weary laugh. He said he hears from Mr. Broll almost constantly. He said he saw no reason to tell Mr. Broll everything was signed and ready to go, awaiting only authorization from her. I got the impression Harry tried to bulldoze him, and Mr. Willow got his back up. Then he began to realize he had told me more than he should. I could feel him pulling back. So I jumped in and said that actually the documents aren’t signed until she says they are signed. Until then it is an approved line of credit, and if she doesn’t care to use it, she doesn’t have to. I told him he was quite correct, and I could feel him trying to persuade himself I was not working for Harry Broll. I hope he did.”

I put the cap on the miracle goop and swabbed up the few white places where it had dribbled on the varnish, miraculously removing the gloss. I spun the helmsman’s seat around and looked at Meyer.

I said to him, “You are pretty damned intense about something I don’t understand. We don’t know whether Mary wants him to have that money or not. We know she’s in Grenada, knowing he’s sweating it out, and she’s probably enjoying it every time she thinks about it. We know that Harry is getting so frantic he’s losing control. He isn’t thinking clearly. Are you?”

“She’s been gone over three months now. Harry is living in a way that means he doesn’t expect her to come back. You thought she’d get in touch with you if she was in trouble. She didn’t. Who saw her leave? What travel agency did she use?”

I reached into the back of my mind and swatted something down. It had been buzzing in circles back there. I picked it up off the floor and looked at it. “Meyer, once on that cruise years ago we bought provisions and got a lot of green stamps. I think it was in Boca Grande. They got wet and got stuck together. Mary soaked them apart. It soaked all the glue off. She dried them between paper towels. Then she got a green stamp book and some Elmer’s, and she glued them into the book. Meyer, she didn’t even save green stamps. Another thing. We spent a lot of time anchored out, as far from marinas and boat traffic and shore sounds as we could get. So she kept turning off the generator, the air-conditioning, even the little battery transistor radio. She made great things out of the leftovers from yesterday’s leftovers. She’s not stingy. If you asked for her last dime, she’d borrow two bits somewhere and give you thirty-five cents. But she has a waste-not, want-not twitch. I kidded her about it. She didn’t mind. But it didn’t change a thing. Holly Dressner told me Mary planned to leave her car at the Miami airport. Okay. Would Mary pay two and a half a day indefinitely? Ninety days is two hundred and twenty-five dollars. Not Mary. No matter how upset. She’d find out the rates and turn around, drive a few miles, make a deal with a gas station or parking lot, and take a cab back and catch her flight.”

“If she had time.”

“Unless she changed a lot, she’d get there two hours ahead when the ticket desk says one hour. She’d have time.”

“So we should go look for her car?”

“Holly should be able to tell me what to look for.”

“Travis, I don’t want to seem efficient, but why don’t we phone Mary in Grenada? I would rather go below and drink one of your Tuborgs and listen to you fight with the island operators than drive to Miami.”

I struck myself a heavy blow in the forehead with the heel of my hand, said a few one-, seven- and ten-syllable words, and we went below.

I started at eleven thirty, and by the time I got the desk at the Spice Island Inn, I was in a cold rage. It was a radio link, and nobody seemed to give a damn about completing it. I had mentally hung Alex Bell and Don Ameche in effigy several times.

At last I got the faint voice of a girl, saying, “Spice Island Inn. May I help you?” It was the singsong lilt of the West Indies, where the accented syllables seem to fall at random in strange places.

“Do you have a Mrs. Broll registered? A Mrs. Harry Broll?”

“Who? I am sorry. What last name, sir?”

“Broll. Bee-are-oh-el-el. Broll.”

“Ah. Broll. There is no Mrs. Harry Broll.”

“Was she there? Did she leave?”

“There is a Mrs. Mary Broll. She is here since many weeks.”

“From Florida?”

“Yes. She is here from Florida.”

“Can you put me through to her, please.”

“I am sorry.”

“Do you mean you can’t?”

“There is the instruction, sir. Mrs. Broil does not take overseas calls. Not from anyone, sir.”

“This is an emergency.”

“I am sorry. I can write down for her your name and the number of your telephone. I cannot say if she returns the call. She does not wish to be disturbed by telephone calls from overseas. If you can give me your name?”

“Never mind. Thank you for your help.”

“I am sorry.” She said something else but it faded away into an odd, humming silence. There were loud clicks. Somebody else said, “Code eighteen, route through Barbados, over.”

I said, “Hey! Somebody!”

The humming stopped and the line went dead as marble. I hung up. I stood up and stretched. “Mrs. Mary Broll has been there for a long time, but she doesn’t take overseas calls.”

“In case one might be from Harry, I suppose.”

“That takes care of it. Right, Meyer?”

“I suppose so.”

“It was your idea. I phoned. She’s there.”

“I know. But… ”

“But?”

“The known facts now seem contradictory.”

“Meyer, for God’s sake!”

“Now listen to me. She wants to hide from her husband and think things out. She does not want to take any overseas calls. What would it cost her to get the operator and the desk clerk to deny that she’s even registered? Ten Biwi dollars each, ten U.S. dollars total? No more, certainly. If she was sure her husband couldn’t trace her, then the only call she could get would be from her friend Holly Dressner, and she would want to take a call from her I’d think. If she set it up so that he can find out where she is, then the refusal to take calls would mean she wants him to fly down, and the bait would be the loan he needs.”

