Bright Orange For The Shroud

I continued south, past Big Marco Pass, and put on dark glasses against the increasing glare. I have ample pigment in my hide, but a short supply in the iris. Pale eyes are a handicap in the tropics. I passed what was Collier City once upon a time, then cut inside around Caxambas. The dozers were working even on a Sunday morning, orange beetles making expensive homesites upon the dizzy heights of the tallest land south of Immokalee-bluffs all of fifty and sixty feet above sea level. I checked my chart, went around the indicated islands, and came in view of the mild and quiet clutter of Goodland, houses, trailers, cottages, shacks spread without plan along the protected inner shore, beyond a narrow beach of dark sand and rock and shell.

I cut to idle and went pooting in toward a rickety gas dock. Beyond it was an improvised boat yard with so many pieces of elderly hull scattered around the area, it looked as if they had spent years trying to build a boat by trial and error and hadn’t made it yet.

I tied up. The pumps were padlocked. A gnarled old party sat mending a gill net with hands like mangrove roots. “Do any good?” he asked.

“All I saw was bonita outside. Didn’t mess with them.”

He looked at the sky, spat. “Won’t be much now till near sundown. Big snook came in right under this here dock last night, popping loud as a man slapping his hands. Joe Bradley, he got one upwards of eighteen pound.”

“That’s a good snook.”

“If’n you don’t know how it used to be around these parts. You want gas? Stecker don’t unlock till ten Sundays.”

“There’s a man here I was told to look up. Will my gear be okay if I leave it right there?”

“Sure. Who you looking for?”

“A man named Waxwell.”

He grunted, pulled a knot tight, spat again. “There’s Waxwells spread all the way from here to Forty Mile Bend. There’s Waxwells in Everglades City Copeland, Ochopee, and, far as I know, a couple way up to La Belle. When they breed it’s always boy babies, and they breed frequent.”

“Boone Waxwell?”

His grin was broad, showing more gum than teeth. “Now that one is a Goodland Waxwell, and he could be to his place, which isn’t too likely of a Sunday morning, and if he is at his place they’s a good chance he got a ladyfriend visiting, and if he’s there and he don’t, it’s still a time of day he could get mean about anybody coming to visit. Come to think on it, there isn’t anything he won’t get mean about, one time or another.”

“I won’t let him hurt my feelings.”

“You look of a size to temper him down some. But be careful on one thing, or size won’t do you no good atall. What he does, he comes smiling up, nice as pie, gets close enough and kicks a man’s kneecap off, then settles down to stomping him good. A few times he’s done it so good, he’s had to go way back into the Park until things quieted down. A couple times everybody thought we’d be rid of him for a few years, but the most it ever turned out was ninety days the county give him. He prowls four counties in that fancy car he’s got now, but around here he keeps to hisself, and that suits everybody just fine.”

“I’m grateful to you. How do I find his place?”

“Go out to the hardtop and go down that way to the end where it curves around to come back on itself, and on the curve two dirt roads slant off, and his is the one furthest from the shore line, and he’s maybe a mile back there, little more than a mile and a half all told. Only place on that road.”

I didn’t see the cottage until I came around the last bend in the shell road, and then it was visible between the trees, a hundred and fifty feet away. Once it had been yellow with white trim, but now most of it was weathered gray, the boards warped and pulping loose. The shingled roof was swaybacked, the yard overgrown. But a shiny television antenna glinted high above it, outlined against the blue sky. A mockingbird sat atop it, rocking with effort as he created melodic patterns.

A big Land Rover, new but caked with dried mud, was parked by a shed at the side. A large, handsome lapstrake inboard launch sat strapped on a heavy duty boat trailer. Parked at an angle, and almost against the rungs of the sagging porch, was a white Lincoln Continental four-door convertible, top up, the current model, dusty, with a rear fender bashed, taillights broken on that side. The collection of hardware was as if a very large child had been giving himself a happy Christmas. The closer I got, the more signs of neglect I saw. I went and looked into the skiff. It was loaded with extras, including one of the better brands of transistorized ship-to-shore units. But birds had dappled the royal blue plastic of the seats, and there was enough dirty rainwater aboard to fill the bilge and be visible above the floorboards.

I couldn’t imagine Boo Waxwell having much of a credit rating. So I could estimate at least twenty-five thousand dollars’ worth of toys in his yard. And guess there would be more in the house. Kids with lots of toys neglect them.

The mockingbird yelled, and insects shrilled, underlining the morning silence. I broke it up by facing the front door from thirty feet away, and yelling, “Waxwell! Yo! Boone Waxwell!”

In a few moments I heard some thumping around inside, saw a vague face through a dingy window. Then the door opened and a man came out onto the porch. He wore dirty khaki pants. He was barefoot, bare to the waist. Glossy black curly hair, dense black mat of hair on his chest.

Blue eyes. Sallow face. Tattoo as Arthur had described it. But Arthur’s description hadn’t caught the essence of the man. Perhaps because Arthur wouldn’t know what to call it. Waxwell had good wads of muscle on his shoulders. His waist had thickened and was beginning to soften. In posture, expression, impact, he had that stud look, that curiously theatrical blend of brutality and irony. Bogart, Mitchum, Gable, Flynn-the same flavor was there, a seedy, indolent brutality, a wisdom of the flesh. Women, sensing exactly what he was, and knowing how casually they would be used, would yet accept him, saying yes on a basis so primitive they could neither identify it nor resist it.

He carried a shotgun as one might carry a pistol, barrel pointing at the porch boards a few feet ahead of his bare toes.

“Who the hell are you, buster boy?”

“I want to have a little talk with you, Waxwell.”

“Now int that right fine?” He lifted the muzzle slightly. “Git on off my land or I’ll blow a foot off you and tote you off.”

And unless I could come up with something to attract his attention, that was just as far as I was going to get. You have to take your chances without much time to think. I knew he could check. But somehow I could not imagine Waxwell being very close to the lawyer. Or trusting him. Or trusting anyone.

“Crane Watts said maybe you could help me out, Boo.”

He stared at me with a mild, faked astonishment. “Now int he some lawyer fella over to Naples?”

“Oh, come off it, for crissake! I’m trying to line something up, and maybe there’s some room for you too, like the last time. The same kind of help. You understand. But this time, maybe nobody takes any of the money back to Tampa. We can use you, and we can use the same woman, I think. Watts said you’d know how to get in touch with her.”

Earnest bewilderment, “Mought be some other Waxwell you want. You makin‘ no sense to me noways, buster boy. You stay right where you are, and I come back out and we talk on it some.”

He went into the house. I heard him talking to someone, then heard a faint female response. He came back smiling, buttoning his shirt, shoes on, and a straw hat in cowboy shape stuck on the back of his curly head. He had indeed a merry smile, and he stuck his hand out when he was six feet from me. As I took it, I saw the first flick of what the old man had warned me about, and I jumped to the side. The unexpected miss swung his heavy right shoe as high as a chorus girl kick, and at its apex, I chopped down across his throat with my left forearm, driving him down to hit the ground on his shoulders with a mighty, bone rattling thud.

He stared up at me in purest astonishment, and then he began to laugh. It was an infectious laugh, full of delight. “Man, man,” he gasped, “you as rough and quick as the business end of an alligator gar. Taught ol Boo a Sunday school lesson.” He started to get up, and his face twisted. He groaned. “Think you bust somethin‘. He’p me up.”

He put his hand up. I took it. He swung his heels up into my belly and kicked me back over his head, and I had enough sense, at least, not to hang on and let the leverage slam me into the ground. I hit rolling, and kept rolling; and even so his heel stomped the ground an inch from my ear before I rolled under his trailered boat.

As I straightened up on the far side, he came running at me around the stern of the boat. He was a very cat-quick and deadly fellow, and he bulled me back against the lapstrake hull, screwed his heels into the ground, and began throwing big hooks with each fist, just as fast as he could swing. When they do that, it is best to try to ride it out. It is better than being bold and catching one. My defensive attitude gave him confidence.

And, at best, I do not impress. I am a rawboned gangler, with a look of elbows and awkwardness. But the left shoulder is curled comfortingly around the jaw, and the right forearm stays high enough. And the best way to catch the rhythm is to keep an unfocussed stare on the other man’s belly. Then you can roll and ride with it, and still be prepared to turn a thigh into the optimistic knee.

He hammered away at my arms, elbows, shoulders, and my swaying crouch kept me within easy range. He got in one dandy under the short ribs, and one over the left ear that rang woodland bells. He matched each effort with a hard explosive snuff, and finally as they began to come in with less snap and at a slower pace, he seemed to realize he was doing very little damage. So he tried to change his style from alley to club fighter, moving back a little, trying the unfamiliar jab, hoping to cross with the right.

But I took him down a little alley of my own. Queensberry, even when it is by way of Graziano, is bad on the knuckle bones. And that is what makes the TV gladiators so hilarious. Just one of those wild smacks in the jawbones would have the hero nestling his splintered paw between his thighs, and making little damp cries of anguish. So, half-turning, crouching, I slumped a little to make him think he’d worn me down. It suckered him into pulling in again.

I came down hard on his instep and, with my hands locked, brought my right elbow up under his chops. In a continuation of the same motion, unlocking my hands, I turned toward him, whipping him across the eyes with an open backhand. Unexpected agonies in unexpected places in very rapid sequence can give a man the demoralizing feeling he has stumbled into a milling machine. I thumbed him in the throat socket, gave him a homemade thunderclap with an open slap on the ear, hooked him, deeply just under the belt buckle-the only traditional blow in my brief routine, and as he bent, I clapped onto his wrist, turned it up between his shoulder blades, and ran him two steps into the side of the boat. His head boomed it like a jungle drum and he dropped loose, made an instinctive effort to come up, then went loose again and stayed down, sleepy cheek on the damp earth by a trailer wheel.

As I fingered tender areas, appraising damage, and feeling pleasantly loose and limber and fit, I heard high heels on the porch. I turned and saw a girl put a giant, white purse and a white cardigan on the top step, then come across the scruffy dooryard, tilting along on the high heels of soiled white shoes. She wore a sheer pale yellow blouse, her bra visible through it, and a tight green skirt in a very vivid and unpleasant shade. She looked like a recruit from that drugstore group. Fifteen, I imagined. Certainly not over sixteen. Still padded with baby fat. Wide soft spread of hips, premature heft of breasts, little fat roll around the top of the waist-tight skirt. A round dumpling face, child-pretty, and a puffy little mouth, freshly reddened. She stared steadily at Waxwell as she approached, and she continued combing her flaxen hair with a bright red comb, guiding the strokes with her other hand. She stopped close to me, looking down at him. Her child-skin was so incredibly fine that even at close range in the morning light I could see no lexture or grain. I could hear the whispery crackle as she pulled the comb down through that straight, healthy blonde hair.

“Done me a favor if ‘n you kilt him,” she said in a thin childish voice.

“There he is. Finish the job.” Still combing, shifting to the other side, she looked up at me, head tilted. I had expected girl-eyes as vulnerable as the rest of her. These hazel eyes were old and cold, and with a little twist of recognition I remembered the wise old eyes of the urchins of Pusan, the eyes which remained unchanged by the appealing, begging, belly-empty smiles they gave the G.I.‘s.

“Could might do jus that some time,” she said. “Or somebody will. Onliest way I could get stopped from coming on over here. Hah! He jus three month from my Pa’s age. But you don’t kill off Waxwells. It comes out the other way around.”

Boone Waxwell grunted and slowly worked himself into a sitting position, head between his knees, hands tenderly holding the top of his head. He peered up at us through lashes I had not noticed before, dense and black and girlishly long.

“Look, I’m going to be going along now, hear?” the girl said.

“So you go long, Cindy.”

She stared down at him, shrugged, started back toward her purse and sweater.

She stopped halfway and called back to me. “Mister, he’ll be thinkin on some way to bust you up when you least expeck.”

“Ain’t going to work on this old boy. Get on home, girl,” he said.

Waxwell pulled himself up, leaning against the boat. He shook his head, put a finger in his ear and wiggled it. “You deefed me up on this side, like a little waterfall inside. And husked up my voice box. Some kind of that judo?”

“The home study course from Monkey Ward, Boo.”

Cindy creaked the shed door open and went in and wheeled out a red and white Vespa scooter. She rested it on the brace, opened the package box, put her big purse and sweater inside, took out a white scarf and carefully turbanned her hair. She did not look toward us. She took the white shoes off and put them in the compartment. She jacked down on the starter and, with it running in neutral, tucked the brace up, hitched the green skirt halfway up the heavy white meat of her thighs, pushed it off and slid aboard, shifting into forward. She wobbled a little, then straightened as it increased its snoring sound, and went off through the sunshine down the shell road, the drone hanging in the air after she was gone, then fading out.

“Little young for you, isn’t she?”

“The man says they big enough, they old enough. I give her the loan of that scooter bug. Cindy, she’s my nearby girl this year. A nearby girl is when it’s too damn much trouble to go after anything else. She lives just over this end of Marco Village. I can swing by that shacky old place and give a long, a short and a long on the car horn, and have me time to come back home here and get settled down, and then I hear that scooter bug like a hornet coming through the night, and she says she won’t never again come when I honk for her, but ever time she comes on in pantin and blowin like she run the whole way stead of ridin.”

“Why don’t her folks stop her?”

He gave me that warm engaging grin, and a broad wink. “Maybe ten years ago it was, Cindy’s daddy, Clete Ingerfeldt, him and me had a little talk about Clete’s missus, and I pure liked to whip the ass clear off him. He got such a strong memory of it, I even say hello to him, his chin gets all spitty. I tell you, fat stuff got the hang of it a lot better than her old lady ever did.” He gave me a stare of amazed innocence. “You come way out here to find out about my love life?”

“I came out here to talk about making some money. Like the money you made off Arthur Wilkinson.”

“Now I don’t recall we made a dime. If that deal went through, we were fixing to make out good. But all we ever got back was the money we put in, less the expense money that come off the top.”

“All of a sudden, Boo, your diction improves.”

He grinned. “Sometimes I had to go away for a spell. Got me exposed to the high and mighty. Got me some college women to learn me.”

“If you give me another chance, I’ll learn you too. It’s a promise. If you get tricky one more time, I’m going to give you a strong memory like you gave Cindy’s father. You’re going to totter around like a very old man for a very long time.”

He studied me carefully. “Lord God, you got a size on you. I shoulda looked more careful to start. From those wrists, you’ll go twenty pound more than I guessed. First time I been whipped in four years. But I ain’t Clete Ingerfeldt. You could bust half the bones I got, and Yd put my mind on mending up and coming after you, and you better remember it, and knowing I couldn’t take you even, I’d take you any ways seems safe, take you way up Lostman’s River and stuff you tinder the red mangrove roots for crab food, and it wouldn’t be the first time I took care of some little problem that way.” There was no bluff in it. It was an absolutely cold and factual statement.

“Then I’ll put it another way, Boo. If you try something, and it doesn’t work, I’ll make sure you never get well enough to even get in and out of a boat.”

I watched him, saw the flicker of appraisal in his blue eyes, half hooded by those long lashes. He hooked his thumbs over his belt. Then, with that flashing speed which can come only from long and intensive practice, he snapped his brass belt buckle loose, yanked it free, exposing the bright limber blade holstered within the belt leather. The wrist snap came before I could hope to reach him. The blade chunked into the damp earth an inch from the outside of my left shoe, driving so deeply that only the brass buckle showed, as if balanced on end. He leaned against the boat with a lazy grin. I bent, put a finger in the buckle, pulled the blade free, wiped the earth from it between thumb and finger. The hilt was weighted to give it a midway balance point. I handed it to him. He fed it back into the scabbard, clinched the belt.

“What’s the message that get through to you, friend?” he asked.

“That I can stop watching you, because you’d just as soon talk about money.”

“Let’s get on in the house. I’m dry as a sandy beach for sure.”

He had more toys in the house. A big rack of new sporting arms, small rust spots beginning to fleck the bluing. Color television. Expensive camping and fishing gear stacked carelessly in corners. In the kitchen he had a hotel size refrigerator, its new enamel dappled with dark fingermarks, its innards stacked full of premium beer. I saw cases of very good liquor in a kitchen corner.

Everything not new was battered and squalid. I looked in the door of the tiny bedroom. The double bed was a rumpled tangle of soiled sheets marked in a leopard pattern. They looked like silk. The pattern seemed apt. The bedroom had the pungent odors of a predator’s cage, a cell for the cat carnivore.

We drank beer in silence and then he said in grotesque host-like apology, “I was fixin to keep fat stuff out here to hoe this place out today, but it slipped clean right out of my mind. I guess it’ll be until after exam week fore she can get to it. I don’t want to mess up her schooling.”

I sat on a chair with a broken arm. “Haven’t they ever heard of statutory rape around here?”

“First somebody has to complain, friend. What the hell is your name?” I told him. He repeated it aloud. “You in some line of work?”

“Whatever happens to come along.”

“That’s the best kind they is, McGee. But sometimes you work with somebody who like to mess things up because they get jumpy for no reason at all. Then you don’t want to work with them again. And maybe they do damn fool things like sending somebody around who could maybe be the law.”

“Crane Watts,” I said. “Great guy. If the law asked him for a match, he’d fink out. It makes us wonder about you, Boo baby. But maybe you went along because it was close enough to legal. Watts filled me in. I can use some of his ideas, but not him. Not to help me with my pigeon. A livlier one than Wilkinson. And it is not going to be split so many ways. From what Watts said, the take from Wilkinson had to be split between him, you, Stebber, Gisik, Wilma and the executor of the Kippler estate. I was hunting up a hungry Iawyer, and found him. But I need a smart hungry one.”

He wiped his mouth, and he looked very uneasy. “That dumb bassard talks awful quick, don’t he?”

“You and me, Boo. We know the ways to make them talk quick. I got interested. He got pretty jumpy.”

“Like to watch ‘em jump,” he said dreamily.

“When he got scared sober, he tried to deny the whole thing. Maybe I like that assessment bit, to keep it legal. But maybe hit and run would be easier all around. Either way I need the woman. The way I understand it, the woman works with Stebber. But do you think she’d come in on something without bringing him in?”

“How in hell should I know about that, buster boy?”

“How in hell should I know until I ask, Waxwell?”

“What did Watts say?”

“Before I got around to that he’d started to do so much lying I couldn’t sort it out.”

“I say it wouldn’t hurt to have Cal Stebber. That fat happy little son of a bitch could sell snowflakes in hell. He makes it go smooth. But you get Watts, and you don’t get Stebber or the woman. Or Boo Waxwell. He was a one-time thing. I got only one more little piece of business with lawyer boy, and that’s all. You see that Viv? She look at old Boo like he’s a spitty place on the sidewalk. I got it in my mind to take care of that. I had other things going then, and no time to line her up. She’s got next to no man atall, and it’s sure a waste. She’s all solid woman, and when ol Boo gets her steadied into it one of these days, she’ll come on like an ol walkin beam pump machine with no place to turn her off. I got that one marked in my mind, because any fool can see she sure ain’t gettin what she come after so far.” He winked. “And she was just a little too snotty to ol‘ Boo, which is always a good sign ever time. They get like that when they get little ideas in their pretty little heads, making them skitty.”

I sensed it was a diversion, but could not imagine why.

“But to get back to it, Waxwell. Is the woman as good as Watts seems to think?”

He shrugged, went out after more beer, came back and, as he handed me mine, said, “She has Arthur clamped down like one of those little hairy dogs rich women tote around. She married him legal. Always does, Cal Stebber said. Gets herself Alabama divorces. Makes no money claim and it goes through quick and easy. Married up with maybe eleven of them, and her and Stebber and Gisik, one way or another, picked every one clean. Averages out maybe one a year. Maybe she doesn’t hit it off so good with your man. She’s no kid anymore.”

“Where can I find her?”

He stared blankly at me that. “Why ask me?”

“Why not? Watts told me that after you cleaned Wilkinson, you and Wilma shacked up right here.”

