Free Fall in Crimson

Free Fall in Crimson

John D. MacDonald

Travis McGee #19 Free Fall in Crimson

John D. MacDonald

I had so often in the past seen dumb domestic animals in Africa so aware of the secret intent of the people who had bred and reared them and earned their trust that they could hardly walk, knowing they were being led to a distant place of slaughter.

Laurens Van Der Post,

The Night of the New Moon

He will wonder whether he should have told these young, handsome and clever people the few truths that sing in his bones.

These are:

(1) Nobody can ever get too much approval.

(2) No matter how much you want or need, they, whoever they are, don’t want to let you get away with it, whatever it is.

(3) Sometimes you get away with it.

John Leonard,

Private Lives in the Imperial City

One

WE TALKED past midnight, sat in the deck chairs on the sun deck of the Busted Flush with the starry April sky overhead, talked quietly, and listened to the night. Creak and sigh of hulls, slap of small waves against pilings, muted motor noises of the fans and generators and pumps aboard the work boats and the play toys:

“I don’t really know how the law works,” Ron Esterland said. “But I would think that if you arranged someone’s death, even if he were dying already, you shouldn’t inherit.”

“Where do you come in?” Meyer asked.

Esterland took a long time answering. “All right. If some money came to me, I wouldn’t turn it down. Maybe to that extent I’ve grown up a little. But I can get along without it. Years ago I would have turned down anything my father wanted to give me or leave me. If, Travis, as a result of your efforts, anything does come to me, the deal is that you get half But the chance is so remote, I pay expenses.” I got up and stretched, went to the rail, and did some push-offs against it and some deep knee bends. The night was chilly for April, and after my heavy morning workout, sitting so long had made me stiffen up.

I turned and asked Ron to straighten out the chronology of the Esterland wives for me. “I guess it is confusing,” he said. “My mother, Connie, was wife number one. She died when I was eleven. Dad married Judy Prisco when I was twelve. She was a dancer. They had no children. They were divorced in six months. It was quick and ugly, and she accepted a sizable settlement. When I was thirteen he married Josephine Laurant, the actress. She and I got along well. I was sent away to school when I was sixteen. Romola, their daughter, was almost three then. I never really went home again. There were some big scenes. My father didn’t like to be crossed by anybody, for any reason. He and Josie got a legal separation after ten years of marriage. Romola was nine. A nice little kid. Josie went out to the West Coast to live. It was what they called a friendly separation.”

“When did they find out your father had cancer?” I asked.

“A little over three years ago. He spent the first few months liquidating his holdings. That is, when he got out of the hospital after the exploratory, and when the radiology and the chemotherapy didn’t leave him too debilitated. Then he began to feel better. He had a remission. That’s when he moved down here to Fort Lauderdale and bought the motor sailer and moved aboard with the woman who had been working for him for several years. Anne Renzetti. As part of putting his affairs in order, he made a new will. As I remember, his previous one left me ten dollars. So he could mention my name, I guess. The new will set up some bequests for Josie and Anne and left the bulk of the estate to Romola. Then there was a paragraph about what should happen if Romola predeceased him, which nobody really expected her to do at that time. If that happened, then the money she would have gotten would go to the setting up of an Esterland Foundation, to make grants for research into neutralizing dangerous chemical wastes before disposal by industry. He thought that’s where he got his cancer, from working with plastics and reagents, chemicals of all kinds. That portion of the will, that contingency portion, left me a hundred thousand dollars. Which of course I didn’t get. But it was nice to know my stock had risen that much in his estimation.”

“And then Romola had her accident?” Meyer asked.

“Yes. Two years ago next month. May tenth. There was a severe skull fracture, and she never came out of the anesthetic. She was plugged into a life-support system. The brain waves were increasingly flat. Josie kept trying to believe there was hope. She died finally on August tenth. She had turned twenty. But by then my father was dead. He was beaten to death near Citrus City on the twenty-fourth of July. So Romola was his heir.”

“How much did the girl inherit?” Meyer asked. “Three and a half million after taxes, but then of course when Josie inherited from Romola, the government took a large slice. A little more than a million dollars.”