“First you simplify things, Meyer, and then you complicate the hell out of them. I don’t know what to think now.”

“Neither do I. That’s my problem.”

“So we drive to Miami anyway?”

Holly was home, and she was very helpful about the car. “It’s one of those Volks with the fancy body. Oh, dear. What in the world are they called?”

“Karmann Ghia.”

“Right! Two years old. Dark red. Hard top. Believe it or not, I can give you the license plate number even. We were shopping, and we went to the place you get the plates together, and mine is about the same weight, so we were in the same series. Hers was one digit more than mine, so hers is 1 D 3108.”

We drove down to Miami in Miss Agnes, and I jammed her through the confusions of the cloverleaves and put her in one of the new airport parking buildings, halfway up the long wide ramp leading to the third level, nosing her against the wall between two squatty Detroit products which made her look like a dowager queen at a rock fest. A mediocre hamburger, gobbled too hastily on the way down, lay like a stone on the floor of my stomach.

I pointed out to Meyer how our task was simplified. Apparently there was some kind of stonecrushing plant in operation not to far from the open parking garages. The longer any car had been parked there, sheltered from the rain, the more white powdered stone dust it had all over it. And Mary’s would be one of the whitest of all.

There were more than enough ramps and levels and separate structures. Finally, on a top level on the side furthest from the entrance and exit ramp, I saw Karmann Ghia lines, powdery white as a sugar doughnut. Even the plate was powder white, but the bas relief of the digits made it readable as I neared it. 3108. Three months of sitting and accumulating stone dust and parking charges.

Meyer drew in the dust atop the trunk. It would have been a childish trick except for what he drew. A single large question mark. I wiped the windshield with the edge of my hand and bent and peered in. Nothing to see except a very empty automobile.

A police sedan drifted up and stopped close behind the Ghia. “Got a problem?” the driver asked. His partner got out.

“No problem, officer.”

“Your car?”

“No. It belongs to a friend.”

The driver got out. “And you can’t quite remember the name of your friend, I suppose?”

I gave him my earnest, affable smile. “Now why’d you think that, officer? This belongs to Mrs. Mary Broll, 21 Blue Heron Lane, Lauderdale, for sure.”

“Girlfriend?”

“Just a friend, officer.”

“Doesn’t your friend have anything to say?”

Meyer said, “I was not aware that you were addressing me with any of the prior questions, officer. I happen to have here-”

“Easy. Bring it out real slow.”

“I happen to have here a page from a scratch pad which, if you will examine it, gives the name of the owner and the license number and description of the vehicle.”

The nearest officer took the note and looked at it and handed it back. “Repo?”

“What?” Meyer asked. “Oh. Repossession. No. We happened to be parked here, and we knew Mrs. Broll has been gone for three months, and we wondered if she’d left her car here.”

The other officer had gotten into their car. I heard his low voice as he used the hand mike. He waited, then got out again. “Isn’t on the list, Al,” he said.

“Parked here, you say. Now both of you, let me see some ID. Slow and easy. Take it out of the wallet. Keep the wallet. Hand me the ID. Okay. Now you. Okay. Now show me your parking ticket. What kind of a car?”

“Officer, it is a very old Rolls Royce pickup truck. Bright blue. It’s over there in that other-”

“I saw that, Al. Remember? That’s the one I had you back up and see if it had the inspection sticker.”

It stopped being confrontation and began to be conversation. “Nobody,” said Al, “but nobody at all is going to arrive here in that freak truck to pull anything cute. Okay. For the hell of it, why were you wondering if this woman left her car here?”

“Not so much if she left it here, but to see if she was back yet. We were just wondering. If we didn’t find it, maybe she left it someplace else, or she came back from her trip. But we found it, so that means she’s still on her trip.”

“She stays away too much longer, she can save money by forgetting the car.” They got in and glided away without saying good-by or looking back. I guessed they cruised the garages from time to time, checking their hot car lists. It would make a good drop after a stolen car had been used for a felony. Leave it, walk across to the upper or lower level, leave the airport by cab or limousine. Or airplane. Or by private car previously stashed in the parking garage.

Meyer was very quiet, and he did not speak until we were approaching Miss Agnes. He stopped and I turned and looked back at him and strolled back to where he was standing.

“Are you going to break into tears?”

“Maybe. If you were as anxious to find your wife as Harry is, if it’s financially important as well as emotionally important, wouldn’t you report her missing and give her description and the description of her car with the tag number to the police?”

“I would think so.”

“Then the number would be on their list, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes. I mean, yes, damn it.”

“And because you are thinking what I am thinking and because we happen to be right here, wouldn’t it be a good time to find out about airline connections, McGee?”

“For two?”

“I have to finish my paper on the Eurocurrency which replaced the dollar. I promised the conference program chairman.”

Nine

I SHOULD have boarded my early afternoon BWIA flight to Barbados with stops at Kingston and San Juan, thoroughly, if not visibly, bloodied by Jillian. This was Tuesday, and I should have been sailing the sea not the air.

Cowardice is a very curious ailment. The attacks occur when you do not expect them. Instead of saying the rehearsed words, I heard myself say, “Jilly dear, the matter of the old friend has come up again. I wouldn’t want to go cruising down to St. Kitts with that hanging over me. I wouldn’t be able to stop thinking about it and wondering. It will take a few days…”

“Darling, I want you to be able to keep your mind on your work. Exclusively. Besides, the five-day forecast is foul. It might work out very nicely.”

