Cinnamon Skin

Cinnamon Skin

John D. MacDonald

Travis McGee #20 Cinnamon Skin

John D. MacDonald Dedicated to our special group of Kiwis, with love

A man’s life is dyed the color of his imagination.

- Marcus Aurelius

One

THERE ARE no hundred percent heroes.

Every man can be broken when things happen to him in a certain order, with a momentum and an intensity that awaken ancient fears in the back of his mind. He knows what he must do, but suddenly the body will not obey the mind. Panic becomes like an unbearably shrill sound.

I was trying to explain this to Annie Renzetti, the trim, tidy, and loving person who had been an essential part of my life for many months. It was late June, summer season at the resort she manages, the Eden Beach near Naples, Florida. We were down on the beach, at the quiet end, beyond her personal cabana, sprawled on huge beach towels. It was difficult for me to carry on any kind of complex discussion and keep looking at her at the same time, especially when she was using a tiny white bikini to set off her golden-dark tan. I had never before been seriously involved with a short, slender, dark-haired woman. My taste had run to tall blondes with long long legs and good shoulders. Maybe in my ignorance I had thought the little ones too fragile. Found out they are not. At least this one wasn’t.

“Did it ever happen to you?” she asked.

“Not really, but I have been so close I know that somewhere, sometime, it could happen. We have a lot of myths in our society, Annie.”

“Please remember you are the only person in the world who is allowed to call me Annie.”

“I will never forget. I think the myth that has humbled Meyer is one of the worst: the myth of the unbreakable hero. I told him some stories. I thought one would make the right impression on him.

“A long time ago, in one of the wars we didn’t win, I had a company commander who was the best I ever saw. Quiet and competent and humane and tough. When bad orders came down, he’d find ways to sidestep them without getting himself or any of us jammed up. He took all the risks we took, and he tried to keep the risk factor down. He took damned good care of us, and when we lost people, it really hurt him.

“One day we had to go through a patch of Asian jungle which had a leech out at the tip end of almost every leaf and twig, swaying, waiting for something full of blood to walk underneath. The captain hadn’t been in leech country before, but the company had. There are two good ways to get them off: touch them with a lighted end of a cigaret or slide a sliver of bamboo under one up to the head end and give a little flip and he’ll come off. After you’ve flipped about ten of them off, you begin to get the hang of it. The thing I hated most about them was the way they would crawl through the eyelets on your boots and fasten onto you through your socks, swell up huge, and then get mashed by the pressure of the boot as you walked.”

“Hey, look!” she said, and showed me the goose bumps on her upper arm.

“Where was I?”

“I won’t even tell you.”

“Oh. Anyway, it was really a heavy fall in there, and they were coming down faster than you could get them off. And if you tried pulling them off, of course you left the jaws embedded and they would fester. So we broke out of the column and looked up and ran to where there were open places in the trees overhead, where they couldn’t fall down and you’d have time to get rid of the ones already on you. But the captain didn’t know the routine. He stood there, pulling them off, faster and faster, thrashing around, and finally he began screaming and running, falling down and jumping up, screaming and running. He was a good brave man, but this little thing came at just the wrong time and place; maybe it resonated with something in his childhood. It broke him. Also, it destroyed his authority over the company. He began to make mistakes. And one of them got him killed about three weeks later.”

“How awful!”

“A couple of days after the leech business, one of the company clowns did an imitation of the captain fighting off the leeches. I decked him.”

“I’m glad.”

“Strange thing, the clown got killed in the same weird skirmish that got the captain killed. The captain read the map wrong, and we went down the wrong trail.”

“But you couldn’t make Meyer understand what you were telling him.”

“I told you how it was. We knew Grizzel was a dangerous psychopath with nothing to lose and that he was probably on his way to see us. Meyer had never seen me bring in outside help before. So when Grizzel came up behind Meyer, spun him around, jammed that derringer into his gut and announced that they were both going to come over to the Busted Flush and visit me-and it would be the last visit Meyer would ever make and I would ever get-Meyer said he looked back into that man’s crazy eyes and saw something moving back in there, something without soul or mercy. He read his own death. He saw there was no hope. He turned into a robot, doing only what Grizzel ordered. He was broken and he knew it.”

“But he saw Grizzel fall dead, Travis! Didn’t that…?”

“Maybe it helped, but not much. It’s been a year. We all miss the old Meyer. That’s why we cooked up this Toronto lecture thing. We had to be careful. If he’d suspected it was a put-up job, he’d have refused the invitation to lecture up there. His old friend Aggie Sloane helped us arrange it, after she flew down and saw Meyer looking so dwindled and withdrawn. She has a lot of clout. She talked one of Meyer’s friends, a man named Pricewater, into backing out of a speaking engagement up there in Canada and asking Meyer as a special favor to fill in for him. The man pled illness.”

“Then I don’t understand about the niece.”

“That was another plot to get Meyer out of his shell. We phoned her. I told her about Meyer: She was hurt that he hadn’t come to her wedding in April and had just sent regrets and a check and the usual best wishes for happiness. And so she said she and her new husband would fly over as soon as she could take some time off. So of course Evan and Norma Lawrence arrived the day before Meyer had to fly up to Toronto for the two-week lecture series. So he insisted they live aboard his cruiser while he was in Canada. One of the captains from Charterboat Row is taking them out on day trips aboard the Keynes. We had two great schemes, and they just happened to overlap. Anyway, he’ll be back here July sixth and they don’t have to leave until the tenth. After that Aggie is going to send him off to cover something or other for her newspapers. She told me that any kind of depression can be cured if you move a person around enough.”

“Let me see, I keep moving you back and forth between Lauderdale and Naples. Feel depressed?”

“Let’s move up to your place and see if there is anything wrong with me that needs fixing.”

“Oh, no, you don’t! I’m a career woman, and there is my career sitting right over there, all two hundred rooms of it, dying for lack of attention.”

“Annie, we’ve been out here in the blazing sun, and we’re going to have to take showers anyway. Florida has a serious water shortage. Why waste a good shower?”

“I have got to learn to start saying no to you.”

“Why?”

She rolled onto her elbows and looked down into my eyes. She pursed her lips and raised her thick dark brows and said, “Now that is a very good question. A very good question indeed. Why should I start that?”

So we picked up our gear and climbed the steps to the shallow porch of the manager’s cabana, up on pilings six feet tall. We had half a bottle of red wine left from the previous evening, and I mixed it half and half with club soda and lots of ice, for tall spritzers. She dimmed the daylight in the bedroom by pulling the draperies almost across. We sat on the bed and sipped the spritzers and grinned at each other. Finally we set them aside, and I took all of her out of her scraps of bikini, admired her every inch at close and loving range, and in due time, with knowing effort, set her to hooting and whimpering and finally sighing deeply and long.

I did not know the relationship was in any difficulty until after our showers, after we were dressed and I was ready to drive back to Lauderdale and she was ready to go back to work. It was a banquet night for some fraternal order and she wanted to watch it very closely, as it was their first arrangement at the Eden Beach.

I said, “When can I come back? When can you drive over? Seems to me I’ve asked before.”

“It’s pretty damn convenient for you, Travis.”

“I’m not sure how you mean that.”

“I’m not really sure either. It just seems to me you’re kind of a lucky chauvinist.”

“Now hold on! We are pretty damn convenient for each other, if you want to put it that way. I wouldn’t exactly call you unfulfilled, lady.”

“Bragging about your work?”

“Jesus, Annie!”

“I’m sorry. I’m trying to hurt you, I guess, but I don’t know why.”

“I thought we got on together pretty well.”

“We do, we do. Of course we do. Maybe it’s some kind of chronic guilt. I used to have the guilts when I worked for Ellis and lived with him. Everybody is supposed to have the right to live as they please these days. Oh, hell, I know what it is, but I hate having to try to explain it to you.”

“Please do.”

“We’ve talked a lot, Travis. That’s been such a big part of us, all the good talk. And you’ve told me about the loves you’ve had and the way you lost them. But… I sense a kind of reserve about you. You seem to be totally open with me, but some part of you is holding back. Some part of you doesn’t really believe that you are not going to lose me also. So you cut down on the amount of loss by not getting as deeply involved as… as we could be involved. Do you understand?”

“I’m trying to. I’m not holding back. I don’t think I am. I tell you I love you. Maybe oftener I should tell you?”

“It isn’t words or deeds, dear. We’re never part of each other. We are each of us on the outside of the other person.”

“And this is no time for a bawdy comment.”

“No, it is not!”

“Are you talking about marriage, for instance?”

“No, dammit! But I would like it if we lived closer together and saw each other oftener.”

“Hell, I wish you’d pick up your life savings, separation pay and all that, and move aboard the Flush.”

“You know better than that. I really really love it here. I’m doing one hell of a job. It shows in the figures I send in, and in the appreciation they’re giving me. I’m just about the best manager in the chain. I like working with people, finding the way to approach each one to make him or her do a better job, to motivate them. Because of me this resort hotel is clean and profitable and fun.”

“Okay, already. Why can’t you just settle for what we have? I think it’s a little better than what most people settle for.”

She sighed and leaned against me, then reached up to kiss the side of my chin. “Okay McGee. I’ll try, but something about us hasn’t quite meshed yet. Maybe it never will. Who can say? Run along. Drive carefully. Phone often.”

Two

THE FIFTH of July began with heavy rain from a tropical depression in the Atlantic east of Miami, a warm rain accompanied by random gusts of wind.

By ten in the morning, the rain had diminished to a misty drizzle and Meyer’s stubby little cruiser, The John Maynard Keynes, had left the gas dock at Pier 66, Fort Lauderdale, proceeded under the bridge, past the cruise ships tied up at Port Everglades, out the main channel and past the sea buoy, and had headed on an east-southeast course, the blunt bow lifting with the chop, mashing out small sheets of spray each time it fell back.

An old man in a condominium apartment facing the sea was looking out his sixth-floor window at the time of the explosion and was able to fix the time of it at precisely 10:41 Eastern Daylight Time.

A cabin cruiser was inbound from Nassau, heading for the channel and wallowing a little in the following sea. It was the Brandy-Gal out of Venice, Florida, owned by a Mr. and Mrs. Simmons Davis. Mrs. Davis was in one of the two fishing chairs, the one on the starboard side, and her husband was at the wheel up on the fly bridge. They both testified that when the two cruisers passed each other, a slender dark-haired woman in an orange string bikini had waved and Mrs. Davis had waved back. They had both seen a bulky man at the wheel and a blond man in the cockpit, coiling and stowing a line.

Mrs. Davis said she remembered being amused at the unusual name on the cruiser, The John Maynard Keynes; she knew that any mention of Keynesian economic theory tended to make her husband very cross. And she remembered thinking that the chunky little cruiser did not take the chop,very well, and that if it were hers she would head back to the Inland Waterway. Also, she thought it seemed to ride too low in the water.

She estimated that it was two hundred and fifty to three hundred feet from the Brandy-Gal when it blew up. It was there, and then suddenly the only visible thing was a white bright glare, larger than the cruiser, with small objects arching up out of it. There was a sound she described as being both sharp and heavy, a kind of cracking whump that made her ears ring, and she felt heat on her face. Simmons Davis wheeled the Brandy-Gal about and went back in a hopeless search for survivors. He knew he was in eighty to a hundred feet of water. He rigged a small spare anchor to an orange float with ample braided nylon line and flipped it overboard. Then he and his wife, using scoop nets, picked up the few floating bits of debris. Half a scorched life ring. A soiled white cap with a blue bill, part of it still smoldering. The lid from an ice chest.

He called the Coast Guard on his radio and reported the incident and then headed in, with his wife, Brandy, vomiting over the side.

An anonymous call was made to the Fort Lauderdale police a few minutes after the explosion. The call was recorded. It was a muffled male voice, heavy and deep, with an accent which could have been Spanish or Portuguese.

“The Liberation Army of the Chilean peoples bass executed the pig dog Doctor Meyer. Death to all who geev help to the fascist military dictatorship.”

I knew nothing about it until I got back to Bahia Mar a little after six that Monday evening. I was walking from the parking area over to Slip F-18 where my houseboat, the Busted Flush, is tied up, when Captain Johnny Dow came trotting up to fall in step with me and say, “Hey, they got Meyer.”

I stopped and stared at him. “What do you mean?”

“Hell, they blew him up.”

“In Toronto?”

“What do you mean, Toronto? In that stupidlooking little cruiser of his. Out past the sea buoy, this morning. They blew him up and took the credit.”

“Who is they?”

“One of those bunches of terrorists. You know. The red army of liberation, truth, and justice. One of those.”

Suddenly I felt hollow and sick. “Johnny, don’t you know who was aboard the Keynes?”

“How should I know? I just got back from Key West.”

I explained it to him patiently. “Meyer is doing a series of lectures at a seminar in international banking at Queen’s College in Toronto. His niece and her husband were on vacation. They were living aboard for the two weeks he’d be gone. And Meyer had arranged with Hack Jenkins to take them out fishing or cruising if they wanted to go, because neither of them could operate a boat. Hack was free because his boat is having the engines replaced.”

Johnny Dow looked stricken. “I knew about the work he was having done on the HooBoy. Jesus! What they say, it was one hell of a big explosion. Anybody aboard got blown to little tiny bits. Jesus! I better go see Hack’s wife. This is terrible, Trav.”

He went trotting off through the light rain. I unlocked the Flush, checked out my alarm system, and heard the phone ringing as I went in.

“Did he get back early?” Annie asked. “Tell me he didn’t come back early, please.”

“No, dear. He’s due to give the last lecture tomorrow, and he’s booked on a flight that gets into Miami tomorrow night at eight.”

“They said on the news that a woman on another boat saw three people aboard Meyer’s boat before it blew up. And I thought-”

“No, the third person was a captain from Charterboat Row here. A friend of both of us. I think you met him once over here. Hacksaw Jenkins. Hack.”

“Oh, yesl That big rubbery guy that looked like a Japanese wrestler. With the very nice little wife. How terrible! Didn’t you hear any of it on the news on the way back?”

“I avoid news whenever possible. I was playing tapes all the way across.”

“Have you got a phone number for Meyer?”

“I know what hotel he’s in. I could call him, but I don’t know what to say. It’s very sad and very ironic, Annie, after all the trouble we went to, trying to get Meyer out of the dumps.”

“Look, let me know how it goes. Let me know how he reacts. I love that funny old bear.”

“I’ll be in touch.”

I didn’t have to phone Meyer. As I was unpacking toilet articles, he called me.

“Travis? A reporter from the Miami Herald tracked me down: Is it true? They’re dead?”

“I didn’t know a thing about it until about fifteen minutes ago. Johnny Dow told me. He thought you were aboard.”

“Would that I had been,” he said. It was not dramatics. He meant it.

“What can I do here?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I can’t think. What is there to do anyway? Where have they taken the bodies?”

“Meyer, from what I hear it was a very big explosion. Very violent. Out past the sea buoy. Out in the open ocean. Who handles your insurance?”

“I can’t think. You know him. Tall.”

“Sure. Walter. So he probably knows about it by now.”

“Before I phoned you, I checked with the travel desk here at the hotel, and I can’t get out any earlier than the flight I’m already booked on tomorrow.”

“I’ll pick you up. Ten after eight. Anybody I should let know about it?”

“There’s an address book in the… oh, dear God, that’s gone too, of course. Anyway, under Amdex Petroleum Exploration in Houston I had the name of her immediate superior. Hatcher, Thatcher, Fletcher… one of those names. Travis, what I don’t understand is this grotesque nonsense about Chile. I was in Santiago for one week, three years ago. It was a small conference. Yes, we were invited to make recommendations to the military government about controlling inflation. And they took the recommendations, and their inflation is under control, unlike the situation in Brazil, Argentina, and Peru. It was a small international conference; Britain, France, Canada, the U.S.-a dozen of us. I didn’t write the final report or any part of it.”

“Meyer, listen. It’s a crazy world. You were there. You got on somebody’s hit list.”

“And so Norma and Evan and Hack die. Can you find whoever did it?”

“There are going to be lots of very competent people trying to find whoever did it.”

“They never seem to find terrorists.” His voice was lifeless, dulled by loss.

At ten o’clock the next morning, local time, I got through to a brisk switchboard person at Amdex in Houston.

“You had a woman working there, a geologist named Norma Lawrence.”

“Sorry. There’s no one here by that name, sir.”

“Look, I know she worked for Amdex. She was on vacation.”

“Oh, you mean Norma Greene! Miss Greene.”

“Okay. Sure. I want to talk to her boss.”

“That would be Mr. Batcher. Sorry, but he’s out of the country, sir. If you want to leave a message, we expect him Friday.”

I sighed with moderate exasperation. “Who on your team there, besides Mr. Batcher, would be interested in being informed that Norma Lawrence, your Miss Greene, is dead?”

“Oh, God! No! To whom am I speaking?”

“My name is McGee. Travis McGee. An acquaintance. Her uncle suggested I inform her employer. That’s what I’m doing.”

“Mr. Dexter will want to know the details. He should be in any minute now. Where can he reach you, Mr. McGee?”

I gave her the area code and the number. She said she was sorry about the whole thing, and I said I was too.

“Automobile accident?” she asked.

“Explosion on a boat.”

I heard her gasp. “Geez, you know I heard that on the news this morning and didn’t make the connection. I mean I didn’t listen to the name, you know? Her and her new husband and a fishing guide? The news said it was maybe some kind of Cuban terrorists. Why would they-oh, Mr. Dexter just came in. Shall I ring him now?”

“Please.”

In a few moments he said, “Mr. McGee? What can I do for you.”

“Hardly anything. Mrs. Lawrence’s uncle suggested that I call her employer and say that she was killed yesterday in an explosion aboard a boat off Fort Lauderdale, along with her husband and a local charterboat captain.”

“Lawrence? Norma Greene Lawrence?”

“That’s right.” There was a silence that lasted so long I said, “Are you there? Hello?”

“Excuse me. That’s a terrible shock.”

“I was trying to get hold of Mr. Batcher. I didn’t think you’d know her.”

“Mr. McGee, this is a small company. A little over two hundred people. The smartest thing we ever did was take on Norma Lawrence when she’d been out of Cal Tech a year. We hired her away from Conoco. She’s… she was going to be one of the best geologists in the business.”

He said something else, but a sudden rumble of thunder drowned him out.

“Didn’t hear you. Sorry.”

“I was saying what a loss it is. What happened?”

“It looks as if somebody put a bomb aboard, some nut trying to kill her uncle. But he was in Toronto. They were going to dive at the site this morning, but the weather is very bad: eight- to ten-foot waves out there, lots of white water. There was a marker buoy at the site dropped off by a pleasure boat, but it was washed loose during the night.”

“I don’t know what to say. Maybe her uncle would know what her personal estate arrangements are. We have an insurance program, of course. And there would be other funds payable to her, or her estate.”

“I’ll have him get in touch. What’s your whole name?”

“D. Amsbary Dexter,” he said. Hence, I supposed, the Amdex. His company. I wrote down his addresses and phone numbers, and he thanked me for calling him. He said it was a terrible thing, and I said it certainly was. He had one of those thin fast Texas voices. Not a good-old-boy voice, a hustler voice. Hurrying to sell you.

By nine o’clock Tuesday night, in the very last of the watery daylight, I was heading back toward Lauderdale from the airport in the Mercedes station wagon I’d borrowed from the Alabama Tiger’s highest-ranking girlfriend, the one who has charge of his floating playpen while he is back in Guadalajara having his big old face lifted again. Wind gusts whacked the occasional rain against the right-hand windows. Meyer sat damp and dumpy beside me, radiating bleakness, speaking only when spoken to.