I went back and sat down. Ronald Esterland sighed audibly. He was a blond man, going bald at thirty-four, with big hands and thick shoulders, a bland face, a good smile.

“I think what is bothering me,” Meyer said, “and Travis too, is why you waited a year and a half to look into this whole thing.”

“I can’t give a good answer to that. I’m sorry. I was in London, and I had a chance to exhibit in the Sloane Gallery. I had enough work on hand for about half the space they were ready to let me have. And it was a chance to work in some bigger pieces. I kept telling myself I didn’t care what had happened to my father. He was a brutal man. He said brutal things. He tried to destroy the people around him. And somebody had the good judgment to beat him to death. I worked like hell, and I filled the good spaces in that gallery. The show was a success. The reviews were better than any of my group expected. Eight paintings were sold at the opening, and by the end of the first week there were only four left unsold, and three of those were huge. I went back one afternoon. Very few people there. I roamed the show, seeing all the little red stars they stuck on the paintings to indicate they were sold. I had a feeling of pride and satisfaction, but at the same time I felt a kind of desolation. A kind of bleakness. I realized then that my father had been dead a year and I hadn’t really understood what it meant to me. A lot of my motivation had been to show him that I had value, that I was valued by the world, and so I was worthy of his love and his respect. He had never shown me love or respect. I know how deeply I had wanted those things. I had wanted to make him come around. And I couldn’t. He was gone. He had somehow escaped, and I felt frustrated. When the show came down, I closed the studio and moved back to New York. Back home. I found that I could work, after a fashion, but not as well as I wanted to work. I kept thinking about my I’ather and Romola and the ugly fact of the murder of a dying man. So I came down here because this is where he had lived, aboard his boat, for the nuomths before he died. That’s how come I ran into tiarah Issom. I hadn’t seen her for years, since I lived in Greenwich Village. She’s doing damned fine work, and she said you bought one of her paintings.”

“A little seascape. An aerial view. Lots of blue in it. I am a junky for blue.”

“She has a lot of skill. She told me you did a favor Ior her a few years ago, and you might be the one to do a favor for me.”

“I’m not a private detective.”

“You said that before. I know.”

“I have no official standing. I don’t want to get into anything where I attract too much attention from the law, because I have no status. They don’t like people meddling. They don’t like amateurs.”

“I’ve put ten thousand dollars aside for expenses.”

“l want to think about it,” I told him. “I’ll be in touch one way or the other.”

So we shook hands around and he went down the ladderway and back to the stern and down the little gangway to the dock. I heard his heels on the cement as I watched him walk off, passing under the dock lights, his long shadow moving and changing with each light.

I went back and sat by Meyer. “So?” he said.

“So. So I know now that I can’t make it doing odd jobs here and there, and if I want to make it, I will have to seek honest work, like in Rob Brown’s Boat Yard. Or with Acme Diving and Salvage. Or working for a yacht broker. Travis McGee, your friendly boat salesman. With a salary, bonuses, and a retirement plan.”

“And,” said Meyer. “on your days off you can sit around here on the houseboat and whine and whinny about how jaded life has become.”

I stared over at him in the darkness. “I have been doing that quite a lot, haven’t I?”

“Not more than I can stand. But enough.”

“What can I tell you? I swam for three hours yesterday, some of it as hard as I could go. I woke up this morning feeling great. Absolutely great. Busting with energy. Know something? I want to get involved in the life and times of Esterland and son. I want to go out and con the people. I want to have to bust a couple of heads here and there and have somebody try to bust mine for me. Why should I feel a little bit guilty about feeling like that, Meyer?”

“Maybe you got so, you were enjoying the ennui.”

“The what?”

“Ennui, you illiterate. That is the restless need for some kind of action without having the outlet for any action at all. It is like weltschmerz.”

“Which, as you have so often told me, is home sickness for a place you have never seen. I miss Gretel, Meyer. God, how I miss her! But she is dead and gone, and the stars are bright and the night wind blows, and the universe is slowly unfolding, revealing its wonders. What was your impression of Ellis Esterland?”