He looked around at the room as though seeing it for the first time. “Here? Why would he say a thing like that?”

“Because Wilkinson told him how it was, months later, when he showed up demanding money. Wilkinson was sent on a wild goose chase up to Sarasota. When he came back to the motel, Wilma had cleared out. Wilkinson told Watts he found you and Wilma here, and you beat him up.”

Waxwell threw his head back and guffawed, slapped his knee. “Oh, that! Goddam! He sure did come around here. Drunk or sick. God knows. I had me a little friend here, waitress that come over from Miami to see me. Little bit of a woman no bigger than Wilma, silvery color hair like Wilma. About sundown and the light not too good. That fool Arthur got it in his head she was Wilma for sure. Maybe out of his head from losing the money and her taking off. Hard to say. I had to bust him up a little and run him off the place.”

He shook his head, stopped smiling, looked earnestly at me. “Mind you I’m not saying I wouldn’t want to a had Wilma here a while. I did give it a little try. But I struck out swinging on three pitches, man. Hurt my pride some, but it wasn’t the first time I missed and won’t be the last, and a man has to face it there’s some you can’t get to. With her, it was all business. She didn’t see no point in just for the fun of it. Cold, maybe. I don’t know. Or maybe no money, no kicks. Way I figure it, while Arthur was riding that bus up to Sarasota, she was long gone on her way to Miami with her end of the loot, and from there God knows where, someplace where she could live good until the money got small enough so she had to start on suckering the next one for them to squeeze dry.”

I used a long drink from the bottle to make certain my face didn’t show anything. The momentary diversion, and then the strange earnestness. The house and yard full of toys. Mildred Mooney could not have invented that rancid little scene by the beach house pool. Nor could Arthur have invented the telling detail of the little diamond watch he thought Wilma had peddled. Conversely Waxwell could not have known of being seen by Mrs. Mooney, nor of Arthur’s instant recognition of the diamond wristwatch. What could he have been worth in the Wilkinson swindle? Five thousand? Ten at the very top. Maybe twenty-five thousand. And it wouldn’t buy many new toys. I had a sudden and vivid image of that small, delicate, pampered face, wavery under the black slow run of water, of fine silver hair strung into the current flow, of shadowy pits, half seen, where sherry eyes had been.

“So Stebber would be the one for me to ask, I guess,” I said.

“Most likely to know. By now maybe they got a new one going for them.”

“So if I have to work through Stebber, then he’s in on it. And my end is smaller.”

“McGee, what got it in your head you got to have one particular broad, just because she did good on the last one? I could pick you one right out of the air. Thinking on one right now. Little ol gal way up in Clewiston, wasting her talent. Doing waitress work. Had her teaching license, but lost it for all time. Dresses good. Acts like a lady. Pretty face but built only a little better’n fair. Sugar sweet, and a born thief. But I swear and garntee, she get any plain ordinary fella into bed just one time, from then on he can have trouble remembering his own name or how to count to ten. And that’s all you need, isn’t it? That’s how Wilma set them up for Stebber.”

“I better think the whole thing over, Boo.”

“It’s Bike Jefferson over to Everglades, executor on the Kippler land, writing any damn letter they tell me to tell him. He married the youngest Kippler girl, how come he got that job, and she’s years dead. I yell frog one time and Bike jumps till his heart gives out. Down in Homestead is Sam Jimper, a lawyer crooked as a ball of baby snakes, but knowing I was behind you with my eye on him, he’d sooner french-kiss a gator than try to get cute two ways. I’m telling you the way to do is you forget Watts and Stebber and all them, and let me get Melly on down here and you look her over, and give her a trial run if you don’t believe me. She won’t take as big an end of it as you’d have to give Wilma. But I get a good cut because you need me to set it up, because without a genuine big piece of land, all recorded and setting there to look at, you’ve got no way to give a man an itch to double his money, so as to show off for his cute new little schoolteacher wife. And I tell you, Sam Jimper’s got an office paneled in black cypress big enough for a ball game, nothing like that closet Watts has got. I say you give Melly five hundred dollars for front and just turn her and aim her at your man, married already or not, he’s got as much chance as a key lime pie in a school yard.”

“Don’t tell me how to run it, Boo. Don’t tell me who I’m going to use. Maybe I don’t need some nut who tries to kick my knee off before he knows who I am or what I want. I have to think this out. I don’t want it messed up. It’s the biggest piece of money I’ll ever get hold of. Right now I’m going to let things sit for a while. Maybe you make sense. I don’t know. If I decide you do, you’ll hear from me.”

“What if’n I think of something else that’d help?”

“Tell me when I get in touch.”

“An if you don’t?”

“Stop leaning on me, Boo.”

He chuckled. “So you got to go talk it over with somebody. Look like you got a partner.”

“What’s that to you?”

He stood up. “Nothing. Not one damn old little thing, buddy boy. None of my business. Maybe you’re just the errand boy, talking big. Come back. Don’t come back. Ol‘ Boo’s gettin’ along sweet and fine. Leave off your car down the road?”

“Left a boat in Goodland and walked in.”

“Drive you in.”

“Don’t bother.”

“Got to go see somebody anyways. Come on.”

It was going sour. I could sense it. We went in the Lincoln. The abused engine was ragged, and he took the curves of the narrow road in careless skids, spattering shell into the ditches. After coming to a noisy, smoking stop at Stecker’s Boat Yard, he got out with me and strolled out to the dock, talking slurred, amiable nothings. The old man was gone. The pumps were unlocked, but I did not want to spend extra time within range of that blue-eyed stare. I gave it full throttle and at the end of the long white-water curve away from Goodland, I looked back and saw him standing motionless on the dock, watching me, thumbs hooked onto that lethal belt.

It had been all right, and then it had gone subtly wrong in a way I couldn’t explain. I had the feeling it had been a near thing getting away from him at all. Something had changed him, some factor of doubt, some special alertness. A twig snapping, maybe, in the tangly backwoods of his mind, bringing the head up, ears cocked, eyes narrow. I now knew it was going to all move quickly, and I could no longer set the pace. I had done my little prying and poking. The avalanche had started its first grumblings. Then comes the time to try to outrun it.

Ten

AFTER EXPOSURE to Boone Waxwell, the look of Chook and Arthur on the early afternoon beach had the flavor of a great innocence. She was hovering around him, cheering him on with shrill yips. He was braced against an impressive bend in one of the big boat rods. When I beached the Ratfink near the Flush, she hollered to me to come tell them what Arthur was fighting.

I trotted down to where they were. I saw a slow massive boil about a hundred yards out. Arthur, grunting, was trying to horse it enough to get some line back.

“What did you use?”

She held her fingers about eight inches apart. “A shiny little fish I caught, but we think he was dead after Arthur threw him out there a couple of times.”

Arthur gave me a strained grin. He and his quarry were in stasis. I waded in and felt the taut line, then felt that slow distinctive stroke, a kind of ponderous convulsion.

“Shark,” I said. “Sand shark or a nurse shark, probably. Longer odds on a hammerhead.”

“My God!” Chookie cried. “We’ve been swimming in there!”

“Heavens above!” I said. “And sometimes a bat will fly into a house and bite somebody. Or a raccoon will charge, snarling, into a supermarket. Sweetie, the sharks are there all the time. Just don’t swim when the water is all roiled and dirty.”

“What’ll I do?” Arthur asked in a strained voice.

“Depends if you want him.”

“My God, I don’t want him.”

“Then set the drag tight, aim the tip at him, and back away from the water.”

He did. After five strenuous steps, the nine thread line popped, out by the leader swivel. As he reeled in, there was another boil, farther out, as the shark went off to think things out.

“Sharks have no bones,” I announced. “Just gristle. They have rows of hinged teeth that straighten up as they open their mouths. They shed teeth from the front row and the other rows move forward. About one third the body weight is liver. The tiny spikes on their hides are tipped with enamel of the same composition as tooth enamel. Their brains are little nubs on the front ends of their spinal cords. They have no intelligence anyone has ever been able to test. They are a roving, senseless, prehistoric appetite, as unchanged as the scorpion, cockroach and other of nature’s improvisations which had good survival value. A wounded shark being eaten by his chums will continue to eat anything within reach, even hunks of himself which might happen by. End of lesson.”

“Gah,” said Chookie. “And thanks a lot.”

“Oh, two more items. There is no effective shark repellent. And they do not have to roll to bite. They can lunge up and chomp head-on, but when they bite down, then they roll to tear the meat loose. Now, children, we go into conference, critical variety. Everybody into the main Iounge.”

When they were seated and expectant, I said, “I learned that it wasn’t Wilma you saw with Boone Waxwell, Arthur. It was a girl who looked a little like her.”

Arthur’s jaw dropped. “But I was certain it… oh, come on! I know it was Wilma. Or an identical twin. And I saw her watch. She told me once it was a custom design. I couldn’t mistake it. No, that was Wilma, even to the way she was asleep in there, her posture.”

“I agree. It was Wilma. And ol‘ Boo went to great lengths to prove it wasn’t. It seems it is very important to him to establish that Wilma was never there.”

“But why?”

“Because that’s where he killed her. And took over her share. And used it to buy himself lots of pretty toys he doesn’t take very good care of.”

“Killed Wilma,” Arthur said in a sick voice. He swallowed. “Such a… such a tiny woman.”

“And it’s a good guess she was your legal spouse, Arthur. She’d been working with Stebber for years. Maybe he had a little stable of Wilmas. Legal marriage makes it neater, and divorce is no great problem. You might have been husband number eleven. Marriage enlarges the areas wherein the pigeon can be plucked.”

“What a charmer,” Chookie said softly.

“Lady spiders eat their mates for dessert. I read about one real smart kind of little boy spider. He doesn’t come courting until he’s caught a juicy bug. Then while she’s enjoying the gift, he’s off and away like a flash.”

“A quarter of a million dollars is a juicy bug,” Arthur said.

“Made her rates pretty high,” Chook said tartly. “Trav, my God, how did you figure this out?”

“I didn’t. It just seems like what must have happened.” And I gave them a condensed but uncensored report. His little knife trick made Chook gasp. I got paper and wrote down the names he had mentioned before they slipped out of my mind. I gave the most weight, detail and careful choice of words to the feeling I had right at the end.

“So here it is. This is his country. I’ll bet he knows every boat for fifty miles around. He’s not going to take me at face value. He’s going to feel uneasy until he finds where I’m holed up. By now it’s certain that there are people at Marco who know where we’re anchored, know there’s two men and a woman aboard. The more he learns, the less he’s going to like the smell of it. And he’s the type to make his moves and to do his thinking later. Cute as we’ve been, we’ve left it clear trail.”

“So we rub it out and pick a new base,” Chook said.

“Right. And then we think up some good safe way to decoy ol‘ Boo, so I can have enough time to take that rat nest of his apart.”

“What do you mean?” Chook asked.

“This is a recovery operation, isn’t it? I doubt he’s spent it all. He wouldn’t bank it. It’s in some hidey hole. And not an obvious one. He’s devious, not in any reasoned way, but by instinct. He has that bluff, battered soldier-of-fortune look, and a ton of ironic charm in that grin, and he makes me think that under other circumstances he’d be the man I’d want to go ashore with in a strange port where there would be good booze and a chance of trouble. But that would be wrong. The essence of him is feline, and not house-kitty. A bigger predator. I wonder how many people he’s conned with that swampy folktalk which isn’t even very consistent. It’s a good cover. His way of life is a predator way of life, a cat-habit. He has his home range, most of four counties to roar around in that abused Lincoln, whipping the other males so ruthlessly nobody challenges him, bringing prey back to the den, protecting the den violently and instinctively, and ready at any time to fade back into the Glades. I’m saying all this because I don’t want us to make the mistake of assuming he will respond predictably to any action of ours. Something that might send another man hustling to a faraway place might make Boo Waxwell run a little way and circle back. And, when he came so damned close to stomping me, I realized it has been a long time since I have seen anyone move that fast.”

“Trav?” Chookie said in a strange and subdued tone.

“What, dear?”

“Maybe… maybe he is you, gone bad. Maybe that’s what he smelled. Maybe that’s why you can handle him.”

My immediate instinct was to get blazing mad, tell her it was a rotten analogy. It was a response the head-feelers would call significant.

“Maybe I’m being dumb or something,” Arthur said. “If this man is all that dangerous, and you’re pretty sure he… killed Wilma, well then I’d think there would be things the police could find out. I mean, maybe an identification of the gray car he had when he took her from the motel while I was gone. Maybe he went with her to the bank when she cleaned out that joint account, before I left on the bus. I could swear I saw her at Waxwell’s cottage. Maybe somebody else saw her there, or when he drove her in through the village. I mean wouldn’t we be better off if he was in jail?”

“Arthur, it is very nice to believe in an orderly society. By and large, all the counties of Florida have pretty good law officers. Some are excellent. But the law isn’t growing even half as fast as the population. So it is selective. From their point of view, how excited could they get over the possibility of a transient woman of dubious character getting herself killed well over six months ago, a woman who was never reported missing. Collier County will have some deputies who know the score in the Marco Island area, and much as they might itch to put Boo away for keeps, they’d blow their chances of finding a body if he was able to take it into the islands and rivers and swamps and hide it. Now after Boo beat you so badly and those nice people who found you on the highway took you in, you must have had some idea of getting the law after Boone Waxwell. Did they give you an opinion?”

“They said to forget it. They said nothing would happen, and it could make trouble for them. They said there were Waxwells all over, and a lot of them were decent quiet people, but there were a lot of wild ones like Boone, and if they wanted to take it out on Sam Dunning, sheltering somebody trying to make trouble, his nets could get cut up and his charter boat could catch fire and nobody would know who did it. The best thing to do, they said, was keep your head down. Trav, I ought to see those good people. I went off and said I’d come back soon. And they haven’t heard a word… It isn’t right.”

“Another thing, Arthur,” I said. “If you made the complaint about Boo, remember it would be coming from a man who recently chopped brush on a Palm County work gang. A man with no funds and no employment. When there isn’t enough law to go around, it has to work on a status system. And suppose you did get them to take Boone Waxwell in. They’d seal his cave, and maybe they would come across whatever he has left, if anything. Then it would be out of reach for keeps.” I looked at Chookie. She sat with chin on fist, scowling. “You’re getting good grades so far,” I said. “What else should we do?”

“I would think that if Wilma was alive, she would have been in touch with Calvin Stebber, and if she’s dead, he’d be wondering about her. It would be a way to make sure. After all, this Boo Waxwell could maybe have gotten money somewhere else. And maybe Wilma told him to lie about her being there.”

“And,” I said, “Stebber might be the one to decoy Boo away from his cave.” I stood up. “It’s gone past the point where we need an imitation pigeon.”

“How about the money of mine that Mr. Stebber has?” Arthur asked.

“I want to get a chance at it. So now let’s unhook this beast and get out of here.”

We brought the bow anchors aboard, worked the Flush out by hauling on the stern anchor lines. When we coasted close enough they pulled free. I hoisted the dinghy up by the stern davits and made it fast, as, under dead slow speed, Arthur took us out through the wide entrance of Hurricane Pass. We towed the Ratfink astern, motor tilted up and covered with a tarp. When we were clear, and headed north up the Gulf, I put it up to cruising speed and went aft and adjusted the length of the tow line until the Ratfink was riding steadily at the right point of our wake.

The bright afternoon was turning greasy, sky hazing, big swells building from the southwest, a following sea that began to give the old lady a nasty motion, and made it impossible to use the automatic pilot. The little solenoids are stupid about a following sea. They can’t anticipate. So you have to use the old-timey procedure of swinging the wheel just as they begin to lift your back corner, then swinging it back hard the other way when the bow comes up. You labor for long seconds apparently dead in the water, and then you tilt and go like a big train. Chook brought sandwiches to the topside controls, and I sent Arthur to dig out the bible on coastal accommodations.

The Palm City Marina, thirty miles north of Naples, had the sound of what I wanted. And from the way the weather was building, it was far enough. We’d begun to get enough wind to pull the tops off the long swells and the sun was gone in haze, the water changing from cobalt to gray-green. The Flush heaved and waddled along, setting up a lot of below-decks creaking, clinking, clanking and thumping, and about every tenth swell the port wheel would lift out and cavitate, giving us a shuddering vibration. At least I never had to slow her down. Her cruising speed was what other boats slow down to when the seas build. When the driving rain came, I sent them down to take over on the sheltered controls. As soon as I felt the wheel being taken, I pulled the lever that freed it, put a loop over a spoke, snapped the big tarp down over the topside panel and throttles and padded below, soaked through. They had the wipers going, were peering earnestly into the rain curtain, and Arthur was misjudging the seas enough to bounce pans off their galley hooks. They let me take over with an obvious relief. Soon, as the heavy rain flattened the swells, she began to ride much easier.

“They put those little signs in boats,” Chook said with a nervous laugh. “Oh Lord, thy sea is so vast and my boat is so small. Trav, you don’t have any funny signs around.”

“And no funny flags to hoist. I almost fell for one little brass plaque though. It said that marriages performed by the captain of this vessel are valid only for the duration of the voyage. Arthur, go see how the Raifink rides. Chook, go make coffee. Busy yourselves. Stop peering over my shoulders. Then check all ports to see if rain or sea is coming in. Stow any loose gear you come across. Then, as a pagan rite I recommend after you’ve brought me the mug of coffee-you people get bars of soap, go aft and strip down and try that warm hard rain out on the after deck.”

After an hour, as I had anticipated, the wind direction had shifted to the west. I made an estimate of my position along the line I had penciled on the chart, put an X at that spot, then changed to a more westerly course so I could take it as a quartering sea on the port bow rather than rocking along in the trough. She steadied, and I put it into automatic pilot, read the compass course, figured the deviation and drew a new line on my chart. According to my computations, another eighty minutes would put us at a point offshore from Palm City where we would turn and run on in. The rain was coming down harder than before, and with less wind.

I prowled, looking for my companions of the storm. The clues were obvious. The closed door to the master stateroom. And, in the main lounge on the rug, a damp blue bath towel. It made me remember a line from a story of long ago, written, I think, by John Collier, about when the kid finds the foot, still wearing sock and shoe, on the landing of the staircase leading to the attic. “Like a morsel left by a hasty cat.” So make this a towel left by a hasty morsel. Hard warm rain, soap, giggles and the tossing and pitching of a small boat are aphrodisiacs vastly underrated. I eeled up through the forward hatch with my soap so I could keep a watch ahead. It was a cool abundance of water, sudsing as only rainwater can. I had a few discernible bruises on my arms where Boo’s fists had sledged, and a round one on the short ribs. When I took a deep breath there was a twinge there, sign that the blow had probably ripped a little of the cartilage between the ribs. Fatuously I admired the new flatness of the belly, and the absence of the small saddle bags over the hip bones. Narcissus in the rain. I dropped back below, re-dogged the hatch, toweled in a hurry, hopped into dry clothes and trotted back to the wheel house, peering through the windshield arcs for the collision course you always anticipate when a bunch of little gears are steering your boat.

Chookie, in a crisp white dress, black hair pinned high, came bearing a tray with three cocktails and a bowl of peanuts, Arthur bringing up the rear. They were elaborately conversational. Rain made a dandy shower. A little chilly but real stimulating. Then both rushed in to find a safer word than stimulating, and managed merely to underline it, giving Arthur such a steaming red face he turned away to stare out the side ports saying, my, it certainly is coming down, isn’t it?

And, my, it certainly was still coming down when we got to my estimated destination. It always seems a waste when all that nice useful rain whishes down into the salty sea. I pulled it back until we barely had seaway, and turned on the little whirling red bulb of the depth finder. The Gulf has such a constant slope, the bottom is a good location guide. We had twenty-one feet under the hull, twenty-five total, and if other things were right, that would put us three and a half miles off Palm City, according to the depths on the chart. I looked up the frequency of a commercial radio station in Palm City, with a tower almost in line with the harbor. When I had picked it up on AM, a baseball play-by-play, I changed our heading to zero degrees and rotated the direction finder loop until I had a good null. I was about a sea mile short of my estimated point I put it on the new course, again with a following sea, and we waddled and rocked on in until the sea buoy appeared out of the murk, giving me a course on the chart for the channel between the keys. Inside, we were in flat water, and it was no trick finding the private markers far the marina channel.

