The Dreadful Lemon Sky

The Dreadful Lemon Sky

John D. MacDonald

The Dreadful Lemon Sky

Travis McGee Book 16

John D. MacDonald

Life is not a spectacle of a feast, it is a predicament.

- Santayana

For each true friend of Travis McGee.

One

I was in deep sleep, alone aboard my houseboat, alone in the half acre of bed, alone in a sweaty dream of chase, fear, and monstrous predators. A shot rang off steel bars. Another. I came bursting up out of sleep to hear the secretive sound of the little bell which rings at my bedside when anyone steps aboard the Busted Flush. It was almost four in the morning.

It could be some kid prowling the decks for a forgotten camera, portable radio, or bottle of Scotch. Or a friendly drunk. Or a drunken friend. Or trouble. I could not know how long I had slept past the first ting of the bell. I pulled on a pair of shorts and went padding through the blackness, past the head and the galley, through into the lounge to the locked doorway that opens onto the sheltered deck aft. The handgun which I had slipped from its handy recess before I was totally awake felt cold in my grasp.

I heard a small knocking sound, secret and tentative. “Trav?” A husky, half-whispering girl voice. “Trav McGee? Trav, honey?”

I moved over to where I could see through glass at an angle, just enough to make out the girl shape of the small figure huddled close to the door, out of the brightness of the dock lights. She seemed to be quite alone.

I called through the closed door, “Who are you?”

“Trav? Don’t turn on any lights, huh? Please!”

“Who is it?”

“It’s me! It’s Carrie. Carrie Milligan.”

I hesitated, then sheathed the revolver under the waistband of the shorts, cold against belly flesh. I unlocked and let her in and locked the door again.

She hooked one arm around me and hugged her small self tightly against me and let out a long breath. “Hey, hello,” she said. “No lights. Okay? I don’t want to get you involved.”

“Lights will get me involved?”

“You know what I mean. If somebody was close, if they knew I came over toward this way and they watched and saw lights go on here, then they’d want to find out.”

“So I can black out the captain’s quarters.”

“Sure. It’ll be easier to talk.”

I took her by the hand and led her back through the darkness. Just enough light came in so that the lounge furniture made bulky shapes to the left and right. When we reached my stateroom I released her and pulled both thicknesses of draperies across the ports. Then I turned on a light, the reading lamp over the bed which makes a bright round pattern on a book and leaves the rest of the room in darkness. It shone on the wrinkled sheets of recent dreams and bounced off, illuminating her in soft light.

She had hugged me with one arm because she held a package and her purse in the other. The package was the shape of a shoe box, wrapped in brown paper, tied with cord.

“I know, I know,” she said, backing away from the light. “I’m not wearing very damn well. I’m not lasting so good. What’s it been? Six years. So I was twenty-four, right? And now I look forty.”

“How’s Ben?”

“I wouldn’t have the faintest idea.”

“Oh.”

“Yes, it’s like that. I haven’t lived with him in… over three years. I threw him the hell out.”

“Oh.”

“Stop saying ‘Oh.’ You know, I felt a little pinch when I saw this great old boat. I really did. I didn’t know I could feel anything like that, related to Ben. I thought it was all gone. But we were happy aboard this crock. It was the only really happy time, I think. Shiny new marriage, and not a dime in the world, but a great boat to have a honeymoon aboard.” She sat in the chair in the corner by the locker, out of the light. In a different voice she said, “I should have settled for you.”

“You figured I wouldn’t marry anybody,” I said. I sat on the bed, facing her.

“I know, I know. What I don’t know is why I was so red hot to get married. So I married Ben Milligan. Jesus! Know what he was, really? He was a child bride. His mother spent twenty-five years picking up after him, waiting on him, telling him how great he was, and then she turned him over to me. Whine, whine, whine. He couldn’t hold a job. Nobody appreciated him. Bitch, bitch, bitch. He had like fourteen jobs in two years, and the last part of that two years, he didn’t even look. He stayed home and watched the soaps on TV He did all that body-building stuff all the time. Muscles on muscles. When I came home from work, I was supposed to cook, or at least stop on the way home and buy pizza or hamburgers. Trav, couldn’t you tell what he was like?”

“Sure.”

“Couldn’t you have said something?”

“And lose an eye?”

“Okay, so I was in love. Thank God for no kids. I think it was him, not me. But he wouldn’t go see a doctor about it. He got very grumpy that I could say anything might be wrong with the perfect body. Look, McGee, it was all a long time ago. All forgotten. I didn’t come here to talk about my great married life. I was thinking on the way here, I don’t really know Travis McGee. But you made me feel close to you, way back. I had to find somebody I could trust. I went through an awful lot of names. I came up with you. Then I started thinking, Maybe he’s got somebody aboard with him, or somebody lives aboard, or he’s away, or he’s married. My God, it’s six years. You know? I stepped aboard and six years were gone. You look great. You know it? Absolutely great. You haven’t changed at all. It isn’t fair. Look at me!”

It happens to people. They get up to the point of explaining the mission and can’t make it, so they go into a talking jag. She needed help. There was a thin edge of anxiety in her tone, and the words came too fast.

So I gave her some help. “What have you got in the box?” I asked.

She exhaled harshly. Almost a gasp. “You get right to it, don’t you? What have I got in the box? In this here box, you mean? Once you said you had a safe place for things. Do you still?”

“Yes.”

She came over and put the package on the bed beside where I was sitting. She grasped the cord and popped it with a swift sure motion. She stripped the brown paper off. Meyer says whole tracts could be written about character revealed in opening a package.

“What I’ve got in this box,” she said, “is money.” She lifted the lid. It was money. It was packed in tightly. Used bills, some loose, most tied into tidy bricks with string, with adding-machine tape tucked under the string. “I’ve got here ninety-four thousand two hundred dollars. Plus ten thousand for you, for keeping it until I want it.”

“No need for that.”

“It’s worth that to me. And I’d feel better.”

“Can I ask any questions?”

“Hardly any. That’s part of the fee.”

“Stolen?”

“Like from a bank or payroll or something? No.”

“And if you don’t come back?”

“I’ll be back to get it before… what’s today?”

“Early early in the morning of May the sixteenth, a Thursday.”

“Okay, if I don’t come get it before the fifteenth of June, or get some kind of word to you before the fifteenth of June, then I’m not coming at all. So it should go to my sister, Susie. Do you remember my maiden name?”

“Dee. Carrie Dee.”

“That was short for Dobrovsky. She uses the whole name. Susie… Susan Dobrovsky. You get it to her. That’s part of the fee. And not telling anybody at all about me being here. That’s the rest of the way you earn ten.”

“Where is your sister?”

“Oh. Sorry. She’s in Nutley New Jersey. She’s younger. She teaches nursery school. She’s now like about the age I was when I knew you before. Twenty-three? Yes. Two months ago. She’s nice, but… dumb about things. She doesn’t know how things are yet. Wouldn’t it be nice if she didn’t have to find out? Look, will you put this in a safe place and keep it for me?”

“Yes, of course.”

She swayed, took one dizzy step, and turned around abruptly and sat down on my bed beside the box, bouncing it, spilling the bricks of money. She shook her head. “I’m dead for sleep. And I’m dirty Trav. I’ve been in these same clothes too long. I can smell myself. These clothes, they ought to be buried. For the ten thousand, dear, could I ask for three more things?”

“Like a bath, a place to sleep, and a change of clothes?”

“I’m a size ten.”

After she was throat deep in the big tub, sploshing and sudsing, scrubbing her cropped pale hair along with the rest of her, I located an old surplus ammo box, the kind with the rubber gasket and the flat metal lever that fastens it safely tight. I moved the money, all except the ten thousand, into the ammo box and put that forward in the flooded area between the double hull. I added the ten to my own cache, mentally adding another four or five months to my retirement. I retire whenever I can afford it. When the money is gone, I go back to work. Salvage work. Retirement comes when you are too old to enjoy it completely, so I take some of mine whenever I can. What good are beaches without beach bums? What would the little vacationing lady urchins do for their holiday pleasures were not some of us out there wastreling away? After the large money was all stowed and quite safe, I went digging into the big locker drawer under the bed in the guest stateroom. It is always packed with girl clothes. They get left aboard. They are purchased in the ports I can reach with my old houseboat; and they are left aboard for another time. No trouble to have them cleaned and put them away. And having the supply facilitates spur-of-the-moment decisions.

I found her some navy flairs and a pink sleeveless turtleneck shirt. And I found the kind of terry robe which fits anyone. It fit her and dragged on the floor behind her. She helped me make up the guest bed. She was yawning with every second breath. Her eyes were glazed with fatigue. When I went in not more than three minutes later to ask her if she’d like some hot chocolate or a drink, she interrupted the question with a long, gentle, purring snore.

I stood for a few minutes leaning against the doorframe, looking at her in the semidarkness, remembering her. I remembered the pre-Ben Carrie Dee, a pretty girl who worked at Peerless Marine and was seen now and again at some of the parties in and around Bahia Mar. We are never the best judges of what is meaningful and what is trivial in our lives, I guess. The accidents of time and place change the script, and later we say it happened on purpose.

Carrie didn’t happen to me on purpose. Or I to her. There was a TV crew at Bahia Mar making a commercial. The Alabama Tiger had them at his permanent floating house party every night of the week they were there. The boss fellow was squat and hairy and very loud. Mod clothes and a glossy wig and a conviction that his profession and personality made him irresistible. I went topside at midnight on the ‘Bama Gal to get some air and see if there were any stars to look at. Boss Fellow had a girl down on the deck by the overturned dinghy and was mauling her around, riding her clothes up over her hips as she kicked and bleated and yelped, her protests lost in the Tiger’s two hundred amps of speakers.

I plucked him off her and, while he flailed and cursed, I carried him to a place along the rail where I could get a clear drop into the boat basin. He made a mighty splash after the twelvefoot drop. When I was sure he could swim, I let him fend for himself. It was Carrie, and she was not in great shape. She was ripped and scuffed and close to hysterics. She was certainly in no shape to rejoin the party, so I walked her back to the Busted Flush and found some clothes that would fit her. She spent a half hour alone in the head, getting herself back together.

It had shaken her badly. He had come all too close to taking her. She looked spooked and sallow. By all the accepted rules of human behavior, she should have been so turned off by the near rape she would have felt neuter for quite a while. And I should have been reluctant to give her any new reason for alarm. But in some strange way the episode became a stimulant. We sat and talked, moved closer and talked, moved closer yet and kissed, and I took her to bed. It was a very gentle time, and very sweet in a strange way. In body language she was saying, This is the way it should be. And I was saying, Replace that memory with this one.

It was an isolated episode. Except perhaps by glance or by fleeting expression, we did not mention it again. Knowing her in that biblical sense changed my status with her to that of benign uncle. She sought me out to ask my advice about how she should live her life. She was so determined, months later, that I should approve of Ben Milligan, I think she convinced herself that I had approved. She wanted a good life. It is not an unusual hope, but a very unusual attainment.

I pulled the door shut. I made myself the drink and dressed while I worked at it. After the drink it was time for juice and coffee. After coffee, it was time to go find her purse. False dawn let a little light into the stateroom. I moved silently on bare feet and found the purse at the pillow end, shoved between mattress and box springs. I eased it out and took it to the galley and opened it at the table in the breakfast booth, under the light.

And hello to you, Carolyn Milligan. Florida registration receipt on a two-year-old Datsun, tag number 24D-1313. I found the car keys and put them in my shirt pocket. The occupation, which used to be given on the driving license, no longer appears there. Assume she is still a secretarial type. I copied down the tag number of the car and the address as given: 1500 Seaway Boulevard, Apt. 38B, Bayside, Florida. Comb, lipstick, dental floss, matchbooks, payroll stub, airplane tickets, used. Misc. intimacies. So Mrs. Milligan worked for Superior Building Supplies in Junction Park in Bayside, Florida, and she made $171.54 per week after deducts. She had been in Jamaica, at a Montego Bay hotel, in April. She had six hundred and some dollars in the purse. And a Master Charge card. And three kinds of pills. Everybody has three kinds as a minimum allowance. It is the creature adjustment to a rapidly changing world.

By then real dawn had arrived, and I locked up the Flush and walked through the deceptive coolness and the varying shades of gray, looking in the lots for her car. I found it. Bright orange. Imitation leather. Thirty-one thousand miles on it. Nothing significant in the glove compartment. A case of twelve bottles of an industrial abrasive in the trunk. Tru-Kut, it was called. I opened one, wet my fingers, rubbed and snuffed. Industrial abrasive. A milky white solution that smelled like men’s rooms, overly sanitized, and contained a gritty cutting agent. So secretary makes deliveries for the boss fellow of Superior Building Supplies.

Nothing else of any moment. The tires were new, doubtless recently replaced. Windshield starred by a kicked-up pebble. Half a tank of gas. I relocked the car. Nobody seemed to be paying any attention to me. Over on charter-boat row they were getting ready to go rumbling out of the basin and roar out to the edge of the Stream. Early birds were beginning to arrive to get the shops ready to open. The early maid shift was reporting to the motel housekeeper. The early bird who gets the worm works for somebody who comes in late and owns the worm farm.

I sauntered back to the Flush by a different route. I unlocked it, slipped keys in purse, slipped purse under mattress while she still snored on and on into this new day. By morning light she did indeed look as if she had not weathered the years too well. New deep lines bracketed her mouth. Her eyes were pouched, her chin slightly doubled, her skin grainy. She frowned in her sleep. By my count, she was thirty. The body was younger, the face older, than thirty. Some great looking couple, those two. Ben and Carrie. Travel poster people. Photograph them on red bikes in Bermuda, and you would sell tickets on the airplanes. Too much boyish petulance in Ben’s face. Too much pseudomasculine heartiness in his manner. His momma had loved him, all too well.

Two

CARRIE SLEPT through the morning and into the afternoon. At three I went in and put my hand on her shoulder and shook her gently. She made a blurred noise of complaint and then gave a great start and snapped her eyes open. She looked terrified. Then she knew me and the lids got heavy again and she put a fist in front of a creaking yawn. “Whassamarra?” she said. “Whatimezit?”

“Three P.M. on Thursday, love. Keep sleeping. You seem to need it. I’m going to lock you in and go over to the beach for a while.”

“Look. When you come back. Wake me up again? Okay?”

“Sure.”

It had taken such a great effort of will and so much pain to get back in good shape, I had vowed never to let myself get sloppy again. And that meant hot sun and sweat and exercise every day, no tobacco ever again, and easy on the booze, heavy on the protein. Meyer was involved in writing a long and complicated dissertation on the lasting effect on international currencies of the Arab oil production disputes, and he quit each day at three and joined me on the beach to get in his daily stint. Meyer never looks fat and he never never looks slender. He is merely broad and durable in a rubbery way, and hairy as an Adirondack black bear.

He believes in exercise in moderation. He says that he is not interested in celebrations of masochism, and so, aside from a part of the swimming, we do not see much of each other until the exercise hour is over.

He was already sitting on his towel at the hightide line when I finished sprinting the last hundred yards of my one-mile run. When I stopped puffing and panting and groaning, I took a final dip and then stretched out close by.

“You ought to run a little,” I told him.

“Would that I could. When the beach people see you running, they know at a glance that it is exercise. There you are, all sinew and brown hide, and you wear that earnest, dumb, strained expression of the old jock keeping in shape. You have the style. Knees high, arms swinging just right, head up. But suppose I came running down this beach? They would look at me, and then look again. I look so little like a runner or a jock that the only possible guess as to what would make me run is terror. So they look way down the beach to see what is chasing me. They can’t see anything, but to be on the safe side, they start walking swiftly in the same direction I’m running. First just a few, then a dozen, then a score. All going faster and faster. Looking back. Breaking into a run. And soon you would have two or three thousand people thundering along the beach, eyes popping out of the sockets, cords in their necks standing out. A huge stampede, stomping everything and everybody in their path into the sand. You wouldn’t want me to cause a catastrophe like that, would you?”

“Oh, boy.”

“It might not happen, but I can’t take the chance.”

“Meyer.”

“Once it started, I could drop out and they would keep on going. The contagion of panic. Once you see it, you never forget it.”

“Meyer, do you remember Carrie Milligan?”

“A thundering herd of… what? Who?”

“About six years ago. I loaned Carrie and Ben the Busted Flush. Not to take on a cruise. Just to live aboard, during a honeymoon.”

“And told me to keep an eye on them. Very funny. I think I saw them come out into the daylight once. Let me see. She worked in the office over at Peerless Marine. Pretty little thing. I forget why you loaned them the Flush.”

“I owed Dake Heath a favor and that’s what he asked for. He was her half brother and he wanted things nice for her. Carrie and Ben were broke and so was Dake. So I broke a rule and said okay.”

“To answer your question, yes. I remember her. Why?”

So I told all. I had promised Carrie not to tell anyone. But all rules are off when it comes to Meyer. Also, it was a form of protection. When somebody comes up and gives you that much money to tuck away for safekeeping, special precautions are in order. Checking the purse and the car, for example. And telling Meyer everything, including my checking the purse and the car. If the law moved in, I wanted to be able to give some plausible answers, with somebody to verify them if need be. Also, if somebody grabbed Carrie and bent her until she told them where to look for money, it would be nice to have Meyer know exactly why my luck had, at last, run out. And it will run out. Maybe not this time, or the next time. Sometime, though. And like everybody else, I will go down with that universal plea blazing in the back of my mind. “Not me! Not yet! Wait!”

Meyer was curious about the money, so I described the stacks to him, each neatly tied with white cotton string, each of mixed denominations, each totaling ten thousand. And, of course there were the loose bills, probably from a broken stack, which could mean that she had spent fifty-eight hundred. Each stack had an adding machine tape stuffed under the string. Yes, all apparently from the same machine, but I hadn’t examined them closely. It was used money, but reasonably clean and tidy. Under black light, it might fluoresce. Or somebody might have a list of serial numbers. Or it could all be funny, printed in a small room by night.

“You know her better than I do,” Meyer said.

“I don’t know her well.”

“Have you formed any opinions about her and about the money?”

“Like what? Like did she steal it? I don’t know. She’s not a bum. She’s a worker. Something happened that makes her feel she’s got some sort of a right to the money. She arrived physically and emotionally exhausted. She didn’t know if she was being followed. She thought she might be. Anyway, I’ll hold it for her. If she comes and gets it, no fuss, it’s a very easy ten, so easy I’ll have an uneasy conscience.”

A late-afternoon breeze riffled the water out beyond the lazy breakers and hustled some candy wrappers down the wet brown beach. Two tall young ladies came sauntering by, brown, brawny, and bikinied, as confident and at home in their bodies as a pair of young lionesses, their hair sun-streaked and salt-tangled, their hips rolling and canting to the slow cadence of their long walk in the sunshine.

Meyer smiled his smile and sighed his audible sigh. It is both a pleasure and a sadness to watch the very young ones walk by. They know so very little, and so frighteningly much. They are on the edge of life, thinking they are in the midst of it. Pretty soon we got up and snapped the sand off the towels and went trudging back across the pedestrian bridge. We parted, and as I stepped aboard the Flush I had the sudden strong feeling that harm had come to Carrie, that harm had come aboard, a feral, crouching, bone-gnawing creature.

But all was well. Such hunches happen all the time, for every one of us. We forget them all-except when one turns out to be right. Then we say, I knew! I knew!

She waited to be awakened, waited there with brushed hair, touch of lipstick, new smudge of eye shadow. She faked a sweet awakening from her drowse to pull me down into the mint taste of my own toothpaste, murmuring, “Hello, hello.”

It was supposed to be very easy. No need for talk, for claiming and disclaiming. All inevitable because she had made it so through contrivance and through the directness of invitation. Worm my way out of the swim pants and glide sweetly into the lady. Thank you, ma’am. The goodboatkeeping seal of approval. Only a total fink person would decline an offer so frankly made. But the problem of her motive got in my way. Was this supposed to be in addition to the ten? Was it supposed to cloud my mind and make me less curious? Was she setting up some justification or rationalization of her own? The problem of playing somebody else’s game is the problem of finding yourself stuck in a role you can’t play. You can’t say your lines.