“I did spend a couple of evenings with him. And Miss Renzetti. Not actually out of choice. He wanted to pick my brain, and I his. He wanted to know some of the banking practices in Grand Cayman, and I wanted to know which plastics companies were going to lead the pack in the future, based on new discoveries. What was he like? He tried to give the impression of being bluff and hearty and homespun. But he was a shrewd and subtle man. A good watcher. A good listener. I had no idea he was as sick as they say he was because that had to be-let me think back-two years ago in May, two months before he died.”

“What happened to his lady? Do you know?”

“Anne Renzetti? She stood up to him pretty well. I think he had a habit of bullying his women. I heard that she’s over in Naples, Florida, working in a resort hotel. Mmmm. Eden Beach! Correct.”

“She was in the will?”

“I don’t know, but I would think she was. She had been an employee. When he sold out his plastics company years ago, he set himself up as a management consultant, specializing in chemical and plastics companies, and from what he said I think he must have had a staff of a dozen or so. The offices were in Stamford, Connecticut. When he got sick he sold out and kept the Renzetti woman as a private secretary to help him put his affairs in order. After he was killed, the executor let her live aboard the boat until it was sold.”

I went back to the rail, snuffed the night. No traffic sounds. No surf sounds. Fifty boats away a night woman gave a maniacal cry of laughter, as abrupt and meaningless as the honk of a night-flying bird. I did not trust the rising sense of anticipation I felt. I had tried to fit myself to somberness, to a life of reserve. I had located a couple of boats for people, for a finder’s fee. I had ferried a couple of big ones-a Hatteras over to Mobile, a Pacemaker up to Maryland-and flown back. I’d done some work for one of the brokers, putting bargain boats through their paces for people who wanted to believe how easy it was before making the down payment.

I told myself I had lived in a house of many rooms, but there had been a fire, and it was all charred to hell except for a small attic bedroom. A bed, a chair, a table, and a window. And if anybody wanted to take a shot, I would happily stand in the window.

But you can’t cut your life back like some kind of ornamental shrub. I couldn’t put the old white horse out to pasture, hock the tin armor, stand the lance in a corner of the barn. For a little while, yes. For the healing time.

It was more than economics. I could tell myself I needed the money.. And I did. More than the money, I needed the sense of being myself, full size, undwarfed by my disasters.

I turned to Meyer and said, “I think I could find something where the chance of some kind of recovery would be better.”

“Maybe.”

“Ron Esterland is a little paranoid about the whole situation. He’s got a hang-up about his father. He isn’t thinking clearly.”

“Probably he isn’t.”

“I don’t see what Anne Renzetti would be able to tell me that would be any help at all.”

“Neither do I.”

“Want to ride over to Naples with me?”

“I would enjoy that. Yes.”

“Thanks for talking me into it, Meyer.”

“For a little while I didn’t think I could do it.”

Two

MEYER WAITED in my old blue Rolls pickup while I, talked money and time with Ron Esterland. Then in midmorning on a fine April Saturday, I drove over to Alligator Alley and we went humming westward past the wetlands, the scrub palmetto, the dwarf cypress. Traffic was heavy. Each year the gringos stay down longer. Each year too many of them come down to stay forever. Once the entire state becomes asphalt, high rises, malls, highway, fast food, and littered beaches, they will probably still keep coming.

The computer in one of the basements inside Meyer’s skull predicts an eventual Florida population of thirty-two million folk, and by that time it will level off because it will not be any more desirable to live in Florida than it is to live in Rhode Island or West Virginia.

“What can you remember about Ellis Esterland’s murder?” I asked Meyer. He walked back into his computer room and checked out the right floppy disc and played it back for me.