It was, as I had hoped, loaded with big cruisers. Two airhorn blasts brought a kid out of the dock house wearing a plastic raincoat with hood. He directed us with hand signals and ran around to the slip. I worked it around and backed it in, went forward in a hurry and got a loop on a piling and around a cleat and snubbed us down. In fifteen minutes we were all set, lines, fenders and spring lines in place, gangplank onto the dock, all identified and signed in. And the rain was slacking off.

I was damp, but not enough to change again. Chook distributed dividends from the shaker and said, “Okay. I bite. Why here?”

“Multiple reasons. If you want to hide a particular apple, the best thing you can do is wire it onto an apple tree. Lots of these big lunkers around us are in wet storage for the summer. We’re one face in the crowd. We’re not far from Fort Myers, where they have air service to Tampa. We’re a half hour by car from Naples, a little better than an hour from Marco. If he finds out we anchored off by our lonesome once, he’d expect us to do it again. And if he does find us, and if he does have any violent ideas, it’s a damned poor place for him to get away with them. Also, it would reassure Stebber if it turns out I can fix up a meeting here.”

Arthur said, “I think it was across that cause-way over there, over on the beach on that key where they found me stumbling around. Should should I sort of stay out of sight?”

Chook said to me, black brows raised in query, “With your fishing hat and those fly-boy dark glasses?”

“See no reason why you should,” I said.

Chook leaned to pat Arthur on the knee. “You have a dear face and I love you, but darling, forgive me, you aren’t terribly memorable.”

“I guess one of us is enough,” he said, making one of his rare little jokes, waiting then with no confidence anyone would laugh.

I got the evening weather news. As I had expected, the wind was swinging around into the north, and by dawn they expected it to be out of the east at three to five knots, clear weather, occasional afternoon thunderstorms. It meant that by early morning, with the Ratfink bailed and fueled, I could make a good fast run close in shore down to the little marina in Naples, tie it up there at that handy and useful location, then take the rented car back to Palm City. The evening was laundered bright, the air fresh, and Chook declined a chance for a dinner ashore, saying she had a serious attack of the domestics, a rabid urge to cook. After dinner, while the two of them were policing the galley I took the little battery operated Mirandette tape recorder into the stateroom I was using and closed the door. For some reason, I cannot perform the feat with people listening, and sometimes I cannot perform it at all. The little machine has astonishingly good fidelity, considering its size.

Try, playback, erase. Try, playback, erase. I learned that to get Waxwell’s tone quality I had to pitch my voice higher, and put a harder and more resonant edge on it. The slurs and elisions were easier to manage, along with that slight sing-song cadence of the swamp lands. When I got a reasonably satisfying result, I left it on the tape.

I went up on the sun deck for the long slow evening pipe. When one is down to this mild reward for abstinence, there is only one way to cheat. I found an oversized pot in the pipe drawer, a massive Wilke Sisters product, and nearly sprained my thumb packing Black Watch into it.

We all sat up there in the warm night, marina lights sparkling on the water, traffic moving across the distant causeway. They sat together, about ten feet from me, off to my right. They rustled a little now and then. And whispered. And several times she made a furry and almost inaudible chuckle, as sensuous as a slow light stroke of fingernails. It began to make me so edgy I was grateful when they said their early, husky goodnights.

I think it was becoming a little more for her than she estimated. I hoped it would get big enough to pry her loose from Frankie Durkin. But any kind of future for Chook and Arthur would depend on my making a pretty solid recovery for him. If she had to support him, or share the job of supporting the two of them, it wouldn’t work out so well. It would make him restive. And this was her time to have kids. And it wouldn’t mix well with her strenuous brand of professional dancing. She had the body for kids, the heart for them, the need for them, and love enough for a baker’s dozen.

So if you don’t recover enough, do you need to clip a full fifty percent of it, McGee?

Next there will be a choir of a thousand violins playing I Love You Truly. Or perhaps, Paddlin‘ Maudlin Home.

Back in my empty lonely nest, I turned the recorder on, and with the larynx memory of how I did it before, became Boo Waxwell giving a sour little talk on the joys of love and marriage. Then I played the tape from the beginning. The part I had previously approved sounded just about the same as the new addition. That meant I had it nailed well enough to risk it.

EIeven

IT WAS a little after nine in the morning when I tied up the Ratfink as before in the little marina. I went over into town in the green sedan, ordered drugstore coffee, and, as it was cooling, shut myself in the phone booth and called Crane Watts’ office number.

He answered directly, sounding remarkably crisp and impressive and reliable. “Crane Watts speaking.”

“Watts, this Boo Waxwell. How about you give me that number for Cal Stebber in Tampa. Caint lay my han on it.”

“Now I don’t know as I’m authorized to…”

“Lawyer boy I git it fast, or in five minutes I’m right there, whippin yo foolish ass down to the bone.”

“Well… hold the line a moment, Waxwell.”

I had a pencil ready. I took down the number he gave me, 613-1878.

“Address?” I asked.

“All I’ve ever had is a box number.”

“Nev mind. Lawyer boy I plain don’t like the way you give that McGee the whole story.”

“Don’t you think you made that plain enough last night, Waxwell? I told you then and I’m telling you now, that I didn’t tell him half the things he claims I told him.”

“Too dog drunk to know what you told him.”

“I’m doing my level best to get a line on him, and as soon as I learn anything useful, I’ll get in touch with you. But I don’t know why you’re upset about it. It was a perfectly legal business arrangement. Another thing, Waxwell, I don’t want you ever coming to my house again, like last night. You upset my wife, the way you acted. See me here if you have to see me at all, but I’m telling you now, I’m no more anxious to have any future association with you than you are with me. Is that quite clear?”

“Think I’ll come by anyways and bounce you some.”

“Now wait a minute!”

“Talk sweet to ol‘ Boo.”

“Well… maybe I did sound a little irritable. But you see, Viv knew nothing about… that business arrangement. You said too much in front of her. She cross-examined half the me night before I could get her quieted down. And she still isn’t satisfied. I’d just rather you wouldn’t come to the house again. Okay?”

“I swear, lawyer boy, I never will. Never again. Unless something comes up all of a sudden.”

“Please, just listen to reas…”

I hung up, sweating lightly, and went back to my coffee. Boone Waxwell had wasted very little time getting to the only man who might know anything about me. And had charged that man with digging up information. Watts could get my Bahia Mar box number from the club records. That wouldn’t be much help. But there was a new factor. Waxwell did not seem like a patient man. Perhaps no later than this afternoon he would be phoning Watts to find out what he’d Iearned. And he would be very intrigued to know it was his second call of the day, and interested to know that he had asked for Stebber’s unlisted number earlier. He would work that out in short order.

I aimed the Chev north up through light traffic, keeping a watch front and rear for State Police, who object violently to any speed approaching three numbers. I pulled into a marina parking space at Palm City at ten o’clock. The Flush was locked. A note on the rug inside the rear door to the lounge said they’d gone grocery shopping. I went hunting and found them in a Food Fair two blocks away, Arthur trundling the basket, Chook mousing along, picking out things, wearing that glazed look of supermarket autohypnosis. Eleven minutes after I located them, I had a protesting Arthur locked aboard with instructions to stay put and out of sight, and I was backing out of the parking space with Chook beside me, hitching at her skirt and buttoning the top buttons of her blouse.

If the feeder flight out of Fort Myers hadn’t been ten minutes late coming in from Palm Beach, we would have just missed it. And I had been too busy driving to do more than fragmentary briefing. I bought two round trip tickets to Tampa. With stops at Sarasota and St. Pete, the ETA was twenty past noon.

Once aboard, I gave it to her in more detail. “But with just a phone number?” she asked.

“And a little jump. And a prayer for luck. And the name of a yacht.”

“Golly, suppose you worked all this hard at something legitimate, McGee. No telling how big you might be.”

“A state senator, even.”

“Wow!” She checked in her mirror and fixed her mouth. “What good am I going to be to you?”

“I’ll figure that out as we go along.”

At Tampa International, with Chook standing outside the booth looking serious, I tried the number. As I was just about to give up and try again, a cool, careful, precise female voice said, “Yes?”

“I would like to speak to Mr. Calvin Stebber.”

“What number were you calling, sir?”

“Six one three-one eight seven eight.”

“I am sorry. There is no Calvin Stebber here, sir.”

“Miss, I suppose that it’s one of the oldest code situations in the world. You always ask for the number to be repeated, and the party calling is supposed to change one digit. But I don’t happen to have the code.”

“I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking ubout, sir.”

“No doubt. I am going to call you back at exactly quarter to one, twelve minutes from now and in the meantime you tell Mr. Stebber that somebody is going to call who knows something about Wilma Werner, Wilma Wilkinson, take your choice.”

She hesitated a half breath too long before saying, “I am terribly sorry that all this means absolutely nothing to me, sir. You’ve made a mistake, really.”

She was very good. So good the hesitation seemed to lose significance.

I tried it again at the promised time. “Yes?”

“Is Mr. Stebber interested in Wilma? This is me again.”

“Actually, you know, I shouldn’t be so childish its to let this nonsense fascinate me, whoever you are. I suppose it’s because I am having a dull and boring day. Do you think that could be it?”

“Nonsense fascinates lots of people.”

“You do have rather a nice voice. You know, if you aren’t too busy for nonsense, you could break up my afternoon with more of it. Why don’t you mystify me again, say, at three fifteen?”

“It will be my pleasure. I’ll be the one with the red rose in his teeth.”

“And I shall be wearing a girlish smirk. Goodbye, sir.”

I stepped out of the booth. “What are you grinning at?” Chook demanded.

“The good ones are always a pleasure. She couldn’t contact Stebber so quickly. But without giving away one damn thing, she lined me up to call back at three fifteen. Then if Stebber is interested, they open a door. If not, she gives me the girlish chitchat, and I hang up never really knowing for sure. Very nice.”

She pulled herself taller. “It means you’re outclassed, doesn’t it, sweetie? Stebber has this terribly keen girl, and you’re making do with a big dull dancer.”

“Oh for God’s sake, why should a little impersonal admiration raise your hackles?”

“Feed me,” she said. “All women are at war all the time, and when I’ve got hunger pains, it shows a little more.”

We went to the upper level where she ate like a timber wolf, but with more evidences of pleasure than any wolf would exhibit. There was so much of her, and it was so aesthetically assembled, so vivid, so a-churn with vitality that she faded the people for ten tables around to frail flickering monochromatic images, like a late late movie from a fringe station. She provided me, in certain measure, with a cloak of invisibility.--Okay, fella, but describe the guy she was with…--Just a guy. Big, I think. I mean, hell, I don’t think I really looked at him, Lieutenant.

She sipped coffee and smiled, sighed, smiled again.

“You look like a happy woman, Miss McCall.” I reached across the table and touched her with a fingetrip right between and a little above those black black brows. “There were two lines here.”

“Gone now? Son of a gun. Gee, Trav, I don’t know. I talk. I talk my fool head off. There in the dark with him holding me, mostly. Things I’ve never told anyone. He listens and he remembers. I skip around, back and forth through my dumb life. I guess I’m trying to understand. I’m talking to myself at the same time, about Frankie, about how my mother made me ashamed of growing too big to fit into her dream, about running off and getting married at fifteen and annulled at sixteen, knocking around, and then buckling down and really working hard and making it and saving money so I could go back in style and knock their eye out. I knew just how it would be, Trav. I would wear that mink cape into that house and my mother and my grandmother would stare, and then I would let them know I hadn’t gotten it the way they were thinking, and show them the scrapbook. Nineteen years old. God!

“There were strangers in the house, Trav. An impatient woman, and kids running all over the place. My grandmother had been dead over a year, and my mother was in the county home. Premature senility. She thought I was her sister, and she begged me to get her out of there. I got her into another place. A bill and a half a week for a year and a half, Trav, and then she had one big stroke instead of continuous little ones, and she died without ever knowing. Arthur asked me how I really know that. Maybe she had some lucid spell when she knew and was proud.” Her eyes swam and she shook her head. “Okay. He’s good for me. Like my head was full of little knots. I talk and talk and talk, and he says something, and a little knot loosens.” She scowled. “The thing about Frankie, when he finds out something bugs you, a long time later he’ll say something that’ll make it bug you more. I explained that to Arthur. He says maybe that’s why I need Frankie, so he can punish me and I don’t have to punish myself.

“Trav, you really have to give Arthur something to do. I can only hoist him up so far. You treat him like a tanglefoot kid, and when I make him into a man it doesn’t hold. It doesn’t last. Maybe, Trav, that’s a more important part than the money. He talks about those jobs at Everglades. Wistful, sort of. When he ran the store it was all kind of set. The buyers knew what to buy for that city. And he had good display and advertising people, and the merchandising was kind of all established before he got into it. But he said if you can put up rough studding and it stands true and the foreman comes around and says okay, then you think people are going to live there for years, and winds won’t blow it down. I can’t say it like he does. But you see, except for the store which was all set anyway, everything he ever did got botched up. Everything except those crummy little jobs. If you trust him to do something, he’ll trust himself more.”

So I promised I would, and I told her we had time, before three fifteen, to get a little better set. I bought a newstand map of Tampa and I rented n pale gray Galaxie. They are turning Tampa into the customary nothing. It used to be memorable as one of the grubbiest and most infuriating traffic mazes south of the Chelsea area of Boston. Now they are ramming the monster highways through it, and one day soon it will become merely a momentary dinginess. They’ve opened up the center of the city into a more spacious characterlessness, and, more and more, they are converting Ybor City into fake New Orleans. In home remote year the historians will record that Twentieth Century America attempted the astonishing blunder of changing its culture to fit automobiles instead of people, putting a skin of concrete and asphalt over millions of acres of arable land, rotting the hearts of their cities, so encouraging the proliferation of murderous, high-speed junk that when finally the invention of the Transporlon rendered the auto obsolete, it took twenty years and half a trillion dollars to obliterate the ugliness of all the years of madness, and rebuild the supercities in a manner to dignify the human instead of his toys.

I left Chook in the car and went into the reference section of the library and looked up the Buccaneer in Lloyd’s Register of Yachts. There were a slew of them, and I found the one registered out of Tampa that was a hundred and eighteen feet long, a converted Coast Guard cutter, owned by Foam-Flex Industries. I phoned them and was shunted up through the pyramid to the Vice President in Charge of Sales and Promotion, a Mr. Fowler with a little trace of Vermont in his speech.

“On anything like that,” he said, “you’d have to check with Mr. Robinelli at the Gibson Yards where we keep her. The way it works, we set up an advance schedule for executive use of the vessel, and empower Mr. Robinelli to charter her when such charters will not interfere with company plans in any way. These charters, and I wish there were more of them, help with maintenance, dockage, insurance and payroll of the permanent crew. I don’t have a copy of the advance schedule handy, but I could have someone get it. I happen to know she is at the Yard right now. If you…”

I told him not to bother, and that I would check with Mr. Robinelli. I looked up the address of the Yard, and went back to the car and found it on the city map. There was enough time to go check it out. It was over in the big busy commercial harbor where a dozen freighters were loading and off-loading, where industrial smog hung low and heavy in the heat, where the air stank of chemicals, and where, in that manufactured haze, some huge piles of sulphur gleamed a vivid and improbable yellow. I parked by the office of the Gibson Yards, and I could see the Buccaneer at a dockside mooring. Two men in khakis were working topsides. She had a lot of brightwork, and I didn’t envy anyone the housekeeping chore of sluicing the local grime off her every day. Robinelli was chunky and brusque, a three telephone, four clipboard, five fountain pen man, a trotting fellow with no time for small talk. I represented myself as spokesman for a group internrested in chartering the Buccaneer for a cruise to Yucatan, say twenty days. Ten in the party. Would it be available anytime soon? At what rate?

He jumped in his desk chair and scribbled on a pad. “Call it an even three thousand. Includes food, steward service. Crew of four. Bring your own booze. Everything else laid on.” He spoke to me loudly, with a whip-crack in his voice, and a thin woman with a limp came at a halting half-trot to hand him a clipboard. He snapped through the top pages. “She’s open as of July 10th for thirty-two days. Have to know by June 30th the latest. Certified check in full two days before departure. No charter passengers sixty-five or older. Insurance provision. Cruises at fourteen knots. Sixteen hundred mile range. Radar, salt water conversion unit, draws nine feet, seven passenger staterooms, three heads with tub and shower. Anti-roll fins. Go look at it.” He scribbled a note, handed it to me. “Let me know. In writing.”

l took Chook down to the dock with me. A husky kid with a blunt indifferent face, big freckled biceps, a khaki shirt tailored to fit as tightly as his young hide, looked at the note, said the Captain had gone ashore for the day and we were welcome to look around. We took a quick tour.

The conversion was well done. She had become luxury transportation without losing her businesslike flavor.

Topside again, I said, “Thanks.” Stuck my head in the engine room. “Solid old lunkers,” I said. “With that big slow stroke, they should live forever. But in the conversion, didn’t they put in a different precombustion system?” I had read the dirt under his nails accurately. Pleased alertness washed away the air of indifference, and in about four minutes he told me more that I cared to know about the brute diesels in the Buck.

“I heard about her from a friend of mine who had her on charter. Cal Stebber.”

“Who?”

“A very important man. Short, heavy, very friendly. He was on her last summer in Naples. He was down there on a land deal.”

“Oh, him! Yeah. Nice guy. But it wasn’t a charter, exactly. We had a three week layover at that Cutlass Yacht Club on account of one job ended there, and we had to pick the next bunch up there, so Mr. Stebber made a deal with Captain Andy to stay aboard for a while. Sort of a dockside charter. Captain Andy got hell from Robinelli. Hell, if he hadn’t turned in the money Robinelli wouldn’t have known a damn thing about it. I think it was fifty a day they settled for. And the deal was that Mr. Stebber had some people he wanted to look real good for, so we were briefed to say, if anybody asked us, friends had loaned it to Mr. Stebber.”

“I know Cal lives right here in Tampa, and I had his unlisted number and didn’t bring it. Forgot his address. One of those cooperative apartments on Tampa Bay. You wouldn’t have it aboard, would you?”

“Golly, I don’t think so. He got on and he got off at Naples, and we were tied up the whole time. He paid cash. There wouldn’t be any reason to…” He stopped and tugged his ear, looking into space. “Wait a minute. There was something. Yeah. Bruno found it when he was sweeping up after Mr. Stebber left. One cuff link under something. Solid gold with some kind of gray-looking jewel in it. Captain Andy had that phone number, or got it somehow, and when we got back to Tampa he got hold of Mr. Stebber and…” He turned to face forward, and yelled, “Hey Bruno. Here a minute.”

Bruno, lanky and unprepossessing, came shambling aft, wiping soapy hands on his thighs, staring with great glint-eyed approval at Miss McCall.

“Say Bru, you remember the guy you took that gold cuff link back to last year?”

“Give me twenty bucks, man. I remember pretty good.”

“Where was it you had to go?”

“West Shore Boulevard, below Gandy Bridge, like near McDill. Some number, I don’t remember. Pretty nice place, man.”

“Could you tell this man something so he can find it?”

“Don’t lean or I come up empty. Give me room to think. It had a number, and it had a name. Pale color building, and like four buildings hooked together, him in the one closest to the water, top floor. Maybe seventh floor, eighth floor. Anyhow, the top one. Something about the name, it didn’t make sense. I got it! West Harbour. Even spelled wrong. Oh-you-are instead of oh-are. And no harbor there, man, no matter how you spell it. Docks and a half-ass breakwater and more little sailboats than they had little cruisers, but nothing I’d call a harbor.”

As we headed away from there, Chook said, “Half the time I don’t know what’s on your mind. I have to just stand there, looking relaxed. It’s a weird way to come up with his address, McGee.”