“No tantrum?”

“What sort of woman do you think I am, dear? That’s hardly flattering, you know. All evidence to the contrary, I am not a spoiled little bitch who goes about whining and screaming and drumming her heels. I’m grown up, you know. And more patient than you imagine. I have waited quite a while to have you all to myself.”

“This shouldn’t take very long.”

“I’ll be here when you return, dear Travis. Grenada?”

The habit of caution took over. It is an automatic reflex. Never tell anybody anything which they might in turn tell the wrong person. “No. That information is obsolete. San Juan.”

“Of course. By this time, Grenada must be well emptied out. She could have more fun in Puerto Rico. Are you and she going to have a lot of fun, Travis? Just like old times?”

“I’m not planning to. But you never can tell.”

“Really! You are the most-”

“You keep asking the wrong questions. It’s a bad habit.”

“As bad as giving the wrong answers.”

For a moment the tantrum was on the edge of happening, but she forced it back, visibly, forgave me, kissed me a lingering farewell.

Now five miles over Cuba, I wondered if it would have been better for both of us if I had made it clear I was never going to become her tame houseguest. I wondered if it had been cowardice or if I was really, underneath, the kind of miserable son of a bitch who likes to keep something in reserve in case he happens to change his mind.

Our captain, being a pleasantly enthusiastic host, invited us to look down at Cuba. I was following the McGee rule of international travel and was in first class, alone in the window seat, the bulkhead seat on the starboard side. It was British West Indian Airways, BWIA, and the leg room in the bulkhead seats on the 727 is good.

A clear and beautiful day. The tilled-field geometry of Cuba looked like the geometry of any other of the islands, from five miles up. We moved across the southern coastline, and the shallow sea was a hundred shades, from the pale pale tan of shallow sand through lime and lavender to cobalt.

“Sir?” the clear, young voice said. She was a small, dusky stewardess with a high forehead, a blue-eyed stare of calculated innocence, a dark spill of glossy black hair. Her skin was a matte texture, and it was one half-shade lighter than milk chocolate. She was the one with the absolutely great legs I had noticed when I had clambered onto their airplane.

“You are going to…”

“Barbados.”

“Ah, yes. Thank you, sir. Can I get you something to drink?”

“The last time I was on BWIA there was fresh orange juice. Do you still-”

“Oh, yes.”

“With vodka then, please?”

“Oh yes, right away, thank you.” She twinkled at me and spun away, the short skirt flirting and snapping. It is changing in the islands, same as everywhere. The conservative island politicians and the white businessmen try to tell you there is no racism, that black and white are treated alike and live amiably together in happy understanding and compassion.

But if you are observant, you notice that the more desirable the job, particularly the jobs women hold-stewardesses, cashiers in banks, clerks in specialty shops, hostesses in restaurants-the more likely they are to be bleached by past miscegenation. There are some true blacks in those positions, of course, but in a far lower ratio than exists in the general population. Look at the cleaning women, the canefield workers, the laundry workers, to find the purest blacks in the islands. And the blackest blacks are, of course, probably seventy-five to eighty percent of the population of the West Indies, the Bahamas, the Windward and Leeward islands. The other twenty percent is a perceptible lightening of color, shade by shade, all the way to unleavened white. Regardless of all protestations, the whiter you are, the better you live. Blondes have the most fun. One of the most thoroughly ignored aspects of the Cuban Revolution is how happily the black Cubans embraced the new order. Though the percentage is smaller in Cuba than elsewhere through the Caribbean, the pattern of discrimination was the same. Black Cuba was entirely ready for anything at all which promised equality in education, jobs, and health care. It didn’t have to be Khrush or Mao. They would have built statues to a big green Martian if it could have delivered on the promises.

The curious and immediate and personal result of the color prejudice in the islands was that my pale chocolate stewardess with the great legs identified with me. We were both part of the ruling cabal. There could be an earnest friendliness in her unlikely blue eyes, an uninhibited flirtatiousness.

Another little girl of exactly the same color, but a citizen of the US of A and working, say, for Eastern on a domestic run, would have been working hard on an Afro hairdo, would have given me the precise number of millimeters of smile as prescribed by Eastern, would have been entirely correct, but her eyes would have been as empty as the ice of a long winter, concealing nothing more personal than a propagandized hostility, a prepackaged contempt, an ability to see me only as a symbol of oppression, not as a living creature walking two-legged on the same untidy world, trying to live through the weird years with a little bit of grace and care.

Too bad, somehow. The real guilt is in being a human being. That is the horrible reality which bugs us all. Wolves, as a class, are cleaner, more industrious, far less savage, and kinder to each other and their young.

When she came back with the screwdriver, she leaned one round delicious knee on the empty seat beside me and reached and put the glass and napkin on the small, built-in service area between the seats. I could read her name tag. Mia Cruikshank. “Mia?” I said.

“Yes, sir?”

“I just meant… it’s a pretty name.”

She made a droll mouth. “Better than what it was, I think. Miriam. Mia is smashing compared to that.”

“Smashing indeed.”

