Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Vol. 57, No. 3. Whole No. 328, March 1971

Green Gravy for the Blush by Jon L. Breen[4]

Jon L. Breen is considered one of today’s best parodists of the mystery story. The author whom he now parodies is considered one of today’s best mystery writers. Thus, a happy combination — the true-read MacB and the true-bred MacD...

You’ll be interested to know John D. MacD’s reaction to Jon L. B’s satirical takeoff. The “victim” thought it a “very delicious parody,” and he read it, prior to publication, “with pink ears and uncertain smile, the way all authors should read parodies of their stylistic twitches.”

A devastating burlesque of “the saga of Trygue McKee”...

The flustered blush rocked fitfully in her temporary harbor in Ferry Landing, Florida. I felt the bracing Florida breeze on my face and watched the warming Florida sun rise above the glittering glassy faces of the overpriced Florida hotels and brushed away an overeager Florida bug about to take a high dive into my corn flakes. I took a long drag on my Donald Duck orange juice and stared northward toward Battle Creek, Michigan. Your com flakes aren’t what they once were, Battle Creek, and try as you will you cannot disguise the fact by designing a new way to get into the box every year.

But then you aren’t what you were, Battle Creek, because you’re an American city and American cities are like archaic broads who try to ward off time, that agent of decay, with ever-increasing layers of junk that only heightens what it’s trying to conceal. Even Miami has that look these days.

It was one of those mornings when all the sun and all the Donald Duck orange juice in the world can’t give balance to the teeter-tauter of my outlook, when my lonely melancholia is so heavy it outweighs soaring birds and flying fish and all the vibrant life around me, and I arise from my bed in my seagoing home full of penetrating social commentary that longs for expression.

I guess I should have been happy that particular morning. I knew she was ready, my little wounded bird, to fly out again on her own, or as ready as she would ever be. She wasn’t scared any more like she was the day I fished her out of the Miami Beach yacht harbor where Chili Warlock had left her to sink.

A broken spirit takes more time to mend than a broken wing, and in the past seven months she hadn’t once stepped off the deck of the Flustered Blush and into the world outside. But now we knew, as if by mutual consent, that she was ready.

She came out now, still looking like a fragile blonde wisp longing for protection. She sat down beside me shyly and said, “Good morning, Trig.”

“Morning, kid.”

She reached for a box of raisin bran from the variety pack. She didn’t hesitate. She reached for it decisively. I liked that. She looked at it for a second, bewildered. “Trig.”

“Yeah, honey?”

“They changed the box again, didn’t they?”

“Yeah, I guess they did.” I didn’t help her. I couldn’t. She had to face it herself this time. And I knew she could. I was right. Two minutes later she had it open.

“I didn’t lose a single raisin, did I, Trig?”

“You did fine, baby, just fine.”

I guess it was a good breakfast, but I didn’t taste much. I never do at times like this. Sometimes I could kick myself for being such a sentimentalist. But other times I think that sentimentality is the stuff of which life is made, however much you can lose by it. What you have to know is when to be sentimental and when to be unsentimental. I usually know, but sometimes I’m too damned sentimental to act on what I know.

When she’d finished her breakfast, except for half a glass of her Donald Duck orange juice, she looked at me, unspeaking, not really knowing what to say. She ended up saying just about what they all say.

“Trig, explain to me again what sort of a business you’re in. I mean, you haven’t had a job in seven months. If you’re in the rest-home business you really ought to charge something for your services, even though I can’t pay you.”

“Well, kid, you might say I’m a knight in faintly tarnished armor, a sort of capitalistic Robin Hood, kind of a sun-drenched Don Quixote.”

Honestly, Trig, you keep giving me answers like that, like you were a dust jacket or something. Now if you can’t tell me what you and this darling little boat do to keep yourselves afloat, just say so. But I can’t help being curious. I mean, are you a detective or a spy or a gunrunner or a smuggler or what?”

“All of those and more.”

“Honestly, Trig! You are utterly infuriating!”

“Take it easy, honey. Just relax. It’s no secret.”

“I want an answer, damn it!” Her voice was tinged with hysteria. “What the hell do you do for a living anyway? I want an answer to that question, a straightforward answer, not an evasion. Is that asking so much of a man I’ve lived with for seven months?”

“Well, kid, you might say I’m a personal representative.”