“There are probably other ways. Maybe not too many, if he’s quiet and careful. People leave tracks. You don’t know where they left them. If you range back and forth across territory where you know they’ve been, then you have a better chance of blundering across something. You just saw good luck. I’ve had a lot of bad days too. If Stebber wants to play, or if he doesn’t want to play, either way I’m glad to know where he is. I think we’ll call him right from there.”

It was almost three thirty by the time I located West Harbour. It was rich and tasteful, the grounds spacious and landscaped, the architecture styled to avoid a cold and institutional look, without severe geometry or mathematical spacing. The main entrance drive split into three seperate drives-delivery, guests and residents. I left Chook in the car, the keys in the ignition.

“I am going to be out of there by four thirty or sooner. I won’t send word. If I want to take longer, I’ll come down and tell you myself. So at four-thirty, you drive right out of here, stop at the first pay phone you can find, tip the police, annomously, that something very strange is going on at the Stebber apartment, West Harbour, the tower nearest the waterfront, top floor. And then find your way back to the airport. Turn this car in. Here’s your airplane ticket. If I don’t show for the seven o’clock plane, get on it anyway. Take the other car back to the marina. Here are the other car keys. Check Arthur off the boat, lock it up, go check into a motel. Make it… Mr. and Mrs. Arthur McCall. Tomorrow morning, find the Chamber of Commerce. They all have visitors’ books. Sign in under that name, with the motel address, including the unit number. Get it?”

“I got it.”

“Need money?”

“No. I’ve got enough.”

I used a pay booth in the West Harbour lobby to phone Stebber’s unlisted number. “Yes?” the same voice said, in the same cool modulation.

“Me again, smirking girl. A little off schedule.”

“The gentleman you were asking about before, sir, would be happy to meet you at the bar at the Tampa Terrace Hotel at five o’clock.”

“Couldn’t he see me now, as long as I’m right here?”

“Here?”

“At West Harbour, dear. In the lobby.”

“Would you please hold the line a moment, sir.” It was a very long moment. She came back and said, “You may come up, sir. Do you know the apartment number?”

“I know where it is, but not the number.”

“Four dash eight A. Four is the tower, eight is the floor.”

I took the walk to the tower nearest the water. The path had a screen of shrubbery. There were curves, stairs up and stairs down, little public courts with benches and some curious cement statuary. The lobby of Tower Four was spacious and empty. You can equate expense with the space they are willing to waste. Two small selfservice elevators. At eight the door hissed open and I walked into a small foyer, indirectly lighted. B on the right; A on the left. I pressed a stainless steel button. There was a three inch circle of mirror set into the door. I winked at it.

The girl behind the voice opened the door and said, “Do come in, sir.”

I did not get a really good look at her until she had led me through a short entrance hallway and down two carpeted steps into a large living room, where she turned and smiled her greeting again. She was medium height, and very slender. She wore pants carefully tailored to her slenderness, of a white fabric worked with gold thread in ornate and delicate design. With it she wore a sort of short coolie coat of the same fabric, with three-quarter sleeves and a wide stiffened collar which stood up in back and swooped down round her shoulders, making a theatrical frame for a slender, pale, classic, beautiful face. Her hair, a very dark and rich chestnut brown, was combed smooth and straight, falling to frame her face in soft parentheses, to chin level, with copper hints where daylight touched it. But the eyes were the best of her. Crystal mint, that clear perect green of childhood Christmas, the green you see after the first few licks have melted the sugar frost. In walk and smile and gesture she had all the mannered elegance of a high fashion model. In most women who have that trick, it is an irritating artifice. Look, look, look at gorgeous incomparable me! But she managed, somehow, to mock herself at the same time, so the effect was of elegance shared. It said: Having it, I might as well use it.

“I’ll tell him you’re here. It would be nice to tell him a name, wouldn’t it?”

“Travis McGee. You have a name too.”

“Debra.”

“And never never Debbie.”

“Never indeed. Excuse me.” She swayed off, closed a heavy door softly behind her. And for the first time the room came into focus. Probably thirty by fifty. Twelve foot ceiling. Window wall vith a spectacular view of the bay, terrace behind it with a low wall, chunky redwood furniture. An almost transparent drapery had been pulled across to reduce the afternoon glare, and there was a heavier drapery racked at the side of it. Giant fireplace faced with coquina rock. Deep blue carpeting. Low furniture, in leather and pale wood. Bookcases. Wall shelves, built in, with a collection of blue Danish glassware, and another, glassed in, with a collection of the little clay figures of Pre-Columbian Latin America. The cooled air was in slight movement, scented very faintly with pine.

It was a very still room, a place where you could listen to the beating of your heart. And it seemed to lack identity, as though it might be a room where executives waited to be called into the board meeting beyond the dark and heavy door.

After long minutes the door opened and Calvin Stebber came smiling into the room, Debra two paces behind him and, in her flat white sandals with gold thongs, maybe an inch taller. He marched up to me and stared up at me, smiling, and I could feel the impact of his superb projection of warmth, interest, kindliness, importance: You could be this man’s life-long friend after ten minutes, and marvel that he found you interesting enough to spend a piece of his busy life on you. It was the basic working tool of the top grade confidence man.

“Well now, Mr. McGee, I do respect Debra’s instinct, and I must say that she was correct. You have not the faintest odor of the law. You do not look irrational; and you do not look a fool. So do sit down, young man, and we will have our little chat. Sit there, please, where you won’t get the glare in your eyes.”

He wore a dark green blazer, grey flannel trousers, a yellow ascot. He looked ruddy and fit, chubby and wholesome as he smiled across at me.

“And,” he said, “our little telltale in the foyer has advised us you are not carrying some lethal hunk of metal. Cigar, Mr. McGee?”

“No thank you, Mr. Stebber.”

“Please, Debra,” he said. She went to a table, took a fat foil-wrapped cigar from a humidor, peeled it, and, frowning in pretty concentration, clipped the ends carefully with a little gold gadget. She lit a kitchen match, waited until the flame was right, then lit the cigar, revolving it slowly, getting a perfect light. She took it to him, her every move theatrically elegant, and this time all elegance was directed at him, and without irony, more as if it was her obligation to herself and to him to be as consciously lovely as she could manage to be. A gift for Calvin.

“Thank you, dear. Before we begin, Harris phoned up here about your companion, Mr. McGee, and I suggested he bring her up.”

“It might be a pretty good trick.”

“Harris can be very persuasive.” A buzzer sounded. “There they are. Do let her in, dear. And tell Harris to bring the car around at five.”

I did not get a look Harris, but Chook told me later that he was so much beef in a grey chauffeur’s uniform, he would make me look shrunken and puny. She said he had plucked her out of the car the way she would lift a kitten out of a shoebox. I realized later that the long wait when I had phoned upstairs was to give Debra time to alert Harris on another phone, possibly a house line to the service area.

Chook came into the room, thin-lipped with fury, rubbing her upper arm. “Trav, what the hell is going on!” she demanded. “That big clown lamed me. And you, fat little man, I suppose you’re the chief thief.”

Stebber scurried over to her, great concern on his face. He took her hand in both of his and said, “My dear child, the last thing I wanted was to have Harris hurt you or anger you or frighten you, really. I merely thought it rude to have you waiting down there in the car in the hot sun. But seeing what a striking creature you are, my dear, it’s doubly a pleasure to have you here. Come over and sit with me here on the couch. There! Now what is your name?”

“But I… Look, I only… Well… Barbara Jean McCall.” It was a measure of his charm that I had never known her name until that moment. She made no attempt to pull her hand away. She looked bedazzled. I glanced at Debra and she gave me a wise, measured wink. “Chookie, people call me. Chook sometimes. I… I’m a professional dancer.”

“Chookie, my dear, with all that grace and vitality and presence, I can’t imagine you being anything else. I bet you’re very good!” He released her hand, gave her an approving little pat on the arm, turned and looked up over his shoulder at Debra, leaning against the back of the couch and said, “Debra, dear, say hello to Chookie McCall, and then you might fix us all a drink.”

“Hello, dear. I’m tremendous with daiquiris if anyone cares.”

“Well… sure. Thanks,” Chook said. I nodded agreement.

“Four coming up swiftly.” Debra said, and Chook did not take her eyes off the willowy grace of Debra until a door swung shut behind her.

“Spectacular creature, isn’t she,” Stebber said. “And, in her own way, quite natural and unspoiled. Now let’s get to it, Mr. McGee. You used a name over the phone. A password. And you show a certain amount of resource and ingenuity. But, of course, we have a problem. We don’t know each other. Or trust each other. What is your occupation?”

“Semi-retired. Sometimes I help a friend solve a little problem. It isn’t anything you need an office for. Or a license.”

“And this handsome young woman is helping you help a friend?”

“Something like that. But when a friend gets caught in a big con, it isn’t easy. Old grifters like you keep the action safe and almost on the level. Maybe you even pay taxes on the take. And you train your ropers and shills and let them take the risks. I suppose you’re so used to living nice, Stebber, you don’t want to risk taking any kind of a fall. How badly do you want to avoid a fuss? When I know that I know how much pressure I’ve got.” I kept it very casual.

He stared at me for long alert seconds. “Certainly not bunko,” he said. “Wrong type, completely. Could you have been with it?”

“Not with it. Close to it a few times. Helping friends.”

Chook said irritably, “What’s going on?”

Debra reappeared, bringing four golden-pale daiquiris on a teak and pewter tray.

I said, “Cal Stebber’s in the bait business, honey. He gets the hungry ones, and they get hauled aboard and gutted.”

Debra made a face at me as I took my drink from the tray. “What a dreadful way to say it. Really! You must have made some very bad investments, Mr. McGee.”

“Debra, dear,” Stebber said. “Have we given up waiting for our cues?” It was said with loving patience, and with an almost genuine warmth. But the girl’s color changed, the tray dipped, the glasses slid an inch before she regained control. She made an almost inaudible murmur of apology. Discipline was rigid on this team.

After one imitation sip, I put my drink aside. Debra sat graceful and subdued on the arm of the couch. Stalemate. I decided I’d better gamble on my knowledge of the type. Perhaps, twenty years ago, he could have taken chances. Now his life would seem shorter to him. If I had no information he wanted, I wouldn’t have gotten into the apartment. Now he was regretting even that. And I could say with almost total certainty that my chance of prying any of Arthur’s money out of this one was zero. I had to give him some confidence. And I thought I might have the name that would do it.

“Know The Moaner, Cal?” I asked him.

He looked startled. “My God, I haven’t thought of Benny in years. Is he still alive?”

“Yes. Retired. Lives with his son-in-law in Nashville. Phone is under the name of T.D. Notta. You could say hello.”

“He knows you?”

“It isn’t a real warm friendship.”

He excused himself and left the room. Chook said, “Somebody could give me a scorecard.”

“When the Moaner was young and spry, back, they say, in Stanley Steamer days, he got his start in Philadelphia, diving into the front end of slowmoving cars. He’d bounce off and roll away and moan like to break your heart. His partner wore a cop suit and came running up and spilled the fake blood on the Moaner when he bent over him to take a look at him. He worked up from there. Fake masterpieces, they say. And he worked the ships. Ran bucket shops, telephone swindles. All the long-time grifters know each other.”

Debra made a sound of amusement. Her morale was returning. But when I tried to pump her, she was both silent and amused.

When Stebber returned he had shed large hunks of his public personality. “The old bastard sounds pretty shaky, McGee. He doesn’t like you. One of the last scores he made, a little one, you got it back before he could get out of range.”

“For a friend.”

“He says you don’t holler cop. He says… Debra, dear, why don’t you take Miss McCall to your room and make girl-talk?”

When Chook looked at me in query I nodded approval. They left.

As the door closed, Stebber said, “Benny says you can get cute. And he says it isn’t a good idea to send anybody after you. He said you made two good boys as sorry as could be. He said don’t try to figure you for a mark in any direction. And you’re pretty much a loner. But if you say you’ll deal, you’ll deal.”

“So you want to know what I’ve got and what I want.”

“I know Wilma didn’t send you. She’s not damn fool enough to think of making a deal to come back in. And she would have given you the phone code. It’s a simple number switch, based on what day of the week it is. Seven digits in the phone number. Seven days in the week. When she asks the caller to repeat the number, you just add one to whatever digit represents that day. You would have said seven one three-one eight seven eight.”

“And having told me, to show how much you trust me, you’ll change the code as soon as you can.”

“You hurt me, my boy”

“The secretarial type who fed Arthur the knockout at the Piccadilly Pub. Could have been Debra, I suppose.”

“You have a good eye. Few men could see how severe and plain she can make herself look. And how is poor Arthur?”

“Insolvent.”

“It had to be him, of course. Wilma’s most recent venture. Your Miss McCall. She has a special interest in Arthur?”

“You could put it that way.”

He awarded me a sad, sweet, knowing man-of-the-world smile. “Odd, isn’t it, how those very vital and alive ones are attracted to such shadowy, indistinct men. Poor Arthur. Not much sport there. Like shooting a bird in a cage.”

“You must have felt sorry for him, Stebber. Or you would have taken his last dime.”

“Wilma had her way. No pity, no mercy. He was just another symbol of what she has to keep killing, over and over.”

“That’s one of the shticks of the half-educated, this bite-sized psychiatry, Stebber. You do it pretty well.”

Ruddiness deepened and then faded. It was nice to mark him a little in an area where he least expected it. “But we aren’t progressing, McGee. We want information from each other. And the magic word is Wilma.”

“For a top operator in the big con, which you seem to pretend to be, Stebber, you put together a damned shaky team. Crane Watts and Boone Waxwell are weak links.”

“I know. Also Rike Jefferson, the executor. Weakness and unpredictability. But it was a… sentimental flaw. I couldn’t take the time to set it up more soundly. Harry couldn’t spare the time. Mr. Gisik. An old associate. A valued friend. He died six weeks ago in New Orleans after heart surgery God rest his soul. As this venture was… reasonably legal, I took the risk of operating with weak people. But they were paid what they were worth. Your being here is, I suppose, one of the penalties of a clumsy operation. But let me assure you, Travis McGee, clumsiness stops out there beyond the main gate.”

“I think there’s another penalty too.”

“Yes?”

“I think Wilma is dead.”

It hit him very solidly. He reverted to that mask face which can be acquired only in prison or in the military. It shows nothing, asks nothing. He stood up slowly, paced to the window and back.

“I’ve thought so too,” he said. “Without quite admitting it. Let me put it this way. She was with me for fifteen years. And it is not an emotional loss. It’s the end of… an effective professional relationship.”

“Fifteen years!”

“She was nineteen when we found her. I had a steady partner at the time. Muscle. I went in for more active gaffs at that time. Southern California. She was in a place that catered to movie money. In little frocks and jumpers and pinafores. Alice in Wonderland haircut, face scrubbed, talking in a thin little lisp, doll in the crook of her arm, bubblegum in her little jaw, she could pass for eleven or twelve. There’s a steady demand at good rates for that sort of thing. But they couldn’t control her. She kept going on the gouge on her own. Greedy and reckless and merciless. We took her off their hands. She responded to discipline when she found we weren’t at all squeamish about it We improved her diction and cleaned up her vocabulary. We put her in full make-up, high fashion clothes, and worked the class lounges and hotels. She had a good natural eye for a mark. After the fun and games, the gaff was to hit the mark in broad daylight on his grounds-home or office-the three of us, Wilma as a scared, bawling fourteen-year-old saying she truly loved the scared clown, my muscle as her murderously inclined father, me as an officer of the juvenile court, with her faked birth certificate in hand. The way out we’d finally give him was for him to spring for two or more years in a private institution for her, with the fee adjusted to how we had checked him out before the visit. You want to see real horror, you should have seen their faces when we laid the gaff on them. When we were home free, my God how she would laugh! A laugh to chill the blood. She learned fast. She was a quick study. She read a lot, remembered a lot. And lied a lot about herself. I think she even believed most of it.”

He sat in silence on the couch, almost unaware of me. He was a dumpy, tired little thief dressed for a costume party.

“I gave up the rough lines. She became a partner. She’d cruise on her own, rope them, bring them back within range, set them up, clean them out, divorce them. Had she been more merciful I think she would have been a poisoner. Mercilessness can be a flaw. And believing your own lies. And she had another flaw too. She could never get any sexual satisfaction from the marks. After the scores she’d almost invariably find some brute stud, usually ignorant, rough, dirty and potentially dangerous. But she always kept the whip hand, drove them hard, walked out when she was ready.” He sighed, stirred, pumped himself back up to full con artist scale, aimed personality at me like a two-mile flashlight.

“McGee, do I do all the talking?”

“I think she must have been carrying her share in cash. And was killed a few days after she left the motel in Naples while Arthur was off on his bus trip. I’d guess the playmate who killed her has spent at least twenty-five thousand. Cars, a boat, guns, toys. I’m helping my friend Arthur. If I could come up with a good way of making a recovery from you, I’d give it a try. I take expenses off the top and keep half the net salvage. So moving in on her playmate could be full of ugly surprises, and if I knew how much she was carrying on her, I’d know if there was a balance worth the risk.”

“And if I give you the figure?”

“Then I’d have to figure out whether to tell you who and where. And if you’re lying. Suppose she was carrying just twenty-five. So you tell me a hundred so I will go prodding and maybe get jammed up in a way that will keep me from ever coming back with some cute idea for you. Or maybe I eliminate the playmate, which would satisfy you up for the way he cooked your future plans for Wilma. Or suppose she was carrying a hundred and you tell me it was twenty-five. I say who and where and you send muscle after it.”

He pondered it. “Stalemate again. I see your point. There’s no way I can get you to take my word that the very last thing I would do these days is go after a hijacked take, or send anyone. Risks alarm me, Travis McGee. I have too much to lose. You could check something out. I own twenty percent of the West Harbour Development Corporation. And some other things here and there. Muscle is seldom combined with wits. You seem to be a striking exception. Someone gets killed and the muscle gets tricked into a state’s evidence revelation, and the middleman I would use implicates me. No thanks. Besides, Debra and I are negotiating a score as big as the one Arthur contributed. By falsifying records, bribing minor officials, making some careful changes in old group pictures-school and church-and with the help of some brown contact lenses, some minor changes in hair and skin texture, we have given Debra an ironclad identity as a mulatto, as a pale-skinned girl who actually did disappear at fourteen. This curious revelation has come as a horrid shock to her young husband of four months, and an even worse shock to her wealthy father-in-law, the ex-governor of a southern state, a fevered segregationist, a man with political ambitions. The positive rabbit test-also faked-is bringing things to a climax. The fat settlement is for divorce, abortion and total silence. There was a real chance they might solve it by having her killed. But Debra is not squeamish. Actually, she takes too many chances. Very good family. She was risk-hunting when I found her. Jumping out of the airplanes, racing overpowered little boats and automobiles, skin diving alone and too deep, potting at cape buffalo with a hand gun. She’s incredibly quick and strong. Now she has found something, finally, which satisfies her. The hunt. Along with the constant and very real danger of displeasing me.

“McGee, all I can ask you to do is accept my story of what happened. There was a hundred and thirty-five thousand left in that trustee account for the syndicate in the Naples bank. I arranged in advance for them to have cash available. It is not difficult in Florida where cash is used so often in real estate closings. The day Arthur came up to meet me, my man Harris drove me to Naples. I closed out the account at noon, kept five thousand for incidental expenses and took the balance to that grisly motel room and gave it to Wilma. She was almost packed. We had arranged she would return to Tampa in the car with me in time to catch a Nassau flight. I had her ticket. The money represented the final take for both of us. I gave her the prepared deposit slip for my share. Bahamian banks have a pleasant policy of never divulging information on an account unless the depositor appears in person and signs a specific authorization. She said she’d made other arrangements, that someone was going to drive her to Miami and she would fly over from there. I made mild objections.”

“And you let her fly off with all that money?”

“She liked money. Without me, she’d have a lot less to spend. We were together fifteen years. Taking cash into the islands is easy. She was shrewd and tough. And far from retirement.”