“On a very hot day Esterland drove up to Citrus City, in River County. That is about a hundred and twenty miles from Fort Lauderdale. Miss Renzetti offered to drive him, but he said he would go alone. She said he was feeling much better that month, even though he was depressed by his daughter’s condition. He did not tell Miss Renzetti why he was going to Citrus City. And nobody ever found out. He was driving a dark gray Lincoln Continental. He had lunch alone at the Palmer Hotel, in the center of the city, and sat in the lobby for a time reading the Wall Street Journal. No one noticed his departure. Apparently he drove his car back over to the Florida Turnpike and stopped at a rest area six miles south of the interchange for Citrus City. A trucker found the body and reported it on CB radio. He was face down on the floor in front of the rear seat with his legs doubled under him. His wallet was on the front seat. His money was gone. Miss Renzetti said he probably had about two hundred dollars with him. He had been severely beaten. Blood beside the car and spattered against it indicated that he had probably been tossed into the back after the beating. Skull fractures, jaw fracture, broken facial bones, broken ribs. Nobody saw anything. No witness ever came forth. There were no clues.”

“I think I was out of town at the time.”

“You were. It was an overnight sensation. DYING MILLIONAIRE SLAIN. KILLED IN HIGHWAY ASSAULT. But it soon became yesterday’s news. Oh, as I remember there was a second little flurry when the terms of his will became known. GIRL IN COMA INHERITS FORTUNE. That sort of thing. I think the headlines called him the Plastics King.”

“And if you had to guess?”

“Ellis Esterland was a very abrasive man. He was cordially disliked by a great many people. I think that if he felt unwell, he would have stopped where they found him. And if anyone had tried to talk to him, he would probably have said something ugly to them. I would guess there was only one person involved.”

“Why do you say that?”

“The money was taken, but not the expensive car. It was a new car. If two people had arrived in one vehicle, one of them could have taken the car. If there was only one person, their identity could have been traced through the vehicle they would have left behind.”

“Meyer, there is a difference between logic and implausibility.”

“I’ve never noticed that logic needs be plausible.” He retreated into silence. I knew that he was back there in one of his thinking rooms, working things out. Staring into the fire. Patting the cat.

I noticed a marsh hawk on a dead branch and pointed it out. “Circus cyaneus hudsonius,” Meyer said. I turned and stared at him. He coughed and said, “Sorry about that. It’s a twitch. Like hiccups. Compulsive classification. I try not to do it. Can’t help observations. Such as what you do when you get annoyed. You go ten miles an hour faster.”

I dropped the speed back where it belonged. We got off the Alley and took 858 into downtown Naples and out to the beach, turned right, and drove along hotel row until we came to the Eden Beach. I drove the long curve of sleek asphalt past the portico and on over into their parking area. A man tending the plantings stopped and stared slack-jawed at the Rolls pickup. It has that effect. The conversion was done clumsily during the Great Depression. Four fat women in shorts were on the big putting-green, grimly improving their game. Through big-leafed tropic growth I could see the blue slosh of the swimming pool, and I heard somebody body-smack into it off the rumbling board. I saw a slice of Gulf horizon, complete with distant schooner. We went up three broad white steps and through a revolving door into the cool shadows of the lobby. A very pretty lady behind the reception desk smiled at us, frowned at her watch, picked up a phone, punched out two numbers, then spoke in a low voice.

“She’ll be right out,” the nice lady said. “What kind of work does she do here?”

“Oh, she’s our manager! She’s the boss.”

Anne Renzetti appeared a few minutes later, looking unlike a boss. I had forgotten what a vivid little woman she was. Black black hair, dark eyes, black brows, a slash of red mouth. She wore a beige suit, white crisp shirt, green silk scarf knotted at her throat, very high heels. She walked trimly, swiftly, toward us, giving Meyer a smile of genuine pleasure at seeing him again, holding her cheek up for a kiss, favoring me with a quick handshake and a dubious look.

“McGee?” I said. “Travis McGee?”

“I think I remember you… Meyer, how are you? You look absolutely wonderful. Gentlemen, perhaps you will join me for a drink? I was getting ready to leave. Marie? I’ll be at my place if anything comes up.”

We followed her out the west doors, through the pool area past a thatched outdoor beach bar, and down to the farthest cabana. It was on pilings six feet high. We went up the stairs to a shallow porch with a broad overhang. A nice breeze was coming off the Gulf. The tubular chairs were comfortable. We approved her suggestion of vodka and grapefruit juice, and she declined any help. When she came back with the drinks on a small tray, she had changed to white shorts and a pink gauze top.