“Were they annoyed you didn’t give the final lecture?”

“I was there. I’d taken their round-trip ticket, hotel room, and food. I gave the talk. Only because it was easier than not giving the talk.”

“The weather has been rotten.”

“Um.”

“The tropical storm has moved closer and picked up a little. But they don’t think it will reach hurricane force.”

“Uh huh.”

Conversation wasn’t working, so I tried silence. After fifteen minutes he said, “These last few months I’ve gotten into the habit of watching television.”

“Meyer!”

“I know, I know. A laxative for the mind. Thinking makes lumps in the mind. Bad memories make lumps. Television flushes them away. At five o’clock, alone there aboard my boat, I’ve been able to get a rerun of M*A*S*H on one channel and then switch to another rerun on another. Old ones. Trapper, Hawkeye, Radar, Hot Lips. You know, the introduction has stayed almost exactly the same. The helicopters come around the side of the mountain. Then you get a shot from on high of the hospital complex. Then an ambulance, a closer shot of the choppers, and then people running up a hill toward the camera. In the left center of the screen a young woman runs toward you, slightly ahead of the others. You see her for four and a half running strides. Dark hair. Face showing the strain of running and her concern for the wounded. A pretty woman, maybe even beautiful, with a strong, lithe, handsome body. She is in uniform. A gleam of dog tags at the opening of her shirt. I’ve thought about her often, Travis. That shot of her was taken years ago. She’s probably in her thirties now. Or even forty. I wonder about her. When they filmed that introduction she had no way of knowing that she would be frozen there in time, anxious and running. Does she ever think about how strange that is? Multiply viewers times original episodes and the countless reruns on hundreds of stations, and you can see she has been looked at a billion times. What do you pay a person to be looked at a billion times? How many thousand miles has she run? It’s the fly-in-amber idea, plus a paradox of time and space. Maybe she never thinks of it these days. Or yawns when she sees, herself. Last night I saw her again, late, in a Toronto hotel room. And she became Norma: dark hair and vitality. Now she is caught in some eternal time lock. Death is an unending rerun until the last person with any memory of you is also dead.”

I had not heard him say this much since that bloody June day when Desmin Grizzel had so totally terrified him that he had, in his fear, violated his own image of himself. I did not make any response because I wanted him to keep talking. I was afraid that anything I might say would make him clamp shut again, like an endangered clam.

“I went through the long list of all the things I should have done and didn’t do,” he said. “Go to the wedding. Or at least pick out a present and send it instead of a check. She was my very last blood relative. It’s like a superstitious fear, having no one left in the world directly related to you by blood. As if you had started somehow to disappear. She wasn’t at all pretty, but being in love made her beautiful. I noticed that. And I haven’t been noticing much lately, have I?”

“No. No, you haven’t.”

“In that sense, to that degree, Desmin Grizzel won after all. All my life, until this last year, I have always noticed everything. Noticed, analyzed, filed. I watched people, understood them, liked almost every one. If he killed that in me, then he killed me, because he killed that part of me that made me most alive. And I let it happen.”

“No, Meyer. There wasn’t any way-”

“Be still!” he said with a surprising vehemence. “I’ve been dwelling on my sorry image, how I sat on the floor like a dumb pudding, peeing in my trousers, while I watched a maniac start to kill the best friend I ever had. In some kind of inverted fashion I fell in love with that image of Meyer. Oh, the poor dear chap! Oh, what a pity!”

“But-”

“So today in that aircraft I took a longer steadier look at myself. I saw my face reflected in the window beside me. One can become weary of shame, self-revulsion, self-knowledge. I am an academic, damn it. I was not intended to become some sort of squatty superman, some soldier of misfortune. It was not intended that I should be unafraid of sudden death. Curiously, I am not afraid of the prospect of my own demise. Plainly I shall die, as will you and everyone we know, and I do not think that a fact worth my resentment. Life is unfair, clearly. One must hope that the final chapter will be without too much pain. It was his terrible eyes and those four barrels on that strange handgun he had. Something inside me broke into mush, into tears and pee and ineptitude. But it does not signify!”

“I tried to tell-”

“I did not listen. I was too enchanted with my humiliation, with how I had failed my adolescent dream of myself as hero. There was a child on the airplane, directly across the aisle. The seat beside me was empty. I smiled at her and did finger tricks, and she giggled and tried to stuff her head under her mother’s arm in shyness. She finally came over and sat beside me, and I told her a story about a cowardly goblin who refused to go out on Halloween and scare people because he was too fat and too shy. Partway through the story I realized I was telling a story about Meyer the Economist. It made the ending easier. They had a meeting of the Goblin Council and called him in and told him not to worry. There had to be room in each pack of goblins for a cowardly goblin who stayed home in the cave. Otherwise, who would count all the others as they came back home after their adventures? So there is room for me: counting goblins, including my own.”

“There always has been-”

“No, Travis. Not for the Meyer of the past year. No room for him at all. But for this Meyer? Why not? I am not the same as I was before the incident, I am less naive. Is that a good word?”

“I think so.”

“You have always been less naive than most of us, Travis. You are a different sort of creature, in many ways. But you are my friend, and I don’t want to lose you. I want you to help me. Somebody blew up my boat, and with it all the artifacts of my past and my last close relative. I want to find that person or those people. And kill them. Is that an unworthy goal?”

“It’s understandable.”

“You dodge the question.”

“You want a moral judgment, go to Jerry Falwell. Anything you really want to do, I will help you do. And it is nice to have you back, even in slightly altered condition. Okay?”

I glanced over at him and saw in the angle of a streetlight that he was smiling. It was a fine thing to see. Utterly unanticipated. I had thought this would be the end of him. Instead, it shocked him out of it not all the way out, but far enough to lead one to hope.

“I keep remembering that Sunday evening aboard the Flush,” he said. “They were really in love, weren’t they?”

Three

THE EVENING had not been awkward because Evan Lawrence was not the kind of man to let that happen. I guessed him at about forty, ten to twelve years older than his bride. He had a broad, blunt face, brown sun-streaked hair, snub nose, crooked grin, the baked look of an outdoor person, and large fan-shaped areas of laugh wrinkles beside his eyes. He was perhaps five-ten, hardly an inch taller than his wife, but broad and thick in chest and shoulders. In repose, Norma was almost homely. Narrow forehead, long nose, an overbite and a dwindled chin, long neck. But her eyes were lovely, her long hair a glossy blue-black, her figure elegant, her movements graceful. In animation, and when she looked at Evan, she was beautiful.

Evan asked Meyer a dozen questions about how he had made the meat sauce. tie asked me fifty questions about my houseboat. We went through several bottles of Chianti (aassir.o while we ate the ceviche I’d made and then had the spaghetti al dente with the meat sauce Meyor had brought.

In the warmth and relaxation after dinner, Evan told us how he had met Norma. “What I was doing, I was down there in Cancun, gone down to Yucatan to visit with my friend Willy, and I was putting in my time helping him sell off some time-sharing condos. He had some he couldn’t move at what he needed to make out, which was one hundred big ones, so he’d taken to selling them off in one- and two-week pieces for three and six thousand, people buying those same weeks for life and Willy explaining how they had tied into the big vacation computer so the pigeons he was selling to could like exchange with some other patsies who’d bought the same two weeks on maybe the coast of Spain or Fort Myers, Florida. I had no work license, so when I sold stuff, Willy had to slip me the pesos in cash and keep it off the books. I can always sell. I’m a scuffler, and there are always things to sell and people to buy them, so I’m home anywhere. Good thing, the way they keep moving Norma around the shaggy places of the earth.

“One day what I was doing, I was taking the pickup to Merida to get some things that had come in that Willy had ordered way back, and ten miles from anywhere I came onto this beat old Dodge pulled way over on the shoulder and this tall pretty girl trying to open the hood. So I pulled over and walked back and I said in my best Texican, her hair being so black, ‘їTiene una problema, Senorita?’ She just spun around and give me the glare and said, ‘Problema? Me? No, I just enjoy standing out here in the hot sun breaking my fingernails on this son of a bitching hood latch.’ And right there it was love at first sight, on my part, not on hers.

“Opened the hood for her and looked in and right there looking back at me is a granddaddy rat, biggest damn thing I ever saw, big as a full-growed possum. We both jumped back, and he ducked down and hid someplace under the engine. I looked around, real careful, and I see he had chewed on the insulation on the wiring to the starter motor. So I had Norma get in and start it while I jumped the contacts with a screwdriver. When it caught and roared, old mister rat he went charging off into the brush. What had happened, she’d stopped to walk over to a formation that looked interesting, and chunked at it with that hammer she’s got at all times, and came back and the car wouldn’t start. Just a click when she turned the key. I led her into town to a garage I’d been before, and we went down the street and sat at a sidewalk place and drank cold Carta Blanca for the half hour it took them to rewire where old rat had chewed. I didn’t find out for a long time how important she was down there, being borrowed by the Mexican government.”

“Hey, it wasn’t all that big and great!” she said. “I had a Mexican friend at Cal Tech, Manny Mateo, and he became an engineer with Pemex, the government oil company. They thought they had a new discovery field just west of Maxcanu, way to the north of the Bay of Campeche, and from the initial geophysical survey work it looked as if it might be a particular kind of formation I’ve had a lot of luck with. So Pemex arranged with Am Dexter to borrow me, and I went down there and we ran two more sets of computer tests and I finally picked a site for the test well, crossed my fingers, and went back to Houston. It took about nine weeks.”

“Did they make a well?” Meyer asked.

She shrugged. “Just barely. It’s a long way from their big fields and their refineries. It’s a discovery well and a new field, but the porosity is bad. It makes the MER pretty low when you are so far from… excuse me, MER is Maximum Efficiency Recovery rate, and they figure it at seventy barrels a day, which would be a two-thousand-dollar-a-day delight in Louisiana but isn’t so great down there. They’ll try again a thousand meters to the north where, according to the core samples, they should hit the formation higher.”

“She talks like that a lot!” Evan said proudly. “Isn’t she something else entire?”

Norma flushed. “All geologists talk funny.”

“I kept after her,” Evan said. “She finished up and went back, so did I. Every time she’d look around, there I was. So along sometime in March she gave up, and we got married in April. Meyer, we sure wish you could have come to the wedding. That was a handsome check you laid on us, but you being there would have been a better present.”

“It would, really,” Norma Lawrence said. “People in this family are always missing ceremonies.” She sounded wistful, and her eyes filled with tears.

Meyer touched her lightly on the arm and said to me, “Remember three years ago when we were in the islands, and I came back and found a threeweek-old telegram about my sister’s funeral?”

“And I was with a crew up in western Canada and didn’t know either, until a week later,” Norma said. “Her friends in Santa Barbara said the church was almost full. She had a lot of love from a lot of people. And gave a lot of love. And she was so damn proud of me.”

She got up abruptly and went over to the window ports and looked out at the marina in the dusk of the year’s second longest daytime. Evan went and put a thick arm around her slender waist, murmuring to her. She leaned her cheek an his shoulder, and soon they both came back to the table.

He poured her some wine and touched glasses with her and said, “Here’s to your never having another gloomy day, Miz Norma.”

We all drank to that. And Evan Lawrence began telling stories of things he’d done. They were disaster stories, all funny, all nicely told. There was the time he had tried out for the University of Texas football squad “as a teeny tiny hundred-and-sixtyfive-pound offensive right tackle, fourth string, and next to those semi-pro freshmen they had on there, I was five foot nothing. Big old boy across from me, looked forty years old, kept ‘slapping my helmet and I kept getting up, thinking, Well, this wasn’t too bad, and then all of a sudden there were voices yelling at me and I came to and I was standing in the shower with my gear on, shoes and all, and everybody mad at me.”

And then there was the time he “got a job with a crazy old rancher just north of Harlingen. Old Mr. Guffey had tried to buy a Japanese stone lantern for his wife’s flower garden and they wanted a hundred dollars for one. Made him so mad he got an import license and imported thirty tons of them. Nine hundred of the forty-pound type and four hundred sixty-pounders. I slept in a shed on his place, and they’d wake me up before dawn to eat a couple pounds of eggs, load lanterns into the pickup, and take off by first sunlight going up and down those crazy little roads, selling stone lanterns. Living expenses plus a ten-dollar commission, payable when the last one was gone. They’s never going to need another Japanese stone garden lantern down in that end of Texas. I got bent over with muscle from lifting them fool things in and out of the pickup. Finished finally and got paid off, went into Brownsville to get the first beer in three months, woke up behind the place with my head in a cardboard box, no money, no boots, no watch. I lay there thinking it was a funny place for a fellow with a B.S. in Business Administration with a major in marketing and a minor in female companionship to spend a rainy night.”

And later on, he said, “Good old friend of mine, he said there was good money to be had traveling with the rodeo. SW a lot of new places, pretty girls, people clapping hands for you and all that. He said I should do the bull riding, because I didn’t have any roping skills or such. First time I stayed on more than three seconds and got me any prize money, the bull he tore up my left hind leg so bad, I was on crutches a month, but they let me take tickets. Prettiest girl I saw there looked like John Chancellor in drag, and she borrowed my old car, totaled it, and walked away without a scratch.”

“Didn’t you ever have a good job, Evan?” she asked him.

“You mean like making lots of money? Oh, hell yes, sweetie. I worked better than a full year in Dallas, selling empty lots and lots with tract houses on them, out in the subdivisions, working for Eagle Realty. Had me a hundred forty thousand in savings, after taxes and living expenses, and this fellow told me that what I had to have, I was making so much, was a shelter. So he sheltered me. What he sold me was a hundred twenty-five thousand Bibles at one dollar each. He was to hold onto them in a warehouse for a year, then start giving twenty-five thousand of them Bibles away to religious and charitable organizations, and on the inside of the Bible it said, plain as day, Retail value seven fifty. What that meant was each year I’d be giving away a hundred and eighty-seven thousand dollars’ worth of Bibles, and half that would come off my tax as a charity deduction. He said it was all legal and I’d be doing a good work. After he was long gone there was a piece in the paper about him. What he was was a Bible salesman, selling fifty-cent Bibles for a dollar each. I went to find the warehouse and look at my Bibles, but the address for the warehouse was pastureland. Honey I made lots of money several times here and there, and what I needed and didn’t have was one smart wife to help me hold onto it long enough to get it spent wisely.”

There was a lull in the storm when we got back to Bahia Mar. I parked and locked the station wagon, took Meyer to my place, then took the car keys back to Wendy aboard the ‘Bama Gal.

“Stay with Meyer,” she told me. “Stay close to him. Don’t let him be by himself too much.”

When I got back to the Flush I found Meyer fixing himself a very stiff arrangement of Boodles gin and ice. “Sleep insurance,” he said. I fixed one half that size for myself, and we went up to the topside controls, under the shelter of the overhead there. He swiveled the starboard chair around and stared through the night toward the place where, for years, The John Maynard Keynes had been berthed. He hoisted his glass in a half salute. “Damn boat,” he said. “Bad lines. Cranky. Not enough freeboard.”

So we drank to the damn boat.

In a little while, in a very gravelly voice, Meyer said, “I feel gutted. Everything was aboard her. All my files and records. Copies of all the papers I’ve had published. All the speeches I’ve given, except the ones I updated and took to Toronto. Letters from the long dead. From my father. From old friends. Photographs. My professional library. Unanswered letters. My address book. I feel as if, on some strange level, I’ve ceased to exist. I’ve lost so many proofs of my existence.”

“Safety deposit box?”

“Yes. A few things there. Passport, birth certificate, bearer bonds.” He swiveled the chair back around so the dock light angled across the right side of his face. “It’s so damned senseless! I had nothing to do with the overthrow of Allende. What is that word used by the agencies? Destabilization. When I was in Santiago, the military was busy returning to private ownership the hundreds of companies nationalized by Allende and badly run by Allende’s people. Who is most hurt by hyperinflation? The old, the poor. So I helped them as much as I could. We devised and recommended the controls, enough controls to put a leaky lid on inflation without stifling initiative. Nobody in Toronto had ever heard of that group. What do they call themselves?”

“The Liberation Army of the Chilean People. Two men will be here to talk to you in the morning. They were here this afternoon. I couldn’t give them much help.”

“Who has jurisdiction?”

“Hard to say. State of Florida. Coast Guard. Federal agencies. The State Attorney’s people are investigating, but they aren’t what you’d call eager.”

“Can we find out, Travis, the two of us?”

I tried not to show reluctance as I said, “I promised you we’d give it a try.”

He was still there when I went to bed. He’d made a fresh drink. He knew how to lock up. After I turned the bed lamp off, I kept thinking about Meyer. The fates were trying to grind him down. And almost doing the job.

The hard rains had begun again. Soon I heard water running in the head, saw a light under the door. Then it went out. I knew he’d sleep.

I reconstructed from memory the bilge of The John Maynard Keynes, the twin engines, the shafts and gas tanks-gasoline, not diesel. I marked the mental spot where I would place the heavy charge, right where the heat of it would turn the two gas tanks into additional explosive force, going up simultaneously with the charge, blowing the boat to junk and splinters. Perhaps it had been detonated by a timer. But how could whoever planted it be certain the boat would be out in relatively deep water when the timed instant arrived?

Had it blown at the dock with that much force, it would have taken the neighbor vessels as well, and a lot more than three lives. People who have tried to put bombs on airliners have used timers or fuses that worked on reduced atmospheric pressure. A bomb aboard a little pleasure boat couldn’t reasonably be hooked up to the depth finder.

Interesting problem. What does a boat do out in deep water that it doesn’t do at the dock? Answer: It pitches and tosses. Very good, McGee. So you use a battery and you get a very stiff piece of wire or leaf spring and you solder a weight to the end of it. It will not bend down to touch the contact, closing the circuit, firing the cap that fires the charge, until it has started oscillating in rough water. That would be efficient, because the whole device could be selfcontained and would take only a moment to place below decks. It could have been placed there while they were gassing up at Pier 66.

What if out in the channel somebody came from the opposite direction, throwing a big wash? Okay, so it was a little more sophisticated, perhaps. It had a counting device, a cogwheel arrangement. On the twentieth big lift and drop, or the fiftieth, bah-room!

And maybe it had been stowed aboard weeks before Norma and Evan arrived. Maybe a fake factory rep inspecting the new sniffer Meyer had installed had brought it aboard back in January, tucked it into the recess aft of one of the tanks.

When the mind starts that kind of spinning, sleep becomes impossible. So I wrenched my thoughts away from explosives and thought about Annie Renzetti, about all her sweetness and unexpected strength. I reinvented her, bit by bit, portion by portion, and went trotting down after her, into sleep.

Four

THE NEXT morning came with a black sky low enough to touch, and about the time I heard Meyer in the shower, the two men from Washington returned. The big natty one with the white hair and red cheeks was Warner Housell, and he called himself a staff person on Senator Derregrand’s AntiTerrorist Committee, and the terrier type with the hair-piece and the hearing aid was Rowland Service, a specialist from the Treasury Department.

They both carried dark brown dispatch cases with brass hardware. I told them Meyer would be out in a few minutes, and would they like coffee, and they said they would, no sugar no cream. They were less friendly with each other than they had been the previous afternoon.

Meyer came out wearing a bathrobe and a headache, and after I had introduced him, he poured himself some coffee and put a chip of ice in it so he could get to it quicker.

Warner Housell asked the questions. Since he had last called on me, he had briefed himself on Meyer’s career, and he was properly respectful. He just took a few quick dabs at Meyer’s background and then said, “How did you get involved in the Santiago conference?”