“So, as I said at first, maybe you’re fattening the figure.”

He called Debra in. I gave them no chance for signals, made her face me with her slender back toward him. She verified the details and the amount, asked no questions, left without a word when he told her to go.

I could have gathered Chookie and left. I doubted he’d have tried anything. But there was an implied obligation. And if he did indeed come after what Boo might have left, it could turn into a diversion I might be able to use.

“Boo Waxwell picked her up at the motel. Arthur went to Waxwell’s place at Goodland and found her there. Boo beat him badly. I jounced Crane Watts around first. I used his name to open Waxwell up. I invented the yarn that Arthur had gone to Watts and told him he’d seen Wilma at Waxwell’s. I said I was trying to set up a similar kind of operation to the way you cleaned Arthur out, and needed the woman. He claimed, wide-eyed, it was a little ol‘ waitress friend from Miami. But Arthur remembers Wilma wearing the watch he thought she’d sold in Miami. He wouldn’t invent that. And, of course, he has all his new toys.”

Stebber nodded slowly. “Her usual type. A little more complex, probably. Whenever she tamed them, that finished it for her. I tried to keep him away from Arthur’s beach house while we were still building the con. Hard man to control. Yes. Of course. It fits. She wouldn’t have waved the money at him. He smelled it somehow.”

Debra knocked and appeared with a blue extension phone. “Crane Watts,” she said. “Do you want to take it in here, darling?”

“Or take it at all? Please.” She stooped lithely, plugged it into a baseboard jack receptacle, brought it to him and drifted out.

In full heat and radiance he said, “How nice to hear from you, Crane, my boy!… Start from the beginning. Slow dawn, boy… Yes… I see… Please, no assumptions. Confine yourself to the facts.”

Watts talked far a long time without interruption. Stebber made a sad face at me. Finally he said, “That’s enough. Do pull yourself together. No person named McGee or named anything else has tried to contact me on that matter. Why should you think in terms of an official investigation? As a lawyer you must know it was a legal business matter. This McGee is probably some sharpshooter who found out Arthur had lost some money in an unwise investment and is trying to shake some of it loose. Tell Waxwell too that neither of you should be so agitated. Please don’t phone me again. I retained you for legal work. It’s finished. So is our association.”

He listened for a short time and said, “The status of your career could not mean less to me, Watts. Please don’t bother me again.”

As he returned the phone to the cradle I could hear the frantic tiny buzzing of Crane’s agitated voice.

Frowning, Stebber said, “Strange that Waxwell should be so eager to bully my phone number out of Watts. He says he gave him the number but not the code-as if he expected congratulations. I would think, if your guess is right, I’d be the last person he’d…”

Changing the pitch and resonance of my voice, I said, “Ol‘ Boo make that lawyer boy itchy.”

It astounded and delighted him out of all proportion to the accomplishment. Patience and a good tape recorder can make a respectable mimic out of anyone.

“Maybe some day we could find a project to our mutual advantage,” he said.

“I can think of one right now. Decoy Waxwell up here and keep him here for one full day and I send you ten percent of all we recover.”

“No thanks. I don’t think the man is entirely sane. And he goes by hunch. I wouldn’t risk it. Decoy him with a woman, McGee. The McCall girl could keep him occupied long enough.”

“Let’s say she’s squeamish, Stebber. Loan me Debra for the same cut. Ten percent.”

“I wouldn’t consider it for one…” He stopped suddenly. His shy glance was more obscene than any wink or leer could have been. “If you could have her back in three days. And… if you could leave Miss McCall here with me. As a guarantee of good faith.”

“How bulky would the money be?”

“New hundreds in Federal Reserve wrappers. Thirteen packets, one hundred bills thick. Perhaps not quite enough to fill a fair-sized shoebox. You didn’t answer my question about Miss… Chookie.”

“Given a choice, given time to think, I imagine she’d pick Boo Waxwell.”

“Why give her a choice, dear boy? You’d find Debra charming company. And I can assure you few men make the impact on her you’ve already made. And when you get Miss Chookie McCall back, you’d find her quite anxious to be agreeable, and not at all contentious. Truly effective disciplines, McGee, leave the loveliness untouched and the soul just an interestingly bit queasy and apprehensive. It’s a superimposed useful anxiety.”

“Speaking for Miss McCall, no thanks.”

“Some day, perhaps,” he said and went and called the girls. They came walking slowly back into the big room, and I saw Chook wearing an odd expression, Debra looking secretively amused.

They both walked us out to the elevator, all charm and assurance, convincing us we were lovely people who had stopped in for a lovely drink. As the elevator door closed, my final look at them showed their gracious smiles, the smiles of an elegant couple, tastefully appointed, mannerly. And virulent as coral snakes.

Choak stayed lost in her silence and did not explode until we were a half mile away. “Girl talk! Girl talk! Do you know what that skinny bitch was doing? She was trying to… to recruit me. Like a gawdam Marine poster. See the world. Learn a trade. Retire in your prime.”

“Recruit you as what?”

“She didn’t say right out. She inspected me like a side of meat and said I was prime. Too bad I was wasting myself in such hard work for so little money. Damn it, I make good money. Men, she said, the right kind of men, could get so expensively intrigued with a big, dark fierce-looking girl like me. And that man, Trav. He made me feel weak and silly and young, and he made me feel anxious to make him like me. At first. But at the end there, I was thinking how nice it would be to squash him like a bug. They scare me, Trav. In a way I don’t think I’ve been scared since I was a kid, when my grandmother got me so worked up about white slavers, if I saw two men standing on a street corner, I’d cross the street so they couldn’t jab me with a needle and sell me to the Arabs. Trav, if we have to have anything to do with those people, something really awful might happen. My God, Trav, you should see the clothes she’s got. Furs and originals and nine drawers of undies and a shoe rack, I swear to God, with a hundred pair of shoes at least. And all the time she was kind of laughing at me inside, as if I was a dumb oaf of a girl, a nudnik. What happened, Travis?”

“In short form, he confirms the hunch Waxwell killed her. She was carrying her share and his of Arthur’s money. She was to put his end in a Nassau bank account. A hundred and thirty thousand dollars. I think he already had taken a fat slice of the rest of it. Everybody else had been paid off. But he writes her off and the money off. He wants no part of it. He says. Maybe I believe him. I don’t know. He might send somebody down. We have to play it that way.”

“A hundred and thirty thousand!” she exclaimed.

“Less what old Boo has blown. Rough guess, eighty-five or ninety left.”

“But that’s good, isn’t it? Isn’t that better than anything you expected?”

“Putting my hands on any part of it, Chook, is going to be better than I expected. And I haven’t done that yet.”

Twelve

IT WAS after nine at night when I parked at the marina and we went aboard the Busted Flush. No light showed. I had the irrational hunch that something had gone wrong. Maybe I had been exposed to too much calculated deviousness for one day. But as I flicked the lounge lights on, there was Arthur slouched on the big yellow couch. He had a tall glass in his hand, dark enough for iced coffee. He gave us a big crooked glassy grin, hoisted the glass in such an enthusiastic salute of welcome that a dollop of it leapt out and splashed his shirt.

“Warra sharra numun!” he said.

Chook stood over him, fists on her hips. “Oh boy! You’ve done it real good, huh?”

“Shawara dummen-huzzer,” he said, in pleased explanation.

She took the glass out of his hand, sniffed it, set it aside. She turned to me. “As you remember, it doesn’t take much. The poor silly. It was such a strain to be shut up here all this time.” She took his wrist, braced herself. “Upsy-daisy, darling.”

She got him up but with a wide loving grin, he enfolded her in big arms and, utterly slack, bore her over and down with a mighty thud of their combined weights. Chook worked free and stood up, rubbing a bruised haunch. Arthur, still smiling, cheek resting on his forearm, emitted a low buzzing snore.

“At least,” she said. “It’s not what I’m used to. A happy drunk.”

Between us we stood him up, draped him soddenly over my shoulder. I dumped him into the big bed.

“Thanks, Trav. I’ll manage from here,” she said, and began to unbutton his shirt, looking up from the task to give me a slightly rueful smile. “Rich warm memories of Frankie Durkin,” she said. “But there the trick was to keep from getting a split mouth or a fat eye before he folded.”

Up on the sundeck I heard the sound of the shower, and a little while later she came climbing up into the night warmth in her robe, bringing two beers.

“Rockaby baby,” she said. “Tomorrow he’ll be a disaster area.” She sat beside me. “And what now, Captain?”

“Confusion. I was thinking that, at the right distance, in the right garments, you might pass as Vivian Watts, tennis player. And if Viv left a message for old Boo to join her in assignation at some far place, it might intrigue him. But it won’t fit together. The odds are she despises Waxwell and he knows it. Then it struck me that she could properly blame Waxwell for her husband’s downhill slide. And she might leap at the chance to give him a bruise if there was a chance of a piece of money to square all overdue accounts and have enough left over to move along to a place where Crane Watts could start all over again. That means sounding her out. Quietly and soon. But with something specific. That’s as far as I’ve gotten.”

“Hmm. And Waxwell would think it fishy if she made a play. But he does have… a certain interest in her?”

“Avid.”

“What if he found out somehow that she had left her husband and gone off someplace alone to think things out, all alone in some hideaway place, away from people. A place hard to get to. She wouldn’t be there, of course, but it would take him a long time to get there and find out and get back.”

“And when he got back and found out he’d been cleaned out, who would he go after first, Chook? That isn’t a happy thought.”

“See what you mean. But what if she and her husband got all set to take off, so then you could give them some of the money and they’d be gone before he got back?”

“And if I can’t find the money?”

“Then he wouldn’t have much to be sore about, would he?”

“And she could say that she started off and changed her mind and came back to her husband. If he asks. You have a talent for this, Miss Chookie.”

“Thanks a lot. Trav, I don’t see how you can expect to find it, even if you had a whole day.”

“I have an idea about that. Remember the story of Bluebeard?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’ll tell you if it works.”

“And you have to think of a place she might be likely to go. And some way of getting the word to Boone Waxwell. And you have to talk her into it in the first place.”

“I think she’s desperate. I think she’s ready to try anything. And she would be the logical one to ask about a place she might go. Meanwhile, playing it by ear, we’ve got ourselves located on the wrong square on this board maybe. Maybe not. Hell, I guess not. With the car, and with the little boat at Naples, maybe right on the edge of the board is the best square to occupy.”

“And you’ll use Arthur somehow, dear? Some safe way?”

“I promise.”

She patted my arm. “Thank you very much. Do men’s work. Leave the lady home to give tearful thanks at the safe return.”

“I can’t take him with me tomorrow. Or you. Not for the morning mission.”

“What is it?”

“I want to see if the Bluebeard idea is any good before I take the Viv idea any further.”

Tuesday morning at nine thirty, from a gas station a quarter mile from the junior high school, I phoned the administration office and asked to speak to Cindy Ingerfeldt. A woman with a tart, skeptical voice said, “This is the next to the last day of exams. I can check to see if she is taking an examination or if she is in a study period, but I shall have to know who you are and the purpose of the call.”

“The name is Hooper, ma’m. Field investigator for State Beverage Control. I’ll have to ask you to keep that confidential. The girl could have some useful information. Could you give me a rundown on her, what kind of a kid she is?”

“I… I don’t imagine you’ll find her cooperative. Cindy is quite mature for her age. A very indifferent student. She’s just marking time here, as so many of them are. I take it her home life is not too pleasant. She’s not a popular child. She keeps to herself. She’s tidy about her person, and would be really quite pretty if she lost some weight. Mr. Hooper, if you want to interrogate the child, you could come here and I could turn over a private office to you.”

“I’d rather not do it that way, ma’m. Word could get back to some pretty rough people. I wouldn’t want to cause her that kind of trouble. That’s why I ask you kindly to keep this to yourself.”

“Oh dear. Is the child… involved in anything?”

“Nothing like that, ma’m. You know, if you really want to cooperate, rather than me trying to get anything out of her over the phone, I’d appreciate it if you could just make some reason to send her down the road to the Texaco Station. I won’t take much of her time, and send her right back.”

“Well… let me check her schedule.” About a full minute later, as I stared through the booth glass at the distant building and the ranks of yellow buses behind it, she came back on the line and said in a conspiratorial way, “She’ll finish her History test at ten. I think the most inconspicuous way would be for me to go and see her in person as she comes out, and I will send her along then. Will that be all right?”

“Just fine, and I certainly do appreciate your cooperation.”

At a few minutes before ten, I moved the car, parked it fifty yards closer to the school, aimed in the direction of the gas station. At a few minutes after ten I saw her in the rear vision mirror, trudging along toward me, both arms hugging a stack of books to her bosom. She wore a green striped cotton blouse, salmon-colored pants that ended halfway between knee and ankle, white sneakers. When she was near enough, I reached over and swung the door open, saying, “Good morning, Cindy.”

She stared at me, came slowly toward the car, stopped a few feet away. “Oh. You, huh.” She appraised me with those wise old eyes. “What’s on your mind?”

“Get in.”

“Lissen, if Sunday give you any ideas, forget it. I don’t know you, I’m not in the mood, and I got enough problems, mister.”

“I want to fix ol Boo’s wagon, Cindy. And he’ll never know you were involved in any way. I just want to ask some questions. Get in and we’ll drive around and I’ll drop you off right here in fifteen minutes.”

“What makes you think I should want to mess Boo up someways?”

“Let’s just say you could be doing your father a favor.”

She pursed her small mouth, gave a half shrug and climbed in. She plunked her books on the seat between us and said, “No driving around. Go like I tell you.”

Her directions were terse and lucid. They took us three blocks over, two blocks to the left, and into a sheltered grove with picnic tables and fireplaces, willows thick around a pond. When I turned the engine off she sighed, undid a button of her blouse, poked two fingers into her bra, squirmed slightly, and pulled out a wilted cigarette and a kitchen match. She popped the match aflame with a deft thumbnail, drew deeply, exhaled a long gray plume that bounced off the inside of the windshield.

“How’d you get old Mossbutt to leave me loose?”

“I said it was official. Beverage Control investigation. When you go back she’ll want to know. Tell her Mr. Cooper said not to talk about it to anybody.”

“That your name?”

“No.”

“Is it official?”

“What do you think, Cindy?”

“Prolly not.”

“You’re right. Sunday you gave me the impression you wish Waxwell was out of your life. Was that an act?”

“I don’t know. Guess not. If he wasn’t so damn mean. And not so old. Don’t take me no place. Miami he keeps saying. Sure. I should live so long. The way it goes, shit, I’ve gotta make some kind of move myself, because I hang around, it’s going to be the same, no matter what. A bunch of the kids, they got a chance to bus up and work tobacco in Connecticut this summer. Working hard and being far away I could get over being so hooked, maybe. Goddam mean old man, he is.”

The last drag drew the fire line down close to her thumb. She snapped the butt out the window, holding her breath, then exhaled, openmouthed. She turned toward me and rested her plump cheek on the seat back. “What d’ya wanna know?”

“Do you know Boo murdered a woman out there at his place last year?”

She hooded her eyes, examined a thumb nail, nibbled the corner of it. “Friend a yours?”

“No. Just the opposite. It didn’t seem to surprise you.”

“I guess I had the feeling something happened. She a midget or something?”

“That’s a fanny question.”

“There was some black lace panties I tried to get on. I’m fat but not that fat. I busted them trying. When I asked too many times he popped me on tap of the head with his fist so hard I got sick an heaved up.”

“She was a very small woman. I understand he makes you work around the place.”

“Oh Christ, I don’t mind that. He lives like a hog. it’s just he won’t let me keep ahead of it. He lets it go, then it’s twice as much work.”

“Is he always there when you’re cleaning up?”

“When I’m there, he’s there. What he says, I ever come around when he’s gone, or come without him calling me he’s got- something special he’s saving for a big surprise. I’m not fixing to get any surprise from him for sure.”

“All right, when you are cleaning the place, is there any particular part of the house he won’t let you touch?”

“Huh? I don’t get it.”

“As if something could be hidden in the house?”

“Huh? No. Nothing like that. But I sure God stay clear of the grove there back of the shed. One time, back in March I think, it got hot unexpected like. He’d come by and give me a blast on the horn pretty late. At like three in the morning, him asleep and snoring by then, I was there smelling some stinking fish he’d forgot about and left on the porch maybe since that noon. Redfish. They turn fast when it’s hot. It got my stomach rolling over finally, so I up and pull my dress on and go out and pick them up by the stringer, get a shovel from the shed and go off back into the grove to bury them holding my breath mostly. I hardly dug half a hole and he come at me, running flat out, grunting, that belt knife of his winking in the moonlight, charging bareass crazy right at me. Me, I take off through the grove and hear him hit a root or something and go down hard. Then he’s coming on again, yelling he’s going to kill me, and I’m yelling I was burying his stinking fish before the stink made me snap my lunch.

“Then he was quiet, so I snuck in a circle and see him back in the open part of the grove, finishing digging the hole. He dabbed the fish in and covered them over, then he hollers for me to come on in, saying it was okay, he was just having a funny dream and he woke up. Hell he did. A long time after he went back in the house I get the nerve fin’ly to sneak back in, and the way I got grabbed sudden in the dark from behind, it like to kill me. But what he wanted to do was just horse around. You know. Laughing and tickling. And he got me all turned on prakly before I got over being scared. And I tell you one thing. I never seen any shovel anywhere around his place since. But he isn’t so dumb he’d bury that dwarf woman onto his own place. Not with a couple million acres of glades close by, where he could put a little dead woman back in there so far and so deep, the whole army and navy couldn’t find her in a hundred years. Why, he could just float her into a gator pool and them gators would wedge her down into the mud bottom for ripenin‘ and have her et’n to nothing in a couple weeks. Maybe they can catch him killin’ somebody, but they’ll never get him for it afterwards. I’ll tell you one more thing for sure. If’n you mess him up good, and he knows who done it, you’re best off leaving him dead your own self. That’s the thing about that tobacco work. I get maybe up past Georgia someplace and the bus stops and there he is, leanin on that white Lincoln grinnin, and I pick up my suitcase off ‘n the rack and get off that bus, because that’s all there’d be to do. And he knows it.”

On one of her notebook sheets I drew a crude sketch of the cottage and shed and road, and she made an X where she had started digging, and drew in some lopsided circles to indicate where the trees were standing.

As I let her off, she looked at me for a moment, eyes squinty and her lips sucked in. “I’d hate for you to say I told you this stuff.”

“Cindy, you’re fifteen years old, and you’re going to get out of this mess and in another couple of years you won’t remember much about it.”

There was a bleak amusement in her woman’s eyes. “I’m three weeks from sixteen, and it’ll keep right on going on until Boo gets tired of it, and there won’t be a day in my life I don’t remember some part of it or other.”

I drove into Naples, on the alert for Land Rovers and white Lincoln convertibles. I found a hardware store several blocks along Fifth Avenue, parked in their side lot, bought two spades and a pick and put them in the trunk. Then I thought of another device that might be useful, a variation of the way plumbers search for buried pipes. I bought a four foot length of quarter inch steel reinforcing rod, and one of those rubberheaded mallets they use for body and fender work. Naples was drowsy in the heat of the offseason, pre-noon sun. I phoned Crane Watts’ office number, and hung up when he said hello. Next I phoned his home number. It did not answer. I tried the club and asked if Mrs. Watts was on the courts. In a few moments they said she was and should they call her to the phone. I said never mind.

When I arrived at the club the parking lot was nearly empty. There were a few people down on the beach, one couple in the pool. As I walked toward the courts I saw only two were in use, one where two scrawny elderly gentlemen were playing vicious pat-ball, and, several courts away, the brown, lithe, sturdy Mrs. Watts in a practice session. The man was apparently the club pro, very brown, balding, thickening. He moved well, but she had him pretty well lathered up. There were a couple dozen balls near the court. He was feeding her backhand, ignoring the returns, bouncing each ball, then stroking it to her left with good speed and overspin. She moved, gauged, planted herself, pivoted, the ball ponging solidly off the gut, moved to await the next one. The waistband of her tennis skirt was visibly damp with sweat.