So I disentangled her and sat up from the steamy kiss and smiled down at her and thumbed a strand of hair back from her round forehead. “You certainly needed a lot of sleep.”

“I guess I did,” she said, looking sullen. “While you were sleeping, I was thinking.”

“Goody!”

“Let’s say it gets to be June fifteenth and Carrie doesn’t come for her money. Don’t you want me to try to find out why you couldn’t make it? Or who kept you from making it?”

“It wouldn’t matter a damn to me by then, would it?”

‘That’s what I’m asking.“

“The answer is no. Just get the money to my sister. That’s all.”

“And she’ll want to know where it came from.”

“Tell her it’s from me.”

“Maybe she’s so straight she might not take it. Then what?”

She bit her lip and looked thoughtful. “I could write her, I guess. Phone her. Something to clue her a little.”

“Want to clue me too?”

“No. I don’t want to talk about it and I don’t want to think about it, okay? It’s my personal problem.”

“You’re paying me enough so you can ask for help.”

“I better not try asking for anything else, huh? A girl shouldn’t make it too obvious. Not and get turned down.”

“I just get suspicious of free gifts.”

“Some gift. From a fire sale. We had us one night, a long time ago. Remember? I was okay for you then, but not now. Not the way I am now. It was a dumb idea. Sorry, fellow.”

I took her hand and then despised myself for checking to find those little fingertip calluses acquired from operating office equipment. McGee checks everything, as do all paranoids.

I kissed her slack, cool, unresponsive mouth, and as I straightened up she said, “No charity, thanks. The impulse has come and gone.”

“Suit yourself.”

“Am I doing something to spoil your day?”

“You don’t leave me any options. Any move I make is wrong.”

“That’s the way it goes. Check with an expert.”

“At least I can tell you that you are still very attractive to me, Carrie.”

“Sure, sure, sure.”

“I mean it.”

“Six years ago you meant it, but that was a different girl, six years ago.”

“You confuse two things. Okay, I didn’t react the way I was supposed to. My guard is up. What do you expect? After six years you show up with a bundle of money and want me to keep it for you. You claim you’ve shed Ben. I stay alive by keeping my inputs open. Is it gambling money? Is it street money? Is it ransom money? I know some people who are hungry enough to nail me, they’d unearth a girl from six years ago and use her to get to me, to set me up. Marked money. Counterfeit money. Nearly everybody can be manipulated. McGee is alive and well because he is very very careful about a lot of things. Carrie, if you had been Miss Universe stretched out here waving your eyelashes at me, the word would have been the same word. Whoa! Look out for free gifts. I check everything I can check. What I found in your purse about working in an office matches the fingertip calluses on your hands. The industrial goop in the trunk of your car feels and smells like legitimate industrial abrasive solution.”

She spun quickly and stuffed her hand under the mattress, looking for the purse.

“It’s there,” I said. “I put it back.”

She sat up, hauling the sheet up under her chin. She stared at me. “Jesus! You are jumpy.”

“And alive. Be glad you are leaving your money at the right place, if you still want to leave it here.”

“I still want to leave it. It could have been more.”

“It’s a tidy sum. You are overpaying me.”

“I’ll decide that. Look, don’t worry about the money. Okay? It isn’t marked or anything. It’s sort of… my share of some action. But somebody might grab it.” Suddenly she grinned. “Hey! Thanks for giving me back my pride.”

“Any time. Want some steak and eggs?”

She looked wistful but refused. She wanted to be on her way. She wore the borrowed clothes and carried her soiled ones in a brown paper bag. She waited for full dark before she left. She marched away under the dock lights, taking a roundabout route to her car. I expected her to look back, but she didn’t.

There was a residual affection for her. The six years had aged her more than she could reasonably expect and had tested and toughened her. Her eyes were watchful, her merriment sardonic. There are too many of them in the world lately, the hopeful ladies who married grown-up boy children and soon lost all hope. They are the secretaries and nurses and switchboard people, the store clerks, schoolteachers, cab drivers, and Avon ladies. They lead the singles life. Lots of laughs and lots of barren mornings. Skilled sex, mod conversation, and all heartaches carefully concealed. They are not ardent libbers, yet at the same time they are not looking for some man to “take care.” God knows they are expert in taking care of themselves. They just want a grown-up man to share their life with, each of them taking care. But there are one hell of a lot more grown-up ladies than grown-up men.

I wished her well. Lonely ladies can get into damned fool capers. I wished her very well indeed.

Three

SO TWO WEEKS went by. A pair of lovely weeks in May. A steady breeze off the Atlantic kept the bright tacky strip of Florida seacoast reasonably free of smodge; fugg, and schlutch. Old parties tottered out of their condominiums and baked themselves black in the white high glare of the beaches, pleased that their eyes didn’t water and they could breathe without coughing.

On the tube the local advertising for condominiums always shows the nifty communal features, such as swimming pool, putting green, sandy beach, being enjoyed by jolly hearty folk in their very early thirties. These are the same folk you see dancing in the moonlight aboard ship in the tour ads. These are the people who keep saying that if you’ve got your health, you don’t need anything else. But when the condominiums are finished and peopled, and the speculator has taken his maximum slice of the tax-related profits and moved on to crud up somebody else’s skyline, the inhabitants all seem to be on the frangible side of seventy, sitting in the sunlight, blinking like lizards, and wondering if these are indeed the golden years or if it is all a big sell, an inflation game that you have to play, wondering which you are going to run out of first, your money or your life. The developers leave enough to go wrong in each condominium apartment that it becomes an odds-on bet the money runs out first. Nursing homes are a big industry in sunny Florida.

Anyway, it was Meyer who picked it up, a minor item on a back page, and brought it over to the Flush on the thirtieth day of May. It was early afternoon and I was topside, wrestling with too many yards of white nylon canvas, and with a borrowed gadget which, when properly operated, puts brass grommets into the fabric. I was irritated at how slowly my self-imposed chore was going. I was dripping sweat onto the grommet machine and the clean white nylon and the vinyl imitation-teak decking.

“Now what?” I asked sourly

“This is what,” said Meyer, and handed me the clip he had torn out of the paper.

PEDESTRIAN FATALITY

The City of Bayside registered its fourth traffic fatality of the year when Mrs. Carolyn Milligan was struck and killed at 10:30 Wednesday night while walking on County Road 858 just inside the city limits.

Roderick Webbel, 24 driver of the farm truck which struck and killed the Milligan woman, claimed that he did not see her until the moment of impact when she apparently stepped from the shoulder of the road into the path of the vehicle.

Mrs. Milligan, who lived alone at 1500 Seaway Boulevard, was employed by Superior Building Supplies, Junction Park Bayside. Police are investigating the accident and no charges have been filed as yet.

A fat drop of sweat fell from the tip of my nose and made a dark pattern of a sloppy star on the newsprint, the same color as the sweat smudge from my fingers. Meyer followed me into the shade of the canopy over the topside controls.

I leaned my rear against the instrument panel and propped one bare foot on the pilot’s chair. The breeze began to cool me off.

“Accident?” Meyer asked. When I stared at him he said hastily, “Rhetorical question, of course.”

“Of course. And who the hell knows? Damn it, anyway!”

I am cursed by an imagination which turns vivid when I wish it would turn itself off. She had been sturdy bone and sinew, sweet flesh and quick blood. She had been scents and secrets. Then a great bewildering bash, a tiny light in the back of the brain flickering out, as spoiled flesh, crushed bone, ripped connective tissue went slamming off into the roadside brush, spraying blood as it spun.

“Meyer, she gave me the orders. Just get the money to my sister, she said. That’s all, she said. She said that if she couldn’t come back and get the money, she wouldn’t give much of a damn who kept her from it.”

“And,” Meyer said, “she paid you to do just what she said.”

“I know.”

“But?”

“I look at it this way. Two thousand would have been more than fair. It would have paid my way to Nutley and back, with a nice hunk left over. So she’s got eight thousand worth of service coming.”

“Posthumous service?”

“Which she didn’t want.” I doubled my right fist and gave myself a heavy thump on the top of the thigh. Painful. “It is the merry month of May, Meyer, and the lady is going to be dead for a very long time. I would be doing what she wanted. Giving the money to the sister. And making certain there are no strings attached, nobody following the scent, nobody mashing the sister too.”

“I admire your talent for instant rationalization.”

“This is not romanticism, dammit.”

“Did I say it was?”

“By the expression on your face. Patronizing, amused, superior.”

“You are reading it wrong. The face is just some skin and fat and muscle stretched over bone. I was actually looking apprehensive.”

“About what?”

“About what you might be getting me into.”

“You can stay right here and work on your treatise.”

“I’m at a stopping point, waiting for translations of some Swedish journals to arrive. I could struggle through them myself, but…” He shrugged and went over and picked up some of the canvas inspected a grommet. “Is this crooked?”

“Very.”

“Then it won’t look very good, will it?”

“No. It won’t.”

“Travis, do we know anybody at all in Sayside?”

“I keep thinking there was somebody.”

So we went below, and while I checked out the book in the desk, Meyer opened a pair of cold Tuborgs. No friends in Bayside. None. Meyer blew across the top of the Tuborg bottle, a foghorn note far away. “So why are we up there fussing around?” he asked.

“A question which will be asked.”

“Insurance?”

“Possibly, but it doesn’t feel right.”

“Good old united Beneficient Casualty and Life. Those are such beautiful blank policies. I can type in all the-”

“I know. I know. But it could be a dead end. Accidental death, fellows. And these days you get checked out too often. It just doesn’t feel right. I think that when she was here two weeks ago I borrowed some money from her. Maybe I gave her a promissory note. I’m in shape to pay it back, but I’d just as soon not pay it back to her heirs and assigns, not if I can get my hands on the note I signed.”

“And you take some cash along. For credibility.”

“Right! Maybe we both borrowed it, and both signed. We’re a pair of real-estate gunslingers trying to cheat the little dead lady’s estate. We’ll pay up if we have to. But we’d rather not.” Meyer closed his eyes and thought long and hard, taking a deep draft on the Tuhorg as he did so. He nodded. “I like it.”

“We’ll take all the cash along,” I said.

He looked startled. “All?”

“We’ll operate from this gallant watercraft. In comfort. Even in certain vulgar luxury. Go pack your toothbrush, my friend.”

After he left I checked my Waterway Guide and picked out what looked like the best of Bayside’s several marinas. It was called Westway Harbor, operated by Cal and Cindy Birdsong. I phoned and got a young man in the office named Oliver. Yes, he had a nice slot for the Busted Flush, one that would take up to a sixty-footer, one with water, electric, and phone hook-up and about a hundred feet from the facilities. I said we’d check in on Friday, probably around noon. The fee sounded a little bit on the high side. Oliver wanted to know how long we would be with them, and I said it was hard to say, very hard to say. He told me to look for a high round water tower north of the center of town, and when I was opposite it, I was to look for their private channel markers and they would lead me right in, and he would be there to direct me to the slip. “You can’t miss it,” he said.

By the time I’d notified the office we were taking off, exchanged a few lies with Irv Diebert, picked up the laundry, arranged with Johnny Dow to take the mail out of the box and hold it, unplugged the shoreside connections, topped the gas tanks, and tied the Munequita well off in the slip, tarped and snug, it was after four o’clock. We chugged out to the channel and turned north.

At drinking time I left Meyer at the wheel and went below and broke out the very last bottle of the Plymouth gin which had been bottled in the United Kingdom. All the others were bottled in the U.S. Gin People, it isn’t the same. It’s still a pretty good gin but it is not a superb, stingingly dry, and lovely gin. The sailor on the label no longer looks staunch and forthright, but merely hokey. There is something self-destructive about Western technology and distribution. Whenever any consumer object is so excellent that it attracts a devoted following, some of the slide rule and computer types come in on their twinkle toes and take over the store, and in a trice they figure out just how far they can cut quality and still increase the market penetration. Their reasoning is that it is idiotic to make and sell a hundred thousand units of something and make a profit of thirty cents a unit, when you can increase the advertising, sell five million units, and make a nickel profit a unit. Thus the very good things of the world go down the drain, from honest turkey to honest eggs to honest tomatoes. And gin.

I put cracked ice in two sturdy glass mugs, dumped in some sherry and dumped it out again, filled with Plymouth gin, rubbed peel around the rims of mugs, squeezed oil onto surface of gin, threw peel away, and carried mugs up to the topside controls, where Meyer was using his best twelve-syllable words on a yuk who had pounded by us, lifting a nine-foot wash behind him. I saw it coming and had time to prepare. I did some twinkle toes myself: three to port, three to starboard, never spilling a drop.

We clinked glasses, took the testing sip, then the deep single swallow. Delicious. The birds were circling; the sun needles were dancing off the water, and the Flush was lumbering along, slowed, imperceptibly by a fouled bottom. It is unseemly to feel festive about checking out the death of a dead friend. But there is something heartening about having a sense of mission. A clean purpose. A noble intent, no matter how foolish. Behind us, a couple of slow hours back of us, the 17,000 resident boats and the thirteen big marinas of Lauderdale, where 150,000 people grow ever more furious in the traffic tangles. Ahead, some murky mystery locked in the broken skull of a dead lady. The knight errant, earning his own self-esteem, holding the palms cupped to make a dragon trap. Peer inside. S’right, by God, a dragon! But what color, fella?

Before nightfall I found the anchorage I had used before, a sheltered slot between two small mangrove islands. Fortunately nobody had yet built a causeway to either island, or erected thereon one of those glassy monuments to the herd instinct. I nestled the houseboat into the slot and went over the side and made four lines fast to the tough twisted trunks of mangroves, at ten, two, four, and eight o’clock. The night air was full of bugs homing on my earlobes, scream ing their hunger, so we buttoned the Flush up, testing night breezes and screens until it was comfortable in the lounge.

While Meyer was broiling a very large number of very small lamb chops, a skiff went churning across the flats, heading out toward the channel. The people aboard were yelping like maniacs, making wolf yelps, panther screams, rebel yells. I heard the crazed laughter of a woman. And then there was a sharp authoritative barking. Thrice. Bam, bam, bam. Tinkle of glass inside the lounge. Sharp knock against paneling. The skiff picked up speed. The woman laughed in that same crazy way. I stopped rolling and got up onto one knee, then raced topside and yanked the shark rifle out of its greasy nest. No point in firing at one small light far away, the sound fading.

“Why?” Meyer said, beside me.

I didn’t answer until we were below again, out of the bugs’ hungry clasp. “For kicks. For nothing. For self-expression. Good ol‘ Charlie shows those rich bastards they don’t own the whole goddamn world. It was a handgun and it was a long way off, and having one hit us was pure luck.”

“It could have been between the eyes. Pure luck.”

“Stoned and smashed. Beer and booze and too much sun. Uppers and downers, hash and smack, all spaced out. Take any guess.”

Meyer went quietly back to his broiling. He seemed moody during the meal, working things out his own way inside that gentle, thoughtful skull. The misshapen slug had dented the paneling but had penetrated so shallowly I had been able to pry it loose with a thumbnail. It was on the table beside my cup, a small metallic turd dropped by a dwarf robot. I had stuck Saran Wrap across the starred hole in the glass port. “Let me give it a try,” he said.

“You think you can explain why? Come on!”

“When I was twelve years old I received on my birthday a single-shot twenty-two rifle chambered for shorts. It was a magical adventure to have a gun. It made a thin and wicked cracking sound, and an exotic smell of burned powder and oil. A tin can would leap into the air at some distance when I had merely moved my index finger a fraction of an inch.”

“Meyer, the killer.”

He smiled. “You anticipate me. There were good birds and bad birds. One of the bad birds was a grackle. Of the family Icteridae, genus Quiscalus. I do not recall why it was in such bad repute. Possibly it eats the eggs of other birds. At any rate, it seemed to be acceptable to shoot one, whereas shooting a robin would have been unthinkable. I had watched grackles through my mother’s binoculars. A fantastic color scheme, an iridescence over black, as if there were a thin sheen of oil atop a pool of india ink. I had shown enough reliability with the rifle to be allowed to take it into the woodlands behind our place, provided I followed all the rules. There was no rule about grackles. I went out one Saturday afternoon after a rain. A grackle took a busy splashing bath in a puddle and flew up to a limb. I aimed and fired, and it fell right back down into the same puddle and did some frantic thrashing and then was still. I went and looked at it. Its beak was opening and closing, just under the surface of the water. I picked it up with some vague idea of keeping it from drowning. It made a terminal tremorous spasm in my hand and then it was still. Unforgettably, unbearably still. As still as a stone, as a dead branch, as a fence post. I want to say all of this very carefully, Travis. See this scar on the edge of my thumb? I was using a jack-knife to make a hole in a shingle boat for a mast, and the blade of the knife closed. This bled a good deal, and because it sliced into the thumbnail, it hurt. It hurt as much as anything had ever hurt me up until that time. And that had happened about two months before I murdered the grackle. The grackle lay in my hand, and all that fabulous iridescence was gone. It had a dirty look, the feathers all scruffed and wet. I put it down hastily on the damp grass. I could not have endured dropping it. I put it down gently, and there was blood left on my hand. Bird blood. As red as mine. And the pain had been like mine, I knew. Bright and hot and savage.”

He was silent so long I said, “You mean that…”

“I’m looking for the right way to express the relationships. Travis, the gun was an abstraction, the bullet an abstraction. Death was an abstraction. A tiny movement of a finger. A cracking sound. A smell. I could not comprehend a gun, a bullet, and a death until the bird died. It became all too specific and too concrete. I had engineered this death, and it was dirty. I had given pain. I had blood on my hand. I did not know what to do with myself. I did not know how to escape from myself, to go back to what I had been before I had slain the bird. I wanted to get outside the new experience of being me. I was, in all truth, in all solemnity, filled with horror at the nature of reality. I have never killed another bird, nor will I ever, unless I should come upon one in some kind of hopeless agony. Now here is the meat of my analogy. Those young people in that boat have never killed their grackle. They have not been bloodied by reality. They have shed the make-believe blood of a West that never existed. They have gawped at the gore of the Godfather. They have seen the slow terminal dance of Bonnie and Clyde. They have seen the stain on the front of the shirt of the man who has fallen gracefully into the dust of Marshal Dillon’s main street. It is as if… I had walked into those woods and seen a picture of a dead grackle. They do not yet know the nature of reality. They do not yet know, and may never learn, what a death is like. What an ugly thing it is. The sphincters let go and there is a rich sickening stink of fecal matter and urine. There is that ugly stillness, black blood caking and clotting and stinking. To them, that gun somebody took out of his fish box is an abstraction. They find no relationship between the movement of the index finger and the first stinking step into eternity. It is emotional poverty, with cause and effect in a taste of disassociation. And they… ”

He had become hesitant, the words coming more slowly, with less certainty. He smiled with strange shyness and shrugged and said, “But that doesn’t work, does it?”

“I think it works pretty well.”

“No. Because then they could only kill once. But some of them go on and on. Pointlessly.”

“Some of them. Weird ones. Whippy ones.”

“Theorizing is my disease, Travis. A friend of mine, Albert Eide Parr, has written, ‘Whether you get an idea from looking into a sunset or into a beehive has nothing to do with its merits and possibilities.’ I seem to get too many of my ideas by looking into my childhood.”

“They didn’t nail either of us between the eyes this time.”

“Ever the realist.”

We cleaned up and sacked out early. I lay wakeful in the big bed, resentful of Meyer nearby in the guest stateroom, placidly asleep. When he had been involved in a government study in India, he had learned how to take his mind out of gear and go immediately to sleep. I had known how, without thinking about it, when I had been in the army, but in time I had lost the knack.