“I was invited by the chairman. Dr. Isling from the London School of Economics. I imagine there was some sort of selection process, but I don’t know what it was. It was an interesting group.”

“Had you been associated with any of the members before?”

“Only very indirectly. Good people. Academics with a good sense of what is practical, of what might actually work.”

“Are you aware of and have you expressed any opinions in your speeches or your writings about the way the military regime treats dissidents?”

“I’ve expressed no opinions except to friends, like Travis McGee here. Yes, I’ve been aware of the reports of violations of human rights.”

He turned to me. “Can you recall any such opinions expressed by Dr. Meyer?”

“Not in his exact words. We’ve discussed what he calls the Shah of Iran paradox. When you crush a rebellion by killing people who are trying to overthrow your government and install their own, at what point are you violating their human rights, and at what point are they violating yours? The Shah let Khomeini escape to Paris. And Batista let Castro leave the country. At what point on the scale are people dissidents, and at what point does it become armed rebellion?”

Meyer nodded at me approvingly. Warner Housell took notes. “Now then,” he said, “are you aware of any threat on your life as a result of the Santiago conference? Any threat, no matter how indirect?”

“I didn’t expect any, so I really wasn’t being observant. No strange letters, phone calls, confrontation. Nothing.”

“Mr. Service, for reasons of his own, considers this a fruitless line of interrogation. Your turn, Mr. Service.”

Rowland Service took out a small notebook and, in silence, leafed through page after page, his forehead furrowed. It is a tiresome device.

“What is your source of income, Dr. Meyer?”

“Please, I do not like doctor used as a form of address except for brain surgeons and such. I am used to being called Meyer. My income comes from lecturing, from consultant work, and from dividends, interest, and capital gains from my investments.” He snapped his ferret head around to stare at me from those two pale close-together eyes. “And you, sir?”

“Me what?”

“What is your source of income?”

“A little of this and a little of that.”

“Impertinence makes me uncomfortable, MeGee.”

“Me too, Service.”

Housell broke in. “Please, let me explain what he’s trying to establish-”

“Damn it, I’ll ask my own questions!”

“After I explain the background. Two organizations in Washington have contacts within the underground groups in Chile, with information contacts arranged through our embassy. The regime has an information network as well. Mr. Service here spent most of yesterday and yesterday evening drawing a complete and total blank not only on the so-called Liberation Army of the Chilean People but on any antipathy toward any economist who attended the Santiago conference three years ago. Things have quieted down a great deal there. There has been enough economic progress to make people look with more favor on the generals. Within the context of everything those groups know, the attack upon Dr. Meyer here is incomprehensible to them. And so the-”

“I’ll take it,” Service said. “The way we see it, that phone call claiming responsibility was a cover story, intended to mislead. It is far more likely that the explosion was connected to the drug traffic that has proliferated along the Florida coast.”

Meyer set his coffee aside and stared at the man. “Drug traffic!” he said incredulously. “Drug traffic! My niece was a respected geologist who worked for-”

“Don’t get agitated. She checked out clean as a whistle. We are wondering about her husband”-he turned a page in his notebook and read off the names-“Evan Lawrence, and the boat captain, Dennis Hackney Jenkins, a.k.a. Hacksaw Jenkins.”

“Not likely in either case,” I said. “Evan Lawrence came over here with his wife from Houston because she wanted to have him meet her uncle, her only living blood relation. Hacksaw was a successful charterboat captain. He had a long list of people who wouldn’t fish with anybody else. He had a talent for finding fish. He kept that fishing machine of his in fine shape at all times. He was booked solid every season at premium rates. Once upon a time he was a professional wrestler. Once upon a time he spent a year in a county jail. He was raised down in the Keys. There are dozens and dozens of Jenkinses there, all related to him. He settled down when he met Gloria. He was fifty a couple of months ago. I went to the birthday party. They have three sons. The youngest is fifteen. Neither Hack nor the kids would be into drugs in any way, shape, or form.”

The ferret looked bleakly at me. “We’ll check all that out, of course.”

The big florid staff person said, “Please forgive my temporary associate here. He has an unfortunate manner.”

“I’m here to do my job,” Service said, “not beat the bushes for votes.”

“Do it elsewhere,” Meyer said.

They both looked at him. “What was that?” Service asked.

“That was the end of cooperation. No more questions and no more answers. End of interview. Leave.”

“I know all about you high-level experts,” Service said angrily. “Next time you come sucking around the government for a consultant contract, maybe you’ll find-”

Housell stood up abruptly. “Come on, Rowland, for God’s sake. You’re acting like a jackass.”

“And you don’t know the first thing about interrogation!” Service yelled.

Housell led him off, still protesting, and turned to smile apologetically at us. The door closed. The bell bonged as they stepped on the mat at the head of my little gangway to the dock. Meyer went over to the galley and poured himself fresh coffee. I saw the cup tremble slightly as he lifted it to his lips for a cautious sip.

He sat and frowned down into the cup. “I wanted them out of here so I could think. They were a distraction.”

“An incompetent distraction?”

“That too.” He sipped again and set the cup aside. “Of course it could have something to do with drugs. Somebody cheated somebody or, turned them in, and a bomber was hired and he hit the wrong boat. But the anonymous phone call rules that out. The caller knew my name. I’m thinking out loud, using rusty equipment, Travis. Forgive me.”

“Keep going.”

“The phone call came about eight minutes after the explosion. So the caller knew it was going to happen and had a vantage point where he could watch for it and then make his call. So the explosive had to be placed just before Hack took the boat out.”

“I’d agree with that.”

“If the caller knew that much about what was going on, wouldn’t he have known I wasn’t aboard?”

“Reasonable assumption.”

“Then the call was intended to deflect attention from the real motive and the real victim. Somebody wanted to kill Hack, or Evan Lawrence, or Norma. So there was one victim and two innocent bystanders, not three.”

“Hack Jenkins?”

“It’s possible, I suppose,” he said. “I keep wondering why he wanted to go on out into that chop.”

“While you were in Toronto, Hack took them outside after fish. Your niece developed a taste for it. She and Evan were good sailors. Some of it was in fairly heavy weather, so I guess Hack learned how much the Keynes could take, and he had some confidence in the boat. If he had word there was something working a little way out into deep water, I think Evan and Norma, especially Norma, would have urged him to take a shot at it and then come running back in if it started to get a little too rough.”

“She really liked it?” he said, eyebrows raised.

“Hack put them into some small tarpon about two days after you left. She hooked a forty-pounder that jumped into the cockpit green, smashed a tackle box, and flipped on out again, and she managed to keep it on the line and bring it to gaff. She told me all about it, with lots of gestures, lots of energy. So, I can understand his heading out past the buoy.”

“Evan liked it too?”

“Whatever Norma wanted was fine with him.”

“It seemed like a good marriage,” Meyer said. “Never knew what hit them. Hell of a phrase, isn’t it? Nothing can happen so fast that there is not a micro-instant of realization. Each nerve cell in the brain can make contact with three hundred thousand other cells, using its hundreds of branches, each branch with hundreds of terminals, and with electrical impulses linking cell to cell. Ten trillion cells, Travis, exchanging coded information every instant. The brain has time to release the news of its own dissolution, time to factor a few questions about why, what, who… and what is happening to me? Perhaps a month of mortal illness is condensed into one thousandth of a second, insofar as self-realization is concerned. We’re each expert in our own death.”

And I knew that strange last statement was correct. We’re experts. We get it done the first time we try it. And we spend too much time thinking about it before we do it.

“Hack’s two older boys are back in town,” I said. “They’re waiting for the sea to flatten out and one of these evenings, about seven thirty, all the charter boats will go out and they’ll drop a wreath on the water, and the Reverend Sam John Hallenbee of the First Seaside Baptist Church will give the memorial service on a bull horn, consigning to the deep and so on.”

“I’d like to have that done for Norma and Evan too. But all her friends are in Houston. I’ll have to go over there and see what shape her affairs are in. I would suppose I’d be her heir, but I’m not sure.”

“Want any breakfast?”

“Thanks. I don’t think I could keep it down yet.”

“Why don’t you get dressed and we’ll go talk to one or both or all of the Jenkins boys.”

“And Gloria,” Meyer said. “I have to face that. She’s going to feel bitter toward me. I asked Hack as a personal favor to take Norma and Evan out in the Keynes a few times. He said he was glad to do it. With the HooBoy laid up, he felt restless unless he could get out on the water once in a while.”

He went trudging off to put on some clothes. He didn’t have much choice. All his treasured old shirts and pants and jackets had blown up along with his boat.

Five

DAVE JENKINS was twenty-two, and he was a guide down in the Keys, an expert at fly-rod fishing for tarpon, at stalking the wily permit, at outsmarting bonefish. I had heard he was beginning to pick up a reputation after surviving the early attempts of the locals to run him off. They play rough down there. He had come up as soon as he heard. And Bud Jenkins, the twenty-year-old, had come down from Duke University. He was there on full scholarship.

Hack and Gloria lived in a two-bedroom frame bungalow on a county road a long way east of the city. They had an acre of flatland, two big banyan trees near the house, a pond with Chinese white geese, and an electrified fence around the pond area to keep the predators away from the geese. There were almost a dozen vehicles parked in the drive and in the yard, several of them the big glossy pickups that charterboat captains favor, with tricky paint jobs and all the extras. A gabble of small children was racing about in the mud. Miss Agnes, my ancient blue Rolls pickup, looked odd parked with the modern machines, like an old lady in a bonnet at a rock concert.

The small house was packed with people. I could see them through the windows, moving around. The intense competition of the fishing folk was dropped whenever tragedy struck.

There was a shallow front porch with a slanted roof, an obvious afterthought. Two steps led up to the porch level. As we approached the steps, the screen door burst open and Rowland Service; the T-man, our recent visitor, came out at a dead run, with big Dave Jenkins so close behind him it took me a half second to realize, as I was stepping back out of the way, that Dave was running him out, with one hand on the slack of the seat of the pants, the other on the nape of the neck. Service’s eyes and mouth were wide open. Dave gave him a final giant push and stopped at the edge of the steps. Service landed running, but leaning too far forward for balance. He made a good effort, though, and galloped about thirty feet from the steps before diving headlong into the wet grass.

Warner Housell, the staff person, came sidling out, carrying both dispatch cases and trying to look inconspicuous. An ingratiating smile came and went, over and over, very swiftly. Dave made a feint at him and stamped his feet. Housell made a bleating sound and sprang off the porch and trotted out to where Service was getting up, dabbing at the mud stains on his knees.

“Hey, Trav,” Dave Jenkins said. “Meyer.”

Housell and Service got into their economy rental. Service was apparently talking angrily and Housell was shaking his head no. They drove off. “What happened?” I asked.

“They came a couple minutes ago. The big one was trying to hush up the little one, but the little one, he asked my mom if maybe Daddy was blowed up on account of he was mixed up in some kind of drug action. He asked her a little bit mean and a little bit loud, and I got my hands on him before one of the other men tried to kill him. It broke her up some. Miserable little scut. Drugs! It took Daddy seven months to set aside enough for the engine work on the HooBoy, so he wouldn’t have to borrow at no high rate. Drugs? Daddy was dead against it. Remember, Trav? He came on those three bales of pot floating out there near Sherman Key over a year ago, and he picked them up and brought them in and turned them over to the narcotics guys. He had no charter aboard. Who was to know? Mom said he hadn’t even had a taste of booze since he got born again twenty years ago.”

“Is there any chance of talking to Gloria?” Meyer asked.

“This wouldn’t be too good of a time, not right now. She’s in the bedroom with a couple of her women friends, and they’re in there praying and crying and hugging.”

“Does she blame me?” Meyer asked.

Bud came out of the house in time to hear Meyer’s question. “I don’t think she’s thought of it that way. I suppose she could get around to it in time,” he said. He was the small-boned son, the one who was most like his mother physically, with delicate features and steel-rimmed glasses.

“Just tell her, when you get a chance, that it appears as if somebody was trying to make it look like a terrorist act,” Meyer said. “There would be no reason to go after me. And nobody has ever heard of the organization that claimed credit. It was a cover for something. We think that if they were in close enough touch to make the phone call so soon after the explosion, they must have known I wasn’t aboard. They were after somebody else. After one or both of the Lawrences, or after Hack.”

Both boys shook their head, and Dave said, “Nobody would up and kill my daddy. Maybe by accident if it come to a fight, something like that. He was sometimes mean. But not planned ahead. Not that way. Mom said he really liked that couple, liked showing them places along the Waterway, liked putting them into fish. But he kept saying what a terrible boat you had, Meyer, and how much work it needed.”

Bud said, “if they ever find out, I think they’ll discover that somebody came over from Texas, following that couple, and killed them, and it didn’t matter to them who else they killed in the process. Maybe it was somebody who didn’t like the idea of your niece marrying that man. Or maybe it was something to do with the oil business, something she knew that somebody wanted covered up for good. If you get any clue at all, me and Dave and Andy would be most grateful to know who did it. Dave and Andy and me wouldn’t like it to be one of those things where it takes three years to come to trial, and finally they call it second-degree, and then there’s a bunch of appeals and the guy gets out a couple of years later. We’d surely like the chance to save him the fuss of waiting around all that time for his trial.”

I looked at their eyes. Hack’s eyes looking out at me. The same amber brown with golden glints, one pair behind lenses, one pair squeezed by the wrinkled squint of a few thousand hours searching the sun riffles for fish sign. A fierce independence. “What we find out,” I said, “You’ll get to know.” There was a look of satisfaction diluting the intensity, and Bud said, “We’ll tell Mom it doesn’t look like it was anybody after you, Meyer.”

On the way back to Bahia Mar, Meyer said, “I never really got to know Norma. One summer I stayed out there in Santa Barbara with my sister, Glenna, for a couple of weeks, helping each other remember things, good and bad. I think Norma must have been about fourteen. She was in a school for exceptionally gifted children, and that summer she was going on some sort of series of field trips with a batch of kids. Overnights, with sleeping bags. She had a rock hammer and a closet full of labeled samples. Her eyes danced and shone with the pure excitement of learning things. Her world was four and a half billion years old, and she had a vocabulary newly full of strike-slip faults, cactoliths, andesite, and monzonite, and she made tilting slipping shapes with her hands to show us how the mountains came about. Strange the way how a bright young brain, exposed to a certain kind of knowledge at just the right time, bends in the direction of that knowledge, sops it up, relishes it. Glenna concealed her dismay at having her only child aimed toward a life of bounding from crag to crag with a lot of rough people, carrying a rock hammer, a sample bag, and a chemistry set. I thought I would get a chance to know her better, after Toronto. Did you see much of them?”

“Not much. They came aboard a few times. She was picking up a good tan. He had a tendency to burn. The obvious thing about them was they were in love. There was between them a… I don’t know the word for it…”

“An erotic tension?”

“Right. Tangible. You could almost see it. Like smoke.”

“I didn’t realize she would ever get to be so handsome,” Meyer said. “She was in fact a very homely young girl, all knees, elbows, and teeth. Glenna thought it would be useful for her to have a profession, and she told me Norma would probably end up in the world of academe, taking students on geology field trips. I’m talking around and around and around what I’m trying to say.”

“Take your time.” We were at a light. I looked over at him. He was scowling.

“Travis, suppose a drunk came across the center line and killed the two of them while I was in Toronto. It would be the same degree of loss. The obligation would be the same. To go to Houston and… tidy up. So, in that process, which I want to accomplish by myself, I may or may not come upon anything which might be related to what happened. If I do come upon anything, I’m not sure I’ll take the right steps. Do you understand?”

“Of course.”

“You’d come help out if I come upon anything like that?”

“Gee, I don’t really know. I have these tennis matches with the ambassador’s daughter, and I’ve been thinking of getting my teeth capped. You know how it is.”

“I’ll pay all expenses.”

“For Christ’s sweet sake, Meyer!”

“I’m sorry. It’s just that I’m not at home in the world the way I was. The same as it would be, I suppose, for a person who had been in a coma for a year.”

“You holler, I’ll come running.”

When the big swells flattened in a couple of days, they were able to anchor a work barge out beyond the sea buoy, and divers went down and located what was left of The John Maynard Keynes.

It wasn’t much. The heavy metal parts of the old cruiser were scattered over a half acre of sloping sand, mud, and weed, with a lot of the stuff already covered or partly covered by sand drift. All the lighter stuff was gone-wood, paper, flesh, plastic, and bone-pulled up and down the coast, in and out of the pass, by tides and currents. From the amount of damage done to the metal remainsengines, anchors and chain, refrigerator, galley stove, wheels and rudder, hatch frames, and transom rail-the borrowed expert estimated that the amount of explosive used was from four to six times the amount necessary to kill three people aboard and sink the vessel. He called it “interesting overkill.” Because of the submersion in seawater, his tests for the kind of explosive used were inconclusive. He found nothing which could have been any part of a detonating device.

All the Bahia Mar boats that could make it, and were interested enough to make it, went out in a twilight procession. Meyer and I dropped our separate wreath for Norma and Evan on an outgoing tide. The minister brayed words of destiny and consolation over the bull horn. We bowed heads for the final prayer and headed back, in convoy, with the running lights winking on in the gathering darkness, moving aside to let the Royal Viking Sea come easing out, a giant hotel, golden lights aglow, full of holiday people on their way to the islands and the tour buses.

After I was properly secure again at Slip F-18, with the phone and electric plugged back in, we went out and ate and came back to the Flush and went topside into the warm bright night, leaned back in the deck chairs up on the sun deck to look at stars too bright to be totally obscured by the city glare and the city smog. But we could smell the smog underneath the scents of the sea, a sad acid, mingling burned wine and spoiled mousse.

“I keep thinking I’ll look something up and suddenly realize that I can’t,” Meyer said. “I don’t even have a picture of her. There was a wedding picture, a Polaroid print she had duplicated.”

“I think they can make a print from a print. In fact, excuse me for stupidity. That’s what they would have to do. So somebody else will have a print and you can get another made.”

“Somebody in Houston,” he said. “Very probably. You know, all the pictures I had of the Keynes were on the Keynes.”

“I’ll look in the drawer where I throw pictures. There’s probably one there, if you want it.”

“I can’t get used to being a guest. I want to have a boat and live on it just where I’ve been living all these years.”

“We can go shopping, if you want.”

“Not yet. That is, if I’m not getting on your nerves.”

“So far you’re only a minor irritation.”

“Somebody around here must have taken pictures of Norma and Evan.”

“Sure. But who? They’d be in tourist shots, mostly by accident. Of course there was a very fuzzy picture taken by the woman from Venice, the one that was reproduced in the paper two days after the… the accident.”

“Maybe if we call it the murder, it will be more accurate.”

I went below and looked for the old newspaper, but it had been tossed out.

So on Saturday morning, I called a man I knew in the city room of the paper, Abe Palinka, and asked about the photograph. Abe checked and called me back.

“What it was, it was one of those little tiny negatives from one of those little Kodak cameras that take the cartridge. It was on Kodacolor, and maybe you know you get a pretty dim-looking black-andwhite off of that, worse in repro in the paper, but Clancy thought it was good enough to use because it was like, he said, dramatic: the scene before it went boom. What we did, we got a rush job on development, made a set of prints, picked the one we wanted, made a black-and-white, and sent the rest back to the lady-got a pencil?-Mrs. Simmons Davis of eight four eight Sunrise Road, Venice, three three five nine five. How come you haven’t given me any kind of a hot lead in a hell of a while, McGee?°‘

“Nothing has been going on.”