It seemed, for her, a strange and intense ritual, a curious sublimation of tension and combat. Her face was stern and expressionless. She glanced at me twice and then ignored me. Gave no greeting.

Finally as he turned to pick up three more balls she said, “That’ll do it for now, Timmy.”

He took a handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his face. “Righto, Miz Watts. I make it three hours. Okay?”

“Anything you say.”

As Timmy was collecting the balls in a mesh sack, she walked to the sidecourt bench; mopped her face and throat with a towel, stared at me with cold speculation as I approached.

“Pretty warm for it, Vivian.”

“Mr. McGee, you made an excellent first impression on me the other night. But the second one was more lasting.”

“And things might not have been what they seemed.”

She took her time unsnapping the gold glove on her right hand, peeling it off. She prodded and examined the pads at the base of her fingers. “I do not think I am interested in any nuances of legality, Mr. McGee, any justification of any cute tricky little things you want to involve my husband in.” As she spoke, she was slipping her rackets into their braces, tightening down the thumb screws. “He is not… the kind of man for that kind of thing. I don’t know why he’s trying to be something he isn’t. It’s tearing him apart. Why don’t you just leave us alone?”

As she gathered up her gear, I picked the words that would, I hoped, pry open a closed mind. “Vivian, I wouldn’t ask your husband’s advice on a parking ticket, believe me.”

She straightened up, those very dark blue eyes becoming round with surprise and indignation. “Crane is a very good attorney!”

“Maybe he was. Once upon a time. Not now.”

“Who are you? What do you want?”

“I want to form a little mutual aid society with you, Vivian. You need help and I need help.”

“Is this… help I’m supposed to get, is it just for me or for Crane too?”

“Both of you.”

“Of course. I get him to do some nasty little piece of crooked work for you, and it will make us gloriously rich and happy.”

“No. He did his nasty little piece of crooked work last year, and it didn’t do either of you any good.”

She began to walk slowly, thoughtfully, off toward the distant entrance to the women’s locker room, and I walked beside her. She had been laboring in the sun for three hours. Under the faded cosmetic and deodorant scents of a fastidious woman was an animal pungency of worksweat, a sharpness not unpleasant, the effluvium of ballet school and practice halls.

“What I can offer, if things can be worked out, is a long odds chance and a suggestion. I thank he’s whipped himself here. I think you’re both whipped. If you had some cash, right now, you should settle up what you owe around here and get out. Try it again in a new place. What is he? Thirty-one? There’s time. But maybe he’s lost you along the way, and you’re not interested.”

Under the shade of big pines the path narrowed and I dropped behind her. Her back was straight and strong, and the round of her sturdy hips, in tempo with the smooth brown muscular flex of her calves, gave the tennis skirt a limber sway. She stopped suddenly and turned around to face me. Her mouth, free of the tautness of disapproval, was softened and younger.

“He hasn’t lost me. But don’t play games. Don’t play cruel games, Travis. I don’t know what’s been going on. He says he got into something and he didn’t know it was a bad thing until too late.”

Sometimes you have to aim right between the eyes. “He knew from the start. He knew it was fraud; with a nice little sugar coating of legality. They paid him well, and he helped them screw a man named Arthur Wilkinson out of a quarter of a million dollars. It got around, Vivian. Who’d trust him now? He’s terrified that somebody is going to wipe off the pretty icing and expose the fraud. He consorted with con artists and trash like Boone Waxwell, went into it with his eyes open for the sake of what he thought was going to be twelve thousand five. But he doesn’t have the nerve to be a good thief. He began to shake apart. They kissed him off with seven thousand five, knowing he didn’t have the nerve to get hard-nosed about it. And if he keeps dithering around spilling his guts to strangers like me, maybe they’ll get so tired of him they’ll send somebody around to put a gun in his hand when he’s passed out, and stick the barrel in his ear.”

She wobbled on those good legs, and her color went sick under the tan. She moved off the path and sat, quite heavily, on a cement and cypress bench, staring blindly through the shade toward the bright sea. Her mouth trembled. I sat beside her, watching that unhappy profile.

“I… I guess I knew that he knew. Sunday night, after Waxwell left, he swore on his word of honor Waxwell had been lying, trying to needle us by all those little hints that Crane had been in on something all along.”

She turned and looked at me in a pleading way, her color getting better, and said, “What makes him so weak?”

“Maybe what’s left of your good opinion of him is the only thing he has left, Vivian. Would you still want to try to save it?”

“His best friend at Stetson, his roommate, wanted Crane to quit here and go in with him in practice in Orlando. He might still… I don’t know. And I don’t know about me even. I think if I could get him straightened out again, then it would be time to decide about me.”

“If what I want to ask you to do works out, I want you and your husband to be ready to leave any moment, to get ready so you can leave. Arrange the big things later, like getting rid of the house and so on.”

“Right now our equity in that might buy one day’s groceries,” she said bitterly. “One way or another, I can make him do it.”

“How much would it take to clean up your bills here and give the two of you say a month or six weeks a good long way from here, in some hideout. Don’t look so skeptical. You wouldn’t be hiding from the law. It would be a chance to get him dried out. And then he might begin to make more sense to himself, and you.”

“My father left me a cabin on a couple of acres of ridge land near Brevard, North Carolina. On Slick Rock Mountain. It’s so lovely up there. You can look out across ridge after ridge, all grayblue in the distance. Wood fires on summer nights.” Her mouth twisted. “We honeymooned there, several thousand lifetimes ago. How much to settle up here? I don’t know. He’s been so secretive. Maybe we owe more than I know. I’d think three or four thousand dollars. But there might be other debts.”

“And getting started in Orlando later on. Call it ten.”

“Ten thousand dollars! What could I do that would be worth ten thousand dollars to anyone? Who do I have to kill?”

“You have to be bait, Vivian. To lure Boone Waxwell out of his cave and keep him out for as long as you can, a full day minimum, more if we can manage it.”

Those good shoulders moved slowly up. She locked her hands, closed her eyes and shuddered. “That man. God, he makes my flesh crawl. The few times I’ve ever seen him, he’s never taken his eyes off me. And he acts as if he and I have same special secret we share. All those little smirks and chuckles and winks, and the way he struts around me, puffing his chest and rolling his shoulders, laughing with a little snorting sound, like a stallion. And he puts double meanings in everything he says to me. Honestly, I freeze completely. He makes me feel naked and sick. That pelt of hair sticking out of the top of those ghastly shirts, and all that black hair on the backs of his hands and fingers, and that sort of… oily intimacy in his voice, it all makes my stomach turn over. Travis, if what you have in mind involves his… even touching me in any way, no. Not for ten thousand dollars, not for ten thousand dollars a minute.” She tilted her head, looking at me in a puzzled way. “It isn’t because I’m… prissy or anything. No other man has affected me that way. I am certainly not… unresponsive.” And the wryness around her mouth. “Of course I haven’t been able to check that in some time. When one becomes a very infrequent convenience for a drunk, an accommodation, the opportunity for any kind of response is very goddam rare.”

A dime of sunlight came through the pine branches overhead, glowed against the firm and graceful forearm, showing the pattern of fine golden hair against the dark skin. She shook her head. “It’s like nightmares when you’re a kid. I think that if Boone Waxwell ever… got me, I might walk around afterwards and look just the same, but my heart would be dead as a stone forever. Oh, I guess I’d make nifty bait all right. He did everything but paw the ground Sunday night.”

“The point is to make him think you have gone to a place where he can get at you. A far place, that’ll take him a long time to get to. And a long time to get back when he finds it was a trick, and when he gets back, both of you will be gone. But you can’t let your husband in on it. Because in his present condition, Waxwell can spread him open like a road map. We have to make Crane believe you have gone to a specific place, and somehow give Waxwell the idea of prying it out of him.”

“Then you can get the money, while he’s gone off after me.”

“I had the idea you’d be just this quick and bright, Vivian.”

“The money… Crane helped steal?”

“A good part of it.”

“But then it’s still stolen money, isn’t it?”

“Not when this time, you get it with the blessing of the man they took it from.”

“The man you’re working for?”

“In a sense. Arthur Wilkinson. And I think he should tell you in person that he approves the arrangement. You think of how we can best set it up, this decoy operation. Maybe Arthur and I can meet you tonight.”

“I could have some specific plan by then, I think, Travis. You could come to the house at eleven.”

“What about your husband?”

“The big suspense in my life every evening is whether he’ll pass out in his big leather chair or totter to bed first. I try to cut down the intake. I make his drinks on demand. It is a delicate problem. If I make them too weak, he comes blundering out into the kitchen and snarls at me and puts another big slug in the glass. He stares at television and doesn’t see a thing or remember a thing. It’s no problem, really. Tonight I’ll make them strong, and frequent. And by eleven you could march a fife and drum corps through without him missing a snore. When he passes out, I’ll put the light on over the front door.” She took a very deep breath, let it out in a sigh. ‘’Maybe it can work. Maybe people can go back and start the race a second time.“

Back aboard the Flush I was in time for lunch only because Chook had delayed it until there was an improved chance of Arthur keeping it down. He was wane and humble, reeking of guilt, his eyes sliding away from any direct glance.

“All these empty boats around us,” he said. “I don’t know. I kept hearing things. A little creak or a thump, after it got dark. Each time I knew he was sneaking aboard. And I knew what he has to do, Trav. He has to get rid of everybody who can link him with Wilma. And I saw her there. I went back and forth in the lounge in the dark, with the loaded gun, and I’d peer out the windows and see things, see some shadow duck across an open space over there, coming closer. I felt I could empty the gun right into him and he’d come right on at me, laughing. He certainly found out the name and description of this boat, and I just knew he’d hunted until he’d found it. Then I thought a drink would give me some confidence. And one didn’t. But the second one worked so good, I thought three would be even better. Hell, I can’t even remember what I did with the gun. We hunted all over. Chook found it. In a corner up against a locker. I must have dropped it and kicked it. I’m a lot of help to everybody.”

Chook stepped from the galley to the dining booth and glowered down at him. She wore pale blue stretch pants that rode low on her hips, and a red bikini top so narrow that only a perfect adjustment, which she attained but seldom, kept the umber nipple areas entirely covered. Halfleaning over the booth in that cramped area, in the glow of sun off the water shining through the ports, it seemed an almost overpowering amount of bare girl.

“Why don’t you go sit in the garden and eat worms, lover?” she demanded. “Your self-pity rends my girlish heart. You got drunk, a condition so rare you can find it only in medical books. God’s sake, Arthur!”

“I got terrified.”

“That man beat you within an inch of your life, with Wilma watching it and enjoying it, and if that railing hadn’t broken, maybe he would have killed you. Do you think a thing like that shouldn’t leave a mark?” She hissed with exasperation. “Since when is it a sin to be scared? Am I going to move out of your bed because you can get frightened? Are people going to spit on you on the street? Drop this boy scout bit. Every day in every way, nine out of ten people in this big fat world are scared pissless. You have some obligation to be different? Even the mighty McGee isn’t immune, believe me. God’s sake, Arthur!”

She strode back into the galley area, made a vicious banging of copper pots.

“Wow,” Arthur said in a low tone of awe.

“She’s right,” I said. “And tonight you get another chance to get a little jumpy Arthur. You and I are going calling.”

His throat slid up and down in a large dry swallow. He put his shoulders back. “Fine!” he said heartily. “Just fine! Looking forward to it.”

Chook appeared with a big scarred pewter plate for each of us, banged them down. “Huevos rancheros,” she said. “There’s enough chili in those eggs, love, and enough heat in that sausage to give your stomach something brand new to think about.” She brought her own plate and slid in beside him. “Ours are merely hot, my lamb. Yours is volcanic. And choke it down or you’ll wear it like a hat. It’s an old home remedy for the squeams.”

Arthur made it. It was a noble effort. It gave him tears, the snuffles and the sweats, and frequent glares of astonished agony before snatching at the soothing blandness of buttered bread.

“You briefed him?” I asked her when we’d finished.

“On the whole thing, at least when he wasn’t clattering off to go whoops.”

“Cut it out, Chookie!” Arthur said firmly. “Enough is enough. Let’s drop it for good.” He stared her in the eye.

Suddenly she grinned, nodded, patted his arm. “Welcome back to the human race.”

“Glad to be aboard,” he said politely.

“Wilma’s background too?” I asked.

“It’s so strange,” Arthur said. “I never knew her at all, did I? I realized something odd today. I can see her very vividly, the way she stood and sat and walked. But in every memory, she’s turned away from me. I can’t bring her face back at all. I can remember the color of her eyes, but I can’t see them. So now somebody I never knew is dead. And… she was married to somebody I didn’t know very well. I see two strangers living in that beach house. Does that make any sense?”

“It does to me,” Chook said. “Trav, please, what happens tonight? Until you’re both back safe, I’ll be half out of my mind. Please tell me.”

Thirteen

It ws very close to eleven when I turned the dark green sedan onto Clematis Drive. The other houses were dark. There were more vacant lots than houses. As I approached the Watts home I saw that the light over the front door was not on. And so I touched the gas pedal again and started by saying to Arthur, “I guess lawyer boy is still semiconscious.”

Quite a few lights were on in the house. And just as I passed it, I saw, in the darkness of the side lawn beyond the carport, something that made me give a little sound of surprise.

“What’s the matter?” Arthur said in a strained voice.

“Good ol‘ Boo’s white Lincoln tucked nearly out of sight at the side there. Top down. See it?”

“Yes, I see it. My God. We better go back, don’t you think?”

I did not answer him. I turned left onto the next street and after the first few houses, there was nothing but the emptiness of development land, where asphalt turned into damp dirt with deep ruts. I backed and filled and got the car turned around, and on the last swing I turned the lights off, proceeded slowly by faint watery moonlight. I bumped it up over curbing and tucked it into the shadows of a clump of cabbage palm. In the silence a slight wind rattled the fronds, making a rain sound.

“What are you going to do?” he asked. There was a tremor in his voice.

“Take a look. Both the Watts’ cars are there. I’ll cut across and come out behind the house. That’s it, over there. The lighted one. You wait for me right here.”

“And what if you g-get into trouble, Trav?”

“I’ll either come back on the double, or I won’t. Then, if I don’t, if you think you can handle it, get as close as you can and see what you can see. Don’t take any chances. Use your judgment. Here.” I took the pistol out of my jacket pocket and shoved it into his hands. Morale builder. I had to turn my frail reed into something stauncher; just in case. Even at the expense of making me feel naked.

“I don’t like this,” he said. He was not alone in that appraisal.

“If it turns very very sour, go and get Chook and get out of the area fast, Use this car and drive all night, right up to Tallahassee. In the morning get hold of a man in the State Attorney General’s office. Remember this name. Vokeler. Truman Vokeler.” He repeated it after me. “Don’t talk to anyone else. If he’s away, demand he be sent for. And you and Chook level with him. Everything. He’ll take it from there. Trust him.”

“Why don’t we just…”

I got out of the car and closed the door. I walked fifty feet into the field, stopped and waited until I had enough night vision to pick up the contour of the ground, and keep from falling over palmetto and small bushes. I kept the vision by not looking directly at the house lights. Brush was thick beyond their rear property line and I moved toward a gap and came upon a woven cedar fence, low enough to stop over. Once in the back yard, I stopped in the shadows, examining the house, refreshing my memory of the layout. Kitchen windows were lighted. Light from the living room shone out into the cage, on plantings and shadowy terrace furniture. I could hear no sound. There was an odd flickering light which puzzled me. After moving a little way to the side, I could see through the cage and into the living room. Crane Watts was slumped in a big green leather wing chair, legs sprawled on a hassock, head toppled to the side. I could detect no sound or movement in any part of the house, nor see any other person.

I moved around toward the carport side, crouched and ran to the side of the convertible, waited there, resting on one knee, listening. I came up cautiously and looked into the empty car, then leaned and felt cautiously. The keys weren’t in it. I went to the rear, crouched and felt the nearest tail pipe. There was just a slight residual heat. Recalling how he drove it, I could guess it had been there some time. I moved close to the house and around the corner and along the front of it, ready to flatten myself among the unkempt plantings should a car come down the street. The awning windows across the front of the living room were almost wide open. I crouched below them, raised cautiously. I saw Crane Watts from another angle. All I could see of him was the sprawl of legs on the hassock, one hand dangling. The chair faced the television set. It accounted for the flickering light. The sound was completely off. A handsome Negro girl was singing. The camera had moved in for a closeup, the white teeth, tremolo of tongue, effortful throat, vast enunciations of the lips. All in a total silence, total until I heard a faint buzzing snore from the man in the green chair, and another.

I ducked down and continued across the front to the far corner. As I went around the corner I saw the long shadow I cast, and knew that I was outlined against the single streetlight on the other side of Clematis Drive, and knew it would be a Very Good Thing to get back where I had been. Out of darkness ahead came a sound. THOP. And with it a whisper of air movement touching the right side of my throat, and immediately thereafter the workmanlike chud of lead into a palm trunk a hundred yards behind me.

They would say, when Whitey ford made that incredible motion to nip the base runner off first, that the man was caught leaning. The man was leaning one way, and realized what was happening, and yearned to go the other way, but he had to overcome the inertia of himself before he could move back. I was off balance. I yearned for the safety I had left. Either it was a cheap silencer he was using, or a homemade one, or a good one used too many times. Good ones go THUFF. Not THOP I did not review all my past life in a microsecond. I was too busy changing balance and direction, and thinking, How stupid, how idiotic, how… Arthur-like. I did not hear the next THOP I heard only the monstrous tearing blast as the slug tore the whole top left side of my head off with such finality, the world ended in whiteness without even any residual sense of falling.

… my head was in a fish bag, in a fetid closure of stink, laced with engine oil. My hand was way off, around a corner, down another street, utterly indifferent to the master’s demands. So if you won’t come, I told it, wiggle a finger. It wiggled a finger. No problem, boss. Try the other hand. The right hand. The good one. But that is impossible, entirely. Cleaved I am, from crown to crotch, the right half discarded, wound fitted with plexiglass so they can see all the moving parts in there, all the little visceral pumps and pulses.

The rebel hand floated up and came drifting, unseen, all the way back, caught upon something, pushed, and the fish bag was gone and I lay in a black fresh wash of air, made one little hitch, another, looked at two moons riding, two half moons absolutely identical. Well now. That is unusual. Each star had a twin, both in the same relationship as were the twin moons. I struggled with some massive concept of duality, something which, could I but grasp it and put it into coherency would alter the whole future of mankind. But some nagging little temporal worry kept trying to intrude. A graveyard slab was over me, tilting. Actually two of them, one merging into the other. I stared and the slab became two white leathery backs of a front seat, merged in the same way, and by painful deduction I established that I was on the rear floor of a car. And suddenly it was Boone Waxwell’s car, and I was dead. Caught leaning. I got my hand up there to find out how I died. It felt very bad up there, and very tall. All caked and torn meat. Stickiness and miscellany which could not be me. I tried to find the other half of myself. The hand, more docile and obedient, went a searching. It found a dull dead meat, and I thought someone was tucked in there with me. But when I prodded it and squeezed it, there was some deep and muffled tenderness announcing itself as my right arm. My efforts brought the edge of the stinking tarp flapping down over my face once more, and I pushed it down and away. Dead was one thing. Becoming crab food was a further unpleasantness. The fellow was certainly casual about it. Kill me, dump me in his car, throw a tarp over me, take care of the body when he found the time. But if the body happened to be gone… Reaching up, I found the release on the rear door. It clicked and I shoved with my good leg. I slid over the sill a little, forcing the door open. I pushed again and again until my shoulders were over the sill, but my head hung down. I got the good hand under the back of my head, pulled it up, shoved again, and I slid out until my shoulders were on turf, hips still up on the sill. Two more shoves and my hips fell onto the ground. Then I could push against the outside of the car with the good leg. The dead leg followed me out. Rolling over was a major feat, requiring careful planning, proper shifting of dead parts into positions where leverage would work. Twice I got up to the balance point and the third time I flapped over.