Meyer had explained very carefully how he did it. “You imagine a black circle about two inches behind your eyes, and big enough to fill your skull from ear to ear, from crown to jaw hinges. You know that each intrusion of thought is going to make a pattern on that perfect blackness. So you merely concentrate on keeping the blackness perfect, unmarked, and mathematically round. As you do that, you breathe slowly and steadily, and with each exhalation, you feel yourself sinking a tiny bit further into the mattress. And in moments you are asleep.”

He was, but I wasn’t. Once I had explained Meyer’s system to a very jumpy restless lady, telling her it wouldn’t work for me and it wouldn’t work for her. I said, “Go ahead. Try it. It’s just a lot of nonsense, Judy. Right, Judy? Hey! Judy? Judy!”

Tonight I was too aware of all the world around me. I was a dot on the Waterway chart between the small islands. Above me starlight hit the deck after traveling for years and for trillions of miles. Under the hull, in the ooze and sand and grass of the bottom, small creatures were gagging and strangling on the excreta of civilization. The farthest stars had moved so much since the starlight left them that the long path of light was curved. After the planet was cindered, totally barren of life, that cold starlight would still be taking the long curved path down to bound off black frozen stone. Ripples slapped the hull. I heard a big cruiser go barreling down the Waterway, piloted by some idiot racing to keep his inevitable appointment with floating palm bole or oil drum. Long minutes after the sound had faded, his wash tipped the Flush, creaked the lines, clinked something or other in the galley. It disturbed a night bird, which rose from one of the islands, making a single horrid strangled croak. Far off on the north-south highways there was the insect sound of the fast-moving trucks, whining toward warehouses, laden with emergency rush orders of plastic animals, roach tablets, eye shadow, ashtrays, toilet brushes, pottery crocodiles, and all the other items essential to a constantly increasing GNP.

My heart made a slow, solemn ka-thudding sound, and the busy blood raced around, nourishing, repairing, slaying invaders, and carrying secretions. My unruly memory went stumbling and tumbling down the black corridors, through the doors I try to keep closed. A tickle of sweat ran along my throat, and I pushed the single sheet off.

Where had Carrie Milligan gotten the money.? Had she told anyone I had it?

What had the money to do with being in the same clothes too long?

Kidnap?

Smuggling?

Casino?

Robbery?

Let’s take it to Nutley and give it all to the little sister and then go fishing, preferably down off Isla de las Mujeres.

But first, friend, let us try to get the hell to sleep. Please? Please? Keep the black circle absolutely round. Sink deeper with each exhalation. Absolutely round.

Four

A GOOD MARINA-and rare they are indeed-is a comfort and a joy. The private channel to Westway Harbor was about six hundred yards long. It was a seminatural basin, dredged to depth, with the entrance narrowed for protection from wash, storm waves, and chop. The gas dock was inside the entrance, tucked over to the south side. Small-boat dockage was on the southern perimeter of the basin. There were an estimated eighty berths for bigger craft dead ahead and to my right as I came through their entrance.

A brown young man in khaki shorts came out of the dockmaster’s office, gave me a follow-me wave of his arm, and hopped onto an electric service cart. I eased to starboard and followed him to the indicated slip, then swung out and backed in between the finger piers as Meyer went forward and put loops over the pilings as we eased past. When the young man sliced the edge of his hand across his throat, Meyer made both bow lines fast to the bow cleat, and I killed my little diesels. The young man was polite. He helped with the lines. He asked permission to come aboard. He handed me a neatly printed sheet of rules, rates, and regulations, services available, and hours of availability. I asked him if he was Oliver, and he said Oliver had gone to lunch. He was Jason. Jason had a jock body, a Jesus head, and gold-wire Franklin glasses.

The instructions were clear and precise. I helped him plug me into the dockside electricity. He took a meter reading. I said we’d like phone service, and he said he’d go bring an instrument. I tasted the hose water and told Meyer to top off the water tank while I went to the dockmaster’s office to make arrangements.

As I walked, I admired the construction of the docks. Concrete piers and big timbers and oversized galvanized bolts holding them together. The trash cans were in big fiberglass bins. There were safety stations, with life rings and fire extinguishers. The water lines and power lines were slung under the docks, out of sight. They had about thirty empty berths. The fifty boats in sight looked substantial and well kept, especially a row of a half dozen big motor sailers. A calico cat sitting on the bow of a big Chriss stopped washing to stare at me as I walked by.

There was a big tall lady behind the counter in the office. She had very short black hair and strong features. She was barelegged and barefooted and wore yellow shorts and a white T-shirt and a gold wedding ring. She stood about six feet high, and though the face was strong enough to look just a little bit masculine, there was nothing masculine about the legs or the way she filled the T-shirt. And she was almost as tan as I am. It made her cool blue eyes look very vivid, and it made her teeth look very very white. “Mr. McGee?”

“Yes. You’ve got a fine looking marina here.”

“Thank you. I’m Mrs. Birdsong. We’ve been open exactly two years today.”

“Congratulations.”

“Thank you.” Her smile was small and formal. This was an arm’s-length girl. With a long arm. Twenty-eight? Hard to guess her age because her face had that Indian shape which doesn’t show much erosion from eighteen to forty.

We made the arrangements. I paid cash for three days in advance, saying we might stay longer: I asked about a rental car, and she walked me over to a side window and pointed to a Texaco sign visible above the roof of the nextdoor motel and said I could get a car there.

Just as we turned away from the window there was a roar, a yelp of rubber, and a heavy thud as someone drove a dusty blue sedan into the side of the building.

A big man struggled out from behind the wheel and walked unsteadily to the doorway and paused there, staring at her and then at me.

“Where have you been? Where-have-you-been?” she asked. Her eyes looked sick.

He was six and a half feet tall, and almost as broad as the doorway. He had a thick tangle of gray-blond hair, a mottled and puffy red face. He wore soiled khakies, with what looked like dried vomit on the front of the shirt. There was a bruise on his forehead and his knuckles were swollen. He wafted a stink of the unwashed into the small office.

He gave her a stupid glaring look and mumbled, “Peddle your ass anybody comes along, eh, Cindy? Bangin‘ dock boys, bangin’ customers. I know what you are, you cheap hooker.”

“Cal! You don’t know what you’re saying.”

He turned ponderously toward me. “Show you not to fool around with somebody’s wife, you bas’ard; you rotten suhva bish.”

She came trotting toward him from the side, reaching for him, saying, “No, Cal. No, honey. Please.”

He swung a backhand blow at her face, a full swing of his left arm. She saw it coming and tried to duck under it, but it caught her high on the head, over the ear. It felled her. She hit and rolled loose, with a thudding of joints and bones and skull against vinyl tile floor, ending up a-sprawl, face down.

Cal didn’t look at her. He came shuffling toward me, big fists waving gently, shoulder hiked up to shield the jaw. If he’d left enough room for me to slide past him and bolt out the doorway I would have. Dog drunk as he was, he was immense and seemed to know how to move. I did not want to be in the middle of any family quarrel. Or any wife-killing. She was totally out, unmoving.

One thing I was not going to do, and that was stand up and play fisticuffs. Not with this one. I was getting a good flow of adrenaline. I felt edgy and fast and tricky. I put my hands out, palms toward him, as though pleading with him not to hit me. He looked very happy, in a bleary way, and launched a big right fist at the middle of my face. I snapped my open palms onto that thick right wrist and turned it violently clockwise, yanking downward at the same time. The leverage spun him around, and his wrist and fist went up between his shoulder blades. I got him started and, with increasing momentum, ran him into the cement block wall. He smacked it, dropped to his knees, and then spilled sideways and sat up, blood running down into his eye and down his cheek from a new split in his forehead. He smiled in a thoughtful way and struggled up and came hunching toward me again. This time I moved inside a pawing left hand and hit him as fast and as hard as I could, left-right, left-right, to throat and belly. I knew it damaged him, but as I tried to slide past him; once more thinking of the doorway, he hit me squarely in the forehead. It creaked my neck, turned the bright day to a cloudy vagueness, and put me into slow motion. As I was going down, my head cleared. I hooked my left foot around the back of his right ankle and kicked his kneecap with my right foot. He grunted and tried to stomp me as I rolled away.

As I came to my feet I saw he was having trouble making his right leg hold him up. And the blood obscured his vision. And he was gagging and wheezing. But he was coming on, and I wanted no part of him. I had lost the edge of my reflexes. I was halfway aware of the whirling blue lights of the cop car outside, and of men moving smartly through the doorway.

“Cal!” some man yelled. “Cal, damn you!” Then they walloped the back of his head with a hickory stick. They rang the hard wood off the skull bone. He tottered and turned and pawed at them, and they moved aside and hit him again. He puddled down, slowly, still smiling, with the unbloodied eye turning upward until only the white showed.

One of the officers rolled the limp hulk face down, brought the hands around behind, and pressed the cuffs onto the wrists. He said, “Hoowee, Ralph. He do have a stink onto him. We want him riding in with us?”

“Not after the last time we don’t.”

Jason, who had helped us dock, was kneeling on the floor. He had lifted Mrs. Birdsong into a sitting position. Her head was a little loose on her neck, and her eyes were vacant. He was gentle with her, murmuring comfort to her.

“She okay, Jason?” an officer asked.

“I… I guess I’m all right,” she said.

“How about you?” he asked me.

I worked my arms, massaged the back of my neck. My head was clearing the rest of the way, taking me out of slow motion. I felt of my forehead. It was beginning to puff. “He hit me one good lick.”

“Why?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea. I was checking in.”

“He brought his boat in a little while ago,” Jason said. He helped Cindy Birdsong to her feet. She pulled free of him and walked over to a canvas chair and sat down, looking gray-green under her heavy tan.

“Want to prefer charges?” the officer asked.

I looked at Cindy. She lifted her head and gave a little negative shake.

“I guess not.”

The cop named Ralph sighed. He was young and heavy, with a Csonka mustache. “Arthur and me figured he might head back here. We’ve been trying to catch up with him for two hours, Cindy. We got all the charges we need. He run two cars off the road. He busted up Dewey’s Pizza Shack and broke Dewey’s arm for him.”

“Oh, God.”

“Earlier he was out to the Gateway Bar on Route Seven eighty-seven, and he pure beat the living hell out of three truck drivers. They’re in the hospital. I’m sorry, Cindy. It’s since he got on the sauce so bad. And being on probation from the last time… look, he’s going to have to spend some time in the county jail. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is.”

She closed her eyes. She shuddered. Suddenly Cal Birdsong began to snore. There was a little puddle of blood under his face. The ambulance arrived. The cuffs were removed. The attendants handled him with less difficulty than I expected. Cindy got a sweater and her purse and rode along with the snoring gigantic drunk, after asking Jason to take care of things.

Jason leaned on the counter and said, “He was okay. You know? A nice guy up to about a year ago. I’ve worked here since they opened. He drank, but like anybody else. Then he started drinking more and more. Now it makes him crazy. She’s really a very great person. It’s really breaking her heart, you know?”

“Booze sneaks up on people.”

“It’s made him crazy. The things he yells at her.”

“I heard some of them.”

The part of his face not covered by the Jesus beard turned redder. “She’s not like that at all. I don’t know what it is with him.”

“Where do they live?”

“Oh, right over there, in this end unit in the motel. They built the motel the same time as the marina, and leased it out, and in the lease they get to use the unit at this end, a little bigger than the others. Cal inherited some money and they bought this piece of waterfront and put up the marina and the motel. But they could lose it if it keeps up this way.”

He went and got a mop and a pail and swabbed up the blood. While he was at it he mopped the rest of the floor. A good man.

I stepped around the wet parts and went back to the Flush. Meyer was annoyed. Where had I been? What had happened to my forehead? What were we going to do about lunch?

I told him how I’d happened to meet the Birdsongs. Lovely couple.

When we went to get a car and get lunch, I saw a different fellow in the office. This one was beardless and smaller and rounder, but just as muscular.

“Jason here?”

“He went to lunch. Can I help you?”

“I’m McGee. We’re in Slip Sixty.”

“Oh, sure. We talked on the phone. I’m Oliver Tarbeck. I understand you and Cal went around and around.”

“Sort of. If I can get a rental car, where should I park it?”

“In that row over there where it says Marina Only. If it’s full, come here to the office and we’ll work something out.”

“Place to eat?”

“A block to the left, on this side. Gil’s Kitchen. It’s okay for lunch.”

We had lunch first. The place wasn’t okay for lunch. Gil had a dirty kitchen. A fried egg sandwich was probably safe. We went from there to Texaco, which had some sort of budget rental deal, and I tested to see if I could get my knees under the wheel of the yellow Gremlin before giving him the Diner’s Card. Nobody will take a cash deposit on a car any more. It forces everybody into cards. As the world gets bigger, it gets a lot duller.

I asked him if he could tell me how to find Junction Park. He gave me a city map and marked the route.

The Gremlin did not have air, but it had some big vents. Meyer read the map and called the turns. It was easy to see the shape and history of Bayside, Florida. There had been a little town on the bay shore, a few hundred people, a sleepy downtown with live oaks and Spanish moss. Then International Amalgamated Development had moved in, bought a couple of thousand acres, and put in shopping centers, town houses, condominiums, and rental apartments, just south of town. Next had arrived Consolidated Construction Enterprises and done the same thing north of town. Smaller operators had done the same things on a smaller scale west of town. When downtown decayed, the town fathers widened the streets and cut down the shade trees in an attempt to look just like a shopping center. It didn’t work. It never does. This was instant Florida, tacky and stifling and full of ugly and spurious energies. They had every chain food-service outfit known to man, interspersed with used-car lots and furniture stores.

Junction Park was inland and not far from a turnpike interchange. It had been laid, out with some thought to system and symmetry. Big steel buildings were placed in herringbone pattern, with big truck docks and parking areas. The tall sign at the entrance said that Superior Building Supplies was the fourth building on the right.

I parked and told Meyer to see what he could pick up at the neighbor establishments, a heating and air conditioning outfit, a ladder plant, and a boatbuilder.

I went into the front office of Superior Building Supplies. A slender and pretty girl in a dress made of ticking was taking file folders out of a metal file and putting them into a cardboard storage file. She straightened and looked at me and said in a nasal little voice, “It isn’t until Monday.”

“What isn’t?”

“The special sale of everything. They’re taking inventory over the weekend. And right now.”

“Going out of business?”

She went over to her desk and picked up a can of Coke and drank several swallows. She gave me a long look of appraisal.

“We sure the hell are,” she said finally. She shook her gingery hair back and wiped her pretty mouth with the back of her hand, then belched like any boy in the fifth grade.

A man came through the open door that led back to the warehouse portion. He had a clipboard in his hand. He was sweaty and he had a smudge of grease on his forehead. Lots of redbrown hair, carefully sprayed into position. Early thirties. Outdoor look. Western shirt with a lot of snaps and zippers. Whipcord pants. Boots. A nervous harried look and manner.

“We’re not open for business, friend. Sorry. Joanna, find me the invoices on that redwood fencing, precut, huh?”

“Cheez, I keep telling you and telling you, it was Carrie knew where all that-”

“Carrie isn’t here to help us, goddammit. So shake your ass and start looking.”

“Listen, Harry, I don’t even know if I’m going to get paid for this time I’m putting in, right?”

“Joanna, honey, of course you’ll get your pay. Come on, dear. Please find the invoices for me?”

She gave him a long dark stare, underlip protruding. “Buster, you’ve been talking just a little too much poremouth. Just a little too much. And you’ve been getting evil with me too often, hear? I think you better go doodle in your hat. I’m going to go get my hair done. I might come back and I might retire. Who knows?”

She slung her big leather purse over her shoulder. He tried to block her way to the door. He was begging, pleading, insisting. She paid no attention to him. There was no expression on her face. When he took hold of her arm she wrenched away and left, and the glass door swung shut.

Harry went over to a big desk and sat in the large red leather chair. He closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. He sighed and looked at me and frowned. “Friend, we are still not open for business. We are even less open than we were. Let me give you some sound advice. Never hump the help. They get uppity. They take advantage.”

“I came by to ask about Carrie Milligan.”

“She used to work here. She’s dead. What’s your interest?”

“I heard she was killed. I’m a friend of hers from Fort Lauderdale.”

“Didn’t she used to live there?”

A bare-chested young man in jeans came out of the warehouse area and held up two big bolts. “Mr. Hascomb, you want I should count every damn one of these things? There’s thousandsl”

“Hundreds. Count how many in five pounds and then, weigh all we got. That’ll be close enough.”

The boy left, and Harry Hascomb shook his head and said, “It’s hard to believe she’s dead. She worked day before yesterday. That’s her desk over there. It happened so sudden. She really held this place together. She was a good worker, Carrie was. What did you say you want?”

“She came to see me two weeks ago. In Fort Lauderdale.”

He was so still I wondered if he was holding his breath. He licked his lips and swallowed and said, “Two weeks ago?”

“Does that mean anything?”

“Why should it mean anything?”

I did not know where to go from there. The loan of money seemed all at once frail and implausible. I needed to find a better direction. “She came to see me because she was in trouble.”

“Trouble? What kind of trouble?”

“She wanted to leave something with me for safekeeping. It happened it wasn’t the best time for me to try to take care of anything for anybody. There are times you can, and times you shouldn’t. I hated to say I couldn’t. I was very fond of Carrie Milligan.”

“Everybody was. What did she want you to keep?”

“Some money.”

“How much?”

“She didn’t say. She said it was a lot. When I heard about her being killed in that accident, I began to wonder if she’d found anybody to hold the money. Would you know anything about anything like that?”

Once again Harry went into his motionless trance, looking over my shoulder and into the faraway distance. It took him a long time. I wondered what he was sorting, weighing, appraising.

At last he shook his head slowly. “My God, I wouldn’t have believed it. She must have been in on it.”

“In on what?”

He undid a snap and a zipper and fingered a cigarette out of his Western pocket, popped it against a thumbnail, lit it and blew out a long plume of smoke. “Oh, shit, it’s an old story. It happens all the time. You never expect it to happen to you.”

“What happened?”

“What’s your name again?”

“McGee. Travis McGee.”

“Don’t ever go partners with anybody McGee. That’s my second piece of advice for you today. Jack and I had a good thing going here. My good old partner, Jack Omaha. It wasn’t exactly a fantastic gold mine, but we lived very well for quite a few years. And then the ass fell right off the construction business. We had to cut way back. Way way back. Trying to hold out until conditions improve. I think we might have made it. Things are looking a little bit better. I’ve always been the sales guy and Jack was the office guy. Anyway, he took off two weeks ago last Tuesday. On May fourteenth. Know what he was doing before he took off? Selling off warehouse stock at less than cost. Letting the bills pile up. Turning every damned thing into money. The auditors are trying to come up with the total figure. I’m a bankrupt. Good old Jack. Come to think of it, I guess he had to have Carrie’s help to clean the place out. She only worked two days that week. Monday and Friday. Went out sick Monday afternoon. Came back in Friday. That was the day I finally decided Jack hadn’t just gone fishing, that maybe he was gone for good. When did you see Carrie?”

“Thursday.”

“It figures. I never figured her for anything like that. Even though she and Jack did have something going. No great big thing. It was going on for maybe three years, like ever since she started working for us. Just a little something on the side now and then. An over-nighter. What we used to do, we’d send the girls, Carrie and Joanna, on another flight up to Atlanta, and then Jack and me would go up to catch the Falcons and stay in the HJ’s next to the stadium. Just some laughs.”

“And you think that was the money Carrie wanted me to keep for her?”

“Where else would she get it? Maybe Jack wanted her to run away with him. He was more hooked than she was, you know. Think of it this way. She helps him and gets a nice piece of change, and everybody thinks Jack took it all. When the dust settles, she can get the money and who’d know the difference?”

“Except she’s dead.”

“Yes, there’s that. I want to make one thing clear, McGee. If you come across that money it belongs right here in this business. It was stolen from this business. It was stolen from me, and if you find it, it belongs right here.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

He squashed his cigarette out. “None of this had to happen,” he said softly. “I wake up in the night and think about it. If I’d had the sense when the money was rolling in, I would have put it in a safe place. Instead I farted it away on boats and cars and houses. If I’d kept it, I could have bought Jack out when things got slow. I could have squeaked through. In the night I think about it and I get sweaty and I feel like my gut was full of sharp rocks.”