“I bet. Okay, if that’s what you want me to believe.”

“Thanks, Abe.”

I dialed information for that area and got the Davis number. After the fourth ring a low, warm, husky, slightly-out-of-breath voice said, “Hello?”

“Mrs. Davis?”

“This is Brandy Davis.”

“I’m calling from Fort Lauderdale. My name is McGee. Travis McGee.”

“Mr. McGee, when I hear the name of your city, why, my stomach just sort of rolls right over. It’s been five days now, but the whole thing is just as vivid in my mind as if it happened five minutes ago. Excuse me, I’m a little out of breath. I was just locking the door when I heard the phone, and I ran back.”

“I don’t want to hold you up.”

“I was just going to the drugstore is all.”

“What I’m calling about, a dear friend of mine owned that little cruiser.”

“I heard he was out of town when it happened.”

“That’s right. And the pictures he had of his boat and of his niece all were blown up with the boat. We saw the one you took they used in the paper…”

“That was a terrible job they did! My goodness. They paid me twenty-five dollars for the right to use it. I wish they hadn’t said who took it, even. I take much better pictures than that!”

“I would think so.”

“What I did, you see, I took two. It was an uggo little old boat and so I wouldn’t have taken any at all except that Sim and I, we collect weird boat names, and you need a picture to prove it. I guess our, or at least my, favorite this cruise was a Miami motor sailer we saw in Nassau called Estoy Perdido. Meaning, I Am Lost. Well, I took two because it looked to me, looking through the little finder, that a wave slopped up and maybe hid part of the name on the transom just as I clicked it. But it turned out they both came out with good shots of that fancy gold lettering. You mean that poor man would like a picture of his boat and his niece?”

“He would indeed.”

“I got them back in the mail day before yesterday, and I took them right down to the camera shop and ordered an eight-by-ten of the best one, the one that was nearest when I took it. That usually takes forever, but I do have the small prints the newspaper made up, or had made up. Maybe you think it’s a little creepy, me ordering the enlargement, but nothing like that ever happened to me before, never in my life. I have no need for these two prints, so I’d just as soon put them in the mail to you when I go to the drugstore, okay?”

“You’re very kind.” I waited while she got a pencil, then gave her the address.

“Aboard the Busted Flush?” she said. “Maybe I should come over and take a picture of that! What is it?”

“Kind of an old barge-type houseboat. Fifty-two foot, two diesels. It’ll go six knots if the wind isn’t against it.”

“It sounds quaint. The name is really odd. Does it mean… some kind of broken toilet?”

“No. A poker hand. That’s when-”

“I know poker. I know about a flush and a straight flush. And I know how, like in stud, a hand can get busted.”

“I had a black card face down and four hearts showing.”

“You mean you won the whole houseboat on-”

“No, I won a pretty fair pot on that bluff and kind of by accident let the hole card show after I’d pulled the pot in and everybody else had folded. From then on they kept staying in, to keep me honest. And I had a lot of good hands.”

Her voice dipped a half octave. “You sound really kind of adventurous, Mr. Travis McGee. Maybe you could sort of whip over here and pick up the prints in person? I’m getting a little stir crazy with Sim away at one of those weird conferences about setting up trusts in Liechtenstein.”

“It certainly sounds like an attractive idea, Mrs. Davis, and I would really take you up on it like a shot, but on Monday I’m being fitted for a new prosthesis.”

“Uh. Well, maybe some other time,” she said briskly.

“The other one never hurts at all,” I said.

“How nice for you. I’ll put these in the mail right away. Nice to talk to you. Good-by Mr. McGee.”

Meyer flew to Houston on Sunday and phoned me at four o’clock on Monday afternoon, the twelfth. His voice sounded tired.

“A progress report. Or a no-progress report. The traffic in this city is monstrous. They are maniacal. I’ve checked out of the hotel and moved into Norma’s apartment. Want to write this down?” After he gave me the address and phone number, he said, “It’s quite nice. It’s a rental, in what they call a garden complex, nothing over two stories, jammed in close but angled very cleverly to give the illusion of privacy. All her stuff is here, so I thought it would be easier to work if her lawyer set it up for me to move in. She left a will, leaving everything to me. It’s dated soon after Glenna died. She was probably going to change it again in favor of Evan. They were married on a Saturday, the seventeenth of April. He may have moved in here with her before then. Probably did. I’ve started going through her papers. Her lawyer is pleasant enough. It’s a small firm. He handled her tax matters and apparently advised her on investments. Windham, his name is. Roger Windham. Did I say he seems pleasant? I’m probably repeating myself. I find I seem to get tired easily. There’s a lot to do. Windham thinks she had some things in a storage warehouse somewhere. And a lockbox at the bank where she did her checking. He’ll have to arrange with the tax people about opening the safety deposit box with them present.”

“Want me over there yet?”

“Not yet. I’ll get the chores done, and if anything comes to light that might be a hint as to anybody wanting to kill her, then, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble…”

“Come off it! That Mrs: Davis is mailing me one print each of the two pictures she took. She took them because of the name. They collect boat names.”

“It still seems like a bad dream. There’s a picture of her parents standing with me somewhere in front of a lot of trees. It’s in a silver frame on her dressing table. I haven’t any memory of its ever being taken. I usually remember things like that.”

“Meyer. Get some sleep tonight.”

“Did I tell you about my mail?”

“I forged your name on the change of address card. It’s coming here. Today you got a fat publication from the Federation of Concerned Economists, a bill from American Express, a catalogue from the Vermont Country Store, and a bank statement. Also, I talked to Irv. There’s a thirty-one-foot Rawson made in Panama City, Florida, moored over at B-Eighty. Apple-pie shape. They went out of business a few years ago because they made them too good. GE diesels, air, recording fathometer. The old couple that lived aboard, he went into the hospital in March, and then into a nursing home, and he died last week, and she is looking to sell privately before she puts it in the hands of a broker. She wants thirty days to move out and go back to South Dakota. She’s talking fifty-eight five. Walter says you’ll get thirty-nine or forty out of the insurance.”

“I don’t want to think about it yet.”

“It’s a good price and a roomy hull.”

“When I do get another boat, I’ll have to think of a name. I couldn’t call it the same thing.”

“Well… stay in touch.”

So I walked over to B-80 and met the old lady from South Dakota. She showed me the boat. She was proud of it. She said she knew one of them would have to die, sooner or later, and they had each hoped it would be themself instead of the other one. “But George won, I guess,” she said. “Tell your friend how nice it is, how nice we kept it.”

Six

WHEN I got the mail on Wednesday, there was a buff envelope with Brandy Davis and her address embossed on the flap. It was heavy stock, with a bright yellow tissue lining, and the two prints were inside, with no note or comment.

I glanced at the two prints just long enough to see the transom and the name and the stubby vessel tilting under a lead-colored sky, white crests rolling on a dishwater sea.

When I was back aboard the Flush I looked at them more carefully in bright sunlight. The first print showed the Keynes at fifty or sixty feet, going away, and the second at about a hundred feet. Assuming an average six knots on each vessel, they were diverging at about fifteen miles an hour, or a little better than twenty feet per second. So about ten seconds after the second picture was taken, the three people were blown to bits: the tall slender woman with the brand-new tan and the vivid orange string bikini, standing at the starboard side near the rail, one hand braced against the bulkhead, waving arid smiling, teeth white, black hair snapping in the wind; the burly figure of Hacksaw Jenkins at the sheltered wheel, in silhouette against the sea beyond the windshield, Greek captain’s hat on the back of his head; and Evan Lawrence, bent over so far in the cockpit, working on a line, that in the first picture only his back and denimed rump showed, then caught in the second picture beginning to straighten up, beginning to turn.

I accepted it as Evan Lawrence, the man with whom I had broken bread, drunk wine, told the tales. And suddenly it was not Evan Lawrence. In the act of starting to straighten up, starting to turn, it became a different person, younger, not as broad, with skin that took a better tan, hair longer, tangled, sun-streaked. Once it became someone else, I could not by any exercise of imagination or will turn it back into Evan Lawrence. But it did turn into somebody I knew from somewhere. I looked at the line of the brow, and the slant of the jaw as seen from the back, from off to the left side. The print was sharp. There was a glint of something on the left wrist, a watch or a bracelet. I found the magnifying glass in the drawer, but I couldn’t make it out. I looked at the hand, then, and I could make out something very specific. The pinky and the ring finger of that left hand were stubs little better than a half finger long.

And then I knew who it was. Along Charterboat Row he was known universally as Pogo, God only knows why. Maybe because he was as cheerful as that immortal possum. Meyer had once pointed him out to me as an example of the perfectly happy fellow. He had a functioning IQ, Meyer guessed, of seventy-five. He loved the sea. He grew terribly excited when fish were being caught. His body seemed to thrive on cola and junk food. He could sew bait, rig lines, net little fish, gaff big fish, wash down the boat, clean up the mess, serve the Coke and beer, swarm up to the tuna tower to search the sea for fish sign. He was cheerful, smiling, quick in his motions, polite to everyone. His face had a fat bland look at odds with his tough body. He had a little thin high voice. He filled in when any one of the captains needed a hand for a day or a week. They paid him off in cash. He had some learning defect which kept him from ever being able to read and write.

I walked down to Charterboat Row and found the Key Kitty with her cockpit hatches open, Captain Ned Rhine staring gloomily down at an electrician working in there.

Ned gave me a beer and we sat on the side of the dock and talked about the memorial service with the wreaths, and how Gloria was bearing up, and how his wife said Gloria would probably get married again someday. Nobody would ever guess she had those three hulking sons.

“Seen Pogo around?” I asked casually.

“Come to think of it, no. Maybe not for a week. Got something for him to do?”

“If he’s available. Where does he stay anyway?”

“Here and there. Here and there. After Roy got hisself all busted up that time last year when the kid ran into his truck, Pogo slept aboard the Honeydoo and worked mate while Stub was taking the contracts Roy had set up. For a while there I think he bunked in the supply room at Castle Marine until it got sold. Pogo is okay. He does a better job of work than some brighter people around here I could name. And he isn’t ever grouchy.”

I changed the subject, and a little later I unchained my bicycle and rode over to Pier 66 and walked out to the gas dock. I don’t buy fuel there, so I don’t know the attendants. There were two on duty, a narrow-faced redheaded man in the office and a young Cuban with a shaved head filling the tanks of a Prowler from Georgia. The redhead had been on duty the morning of the fifth.

They remembered gassing The John Maynard Keynes only because it had blown up soon afterward, and the police had questioned them after somebody reported having seen the Keynes at their gas dock at about ten that morning.

They had noticed the woman in the string bikini but not much else. There were three people on the boat. Or maybe four. It had been a busy morning. The woman had paid cash. She had gone below to get her purse. Ninety-five gallons of regular. A hundred and twenty-nine dollars and twenty cents. She’d asked for a receipt.

“Sure, I’ve seen Hack Jenkins around,” the redhead said. “I remember wondering what he was doing with that boat instead of his own.”

Neither of them knew anybody called Pogo who worked around the docks over at Bahia Mar. As all the charterboat captains would customarily buy fuel at Bahia Mar, that wasn’t unexpected. Every large marina seems to acquire its own village of regulars.

As I biked on back to Bahia Mar, I kept tugging at the minor improbabilities, hoping something would come loose. Norma Lawrence had not impressed me as the kind of take-charge lady who would jump up and pay the bills. It would be more likely she would get the money from her purse and give it to Evan to pay the bill with. And why had Evan stayed below when they went out past the sea buoy into the chop building up from the offshore storm? That was when the customers were always on deck, holding on, peering into the wind like dogs leaning out of car windows.

I carried the bike aboard and locked it to the ring I had bolted to the aft bulkhead, under the overhang, unlocked the Flush, and went into the lounge, into the air-conditioned coolness that chilled the sweat the ten-speed generated.

So what if Evan Lawrence wasn’t aboard for the big bang?

It was an idea that offended my emotional set. A very likable guy with a good grin, a man of warmth, of funny stories, a newly wedded man in love with his wife. And if he hadn’t been aboard, and hadn’t made known the fact of his survival, then it was a possibility he had engineered the explosion and made the anonymous call to deflect any possible suspicion.

So if he was that sort of man, he would have left a special scent along his back trail. I did not know enough about him, and neither did Meyer. Dinner aboard is not an excuse for an inquisition. He had seemed open about himself, but I could recall no talk of family. Funny stories of things which had happened to him here and there along the way. How they had met. How he had pursued her. Strange jobs he had held. Nothing more than that. They were in love. And there was that physical attraction so strong it was tangible, a musk in the air.

In the evening I went over to Charterboat Row during the interval after the customers have had their pictures taken with their fish, that time when the boats are cleaned up, the gear put back in shape, the salt hosed off. I had some heavy work I wanted done, and I was looking for Pogo.

Finally Dan List, skipper of the Nancy Mae III, told me I might try the construction shack over behind that big sign I had seen which said SHORE VIEW TOWERS, 200 Elegant Condominium Apartments, $165,000-$325,000, Ready For Occupancy Soon. Model ready for viewing. Phone so-and-so for appointment. But the construction cranes had stopped when the structure was about four stories high. They stood silent against the sky, like huge dead bugs. Somebody had run out of something essential: money or time or life. One of those things.

There was an old man in a blue uniform living in the construction shack. In the fading daylight I could see the cot in there, neatly made up. The old man had a big belly, and a badge, and a revolver in a black holster.

“You see that half-wit Pogo, friend, you tell him the only reason he should come back here is to get his stuff. It’s in a suitcase and a cardboard box. What clothes he owns and those filthy dirty picture books. I’m only filling in until they can get somebody for next to nothing, like they paid Pogo. I’m a licensed security guard, and my old lady is nervous alone at night in the apartment while I’m here in this stinking heat to keep vagrants and Haitians and trash from sneaking into that there building and messing up. You tell him he doesn’t show up soon, I’m putting his stuff out in the weather. There’s no agreement we got to store it for him. You tell him that.”

“Is there anything of value?”

“There’s a gray metal lockbox. It’s locked and there’s no key I could find around here. And the little television set I’m using, to keep from going nuts. The picture starts rolling and there’s no way to stop it. You just have to wait until it stops. Feels like it would pull your eyes out on sticks.”

He kept slapping the black leather holster. It was shiny from being slapped ten thousand times. It was a habit that could get him killed. I said if I saw Pogo, I’d tell him.

Even when a missing person is reported, nothing much happens. Local police forces have higher priorities. Nobody would report Pogo, and I saw no reason why I should. There would be a lot of interviews, a lot of forms to fill out. Transients flow back and forth across the country, and up and down the coasts. They are of little moment. They become the unidentified bones in abandoned orchards. Dumb, dreary, runaway girls are hustled into the dark woods, and their dental-work pictures go into the files. As the years do their work, shallow graves become deep graves, and very few of the thousands upon thousands are ever discovered. Burial without the box, without the marker, hasty dirt packed down onto the ghastliness of the ultimate grin. Old Fatso would eventually pry open the box, take anything of value, and destroy the rest. The trash truck would pick up the suitcase and the cardboard box, sodden with rainwater. And years down the road somebody would say, “Hey, remember that Pogo that used to work around here? Kind of a dimwit but a good worker?”

And somebody else would say, “Guess that was before my time.”

Nobody remembers very long any more. Like the half owner of the Nancy Mae III, which Dan List skippers. Three seasons ago, as a defensive lineman for the Dolphins, he made thirteen sacks in the regular season before they smashed his knee. And now I can’t remember his name. Six-five, about two fifty-five, quick as a weasel. And I can’t remember any part of his name.

Intimations of mortality often make me lonesome. I went back to the Flush and stretched out and called Annie Renzetti on the new private line that rings in her office and in her beach bungalow over there in Naples. Four rings and hang up. If she was alone she could catch it on four rings. If not alone, she could call me back. If she wasn’t in, nobody else would answer that line. It was known to be private.

I tried again at nine fifteen, and she answered from the bungalow. “How’s with you, Annie?” I asked her.

“This day has just about flattened me, love. They start arriving tomorrow before lunch.”

“Who?”

“My convention, dummy. Did you forget? Fifty-three specialists and their wives, or husbands, or special close friends. Proctologists.”

“I forgot it was this week.”

“By Monday afternoon when they all leave, my smile is going to feel as if it was nailed on my face. Tomorrow, early, some computerized little snit from company headquarters will be here to double-check my arrangements. This group doesn’t strike bargains. They want it nice. They’ll get it nice. Management wants them back here every year. What I have paid out for beef you wouldn’t believe. Lobsters and clams are coming by air express. Orchids for the ladies. A really good trio in the lounge. And by the time they arrive I will have personally inspected every room, every suite, every bath towel, tested every light bulb. The thing I resent, Trav, is their thinking they have to send somebody down to backstop me. I’ve proved I’m a damn good manager here. I get the printouts from the whole chain every month. I’m always in the top ten on the ratio of gross profit to gross sales, percentage occupancy, personnel turnover. They hired me to manage so they should let me manage, right?”

“Right!”

“My, my, my, how I do go on. Why should I take it out on you?”

“I’m your friend. Remember?”

“But if you were thinking of driving over about now…”

“Forget it?”

“Yes. Look me up after the convention. I fought it, you know. I don’t think we should have conventions here, even in the slack season, even at top rates. I’ve had to turn away reservations good old customers wanted to make, just to accommodate these… these…”

“Careful.”

“Are you okay, love? You sound kind of down.”

“Lonesome, sort of. Meyer phoned from Houston. He got permission to stay in her apartment while he takes care of the details. He sounded depressed, but he seems to be coping. But I know something he doesn’t know, and I don’t know whether I should tell him. I’m going over there soon. Maybe tomorrow.”

“Whether you should tell him what?”

“I won’t go into how I found out, but if only three people were blown to bits on Meyer’s boat, one was his niece, one was Hacksaw Jenkins, and one was a local retard, an itinerant worker everybody called Pogo, actual name unknown.”

“What do you mean, if only three?”

“The photo taken showed three. Maybe Evan Lawrence was below. But I have the queasy feeling he was on shore. I have the feeling that maybe he was where he could watch the Keynes and push a button on a transmitter. I have that feeling in spite of believing he was not the kind of person to do something like that. I really liked him. He had a good face, good laugh lines. You know?”

“I know what you mean. How would he arrange to stay ashore?”

“I don’t know. Back out at the last minute. Plead an upset stomach. And Hack would have picked up Pogo to help with the fishing because he’d be busy at the wheel out there in that chop. The Lawrences had been living aboard for almost two weeks. Time enough for him to poke around in Meyer’s files and pick up enough information so he could make a convincing phone call about the Chilean connection.”

“But what are you going to do?”

“Annie, I can dig into his life and find out if he was what I believed him to be. If so, he blew up too. If the back trail is rancid, he didn’t die, and we have a new kind of ball game.”

“In either case, you’ll have to start in Houston, and you’ll have to tell Meyer what you are thinking, won’t you? So no need to worry. Tell him the whole thing.”

“He’s had so much-”

“Look. Trust him to be able to accept that immortal truth, dear, that life is unfair. And unpleasantly abrupt at times.”

“It would be a lot easier to talk this all over if you had your head on my shoulder; and my left arm around you, and-”

“Hush. Please hush, McGee. I’d be of no use to you at all.”

“Let me be the judge of that.”

“No way.”

“And so I am separated from my own true love by fifty-three proctologists?”

“That’s one way to put it. Say hi to Meyer for me. Extend my love and affection and sympathy and so on. And phone me from Houston or wherever you may be-but not before Monday night next, which will be… the nineteenth. Look, if things turn ugly, don’t take any dumb chances, okay?”