“That’s the last straw!” She picked up her glass of Donald Duck orange juice and heaved it in my face. We stared at each other for a moment, and then she collapsed into weeping. “Oh, Trig, I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right, honey. Go below now. We were wrong. You aren’t quite ready yet.”

I had thought she was ready, but occasionally I’m wrong about those things. You might have thought I was provoking her needlessly, and it may be that I was because deep down I wanted her to stay. Actually, what I do for a living is no great secret. But I feel that if she couldn’t stand up under this minor amount of friction, she probably couldn’t stand up to the Chill Warlocks of the world without more preparation. In my own mind I feel I did the right thing, but then rationalization comes fairly easy even to a realist like me.

Anyway, I decided it would be cruel not to follow her below and explain to her just what it is I do.

“Now, kid,” I told her, “this Chill Warlock cheated your father out of a lot of money, didn’t he?”

“Yes,” she whimpered. “His life savings for that worthless pay-TV stock. Daddy shot himself when he found out.”

“Now let’s say I was to go out and find Chill Warlock and get back the money—”

“Oh, Trig, would you?”

“Sure, for a price. You see, if I recovered the money I would give you half and would keep half for myself. And that’s the business I’m in. That’s how I keep the Flustered Blush seaworthy.”

“Oh, I get it,” she said, sniffling. “But, Trig, why didn’t you say so before? It would be worth it to me to get back that money.”

“Well, sweetheart, when you first turned up I didn’t really need the money. I’d just finished a big job.”

“Oh, I see. But, Trig, it’s been seven months. By now, who knows where Chill could have gotten to? You could never find him.”

I gave her a grim and determined look. “I can find him. And I will find him, kid.”

“Oh. Is your money running low?”

“Well, of course, there’s that, too. But mainly I can’t stand injustice. It makes me sick, and like the twentieth-century Sir Galahad I am, I cannot re§t until that injustice has been avenged.”

“Trig, in all candor, you did do rather well for seven months—”

“But you needed me. I couldn’t leave you.”

“And I still need you, Trig! After this morning I know I do.”

“Sure, but I can afford to get away for a few days to go after Warlock, while you mind the Blush.”

“I guess I could, Trig.”

“So, can I consider you a client? At the usual percentage?”

“All right, Trig.”

“That’s the spirit, honey. I’ll have the usual contract for you to sign, and by noon I can be out and after Chill Warlock.”

“Oh, Trig, you’re so good.”

Chill Warlock was one of the most undesirable products of our sick society. There have always been swindlers, sure, but there was a day when swindlers had a little class. Chill Warlock was the kind of a mar; who could beat up a defenseless girl with one hand and sell her father worthless pay-TV stock with the other. You had to say one thing for Chill Warlock — he may have been crude and filthy and ugly and antisocial, but he was one hell of a salesman.

My contacts told me Warlock had been last heard of in Chicago where he was working his pay-TV swindle on a new crop of suckers. An hour later I was on a jet for the so-called Windy City.

Fifty years ago aviation was fun, I suppose. Adventurous. Young men with goggles and the dusty wind blowing their hair climbing into two-cockpit biplanes and smiling for the newsreel cameramen and flying into a great beyond you could feel and taste and if you didn’t come back at least you’d done something, experienced something. Now, fat middle-aged businessmen and women and children sit in luxuriously furnished, obscenely spacious jet-powered vehicles and watch “Mary Poppins” on the screen and read the Reader’s Digest and feel pangs of fear about dangers they can’t even see. They can still die, but if they die they’ve done nothing, experienced nothing.

We got into O’Hare Airport in early evening. I put through a call to Tim Dugan, an old friend of mine who was a television commentator in Chicago.

“Tim, this is Trig.”

“Trygve McKee! It’s good to hear your voice, buddy.” It was good to hear his voice, too. It brought back memories of lazy days and fishing amid the Florida Keys, nights of laughter and beautiful girls and sweet life. It brought back to me the beauty that is friendship.

“Tim, I’m on the trail of a chap named Chill Warlock, a very nasty sort of character. He’s running a phony pay-TV stock racket. I hear he’s in your town.”

“He was, Trig. I had him on the program, gave him a hard way to go, told him to shinny up a tree.”

“And did he?”