“What will happen?”

“I have to sell off what we’ve got left and throw it in the pot. It gets divided up among the creditors. I guess I’ll lose the house too, maybe the cars. Then I’ll start hitting my friends for a job. That son of a bitch said he was going fishing Tuesday and he’d be in Wednesday, and he said he had some money lined up to tide us over. I wanted to believe him. By Friday I got worried. I got some phone calls about bills I thought were paid. I called Chris. Jack’s wife. She didn’t know where the hell he was. She thought he was off in the boat somewhere. I phoned the marina and the boat was tied up there, nobody aboard. You know what? I just remembered. I had Carrie check out the bank accounts. She acted like she hated to tell me he had cleaned them out. He’d left ten bucks in each of them. He’s a wanted man. I brought charges. I signed papers. It was on the news. I hope they find the son of a bitch, and I hope he has a lot of money left when they find him.”

“You never thought Carrie was involved?”

“Not until you told me about her being in Lauderdale when I thought she was sick in bed. Not until you told me she wanted you to hold a lot of money for her. I swear. I mean I thought Jack was smarter than let some girl in on a thing like that. I wouldn’t ever give Joanna any kind of leverage. I guess it was just that she kept a close enough eye on the books, he couldn’t work it without her help. And, knowing that, she cut herself in pretty good. Maybe she.was afraid Jack might come back to her for the money.”

“Did you case her as a thief?”

“Her! I thought I was surrounded by friends. I guess they decided that since the business was going to fold no matter what anybody did, the thing to do was grab the goodies and run. Like maybe running into a burning motel and grabbing a wallet. Shit, maybe I would have cleaned the place out first if I’d thought of it before Jack did. And if I knew how. I wonder where Jack is now. Brazil?”

For once Meyer followed my standing instructions. He came in and folded his arms and leaned against the wall beside the door. He didn’t say a word.

“We’re closed,” Harry told him.

I said, “He’s with me.”

Harry stared at him. Meyer stared back, letting his underlip and his eyelids sag. With all that hair and with that inch of simian forehead he looked so baleful as to be almost subhuman. Of course the effect is ruined if he opens his professorial mouth.

Harry swallowed and said, “Oh. Uh… what kind of work are you in, Mr. McGee?”

He rolled a yellow pencil under his palm, the flat sides clicking against the top of the desk. I let him roll it four times before I said, “Oh, I guess you could call it investments.”

He smiled too brightly. “Want to buy a nice building-supply business?”

I gave it a slow four count while the smile faded.

“No.”

The kid came out of the warehouse again. “For Chrissake, there’s supposed to be almost two dozen wheelbarras and I can’t find a good goddamn one out there.”

“Wait a second,” Harry said. He took a sheet of letterhead, turned it over, and with a marking pen printed C L O S E D on it, and put pieces of Scotch tape on the corners. He stood up and said to me, “Nice to have met you, Mr. McGee.”

“I’ll stay in touch,” I said. It didn’t seem to make him happy.

After we left I looked back and saw him tape the sign to the inside of the glass door.

Meyer said, “What kind of fantasy were you selling him in there?”

“I was making it up as I went along. I was throwing in stuff to keep him talking. I dropped the loan idea.”

As I drove slowly back toward town, I briefed Meyer on what I had learned. Then it was his turn. He gave it such a long dramatic pause, I knew he had done well. Why shouldn’t he do well? I have busted my gut to learn how to make people open up. Meyer was born with it. A loving empathy shines out of those little bright-blue eyes. Strangers tell him things they have never told their husband or their priest.

He said that the secretary to the president of the Bayside Ladder Company Inc., was one Betty Joller and, being Carrie Milligan’s best friend, Betty was all racked up over the accident. Once upon a time Betty and Carrie and girls named Flossie Speck and Joanna Freeler had shared a little old frame house on the waterfront, at 28 Mangrove Lane. When Carrie moved out, they had gotten another girl to share rent and expenses. Meyer couldn’t recall the new girl’s name.

Anyway, Carrie Milligan was at the Rucker Funeral Home on Florida Boulevard, and there was to be a memorial service for her tomorrow, Saturday morning, at eleven o’clock. The sister, Susan Dobrovsky, was down from Nutley. She had arrived late last night. Betty Joller had picked her up at the airport and taken her to the Holiday Inn.

“You did well!” I told him. “Very very well.” It made him beam with pleasure.

I found 1500 Seaway Boulevard. I reminded him that Carrie had lived in 38B. I dropped him off and told him to see what he could get from the neighbors, and then work his own way back to Westway Harbor, and wait for me there if I wasn’t back yet.

Five

THE OMAHA house was in a fairly new subdivision called Carolridge. The developer had bulldozed it clean in his attempt to turn it from flatlands to slightly rolling contours. The new trees were all growing as fast as they could. In twenty years, when the block houses were moldering away, the shade would be pleasant and inviting. But in the mid-afternoon heat, all the houses sat baking white in the sun, and the spray heads made rainbows against immature gardenia bushes.

There were two cars in the carport at the Omaha place, and a fairly new cream-colored Oldsmobile in the driveway. A little wrought-iron sign was stuck into the parched grass, spelling out THE OMAHAS.

They give the development houses names. This was probably called The Executive or The Diplomat. It looked like eighty to ninety thousand, the top of the line for the neighborhood. Purchase would guarantee membership in the Carolridge Golf and Country Club. You could read the house from the outside. Three bedrooms, three and a half baths, colonial kitchen, game room, cathedral ceilings, patio pool, fiberglass screening.

I pushed the button and heard the distant chimes inside. Bugs keened in the heat. Some little girls went creaking and grinding past on their Sears ten-speeds, giggling. Somebody was running some kind of lawn machinery three houses away. A cardinal was sitting on a wire, saying T-bird, T-bird, T-bird-cool, cool, cool. I pushed the button again. And finally again. Just as I was about to give up, a woman opened the door. She had a broad, coarse, pretty face. She wore fresh lipstick, a sculptured blond wig, tiedye jeans, and a white sunback blouse with no sleeves.

“Mrs. Omaha?”

“Yes. We were out in the back. I hope you haven’t been ringing the doorbell long?”

“Not very long.”

“I didn’t know you’d come so soon. What happens is I keep getting a dial tone all the time, even when I’m trying to talk to somebody.” She had a thin little-girl voice. She had the dazed glazed manner of someone awakened from deep sleep. Her mouth was puffy, her eyes heavy. The fresh lipstick missed its mark at one corner of her mouth. The sculptured wig was slightly off center. There was a red suck mark on the side of her throat, slowly disappearing as I looked at it. “I’m not from the phone company,” I said.

Her gaze sharpened. “Oh, boy, you better not try telling me you’re selling something. You just better not try that.”

“My name is McGee. Travis McGee from Fort Lauderdale. A friend of Carrie Milligan.”

She was puzzled. “So what? What do you want here?”

“Did I come at a bad time?”

“Brother!”

“Suppose I come back later?”

“What for? Carrie is dead, right? Jack took off. Let’s say they were very very good friends and I couldn’t care less.”

“I was talking to Harry over at Junction Park. He says Jack cleaned out the partnership accounts on May fourteenth. Carrie came down to Lauderdale to see me on the sixteenth. She was jumpy. She thought she was being followed. She gave me some money to keep for her.”

“How much?”

“Maybe some other time would be…”

“Come on in, Mr. Gee. It’s real hot this afternoon, isn’t it?”

I followed her through the foyer to the long living room. She filled the rear of the stretch jeans abundantly. As she walked she reached up and patted the wig. The draperies were pulled shut. The subdued daylight came from the outdoor terrace area where, through the mesh of the drapery fabric, I could see a screened swimming pool as motionless as lime Jell-O in the white glare.

A tall and slender man stood in front of a mirror, combing his dark hair down with spread fingers. He wore a pair of quiet plaid slacks and a white shirt. His necktie hung untied. Over the back of a nearby chair I saw a dark blazer with silver buttons.

He said, “Honey, I’ll get in touch again about the…”

He spotted me in the mirror. He whirled and said, “Who the hell are you?”

“This is Mr. Gee, Freddy.”

“McGee,” I said. “Travis McGee.”

“This here is Fred Van Harn, my lawyer,” Chris explained.

I put my hand out. He hesitated and then shook hands and gave me a very pleasant smile. “How do you do?”

“Honey I asked him in because he says he’s got some of the money. Maybe he’s got all of it. Tell him he has to give it to me, dear. Mr. McGee, it’s my money.”

I looked at her in astonishment. “I haven’t got any money!”

“You said Carrie gave it to you to keep for her!”

“She did, but I gave it right back. I couldn’t accept the responsibility.”

“How much was it?” Chris Omaha demanded.

“I’m sure I wouldn’t have the slightest idea. She said it was a lot. She didn’t say how much. What is a lot to one person is not a lot to another person.”

Chris said, “Oh, Goddamn everything.” She plumped herself down on a fat hassock which hissed as she sat on it.

Freddy said, “Do you know who did agree to keep the money for her?”

“She didn’t say who she was going to try next.”

“Where did this happen? And when?”

“On Thursday May sixteenth, at about three or four in the morning aboard my houseboat moored at Bahia Mar in Fort Lauderdale.”

“Why would she come to you?”

“Perhaps because she trusted me. We were old and good friends. I loaned her my houseboat for her honeymoon.”

Freddy had long lashes, rather delicate features, olive skin. His eyes were a gentle brown, his manner ingratiating.

“Why did you come here, Mr. McGee?”

“I had a long talk with Mr. Hascomb. I just thought Mrs. Omaha would like to know about Mrs. Milligan coming to me. I thought it might answer some questions about her husband.”

“You wouldn’t listen to me, would you?” the woman said to Freddy in a whiny and irritating voice. “I told you that Milligan slut had to be in on it somehow, but you wouldn’t listen to me. I happen to know as a fact that Jack was screwing her for years, even though he didn’t know I knew, and-”

“Be quiet, Chris.”

“You can’t tell me to be quiet! You know what I think? He cleaned out the business and mortgaged everything in sight, this house and even the boat, and she was going to run off with him, but she probably had some boyfriend and they decided it was safer and easier to chunk my husband on the head and throw him into-”

He moved close to her. “Shut up, Chris!”

“I can put two and two together even if you can’t, Freddy, and let me tell you one thing-” She didn’t tell him one thing. He was one very fast fellow. He had a sinewy hand and a long whippy arm and a very nice clean pivot. He slapped her so fast and so hard I thought for one crazy moment he had shot her with a small caliber handgun. It knocked her completely off the hassock. She landed on her hip and rolled over onto her shoulder and ended up face down on the carpeting. He got to her quickly, turned her, and pulled her up to a sitting position. Her eyes were crossed. The impact area was white as milk. I knew it would turn pink, then red, and finally purple. She was going to be lopsided for quite a few days. A little trickle of blood ran from the corner of her mouth down her chin.

He sat on his heels, holding her hand, and said, “Darling, when your attorney tells you to be quiet, there might be a very good reason for it So you have to learn to be still when he tells you to.”

“Freddy,” she said in a broken voice.

He pulled, her up to her feet and turned her toward a doorway and gave her a little push. “Go in and lie down, darling. I’ll come in and say good-by in a few minutes. Close the door, please.”

She did as ordered. He turned mildly toward me and said, “Now let’s understand where you fit, Mr. McGee. You just wanted to get involved?”

“Doing my duty as a citizen.”

“I’m familiar with your type. The smell of money brings people like you out of the wood work. I can’t think of a way you can work any kind of a con in this situation. So give up and go home.”

“I’m familiar with your type too. I saw the way you tied that tie. Very quick and neat. Ready Freddy, servicing another client. I bet you’re in and out of those clothes as often as a fashion model.”

I saw the little flare behind his eyes and hoped he would try me. I tried to look smaller and slower than I am. Finally he smiled and looked at a microthin gold watch gold-clamped to a lean and hairy wrist.

“With a deposition at four o’clock, there’s no time for schoolyard games, my friend.”

“Nor will there ever be, eh?”

A sudden flush made him look healthier, and then pallor turned him gray-green. “I think you’d better leave, McGee. Now!”

So I left that enchanting place. Pale shag, silk lampshades, velvet wing chairs, brocade, imitation Tiffany stained glass, Japanese lacquer, gilt mirror frames. Somehow like a matinee in a department store. Van Harn looked about thirty, or a shade under. The lady looked well over. They were consenting adults, consenting to afternoon games in the tangly bed under the long exhalation of the air conditioning.

As I backed out a phone truck pulled up. I smiled and waved at him and wondered what kind of reception he’d get. Good luck, fella. Must be an interesting line of work.

It was quarter to four. The yellow Gremlin was hot enough to bake glaze on pottery. The steering wheel was almost, not quite, too hot to touch. I stopped wondering what to do next and ran around for a mile or two trying to get cool in a hot wind.

I found a shopping center and discovered that they had left some giant oaks in the parking lot. This runs counter to the sworn oath of all shopping center developers. One must never deprive thy project of even one parking slot. And, wonder of wonders, there was an empty slot under one tree, in the shade. As I got out of the Gremlin, a cruising granny glowered at me from the airconditioned, tinted-blue depths of her white Continental.

I found pay phones in a big Eckerd Drug, the phone stations half hidden by huge piles of pitchman’s merchandise.

At the Holiday Inn they had a Miss Dobrovsky registered in Room 30, but she did not answer the phone. I looked up Webbel, who had driven the truck. There were about fifteen of them, but no Roderick. I wondered why Susan Dobrovsky would stay in the Holiday Inn instead of in Carrie’s apartment. Squeamish, maybe. But sooner or later she would have to decide what to do with Carrie’s personal belongings. That made me think of personal arrangements, and so I looked up the number for the Rucker Funeral Home and asked for Miss Susan Dobrovsky. After a long wait the man came back on the line and said that Miss Dobrovsky was busy with Mr. Rucker, Senior. I told him to tell her to wait there for me. Wait for McGee. Right there.

Rucker’s Funeral Home was from the orange plaster and glass brick era. It had arches and some fake Moorish curlicues along the edge of the flat roof. A small black man was listlessly rubbing a black hearse parked at the side entrance. There was a large cemented area at the side and in back where doubtless they shaped up the corteges. I saw Carrie’s bright orange Datsun in the parking lot on the other side of the building. On one side of the home there was a savings and loan branch, and on the other side a defunct car wash. I stuck my yellow Gremlin beside the orange Datsun, wondering if the industrial abrasive was still in the trunk. The bright colors screamed at each other.

She was sitting on a marble bench in the hallway just inside the front door. She looked enough like Carrie so that I was able to recognize her at once. She was a taller, younger, softer version of Carrie. She had on a dark gray tailored suit, a small round hat. She carried a purse and white gloves. Her eyes were swollen and red. She looked dejected and exhausted. But she was a marvelously handsome lady.

“I’m pleased to meet you, Mr. McGee.”

“Did Carrie write you about me?”

“No. It was just… she phoned me long distance over a week ago, one night about ten. I was getting ready for bed. She talked a whole hour. It must have cost a fortune. She was funny. She kept laughing and saying silly things. Maybe she was drinking. Anyway, she made me get a pencil and paper and write down how to get in touch with you. She said that if anything happened to her, it was important I should get in touch with you. She said I could trust you. She said you’re a nice person.”

“She was in a loyal minority, Miss Susan.”

“I… I don’t know what to do about this,” she said. She took a sheet of letterhead paper, folded once, out of her dark plastic purse and handed it to me. It was a heavy, creamy bond, and the statement of account had been typed with a carbon ribbon electric, flawlessly. It added up to $1677.90. It contained all manner of processing charges and service charges and mortuary overhead charges. It contained a coffin for $416 including tax, and it included an embalming fee, crematorium fee, death certification fee.

“She wanted to be cremated. It’s in her will even. I can’t pay all that. He has some kind of installment note he wants me to sign. He seems very nice… but…”

By being very firm with a chubby sallow fellow I gained an audience with Mr. Rucker, Senior. If you shaved Abe Lincoln and gave him a thick white Caesar hairpiece, and left the eyebrows black, you would have a reasonable duplicate of Rucker, sitting there in perpetual twilight behind his big walnut desk.

His voice was hushed, gentle, personal.

“I should be pleased to go over the billing with you, sir, item by item. Let me say I am glad the little lady has someone to help her in this time of need.”

“Shall we discuss the coffin first?”

“Why not, if you wish? It is very inexpensive, as you can see.”

“The decedent is to be, or has been, cremated.”

“Cremation will take place this evening, I think. I can determine for sure.”

“So there’s no need for a coffin.”

He smiled sweetly and sadly. “Ah, so many people have that misconception. It is a regulation, sir.”

“Whose regulation?”

“The State of Florida, sir.”

“Then you will be willing to show me the statutes which pertain?”

“Believe me, sir, it is standard practice and…”

“The statutes?”

“It may not be specifically spelled out in the law, but…”

I reached and took the pen from his desk set and drew a thick black line through the coffin and said, “Now we’re down to twelve sixty-one ninety. I see you’ve charged for embalming.”

“Of course. And a great deal of cosmetic attention was required. There were severe facial lacerations which-”

“It wasn’t ordered and is not required by law prior to cremation.”

He gave me a saintly smile. “I am afraid I cannot accept your judgments on these matters, sir. I must refer them to the sister of the deceased. We must bring her in on this. I must caution you that this is a very difficult situation for her, all this petty squabbling about the account as rendered.”

“It’s easier on her to just go ahead and pay it?”

“This is a very sad occasion for her.”

“Wait right here,” I said.

I went and found Susan on the bench in the hallway. I sat beside her and said, “We can cut that bill by a thousand dollars, but he thinks it will be such a rough experience for you to haggle over price, we should go ahead and pay it. What do you think?”

For a moment she was blank. Then I saw the tender jaw clamp into firmness and saw her eyes narrow. “I know what Carrie would say.”

Mr. Rucker Senior stood up behind his desk when I walked in with Susan Dobrovsky. “Do sit down, my dear. We’ll try to make this as painless as we possibly-”

“What’s this crap about you overcharging me a thousand dollars?” she said in a high, strident, demanding voice.

He was taken aback but he recovered quickly. “You don’t quite understand. For example, it may not be absolutely legally necessary for you to purchase a casket, my dear, but I think it would be a gross disrespect to your poor sister to have her… tumbled into the burning chamber like some kind of… debris.”

She braced her fists on his desk and leaned closer to him. “That is not my sister! That is a body! That is debris! My sister is not in there any more and there is no reason for you to… to try to get me to worship the empty body, damn you, you greedy old man!”

He moved around the side of the desk, his face quiet as any death mask, and said, “Excuse me. I’ll have this account recomputed. It will take just a few minutes.”

He went out a side door. When it was open I could hear an electric typewriter rattling away. When he closed it behind him, she turned blindly into my arms. She rolled her head against my shoulder and gave three big gulping sobs and then pulled herself together, pushed away from me, honked into a Kleenex, and tried to smile. “Was I okay?” she asked.

“You were beautiful.”

“I was pretending I was Carrie and it was me who was dead. She’d never let him take advantage. I was just so confused when he gave me the bill before.”

“Is the memorial service to be here?”

“Oh, no. Betty Joller sort of arranged it. It’s going to be on the beach there at Mangrove Lane where she used to live.”

Rucker Senior came back into the room and tried to hand her the new billing. I reached across her and took it. It was far more specific. It came to $686.50. I noticed he had included a sixty-dollar urn, sixty-two forty with tax. I was tempted to strike it but decided it was best to let him have a minor victory.

“Here are the rings from the deceased,” he said, holding out a small manila envelope. She hesitated, and I took that also and slipped it into my shirt pocket.

“Satisfactory arrangements for payment will have to be made,” the man said.