“No dumb chances.”

“I had sort of an idea. There’s a place on the waterway where they are condominiumizing boat slips: in other words, selling the slip itself with the dock, pilings, and overhead roof, like for forty or fifty thousand for a slip big enough for the Busted Flush. I haven’t worked out the arithmetic yet, but I suspect that I could talk management into letting me invest in that as an adjunct facility to the Eden Beach. Then we could work out a lease arrangement, a sort of contract with you, to have a kind of permanent party-boat setup whereby the guests at the hotel here could sign up ahead and there could be sightseeing cruises, or cocktail cruises, or maybe even dinner cruises if we could work out the service details. What I mean to say, it could be a very nice little living for you, dear. It wouldn’t be a killing but it would be steady, and you would practically be your own boss. And we would… see each other oftener.”

“And I wouldn’t be charging around taking dumb chances?”

“Something like that.”

“On the dinner cruises, could I wear one of those great huge tall white chef’s hats?”

“Don’t be such a bastard, McGee.”

“Look into your heart of hearts and see if you can really see me doing that.”

“Hmm… Oh, shucks. No.”

“Thanks anyway for the concern.”

“You’re welcome indeed. Good night, McGee. I love you.”

Seven

ON THURSDAY morning as I was washing up after break-fast, Dave Jenkins came by to see me. Oldlooking for twenty-two. Burned to a brick bronze by the summer sun down in the Keys. Muscles rolling under the parched hair on his big arms. Sloping powerful shoulders, just as Hack had.

You have to wait the locals out. Nothing is done without a reason, and sooner or later they either get around to it or change their minds and leave. The quickest way to change their minds is to press them to find out what they want.

He looked around the lounge and said, “Changed it some.”

“You haven’t been aboard in a while.”

“I guess I was about fourteen. You and Dad armrassled to a draw, maybe forty minutes, with the sweat popping out and one or the other of you groaning from time to time, your faces like beets. He was a little bit stronger, and you had a little bit better leverage, having a longer arm.”

“I remember.”

“Then it was Meyer stepped in and called it a draw, and you both fell off the chairs and lay on the floor there, panting like dogs in the summertime.”

“I remember it well. Want a beer?”

“I won’t ever forget it, not ever. I’d never seen anybody ever rassle my dad to a draw, arm-rassling or any other kind. Little early for me for a beer, I guess.”

“Carta Blanca?”

“Well, not all that early.”

He drifted out to the galley with me, and I took two cold ones out of the locker and uncapped them. We went back into the lounge, and he dropped into a chair and took long swallows, wiped his mouth on the back of his brown hand. “Real good. Thanks. You and my dad were friends.”

“Pretty good friends.”

“I come onto something, I don’t know how I should handle it, and there’s nobody I can rightly ask. I don’t want to bring Bud in on it. He’s back up at Duke in that summer program. Andy’s too young. And I can’t ask Mom.”

“What’s it all about?”

There was a long final hesitation, and then he shrugged and sighed. “Like this. I’ve been building up a fair trade down there below Marathon, but it’s nothing like Dad had here. I’ve been over his list for the season coming up, and he’s booked nearly solid. I know his kind of fishing. I can do it, but not as good as he did. He could smell fish. The HooBoy would be mine to use or sell, whatever. I went prowling around among the charterboat guys, trying to find out if I could make some kind of a deal for his boat plus the bookings. Everybody acted just a little funny. You know? There was something going on I couldn’t figure out.

“So I went over to the boatyard, to Dalton and Forbes, where the engine work is being done. And they acted funny over there too. It’ll be ready in one more week. I climbed up the ladder and went aboard her. I looked at the work sheets. The work is all paid for. Thirty-eight thousand dollars’ worth, and he paid in cash.”

“To rebuild a couple of old diesels?”

“Rebuild, hell. A new pair of high-speed jobs, with every kind of booster you can think of. They reinforced and cross-braced the whole front end of the hull. High-speed props. New controls. Outside it isn’t changed. It was always just a little bit underpowered. He could have gone bumbling around in it, looking the same as always, but when anybody jammed those throttles forward that thing would take off like a big-assed rabbit.”

“Isn’t that a displacement hull?”

“No. It’s kind of a modified deep vee, and they’ve put a new kind of step thing on the hull that will pop it right up into planing position. I remember when it was new, if we were heading downwind and he gave it full throttle on both engines, and we had a lot of room ahead of us, it would get up onto the plane and scoot. But it took too much gas to get it there. Jerry Forbes told me they think it will do a little better than forty knots once they get the step adjusted just right. I don’t even like to think about it. He told Mom he had to get five thousand together to get the engines rebuilt. I’ve been through his papers, and there’s nothing there to show where any thirty-eight thousand came from or where it went to. What do you think was going on, Trav?”

“Did they enlarge fuel capacity?”

“Bigger tanks, and they set them so the center of balance is a little more forward of where it used to be. When he got that boat, I was six and Bud was four and Andy wasn’t born yet. We were so proud of the HooBoy. It was so pretty!”

“Your father was a good man, Dave. He had lots of friends. He worked hard. You could trust him.”

“So where did a good man get thirty-eight thousand cash money?”

“Have you looked around at the charterboat people along this coast and in the Keys lately? There’s a lot of big new vans and pickups. Lots of gold jewelry. New televisions with big big screens. Brand new washer-dryers. And little trips over to Freeport for shopping and gambling, and maybe a visit to the branch of the Bank of Nova Scotia.”

“Certainly I’ve looked around. And I’ve thought about it. Fellow I knew down in Marathon had him a fast little runabout, like a California boat. Cigarette hull and power assists so he could do up to eighty-five, he claimed. He was clearing ten thousand a week running coke from a mother ship. One time they waited for him and tried to corner him. They had three boats not as fast as his. But he tried to get away around the end of a reef, and he cut it a little bit short and turned himself and his pretty boat into a ball of flame rolling for fifty yards along the night water. Friend of mine saw it happen. We’re not talking about people like that coke dealer. We’re talking about my dad, Dennis Hackney Jenkins, Hack. We’re talking about lying, and cash money, and why’d he have them turning the HooBoy into a bomb.”

“Look. I don’t want to be in the position of making excuses. He’d just turned fifty. Men do funny things when they come up against a birthday with a zero on the end of it. They wonder if their life is pointless. They wonder what other kinds of lives they could have led. Don’t judge him. A man can be tempted. Few ever get caught, and the ones that do get out on bail, and cases don’t come to trial for years. The U.S. Attorney’s office in Miami has a nine-year backlog of dope cases.”

He stood up abruptly. “Thanks for the beer. He wasn’t like that. You know it and I know it. And I’m going to find out what the hell was going on.” And out he went. Blind loyalty. It made me wish my life had been different and I’d had some sons. Sure, McGee. What you want are the full-grown variety, big and sturdy and loyal and true. But you never wanted what came in between: diapers and shots, PTA and homework, yard mowing, retirement programs, Christmas lists, mortgage interest, car payments, dental bills, and college tuition. You made your choices, fellow, and you live with the results. And if in the end there is nobody to give a single particular damn when you die, that too is part of the bargain you made with life. And maybe that was what Annie was trying to tell me a couple of weeks ago.

If Dave Jenkins was as shrewd as I judged him to be, he would take delivery on the HooBoy, put it back on Charterboat Row, and start filling Hack’s commitments to his clients. Certainly Hack wasn’t working in a vacuum. Sooner or later some information would turn up. Somebody would come around. Charter fishing was sick. Money was tight and getting tighter. A lot of them were out there after the square grouper, as the bales of marijuana were called. Hack or whoever would run the transformed HooBoy, could make $10,000 a trip, out and back to the mother ship, some rust-bucket freighter chugging around out there, sixty miles offshore.

I decided to look him up when I came back from Houston, find out if anything at all had happened. But I wouldn’t look him up to do any arm-rassling.

He looked as strong as his father, and his arms were longer: After a match with him, I would have to brush my teeth with my left hand for a week.

On Friday the sixteenth, Eastern Airlines took me from Miami to Houston by way of Atlanta. I went first class, I told myself, for the sake of the leg room. At six-four I am not the right size for tourist. But I probably went first because I like first. If I did a lot of flying, I’d probably find a reasonably good way to wedge my knees into the tourist-size seats. But flying seldom, I tend to treat myself to the best. I had alerted Meyer, and he met me at the gate and led me with my underseat case out to the lot to his rental Datsun, which seemed even smaller than tourist class.

He said I had best not talk to him in the noontime traffic. I soon saw what he meant. We came whining down the Eastex Parkway at sixty-four miles an hour, because that was the average speed of the dense stampede in which we were enclosed. It is a fact of highway life that each heavily traveled road establishes its own cadence. The great pack of candy-colored compacts, pickups, vans, delivery trucks, taxicabs, and miscellaneous wheeled junk flowed in formation, inches apart, through the gleam, stink grinding roar, and squinty glitter of a July noontime, through a golden sunshine muted to brass by smog. What the traffic consultants seem unable to comprehend is that heavy traffic makes its own rules because nobody can nip in and pull anybody over to the side without setting up a shock wave that would scream tires and crumple fenders for a mile back down the road. California discovered this first. It is probably a more important discovery than est or redwood hot tubs.

In such traffic there are two kinds of maniacs. The first is the one who goes a legal 55 and becomes like a boulder in a swift stream. The stream has to part and go around, finding the spaces in the lanes on either side, getting impatient when they can’t find the spaces, finally cutting out somebody else and making them so cross that a few miles down the road they actually nudge another car. Hence the plague of car wars. At times I have had a fleeting sympathy for the fellow in Dallas who ran such a station wagon off onto the median strip, hopped out, dragged the offending driver out of his vehicle, and flipped him into the fast traffic. Murder by impulse. Rage unconfined.

The second maniac is the one who tries to go nine miles faster than the flow instead of nine miles slower. This type is often bombed out of his mind on booze, cannabis, crazy candy, or marital disagreements.

Once you have the concept of the pack making the law, driving the urban interstates is simplified. You maintain just that distance from the vehicle ahead which will give you braking room yet will not invite a car from a neighbor lane to cut in. You pick the center lanes because some of the clowns leaving the big road on the right will start to slow down far too soon. You avoid the left lane when practical because when they have big trouble over there on the other side of the median strip, the jackass who comes bounding over across the strip usually totals somebody in the left lane. When you come up the access strip onto the big road, you make certain that you have reached the average speed of all the traffic before you edge into it. Keep looking way way ahead for trouble, and when you see it put on your flashing emergency lights immediately so that the clown behind you will realize you are soon going to have to start slowing down.

Meyer did well, hunched forward, hands gripping the wheel at ten o’clock and two o’clock. We traversed the interchange onto the loop Interstate 610, heading west. The average speed moved up to a little above seventy. He took the first exit past the junction of Interstate 10, headed west again, turned south at a light, and after a couple of miles turned into the main entrance of Piney Village, a misnamed development of clusters of town houses and duplexes in stained wood with some stone facing, set at odd angles on curving asphalt to manufacture illusions of privacy. Berms added variety to flatness, and new trees struggled. The architect had been crazy about step roof pitches, a manifest insanity in the Houston climate. Meyer meandered left and right and left, pulled into a driveway barely longer than the orange Datsun, and parked with the front bumper inches from the closed overhead garage door, killed the motor, and exhaled audibly. “Very nervous traffic,” I said. “You did good.”

“Thank you. Lately I seem to get along better by focusing on just one thing at a time, pushing everything else out of my mind. Driving a car, shaving, cooking eggs. The other day I was adding figures on a pocket calculator and I suddenly lost track of what I was doing.” He frowned at me. “I was adrift all of a sudden, and I had to reinvent myself, find out who I was and where I was and what I was doing. Like waking from very deep sleep. Strange.”

He got out and I followed as he went to the door of D-3 and unlocked it. In the hallway, he pushed a sequence of numbers on a small panel, and a voice came out of the grill and said, “Identify please.”

“Meyer here. Two eight two seven five.”

“Thank you,” the grill said, after a short pause.

“Security,” Meyer explained. “All these places are hooked up to a central control. When we sign out, they’ll be listening for sounds of break-in or fire or whatever.”

It was a two-level town-house apartment, with two bedrooms and bath off a balcony, with kitchen, bath, and a studio-workroom under the bedroom portion. The two-story-high living room had a glass wall at one end, with sliding doors that opened onto a small garden surrounded on three sides by a seven-foot concrete wall, and a fireplace at the other end. The furniture was modern and looked comfortable without being bulky. The colors were mostly neutral, but with bright prints on the wall, bright jackets on the bookshelves. It had the look of being well-built, solid, efficient, and impersonal.

“Norma lived here alone before she got married, and Evan moved in with her. She was the first occupant after this unit was finished. She rented it on some complicated lease-purchase arrangement whereby she paid six hundred and twenty-five a month, and two hundred of that went into an escrow account against her decision to purchase for sixty-five thousand when her two-year lease was up. It will be up in October. These places are now going for ninety to a hundred, so I guess she made a good decision. There’s a big shopping mall about a mile away, and it’s close to a very direct route into the middle of the city.”

He said it would be easier if I stayed in the place, and he assigned me the bedroom on the left. I unpacked in about seventy-five seconds and went down, and he said we could eat at the mall. He checked out over the security intercom and locked up.

We drove to the metallic acres of mall parking lot. Meyer said it was going to get up to a hundred and five again by midafternoon. It was the fourth day of the heat wave. A lot of old people were dying, he said. They didn’t dare leave windows open because the feral children would climb in, terrorize them, and take anything hockable. Their windows were nailed shut. They sat in heat of a hundred and twenty with their bare feet in pans of water, fanning themselves, collapsing, dying. They couldn’t afford the cost of air conditioning or, in many cases, the cost of running an electric fan. From where they died, from anywhere in the city, the giant office towers of the seven sisters of the oil industry were invisible.

We walked through the cool shadowy passageways of the mall, lined with the brightly lighted shops. The tiled pedestrian avenues led to Sears, to Kmart, to JCPenney. There were fountains and benches and guide maps: “You are here.” Thousands shuffled through the mall in coolness, children racing back and forth, dripping ice cream. It is contemporary carnival, an entertainment of looking at shoe stores, summer clearance sales, of being blasted by the music coming out of Radio Shack of trying to remember the balance already committed on the credit card account. There was a public service display of security equipment devices, with uniformed officers answering questions. Uniformed guards stood in boredom in the jewelry stores. Young mothers with tired and ugly expressions whopped their young with a full-arm swing, eliciting bellows of heartbreak.

He led me to a narrow fast-food place with a German name, and we went to a table for two way in the back. He recommended the wurst, the kraut, and the dark draft. So be it.

Then I had the feeling he had run down. He had pre-planned the airport pickup, the ride, getting me settled, taking me to the mall. But it ended there. He had no key for the rewind.

“How is it going?” I asked.

“Going?”

“Cleaning up her affairs.”

“Well, there is a will. Everything comes to me. She didn’t get around to changing it. She previously changed the beneficiary when my sister died.”

“Is there much involved?”

“It-it seems to be complicated.”

“Okay. So you don’t want to talk about it. Okay.”

“No, Travis. It’s not that. I don’t want to compromise what you might think by telling you in advance what I think.”

“In advance of what?”

“I made an appointment for us with Roger Windham.”

“Her lawyer?”

“At three o’clock in his office in the Houston Trust Building.”

“Let’s cover a couple of things first,” I said. “Take a good close look at this.” I handed him the Kodacolor print.

He looked at it and gave me a puzzled look. “So?”

“Take a closer look at the man’s hand.”

His eyebrows lifted in surprise. “Good Lord! I remember Pogo telling me how he lost those fingers. He was boating a mako, and a loop in the wire leader slipped around his fingers just as the shark shook his head for the last time. Nipped them right off. Now I can see that it really is Pogo. In the picture in the paper I thought-”

“So did I. Then I wondered if maybe Evan Lawrence had been below when that woman took the picture. I tried to check it out. I went to the gas dock over at Pier Sixty-six. I went from boat to boat along Charterboat Row. Here is my best guess. Evan Lawrence was-handy. He caught on quickly. There was no need for the expense of a mate aboard when Hack took Evan and Norma out. In the rough chop out beyond the sea buoy Hack would want to stay at the wheel. So when Evan couldn’t make it, he hired Pogo. Norma was hooked on game fish. If Evan wasn’t feeling too great I don’t think she would have stayed ashore in some motel room just to hold his hand, even if it was a belated honeymoon. So with no proof at all, it is my belief that Evan didn’t get blown to bits. He seemed like such a hell of a nice man, it’s hard to take the next logical step.”

“He arranged to blow up my boat.”

“Exactly. And living aboard for a couple of weeks, he had a chance to go through your papers and come up with that Chilean connection to use as a red herring. Why did you jump an the idea so quick and easy Meyer?”

“You’ll know after you hear Windham.”

I waited until it became obvious he wasn’t going to say any more. So then I gave him the next chapter, about Hack Jenkins giving the boatyard, Dalton and Forbes, thirty-eight thousand in advance to turn the HooBoy into a fifty-mile-an-hour bomb, and it would be finished within a week.

“Young Dave came to me with the information. He was very upset. Couldn’t see his daddy mixed up in drug running.”

“Can you?” Meyer asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t know what pressure could have been brought to bear against him. Maybe he was tired of seeing his friends making it big. But the thing that bothers me there is that his friends make out pretty well using the same old slow fishing machines, just by knowing their way around the area.”

“It doesn’t sound like Hack. He was about the best in the whole marina,” Meyer said. He shrugged. “On the other hand, these are the days when people are turning strange. Doing things they never thought they would do.”

The food was better than I had any right to expect. Walking back through the mall to the exit nearest our part of the parking lot, we passed one shop which sold computers, printers, software, and games. It was packed with teenagers, the kind who wear wire rims and know what the new world is about. The clerks were indulgent, letting them program the computers. Two hundred yards away, near the six movie houses, a different kind of teenager shoved quarters into the space-war games, tensing over the triggers, releasing the eerie sounds of extraterrestrial combat. Any kid back in the computer store could have told the combatants that because there is no atmosphere in space, there is absolutely no sound at all. Perfect distribution: the future managers and the future managed ones. Twenty in the computer store, two hundred in the arcade.

The future managers have run on past us into the thickets of CP/M, M-Basic, Cobal, Fortran, Z-80, Apples, and Worms. Soon the bosses of the microcomputer revolution will sell us preprogrammed units for each household which will provide entertainment, print out news, purvey mail-order goods, pay bills, balance accounts, keep track of expenses, and compute taxes. But by then the future managers will be over on the far side of the thickets, dealing with bubble memories, machines that design machines, projects so esoteric our pedestrian minds cannot comprehend them. It will be the biggest revolution of all, bigger than the wheel, bigger than Franklin’s kite, bigger than paper towels.

Eight

DOWNTOWN HOUSTON seemed an empty place on a Friday afternoon. Bulky skyscrapers faced with granite and marble stood in a kind of gloomy silence in the golden smog. There was light traffic, few pedestrians, few stores, a broad deserted public square. Meyer ducked down a ramp into an underground parking garage.

Once we left the garage, I realized why there were so few pedestrians out on the streets. The underground tunnels were cooler and busier. We missed an important sign and had to double back to an intersection before we finally found the elevator bank for the Houston Trust Building.

The law offices of Sessions, Harkavy and Windham were on the twenty-seventh floor. We waited ten minutes on plastic furniture looking at sections of newspaper before Roger Windham’s secretary, a rangy graying redhead, led us back to a small conference room.