Meyer said, “Congratulations on your exalted position, Anne.”

She made a face. “It was sort of an accident, actually. First, I was secretary to Mr. Luddwick and then the company moved him to Hawaii, to a bigger hotel. His replacement was driving from Baltimore, and he got into a really bad accident. He was alone and fell asleep and went off the road. They thought he might be laid up for six weeks to two months, and they asked me if I could carry on alone herewith a small raise in pay, of course. I said sure. They had to pin the man’s broken hip, and he got an infection, and finally, when he was ready to report, somebody had the good sense to look at the results for the three months I had been running it, and they decided they shouldn’t change a thing. I owe getting the top job to Ellis Esterland.”

“You do?” Meyer said, astonished.

“I cover every inch of this place at least once a month. I know what every employee is doing and what they are supposed to be doing. I know where every penny of expense goes. I listen personally to every gripe. Ellis taught me that there are people who try to look as if they are doing a good and thorough job, and then there are the people who actually damn well do it, for its own sake. I’m proud of myself, damn it. And I love being the boss. I really love it! Everything you do in life is worth infinite care and infinite effort, Ellis said. He said that in a half-ass world the real achiever is king. He used to make me do things over if I made the tiniest mistake. He used to make me cry. But, wow, I really owe him.”

“Nice-looking place,” I said.

“Why have you looked me up?” she asked.

Meyer left it up to me. “We were talking with Ronald Esterland yesterday night in Lauderdale, Miss Renzetti.”

“With Ron! You were? How is he? What is he doing?”

“Fine, apparently. He had a big show of his work in London and he sold most of it. He is beginning to get a lot of attention.”

“I’m so glad! You know, I thought Ellis had really gutted him. I really thought Ron would never amount to anything. His father thought Ron’s ambition to be a painter was absurd. He thought it was a cop-out, an excuse for not working. I tried in little ways to get Ellis to get in touch with Ron. But he wouldn’t. I felt… maternal about Ron, which is strange because he’s a little older than I am. I think Josie felt that way, or feels that way, about him too, and though she is older than he is, she certainly isn’t old enough to be his mother. It really crushed Josie, losing Romola the way she did… What does Ron have to do with your looking me up?”

“His attitude toward his father has mellowed, Miss Renzetti.”

“Please call me Anne.”

“Thank you, Anne. Ron realized that he lost some of the fun of success because his father wasn’t alive to see it happen.”

“Ellis would have been totally astonished. He used to say to people, ‘I’ve got a middle-aged son living abroad making funny daubs on canvas, trying to live in the wrong century’.”

“He isn’t satisfied with the story of his father’s death.”

“Who is? They never found out a thing. Not a single thing. And it happened in such a public place. It doesn’t seem possible they couldn’t find out something.”

“So I’m poking around.”

“Are you some sort of police officer?”

Meyer answered, “No, he’s just a private citizen. But he’s had a lot of luck finding things for people, answering questions people have had. You can trust him, Anne.”

“With what? I don’t know anything I haven’t told the police long ago. It wasn’t too pleasant, you know. I was a single woman living aboard a fancy boat with a rich old dying man. They were less than polite. They wanted to know what boyfriends I had on the side. They wanted to know, if Ellis was so sick, why I hadn’t driven him up there. Was he getting a divorce from Josephine? Did I plan to marry him if he got a divorce? Had we quarreled before he drove up there? Finally I had enough and I told them I wasn’t answering any more questions. They tried to bully me, but I had been bullied by one of the world’s greatest, so it didn’t work. Look, tell Ron I’m so glad he’s making it. And tell him I feel quite certain Ellis would have come around and been proud of him too. Will you do that?”

“Of course we will,” Meyer said. “Did Ellis go off on trips like that often, without telling you why?”