I took out my money clip, slipped the currency out of it, and counted out seven one-hundred-dollar bills on the front edge of his desk. “We’ll need thirteen fifty in change and your certification on this bill, Mr. Rucker.”

He expressed his opinion by looking most carefully at each bill, back and front. He made change from his own pocket and receipted the bill. Paid in Full. B. J. Rucker, Sr.

“You may pick up the urn here between one and two tomorrow afternoon,” he said.

I nodded. There were no good-bys. We walked out.

Out in the afternoon sunshine of the parking lot, she swayed against me, leaned heavily on my arm as we walked. She shook her head and straightened up and lengthened her stride.

“He had me go back in there and see her,” she said. “I thought there was some mistake. Her face wasn’t the right shape even. She looked like she was made of wax. He showed me how the inside of the casket is all quilted, the kind he was selling me. Would he have really had it burned up, or would he have saved it for the next person?”

“I think B.J. would have it burned up.”

The lower angle of the sun had stretched casuarina shadows across our two bright little cars. Before she unlocked the Datsun she turned to face me and said, “About that money in there, I’ll be able to…”

“It was your money.”

“What do you mean?”

“I owed it to Carrie.”

“Is that true? Is that really true?”

“Really true.”

“How much did you owe her?”

“It’s a long story.”

“Well, I’d like to know.”

“She told you to trust me.”

“Yes…?”

“Trust me not to tell you now, and trust me to have good reasons not to tell you. Okay?”

She looked at me for a long moment and then slowly nodded. “Okay, Mr. McGee.” Her hair was long, and a couple of shades darker than Carrie’s cropped silvery mop. The face was as round as Carrie’s, the cheekbones high and heavy, but her eyes had more of a Slavic tilt, and their color was a seagreen-gray.

I made her try calling me Trav, and after three times it came easier and she smiled.

“How long are you going to stay?”

“Well, I guess until the lawyer says it’s okay to go back to New Jersey. I’ve got to sort out all her stuff in that apartment. It’s in a terrible mess. Somebody broke in and tore up the furniture and rugs and emptied everything out on the floor.”

“When did this happen?”

“So much is happening, I’m getting confused on the dates. She was killed Wednesday night. Betty Joller was in bed and heard it on the eleven o’clock news. Betty, being her best friend, got dressed and drove to the apartment figuring my phone number would be in Carrie’s phone index someplace, and I should be told. Betty has a key to the apartment that Carrie gave her. Betty got to the apartment about midnight and found it all in such a mess it took her a half hour to find my phone number. She was crying so hard I couldn’t understand what she was trying to tell me. And when she did… wow, it was like the sky falling down. Carrie was seven years older, and I saw her just once in the last six years, when she came back to Nutley five years ago for our mother’s funeral. I had no idea it would hit me so hard. I guess it’s because she was the only close family I had left. There’s some cousins I’ve never seen since I was a baby.”

“Did Betty Joller report it to the police?”

“I don’t really know. I guess she would have. I mean it would be a normal thing to tell the police about it. I told the lawyer about it, and he asked me if there was any specific thing we could report as being taken in the robbery, and I said maybe Betty could figure out what was missing, that I wouldn’t know.”

“Who’s your lawyer?”

“He’s a good friend of a girl that lives at 28 Mangrove Lane. I keep forgetting his name. But I’ve got his card here. Here. Frederick Van Harn. He just has to straighten out about the will and the car and all that. I guess it will be okay because he is the one who drew up the will for her. After she broke up with Ben she wanted to be sure he didn’t get a dime that was hers if anything happened to her. Ben was at the funeral too, five years ago, but I can’t remember him at all.” She looked at her watch. “Hey I’ve got to get going. Betty is coming over to the inn, and we’re going to work it all out about tomorrow. You’re coming, aren’t you?”

“Of course.”

She drove away and I drove back to Westway Harbor.

Six

I PARKED my rental in one of the reserved slots. As I walked past the office toward the docks, Cindy Birdsong came to the door and said, “Can I speak to you a moment, Mr. McGee?”

“Of course.”

She had changed to a white sunback dress, and she wore heels, which put her over the sixfoot line. A big brown lady with great shoulders and other solid and healthy accessories… And a mighty cool blue eye, and a lot of composure and pride.

“I want to apologize to you for the trouble my husband gave you this noon. I am very sorry it happened.”

“It’s perfectly all right, Mrs. Birdsong.”

“It’s not all right. It was a very ugly scene. If they release him on bail, I am sure he will want to apologize personally. I’m going to visit him this evening in the hospital, and I know he will be very ashamed of himself.”

“He had a few over the limit.”

“A few! He was pig drunk. He never used to get like… well, I shouldn’t burden you with our personal history. Thank you for giving me the time. If there is anything you need we are… always anxious to serve our customers. Oh, and I meant to thank you for not signing a complaint.” Her smile was inverted and bitter. “There are enough of those to go around as it is.”

“If there’s any way I can help…”

She blinked rapidly. “Thank you very much. Very much.”

Meyer was aboard the Busted Flush, dressing after having just gotten back from taking a shoreside shower. I broke open a pair of cold beers and took him one and sat on the guest stateroom bed and watched him put on a fresh white guayabera.

“Fifteen Hundred Seaway’s one of those bachelor boys and girls places,” Meyer said. “Everybody seems to laugh a lot. It’s very depressing. Eighty small apartments. There’s a kind of… watchful anxiety about those people. It’s as if they’re all in spring training, trying out for the team, all trying to hit the long ball, trying to be a star. And in a sense, they’re all in training. They’re pretty trim and brown. Very mod in the clothes and hair departments. They’re all delighted that there’s a long waiting list for Fifteen Hundred. Pools and saunas and a gym… Four-channel sound systems. Health fads. Copper bracelets. The Joy of Sex on each and every coffee table, I would guess. Water beds, biofeedback machines. There doesn’t seem to be any kind of murky kinky flavor about them. No group perversion scenes. Just a terrible urgency about finding and maintaining an orgasm batting average acceptable to the peer group. Their environment is making terrible demands upon them. I bet their consumption of vitamins and health foods is extraordinary.”

We went up onto the sun deck and sat in the shade of the big canopy over the topside controls. “It doesn’t sound like the kind of place where Carrie would want to live.”

“No. It doesn’t. It isn’t. I didn’t say why I was asking about her. I imagine they assumed I’m some kind of relative of hers. There was a coolness toward her. They thought she was standoffish, too much of a private person. She didn’t get into the swing of things. I guess the pun is intentional.”

“An outcast in Swingleville, eh?”

“Not exactly. More like a special friend of the management. The management is Walter J. Demos. He owns it and manages it and is sort of a den mother to all. He lives there, in the biggest apartment. He personally approves or disapproves of every applicant. He won’t accept tenants who are too young or too old. He settles quarrels and disputes. He collects the rents, repairs plumbing, plants flowers, and he laughs a lot.”

“How old a man?”

“I wouldn’t want to guess. He looks like a broader, browner version of Kojak. He has a deep voice and a huge laugh. He is a very charming and likable man. He is very popular with his tenants. He is Uncle Walter. I think Uncle Walter is a smart businessman. The rents start at three hundred and seventy-five a month, and his occupancy rate is one hundred percent. By the way, he told me about Carrie’s apartment being burglarized the same night she-”

“I heard about it. Was the door forced?”

“No. The layout is arranged for maximum privacy. If you go from your apartment to visit somebody, there’s very little chance of your being seen. And it seems to be local custom to have a batch of keys made and hand them out to your friends.”

“How long had she lived there?”

“Four months only. I picked up the rumor that Uncle Walter had moved her to the top of the list. They all seemed miffed about it. Jealous, almost. They don’t want Uncle Walter to have a special girl.”

“Did you get the feeling from him that she was special to him?”

“He seemed very upset about it, about her being killed. He said all the usual things. She had the best years of her life ahead of her. A pointless tragedy. And so forth.”

“Seems like high rent for Carrie to pay.”

“That’s something that kept cropping up in conversation. Those tenants seem to feel they have to give a continual sales talk about the joys of living in Fifteen Hundred. They claim that be cause they don’t have any urge to go out at night or away for vacations, it really saves money to live. there. The little shopping center is so close you can walk over and wheel the stuff home. The ones who work close, some of them at least, have given up cars and use bikes. It’s fascinating, in a way. A village culture. Maybe it’s part of the shape of the world to come, Travis.”

“Let us hope not.”

“You seem a bit sour.”

I stretched and sighed. “Carrie is in an upholstered box at Rucker’s, her face reassembled with wax and invisible stitching. Tonight they will tote her off to the electric furnace and turn her into a very small pile of dry gray powder. So I am depressed.”

“I don’t think I can add anything of interest. Carrie didn’t make any close friends there.”

“Pun intended?”

“Not that time. Maybe you’re not as sour as you act?”

“I’ll tell you my adventures,” I said. And did. When I had finished he said, “I suppose we’ll learn that young Mr. Van Harn is the attorney for Superior Building Supplies, which would account for his doing Carrie’s will and being recommended to the sister, and being with Mrs. Omaha.”

“I had the same feeling.”

“What next?”

“We have a drink with a little more authority, and then we find a place to eat.”

“Please don’t give GiI’s Kitchen another chance.”

“And you call yourself fair?”

“You wouldn’t!”

“You are right. I wouldn’t. But between the drinking and the eating, let’s go see where Carrie was killed.”

By seven o’clock we had found the approximate place where it had happened. County Road 858 was called Avenida de Flores. It was an old concrete road, the slabs cracked and canted. Weeds stood tall on the shoulders. The shoulders slanted down into overgrown drainage ditches. There were a few old frame houses, spaced far apart, on the west side of the road. On the east side was a grove, with high rusty hurricane fencing installed on the other side of the drainage ditch. I went on out past the city limits sign and turned around in the parking area of a large new shopping plaza and came back, driving slowly.

I pulled off into the weeds of the shoulder, car at a big list to starboard, and stopped.

“For what?” Meyer asked.

I nodded toward the house two hundred feet ahead. An old man was riding a little blue power mower back and forth across the big expanse of front yard. “We just get out and start looking up and down the shoulder, and he’ll come over and tell us all.”

That is one of the few bonuses when looking into a fatal accident. People do love to talk about it. In a few minutes I heard the mower cough, sputter, and die. Cars whooshed by, whipping the weeds around, blasting the hot wind against us. I looked up and saw the old man fifteen feet away, walking smartly, his face aglow with the terrible delight of someone loaded down with ghastly details.

“Hey, you wouldn’t be looking for the spot where that there Mulligan woman got killed Wednesday night, would you?”

I straightened up and said, “Milligan. The name was Milligan. Carolyn Dobrovsky Milligan, Fifteen Hundred Seaway Boulevard, Bayside, tag number Twenty-four D, thirteen thirteen. Her name was not Mulligan, it was Milligan.”

I used the voice and manner of the small-bore bureaucrat, petulant, precise, and patronizing. I needed no further identification as far as he was concerned. I was one of Them.

“Milligan, Mulligan, Malligan. Shoot, you’re looking on the wrong side of the road is what you’re doing.”

“I doubt that,” I said. “I doubt that very much.”

He peered up at me. “Well, by Jesus H. Sufferin‘ Christ, you are something, you are! You may know her name right, but you don’t know the first goddamn thing about the rest of it.”

“I think he might be able to give us a little help,” Meyer said, right on cue.

“Your partner here has got a little bit of sense,” the old man said. “My name is Sherman Howe, and I’ve lived in that house there twelve years now, and you wouldn’t believe the number of idiots get smashed up and killed on this straight piece of road in the nighttime. One drunk son of a bitch about six months ago-see over there where that fence by the grove is fixed up new? He come off the road and went through that fence, and he went weaving amongst the trees until he zigged instead of zagged and hit one dead center and mushed his skull on the windshield, dead as a fried mule. I keep my clothes on a chair by my bed and I keep a big flashlight handy, and when I hear that crunching in the night, I dress fast and come see what help I can give because that’s the Christian thing to do. If it’s bad, I blink the light back at the house here, and Mabel is watching for it, and she phones for the ambulance, and that’s exactly what happened Wednesday night, and I was down here before that poor boy had even found the body, so don’t tell me what side of the road it was on, mister. I know what side. Come with me. Watch out, now, you don’t get yourself killed. Nobody slows down. Nobody gives a shit anymore what happens to anybody else in the world. Let me see now… Sure. Here’s where her car was. She was heading north, out of town, when she ran out of gas and pulled over onto the shoulder right here. See where she drove in? See the tracks? And the grass is still matted where the wheels set. It happened at twelve minutes after ten by my digital clock on my bed stand, and I’d just turned out the light to go to sleep. Mabel was in the living room watching the teevee. She still likes it, but it’s got to the point where all that slop looks alike to me. I think the dead woman was… wait, follow me and I’ll show you where the body was. I’m the one found it. That Webbel kid didn’t have a flashlight at all. It was right about here I seen her arm kind of laying up against the side of the ditch in the grass, and the grass sort of hid the rest of her. She was right here, down in this dry ditch, her head aimed that way and her feet this way, neat as you please. Would have played hell finding her if that arm hadn’t been up like it was and bare, so it caught the light from my flashlight. Sixty-five feet from the point of impact. I paced it off. Lordy, she was a mess. That whole left side of her face and head… Anyway, I put the light on her and that boy fainted dead away. He fell like his spine had give way on him. I put my fingers on that girl’s neck and thought I felt something, but I couldn’t be sure. I ran and flashed my light three times at the window where Mabel was waiting, and she phoned it in. Then there was a terrible screechlng and nearly another accident on account of that Webbel kid had parked half on the road and half off, being so shocked by hitting her the way he did. His motor was still running, so I run the truck off all the way onto the shoulder and turned it off. He was sitting up by then, moaning to himself. Pretty soon I heard the sirens coming from way off. The cops got here first. Those blue lights tamed traffic down. They took flash pictures of the two cars and the body, and they measured the skid marks, which didn’t start until he was right at or a little past the point where he hit her. Any fool could see it wasn’t the kid’s fault.”

“Would you care to explain your… theory, Mister Howe?”

“Theory! Goddammit, it’s fact! Now you look and see that she was parked real close, too close, to the pavement. Maybe it was as far as she could get, running out of gas like that. The car lights were off. That’s supposed to be what you ought to do if you are over on the grass at night, because, you leave taillights on, some dumb stupid drunken son of a bitch is going to aim right for those taillights thinking he’s following you. Now the Webbel boy was driving one of those big Dodge pickups that’s built like a van in the front, where the driver sits high, right over the wheels. You can see that this road is two lane and pretty narrow lanes at that. They talk about widening it, but all they do is talk. I heard them question the boy. There was a car coming the other way. He couldn’t swing out around that girl’s car. No room. He had to cut it pretty close. Now she might have slid across and got out the passenger side so as not to open her car door into traffic. Then she walked around the front of the car and stepped right in front of that farm truck. It sort of dented in the front right corner of that truck. Busted the right headlight, dented the metal, and so on. You could see where the post hit her head. She didn’t realize a car would be so close. He said he saw her out of the corner of his eyes just as he hit her. He said there wasn’t anything he could have done about it, and that kid is absolutely right. He was on his way home, and my guess is she was on her way to that gas station up across from the plaza, that stays open way late. When the ambulance came the medical fellow said she was dead. Massive skull fractures, he said. But he said it would be declared a DOA and the certificate would be made out at the hospital. Let me see. They took her away, no need for sirens. They’d got’her ID from her purse in the car. The keys were in the ignition. It wouldn’t start. When the wrecker came, the fellow looked at the gas gauge on the woman’s car, and he had a can of gas on the back of the wrecker. He put some in and it started right up. I forget who drove it away. They took it down to the City Police Station. By that time the television truck was here, but there was nothing to take pictures of. So they just got the facts and used their radio to call them in. There was no cause to hold the Webbel boy. He was too shook to drive, but by then his father and his brother had arrived, and the brother drove the truck on back home. Their place is in the northwest part of the county. I guess that’s all of it. You got any other… theory, mister?”

“When all the facts are in, all the pertinent facts, Mister Howe, I’ll be able to summarize.”

He turned toward Meyer. “Summarize, winterize, I feel sorry for you, friend, having to work with this sorry son of a bitch.” He marched away without a backward glance. When I heard the mower start up again, I looked and saw him riding solemnly back and forth in the fading light of day.

Meyer said, “You couldn’t have gotten any more under hypnotherapy. What are you looking at?”

I was down on one knee in the weeds, between the matted places where the rear wheels had rested. I pointed to the place where the weeds and grass were withered and blackened. It began at a point midway between the wheels and slightly behind them. There was an area six inches in diameter and a random line half that width leading down the slope into the dry ditch, getting narrower and less evident as it approached the ditch.

“Gasoline spill will do this,” I said. I dug down into the dirt with thumb and finger and pinched some of it up and sniffed it. It had a faint odor of gasoline. “I think her car fills on the left corner, aft of the wheel. But if it fills there or in the rear center, no matter how clumsy the man was who dumped gas into it, he could hardly manage to spill this much way under here without getting a lot right under where he was pouring.”

“It soaked in before it got to the ditch,” Meyer said.

“There had to be a lot of spill for it to run down the slope at all. It’s been dry lately.” Meyer nodded. “And so she didn’t stop because she ran out of gas. But it had to look as if she had a good reason for stopping. Is there some kind of drain under there, on the underside of the gas tank?”

“We’ll be able to check that out. For now let’s say yes.”

“Am I following your scenario, Travis? X is in the car with Carrie. X is driving, let’s say. He pulls off the road and stops. He picks a place a long way from any house. No street lights. He strikes her on the head with the traditional blunt object. He leans across her and opens the door. He pushes her out. The weeds are tall enough so that she would not be picked up in the lights of any passing car. He wiggles under the car with a wrench and a flashlight and opens the drain valve. When all the gas has run out, he closes the valve. He pulls her around to the front of the car, waits until he gets the right traffic situation and the right kind of oncoming vehicle, then boosts her up and walks her into the front corner of it. Then he takes off. Isn’t that a little bit too much to get out of some weeds and grasses killed by gasoline? Isn’t that too much of a dreadful risk?”

“Maybe it’s too much. If X wears dark clothing, that would diminish the risk. He could stretch out flat beside her just ahead of the front bumper. He could look under the car for oncoming traffic heading the same way.”

We went to where the front of the Datsun had been and looked at the weeds. It is too easy to let your imagination interpret the patterns.

“If so,” Meyer said, “he didn’t have much time to get out of sight. Too risky to go across the highway. Over the fence?”

I studied the fence line. “Under it. Where it’s washed out. I think this was one very cool cat who checked his escape route first.”

“Would your scenario include some telltale dark threads caught on the wire at the bottom?”

“There could have been, until you mentioned it.

I slid under the fence, on my back. Meyer stayed outside. There were inches to spare. I searched a quarter-acre area and came up with the startling conclusion that it was a very well maintained grove. Nothing more. He could heave her into the front of the Webbel truck and spin and hit the hole before the truck could stop.

Then, in dark clothing, he could melt back into the black shadows of the night and walk parallel to the fence line until it was safe to go over or under the fence.

Or, I thought as I went back under the fence, another vehicle had stopped there. Maybe a wife got nervous about a can of gas in the trunk of the family car. Dump it out this minute, dearest. Or maybe a can started leaking and somebody abandoned it there, and later somebody picked up the can, thinking it usable. Many false structures have been built from the flawed assumption of the simultaneity of seemingly related events.

As we got into the rental car, Meyer said, “We have no way of knowing that the gasoline was spilled-”

“At the same time. I just went through that.”

“There are certain concepts which offend emotional logic. You have stopped beside a two-lane road at night. Traffic is light but fast. You walk to the front of your car, after sliding out on the passenger side. What are you going to do? Cross the road? Hitchhike? Open the door on the driver’s side? Assume there is a good reason, do you step out, or do you look first?”

“If you are smashed, maybe you step out.”

“If you are drunk, you would have opened the door on the driver’s side, wouldn’t you?”