Roger Windham was waiting for us. He was tall, in his early thirties, with red-blond bangs, a ragged reddish mustache, pale blue eyes that looked red and irritated. He was in shirt sleeves with a conservative tie, perfectly knotted. I wondered how many ties you could find in downtown Houston when the temperature was over a hundred.

I saw Windham trying to put a label on me as we were introduced, and as we sat in three chairs at the end of the conference table. I manage to look out of place in an office. Too much deep-water tan, too much height, too many knuckles, too many fading scars of past tactical errors and strategic mistakes. Had I come to repair the wiring in the overhead ducts, he would have had not a glimmer of curiosity about me.

Windham opened the folder in front of him, closed it again, and sighed. He scratched a freckled wrist. His shirt sleeves were turned back, midway up the tendoned forearms of the tennis buff.

“As I understand the situation, Mr. McGee, you are here as a friend of the deceased’s uncle.”

“And someone,” I said, “with a lot of curiosity about how it happened to happen.”

“You’re not alone,” he said tiredly. “I’d handled Norma’s legal affairs and advised her on financial matters for probably four years. The longer I knew her, the better I liked her. I must confess to a certain bias in this whole affair. I did not realize what a complete damn fool I had been until all of a sudden I discovered that she was in love with Evan Lawrence, he had moved into her place with her, and they were going to be married. She was one hell of a woman. I didn’t know how far I’d fallen for her until… it was too damn late. I wasn’t planning to tell you this, Dr. Meyer-”

“Please, I am just Meyer. McGee is Travis. You are Roger. We’re talking personal things, so it will be easier without formalities.”

“Okay. Let me give you the financial picture the way it was before she went to Mexico. She was very bright. I guess you knew that already, Meyer. She got her degrees at a tender age. Am Dexter, who is wise in the ways of geologists, snapped her up six years ago. He hired her away from Conoco and talked her into a long-term contract, with a smaller royalty override than she was maybe worth then, and certainly smaller than she was worth at the time… at the time she died.”

It was hard for him to say. His throat worked. It was something he didn’t like to swallow.

“Anyway, even being paid less than her market value, she was able to accumulate a substantial amount after living expenses and taxes. I had her tax returns done here in the firm. I tried to talk her into investing in private drilling programs with people in the industry, people she knew and respected. I told her it would be a good tax shelter for a single person with her income. But she was not interested in manipulating money and making it grow. She wanted to tuck it away and forget it. So three years ago I had her open a discretionary trust account at Houston Bank and Trust and empty her savings accounts into it. The trust officer, Phyllis DeMar, consulted with me about what we should recommend to Norma. We put her into growth stocks, because it was not appropriate for her to invest for income. And we put her into tax-frees. It made a suitable portfolio.”

“Very sound,” Meyer said.

Windham turned the folder to where both Meyer and I could see a page of columns of figures, and then he came around the table to lean between us and point to the appropriate places.

“This is a summary printout made by the Trust Department. It shows the contributions in this column, withdrawals in this, and the total value of the trust based on market value of the holdings, at the end of each month since the account was established.

“As you can see, the total value of the account reached a peak of three hundred and fifteen thousand, seven hundred and twenty-eight dollars and forty cents on the last day of February this year. There were no more contributions made after that date. In the period from March first to June fifteenth, three and a half months, the account balance was drawn down to this figure here, which is approximately what is in the account today, nine thousand three hundred and something.

“Though it was a substantial amount for her to have saved, it is but a tiny driblet of the money that surges through the banks in this city. In each case she authorized the sale of the securities, signed the authorization, and deposited the checks in the account she maintained at First National. Then she cashed a large number of checks over that time span. As she made me and the Houston Bank and Trust co-executors, I was able to get access to the checking account records. The summary is on this next sheet. This column here is normal account activity: charge accounts, bills, etc. These are the checks she cashed. One hundred and fifty-two, all in the fifteen-hundred- to twenty-five-hundred-dollar range. About ten a week. Two every working day. But because she was on field trips from time to time, the incidence had to be higher than that when she was in town. She went around to branch offices of the bank. She evidently wanted to accumulate cash without attracting any kind of attention. And it worked.”

“What do you think was going on?” Meyer asked. “Take a guess.”

Windham went back to his chair and slouched into it, leaning his chin on a steeple of long fingers. “My bias comes into the answer. Where did this Evan Lawrence come from? Maybe she married some kind of con man, or somebody given to harebrained schemes to make a million. Even though Norma wasn’t interested in money for its own sake, she was a very smart woman. She had a good mind. Could she have been cheated?”

“Probably,” Meyer said. “She was deeply in love. Trust becomes very important then. You suppress doubts for fear of offending the loved one. Her man and her work they were the important things in her life. If he asked for a loan, made a plausible sales pitch, she would have given it to him.”

“But why such stealth?” Windham said. “If she had doubts, she knew she could come to me for advice.”

“Tell him, Travis,” Meyer said.

I didn’t want to, because I knew it was going to have a very ugly effect on Roger Windham.

“It was a very violent explosion,” I said to him. “I read the reports. I know. Explosions are the big thing lately. How many school kids can you kill with a car bomb?”

“There were no identifiable remains. In fact, there were no remains at all. None recovered. Not of anybody aboard.”

“I read that-at least a hint of it-and I couldn’t believe it. Or understand it.”

“Nobody aboard ever knew what happened to them. Existence suddenly stopped,” I said.

“Her friends,” he said, “decided we’d have a memorial service for them in a week or so. For there to be a funeral, there has to be something to bury.”

“We had a little ceremony in the Atlantic off Lauderdale, out off the sea buoy;” Meyer said. “The other boats were there because of Captain Jenkins. But we brought our own wreath and floated it out on the tide at the same time. Our wreath was for Hack Jenkins and Norma and Evan Lawrence.”

“I’m glad that happened,” he said.

“But now,” I said, maybe too loudly, “Meyer and I are ninety-nine percent certain only three people were blown up out there-Norma and Hack and a harmless little guy who worked mate part-time.”

Windham shook his head and knuckled his tired reddened eyes. “What are you trying to tell me?”

“Evan Lawrence had some time to work it all out The happy couple were living aboard Meyer’s boat. In the Miami area you can buy anything in the world. Anything. A bazooka and a case of antitank grenades. Russian land mines. Persian whores. Chinese poisons. All you need is enough cash. He had access to Meyer’s professional files aboard the Keynes. He could have picked up enough about Chile to be able to fake the terrorist claim on the phone. We have identified the third person on the boat as the hired mate. Evan was handy enough so that Jenkins would never have hired the mate if Evan had been along to help with Norma’s tackle and bait. When they gassed up, Norma paid the hundred and something in cash out of her purse to the man at the pumps. Had Evan been there, she would have given it to him to give to the man. Had Evan been aboard, he would have been up on deck when they went out past the buoy into the wind and the chop. And what is more conclusive, Roger, is the way the money fits into the whole pattern.”

He didn’t say anything. He did a strange and touching thing. He bent over slowly, all the way over, to rest his forehead against the shiny dark wood of the conference table. His red hair was thinning at the crown. It gave him a vulnerable look.

We said nothing. In time he straightened up. “I guess I knew it somehow,” he said in a flat voice. “Maybe I knew it when he shook my hand. After the wedding. He pumped my hand and beamed at me and told me how happy he was. All that great warm grinning. She was right there, his big left paw resting on her waist in ownership. He looked at me in… in a jolly way, as if we shared some kind of joke together. I guess he was laughing on the inside at the way he’d gotten Norma to spirit the money out of the trust without letting her faithful old adviser know about it. Or laughing about how it was all going according to plan.”

Meyer said, “Maybe at that time he already planned to kill her in such a way it would look as if he had died too. But he wouldn’t have had the details worked out. They didn’t know they were going to live aboard my boat while I gave talks in Toronto.”

“But they seemed to be so much in love. Both of them,” Roger said wonderingly. “Do the police believe any of this?”

“There’s nothing yet to tell them,” Meyer said. “We’ve got no basis on which to try to trace Evan Lawrence. No personal papers. No fingerprints. Nothing. Just some little stories he told about his past. We’re going to look into his past, provided those stories weren’t lies.”

“If only Mr. Dexter hadn’t loaned her to Pemex,” he said. “You know, when I found out about the money, about her taking it out of the trust account, that’s when I knew why she was avoiding me after she married Evan Lawrence. I’d told her that she ought to come in and chat about the changes that ought to be made in their wills. But she was elusive. It wasn’t a matter of any great urgency, I thought. I just wanted to see her and talk to her. She was an honest person. She was doing something without telling me, taking that money out. She really didn’t have to tell me. It was her money, after all. But she didn’t want to come in and not tell me. Sorry about nattering around like this, thinking with my mouth open. I just have the crazy feeling I lost her three times, when she got married, when she died, and-now-finding out maybe she was killed. I really think she liked me. We always found a lot to laugh about together. I just didn’t make a move when I should have. And she happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and there was Evan Lawrence, grinning away, putting those big hands on her.”

Meyer said gently, “I never really got to know her. I should have made the effort. But she had a very busy life. We all think of the inconvenience of making an effort. We’re all going to do the right things a little later on. Soon. But soon slides by so easily. Then we vow we’ll try to do better. We all carry that little oppressive weight around in the back of our mind-that we should be living better, trying harder, but we’re not. We’re all living just about as well as we can at any given moment. But that doesn’t stop the wishing.”

We went down into the tunnel system and found the underground garage and paid the ticket on the way out. He was silent on the way back to Piney Village, apparently concentrating on his driving, but I sensed that things were moving about in the back of his head, where his little personal computer works on equations.

As soon as we were inside, he announced his return and the voice of the security office made its metallic acknowledgment. I stretched out on the couch near the fireplace. Meyer stood by the glass wall and looked out into the little garden.

Finally he came over and sat near me. “Once Windham arranged for me to stay here, he asked me to go through all the papers and documents I could find to see if I could learn anything about Evan Lawrence. The only traces of him were some old clothes, a pair of work shoes, and some love letters from Norma to him.”

“With addresses?”

“Without envelopes. From the contents I think they were sent back here from some field trips she went on. All the rest of her papers were professional documents, in those files there in the office alcove. Reports, surveys, daily drilling reports. Field maps. Computer printouts. All apparently in good order. How do we look for him?”

“We can start with a picture of him.”

“There isn’t one here. Not one. I thought there would be wedding pictures at least.”

“There probably are. She would have invited her friends from the company to the wedding. People who go to weddings take their little cameras and take shaky shots of the happy couple. And they would not have thrown them away.”

“Yes, you mentioned that before. I’d forgotten. I seem to be forgetting too many things this year.”

Nine

ON SATURDAY we drove out to a commercial area where Amdex Petroleum Exploration was located. It was out Interstate 10, east of town, past Jacinto. Hurricane fencing and barbed wire enclosed a yard full of big trucks and incomprehensible hunks of machinery. There were two long prefab steel buildings. Even at nine thirty in the morning it was sickeningly hot. The guard on the big gate let us in and told us to park over near the first building. Meyer parked between a white Continental and a row of big rugged-looking trucks.

We walked through a shop area, the machines silent, work floor empty, air stale. The offices were at the far end of the first building, partitioned off and air conditioned. Beyond the reception area, two men and several women worked at the keyboards of data processing units, green figures glowing on the small screens. Fanfold paper came out of two high-speed printers that clattered and roared as the paper piled up in the waiting tray.

Mr. D. Amsbary Dexter came hurrying out of the larger office in the rear. He had met Meyer, of course, and seemed glad to see him. He looked me over with that quick appraisal of my financial condition which all hustlers learn before they leave grade school and decided I was worth only a small portion of his attention.

He shook hands, then trotted ahead of us into his office, waving us in, waving us toward the chairs. “Come in, come in.” He perched a haunch on the corner of his desk, a smallish wiry man, going bald, fishing in his shirt pocket with yellowed fingers for a cigarette. He had faded eyes, full of a nervous alertness, and a sore-throat voice.

“Meyer, I have to ask you for a favor. I talked to our lawyers. And I’ve cleared this with Roger Windham. He doesn’t see any estate tax consequences here, because even if the trust account were intact, there is enough coming in from the employee insurance, and enough pay and royalty interest due her, to more than take care of the tax. Apparently, all she has otherwise is that old van of hers, professional library, the furniture, and so on. There’s two four-drawer, gray-steel, fire-resistant, legal-size filing cabinets in that little office setup of hers in the apartment near the stairs. We bought them, and they are on our corporate inventory. They hold work papers which she created as a part of her employment contract with us, and thus belong to us. Most of the work papers are case histories, but there are quite a few which involve acreage we still have under lease.”

“I went through the files, Mr. Dexter. Her personal papers are in one drawer, half of one drawer. Once I remove those, you’re welcome to the files and the rest of the documents.”

“I appreciate your attitude. If it’s convenient, I’ll have some men over there tomorrow to pick up the filing cabinets.”

“Have them bring a letter from you, explaining ownership. Just in case anybody ever asks.”

“No problem. Now then, gentlemen, what was it that you wanted to see me about?”

Meyer signaled me with a glance, and I said, “We wonder what opinion you formed of Evan Lawrence.”

“Opinion? Well, he seemed very likable. Everybody around here took to him right away. I thought he was maybe a little bit old for her, ten or twelve years, I guess, but on the other hand she was beginning to get a little long in the tooth. Pushing thirty. Reaching the point where if she wanted kids she’d have to hurry. Maybe I resented him a little. He was marrying a successful woman. Someday she was going to be my best geologist. Maybe someday she would be a legend in the drilling industry. I mean she had that capacity. And I thought marriage might send it all down the drain. Children and a husband and all that. Of course, now all my worries seem ridiculous. What did I think of him? A very relaxed cat. A drifter, I think. And just by the way he listened to you, he could make you feel important and interesting.”

“She’s a big loss to your company?” I asked.

“I’m going to miss her. A lot. Unless you know modern oil and gas exploration, it’s hard to describe her talents. An old friend birddogged her for me when she was with Conoco. I hired her six years ago after talking to her for an hour. We worked out a contract.

“What the public doesn’t know is that there is just too damned much information available when you try to make an exploration decision. Old wells, core samples, old geophysical surveys, producing wells, geological surveys. It’s a big fat confusion because of so much raw data. Norma helped move this company into computerized data processing and into electromagnetic mapping from the air. I’ve got the airplane now, loaded with electronics. We do some contract mapping with it to help pay the rent. Norma got into remote sensing analysis too. That’s where you get a computerized image analysis of satellite photographs. She worked with a good programmer until they finally developed the software to tie all the random information together, all the way from the history and the geophone records from the charges and the thumper trucks to core analysis.

“The thing is, she had a knack of sensing what was pertinent information and what was junk. With all the pertinent data in the computer, it could draw you a map of the subsurface structures that was clean and pretty, without anomalies that give you questionable areas. Norma put us out front of a whole mob of little exploration companies. She could take the series of computer maps and go into a trance, dreaming of what the earth was like at that place once upon a time, and she’d put down a little red circle with an N inside it. Her mark. Drill here. Or she would throw the whole thing out. There’s no big demand for dry holes, she’d say.

“Hell, we got a lot of other benefits from the data processing. We never lose track of a lease rental payment. We’re right now revamping the software to catch up with the changes in the WPT. We got all the payout status reports up to date. And we do our own econometric studies. But keeping track of all the nuts and bolts is housekeeping. Using computer technology to process information about, what might be a couple of miles underground, and draw maps of it, that was her contribution, and she came in for a percentage of every well after payout, a certain percent for the ones she worked on and smaller for the others, and for the development wells based on her original recommendation. Having that engineering under her belt gave her a practical base for all the rest of it.”

“I understand her percentages stop now?” Meyer said

“You sound like you disapprove. You don’t understand the picture. I’m not running a farm team to train people for the seven sisters to snatch up. It’s all spelled out. She came in with her eyes open. The longer good people stay, the more they make. If they quit, their percentages go back into the pot. If they retire, they keep the percentages until they die, provided they have at least fifteen years in. In case of accidental death, there’s the insurance, and the percentages keep on going for the full calendar year following the year of death, payable to the heirs. So you’ll make out okay. Not to worry.”

Meyer seemed to swell visibly. He said in a very quiet gritty voice, “I never approve or disapprove of practices with which I am not familiar. I would suspect that when a person becomes contentious and defensive about a given practice, without cause, then there could be reason to doubt either its efficacy or its morality. I did not come here to learn how I would ‘make out,’ as you put it. I. came here to see if you could give us any useful information about Evan Lawrence. Mr. McGee and I are quite convinced he killed my niece. If we are ever to find him, we must learn more about him.”

Dexter stood up from the corner of his desk and stared at Meyer and then at me. “Jesus H. Jumping Christ!” he whispered. “Killed Norma? For the money? Jesus, if he stuck with her,. in ten more years she’d be spilling money on the way to the bank. Talk about killing the goose!”

Then he made a funny little bow to Meyer. “Excuse me. I had you all wrong. I thought a band of nuts tried to blow you up but got Norma and her husband by accident. I thought you were here to find out how much you were going to get. In my line of work, there are a lot of people who spend all their time trying to find out how much they are going to get. They generally get less than if they spent less time thinking about it. What did that husband do? Blow up a stand-in?”

“Good guess,” Meyer said. “No part of any body was recovered. In a photo taken moments before the explosion, from another boat, Norma and Captain Jenkins are recognizable and the third person has been identified, but not officially, as a hired mate. Authorities can find no trace of any such terrorist organization. Of course, there could be an international organization with a compulsion to kill economists, an urge I would find understandable, if not sympathetic.”

Meyer startled me. It was almost the very first glimmer of humor I had detected in a year, and it came at an unexpected time and place.

“But you do have more to go on than what you’ve told me?”

“Just behavior patterns. But convincing,” Meyer said.

“I think I told you what I know about the husband. A pleasant guy. Maybe not very motivated. Maybe twelve years older than Norma, maybe less. He seemed like the kind of person who makes lots of friends and has lots of contacts. A salesman type. He had a good laugh. I decided he’d make a pretty good husband for Norma. That is, if she had to have a husband.”

“Any distinguishing marks or characteristics?” I asked. “We had dinner with the two of them aboard my houseboat, and we can’t come up with anything. Maybe five-ten-and-a-half or -eleven. Close to two hundred. But pretty good shape. Brown hair, receding a little. Green eyes, I think. Nose a little crooked. Plenty of tan. Good teeth.”

“Big hands on him,” Dexter said. “Real big. Thick wrists. Big bone structure. Spoke some Mexican.”

“We know how they met,” I said. “If he swindled her out of her money and killed her, he’ll make himself hard to find. We want to go down his back trail and see if we can turn up anything. We need a good picture of him. We thought maybe somebody at the wedding took some.”

He called a plump woman in from the outer office and asked her.

She remembered that one of the women in the office had taken a lot of pictures of the ceremony. Her name was Marlane Hoffer, and she lived with a friend in a little apartment in the Post Oak area. She went out and typed the name, address, and phone number and brought it in and gave it to Meyer.

Marlane was on the third floor of a new nondescript apartment building a block off Westheimer Road, behind the Galleria development area. Marlane’s friend checked us through the peephole lens and rattled the lock chain. He was a big man with long hairy legs. He wore short running pants and an unbuttoned yellow shirt. A slab of brown belly bulged over the top of the running pants. He had a big head and a lot of brown hair and blond beard.

As soon as he let us in he turned and bawled, “Marl! It’s the guys about the pictures. Marl!”

“Okay, okay,” yelled a voice from behind a closed door.