So we went humming down across the blue seas under the blue skies of vacationland at approximately nine hundred feet per second, which is the muzzle velocity of the.45 caliber Colt automatic pistol, an ugly and cumbersome weapon. Our happy captain pointed out this and that. We stopped at Kingston and San Juan and points south.

We lost more passengers than we took on. Each is land had its quota of red tape, so that the stops were long.

Mia kept me happily supplied with drinks and food, and we found it easy to smile at each other. We stood together when the sun was low, on the little platform at the top of the rolling stairs at the little airport on St. Lucia.

“You are remaining at Barbados, sir, or continuing?”

“To Grenada tomorrow morning.”

“Oh, yes. That is so lovely an island. Of course, Barbados is very nice, too. Just one night is a short time to stay.”

“I didn’t want to stay there at all.”

“I know. There is no way. You fly with us or Pan Am to Barbados or Trinidad, from Miami everyone arrives too late for the last flight to Grenada. It has to be by daylight, of course, in the small aircraft. Where will you stay in Barbados?”

“I thought I would check it out after I get there.”

“Oh, yes. The season is over. There is room everywhere. But really, there was room in most of the places during the season too this year. We did not carry so many people to Barbados this year.”

“Why not?”

She glanced back over her shoulder and moved closer to me, lowered her voice. “I am not a rich, Important person who owns a hotel, so perhaps they know what they are doing. But, sir, suppose this was in the season and you are traveling with a lady and you try to make a reservation for the two of you in Barbados, just to stay in a hotel room overnight to continue on in the morning. In your money, in US dollars, to stay at the Barbados Hilton, it will be seventy dollars for one night, and there will be ten percent service charge added to that, so that it will be seventy seven dollars. Even were you to stay at the Holiday inn, sir, it will be fifty-five plus ten percent, or sixty dollars and fifty cents.”

“Without meals? You have to be kidding.”

“Oh, no. You see, sir, they will only make reservations for you on the Modified American Plan, which includes breakfast and dinner, even when it is clear you will have dinner aboard this flight and leave so early the next morning there is perhaps time for coffee and rolls. This is happening in all the islands, sir. It is perhaps the worst in Barbados, the worst of all. It is a fantastic greed. It is like some terrible animal out of control, so hungry it feeds upon itself and is killing itself. I should not say so much.”

“I won’t turn you over to the tourist board, Mia.”

“Oh, thank you.” She hesitated and scowled. “There is something I am trying to think how to say. It is really what is wrong now with the islands. It is why each year there will be fewer people coming to these lovely places.”

“It’s a shame.”

She turned to face me directly and looked up at me. “Seventy-seven dollars is over a hundred and fifty dollars in our currency. In Biwi dollars. A house servant in Barbados might make fifty dollars, Biwi, a month. A waiter or waitress might make seventy-five dollars, Biwi, a month. So how does a human person feel serving or cleaning up after another human person who pays two or three months wages for one single night in a room? Sir, it is like such a terrible arrogance and thoughtlessness. It makes hate, sir. It makes contempt. So the cleaning is done badly, and the serving is done very slowly and badly, and there are no smiles. Then, sir, the person who is paying too much because the hotel owners are so greedy, he becomes very angry, because if he pays so much, the service should be of the very best, and everything should be very clean. When he is angry, then he seems to be more arrogant and rich and thoughtless, sir. Hate and anger back and forth, it is a terrible thing. There is no pleasure in work and no pleasure in vacationing here, and that is why each year, like this year, there will be fewer and fewer tourists, jobs, money. It is wicked. I keep thinking to myself, what can be done-what can be done? It is like the goose, sir.”

“The goose?”

“The goose they killed to get at the golden eggs.” She looked at her watch. An official was trotting up the stairs. “Now we will be going, sir.”

After lift-off she gave me a final drink, and she. and the other girls did their desk work and policed their area and changed to their ground uniforms. She had time to give me some advice. She told me that the nearest hotel to the airport was a five-dollar taxi ride, Biwi. The Crane Beach. She said the rooms were very small and primitive, but the beach was beautiful, and the food was excellent. She said the management was surly, and the waiters insolent, but it was only for overnight, and it would be almost empty. Besides, the Barbados Hilton and the other hotels were a lot closer to Bridgetown, and so were ten to fifteen Biwi dollars one way from the airport. In most of the islands it appears that committees of taxi drivers determine airport locations.

“Just laugh at whatever they want to charge you at the Crane Beach, sir. The season is over. Put down ten dollars, Yankee, and tell them the service charge percent is included, not extra. They will show you a rate schedule and tell you it is official and they cannot change it. Just laugh. They will take the money and give you a room. It is not so easy to get a taxi in the morning early from there. Just tear a Yankee dollar in two pieces and give half to the taxi driver and tell him when to come in the morning. He will be certain to return. Do not tip anyone at that hotel. They are shameless, and it is all included in the price of everything anyway.”

I was genuinely grateful to Mia. I thanked her and said, “I hope I will get a chance to tell you how I made out.”

“Perhaps, if you fly BWIA back to Miami, I will serve you again. How long shall you be in Grenada, Sir?”

“A few days. Any idea where I should stay?”

“Oh, no. I do not know that island so well. This is not a vacation for you. Business, yes?”

“How do you know?”

“I think I can tell if a man is not one who would take a vacation alone, sir. Good luck, sir.”