“I understand he shinnied up a Central Park elm tree. I’d like to say more, Trig, but I hate to say anything on the phone. I think they have my line tapped. Come out to the apartment?”

“Sure, Tim. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

“Okay, buddy. Take two and hit to right.”

A yellow cab carried me through the Chicago twilight, but the real way to see Chicago is by El train, whizzing past the hanging laundry of dirty slum backyards and filthy prehardened slum kids like some of us were and nobody should have to be. Chicago is that El ride and that El ride is Chicago, because Chi is a dull, decaying, dying town these days, a town with a racy past and no perceptible future. I longed for a little wisp of wind to relieve my boredom.

Tim Dugan lived in a classy apartment on Sheridan Road. The penthouse. Tim doesn’t live there any more. Tim doesn’t live anywhere any more. Because in the half hour between the time I hung up the phone at the airport and the time I entered the apartment somebody had put an end to Tim Dugan. The big gaping hole in his head left little doubt of this fact.

I didn’t know who had done it, but I had a hunch it had to do with Chill Warlock. Then I knew I’d get him. You don’t murder Trig McKee’s friends and get away with it. Up to now the hunt for Chill Warlock had been strictly business. Now it was pleasure, too.

I thought perhaps I should call the police. I dialed headquarters and asked for an old buddy of mine on the Chicago police force. They’d never heard of Captain von Flanagan. Well, there’s quite a turnover of police these days. Mostly in dark alleys.

I set out to find Chill Warlock, following the one clue Tim Dugan had given me: an elm tree in Central Park.

There was garbage in the streets in New York. I don’t mean that metaphorically; there was a garbage collectors’ strike at the time I was there and the stuff was piling up all over town, creating a health hazard. It was a kind of symbol of New York, because there’s been garbage in the streets there for a long time and New York’s always been a health hazard, physically, mentally, and spiritually. Those pictures you see of New York’s skyline may be beautiful and inspiring, but you have to be there to know that what’s at the base of those vaunted skyscrapers is ugly and rotten, and that lady with her torch raised heavenward and her welcoming speech carved in stone gets more and more ironic, more and more absurd as the years go by. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shores and I will smother them in the ghettos of New York and make the more intelligent of them leaders of the underworld...”

New York is full of rats, but there was one rat it didn’t have: Chill Warlock. The word was he’d headed west, to California. Only a few minutes after I’d landed at Kennedy Airport, I was watching “Mary Poppins” again.

California is a cheap, gaudy, second-rate imitation of Florida. But then Florida is a cheap, gaudy, second-rate imitation of California, so I guess that’s as fair as you could expect in a society like ours that’s lost all its values.

San Francisco isn’t the biggest city in the United States, but it’s easily the most thin-skinned and defensive. It’s gotten that way because it knows it’s only a shoddy fifth carbon of the city that it once was, when men like me loved it, when men thought of it not as it but as her, a carefree girl with laughing eyes who came strolling out of the fog with a smile of I-don’t-give-a-damn on her lips, and you knew that here was one girl who didn’t take herself too seriously. But the girl had aged as all girls do, and she tried to remain a girl, which she wasn’t. And thus she was not even a woman, not a her at all but an it, neuter as all American cities have become. It gave me no pain to see it, for it was an object, not her any more. She was dead.

Oh, by the way, Chill Warlock wasn’t in San Francisco either, but I got the word that he’d moved southward to try to sell his phony pay-TV stock in Los Angeles, a town that was full of suckers eager to buy it. The phony sells very well in Los Angeles.

There may have been a day, long gone by, when Los Angeles was a nice place to live. The natives tell me that even today, after a rain, the smog lifts and you can see mountains and the city stretching for miles and L.A. is a beautiful place. But every time I’ve been there the smog has been thick and oppressive, burning my eyes and my throat. Still, maybe the smog is a good thing, because it’s the only thing in L.A. that’s not phony.

I caught up with Chill Warlock in a Hollywood television studio where he was being interviewed.

“Mr. Warlock, what are your qualifications as head of a pay-TV company? What TV shows have you ever produced?”

“Well, to that I would say—”

“Why should some poor slob, home from a hard day at the office, have to pay for what he sees on his television screen? Huh?”

“Well, it is our hope—”

“Mr. Warlock, a few years ago there was a proposition on the ballot in California to outlaw pay TV. It was passed by an overwhelming majority. Don’t you feel the public has spoken on this question?”