“I don’t know. But what the hell was she trying to do? Walk to one of those houses and phone? If so, Meyer, would she leave her purse and car keys?”

“Nice point. Now what?”

The wrecker stood beside the large gas station across from the entrance to the shopping center. It was a very muscular beast. It was painted bright red. It had warning lights, emergency lights, floodlights, and blinkers affixed to all available surfaces. The big tires stood chest high. The array of winches and cables and reels on the back end of it looked capable of hoisting a small tank up the side of an office building.

“Something I can do for you?” the bald sunburned man said.

“I didn’t know they were making them so big.”

“Mister, when you get a tractor trailer rig totaled across three lanes of an Interstate, you need something big to get it out of the way fast.”

“Did that go out Wednesday night when that woman got killed just down the road there?”

His face twisted in pain. He spat and sighed. “Oh. Jesus, yes, it went out. Ray took it out. I had two guys out with flu. That goddamn Ray. You know what the payments run on this brute son of a bitch?” he kicked a high tire.

“No idea.”

“Four hundred a month. A month. And Ray, the dummy, has to diagnose. Is he some kind of mechanic already? Hey, he says, no gas. So he puts some in. So what does that cost me? Thirty bucks’ tow charge. Jesus!”

“Is he around?”

“Look what’s your interest in this thing, mister?”

“It’s a case study project for the Traffic Advisory Council for the State Department of Transportation.”

“Oh. Well, that’s him at the far island there, checking the oil on the green Cadillac. Just don’t hold him up on working the island, okay? It’s money out of my pocket.”

Ray was a stumpy nineteen with blue eyes empty of guile and with a face ravaged by acne. “Gassy smell? Well, yeah. The way it was, see, I leaned inside to check the gear it was in and the brake. I was glad to see the keys there because it was in park, you know, and I was moving it to N when on account of the gassy smell inside it I looked at the gauge and seen it was empty. I turned the lights on. It’s best at night, a short tow, keep the lights on, all the lights you got. I put gas in, figuring if it would run what’s the sense towing it. I didn’t know the boss would get his ass in such a big uproar about it, see. And I didn’t even think who is going to pay for the couple gallons I put in, or the service call. That made it worse. Jesus, he’s been all over me all the time since Wednesday. I’m about ready to tell him to shove his job.”

I went to the boss and thanked him and said, “I have to interview the dead woman’s sister. I can give her the bill for the gas and service, if you want.”

He brightened up. We went into the office. He made out the bill. I looked at it and shook my head and handed it back. “Not like that, friend. Two gallons, not five. Five dollars’ charge, not ten.”

“So what are you, her brother? Look, the dead lady is in no shape to care what the bills are.”

“Do you want to take a dead loss or fix the bill?”

“Everybody is all of a sudden getting weird,” he muttered, and made out a new bill.

At ten o’clock we were back aboard the Flush, up on the sun deck under hazy stars, in two unfolded deck chairs like old tourists on a cruise ship. The events of the long day had been more abrasive than I had realized while they were happening. I felt a leaden weariness of bone and spirit.

I whapped a mosquito which tasted the side of my neck and rolled him into a tiny moist gobbet of meat and dropped him out of his life onto the deck. In many ways the Hindu is right. All life in all forms is so terribly transient there is an innocence about all acts and functions of life. Death, icy and irrevocable, is the genuine definition of reality. In my unthinking reflex I was doubtless improving the mosquito breed. If, over a millennium, man whapped every side-of-the-neck biter, maybe the mosquito race would bite only neck napes.

“Mr. McGee?” the polite voice said from the dock. I got up and walked aft to look down. There was Jason with the Jesus face and wire glasses standing under the dock light in a T-shirt with the short sleeves torn off, ragged blue-jean shorts, and a pair of boat shoes so exquisitely and totally worn out it looked as though he had wrapped his feet neatly in rags.

“Hi, Jason.”

“Permission to come aboard?”

“Come on.”

He came up the side ladderway like a big swift cat. He accepted a can of beer from the cooler. He had something to say, but he seemed to be puzzling out how to say it. He sat on his heels, on those brown legs bulging with big muscles.

I finally had to give him some help. “Something bothering you?”

“Sort of. I mean maybe it isn’t any of my business. What I wouldn’t want is her having a worse time than she’s having already. Okay?”

“Her being Mrs. Birdsong.”

“She’s really a great person. If I could have got to the office quicker, maybe the two of us, you and me, we could have grabbed onto Cal and quieted him down. I know how he could get. Did you hit him with anything? Did you pick up anything and hit him on the head?”

“I sort of hurried him into the wall once. Ralph or Arthur rapped him on the head with a hickory stick, a couple of good licks.”

“Hey! That’s right. I forgot that part. Then maybe it was from them. Look, can you tell-not you but medical doctors-can they tell which knock on the head did the most damage?”

Meyer answered. “I don’t think so. Provided, of course, there’s no depressed fracture or anything like that. The brain is a jelly suspended in a lot of protection, and oftentimes the greatest damage happens in the area directly opposite the point of impact. This could be in the form of a subdural hematoma, a bleeding which gradually creates enough pressure inside the brain to suppress the vital functions.”

“Well, she visited him and then went out and got something to eat and went back and found a half dozen people working on him, but he was dead. There’s going to be an autopsy. She came back in terrible shape. They gave her some pills. She’s asleep now. A girl friend of Oliver’s is sitting with her. Bet you it was a heart attack, or maybe a stroke that didn’t have anything to do with getting hit on the head.”

My neck was still sprained from being popped on the forehead. I hadn’t enjoyed meeting the fellow, but had not wished him dead.

“Thanks for letting me know,” I said.

“It’s okay. I’ve been here the whole two years, you know. He was a pretty great person until he got to boozing real bad. And until just a little while ago, even though he got too drunk when he got drunk, he wouldn’t drink when there was something he had to do that was best done sober. Like when Jack Omaha would hire him to captain.”

“Jack Omaha!”

He turned toward me. He was slowly and carefully folding his empty beer can the way somebody might fold a Dixie cup, turning it into a smaller and smaller wad. “You knew Jack?” he said.

“No. But I heard he took off with a lot of money.”

“That’s what they say.”

“You don’t believe he did it?”

“No. But that’s because somebody told me he didn’t.”

“Who would that be?”

“Somebody that knew him better than I did.”

“Carrie?” I said.

I heard the air whoosh put of him. He stood up. “Who the hell are you?”

“Carrie’s friend. When she married Ben Milligan she honeymooned aboard this old barge.”

“Hey! I remember something about that. Sure. Have you got a great big shower stall aboard, and a big tub? And… uh…”

“A big bed? All three.”

He leaned his rear against the rail and stood with ankles crossed and arms folded.

“Cheez. That Ben came by a year ago. She was still living at the cottage then. She and Betty Joller and Joanna Freeler and some bird name of Flossie. How come she ever married him, I wouldn’t know.”

“Nor anybody else. It happens.”

“Mister America. Mister Biceps. He was in some kind of movie deal they were making up in Jax, probably an X movie. He came down to con some money off of Carrie. He’d done it before. She didn’t have any. He said he would hang around until she got some. Betty came over and got me. It was a Sunday afternoon. Mangrove Lane is right down the shoreline to the south of us. I got there and he was sprawled out in the living room. I told him it was time for him to get on his Yamaha and into his helmet and head north. So we went out into the side yard and he began jumping back and forth and yelling ‘Hah! Hah!’ and making chopping motions. He came toward me and I kept moving back. I picked up the rhythm of the way he was hopping, and when he was up in the air, or starting up, I stepped into him and hit him in the mouth so hard it pushed this middle knuckle back in, and the first thing that hit the sod was the nape of his neck. He jumped up with both hands on his mouth, yelling, ‘Not in the mouth. My God, not my mouth. Oh, God, my career!’ So the girls babied him a little and I stood around until he got on his bike and roared away. I haven’t seen him since. I don’t think Carrie saw him either before she got killed. Are you coming to the service tomorrow morning?”

“At eleven? Yes. The sister asked me.”

“She seems nice, that Susan. Carrie was too old for me. Maybe she wasn’t, but she thought she was, which is the same thing. We had some laughs. She was making it with Jack Omaha. I told her that was dead end, and she said, What the hell, everything is. And there’s not much answer to that, I guess.”

“Where did Omaha keep his boat?”

“Right here. There it is, tied up to that shoreline dock at the end there, past the office, over beyond the lights.”

I stood up. It was hard to see. “Beriram?”

“Right. Forty-six-foot with all the high-speed diesel you can use. All the extras. One hell of a lot of boat.”

“I can believe it. It’s one hell of a lot of price too.”

“You can get that one at a pretty good price right now. The bank wants off the hook on it. I understand they’ll take ninety-five cash.”

“They ought to get that with no trouble if it’s been maintained.”

“Two years old and clean.”

“Do you mean Omaha couldn’t run it himself?”

“No. He could run it. But you can’t fish and run it at the same time. When he got an urge to go billfishing, he’d get Cal lined up. He liked the edge of the Stream up beyond Grand Baharna. That’s a good run, so they’d take off way before daylight and come back in by midnight or later. It makes a long day. Sometimes Carrie would go along.”

“When was the last time?” Meyer asked. “Do you remember?”

“Only on account of the cops being here asking us. It was on a Tuesday, the fourteenth of… this month? Is it still May? Yes, the thirty-first. May is one of the months I always think should have thirty days. Yes, Jack Omaha took off with Cal about three in the morning, and they didn’t come back in until after midnight. They questioned Cal about it. Just the two of them alone? Where had they fished? How had Jack acted? What time did they get back? How was Jack dressed? What was he driving? And so on and so on.”

He stood up, shrugged, moved toward the ladderway.

“What time is it?” he asked. “I’ve got to go help Oliver lock the place. Anything you want, just ask either one of us.”

After he was gone I strolled over and looked at the Bertram. It was called Christina III. It looked very fit and very husky. When I went back, Meyer was in the lounge. He was tilted back in a chair, hands laced behind his thick neck, staring at the overhead and frowning.

“Now what?” I asked.

“Do you know how they locate invisible planets?”

“No. How do they do that, Professor?”

“Because the visible ones act in erratic and inexplicable fashion. Their orbits are… warped. So you apply gravitational theory and a little geometry of moving spheres and you say Aha, if there is a planetary body right there of such and such a mass and such and such an orbit, then all the random movements of the other planets become logical, even imperative.”

I sat on the yellow couch. “So what kind of mass and orbit are we looking for?”

“Something large, important, illegal, and profitable.”

“Involving a fast cruiser?”

“Possibly.”

“Okay. Sunken treasure or Jamaican grass, routed via the Bahamas.”

“Isn’t there a lot of cannabis coming into Florida?”

“All the way from Jax around to Fort Walton Beach. Yes. Based on what they’ve intercepted and what they think they’ve probably missed, it would be at least ten tons a week. From Colombia, Mexico, Jamaica, and maybe some other BIWI islands.”

“Big money?”

“Not as big as you read in the papers. Street value doesn’t mean a hell of a lot. It passes through a lot of hands. The biggest bite is in getting it into the country and into the hands of a distributor. That’s where you double your money, or a little better. Five thousand worth of goodquality, nicely cured Jamaican marijuana will go here for possibly twelve thousand. But if it is intercepted, they’ll call it a quarter-million street value. It has to go from distributor to big dealer to little dealer to pusher-user to user. Everybody bites.”

“How do you know all this?”

“What I don’t know, I make up.”

“Seriously, Travis.”

“Boo Brodey wanted me to come in with him on a run last year. He laid it all out, including the comparison with Prohibition and so on. I said, Thanks but no thanks.”

“Didn’t he get picked up?”

“He’s out again.”

“Did you disapprove?”

“Can’t you read me on that?”

Meyer chuckled. “I guess I can. You don’t like partnership ventures and middleman status. You don’t like large investments. You don’t like coming to the notice and attention of the law. You wouldn’t want anybody to have the kind of hold over you that Boo would have had. It’s not your idea of high adventure. It’s what the British would call a hole-and-corner affair. Tawdry. A gesture of defiance for the very young.”

“So why ask questions you can answer?”

“I guess I meant, Do you disapprove of a person using the weed?”

“Me? I think people should do whatever they want to do, provided they go to the trouble of informing themselves first of any possible problems. Once they know, then they can solve their own risk-reward ratios. Suppose somebody proved it does some kind of permanent damage. Okay. So the user has to figure it out if there is any point in his remaining in optimum condition for a minimum kind of existence. For me, it was relaxing, in a way, the couple of times I’ve had enough to feel it. But it gave me the giggles, warped my time sense, and made things too bright and hard-edged. Also it bent dimensions somehow. Buildings leaned just a little bit the wrong way. Rooms were not perfectly oblong any more. It’s a kind of sensual relaxation, but it gave me the uneasy feeling somebody could come up behind me and kill me and I would die distantly amused instead of scared witless.”

“I am trying to imagine you giggling.”

“I can still hear it.”

“What about it being sunken treasure, Travis?”

“I am thinking back to the money. How it was packaged. Hundreds on the bottom, then fifties, twenties, tens. Some had fives on top. Tied with white cotton string, in both directions. With an adding-machine tape tucked under the string. Bricks of ten thousand. Somebody very neat. It smacks of retail business, my friend. Think of it this way. Suppose you are taking in a lot of cash from various sources, and you use that cash to buy from several other sources, after removing your own share. Assume you do not want to change little ones into big ones at your friendly bank. Okay, if you put all the hundreds together, you have some thin little bricks to buy with. But at the other end you’ve got some great big stacks of little bills to add up to the same kind of round number. So you mix them up, and you have fairly manageable sizes.”

“Sounds less and less like doubloons,” Meyer said.

“Yes, it does.”

“When I get this pain right between my eyes it means I’ve done enough thinking for now-on a conscious level. Now the subconscious can go to work. Do you have the gut feeling Jack Omaha is dead?”

“Yes.”

“Then that makes the Christina III a very unlucky vessel.”

“Jack Omaha, Carrie Milligan, and Cal Birdsong.”

“And,” he said, “the invisible planetary body which warped the other orbits. Good night.” After I had puttered around aimlessly and had at last gone to bed, I found myself reliving the memory of Boo Brodey when he tried to recruit me. He’s big and red and abraded by life-by hard work and hard living, by small mercenary wars and thin predatory women. Yet there is something childlike about him. He paced up and down in front of me, his face knotted with anxiety and appeal, chunking his fist into his palm, saying, “Jesus, Trav, you know how I am. Somebody tells me what to do and when, it gets done. I work something out myself and it’s a disaster. Trav, we’re talking about the money tree. Honest to Christ, you wouldn’t believe it, the kind of money. Kids, weird little kids, are bringing in bags of grass right and left. Anything that’ll fly, that’s the way to do it. You can lease an airplane to fly up to Atlanta and back. Okay, you put it down on the deck and go to Jamaica and buy ten thousand worth and come back, and you got thirty thousand before the day is over. It’s coming in on boats and ships and everything, Trav. Come on! The narcs aren’t all that hard-nose about grass. They know they can’t keep it out, and a lot of them, they don’t know for sure it hurts anybody anyway, right? Come on in with me and help set it up. You know, the contacts and all. Help me out, dammit!”

When I told him I didn’t want in, he wanted me to set it all up for him. I could stay outside and get a piece of it in exchange for management skills. I said no, I didn’t want to go down that particular road. If you make it with grass, you find out that hash and coke are more portable and profitable. You kid yourself into the next step, and by the time they pick you up, your picture in the paper looks like some kind of degenerate, fangs and all. And all you can say is, gee, the other guys were doing it too.

If I were really going to do it, I would refit the Munequita for long-range work. Tune her for lowest gas consumption and put in bigger tanks. She’s already braced to bang through seas most runabouts can’t handle. Then I would…

Whoa, McGee. There is larceny in every heart, and you have more than your share. So forget how far it is across the Yucatan Straits, leaving from Key West.

Seven

IT WAS an overcast morning with almost no wind at all. The wide bay was glassy calm, the outlying headlands misted, looking farther away than they were.

There was a narrow, scrabbly, oyster-shell beach beside the cottage at 28 Mangrove Lane where Carrie Milligan had once lived. A narrow wooden dock extended twenty feet into the bay. It was still solid, just beginning to lean. It was good, I guessed, for another couple of years. Two old skiffs were high on the beach, overturned, nosing into the sea grapes.

Jason sat on the end of one of the skiffs. He wore a white shirt and white trousers. He had a big plantation straw hat shadowing his face. He was playing chords quite softly on a big guitar with a lot of ornate fretwork against the dark wood. The chords were related but did not become any recognizable song. They were in slow cadence, major and minor.

Meyer and I joined the group, standing a bit north of most of them, in the shade of a small gnarled water oak. I saw Harry Hascomb and the young man who had been counting stock in the warehouse. I saw Mrs. Jack Omaha, Gil from Gil’s Kitchen, Susan Dobrovsky, Frederick Van Harn, Oliver from the marina, Joanna from Superior Building Supplies, and a man it took me a few moments to place. He was Arthur, the younger of the two cops who had subdued Cal Birdsong.

There were seven young ladies in long pastel dresses. The dresses were not in any sense a matched set. They were all of different cut and style, but all long and all pastel. Susan wore a long white dress which was just enough too bigso that I suspected it was borrowed. Susan and the other girls all had armfuls of the lush Florida flowers of late springtime.

A young man stepped out of the group and turned and faced us. He had red hair to his shoulders and a curly red beard. He wore a sports jacket and plaid slacks.

In a resonant and penetrating voice he said, “We are here today to say good-by to our sister, Carrie.” The guitar music softened but continued. “She lived among us for a time. She touched our lives. She was an open person. She was not afraid of life or of herself. She was at home being Carrie, our sister. And we were at home with her, in love and trust and understanding. In her memory, each one of us here now most solemnly vows to be more sensitive to the needs of those who share our lives, to be more compassionate, to give that kind of understanding which does not concern itself with blame and guilt and retribution. In token of this pledge, and in symbol of our loss, we consign these flowers to the sea.”

He moved to the side. The guitar became louder. One by one the pastel girls walked out to the end of the dock and flung the armloads of blooms onto the gray and glassy bay. There were tear marks on their cheeks. The flowers spread and began, very slowly, to move outward and in a southerly direction with the current. It was a very simple and moving thing. I had the feeling of a greater loss for having so undervalued Carrie. I excused myself by saying I had really not known her very well. But that was what Red-beard had said, that we should be more sensitive to the needs of others-and more sensitive, I added, to their identities as well. If she had meant this much to these people, then I had slighted her value as a person.

The music trailed off and stopped. Jason stood up and bobbed his head to indicate that was all. The murmur of voices began. Susan went a little way down the beach and stood, watching the floating flowers.

I looked at the twenty or so people I did not know, and I realized anew that there is a new subculture in the world. These were mostly young working people. Their work was their concession to the necessities. Their off-work identities were contra-establishment. Perhaps this was the only effective answer to all the malaise and the restlessness and the disbelief in institutionalized life, to conform for the sake of earning the bread and then to step from the job into almost as much personal freedom as the commune person.

I realized Meyer was no longer at my elbow. I looked around and did not see him. Jason nodded to me and said, “Was it okay?”

“It was beautiful.”

“I figured if I just noodled around it would be better. If you play something, people start making the lyrics in their heads and they miss the other words. Robby did fine, I thought. He’s an architect. Cindy wanted to make it to the service here, but she’s still too shook.”

“She shouldn’t have even thought about it.”

“Well, she thought a lot of Carrie. When Cindy was sick last year, Carrie came over and straightened out the books. It took her a whole weekend to do it, the way Cal had screwed things up. Look, I think I ought to talk to Susan. You think it would be okay?”

“I think it would be fine.”

He moved off down the beach. Meyer came up to me and said, “There’s a hex nut on the bottom of the gas tank. The undercoat is off it on one of the surfaces, and the metal is shiny where the undercoat flaked off.”