My taxi man arrived the next day three minutes before the stipulated hour. He smiled broadly when he saw me standing in the early morning light outside the hotel gates with my single piece of carry-on luggage. He decided that it was a splendid idea, the half of the paper dollar. It left each of us with an investment to protect. He had brought some tape, and he put his dollar back together before we started off His name was Oswald, and he was a thin old man with several gold teeth. He drove his elderly white Plymouth with that kind of care which is more involved with not breaking anything than not hitting anybody.

I took LIAT, a BWIA subsidiary, to Grenada, a direct flight of about forty minutes. It was an old Avro with the rows shoved closer together to increase capacity, so that the little oval windows did not match the seat positions. Two big propjet Rolls Royce brutes powered the small aircraft. The stewardess was about the same size and shape as Hubert Humphrey. The pilot had Walter Mitty dreams of being a fighter pilot. It was an interesting takeoff and an even more interesting landing.

At Grenada’s grubby little airport I once again had to show my driver’s license and turn over that card form which serves as embarkation and debarkation permit, depending on how you fill out the blanks.

And then came a fascinating ride in a taxi. The island is only twenty-one miles long and twelve miles wide. The airport is about as far as it could possibly be from the principal town, St. George’s. The morning ride took one full hour, and I would not have wanted my man to have tried to shave five minutes off the elapsed time. I helped with the brakes so continuously that my right leg was nearly paralyzed when we finally came down out of the mountains to sea level. The driver-he gave me his card-was Albert Owen, and he had a Chevrolet assembled in Australia with a suspension system designed for the Outback of Australia. He had put fifty-three thousand incredible miles on it on that improbable road system, using up God only knows how many sets of brake linings. Drive on the left. Average width of road-one and a quarter lanes. No shoulders. Blind corners. Big lumps, deep potholes, children, dogs, pigs, donkeys, bicycles, trucks, buses, motorcycles. So honk the horn almost continuously, shift up and shift down, swerve, leap, squeal, slide, accelerateand all the time Albert Owen was hollering back over his shoulder at me, pointing out bah-nah-nah tree, almond tree, sugar cane, sar. Over there mammy apple, coconut plahntation sar, cocoa, also you are seeing nutmeg, sar. Many spices.

Once when a small insane truck came leaping at us on the wrong side around a bend, Albert swerved smartly. It missed us by the thickness of a coat of paint. Albert laughed and laughed. He said, “That is one foolish driver, sar. He nearly mosh us.”

But nobody actually did mosh us. It was hard to believe they were not trying. Were the fates to put Albert down on any weekday morning on the Palmetto Turnpike heading into Miami with the inbound torrent, the terror of it might put him into a dead faint. A Miami cabdriver suddenly transported into Albert’s mountains might conceivably run weeping into the jungle.

People certainly did go about moshing people. The dead cars amid the lush vines and wild shrubs were proof enough of that.

Albert asked me where my reservation was as we plummeted down toward the town and blue late-morning sea beyond. I said I had none but would look about a little. He said there were no problems this time of year. There had been trouble with the government water supply. When the hotel cisterns had run out, many people had left. Now the water was on again, but there were not so many tourists as on other Aprils. I found out that the Grenada Beach Hotel was the place most centrally located on Grande Anse, the two miles of crescent beach just south of the town, looking westward. I asked him if he would wait there for me. We made certain financial negotiations.

I left my single piece of luggage with him. He parked in the vehicle circle outside the main doors. I walked in and through an open lobby area and found a thatched bar off to the left, open to the outdoors, looking out across a long expanse of green lawn and tall, graceful coconut palms toward the garden of beach umbrellas, toward the bright colors of beach chairs and towels on the distant sand.

A bored bartender in a red coat appeared from some unknown hiding place, yawning. He made me a delicious rum punch with grated nutmeg afloat on it. He asked for my room number, and I paid cash for my drink, then gifted him with some of the Biwi I had picked up at the moneychanger’s booth in the temple of Miami International. He brightened visibly, and I asked him if he had a phone back there, and he said he did, and he said he would be glad to phone the Spice Island Inn for me. He did so and handed me the phone.

“What number is Mrs. Broll in, please? Mrs. Mary Broll?”.

“Ah… yes, she is in cottage 50, sir. Shall I ring her for you?”

“No thank you,” I said and hung up.

I finished my drink very, very slowly. It is a very strange reluctance, a curious hesitation that can immobilize you at such a time. You are eager to prove to yourself that you’ve been quite wrong, that you’ve taken too many small things and built them up into a fantasy structure that cannot be true.

Yet, if by some chance the fantasy proves to be reality, most of the game is still left to play, and an ugly game it can be.

It could be a delicious surprise. I could see the shape of Mary’s familiar mouth, the wide and startled eyes, and then the rush of pleasure, the embrace.

“The Spice Island Inn is close by?”

“That direction. Very close. A small walk, sir. Two minutes.”

But in the hot tropical blaze of April a man in slacks and sport shirt, socks and shoes would be as conspicuous on that beach, I found, as in a Mother Hubbard at a nudist camp. I went back through the hotel and found Albert dozing in the shade. I woke him, and we got into the broiling taxi and rode south to the entrance to the Spice Island Inn.

Meyer and I had tried to cover all eventualities in the long planning session we’d had before I left. In the islands there appeared to be so little interest in any verification of identity that the risk factor seemed very minor indeed. If we were wrong, I was going to feel a little foolish: But if we were right, there was a chance I could feel something beyond mere foolishness.