Rested, then with the help of my hand, got my head up to take a look. Two of everything. Far things were doubled. Close things were two things merged, blurred into each other. Blinking did no good. It was between his convertible and the side of the carport. I had begun to wonder if I might not be entirely dead. The raw scrubby land out back would be that way. Worry about the fence when I got to it. If I got to it. Go that way. Get to back corner of carport, turn left. Go along back wall of carport and house. Come to cage. Turn right. Go along edge of cage and then straight out across yard.

In a little while I found the only possible method of locomotion. Roll onto the dead side, stay propped up by pressure of left hand against ground. Bring left knee up as far as I could get it. Use leg as brace and reach as far ahead as possible with left hand. Dig fingers into soil. Then pull with hand, and push with edge of left shoe, and slide on the dead side. Not quite as dead. It had begun to tingle in a very unpleasant way. Pins and needles. But it wouldn’t respond to command. I estimated that five or six good efforts took me my own length. I awarded myself a brief rest at the end of each McGee-length. Four rests brought me to the carport corner. Four more rests and I seemed to be halfway to the cage. It seemed to me that a long time had passed since he had shot me in the head. There seemed to be only one light in the house. I felt I was rustling the half-dead leaves of the plantings too loudly. At least I was in moonshade on the back side of the house.

I stopped for an earned rest, face down in moist grass. I was ordering a dead-hand finger to wiggle when, directly over me, in a voice that was half a hard resonance and half a husky whisper, with a dreadful, intimate jocularity Boone Waxwell said, “Gone play dead now, hey?”

I waited to feel the cool fat end of that silencer against the nape of my neck.

“You answer ol‘ Boo now, hear?” he said in that same wheedling, jolly imitation of affection. “Gone play dead? Little ol’ country club pussycat gone try that little game that didn‘ work the other times neither?”

And suddenly it was all clarified by the thin, faint, weary sound of Vivian’s voice. I could not hear the words. It was utter hopelessness. I turned my head slowly and looked up at the side of the house. Even with the irritating double vision I could see what the situation was. Sliding glass bedroom doors were open. The screening was not eighteen inches from my face, and the terrazzo floor level perhaps eight inches above ground level. In a faint illumination through a half-open door to the hallway, I could see the bottom corner of a bed, possibly twelve inches from the other side of the screen.

My impulse was to scramble away like a crippled bug before he looked out and saw me. Realization of the situation was like smelling salts, pushing the mists out of my mind, bringing me from stubborn dreamy labor of escape up to a vividness of alarm, awareness of life. At the edge of panic I heard, distinctly, a rustle, slow shift of weight, sigh, whispery sound of flesh stroked. And if I could hear them so distinctly, it was only wild luck he had not heard my labored squirming.

“Now why’d I want to go away, pretty pussycat?” he asked in mock astonishment. “What for I’d do that when we ain’t even half finished off?”

Again her begging, toneless plaint, her tired whining.

“Pore little dead pussycat, thinks she’s all wore down. Ol‘ Boo, he knows better. Such a sweet piece you are now. And you do so fine, so real fine.”

I heard an aimless shifting, rustling, small thud of elbow against wall or headboard, a sudden huff of exhalation, a silence. Then he said, in the voice people use to play games with small children. “What’s this! And this here? How in the worl‘ can this be a-happenin to a pore dead pussycat? It beats all!”

There was a small thrashing, a silence, a whine, another silence.

In a voice suddenly tightened and gritty with effort, he said, “Now how this for you?”

There was a scampering rustle, a loud whimper, a restraining clap of hand onto flesh. And a silence longer than before.

“AAAAAAA,” she said. And again. “AAAAAAA.” It was not a sound of pain or of pleasure, of fright, of want, or of denial. It was simply the sound of sensation, purified, dehumanized, so vivid that I could visualize her head thrown back, eyes wide blind staring, mouth wide and crooked.

And the random and meaningless sounds of motion began a cyclic repetition, steadying into a slow heavy beat.

Across that beat, in a rhythmic counterpoint, she cried “OGodOGodOGod!” in a voice of that same clarity and formality and impersonality I had heard her use to call Love and Ad and Game and Let.

“Stay with it,” he gasped.

And, released from my unwilling voyeurism by the sounds of them, I went hunching and scrabbling along, turning away from the house, heading out across the open yard, aching to get out of earshot of what they had built to, away from that furnace-gasping, whumpety-rumpety, plunging, wall-banging, flesh-clapping prolonged crescendo of the pre-wearied flesh, crawling and hitching, weeping inwardly sick weak tears for the plundered wife, wondering how in God’s name I’d ever had the benign stupidity to formulate the jackass theory that the sounds of love could never be sickening. This was as pretty as the raw sound of a throat being cut. Or the sound of the great caged carnivore at feeding time.

The hurt on the dead side was beyond pins and needles. Though the surface felt numbed, each pressure brought a dead aching pain, as though I had been burned. I felt as if each grunt of effort was tearing the inner lining of my throat. Finally, reaching, I stubbed my outstretched fingers against the fence. I hitched closer to it, reached up and got my hand around the top edge of it. I rested there, breathing hard. Distance had faded the sounds of them, losing those sounds in bug shrilling, frond clatter, mockingbirds, a dog barking two streets away. The little fence was improbably high. I had an arm ten feet long, thin as a pencil reaching up and up to take a weak grasp on the roof-edge of a building, and any idea I could hoist myself up and over was absurdly optimistic. From the mortgaged house came the finishing cry of the tennis player, a tearing hypersonic howl like a gun-shot coyote. Her eyes were a very dark blue, and with sun-coin on the tawny forearm, she had closed her eyes and shuddered at the thought of any Waxwell touch. I borrowed from her cry the energy of desperation, pulled myself up and up, hooked my chin over the bruising wood, and got just enough response from the dead arm to swing it up and over, fence edge biting into armpit. I writhed and pushed and worked, hung there with the edge across my belly, reached and found a tough curl of root, pulled, tumbled, rolled onto my back on the slight slope beyond the fence.

So die right here, McGee. Cheat the bastard out of that much. But maybe, with a light, he can follow you. Torn and flattened grass. Wetness that could mean you leave blood. Maybe it’s as obvious as the sheen a snail leaves on a sidewalk. And Boo would act with the same jolly and intensely personal manner, giving death the same intimacy as assault. Now what’s ol‘ Boo found hisself here? MY my, my -

I tried the dead arm and it came up slowly, as remote from me as those coin games where you look through glass and work the claw to pick prizes out of the bin of candy. It steadied, outlined against the double images of the stars. I put the good hand up and took hold of it. No feeling in the skin, like taking a stranger’s hand. But when I squeezed it a bone ached announcing identity.

So scrabble on, this time getting a partial use of it, a slight helpful leverage of elbow. Then, when, next I rested, I heard a clumsy thrashing and stumbling coming toward. me. I felt more irritation than alarm. A damn fool way to go busting and blundering through the night. It came on and was going to pass me, ten feet away, and I saw it, the shape and posture of the doubled silhouette familiar.

“Arrar,” I said in a voice I’d never heard before. It stopped him. There was something loose and sloppy and wrong about the right side of my mouth. I firmed it up with effort. “Arthur.”

“Trav?” he said in a nervous whisper. “Is that you?”

“No. It’s just one of us gophers.”

He felt his way to me. “I… I thought you were dead.”

“You… could be right. Gemme outa here!”

He couldn’t carry me. It was not the kind of terrain to drag people across. We got me up, with fumbling clumsiness, dead arm across his shoulders, his left arm around my waist, dead leg dangling and thumping along between us like a sack of putty. It was damned high up there. Like standing on the edge of a roof. And he kept coming close to losing me when we’d get off balance. He would brace and heave and I would manage a little hop on the good leg. Several weeks later, we came upon the car. During the final fifty feet I had been able to swing the dead leg forward, sense the ground under it, lock the knee and lurch forward on it. He fumbled me into the passenger side of the front seat. I slumped, resting my head on the seat back. He went around and opened the door and got halfway in and stopped. The courtesy light shone down on me. I rolled my head and looked at him. The double image slowly merged into one and then separated again. Double or single, he wore a look of horror.

“My God!” he said in a thin high voice. “My God!”

“Get in and close the door. He shot me in the head.” I had to speak slowly to make the right half of my mouth behave. “It isn’t supposed to make it pretty.”

He piled in, anxiety making him breathe hard, fumbling with the, ignition, saying, “I got to get you to a doctor… a… doctor…”

“Hold it. Got to think.”

“But…”

“Hold it! How much time’s gone by?”

“Since you… It’s quarter of two.”

“Took you long enough.”

“Trav, please try to understand. I… I went after you a long time ago, when you didn’t come back. I sneaked over there, like you said. I got into the side yard, behind a tree, looking at the house. I couldn’t hear anything. I didn’t know what to do. And all of a sudden he came around the side of the house, in sort of a springy little trot, grunting with effort and he… he had you over his shoulder. He passed the light from a window. Your… arms and head were dangling and bouncing all loose and dead. And… he trotted right to the car and stopped short and gave a heave and you… fell into the car, in back. He didn’t open a door or anything. You made such… such a thud, such a dead thud. He stood there for a little while and I heard him humming to himself. He opened the trunk and got a blanket or something out of there and leaned into the car, apparently covering you up. Then he went back into the house. Lights started going out. I heard a woman sobbing like her heart was breaking. And I… couldn’t make myself look at you. I crept away. Please understand. I got far enough to run, and ran back to the car, and started up to Palm City to get Chookie like you said. I went very fast, and then I went slower and slower. I pulled off the road. I wanted to come back. I tried. I couldn’t. Then I went all the way to the marina, but I stopped outside the gates. I’d have to tell her what happened. I’d say it was the only thing I could have done. But it wasn’t. She’d know that. I couldn’t face her. I couldn’t come back. I wanted to just run away. I turned around and came back, and it took me a long time to make myself get out of the car and… come looking for you. The only way I could do it was telling myself he was gone, he’d driven away with you. Trav… is he gone?”

“He’s still there.”

“How did you… get to where I found you?”

“I crawled. Arthur, you came back. Hang onto that. It can be worth something to you. You came back.”

“Why is he still there?”

“… I guess it’s the hospitality. Shut up. I’m trying to think.”

“But maybe… we’re waiting too long,” he said. “I should put you in the hospital and call the police.

“You have a very conventional approach. But shut up.”

When I had it worked out, I had him drive east on the Trail into the empty night land of cypress, billboards, and roadside drainage ditches. With no traffic from either direction, I got the automatic pistol. I had to keep my right hand folded around it with my left hand, and give the trigger finger a little help. I emptied it into the wilderness. On the way back to the hospital, I coached him carefully.

He parked near the emergency entrance. He helped me walk in. Double vision had become infrequent. The life in the dead arm and leg felt closer to the surface. Now they felt as if I had a thick leather glove on the arm, fitting firmly to the armpit, and a similar stocking on the leg. It was a trim little hospital, and they were doing a big business. The staff was trotting around. Fresh blood dappled white nylon. Doctors and relatives were arriving. Somebody in the treatment room kept screaming until suddenly it stopped, too suddenly. A woman sat weeping in a chair in the corridor next to the check-in desk, a red-eyed man clumsily patting her shoulder. Arthur made ineffectual attempts to attract attention. I got a few absent glances from staff people until finally a harried burly nurse hastened by me, skidded to a stop, came back and stared at me, lips compressed with concern. She got me over to a chair, down to a level where she could look at my head. “Gunshot,” she said.

“Yes indeed,” I said.

“It’s all we need,” she said. She grabbed an orderly, told him to get me bedded down in Trauma Room C right away. I was there five minutes with Arthur standing by before a young, squat, redheaded doctor came swiftly in, followed by a tall, narrow, pock-marked nurse. He. pulled the light down, hunched himself over my head. His fingers felt like busy mice, wearing cleats.

“How long ago?” he asked Arthur.

“Three hours, approximately,” I said.

He seemed a little startled to get the answer from me. “How do you feel right now?” he asked me.

“Shot.”

“We’re not in the mood for smartass remarks around here tonight. Several local young people were in a car that didn’t make a curve north of here about three quarters of an hour ago. We lost one on the way in, another here, and we’re trying like hell to keep from losing two more. We’ll appreciate cooperation.”

“Sorry. I feel mentally alert, doctor. I’m not in pain. When I first regained consciousness, I had double vision, and no feeling or control in the whole right side of my body. The symptoms have been diminishing steadily, but my right side feels… leaden, as if every muscle had been strained.”

“Why has it been so long, and how did you get so messed up?”

“I was alone. I had to crawl to where I’d be noticed.”

“Who shot you?”

“I did. It was an accident. A very stupid accident. That gentleman has the gun.”

“Outside the city?”

“Yes.”

“We’ll get a deputy over to make out a report. It’s required.”

He turned the overhead light out, shone a pencil beam into each eye, taking his time. The nurse took pulse and blood pressure, and I gave my name and address. Redhead went out and came back with an older doctor. He looked me over, and they went over into the corner and I heard some of the words they feed Ben Casey. One is practically television cliche. Subdural hematoma.

The older doctor left. Redhead came back and said, “You seem to have your luck with you, Mr. McGee. The slug hit right at the hairline at such an angle it grooved the skull but didn’t penetrate, traveled about a full inch under the scalp, and then, probably tumbling after impact, tore free. A sharp blow on the so-called funnybone can numb the hand. The left hemisphere of the brain controls the motor nerves and sensory nerves of the right half of the body. We feel that a shock of that severityoould well have stunned and, deadened the synapses on that side, the nerve functions, the ability to originate and transmit orders to the right side of your body. Sensation and control are returning so rapidly, we feel you should be back to normal feeling and use in a day or so. I see no clinical evidence of concussion, but there could be a rupture of small blood vessels in the impact area, and slow bleeding. So we’ll keep you here a few days for observation. Now the nurse will clean the wound and prep you for a little stitching.” He got a hypo, held it up to the light. “This is just to deaden the area to save you discomfort.”

He pricked me twice in the scalp and once in the left temple area and went away. The nurse tested, and when I could not feel her touch, she cleaned and shaved the area. She went and summoned the redhead. I could hear, inside my head, the sound as he pulled the stitches through. When he drew them tight, I could feel the pull in my left cheek and temple. When the cleaning had started, Arthur had gone into the hall. Not until the antiseptic dressing was in place did he come back in, looking queasy.

Then they rolled me down the corridor to what seemed to be a combination treatment room and storage room. Bright lights were on. The deputy got up when I was wheeled in. He was elderly, florid, heavy and asthmatic, and he licked his indelible pencil after every few words he wrote on the form in his clipboard. I swung my legs over the side of the wheeled stretcher and sat up. There was a mild wave of dizziness, a momentary recurrence of double vision, and that was all. He put the clipboard on the foot of the stretcher and hunched over it.

“Got the name off the records. Let’s see identification, McGee.” He took my driver’s license and copied the number on his form. For local address, I gave him the name and registration number of my houseboat and told him where it was docked.

“Scalp wound, self inflicted,” he said.

“Accidentally self inflicted, Deputy.”

“Weapon?”

Arthur handed it over. He took it with the familiarity of the expert, pulled the slide back and locked it back, checked chamber and clip, sniffed the muzzle, then pushed the clip ejector. It doesn’t work. I’ve been meaning to have a gunsmith fix it. You have to pry it before it comes loose.

He fiddled with it and said, “Jammed in there.”

“That’s how come I got shot, Deputy.”

“You carry this around on your person?”

“No sir. I’d have to have a permit to do that. I keep it in the car or on the boat. What happened, I had it in the car, and I wanted to get that clip out. I thought it would be safer to empty it first. So I drove off the Trail down a little road, away from any houses, and fired it until it seemed empty. I didn’t count the shots. Then, let me take it a minute, I sat down on the door sill of the car where I could see by the dome light what I was doing. Like a darn fool I held it this way to get the slide back. My hand was sweaty, and I guess there was a misfire on the last one in the chamber. But it fired when it got a second chance. Next thing I knew, I woke up on the ground beside the car. When I felt able, I decided the best thing to do was try to crawl back to the main highway. It numbed my whole right side. But that’s going away now. You see, Deputy, my friend here was making a long distance call from a roadside phone booth. He was having trouble getting it through. I got bored. I thought I’d just get off the highway, empty the pistol and get the clip out of it. It had been on my mind. I told him I’d be back in a few minutes. When I didn’t come back, he thought I’d gone down a side road and got stuck in the mud. He looked and looked, after he got through phoning. I guess it was the third road where he found me, almost all the way back out to the highway.”

“Third road,” Arthur said. “So I walked in and got the car and brought him right here. I thought he was dying.”

“He don’t look dead. But them kids out there do.” He bounced the pistol on his broad tough hand, handed it to Arthur and said, “See he gets it fixed, mister.” He left.

I slid off the stretcher. Arthur started toward me to help me and I waved him back. In cautious balance I plodded slowly around the little room. I had to pivot and swing my hip to get that leaden leg forward, but with the knee locked it took my weight.

My light-weight jacket was a ruin, dirt, rips and grass stain, slacks not quite as bad, but bad enough. I balanced and took the jacket off, checked the pockets, tossed it to Arthur and pointed to a porcelain can with a lid worked by a foot pedal. He balled it up and stuffed it in. A blank doorway led, as I hoped, into a little wash room. With the dull clumsy help of the reluctant right hand and arm, I got the mud off my face and hands, the dark scabs of dried blood on the left side and the back of my neck. I used a damp towel to scrub down the right side of my slacks, the side I had dragged. I studied myself in the mirror. I didn’t look like a disaster case. I looked as if I had been rolled in a waterfront alley. The dressing was too conspicuous.

“They’ll clean you up when they put you to bed.”

“Hat,” I said. “Go right when you go out this door and find another way out of here. I tossed the hat on the shelf behind the back seat of the car. And get back to me with it the same way you get out. And fast.”

“Listen, I won’t do it! You can’t leave. It’s dangerous!”

“So are home-canned vegetables. Get the hat.” I sat on a white stool and waited. Merry McGee, the valiant quipster, with a hole in his head and the horrid conviction it was bleeding in there. My precious, valuable, irreplaceable head. Under the bullet groove would be some little white needles of splintered bone, sticking down into the gray jelly where everything was stored, all those memories unique to me.

A fat nurse opened the door and said, “Mr. McGee? Come along.”

“I was told to wait here until they check something out.”

“Tests can be taken in the ward, sir.”

“Something about radiology.”

She frowned. “Seems odd. I better go find out what’s up.”

She bustled away. When I saw Arthur in the doorway I heaved myself up and got out of there in my curious hitching gait, putting the baseball cap on as I went down the hall. I did my very best walking as we passed a woman at a desk near the main entrance. I waited in shadow by the curb, leaning against a tree. Arthur brought the car around, something he should have thought to do when he got the hat. I didn’t remark on it. He was managing better than I could have hoped.

“Clematis Drive,” I said as he got behind the wheel.

“But how can you…”

“Arthur, my friend, you will be orderly and agreeable and stop twitching. I want you near me. I want you to stay near me. Because I am highly nervous. And if I stop making sense, or my speech goes bad, or my leg and arm get worse again, you hurry me back there so they can saw a little round hole in my head. Otherwise, just take on trust the strange idea I might know what I’m doing, because I’m too pooped to argue. Just drive. And pray my hunch is wrong. What time is it?”

“Five something. Chook will be…”

“She’ll sweat it out.”

As we turned onto Clematis, I looked over and saw the first paleness in the east. The dark trees and houses had begun to acquire third dimensions as the first candlepower of Wednesday touched them. The Watts’ house was lighted up again, almost completely. The big white convertible was gone.

“Turn into the drive… No, keep going, and put it in the driveway of the next house. Hurricane shutters are on. It’s empty for the summer. Turn out the lights before you turn in.”

As we started back down the sidewalk, I said, “if anything comes, car or bike or pedestrian, either way, help me hustle into the brush and flatten out.”