I stared at him in disbelief. “With all these people around, you were damn fool enough to-”

“I was flipping my lucky silver dollar and catching it, like this. I dropped it and it hit the toe of my shoe and rolled under the Datsun. I didn’t get a good look or a long look.”

“Don’t try to be cute about these things.”

“Don’t try to be McGee, you mean?”

“Don’t get huffy. If you want to travel with the team, learn the ground rules. I’ve told you before. Don’t ever take a risk you don’t have to take, just to save time or inflate your ego.”

“Now wait a minute-”

“There are a lot of things you can tell me that I would never know or guess unless you told me. You have a lot of special information in your head. So have I in mine. My information can make you live longer. And better.”

“Better than what?” a girl asked. I turned. Joanna. Miss Freeler, recently of Superior Building Supplies. Dear friend of Harry Hascomb. Ex-friend. Slender girl with a delicate and lovely face, long fall of ginger-colored hair. Green eyes, slightly protruding and very challenging. The girl challenge, old as time.

“Live better than Harry is going to live for a while.”

“That wouldn’t be hard,” she said. “Bet your ass. Harry is going to have to give up a lot of goodies. I know you from the office yesterday, when I quit. I remember you because you’ve got weird eyes. And for other reasons too, I might add. I bet you hear that from all the girls. You know, you got eyes the color of gin. What’s your name?”

“McGee. And this is Meyer. Joanna Freeler.”

“Hello, Meyer,” she said. “Hello, McGee. What are you two dudes doing here at the memorial?”

“Friends of the deceased,” I said. “From Lauderdale.”

“Sure. That’s where she married that muscle bum. Why didn’t she marry you? Weren’t you available, McGee?”

“Weren’t. Aren’t. Won’t be.”

“Now you’re singing my song,” she said.

She was wearing a long orange dress. The color was not good with her coloring. She had thrown her flowers farther and spread them wider than any of the others.

“You seem to be in good spirits,” I said.

She clenched her jaw and glared up at me. “That’s a shitty thing to say, friend. I miss her like hell. And in one way or another, I’ll always miss her. Okay?”

“I didn’t mean anything by what I said.”

“Then apologize for letting your mouth run with your head turned off, McGee.”

“I do so hereby apologize.”

She hugged my arm and smiled and said to Meyer, “You run along, dearie. I have to ask this man something.”

Meyer said, “I’ll walk back to the boat.”

“You’ve got a boat here? At Westway? Hmm. A fast boat?”

“If you really press her, she’ll do seven or eight knots.”

“You a pilot? Like in an airplane?”

“No.”

“Come along. I just don’t like to say some kinds of things in front of two people. All right?”

She led me well away from the others, over to the far edge of the lot. One water oak had sent out a huge limb, parallel to the ground, the top of it almost as high as my shirt pocket. Joanna gave a little bounce and put her palms on the limb and floated up, turning in air to sit lightly. She patted the limb beside her. “Come into my tree, friend.”

I sat beside her. She took my hand and inspected it carefully, back and front.

“Hmm. You’ve had an active past.”

“You could have said that in front of Meyer.”

“It’s hard to say what I want to say in front of just one person. I mean it’s so easy for you to get the wrong idea. I’ll miss Carrie. But she is dead, right? And the world goes on. One thing I know from all this, maybe the same thing Carrie figured out, there’s got to be more to living than sitting on your butt forty hours a week in an office and getting laid once in a while by the joker who signs your paycheck. I could retire, maybe. If I play it right. But what I want is more interesting work. Like what Carrie was doing.”

“What was she doing?”

“Don’t try to get cute, McGee. Listen, I knew that girl. There’s four of us in the cottage now. Me and Betty Joller and Nat Weiss and Flossie Speck. So before she moved out and since, Carrie was supplying the cottage with free grass for her friends, like a paper bag this big half full. We must have two pounds left. Do I have to spell it out? What I wasn’t told, I can guess. So it all fell apart for you people. She went to Lauderdale. Now you are here to put it back together again, right? So this is a job application. I’m very smart and I know how to keep my mouth shut.”

“I wouldn’t say you know how to keep your mouth shut.”

“This one time I have to take the chance, or where am I? Outside, as usual.”

“Who do you think I represent?”

“You are sitting in my tree playing stupid. You look smart and rough. You’re in distribution after the crazy people bring it in. I want to be a crazy people because I need something weird to do, and the money is nice. I told Carrie she shouldn’t be involved, and here am I asking to get involved. What did happen to Jack?”

“Didn’t Carrie tell you that?”

“She said he got scared and probably grabbed his share and ran. But that doesn’t…”

“Doesn’t what?”

“Never mind. Skip it.”

“Did Harry know what was going on?”

“Cowboy Harry? He’s a jerk. How could he know what was going on? It takes him both hands to find his ass. Why did you come to see him anyway?”

“To talk to him about Carrie.”

“Why would you want to talk to him about Carrie?”

“You can keep your mouth shut?”

“You know it!”

“Just trying to get a line on who pushed Carrie in front of that truck.”

The color drained out of her face. She wiped her mouth and shuddered. “Come on, now!”

“She was killed. I guess you could call it an occupational hazard, right? If you want to accept that kind of risk, maybe we can find something for you.”

“But who… who…”

“The competition, probably.”

She looked down and plucked the orange dress away from her body. “I’m getting all hot and sticky. I better change. Don’t go away, huh? I want to think this over, okay?”

Joanna dropped lightly from the limb and went to the cottage, striding long, and disappeared inside. A lot of people had left. Some had gone into the cottage. Others were talking, by twos and threes. I saw Susan walking toward the Datsun, so I dropped down and got to the car just as she did. Her eyes were red, but she managed a smile.

“I think Carrie would have liked it,” she said.

“I’m sure she would. Yesterday I walked off with her rings. I forgot to give them to you. And I left them on the boat. We could go get them now.”

She frowned and shook her head. “There’s no hurry. I have to be here a few days anyway, Fred… Mr. Van Harn says.”

“Do you want me to go and pick up that package from Mr. Rucker?”

“Oh, no, thanks. I already talked to Betty about it, and she’s coming with me now and we’ll go over there before two o’clock. It’s perfectly all right, really. But thank you.”

A sturdy girl in a yellow dress came hurrying to the car, saying, “Sorry, Sue. I got to talking to somebody.”

“Betty, this is Travis McGee. Betty Joller.”

She had one of those plump pretty faces which go with wooden shoes and beer festivals. Her eyes were Dutch blue, and her smile was totally friendly and not the least bit provocative. “When I saw you standing with Meyer, I figured it had to be you,” she said. “Carrie told me once that the only really happy time she could remember was when you loaned her and Ben your houseboat for their honeymoon. We’re all going to miss her so much around here.”

They got in, and Susan hitched her white dress up above her knees and then backed smartly around and they left. At my elbow Joanna said, “Now that Susan is some kind of great package.”

“And Jason has his eyes on it.”

“I noticed that. She’s too young for you, chief.”

“So are you.”

She laughed so hard it bent her over. The laugh was silver bright under the shade trees, unfitting for the occasion. “Me? Me?” she gasped. “I’m the oldest person around anywhere.” She wore little salmon shorts and a soft gray top. She had wound her ginger hair into a pile atop her head and pinned it in place casually. Ends were escaping. It made her throat look very slender and vulnerable.

She looked around. “Where did you leave your wheels?”

“We walked over from the marina.”

“So I’ll walk back with you, okay?”

“Okay Joanna.”

“We haven’t made our deal yet.”

“Deal?”

She carried a small white canvas beach bag. She twirled it by its draw cord. “Keep playing dumb and I’ll brain you, honey.”

So we went out to the sidewalk and walked through sun and shade, past little frame houses and new little stores, to the marina. Jason was back at work. He was in his khaki shorts standing on the bow deck of a big Chriss, hosing it down, washing off the salt, and the new arrivals, a pair of small round white-haired people in bright boat clothes, stood sourly watching his every move. “Get that cleat too,” the man yelled. “The cleat!”

“Yessir,” said Jason the musician. “Yessir, sir.” Joanna was loudly enthusiastic about the below-decks spaces of the Busted Flush. While she was. trotting around, oh-ing and ah-ing, Meyer told me he had some errands. I gave him the car keys. I did not know if he had errands or a sudden attack of discretion.

I caught up with her in the head, standing in front of the big mirror, touching her hair, turning and looking back at herself over her shoulder. She saw me in the mirror and said, “This is really some kind of floating playpen. It’s funny. I keep feeling left out. I keep thinking that it isn’t right that all this has been going on without me. After all, I’m the best in the world. You didn’t know?”

“You hadn’t mentioned it before.”

“Don’t tell me you designed all this?”

“No. It was as is when I won this barge in a poker game.”

“Ah. Hence the name:”

“There was a Brazilian lady that went with it, but I wouldn’t let him bet her.”

“Are Brazilians so great?”

“I wouldn’t know. Anyway I kept the decor.”

She was smiling. Then suddenly she slumped her shoulders, shook her head, her face somber. “It’s so great to kid around, isn’t it? I guess the real reason I’m quitting the job is because it wouldn’t be the same there without Carrie. Can I have a beer?”

“Of course.”

We sat in the galley booth, facing each other across the Formica top. She was pensive, silent, unreadable.

Finally she said, “So it isn’t any game. So I don’t want in, thanks just the same. Sorry I bothered you.”

So I told her the truth about my relationship to Carrie. And why I was here with Meyer. She turned beet red and had to get up and pace around to control her restless embarrassment. It took me about five minutes to get the record straight. I left out the part about the money.

“You must have thought I’d lost my mind!”

“I decided you weren’t too tightly wrapped, kid.”

“You encouraged me, damn you!”

Finally she calmed down and sat down, sipped her beer, and said, “Okay, I can see why you think she was killed. The purse and the gas and so on. But why? She wasn’t into anything that rough. Everybody and his brother is hustling grass into Florida. There’s absolute tons of it coming in all the time. It’s about as risky as running a stop sign.”

“Did she tell you how it worked?”

“Not in so many words. It was no secret they used Jack’s cruiser. There is no way this coast can be policed. Too many small boats and little airplanes and all.”

“Didn’t anybody at the cottage ask Carrie where she got it?”

“Betty always did, and Carrie would say something different every time. Like she’d say they had a special on it at Quik-Chek. It was top quality, cured right. Jason says it’s the best he’s ever run into. It was fun, the four of us, Betty and me, Carrie and Floss. Betty got a little machine and made cigarettes. And we had the cookbook, too, and made those hash puppies. Like on an evening, there’d be eight or ten of us sitting around, and maybe Jason making music, and we’d get onto a real nice level. And there’d be good relaxed talk that made sense, not like when everybody is drinking and people get ugly or silly. They say now it can mess up having babies, and it can lower your resistance to colds and flu and infection and so on. So? Automobiles can kill you, and people don’t stop driving.”

“The imperatives aren’t the same.”

“The what aren’t what?”

“Excuse me. Let’s not get into a hard sell.”

“Are you opposed?”

“Joanna, I don’t know. A fellow who was pretty handy with a boat once said that anything you feel good after is moral. But that implies that the deed is unchanging and the doer is unchanging. What you feel good after one time, you feel rotten after the next. And it is difficult to know in advance. And morality shouldn’t be experimental, I don’t think. I find that the world is full of things which are unavoidable and which cloud my mind. When my mind is clouded, I am experiencing less. I may think it is more, if the mind is warped, but it is less, really. The mind looks inward, not outward. So I just… try to make sure there’s always somebody in the control room, somebody standing watch.”

“Somehow it sounds dull.”

“It isn’t.”

She wrapped her fingers around my wrist. “Okay, smart-ass. Do you think you’d feel good after me?”

“If the reasons are right, sure.”

“Is there more than one reason, friend?”

“The biggest and most important reason in the world is to be together with someone in a way that makes life a little less bleak and solitary and lonesome. To exchange the I for the We. In the biggest sense of the word, it’s cold outside. And kindness and affection and gentleness build a nice warm fire inside. That’s okay. But if you want to set some new international screwing record, or if you want to show off the busiest fastest hips in town, forget it.”

The fingers slackened their hold on my wrist and she pulled her hand back. Tears stood in her eyes. She smiled and shook her head and said, “No way McGee. Whatever it is you’re selling, I can’t afford it. I went that route once, and it stung. It stung a lot. If that’s the kind of dressing you want on the salad, eat elsewhere. I am a very good lay for the Harry Hascombs of the world, and I always feel good afterward, thanks.”

“Always?”

“Go to hell!” she said and got up. “All I am is your garden-variety man-eater. I like it. Go to hell!”

“To each his dagnab blue-eyed own.”

She smiled. “And I’ll always miss Walt Kelly too.” She held her hand out to me. “Friends? I didn’t exactly come here to set up a friendship. But it’ll have to do. God! I am starving… What have you got here?” She had opened the refrigerator. “Is that corned beef? Cheese. Where’s the bread? I have this terrible food engine inside me. I eat enough for three truckdrivers and I’m always hungry and I never gain one little ounce. I could give you bone bruises, dear.”

I sat and watched her make sandwiches. She was very deft, and she made a lot of them. She ate about twice as much as I ate. She ate with such enthusiasm it made her sweaty, even in the air conditioning. She ate with such a lusty, bright-eyed joy that I had the wistful wish to have played her game and bundled her into the sack five minutes after Meyer stepped off the boat. She was intensely alive, as vital and immediate as anyone I had met in a long time.

“How often did she bring the samples?”

“What? Oh, when we were about to run out. Her moving to that Fifteen Hundred place had something to do with the deal. She told me she was getting a free ride on the apartment. But she missed us.”

The phone rang. It startled both of us. I went into the lounge and answered it. It was Meyer. “About the autopsy on Birdsong, it was heart. Some kind of aneurysm. Thought you’d like to know. I hope I… haven’t disturbed you by phoning.”

“You can come back aboard any time.”

“Oh.”

“What’s this with the Oh?”

“Just Oh. Nothing complicated. Oh.”

She sauntered into the lounge and stretched out on the yellow couch, placing her second mug of milk on the coffee table. “This is truly some great boat.”

“What is Chris Omaha like?”

“Nobody can ever figure out how come Jack stayed with her so long. She’s dumb, loud, and greedy. Rotten to him and rotten to the kids. Ever since the kids got old enough to be sent off to school, they’ve been away. She likes to be alone in the house in case something wearing pants comes by to make a delivery or fix something. Jack caught her a couple of times. But leave her? No. Carrie thought for quite a while maybe he would leave Chris and marry her. I don’t know what the hold is. It was a kid marriage for them. Seventeen and eighteen they were. It finally got to be an arrangement, I guess. He could have Carrie, and she could have anybody who happened to come along.”

“Like Ready Freddy Van Harn?”

“Ready Freddy? Wow, you read him right. I’ll have to tell Floss what you called him. No, Fred is the lawyer for the business, and he’s Jack and Harry’s personal lawyer, and he’ll be handling the estate, what’s left, but he wouldn’t boff around with old Chris, not when he can tag the best there is.”

I recounted my reasons for contradicting her. She looked astonished. “What about that! What do you know? I guess old Chris snuck up on his blind side or something.”

“He was Carrie’s lawyer?”

“From being the lawyer for the business. When she wanted to make out a will so that Ben couldn’t get her savings or her car or anything like that, she asked Fred one day when he was in to see Harry about something, and he made some notes and drew up a will and had her come into the office and sign it. I guess he made himself the executor. That would be okay by Carrie. And Betty told me she’d warned Susan about Fred. Susan seems like such a nice kid. Fred even got to Betty one time. I guess it was sort of a challenge to him. Betty is sort of sexless, you know? She has all the equipment and she’s pretty but something’s left out. Fred got her a little bit bombed on wine and then he took her. It wasn’t exactly rape, but it was as close as it could get and still not be. She hates him. He really hurt her, because she’s built small, and that Fred has… well, all I can say is that you’d never know, looking at him, so kind of slender and girlish almost. And pretty. But he’s a bull. He’s huge. He’s so huge he’s sort of scary. And… he likes to hurt. I don’t like kinky things. I like it, you know, for fun. It doesn’t seem to be fun for him. Oh, he knows a lot of tricks and so forth. But it’s more like he read up on it in engineering school. Once was enough for me. He’s with you but he isn’t. He’s… I don’t know how to say it.”

“Remote?”

“Ri-i-ght! I think Fred is trying to score every girl in Bayside and surrounding area. He’s real hell on wives. Maybe that’s why he put Chris on his list. Men have tried to beat up on him for messing around, but he is just as quick and just as mean as a snake. He’s a good lawyer, but he’s not a very nice person. I don’t know how marriage is going to work out for him. He’s going to get married. It was in the paper. Jane Schermer. Very social and very very rich. It’s grove money from way back. He has some ranchland out near all her groves, lots of it, but nowhere near as big. The Van Harn family used to have money, but about the time Fred was in Stetson Law, his daddy shot himself and it turned out he was almost totally busted. It was something to do with letter stock. I don’t even know what that is. But that’s what they say. Something about pledging letter stock for bank loans, and him being the lawyer for the bank. Fred works hard. I think. he’s maybe made back a lot of money. Everybody says he does a good job. But I think that way down deep he’s a creepy person.”

“Bayside seems like a busy place.”

“It’s okay, I guess. I really don’t know whether I’ll stay around. I left once before and came back. Maybe I’ll come to Lauderdale and live on this boat with you for a while. Okay?”

“We’ll keep your name on file, Miss Freeler.”

“You are so nice to me.”

My alarm bell bonged as Meyer stepped aboard, onto the mat on the stern deck. He knocked and came in and smiled at pretty Joanna on the yellow couch. “I like to see healthy young girls drinking milk,” he said. She had set aside a couple of sandwiches for him, neatly packaged in Saran. She stirred herself and got up, yawning, and said she was going back to the cottage for a nap. I took her by the shoulders and turned her around and gave her a little push toward the staterooms. She trudged off, scuffing her heels, and when I looked in on her she was snoring, a large snare-drum sound for such a small lady.

I sat with Meyer while he ate at the booth in the galley.

“I tracked it down,” he said. “The place Carrie had her car serviced. It’s a big Shell station right across from the entrance to Junction Park. It was handy for her because she could leave her car there while she was working. It was in last Tuesday. They looked up the ticket. They changed the oil and the filter and put on new wiper blades, and filled the tank.”

“And if it was filled Tuesday, and she didn’t go on any trips…”

“She worked all day Tuesday and Wednesday.”

“Very nice work, Meyer.”

“Thank you.”

“About that planet theory of yours, how they find the invisible one by seeing what it does to the orbits of the others, I have a candidate for planet. One attorney by the name of Frederick Van Harn. He impinges on the lives of too many of the people we’re interested in.”

“Including Mrs. Birdsong.”

“Huh?”

“He was coming out of her motel unit when I drove in.”

“Oh, that’s just great. Anyway, he’s top priority. All we can find out. Right?”

“Yessir, sir.”

And despite my protestations that it wasn’t all that urgent, he headed on out again after reborrowing the car keys.

Eight

JOANNA WOKE Up at four and said a sleepy farewell and went tottering off. I wrote a note to Meyerand left it where he would see it. I locked the Flush and walked all the way to 1500 Seaway Boulevard, estimating it at a little less than two miles south of the marina. At first it was very hot, but then a quick thunderstorm came slamming in. I stepped over a hedge and took refuge under a tremendous old banyan. A small white dog yapped at me from a screened porch, some of his yapping drowned by thunder. A pale woman came out onto the porch to see why he was making such a fuss. Over the rain sound I yelled, “I’m trespassing!”

“You can trespass on the porch here if you want.”

“I’m terrified of the savage dog. Thanks anyway.”

She smiled and went back into the house.

When the rain stopped, mist rose from the pavement. The air was washed clean and was much cooler. I stepped along faster than before.