And so, in Albert Owen’s backseat I switched the cash money, all of it, from one wallet to another and became Gavin Lee. Known as Gav. Known as Mr. Lee. This follows Meyer’s theory that when you pick a new name, pick one that has the same basic vowel sounds. Then you will react if you hear somebody behind you say your assumed name.

I was going to carry my own suitcase in. Albert did not think that was appropriate. The desk was very cordial. Nothing creates such a flavor of genuine, heart-felt welcome as a nearly empty hotel.

They showed me the rates. They told me I had a choice of plans. They showed me a map of the place with all manner of accommodations. What would please Mr. Lee, the ostensibly vacationing land developer from Miami, Scottsdale, Acapulco, Hawaii, Palm Springs, and Las Vegas? Well, I’m kind of curious about those with the private pool. These here on your map. Just this row of them, eh? How about this one right here on the end? Number… I can’t read it upside down. Thank you, 50. Full. Are all these full then? Just 50, 57, and 58. Well, in the middle then, as far from the occupied ones as… 54? I can see there are two bedrooms, but I don’t see any one bedroom ones with the walled garden and the pool, so… Now what will it be on… a European Plan? After a few days I may change, depending on how the dining room is here. Of course. I’m sure it’s marvelous. All right. Quote me on a per day… That’s $28, single? That’s US? Hmmm. Plus ten percent service charge and five percent tax, which is… $32.34 per day. Look, I’m carrying a bit more cash than I intended. Would you mind taking this hundred-dollar bill for three days in advance? And I’ll bring you an envelope to put in the safe.

I paid Albert off and told him I would keep his card and I would certainly get him to drive me back to the airport some day. A bellhop led me down a long long path to the newest line of attached bungalows, the ones with the pool in the garden. The row was a good two hundred and fifty yards from the hotel proper. He demonstrated the air-conditioning, the button to push for food service, the button to push for drink service.

Then he went away. I was left in silence, in the shadowed coolness of the tourist life.

Drive the clenched fist into palm. Pock! “Be here, baby. Just be here!”

Ten

THE ROW Of tall attached cottages with a double peak on the roof of each one was set at a slight angle to the beach, so that architecturally they could be set back, one from the next, to provide total privacy for the individual walled gardens where the small swimming pools were.

The row of cottages was back a hundred feet and more from the beach. Between the front gates of the cottages and the beach itself was a private expanse of sand, landscaped palms, sea grapes, almond trees with sun chaises spotted about at intervals far enough apart for privacy.

I put on swim trunks and took up a position on a chaise fifty feet from my front gate, turning it in such a way I could watch the gate of number 50. By then it was past noon. The tropic sun had such a hefty sting I knew that even my deep and permanent tan would not be immune, not without a little oil and a little limitation on the exposure time.

At twenty minutes to one the gate opened, and a young woman came out. She was of medium height, delicately and gracefully built. Her dark hair was quite long, and she had a white band above her forehead clipping it in place. She seemed to be somewhere in her twenties. I could not make a closer guess at that distance. She wore eccentric sunglasses with huge round lenses in dark amber. She wore a don’t-swim-in-it bikini fashioned of white elasticized cord and swatches of watermelon colored terrycloth. She was two shades darker than Mia Cruikshank, a perfect and even tan which could only have come from untold hours of total discipline and constant care.

A man came out with her. Youngish, lithe, laughing and saying something which made her laugh. Awesomely muscled, moving well so that muscles bulged and slid under the red-bronze tan. A Riviera swimming outfit, little more than a white satin jockstrap. She walked a few steps and then turned in a proprietary way and went back and tested to see if the gate was locked. She looked in her small white Ratsey bag, apparently to make sure that her key was there. Then they walked toward the hotel.

My heart had turned heavy, and there was a taste of sickness in my throat. But you have to be certain, terribly certain. Like a biopsy. Make absolutely sure of the malignancy. Because the surgery is radical.

I gave them five minutes and then followed the same route. I found them in another of the ubiquitous thatched bars, having a drink at a shady table and still laughing. A cheerful pair. I went to the bar and ordered a drink. When I had a chance, I asked the bartender if the woman at the table was a certain Lois Jefferson. He looked troubled. He said he knew them by the numbers. Just a moment, please. He went to the other end of the bar and came back with a signed drink tab. Mary D. Broll. Number 50. He showed it to me. I thanked him, said I was wrong. I winked at him and said, “But that is not Mr. Broll?”

He had a knowing smile. “It is just a friend. He has been a friend for a week, I think. He works, I think, on a private boat. That is what I hear. It is easy to make friends here.”

I picked my drink up and moved along the bar to a stool that was about a dozen feet from their table. I turned around on the stool, my back to the bar, and looked at her with obvious and amiable and very thorough appreciation. She was worth appreciating, right from her brown, slender, tidy little ankles right on up-not too quickly-to a ripely cushioned little mouth, dark eyes set at an interesting tilt, a broad, immature, and vulgar little nose.