“Okay Trav. Sure.”

Nothing came. We went around the side of the house. Waxwell had taken off with typical flair, wheels digging deep gouges in the soft lawn.

I tried the outside screen door of the cage. It was latched on the inside. As I wondered whether it was worth trying to call her I smelled, adrift in the predawn stillness, a faint stench of fecal matter. I turned to Arthur and said, “When we’re in the house, don’t touch a thing unless I tell you. Stay away from the windows in the front of the house. Squat low if you hear a car.”

Bracing myself against the frame, I put a knee through the screen, ripping it. I reached through, unlatched it, and, when we were inside, smeared the metal handle where I had touched it, with the palm of my hand. The odor was stronger in the living room. The television set emitted a constant cold light, the random snow pattern after broadcasting is over. The odor was much stronger. Crane Watts had slid down between chair and hassock, half sitting, head canted back on the chair seat. His face was unnaturally fat, his eyes bugging wide, pushed out by pressure behind them. It was a moment or two before I found the point of entry, the charred ear hole. And I knew, I knew exactly what else I would find in the silence of that house. The husband had slept through too much. Too many empty evenings slack in the chair, while the wife’s heart grew more hopeless. But when Boo came in, came at her, she would have cried out to the husband. Many times, perhaps, before she knew it was too late, and he was too far gone and would sleep through every endless lift and stroke, every new and demanding invasion, every cuff and slap, every jolly instruction, every rough boosting and shifting of her into new postures for his pleasure. So, having slept, husband, sleep longer yet. Forever. I wondered if she remembered who had said a nonsense thing about a pistol barrel in the ear. And, accustomed only to the antiseptic violence of television and the movies, I imagined that the sudden ugliness had shocked her. After such a small tug at the trigger. The huge terminal spasm had flounced him off the chair, opened his bowels. And hydrostatic pressure had bloated his face to an unrecognizable idiocy. I even knew what she would instinctively cry at such ghastliness. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” It would end her auto-hypnosis, the trance state of the amateur murderer, and leave her no choice at all but to do what I knew I would find.

I heard the dry gagging behind me and saw Arthur with his back to the body, hunched over, hands to his mouth. I bumped him away, saying, “Stop it! Not in here, you damn fool!”

With a struggle he gained control. I sent him to wait out in the screened cage. I hobbled into the kitchen and, with my thumb nail, turned the lights off. It’s what they so often do in the night. Maybe some forlorn fading desire to keep the darkness back. But if they could turn on all the lights in the world, it wouldn’t help them. I knew where I’d most probably find her. She was in the empty tub, and had slid almost flat, head over on her shoulder. She wore a floor-length orange housecoat, with white collar and cuffs, buttoned neatly and completely from throat to hem. It had been a good vibrant color for her swarthy handsomeness. She had fixed her hair, made up her mouth. The dark stain between her breasts, and slightly to the left was teacup size, irregular, with one small area of wet sheen remaining. I bent and put the back of my hand against her calm forehead, but there was no warmth. The weapon, a 22 caliber Colt Woodsman with a long target barrel lay against her belly, the butt under her right wrist. She was barefoot. Though she had fixed herself up for dying, there were marks she could not conceal, swollen lips, blue bruise on the cheek, long scratch on the throat marks of that long hard use.

I sat on the edge of the tub. Dishonor before death. And more effective with that popgun than she would ever know. Two shots, even with the barrel against the target, seldom kill two people. Her death was not as messy as her husband’s. Heart wounds give a tidier result. To prove a guess, I went to the shower stall. The soap was moist. There were water droplets on the shower walls. A big damp yellow towel had been put neatly on a rack. So, after she had heard Boone Waxwell drive off, she had dragged herself out of bed and plodded in and taken a shower, probably just as hot as she could endure it, scrubbing herself mercilessly. Dry off. Go take the pretty housecoat from the closet and put it on. Sit at your dressing table, and fix your hair and your bruised mouth. The mind is numb. Get up and walk through the house, room to room, turning on the lights. Stop and look at the snoring husband. Breadwinner, mate, protector. Pace some more. Reach deep for the rationalizations. Women have been raped before. It hasn’t killed them. There is a legal answer. Let the police handle it. Turn him in.

“Now let me get this straight, Mrs. Watts. Waxwell was there from ten something last night until two or three this morning? And you claim that during that time you were repeatedly raped, during that whole time your husband was sound asleep in front of the television set? And Waxwell was a client of your husband? And you had met him before? And he left his car parked at your house, a very conspicuous car, all that time?”

So she paces and tries to think clearly, and she knows that if she does nothing, Waxwell will be back. Next week or next month, he will be back, again and again, as he promised he would.

And that brings her to the thing she has been trying so desperately to force out of her mind. Had he taken her quickly, she could have merely endured him, been a helpless vessel for him. But he was so damned sly and knowing, so crafty and so patient that each time, even the last time, he had awakened the traitor body so that while the soul watched the body gasped and strained to hungry climax, to dirty joy, grasping powerfully.

So she would pace and stop to look at the husband who had let that hunger in her grow so big she could betray herself. And then…

I found the note on her dressing table. Her personal stationery, monogrammed. A downhill scrawl with an eyeshadow pencil. “God forgive me. There is no other choice left. My darling was asleep and felt nothing. Sincerely, Vivian Harney Watts.”

On the other side of the room, beyond the plundered bed, the lowest drawer of his chest of drawers was open. Cartridges a-spill from a red and green cardboard box. Extra clip. Little kit with gun oil and collapsible cleaning rod. The shells were medium longs, hollow-point. So, with luck, the one she used on herself might not have gone through her to chip or stain the tub. I went back in and cupped the nape of her neck and pulled her up far enough to see. The back of the orange housecoat was unmarked. I made my gimpy hitching way out to the screened cage.

“She’s dead too. I have some things to do. I’ll try to make it fast.”

“D-Do you need help?”

I told him no. I went back and looked for signs of Waxwell. He would not go without leaving some trace. Like a dog, he would mark the boundaries of the new area he had claimed. But I found nothing, decided I needed nothing. First, on a table by the bedroom door, I made a little pile of things to take away. The note, the gun, the other things from the drawer that belonged with the gun. By the time I had gotten her half out of the tub, I wished I could depend on Arthur to help me with this sort of grisly problem. She was a very solid woman. She had not begun to stiffen. Death gave her a more ponderous weight. Finally I was on my feet with her in my arms. Her dead forehead lolled over to rest against the side of my chin. Carefully bracing the bad leg, and willing the bad arm to carry its share, I hobbled into the bedroom with her. I put her on the bed.

Out across the back yard the morning was a pearl pale shade of gray. I closed the draperies. She was on her back on the bed. I grasped the hem of the housecoat and with one hard wrench tore it open to the waist. Fabric ripped, and the small white buttons rattled off the walls and ceiling. I tucked the bottom of the housecoat up under her, pulled it up around her waist. She lay in dead abandon. On the white of her hips and upper thighs were the myriad blue bruises left by Waxwell’s strong fingers. Begging silent forgiveness, I thoroughly tousled the black hair and, with my thumb, smeared the fresh lipstick on her dead mouth. She had gotten all prettied up to die. In the bedroom lights I could see little segments of dark blue iris where the lids were not quite closed. Sorry I ruined the housecoat. Sorry they’ll see you like this, Vivian. But you’ll like the way it works out. I promise you, honey. They’ll pretty you up again for burying. But not in orange. That’s a color to be alive in. To be in love in. To smile in. They won’t bury you in it.

I tipped the dressing table bench over. Using a tissue, I picked up a jar of face cream and cracked the dressing table mirror. I turned the other lights out, left just one of the twin lamps on the dressing table on, and shoved the shade crooked so that it shone toward her, making highlights and deep shadows on the tumble of dead woman.

I crammed the stuff from the table into my pockets. I left one light on in the living room, a corner lamp with an opaque shade. Day was beginning to weaken the lights. With my thumbnail I turned the sound control on the television until the hiss of non-broadcast was loud. We left. I saw no one on the way to the car, or when Arthur drove us back up Clematis Drive.

“What did you do?” he asked.

“She didn’t live long enough to have her chance to decoy him off his place. I’ve given her a chance to do it dead.”

On the north edge of town, up the trail, I had him pull over and park near a phone booth near the curbing, at a gas station showing only a night light. I had one dime in change. Just enough. The sergeant answered by giving his name.

I pitched my voice lower than usual. “Look, you want to do me a favor, you write down a license number, okay?”

“Give me your name, please.”

‘’I shoulda phoned you hours ago. Look, I can’t sleep. Maybe it’s nothing. But the thing is, I don’t want to get mixed up in anything. I don’t want to get involved, see?“

“If you’d tell me where you’re calling from.”

“Knock it off, Sergeant. Write down the number, hey?”

“All right. License number what?”

I gave it to him and said, “A white Lincoln convertible with the top down, this year’s maybe. The other two cars, I figure they belong there, see?”

“Belong where?”

“At this house I’m telling you about. The Lincoln was on the lawn over to the side. Listen, I’m just passing through and I don’t want to get involved in anything. When I get a little buzz on, I got to walk to clear my head, okay? So I went over and found some damn back street. I looked at the street sign later. Clematis Street, or Drive, I think. Yeah, it was Drive. I parked and started walking. You know, you walk around a couple of blocks, you feel better in the morning. Right?”

“Mister, will you get to it?”

“What do you think I’m doing? It was hours ago. Maybe around three sometime. I didn’t check close. Okay from this house comes this sound of a broad screaming. Honest to God, my blood runs cold. I’m right in front of the house. Then I hear a kind of sharp crack, not like a shot but sort of like a shot, and the scream stopped like her throat got cut. Maybe the crack was her old man giving it to her across the chops. What I did, I turned around and headed back to my car, and I made a mental note of the license number. You can tell the house because of the other two cars, one is a little light color Mercedes and the other is a tan Plymouth. Tan or gray. So maybe you should check it, I don’t know. I just got a feeling about it somehow.‘’

‘’And can you give me your name?“

“John Doe, Joe Citizen, Jesus, Sergeant, I just don’t want to get mixed up in anything. I don’t know the house number. I couldn’t see it. But it’s not what you’d call a mile long, that street.”

I hung up and got back into the sedan.

“Now can we go back?”

“Yes. Keep the speed down.”

Fourteen

CHOOK WOKE me at twenty minutes before noon, as I had asked. She sat on the side of the bed. I hitched myself up, flexed my right hand. Arthur appeared in the doorway, stood there watching me.

“How is it now?” Arthur asked.

“Better. It just feels asleep. The leg too. The hand feels weak.”

“She’s been coming in every half hour at least to see if you looked all right,” Arthur said.

“And you don’t look so great,” she said.

“I feel as if I’d been hung up by the heels and beaten with ball bats.”

“Head ache?” she asked.

I fingered the dressing, lightly. “It’s not an ache. It’s a one inch drill bit. It makes a quarter turn every time my heart beats. How about the gun?”

“It was too rough to go outside in the dinghy,” Arthur said earnestly. “I got as far as the middle of the pass and dropped it there. Okay?”

“That’s just fine, Arthur.”

Chook said, “I guess… you didn’t know you were going to walk into anything so rough.” I interpreted the appeal in her eyes.

“Damned glad I took you with me, Arthur. Chook, between us we managed.”

“I was nearly out of my mind! Trav, I’m still scared. I mean now there’s no way to prove she did it, is there?”

“Waxwell killed them both. He didn’t pull the trigger. He killed them. And if his slug had hit a sixteenth of an inch lower… Wish I could have seen the bastard when he looked into the back end of that car. Nothing will go wrong, Chook. They’ll find enough to prove he was in the house. There’s a busted screen to show how he got in. And he isn’t a pillar of any community. How has the news been?”

“Like you thought, so far.”

I shooed them out, got into my robe and joined them in the lounge. I found I could manage an inconspicuous gait, if I kept it slow and stately. I put the big set on AM and cut the volume when a noontime used-car commercial over the Palm City station blasted on.

Their local news announcer had the usual airedale yap and the usual difficulty with long words. “This morning state, county and other law enforcement officials are cooperating in a massive manhunt for Boone Waxwell of Goodland on Marco Island, wanted for questioning in connection with the rape murder of housewife Vivian Watts of Naples and the murder of Crane Watts, her husband, a young Naples attorney. Based on an anonymous tip from a passerby who heard screams and what could have been a shot emanating from the thirty thousand dollar home on a quiet residential street in Naples in the small hours of the morning, city police investigated at dawn and found Mr. Watts in the living room, dead of a small caliber bullet wound in the head, and Mrs. Watts in the bedroom, the scene of a violent struggle, shot through the heart. The anonymous tipster gave police the tag number and description of a car he saw parked in the side yard at the time of the shot he heard, and the car has been identified as belonging to Boone Waxwell, Everglades fishing guide, who for some years has been living alone in a cottage over a mile west of the village of Goodland.

“When County police arrived at the Waxwell cottage this morning, they found the car reported as having been at the scene of the crime. Goodland residents state that Waxwell had another vehicle, an English Land Rover, as well as an inboard launch on a trailer. The truck and boat trailer are missing, and a thorough search of all waterfront areas is now under way. Goodland residents say Waxwell kept to himself and did not welcome visitors. They said he seemed to have ample funds, but could not account for how he had acquired them. Waxwell is about thirty-seven or thirty-eight years old, five foot eleven, about a hundred and ninety pounds; blue eyes, black curly hair, very powerful, and believed to be armed and dangerous. On forcing entrance to his cottage, police found quantities of arms and ammunition. He has been in difficulty before for minor acts of violence, and successfully fled on two other occasions to avoid prosecution, returning after those who filed the charges had dropped them.

“The preliminary medical opinion, pending a more detailed examination, is that Mrs. Watts, an attractive twenty-eight year old brunette, was criminally assaulted prior to her death. Waxwell apparently gained entry by forcing a screened door which opened onto the patio in the rear of the house. Time of death is estimated for both husband and wife as occurring between two and four A.M. today. Mrs. Watts will be remembered as one of the finer amateur tennis players on the lower west coast. A close friend of the family, not identified by police yet, hearing of the double murder, reported that on Monday Mrs. Watts had complained about her husband being annoyed by Boone Waxwell over some business matter. It is reported that Crane Watts was the attorney for a land syndicate operation in which Waxwell had a minor interest.

“Authorities, fearing that Waxwell may have gone back into the wilderness areas of the Ten Thousand Islands, plan to organize an air search using the facilities of the Coast Guard, the National Park Service and the Civil Air Patrol. It is believed that… Here is a flash which has just come in. The English truck and the boat trailer have just been found pulled off into deep brush near Caxambas, adjacent to a shelving beach often used by local fisherman for the launching of trailered boats. The effort to hide the vehicle and trailer seems to indicate that Waxwell sought to conceal his avenue of escape. This station will issue further bulletins as received.

“And now to other local news. The Fort Myers Chamber of Commerce today issued a statement regarding…”

I snapped it off. “I wish they’d got him,” Chook said.

“They will,” I said. “And he won’t have the money with him. He’s not that much of a damn fool.”

They both looked puzzled. “But it would take him only five minutes to dig it up and take it along,” Arthur said.

“Think of the timing. He thought I was dead. He risked stashing me in the car while he spent three hours with the woman. My guess is he tricked or scared her into saying I was coming by at eleven. Then he tied her up or locked her up while he played games with me. If she heard those sounds, she wouldn’t have recognized them as shots. He wouldn’t have told her he killed me. His style would have been to tell her he’d scared me off, probably. Okay, so he found the body gone. Either I woke up and got the hell out of there, or somebody took the body away. Whoever took it away hadn’t called the police. Or at least hadn’t had time. I think he would want to clear out until he could figure out what was going on. If I was dead, who could prove he did it? I think he was too sure of himself with the woman to think for a moment she’d charge him with assault. In fact, she’d be more likely to swear he was never there at all. If he got back to his cottage by three o’clock, which I think is a good guess-good enough for our purposes-he would be feeling easier in his mind every minute. After all, the woman had obviously enjoyed it. The husband had slept through it. He would have checked the three o’clock radio news. All quiet. So why would he complicate his life by carting all that money around with him? If he was picked up, how would he explain it? He thought then he would be coming back to his shack. It was better off in the ground. He’d take some with him, not enough to be awkward. By first light he could be way back in Big Lostman’s Bend country, setting up camp on some hammock back there. I saw the radio rig on that boat. It’s a big one, including an AM band. So what does he find out when it’s too late to go back for the money? Boone Maxwell is wanted for rape and murder. So we get to the money first. They’ll have the area sealed and staked out. So we run a bluff. If we find fresh holes in the ground I will be one very astonished McGee.”

“Bluff?” Chookie said uncertainly.

“Arthur looks very reliable and respectable. And I know he’s got the nerve for it.” Arthur flushed with pleasure. “So we do a little shopping first. I mean you two do. I’ll make out the list.”

There seemed to be an unusual number of cars and people in Goodland when we drove slowly through at two-thirty, and we were stared at with open curiosity. There was an official car parked at the entrance to the shell road that led to Waxwell’s place. Two men squatted on their heels in the shade. One sauntered out and held up his hand to stop us. He was a dusty little lizard-like man in bleached khakis. He strolled back and stared in curiously. Chookie, secretarially severe in white blouse, black skirt, hornrimmed glasses, hair pulled back into a bun, was driving. She rolled the window down and said, “This is the way to the Waxwell place, is it not?”

“But you can’t go in there, lady.”

Arthur rolled the rear window down. I was in the back seat beside him. “What seems to be the trouble, officer?”

He took his time looking us over. “No trouble. You can’t go in.”

“Officer, we’re working on a very tight timetable. We’re advance technical staff for network television. The generator truck and the mobile unit will be along within the hour. I’m sure they’ve cleared everything. We have to mark locations, block out camera angles and placement. I’d like to get it done before they get here.”

“The shack is sealed, mister.”

“I don’t have to get into the shack. That’s up to the lighting people. That’s their problem. We’re setting up the outdoor shots and interviews, officer. And we’ll lay some cable so it’ll be all ready for them to hook on.”

Arthur was very earnest and patient. He wore my bright blue linen jacket, white shirt, black knit tie. I yawned and turned a little more to make doubly certain the man would see the CBS over the breast pocket of my work shirt. Mailbox letters from the five and ten, backed with stickum. Gold. I hoped he had noticed the letters on the big tool box off the boat, resting on the floor beside my feet.

I said, “Hell, Mr. Murphy, let em sweat it when they get here.”

“I don’t like your attitude, Robinson. They depend on us to do a job.”

“I was told no kind of reporters at all,” the dusty deputy said.

“We are not reporters, sir!” Arthur said indignantly. “We’re technicians.”

“And you don’t want to git into the shack?”

“We wouldn’t have time if we wanted to,” Arthur said, and looked at his watch. My watch. A gift I never wear. It tells the day, month, phase of the moon, and what time it is in Tokyo and Berlin. It makes me restless to look at it.

“Well, go on ahead then, and you tell Bernie down there that Charlie says it’s okay.”

Bernie was on the front steps, and he came out with a shotgun in the crook of his arm. He had one of those moon faces which cannot look authoritative. And when he found out Charlie said we were okay, he was delighted to be so close to the mysterious functioning of something he watched every day of his life. Too delighted. The gold letters and the reel of cable were symbols of godhead, and his smile was pendulous and permanent. We could not sustain the myth of locating proper areas to ground the equipment with Bernie hovering over every move. Chookie took him away from the play, notebook in hand, easing him back to the porch to get his expert opinion on who would be the best people to interview, and who had known Waxwell the longest, and what other interesting places were there in the area where the mobile unit could be set up.

I’d had them pick up another length of rod, and Arthur had sharpened both of them with the file from the ship’s tool supply. I picked two likely spots, and with Bernie out of sight, we each began an orderly search pattern, working out from the initial probe, an expanding checkerboard pattern, six inches between the deep slow stabs into the moist earth of the open area in the grove.