Fifteen Hundred was a jumble of villas and town houses, of joined and separate structures interconnected by arcades and roofed walkways. The layout established small courtyards of various sizes. It did allow for a maximum privacy of approach and departure, but at the expense of security. In a world where violence is ever less comprehensible and avoidable, peopleespecially the middle-aged and the old-settle more comfortably behind barred gates, locked lobbies, roving guard dogs. They seek to die in bed, of something gentle and merciful.

I roamed, looking for Walter J. Demos. His was number 60, the ground floor of a town house near the back of the property, looking out at the pool area. A pretty lady in jeans and work shirt and tousled hairdo opened the door and said, liltingly, “No vacancies, none at all; so sorry.” She started to close the door.

“I want to talk to Mr. Demos.”

“He isn’t even adding any names to the list, it’s so long now.” She had sweat beads of exertion on her forehead and upper lip. Behind her I could see a mop pail with a wringer fastened to it.

“I don’t want to live here.”

“Then you must be out of your tree. If it’s about something else, well, let me think. Mary Ferris was after him to do something about her disposer. I think he’ll be there by now. That’s Twenty-one. Go past the pool and through that arch at the right and it will be… the second? No, the third doorway to your right. Go up the stairs and come back toward the front of the building.”

Walter J. Demos wore gray coveralls and an engineer cap. The coveralls were wet-dark around his middle in a wide irregular band. He did indeed look something like a shorter broader Kojak, his face and jaw massive, almost acromegalic.

He showed me what he had in his hand. It looked like a tangled ball of dirty string.

“Do you know what this is? Can you guess?” he asked.

The woman giggled. She was plump and coy and underdressed.

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Miss Mary here had a lovely artichoke yesterday, and she put all the inedible parts of it into her disposer. Artichoke leaves, my friend, are made of string. And in a little while the string wound itself into a tangled mess and stopped the machinery.”

Mary giggled again and switched back and forth, chewing a knuckle, scuffing her sandaled foot.

She thanked him and he gave her the string to dispose of in a less damaging manner. He picked up his tin toolbox, and we left to walk slowly back toward his apartment.

“I could tell them all to call the repair people. I could spend all my time in the pool. But it would drive me quite mad, I think. I have to keep busy. That’s the way I am, Mr. McGee. And it saves my people money, which is increasingly important these days. Everyone chips in and helps whenever and wherever they can. We’re a family here, helping and protecting each other.”

“Meyer told me he got that impression.”

“Oh, then you must be the friend he mentioned. I chatted with him for just a few minutes, but he struck me as charming and highly intelligent. I like intelligent people. That’s the way I am.”

“Have you found out who trashed Carrie’s apartment?”

“What? Oh, no, we haven’t. And I doubt we ever will. No one resident here would ever do a thing like that.”

“Even though she was resented by the other… members of the family?”

He stopped and peered at me. “What would give you that idea?”

I was tempted to remind him of Meyer’s intelligence, but I thought I could make a little more mileage by using the dead lady, so I said, “Mrs. Milligan was quite aware of it.”

He grunted and we walked on, right to his door. The lady had stopped sweating. He took her hand in both of his. “Thank you so very much, Lillian. You know how much I appreciate it.”

She went smiling off, purse in hand. He closed the door and looked around. “Nice job,” he said to himself. “Very nice.” He turned to me and made a wry grimace. “I have to be so very careful. If one of them cleans up for me too often, the others get jealous. Please sit down. You were telling me that Carrie had some fantasy about resentment.”

“Purely a paranoid fantasy. She thought that because you put her at the head of the list and gave her the first empty apartment, the others resented her. She thought that because she was getting a rent-free ride, they resented her. She thought that because she didn’t care to mingle, they resented her. She would rather have stayed with her friends in the cottage at Mangrove Lane. Maybe you should have told the whole family that Carrie. wasn’t a very special and dear friend, but just part of the pot distribution system. Jack Omaha, Cal Birdsong, Carrie Milligan, and you.”

He was good. He stared at me. At first he chuckled and then he laughed and then he roared. He slapped his thighs and rocked back and forth and lost his breath. Finally he held his wrists out and, still choking, said, “Okay, officer. I’ll go quietly. You’ve got me.”

“Why the special treatment she got from you? Tell me so we can all laugh.”

He lost all traces of mirth. “You’re beginning to annoy me. It’s no business of yours, but I’ll tell you anyway. A friend of mine asked me to make the apartment available to Mrs. Milligan. Jack Omaha asked me. My books show the rent paid every month. She may have a free ride, but it wasn’t from me. Probably Jack felt that it would be more pleasant to have… more privacy and more access to the lady.”

I lifted my eyebrows and looked at him politely. “I’m beginning to annoy you, Mr. Demos?”

“Frankly, yes.”

There are a lot of choices in every instance. And it is easy to make a bad choice. A man will react badly to the promise of some unthinkable punishment. The musician will buckle at the thought of smashed hands. The choice cannot be made with the thought of taking any pleasure in the choice. It has to be businesslike, or it will not be convincing. This man was the benign daddy, the solid meaty big-skulled patriarch, full of such amiable wisdom and helpfulness that he would appeal to the little girl in any woman who might be still searching for poppa. A gregarious man. A sensualist. A skilled, successful, and unlikely womanizer who had built himself a profitable world teeming with prey. He was pleased with himself, and evidently still greedy.

“I’m thinking of alternate ways of annoying you, Mr. Demos.”

“What do you mean?”

“We have a specialist we could import. His nickname is Sixteen Weeks. He’s very bright about guessing just how much punishment a given person can endure and still recover. He can guarantee you sixteen weeks in the hospital, Walter. At your age you might not ever get about as well as you do now.”

His attempt at a smile was abortive. “That’s grotesque.”

“Or, if we decide to head in another direction, I’d turn the problems of disposition over to Meyer. He works things out so there isn’t any fuss. As you noted, he’s highly intelligent. We gave him the problems of Mr. Omaha, Mr. Birdsong, and Mrs. Milligan. He’d find something plausible for you. They could find you on the bottom of the pool some morning.”

I think he tried to smile again. It gave his mouth an odd look. “Are you quite mad? Why are you saying such terrible things? What do you want from me?”

Rhetoric, all by itself, is too abstract. It needs punctuation. Show and tell. I stood up, smiling. I moved slowly. He watched me with some agitation. I walked slowly around to the back of his chair. He leaned forward and craned his neck around to watch me. I knew he was wondering whether or not to get up out of the chair.

It takes a reasonable amount of precision. In the clavicle area, where the muscle webs of the trapezius and deltoid are thinned out, the descending brachial plexus, which includes a big ulnar and radial nerves to the arm, is close to the bone. I chopped down, a short swift smashing blow, and hit him just as he started to move, hit him on target, mashing the nerves against bone with the bone ridge of my knuckles.

Walter J. Demos screamed in a very aspirated hissy way and came floundering up out of the chair. His right arm hung dead. He clasped his right shoulder in his big left hand. He stared at me with bulging eyes and roared with pain. Tears ran down his face.

There was a flurried rapping at the door. “Walter?” a woman cried. “Are you all right? Walter?”

“Tell her to call the cops,” I suggested. “We can all sit around and talk about how much pot you moved out of this place.”

“Walter?” she yelled.

“Everything is fine, Edith,” he called. “Go away!” He sat down again and said, “You broke my shoulder!”

“It isn’t broken. It will be okay again in a week.”

“But I can’t move my arm. It’s numb.”

“The feeling will come back, Wally.”

“Nobody ever calls me Wally.”

“Except me. I can call you Wally, can’t I?”

“What do you want of me? Were they really killed? Really?”

“What we want is an established outlet in Bayside. Your previous source has dried up, Wally. Now tell me how you got into it and how you’ve been operating.”

He found a hanky with his left hand and patted his eyes and blew his nose. He rubbed his numb arm. He talked and talked and talked.

He had always purchased supplies for apartment repairs and redecorating from Superior. He became friendly with Jack Omaha and they would have coffee together at a diner near the industrial park, within walking distance. One day he told Omaha that a lot of his tenants had become ill from smoking grass adulterated with some unknown compound. Jack said that his personal supplier, his milkman, had recently been busted, and he was buying it at a gas station and paying too much. Omaha had taken a lot of his vacation time in Jamaica. Half joking, he had told Demos he was tempted to go get his own, but it wasn’t worth the risk unless he arranged to have a lot of it brought in, and he couldn’t see himself peddling it. Demos told Omaha that quite a bit could be absorbed at 1500 Seaway Boulevard, and some of his tenants could probably get rid of a lot more at the offices where they worked.

It wasn’t long before they had talked themselves into it. Omaha came back from Jamaica with guarantees, having talked to local hustlers named Little Bamboo, Popeye, Hitler, John Wayne, and so on.

At that point it was decided that Walter would be better off if he did not know any of the details of the smuggling operation, and if Omaha did not know a thing about his wholesale operation. The first shipments were small. As they got bigger, Demos brought in his most trusted tenants and it became a cottage industry, taking the bulk and weighing, measuring, and bagging it for the smaller wholesalers and the retail trade.

“We thought we’d be able to avoid getting mixed up with any-excuse the expression-hoodlums. We didn’t see that there was anything terribly sinister about it. We were filling a demand at a fair price. We tried to cut our risks. Bringing Carrie here to live was part of the riskcutting. She’d tip me in advance as to when a shipment would be coming in. I’d get my people ready. On those nights she’d be driving one of the little panel trucks from Superior instead of her own car. When it was unloaded, checked, and weighed, I’d give her the money. We’d work all night. I wanted it all out of here by the following morning. Except personal supplies, of course.”

“When was the last shipment?”

He looked dispirited. He nursed his shoulder.

He sighed. I could feel a certain satisfaction in having diagnosed him so precisely. But with satisfaction there was also regret. Demos had been full of himself, full of a big-bellied confidence, sure of his place in his world. But in had come the pale-eyed stranger who had said terrifying things and who had sickened him with pain. His world had become fragile all of a sudden. His heart was heavy. He was not a bad man, everything considered. He had been a jolly sly man, a manipulator, a greedy chap, overconfident. He had changed.

“Do you want me to annoy you some more, Wally?”

“No! No, I was trying to remember exactly. A Tuesday night. That would make it May fourteenth. Yes. I can’t remember the exact time, but it was before midnight.”

“How much was there?”

“An average shipment. Ten sacks, I think. Forty kilos each. Over eight hundred and fifty pounds. I think I gave her about ninety thousand dollars.”

He described, by request, the way the money was wrapped. It fit the way it had been packaged when Carrie gave it to me. The adding-machine tape was from his office machine. He handled the money, figuring the commissions to his peddlers.

I pressed him to find out how well he had done. He was evasive. In the beginning he had plowed everything back into increasing the shipments. He guessed Jack Omaha was doing the same. They were on a cash-and-carry basis with each other. When they got to maximum weight coming in, he had started to skim, and he guessed that Omaha had started too. He said he was having a problem legitimizing the cash, trying to work it out in such a way that he could apply it to the outstanding mortgages on Fifteen Hundred. He guessed that probably Jack Omaha was having the same problem, but he hadn’t discussed it with him. He started to ask me about Jack Omaha and changed his mind. He didn’t want to know anything about Omaha. Or Carrie.

I asked to see Carrie’s apartment. He said that a Miss Joller and a Miss Dobrovsky, Carrie’s sister, had gone through everything and packed up some things for shipment to New Jersey, and had called Goodwill to come pick up the rest. It had been cleaned and the new tenant was moving in tomorrow morning. So there was nothing to see.

He said he had a headache and would like to lie down. I told him we had some more ground to cover first. I asked him what Carrie did with the money.

He said he had the impression she took it down to Superior and put it in the safe. It seemed logical that she would have some safe place to put it.

“What do you want from me?” he asked again.

“You have a nice operation, Wally. It’s cleaner than some loft or old warehouse or a trailer parked in the woods. And you have those nice clean little clerks and bank people doing the pushing and being very careful because they don’t want to mess up this great life-style you created for them. I don’t have to put you out of business because you’re already retired. You’ve got no supply, right? Do you know what I’m going to recommend? I’m going to say you should be our exclusive distributor in Bayside. How about that?”

I couldn’t detect any genuine enthusiasm in his response.

“What does… it entail?”

“We’ll guarantee top quality. We’ll guarantee no hassling by the law. We’ll expect you to absorb, say, a ton a month, cash on the line, half again what you were paying Omaha. In time we’ll have you broaden the line. Coke and hash.”

“Oh, I just couldn’t handle that, Mr. McGee. I really couldn’t. That quantity and price… This has been just a small operation. An amateur thing. You know. I just couldn’t…”

I stood up, smiling at him. “It’s all settled.”

“Don’t I have any choice?”

“Choice? Of course! You stay right here and hang onto that cash, because when we make a delivery, you have to be able to pay. You have to accept what we send you. Don’t try to look for another supply source. You just wait. If you want to fuss and bob and weave and make trouble, that’s your choice: If so we’ll kill you and make our deal with whoever takes over this place. It might be a couple of months before we set you up as a distributor, Wally. Hang in there.”

He didn’t move. I let myself out. I was a little depressed by my own childishness. It was a fair assumption it could work exactly as I had outlined it to Demos. The contact would probably be. a lot less melodramatic than I had made it. Actually the setup would probably not appeal. It was too unusual. Hoodlums are the true conservatives. When you are winning, never change the dice. Distribution would be limited to the candystore, horse-room, bartender, cocktail-waitress, coin-machine, call-girl circuits. Demos’s arrangement was too fancy and made too much sense.

I took a small detour to go around by the pool. The after-work residents crowded the pool area. They made a youngish, attractive throng in their brown hides and resort colors. The scene looked like a commercial for swimming pools.

They made gay little cries of glee and fun. A game of water tag was in progress.

Wally’s Paradise. There was one thing wrong with it, and that was what probably created the slightly frantic gaiety. They all loved it here. They were all going to stay. They were going to obey all the rules, and pay the rent, and stay and stay and stay.

It was a life-style designed for the young. Twenty years from now it was going to look a lot less graceful and productive. Unless all leases were canceled at age thirty-five, and your family throws you out. It was a pretty problem for Wally, and a dreadful one for his tenants.

I skirted the jolly crowd and walked back to the marina. I needed the long walk in order to sort out everything I had learned from Walter Demos and fit it into the facts and inferences I had acquired before chatting with him.

Nine

THE DAY was darkening prematurely by the time I got back to the marina. As I passed the office there was a bright blue click of lightning, a white dazzle, and an enormous crash of thunder. I ran through the first heavy drops and boarded the Flush…

It was still locked, the security system still operative. Meyer was not back yet. My note to him was still where I had left it. He arrived, soaking wet, ten minutes later.

After he had changed, we sat in the lounge and exchanged information.

“Frederick Van Harn is a very impressive young man,” Meyer told me. “In a very short time he has built up a very wide-ranging and profitable practice of law. He has been pulling together the shattered remnants of the Democratic Party in this county. He will very probably run for the state legislature and very probably make it, after he marries Jane Schermer. He Uncle Jake is the power and money behind the party. Van Harn can speak very persuasively in public. A lot of people don’t care for him personally, but they have a grudging respect for the way he came back and started building a career right on the top of the ruin his father made of his life. About two years ago Van Harn bought the Carpenter ranch twelve miles west of town. The Schermers live out that way. Jane has extensive grove land out there.”

“From what Joanna said, I’d think his reputation as a womanizer would get in the way of his electioneering.”

“The general feeling around the area seems to be that he has a way with the ladies, but he’ll settle down after he marries Jane. It isn’t doing him any harm that I could see. And I spent my time drinking beer in a place across from the courthouse. Bail bondsmen. An investigator for the state’s attorney. Bartender. A lady from the tax office. There was just one questionable area that turned up.”

“Such as.”

“Gossip. About money. It just seems to the spectators that Freddy has bought too much too fast. They wonder if maybe Freddy’s father killed himself because he couldn’t avoid being caught, but left a stash of cash around somewhere. They say the ranch he bought is twelve hundred acres, high and dry. It had to be at least a million one, even without the ranch house and the man-made lake and the airstrip and hangar. So even if he made out well in the law, how could he pay his taxes and still have enough left over for his lifestyle? He’s about thirty years old, and he’s been at it here just six years, but he started slow and small.”

“Did you get any information on how well his father lived?”

“Oh, very well, apparently. Cars, boats, hunting lodges, women.”

“You’ve come back with a lot.”

Meyer smiled. “It’s a cozy bar. The conversation was general. Everybody joined in. Freddy has charisma. He’s one of the people that other people like to talk about. So it was easy. Besides, due to constant pressure from you, I’m getting better at being a sneak.”

“That isn’t a word I would have chosen.”

“Once you face up to reality, everything is easier.”

From time to time the rain came down with such a roar we couldn’t hear each other. Wind buffeted the Flush, thudding her against the fenders I had put out and made fast to the pilings. Then the rain steadied down into a hard, continuing downpour. I opened two cans of chili, and Meyer doctored the brew with some chopped hot pickled peppers and some pepper seeds. He does not approve of chili unless the tears are running down his cheeks while he eats. His specialty, Meyer’s Superior Cocktail Dip, is made with dry Chinese mustard moistened to the proper consistency with Tabasco sauce. The unsuspecting have been known to leap four feet straight up into the air after scooping up a tiny portion on a potato chip. Strong men have come down running and gone right through the wall when they missed the open doorway.

It was a good night to stay aboard. It was a good night to conjecture, to try various possible patterns of human behavior and see how well they fit, much like kids in the attic trying on old uniforms, wearing old medals.

I got out charts of the Caribbean and worked out alternate routes from Bayside to Kingston and to Montego Bay. It was easier to route back in pre-Castro days. (Maybe everything was easier.) I made it 650, if you were a straight crow. But avoiding Fidel’s air space with enough of a margin of comfort made it 1,000 miles. No great problem for the huskier variety of private aircraft, provided fuel was available at the Jamaica end.

So add in the Bertram. From predawn to after dark would give you, say sixteen hours. Allowing for variations in wind and weather and the size of the seas, call it an outside distance of 120 or 130 out and the same back. That would also allow some time at the far end, for rendezvous.

As I had to start somewhere, I picked 220 mph for the aircraft cruising speed. Give it an hour at the far end for gassing and loading. Ten hours would do it. Leave in daylight, return by daylight. Okay, so why push the boat so hard? Probably two reasons. First, because the seas close to Florida are so full of small craft, you have to go a long way to get out of the traffic. Second, once you are in open empty water, you are too hard to find from the air. So you have to head for some distinctive land mass that the aircraft can find without too much trouble.

I drew a 130-mile half circle on the chart, with the point of the compass at Bayside. Of the areas included, I was willing to vote for the north side of Grand Bahama, over away from the folks and the casinos, where the water is tricky. Big stuff goes way north to come around into the Tongue of the Ocean. Little stuff stays inside, south of Grand Bahama. If they picked a tiny island off the north shore, a pilot could orient himself by the configuration of Grand Bahama, head for the tiny island, and the rendezvous point could be, for example, a mile north of that crumb of land.

If they had a source in the Bahamas for the Jamaican weed, then I was wrong. But that was not likely. Too much risk and too low a margin.

And our Freddy Van Harn had an airstrip and a hangar. And he was Jack Omaha’s lawyer. Chris Omaha’s lawyer. Lawyer for Superior. Lawyer for Carrie, and Susan, and the marina.

“The invisible mass,” Meyer said, “distorting the orbits.”

“Distorting the orbits, or removing the planets?”

“But why?” Meyer asked.

“You know, that’s really a rotten question.”

“It has to be answered. Otherwise there’s nothing.”

“Let’s find out first if he has an airplane.”

“How?”

“The direct approach. Let’s go look. Very very early tomorrow.”

Somebody came hurrying out of the rain and boarded the Flush. We both heard the warning bell. I snapped on the aft floods, and through the rain curtain we saw Joanna scuttle close to the door for shelter. She was holding a package.

I let her in. She was one very damp lady. “Hey!” she said. “This is such a rotten Saturday night, all things considered, I decided we ought to have some kind of celebration. Okay?” She turned and put her package on the table, her back to me. “And it just so happens-”