“Well—”

“Mr. Warlock, do you have a college degree?”

“No.”

“From where? Some correspondence school in St. Louis?”

“But I said—”

“Mr. Warlock, you sound like a dingaling to me, and I’d like to tell you to take a walk. But I see there’s a gentleman in the dock. What’s your name, sir?”

“Trygve McKee is my name. I’d like to ask Mr. Warlock a question. Is it true you’ve tried to peddle pay-TV stock in major cities all over the United States?”

“Well—”

“Is it true this stock is totally worthless?”

“Well, I wouldn’t say—”

“Is it true that your company doesn’t even exist and that it and you are in fact as phony as everything else in this town?”

At that point we were interrupted by a commercial. I could see the beads of perspiration on Chill Warlock’s forehead. I knew I was getting to him. His eyes darted back and forth, looking for an exit to run for. Suddenly he was sprinting away. I vaulted over the dock and ran after him. Now I was in my element. Chill Warlock’s agile tongue couldn’t help him now.

I chased him into the alley outside the studio. I saw that he was stopping and drawing something ugly out of his coat. It looked like a gun. It was, and he was pointing it straight at my head.

“Go ahead, Warlock. Shoot an unarmed man,” I taunted him.

“You think I won’t? Didn’t I beat up a defenseless blonde wisp of a girl? Didn’t I steal her father’s life savings? Didn’t I hire some former F.B.I. men to tap Tim Dugan’s wire and kill him if he got too dangerous? You think I wouldn’t shoot an unarmed man? Do you think society with its corruptive influences has left me with any trace of conventional morality? Do you think I care for anything but my own skin?”

“That’s just it, Chill. If you kill me now, you’ll never escape. They’ll get you for sure. You’re in deep enough trouble already. People don’t just walk off the Alvin Turke Show like that. Al Turke doesn’t forget.”

He was wavering.

“I’ll make you a deal, Chill. We go back in and finish the show. Then we split the loot. I go back to the Flustered Blush with some green gravy and you do whatever you like.”

He considered. “Why should I split with you?”

“Chill, you’ve heard about me. I’m Trig McKee. You’ve killed one of my best friends. You’ve robbed and, indirectly, killed the father of a girl I think a lot of. And you should know that once Trig McKee goes after somebody, he gets him. You don’t just kill off McKee’s buddies, beat up his women, and flaunt your injustices in his face. Not Trig McKee.”

“What are you getting at, McKee?”

“The gist of it is this: it takes a hell of a lot of money to buy me off. You cheated that girl’s father out of three hundred bucks. On the whole racket I’d say you’ve made about fifty thousand. Now, as I figure it, she has a hundred and fifty coming. I want twenty-five grand. The rest is yours. Now let’s go back inside. That commercial should be about over.”

Chill Warlock put away the gun and we went back inside.

Five months later the Flustered Blush was in her customary slip at Fort Lauderdale. It had been a good five months — in all a good twelve — but now it was clear that she was ready at long last.

“Trig, I hate to leave. I feel I should stay. To take care of you.”

“No, honey, the Blush and I can take care of ourselves now. I’m feeling stronger with the L.A. smog out of my lungs, and that smashed finger I got fighting with Chill Warlock is as good as new. Besides, I think you’re ready now, and for you to stay here would be to stagnate. You have a future, kid, a bright one. You and me was good together, but now it’s over.”

She brushed away a tear. “All right, Trig. I guess you’re right. What can I say? Just thank you, I guess.”

She kissed me lightly and got up from her deck chair. She was leaving all right. How many times had the deck of the Blush seen this same bittersweet scene? I sighed inwardly. It was going to rain soon. The clouds told me that, and so did the twinge in my finger; somebody’d slammed a car door on it in Las Vegas. There’s a great town, by the way. You should go there.

I watched her wispy blonde form walk toward the dock. She turned for a moment and waved shyly; then she took a decisive step away from the Blush, toward the great, mean, hungry outside world, and with a loud splash she fell awkwardly into the water.

I shook my head. The poor kid just wasn’t ready yet.

AUTHOR’S DISCLAIMER: John D. MacDonald’s famous character, Travis McGee, is neither a cad nor a scoundrel and bears only superficial resemblances to the hero of this story, which is intended to illustrate how our society has lost its values.