She came out in a few minutes in a floor-length white terry beach robe, her hair turbaned in a blue terry towel. She was a small woman with a pert, friendly face. The friend had gone over to an alcove off the living room and was stretched out watching automobiles racing somewhere, noisily.

She spoke over the roar of engines. “I want to go down to the pool, but he says it’s too hot. Here’s the pictures I took. I didn’t do so great with them. What I got, it’s this Pentax he used to use until he got a Nikon, and he never explained all the buttons so I could understand.”

We stood and looked at the pictures together. There was one where she had evidently tried to get them both in a closeup. It was an outdoor shot, under some trees. In that picture Evan was looking directly into the camera, with a slightly startled expression. Norma was beyond him, out of focus.

“It was in this sort of garden out behind a restaurant, a really great place to get married. The food was absolutely delicious, and I kind of busted loose on the wine. They said it was Spanish champagne, but what do I know? Look, take the whole thing. She was my friend and now she’s dead and I don’t want her picture around, okay?”

“If you’re really sure you don’t…” Meyer said.

“You can bet your ass I’m sure. You, being her uncle, I can understand how you’d want pictures. But she wasn’t one of my best friends, you understand? It’s a hell of a thing, dying on a honeymoon. But there you are.” She whirled and yelled, “Can’t you turn that shitty noise down?”

“You don’t like it, go out in the hall!” he yelled. We thanked her and left. Through the closed doors, as we walked toward the stairs, we could hear her squalling at him and him roaring back. I made sure we had the negatives, including the one of Evan. “Now we find a good lab,” I said.

On Monday morning we brought the four color prints back to the condo at Piney Village. The professional lab had done good work on the eight-byten enlargement. The Pentax lens had done the original good work. It was unmistakably Evan Lawrence, every pore, blemish, and laugh line. He was half smiling, startled, one eyebrow raised. The lab had put them in gray portrait folders.

Meyer sat at Norma’s desk in the little office she had fixed up. The file cabinets had been taken away.

Outside, the rain fell in silver-gray sheets out of a gun-metal sky. A tropical disturbance had moved in off the Gulf, a rain engine that had broken the heat wave. All over the city the body and fender shops were accumulating backlogs.

I leaned against the angled drawing board, one foot on the rung of the stool she had sat on when she worked at the maps, my arms crossed.

“One thing we know is that he left almost no trace of himself here,” Meyer said. “He lived here for almost three months. No possessions. No personal papers. Just some rough cheap chain-store clothing. This was going to be his home. It isn’t normal that he should leave so little hint of himself.”

“You said there were letters she wrote to him when she was out in the field. No hints in those? No clues?”

He frowned. “When I found them I thought he was dead too, and it seemed a terrible invasion of privacy. I threw them out, and then I retrieved them and put them with her personal papers. I just scanned a couple of them quickly. There’s about a dozen, I think. She was very much in love.”

He went off and found the letters and brought them back to me. “Travis, I don’t think I want to read them. If you wouldn’t mind…”

There were twelve of them, written on whatever paper was handy at the time. Yellow legal sheets, office memo paper, the blank backs of obsolete printouts. She wrote in the hasty scrawl of a busy person, using abbreviations, leaving out words. She talked of her work but without the technical details he would probably not have understood.

They were all dated and could be divided into small batches. Apparently she wrote frequently when she was out in the field. Three consecutive days in March, four in April, two in mid-May, and three in June.

Darlin, having dreadful time today with a ranch woman who refuses to believe we will repair their land when we’re through. Kept coming out, whining about the ruts and how we were scaring her animals. We were using some new equipment, and had to make certain it was placed just where I had marked the aerials. If, when all the reports are in, we decide to try to make a well, she will really go out of her mind.

Miss you so much I can’t believe it. I think of your hands touching; and I feel all weak and dizzy, and I forget what it is I’m supposed to be doing here. I can close my eyes and look into your eyes and see my whole life there. You can never ever love me as much as I love you. I never thought I could feel like this, not in my whole life. I never thought I could feel this kind of physical hunger for someone. Tomorrow night I will be home, darling; and we will be together, and I will be in your arms, and we will make it last and last until I go out of my mind.

That erotic strain ran through all the letters, those written before the marriage and those written afterward. It was a very strong physical infatuation. I could guess that she had been a shy person, not pretty, uncertain in any kind of sexual relationship, dedicated to her work. At twenty-nine, awakened by Evan Lawrence, she wanted to catch up on everything she had missed, and from the letters she was making a pretty good try.

But I was after hints and clues. What about the money? What kind of a man was Evan Lawrence? I came upon a comment in a June letter that puzzled me.

When we talked the other night, Evan, I guess I seemed too nervous about the arrangement. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to sound that way. It’s just that I’ve been so damned orderly all my life. Oh, I’ve taken big risks in my work, but not in my personal life. I pay every parking ticket on time. I know you are amused by that, and maybe you are a little irritated by it too. I agreed, and I’m not going to back out. The only thing is, we have to turn it around by April of next year. You say we will, so okay. And, darling, I can understand how just as a matter of personal pride, you want to make a contribution to our future. But it really doesn’t matter that much to me. I don’t think of things like that. I love you just as you are, and it would not matter to me if you had five million dollars or twentyeight cents. I trust you with my life and everything that goes with it. Now it is Cinderella time, and I am yawning, and this gasoline lantern in the van is hurting my eyes and attracting every bug in Louisiana, and tomorrow is the day when we’ll find out-not for sure but for maybe-if we want to keep this lease. If we want to keep it, we have to start making a hole in the ground by August at the latest.

I marked the passage and took it over to Meyer. He read it. carefully. “So! She filed a quarterly estimate in addition to the deductions they took from her salary at Amdex. And she would have to pay the estimate plus last year’s tax on April fifteenth. She was telling him that she had to have the deal consummated, whatever it was, and get enough money back so she wouldn’t be caught short when tax time rolled around. He had some kind of scheme and he talked her into letting him have the money quietly and secretly so he could, perhaps, double it.”

“That makes her sound like a dummy Meyer.”

“What could she say to him? ‘No, thanks. I don’t want you investing my money. I don’t trust you. You’re not smart enough, Mr. Lawrence. I earned it and it’s mine.’ Think of all the ways he could have worked on her, and then see if you really want to call her a dummy.”

I told him it was probably the wrong word to use, and I went back to my reading and rereading of that highly personal mail. I marked a few short passages and finally, when I was certain there was nothing else, I read each one aloud to Meyer.

You must have lots and lots of friends, darling. Don’t they know where you are living? It seems odd that you don’t get any mail or phone calls at all, only from my friends-or I should say our friends.

And, in another letter:

I don’t know what I did to make you so angry. I wasn’t jealous. I was just curious. I want to know what every minute of your life has been like. If you don’t want to talk about her, I’ll never bring it up again.

And finally:

I don’t care how beautiful Cuernavaca is, darling. Anywhere we can be together will be wonderful enough. I just can’t run out on Am Dexter at this point. Can’t we just begin to make plans instead of being so abrupt? In two years I could arrange to be as free as a bird. But I don’t really know how well I would adjust to being unemployed. I shouldn’t have brought this up in a letter. Don’t be angry with me.

Meyer shook his head and sighed. “So he was going to double her money and they would then live forever in Mexico in peace and luxury. And it is a fair guess he was married before.”

“Where does all this leave us?”

“Only a little better than nowhere at all. I’ve been trying to reconstruct some of the history he told us that night aboard the Flush. He worked on timesharing sales with somebody named Willy in Cancun. He has a degree in Business Administration from the University of Texas. He worked for a Mr. Guffey, a farmer living north of Harlingen, selling Japanese stone lanterns. He worked for Eagle Realty in Dallas. He worked in a rodeo for a short time. Can you remember anything else?”

“Not a thing.”

“Where do you think we should start?”

“You’re the academic type, Meyer. So you go to Austin, and I’ll go to Dallas.”

Ten

ON MONDAY afternoon in Dallas, I found Eagle Realty with a certain amount of difficulty because it had no sign. They had just moved into larger quarters, into a new building, and the sign hadn’t arrived yet.

The car rental woman at the airport had been helpful in getting me to the general location, north of I-30 and east of the North Tollway, over in the vicinity of Southern Methodist, but once I was in the area I had to ask three times before I finally found it near a giant shopping mall, a long low building with lots of windows, faced with pale stone and redwood, with a big carved golden eagle over the double doors in front. Something had been there first and had been torn down. Heaps of rubble were shoved to the back of the raw lot, waiting to be trucked off. They were starling to pave the parking lot. Some very small trees had been put into the planters, and a man was watering them.

I pushed my way into the air-conditioned reception area, where a man in khakis was slowly stripping transparent plastic from the reception-area chairs and couches.

A big nervous young woman came trotting back to the reception desk, stared at me, and said, “Thank God! At last!”

“At last what?”

“You’re from the electric, aren’t you? My God, you’ve got to be from the electric!”

“I’m from Florida.”

“If you’re here trying to sell something, I can tell you that you are going right back out that door so fast-”

“I’m not selling anything, buying anything, or fixing anything.”

She finally smiled. “Then you’re not going to be much good to us, are you? Honest to God, I’ll quit before I get involved in moving the office again.”

“I’m trying to find out a couple of things about a man who used to work for Eagle. His name is Evan Lawrence.”

“Doesn’t mean a thing to me. Not a thing. How long ago?”

“I’m not too definite about the date.”

“We get a big turnover on salesmen, especially the last few years. You know how it is. The old personnel records are on floppy disks, and unless somebody comes from the electric and gets that back office juiced up, nobody is ever going to read them. We’ve got four tabletop IBMs back there, with data-processing programs and printers, and our information about current sales and rentals is all on the disks, and we can’t run anything because the current keeps cutting out.”

“Who’s around who’s been here the longest?”

“Well, I guess that would be Martin Eagle.” She reached toward the phone. “Who will I say?”

“McGee. Travis McGee from Fort Lauderdale.”

She picked up the phone and said a very ugly word. Her face turned red. “Now the effing phone is effing well dead too. You wait here.”

She trotted off. The man uncovering the furniture was chuckling and shaking his head. She came back and beckoned to me, and I followed her to Martin Eagle’s big corner office with a view of the rubble piles and a corner of the mall and ten thousand automobiles winking in the heat waves. She waved me in and closed the door.

Martin Eagle looked over his shoulder at me and smiled and nodded and turned back toward the perforated section of white wall where he was hanging trophies and credentials on little hooks that fitted into the perforations.

He hung a framed scroll which said in Olde English that Martin Eagle was Junior Chamber of Commerce Man of the Year. It was dated three years ago.

“You think it’s maybe too close to the award from the city? What do you think?”

“I guess it would depend on how much you are going to hang there.”

“Good thinking. McGee, is it? Call me Marty. I don’t know if I should hang all this shit or not. Look, I got the top of the desk covered. Maybe I shouldn’t even hang that JC scroll. They gave it to five of us that year. I was the third runner-up. All this stuff could be, you know, ostentatious. But you take doctors. They hang stuff all over. Gives the patients confidence, I guess. I’m doing the same thing. Eagle Realty gives you a fair deal, buying or selling. That’s the only thing I’ve ever learned about this business. You screw somebody, it comes back to haunt you. Even when you don’t screw somebody, it comes back to haunt you. People don’t listen and people lie. What am I doing in a new building anyway? In these times. You want to know why? We got too big for the old place and we were going to stay right there, all packed in, no matter what, and they decided to tear down the whole block and put up another gigantic building. So here I am. Wait a second. I want to put up this little shelf thing and put some eagles on it. I’ve got a big collection of eagles. Pottery, silver, stone, wood. You wouldn’t believe how many I’ve got at home. Everybody knows I collect eagles, and there you are.”

He put four eagles on the little shelf and stepped back and made a little sound of satisfaction and went around his desk and sat down and gestured toward a nearby chair.

“It’s going to look okay in here when we get organized,” he said. “Nice building, don’t you think?”

“Very nice, Marty. My name is Travis McGee.”

“Trav, my friend, you have given me invaluable advice about my wall over there. I am in your debt. What can I do for you? Like a good price on a nice little house? Why live in Florida when you can live in Texas like a human being? Bring the wife around. In a week we’ll have our new slide show deal going and it will be computerized. The way it works, a man says he can spend from eighty-five to a hundred and five thousand. He wants at least a half acre of land. He’s got to have two bedrooms. Okay, we save a lot of time by showing the slides before we go out driving around in traffic. What can I do for you?”

He was a jolly man with a happy face. Dark hair combed all the way forward and then curved off to one side and sprayed into place. He was carrying a little too much weight, but he looked comfortable with it. Fawn-colored slacks, white shoes, yellow sports shirt with a little eagle embroidered over the left pocket. Gold chain around the neck and the right wrist. Gold watch on the left wrist. Gold ring on the right-hand pinky, with an eagle on it.

“I wanted to ask a couple of questions about a man who used to work here.”

“I’m telling you, Trav, we try to screen them all as well as we can, but these days it’s a real burden. A man fills out an application, and it costs you real money to check out all the references he gives you. What I do, and sometimes I’m sorry, I size them up myself. We have a little chat. Take for example yourself. If you wanted to work here, I’d say okay. I’d teach you the ropes, help you get the licenses. But I wouldn’t let you handle any cash money until I was damn well sure you were okay. I’m telling you that over the years we’ve had some bad apples. They float around like used car salesmen. But we’ve had some real good ones too. Who are you looking for?”

“Evan Lawrence.”

“Evan? Evan Lawrence?” He shook his head slowly. “No, that doesn’t ring any kind of a bell at all.”

“He said he worked here for at least a year, and he made quite a lot of money selling tract houses and lots for you.”

“Listen, anybody who makes money for me, I remember. Because when they make money. I make money. A year, you say? Trav, my friend, somebody is kidding you, or you are kidding me. What did this fellow look like anyway?”

I took the portrait folder out of the small leather portfolio, stood up, and leaned over and handed it to Marty Eagle across his big new desk.

Still smiling, he flipped it open.

All expression ceased. The blood drained from his face, leaving a yellowish cast to his tan. He seemed to stop breathing. Suddenly he looked alarmed, heaved himself up, and trotted to his personal executive washroom and slammed the door. I heard him in there retching, heard the water running, the toilet flushing. When at last he came out there was a gray tired look about him. There was a water stain where he had dabbed at his yellow shirt. He brought a faint sharp aroma of vomit, quickly dispelled by the air conditioning.

He sat heavily behind the desk and shook his head. “Never had that happen to me before. Never.”

“I’m sorry.”

“So don’t be sorry. How could you know? When was this taken?” He was studying the picture carefully.

“Last April.”

“Where is he now?”

“I have absolutely no idea.”

“I think why I threw up, we were always a close family, me and my two sisters. This man isn’t any Evan Lawrence. His name is Jerry Tobin. Everybody working here at the time liked him. That was five years ago. And I have thought about the whole thing ten thousand times. Doris, she was my kid sister, she fell head over heels. What can you do? I didn’t want her marrying any con artist like Jerry Tobin. He was very slick. He could really close a sale. Hell, Dorrie hadn’t turned twenty-one even. But she got her money when she was eighteen. We all did. That was the way Poppa’s will worked. I told her that she was going to have to wait a year and see if she still loved Jerry enough to marry him. She was furious. She didn’t want to wait. She was pretty. And she wasn’t thinking straight because good old Jerry Tobin had gotten into her pants, and she couldn’t get enough of it. They called from the bank and said they had tried to keep her from cleaning out her accounts, but they had no legal way to stop her. She didn’t come back home; not ever again. She was dead by evening of the next day. Down near Kerrville, just past a little town named Ingram, on a back road. It was her car, her white Buick. She was driving. They missed a turn and went off the road and hit a live oak a kind of glancing blow. It threw him clear when the car rolled. They think she was knocked out. They couldn’t tell because the car burned. It burned her all to hell. They had to identify her from dental work to be sure. People saw the fire and stopped. Jerry Tobin was face down on a stony bank, all scuffed up. He didn’t come to until he was in the ambulance. He came to the funeral service here in Dallas. He cried like a baby. He still had some small bandages on. But she was dead. Where was the money? It had burned up with her and her luggage and clothes and car, and his luggage and clothes. Too bad. All gone.”

“Much?”

“Depends on who is counting. Two hundred and twenty something thousand. I didn’t buy it. I didn’t buy the story. I drove way down there and looked at where it happened. I looked at what was left of the car. There was a police investigation. They cleared him. Dorrie’d had a couple of minor accidents and a whole bundle of moving vehicle violations. She always drove too fast. He knew that. Everything fitted together. I hired private investigators. I wanted them to find him loaded with money. I wanted to get the whole thing opened up. But all of a sudden he just took off. He left a note on my desk. There are too many sad memories around here, Marty. I can’t take it any longer. Good-by and good luck.”

He tried to smile.

“I thought I was past being really hurt about it and then I saw that face, that goddamn smirk of his, and it got to me. Why do you want to find him?”

“Maybe the same kind of thing. A little bigger stake. And more risk.”

“How much bigger?”

“Half again.”

He whistled without making a sound. “Maybe there’s some law about using a false name.”

“And maybe he had it legally changed. If I can’t locate him, what difference does it make?”

“She was so alive! Look, if he did it twice, then he killed them both.”

“Just an assumption, Marty.”

“You sound like some kind of lawyer. You know what I did? When they weren’t finding out anything about him-those investigators I was paying-I asked one of them if he knew of a good safe way to find somebody who’d be willing to kill Tobin. It made the investigator very nervous. He didn’t seem to want to ask around. I was going to try some other way of finding somebody when all of a sudden Tobin took off. I am not a violent-type guy, as you can probably guess, McGee. But she was my kid sister, and that son of a bitch came into her life and ended it. Maybe it happened just like he said. So what? He was still to blame, wasn’t he? I’m not hurting for money. I could hire the best there is.” He tried to force a laugh, but his eyes filled with tears and he hopped up and stared out his window. “We were always such a close family,” he said in a hoarse voice.

“Did you try to trace him?”

“For a while. It’s a big country. Even back then all the rules were beginning to break down. You know, about new identities. People drifting all over, calling themselves anything at all, buying new names with driving licenses and passports and the whole thing. They say you can trace people through social security numbers. If a person stayed put, maybe you could. But a drifter can invent a new number for every job he has. I traced down the number Jerry gave when we hired him. It took months for the report to come back through the local office. It was a number issued to a woman with an Italian name.”

“Was he a good salesman?”

“I don’t know how he’d have done in the market we got now, but five-six years ago he was a killer. He could close a deal while the next guy would just be getting around to showing the bathrooms. I would say he cleared somewhere in the low six figures in the time he was here.”

“Would you know about him getting ripped off by somebody with a tax-shelter scam?”

“Jerry? Ripped off? Not likely.”

“Buying a bunch of Bibles to donate them later to schools and churches for four times what he paid?”

“No way at all. He had a good business head. Very very sharp. I’ve got some pretty good moves myself. But I think he could have come up with better ones. I kept telling him I should open a branch of Eagle in Fort Worth and he could run it, but he didn’t want any part of it. He said he was lazy. I don’t think so. I think it was something about the exposure, about attracting too much attention to himself.”

“Did he get into any kind of trouble while he worked for you?”

“Not money trouble. And not really what you’d call trouble. We were peddling a development called Crestwinds, and we put together a model house with the contractor and some decorators. During open house the salesmen had to take turns manning the place. So they had keys. One of our saleswomen went back after hours one night looking for a gold earring she could have lost there, and she found Jerry in the sack with the wife of the contractor. It was a second wife, a young one. That was before he took aim at my sister Doris. The woman that found them raised hell, and I told Jerry to find a better place for his fun and games. It didn’t happen again, at least that I know of.”