She put her glasses back on and leaned over and said something to her nautical friend. He put his drink down and turned around and stared back over his shoulder at me. I smiled and nodded at him. He had a Prince Valiant haircut, and his hair was the dark molten shade of some golden retrievers. His face had a tough, pinched, disadvantaged look which did not go with the Valiant hair or the beachboy body. I do not make any judgments about hair length, mine or anyone’s. I own some Sears electric clippers with plastic gadgets of various shapes which fit on the clippers to keep you from accidentally peeling your hair off down to the skull. I find that long hair is a damned nuisance on boats, on the beach, and in the water. So when it gets long enough to start to make me aware of it, I clipper it off, doing the sides in the mirror and the back by feel. The sun bleaches my hair and burns it and dries it out. And the salt water makes it feel stiff and look like some kind of Dynel. Were I going to keep it long, I would have to take care of it. That would mean tonics and lotions and special shampoos. That would mean brushing it and combing it a lot more than I do and somehow fastening it out of the way in a stiff breeze. Life is so full of all those damned minor things you have to do anyway, it seems nonproductive to go looking for more. So I go hoe the hair down when it attracts my attention. The length is not an expression of any social, economic, emotional, political, or chronographic opinion. It is on account of being lazy and impatient. No reason why the male can’t have long, lovely, dark golden hair if he wants it. But it is a personal decision now, just as it was during the Crusades and the Civil War.

He kept staring right at me, and I kept smiling at him. So he got up fast and rolled his shoulders as he covered the twelve feet to stand in front of me, bare feet spread and braced.

“Chief, stop the bird-dog routine. You’re annoying the lady.”

“Me? Come on now! Don’t let her kid you. Lois and I have known each other for a long time. She knows I like to look at her. Always have. And I know she likes being looked at. Right, dear?”

“You’re out of your tree, chief. Knock it off. She isn’t Lois.”

I stood up. “She’s Lois Jefferson. Believe me!” I edged by him as he tried to block me away from the table. “Lois, honey. It’s Gav Lee, for God’s sake. It was a good joke, but let’s not run it into the ground.”

She took the glasses off and looked up at me. “Really, I’m not Lois. I’m Mary Broll. Really.”

I boggled at her. “Not Lois Jefferson from Scarsdale? Not Tom’s wife?”

It sucked in the fellow nicely. He was all alerted for games. When you roam in public with an item like that woman, you keep the guard way up. “Honey,” he said, “how about this clown? You get it? Tom Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson. Stop annoying us, chief, or I’ll call the-”

I turned on him. “Really. Would it put too much of a strain on you to have a little common courtesy? Her husband has always had the nickname Tom, for quite obvious reasons. His real name is…” I turned back to her. “What is Tom’s real first name, dear?”

She laughed. “But I am really not your friend!”

I stared at her. “That can’t be possible. It’s the most fantastic look-alike… You wouldn’t believe… Miss Broll, would you-”

“Mrs. Broll.”

“I’m sorry. Mrs. Broll, would it be rude of me to ask you to stand up for just a moment?”

“I guess not.”

“Now just one goddamn-”

I turned on him again. “What harm can it do, Mr. Broll?”

She stood up beside her chair. I moved closer to her, and I stared into her eyes from close range. “By God, I am wrong. I would never have believed it. You are a little bit taller than Lois, and I think your eyes are a darker shade, Mrs. Broll.”

“Now go away,” the man said.

As she sat down she said, “Oh, shut up, Carl. You get so boring sometimes. The man made a mistake. All right? All right. Please forgive Carl, Mr…”

“Lee. Gavin Lee. Gav to my friends.”

“I don’t see any friends of yours around here,” the man said.

She gave me a very pretty and well-practiced smile. “Gav, this rude animal is Carl Brego. Carl, shake hands nicely with Gav, or you can damned well take off.”

I saw the little tightening around his eyes and knew the childish bit he was going to try. So when he put his hand out, I put my hand into his much too quickly for him to close his hand to get my knuckles. I got my hand all the way back, deep into the web between thumb and finger. Then I could just maintain a mild, firm clasp and smile at him as he nearly ruptured his shoulder muscles trying to squeeze my hand to broken pulp.

“Sorry about the little misunderstanding, Carl,” I said. “I’d like to buy you two nice people a drink.”

He let go of my hand and sat down. “Nobody invited you to join the party, chief.”

He had fallen into that one, too. He was scoring very badly. I said, “I don’t expect to sit down with you, Carl. Why should I? I was going to go to that table way over there and have my own drink over there and send two to this table. You act as if I’m trying to move in on you. How far would I get, Carl? As you are not Mr. Broll, then this lovely lady is a friend of yours. You are having lunch together. Just the two of you. If I were having lunch with her, I would be very ugly about anybody trying to move in. I just think you overreact, Carl. I made a little mistake. You keep getting rude for no reason. But I’ll still buy those drinks. I was thinking of it as an apology, not a ticket to the party.”

So saying, I gave the lady a little bow and marched on over to my distant table and told the waiter to give them anything they might want. I sat with my back toward them.

It did not take her long. Four minutes, I think it was, before he appeared beside my chair, standing almost at attention.

“Excuse me. Mrs. Broll would be very happy if you would join us for lunch.”

I smiled up at him. “Only if you are absolutely certain you don’t mind, Brego.”

It hurt his mouth to say it. It hurt his whole face.

“m…~,.:- ma… r e

An through lunch I knew Brego was waiting and planning. When I saw that he wasn’t at all upset that I was living just a few doors-or a few gardens-away from his pretty friend, I could almost guess the kind of routine he had figured out.