Finally there was no more information to be gained. He was dispirited, quite unlike the mood he’d been in when I arrived.

As I was getting ready to leave he gave me his card. “Look, stay in touch, Trav. You get a line on him and need any kind of help at all, phone me. Okay? A promise?”

“Sure.”

“What is inside the head of a man like that? I mean, assuming he killed Doris or any other girl, what’s the point?”

“I read somewhere that the average bank robbery nets eighteen hundred dollars. That could have something to do with it.”

“But he couldn’t have been hurting for money. He made good money. He didn’t have a lot of expensive habits.”

His last question was, “Where do you go from here?”

“When did the accident happen?”

It took him a moment to count it out. “In May. A Saturday, the twenty-first. Five years and two months ago.”

“Did the press cover it?”

“Yes. On Monday morning. It didn’t make the Sunday papers.”

“So from here I go and look up the report.”

“I came across the clippings a year or so ago and wondered why I was saving them. I tossed them out.”

Eleven

WEDNESDAY THE twenty-first of July in Naples was one of those rare mousse-mist days of summer, a heavy overcast, no wind, and an invasion of almost invisible bugs from the swamps and inlets, driving the tourists off the beach in front of the Eden Beach Hotel and its bungalows, sending them into the lounges for listless sessions of Scrabble or backgammon or into their rooms for the dubious diversion of daytime television.

Even though Annie Renzetti had been free of her fifty-three proctologists since Monday, she did not seem to be unwinding completely. I sensed a reserve. I roamed the area while she did her office work. Even though we had been circumspect for over a year, it is just not possible to conceal a relationship in a hotel setting. She was the boss lady, and I was “him.” I was her “him,” my status known to the bookkeepers, the room maids, the dishwashers, the bartenders, the waitresses, the girls at the desk, the grounds keepers, the pool sweeper, the beach tenders, the lifeguards, the tennis pro, and the in-house maintenance men. So I was conscious, and had been for some time, of a discontinuous but consistent appraisal.

Gossip can exist only when the relationship gossiped about can have some effect upon the community, good or bad. What are they really like when they’re together? Do they say anything about us? Will they break up? Will that change her? Will somebody else come along? What will that do to the situation here? What does he/she see in her/him?

She was the queen bee of the hotel and I was the prince consort, the sporadic visitor, and a source of some concern and uncertainty to them. By instinct Annie had fastened upon a very good personnel management technique. She treated every employee with courtesy, fairness, and impartiality. She pitched in on any kind of unpleasant work when there was an emergency. She did not make a confidant of any employee and thus kept a certain distance from them all. She listened to complaints, prowled the whole area at unexpected times, rewarded top performance with raises, and fired the lazy, the indifferent, the thieves, and the liars. I was proud of the job she was doing, and at the same time felt a little uncomfortable with it. She was a paragon. And she was making a hell of a lot of money for the chain.

I bought myself a Bloody Mary at the pool bar and borrowed some of the bartender’s Cutter’s. He was stiff and formal with me. “Yes, sir. Celery, sir?” The safest place to keep me was at full-arm’s length. It can make a person lonesome.

I went back to her cabana, the last one in the row, up on six-foot pilings, let myself in, positioned myself in the middle of her small living room, and tried to undo some of the damage of too many days spent sitting in cars and offices and airplanes. One

John D. MacDonald very sound rule for the care of the body is always to keep in mind what it was designed to do. The body was shaped by the need to run long distances on resilient turf, to run very fast for short distances, to climb trees, and to carry loads back to the cave, so any persistent exercise you do which is not a logical part of that ancient series of uses is, in general, bad for the body. A succession of deep knee bends is destructive, in time. As are too many pushups. As is selective muscle development through weightlifting. As is jogging on hard surfaces. A couple of years of such jogging and you are very likely never to walk in comfort again. Man is a walking animal, perfectly designed for it. The only more efficient human energy use is the bicycle.

So what I am after when I have been too sedentary, and feeling bad because of it, is limberness. The unstretched tendons try to lock in place, resisting extension and contraction both. Stretch slowly like a cat awakening. Then twist and bend slowly, as far as you can, in any position where you can feel the muscles pulling. Hold that position, then push it a little farther. Hold it, then push again. Loosen all the fibers in that fashion, slowly and without great strain, until you have limbered your entire body. Then play the Chinese morning game of imitation slow-motion combat, striking the long slow blow, balancing on one leg, retreating, defending, striking again. Then it is time to take the long slow swim along the beach, breaking it up with little speed sprints. Crawl, breaststroke, backstroke, working the muscles you’ve limbered up.

Anne Renzetli came back to the cabana after I had finished my swim and my shower and had stretched out on the long padded window seat in the living room to scan a magazine called Motel 110

CINNAMON SKIN

and Hotel Management Practice. It said the shape of the soap makes a big difference in how long it lasts. As she was apologizing for having to take so long over her management chores, I scooped her up. She clung in warmth and fragrance, with a soft and smiling mouth, and I backed to the couch and sat with her, holding her on my lap, holding her close-a small and tidy woman, as electrically alive as a basket of eels.

A long time later, as the sun was dipping down into the red-brown smog that now greases the edge of the sky all along our coasts, I made us our drinks and we took them out onto the shallow porch, in the deck chairs side by side.

“I flew into Tampa,” I said, “got a connection to Fort Myers, and picked up a rental car there and drove down.”

“Down I-Seventy-five?”

“No, down the old coast road, the Tamiami Trail. An exercise in masochism. I get the feeling that if I’m away for three days, I can see the difference.”

“Maybe you can. My company subscribes to a service for me, and the last issue had an article about Florida population. We’re getting a thousand new residents a day. Permanent residents. A little

_ family every six minutes. In the public restaurants of Florida, one and a half million people can have a sit-down meal at the same time.“

“No more. Please.”

“We’re the seventh largest state. We get thirty-eight million tourists a year.”

“And the rivers and the swamps are dying, the birds are dying, the fish are dying. They’re paving the whole state. And the people who give a damn can’t be heard. The developers make big campaign contributions. And there isn’t enough public money to treat sewage.”

“Poor baybee!”

“Poor Florida. Everything is going to stop working all at once. Then watch the exodus. Okay, coming down that way this morning depressed me. But you cured the depression. You’re a natural resource they can’t drain and pave.”

“You say lovely things. Where’s Meyer? What did you find out?”

So I told her the whole thing. It was pitch-black night before I finished. She hadn’t seen the photographs of Evan Lawrence, a.k.a. Jerry Tobin, and she wanted to see the Xerox copy of the Texas news story, reproduced from microfilm. We went in and turned on the lights. I fixed fresh drinks while she studied the clipping and the photo.

“She was a very pretty girl, wasn’t she?”

“Yes indeed she was. They played down the angle that she was probably running away with Evan Lawrence.”

“Was she?”

“Her big brother, Marty, thinks so.”

I gave her the drink and sat near her. She kept looking at Evan Lawrence’s face in the color enlargement, her expression odd.

“What’s the matter, Annie?”

“What I was going to say before, out on the deck there when you told me all about it, I was going to say I couldn’t make it sound like something that really happened, those two things, those two women. It seems so sort of pointless. I mean, they both adored him, right? What was the need? Suppose he was with them for years and years and got tired of them. Like taking out insurance on the wife. That sort of dirty thing. But, looking at him…”

“Looking at him what?”

“I can sort of understand. I think this is a kind of man most women never get to see even once in their lives. I knew one like that when I was very young. He used to come to our house. I was about thirteen. He used to bring his wife. She didn’t have very much English. I think she was Hungarian. He was trying to make a deal with my father. He wanted a tract of land my father had inherited. He wanted to build some kind of factory on it, and he was trying to get my father to take a stock interest instead of demanding cash for the land. I heard years later that if my father had taken the stock interest, he would have become a very rich person in a very short time. I looked at that man with the Hungarian wife and I fell madly, totally in love with him.”

“Why?”

“How do I know? I looked at him and I saw strength and kindness and gentleness and love and understanding. I saw right away that he would know every thought and emotion I might have without my having to tell him. I looked at him and something inside me melted. There is something very much like that in this man’s face.”

“I can’t see it.”

“Another woman would.”

“So why does what you see in his face make it easier for you to understand what we think he did?”

“That man I fell in love with? He turned out to be very corrupt. He cheated his associates. His wife drowned mysteriously in a boating mishap in California. When he was arrested, he posted bail and disappeared. I’ve heard he is living in Turkey. They have no extradition. He had everything and he threw it away. Just like this person here, whatever his name is.”

“Maybe Meyer will come up with a better name through the university records.”

“Have you wondered if this person might be insane?” she asked.

“I’ve thought about it.”

“If a person has built up enough of a structure of delusion, the things they do only make sense as they relate to the delusion. What is he, about forty? Or a little more. He may have been doing this sort of thing for years.”

“Without attracting a lot of attention?”

“A little here, a little there. But he keeps moving on.”

“What kind of a delusion would make a man kill women who have fallen deeply in love with him?”

“Punishing them for loving somebody he knows is unworthy of love?”

“Come on Annie!”

“So he’s schizo. The lover and the killer. There are mental disorders a lot wilder than that.”

We left it there. I put the picture and the clipping back in my case. We had a late supper in a private corner of the lounge.

“Okay,” I said finally. “What have you got on your mind?”

“Does it show? I didn’t want it to show.”

“Annie, about one minute ago I said that these tiny potatoes are really delicious. And you smiled and said they surely are. And they happen to be sauteed scallops.”

“It’s not fair, damn you, to do it that way. That’s entrapment.”

“What’s going on?”

“I wasn’t ready to tell you yet. I’ve been summoned to Chicago. I go up Thursday night and come back Saturday.”

“What’s going on?”

A friend in Chicago gave me a tiny clue over the phone.“

“Such as?”

“Do you remember, when I first went with the company I was secretary to a Mr. Luddwick?”

“Then he was transferred to Hawaii?”

“Right. And his replacement got into a one-car accident driving down here, and by the time he was recovered enough to take over this hotel, I was doing so well they decided to let me run it.”

“And you’ve been doing well ever since.”

“They must think so. The executive vicepresident, Mr. Minter, has had a heart attack and he’s taking early retirement. So they’re bringing Al Luddwick back from Hawaii to take over. That leaves Hawaii open. It’s brand new and twice the size of this one. And lots more money.”

I frowned at her. “They’re going to offer it to you?”

“Why not? I don’t mind saying I am doing a hell of a job. All they have to do is look at the ratios. Every computer study they run tells them I’m doing a hell of a job.”

“At least it’s nice to be asked.”

“I’m not sure I’m going to be asked, Travis. So far, it’s just a rumor.”

“But if they ask you, you wouldn’t take it, would you?”

“Why the hell wouldn’t I?”

“What about us?”

“Good grief, Travis, what about us? You don’t understand how these things work, do you? Right now, I’m red hot. Suppose they offered it and I turned it down. What would that tell them about me? Oh, they’d probably keep me on here, but they’d be… dubious about me. Maybe I was scared to try something bigger. Maybe I have some kind of action going on the side, down here, and they better do some more auditing. The instant I say no, I stop being Golden Girl.”

“So who needs to be Golden Girl? What’s wrong with the life you have?”

“How can you be so chauvinistic stupid?”

“Hey, wait a minute!”

“I mean it. Look, when I think of that much bigger a job, I get flutters in my stomach and I can’t take a deep breath. My God, honey, that is the direction of the stock options, the bonuses, the eventual seat on the Board. Look, I have something I can do damn well. I love the work. I love the challenge. What am I supposed to do, cut myself back like pruning a bush so I can be your convenient little shack job?” She thumped her breastbone with her knuckles. “I am me in my own right. What do you do in Florida that is so damned important anyway? Of course I don’t want to lose you. Why can’t you ship the Busted Flush out to the islands as deck cargo? You could have a better life out there than you have here. Those good old buddy boys of yours around Bahia Mar would forget you in three months. What would you be giving up compared with what you’re asking me to give up?”

The food was good, but the appetite came to a dead halt. We went for a walk. We took the quarrel up and down the beach. The breeze had come up, out of the west, shoving the bugs inland. The waves slapped on the starlit sand.

We took the quarrel, unresolved, to bed, both of us secretly hoping that lovemaking would provide a solution somehow. It was a gentler interlude than ever before. There seemed in it elements of sadness, of regret and farewell. Afterward I kissed her moist eyes and tasted the salt, asked her why she wept. “For what might have been, I guess.”

“Such as?”

“Had we been younger. I don’t know. At my age with this pelvic structure, having a baby would be a very dangerous thing. And you’re past changing, McGee. You’re past having tots around. But even if I were younger and wanted to risk it, the thing I talked about before would make me wary.”

“What was that?”

“The way you keep some important part of yourself hidden away. The reserve I can’t break through. Maybe you were different a dozen years ago. Maybe then you could give all the way. With me, I get the feeling you are a user, not a giver.”

“And you feel like someone who is only used?”

“No, dear. Not that harsh. I don’t have the right words. What I do know is that I have more energies than you can waste. I can’t use all of myself with you because neither you nor the years will let that happen. But I can use all of myself in my work. Believe me, I’m not motivated by trying to make a lot of money, or be important, or force people to respect me. I want to do what I do because it is tricky work, and when it goes well I feel a very intense satisfaction. Can you understand all that?”

“I can try.”

She made a sound in the darkness almost like a laugh. “Oh, my darling, this has been good. I needed you. I needed more of you than you were willing to give, but it was damn good nonetheless. And now we’ve bitched it all up for fair.”

“How so?”

“If they offer me the job, I’ll take it. But if the rumor is wrong, and they don’t offer it to me, and I stay here, I don’t want this relationship with you to continue.”

“Why not?”

“The fact you could ask that question is one of the reasons.”

“Maybe I’m not very bright.”

“Okay, you are a no-win situation for me. You unfocus my attention on my work. You create little problems with the hotel employees. Some of them think they can get a little smart-ass, as if they have something they can use against me in some way, and I have to smack them down. After you have been here, my bed is always too empty for night after night. Yet when I know you are on your way over, I feel a funny resentment. As if I’m some kind of chattel. You and my work overlap in a way that makes me irritable. Can you understand?”

“I think maybe I’m beginning to. Maybe we can leave it that you can come over to Lauderdale whenever.”

“I don’t think so. Thank you, but I don’t think that would be wise. Besides, I really do expect to get the position in Hawaii.”

She turned her head and looked at her bedside clock. Ten past three.

“Travis?”

I slipped my arms around her and pulled her closer.

“Travis, do me a favor.”

“Sure.”

“Just get up and get dressed and get in your little rented car and go home.”

When I started to speak she pressed two fingers against my lips.

“Please, dear: I want to cry in peace. I want to cry for a long long time, and then sleep like death: Please go. Please don’t say anything. We’ve said it all.”

And so I dressed in darkness, picked up my gear, let myself out, making certain the door was locked. One of her alert security guards checked me, grunting recognition after putting his flashlight on my face.

And here is how it was for me, as I droned across Alligator Alley in the little tin car. I told myself there was no understanding women. I told myself she didn’t understand what she was throwing away. I told myself I would probably read about her in the papers, years hence, a hard-bitten little gray-haired woman who had been made head of something or other.

I felt lost and lonesome and, in a curious way, unworthy. I still kept telling myself there was no understanding them.

But honesty cannot be indefinitely suppressed. Yes, I knew exactly what she meant. I knew exactly why she had made her decision, and I was forced to admit that no matter what I thought of it, it was the right decision for Anne Renzetti.

Then came the hard part. I had suffered loss. I had been rejected. I was the lover cast out I was alone. And when I tried to plumb the depths of my grief and my loss, I came finally upon a small ugly morsel way down in the bottom of my soul. It was a little round object, like a head with a grinning face. It said ugly things to me. It kept telling me I was relieved. I strained for the crocodile tears, but the little face grinned and grinned. It shamed me.

And as I unlocked my houseboat and got ready to go back to bed, I realized that Annie had perhaps suspected that the little ugly feeling of relief and release would be there. We are all, says Meyer, in one way or another, large or small, hidden or revealed, rotten at the core.

Goodbye, Annie girl. I loved you as much as I can love. And I will feel an aching need for you for a long time.

So what if I did put the Flush aboard a freighter as deck cargo and go out to the islands? New place. Cleaner skies. Hadn’t I been saying sour things about all of Florida going down the drain under the polluting weight of an unending invasion of new residents?

Florida was second rate, flashy and cheap, tacky and noisy. The water supply was failing. The developers were moving in on the marshlands and estuaries, pleading new economic growth. The commercial fishermen were an endangered species. Miami was the world’s murder capital. Phosphate and fruit trucks were pounding the tired old roads to rubble. Droughts of increasing severity were browning the landscape. Wary folks stayed off the unlighted beaches and dimly lighted streets at night, fearing the minority knife, the ethnic club, the bullet from the stolen gun.

And yet… and yet…

There would be a time again when I would canoe down the Withlacoochee, adrift in a slow current, seeing the morning mist rising at the base of the limestone buttes, seeing the sudden heartstopping dip and wheel of a flight of birds of incredible whiteness.

On an unknown day dawn the road ahead, I would see that slow slide of the gator down the mudbank into the pond, see his eye knobs watching me, see a dance cloud of a billion gnats in the ray of sun coming through Spanish moss.

And once again maybe I would be wading and spincasting a pass at dawn, in an intense, misty, windless silence, and suddenly hear the loud hissy gasp of a porpoise coming up for air just a few feet behind me, startling me out of my wits, and see his benign, enigmatic smile as he sounded again.

Wild orchids, gnarls of cypress knees, circlets of sun slanting down onto green marsh water, a half acre of-wind moving across the grass flats, fading and dying, throaty gossip of wild turkeys, fading life of a boated tarpon, angelfish-batting their eye lashes moving coy and elusive between the sea fans, the full, constant, mind-warping, roaring, whistling scream of full hurricane.

Tacky though it might be, its fate uncertain, too much of its destiny in the hands of men whose sole thought was grab the money and run, cheap little city politicians with blow-dried hair, ice-eyed old men from the North with devout claims about their duties to their shareholders, big-rumped good old boys from the cattle counties with their fingers in the till right up to their cologned armpits-it was still my place in the world. It is where I am and where I will stay, right up to the point where the Neptune Society sprinkles me into the dilute sewage off the Fun Coast.

It has too many magic moments that make up for all the rest of it. Too many flashes of a pure delight. I realized there was no point in trying to sleep. I dug out the tallest glass I owned, found four oranges in the cold locker that had no soft spots, made a tall mourner’s breakfast of juice, cracked ice, and Boodles gin, and took it up to my fly bridge forward of the sun deck, swiveled my captain’s chair, and put my heels on the starboard side of the control panel. The promise of dawn was a salmon thread over by the Bahamas.

I realized that Annie might never be aboard again, and there was a sudden sickening wrenching sense of loss, a kind of vivid despair. Loss with no dilution of relief.

When the drink was half gone my phone began ringing. I hurried on down, knowing who it was, hoping she wouldn’t give up. She was still there. “Yes?”

“Look. Not like this.”

I exhaled a long breath. “You’re right. Not like this, Annie.”

“Because, plus the rest, we were friends.”

“Are friends,” I said.

“And we keep the friends part.”

“You let me know what they say in Chicago.”

“I will.”

“I hope they offer it and you take it and work your tail off.”

“Thank you. But of course it will take some time to turn this over to somebody else. Properly. So…‘’

“We’ll see each other again.”