And during lunch I had managed to steer the conversation in a direction that gave me a chance to awaken more than a flicker of interest in her eyes and at the same time gave her a chance to shove a little blade into Carl Brego and give it a twist.

I said, “I take little flyers in island property sometimes. Actually, that’s why I’m here. Some associates said I ought to take a look at this one. Anyway, usually I like to pyramid, but quite a while ago I got into Freeport up in the Bahamas at the right time and got out at exactly the right time with much more than I’d expected, so I thought I’d give myself a little present. So I bought this great big, ridiculous brute of a schooner in Nassau and had the yard that sold it to me hire aboard a crew, and I actually set out for this island. But the guest I invited aboard for the trip became terribly seasick. We made it as far as Great Inagua and got off, both of us, at Matthew Town and arranged passage from there back to civilization. I had the crew take the boat back to Nassau. As I remember, my accountants told me the net loss was something like thirteen thousand dollars after I had the yard resell the schooner. But it would have been cruel and unusual punishment to have made the young lady sail one more mile.”

Something behind her dark eyes went ding, and a cash drawer slid open in her skull. She counted the big bills and shut it again and smiled and said, “Carl knows all about yachts. He sails one around for a very fat rich lady, don’t you, darling?”

“That must be very interesting,” I said.

“He’s waiting on Grenada until she arrives with friends,” the woman said. “You know. Like a chauffeur, parked somewhere.”

“Knock it off,” Carl said in a small humble voice.

“Please?” she said.

“Please.”

And that made it even more imperative. I decided I was reading her well enough to see that she knew the direction the tensions would take and would give the ceremony a chance to get under way at the first opportunity. And would want to watch.

When we got to her gate, there was no one in sight. The breeze had stopped. Sweat popped out immediately on all three of us. I felt it run down my back.

“Do come in, Gay,” she said. “Do join us.”

She was starting to unlock the gate. Carl said, “So it’s enough already.”

“Enough?” she said blankly. “Enough?”

“Honey, the guy is taking a cheap shot, and I’m going to run him off.”

She licked her mouth. “Carl, sweetie, why do you have to be-”

“You can go in out of the heat, or you can stay and watch how it’s done, Mary. Either way I run this smartass off.”

“Any special direction?” I asked.

“Pick the one you like best, chief,” he said with a jolly grin of anticipation. “Start now and save yourself grief.”

“Take your best shot, Brego.” He took it. I was worried that he might know too much about what he wanted to do. If he did, it was going to take a long time in the hot sun, and if he didn’t, it could be reasonably quick.

He did a little bounce, a little prance. He pawed with the clumsy, measuring left and then came leaping in, following up on the right hook that he had brought up from about five feet behind him, practically at ground level. He did not know what he was doing. People who know do not go around taking the chance of hitting the solid bone of skull or jaw with the bare fist. A broken hand is incapacitating. It takes a long, tiresome time to heal. He wanted to pop me one and let the momentum carry him into me so he could get his hands and arms on me and put those muscles to work. He gave me lots of time for a decision. If I fell back away from it, he was going to tumble onto me. That way. I might get a thumb in my eye before I could unwind and unravel him. The footing in the soft sand was a little uncertain for savate. So I moved forward, a little to my right, to take me inside that long, sweeping hook.

I felt it go around me, and I let his momentum then drive me back. I drove both hands, fingers spread, into his long hair, I clenched hard and went down pulling him on top of me but getting my knees up against my chest in time. One shoe slipped off his sweaty body, but the sole of the other stayed in place against his belly, and momentum gave me enough leverage to push him up and over. It was a good, high kick, and he spun well. By then I was on my back with my hands straight up over my head.

He hit the soft sand flat on his back with one hell of a whump. It exploded the air out of his lungs. I was up first, and I moved into position, waiting for him. He got up slowly, gagging for air. As he pushed up, I cranked his arm around behind him and put my other hand on the nape of his neck and ran him into the weathered boards of the garden fence, quite close to the woman. He splintered a board with the top of his head. She squeaked and chewed her fist. I dragged him back by the ankles, face down. I picked him up and stood him on his noodle legs and slapped him until he started to come around. Then I bent him over and ran him into the fence again. I dragged him back again, and I turned his feet until he rolled over onto his back. I slapped him where he lay, and when he stirred and his eyes came into focus, I levered his mouth open by bracing the heel of my hand against his chin. I packed his mouth full of soft hot sand, from the back of his throat to his pretty, white teeth. He came sputtering and gagging onto his hands and knees and coughed himself sick. I grabbed the hair and pulled his head up and back.

“Nod if you can understand me, Brego.” He nodded. “Do you want me to break any bones? Do I have to do that?” He shook his head. “She isn’t your woman any more. Understand?” He nodded. “Now I am going to start kicking your ass. You better head for the beach. If I ever see you back here, I’ll break some bones.”

I went around behind him and got a pretty good soccer kick into it, using the side of my foot. On the upswing. It slid him onto his face. He came scrambling up with more energy than I expected, but I got him again just as he got his feet under him and his hands free of the sand. Three running steps and he landed on his face again but didn’t spend any time resting. He got up and went into a wobbly scuffling run, fists against his chest, not daring or wanting to look back.

I watched him and then turned and looked at the woman. She gave me a very uncertain smile. There was an unhealthy skin tone under that deep lovely tan. “I… I thought you were going to kill him.”