“Never! Here’s all I know about that trip. He was feeling better. He’d been-regaining lost ground for a month. He had picked up some of the weight he had lost, and his color was better. He was talking about being strong enough to fly out to Los Angeles to see Romola and talk to Josie and the doctors. He wanted to see Romola, but at the same time he dreaded it. He had talked to the doctors on the phone. They said there was no hope at all for her. I was a terrible thing for him. I think he really loved Romola. I don’t think there was ever any other person in his life he had loved. Not me. Not anyone. So, okay, when I came back from shopping on Monday, the day before he was killed, he was talking on the phone. Mostly he was just saying ‘Okay, okay, okay.’ I had the feeling it was a long distance call. They checked the phone records afterward, and if it was long distance, it wasn’t an outgoing call. He, seemed thoughtful that afternoon and evening, and before we went to bed he told me he was going up to Citrus City the next day. He said he would go alone. He wouldn’t tell me why he was going. He told me to stop asking questions.”

“Do you have any idea why he didn’t want to tell you?”

“It wasn’t like him not to. Not that he was so very open with me. It was just that he didn’t care what I knew about him. I wasn’t in any position to disapprove of anything he might do. I don’t know why I didn’t walk out. It just didn’t occur to me that I could. Does that make any sense? I was in a cage with the door open, and I never even noticed the door. Now here is the only dumb guess I could come up with. He had a scientific mind. He started as a research chemist, you know. The one thing he hated above all else was doing something ridiculous and being found out. He knew how sick he was. We told each other that the remission was holding, and maybe he had licked the cancer. But he knew better than that. It had metastasized before it was first diagnosed. Chemotherapy had knocked it down for a little while, long enough for him to recover from most of the effects of the therapy, but when the remission ended, the next series of chemotherapy treatments would, if they suppressed the cancer at all, knock him back further than the previous set. And the pain would be back too. The only thing I can think of that would make him keep a secret from me was the idea I might ridicule him. Hope can be a dreadful thing, I guess. If he was going off to track down some sort of a quack cure, I don’t think he would have told me.”

“Is there some kind of miracle cure available in Citrus City?”

“I never tried to find out. But I would think that if there was, the police up there would have checked to see if he made contact, once they knew of his condition.”

Meyer cleared his throat and looked uncomfortable. We looked at him and he said, “There’s always the remote possibility that he didn’t tell you because he thought you would try any means of stopping him if you knew.”

“Knew what?”

“That he knew exactly what was in store for him with what was left of his life, and he had been arranging to get himself killed.”

She stared at him wide-eyed. “No,” she said firmly. “No, Meyer. Not Ellis. Not like that. This might sound sick, but I think he was enjoying the battle too much. He was a very gutsy man. All man. Cancer was challenging him. It pushed and he pushed back. He would delay taking pain pills, and keep track of how bad the pain was. No. To him it would have been like some kind of dirty surrender. He was building himself up to give it another battle.”

“Suggestion withdrawn,” Meyer said.

“Would it have had anything to do with Romola?” I asked.

“If that was so, he would have told me.”

“Could he have been going to buy a present of sorne kind?”

“He wasn’t much for presents and surprises. On my birthdays he would give me money to go out and shop for myself.”

“Was there any clue as to what he was going to do in what he picked to wear?” I asked.

“Not really. He wore gray slacks and a pale blue knit sports shirt with short sleeves. He took a seersucker jacket along to wear if he was in very cold air conditioning. I think he wore it in that hotel, from what the police said. But he wasn’t wearing it when he… when they killed him.”

She hitched her chair forward and hooked her bare heels over the porch railing. Her legs were well-formed and slender. The skin, moderately tan, looked flawless as plastic.

“I’ve been over it ten thousand times. It seems so pointless, dying like that. I wouldn’t admit it to myself at the time, but I did later: I was relieved. I’d been bracing myself to go all the way with him. Through all the pain. Caring for him when he became helpless. I was getting myself charged up to really do a job. But at the same time I dreaded it. Which is natural. He didn’t love me. He sort of liked me. I had good lines and I was obedient, like a show dog. And I sort of loved him.

“There can be a habit of love, I think. You justify the way you are living by telling yourself that love leaves you no other choice. And so you are into love. Women stay with dreadful men. You see it all the time. You wonder why. You know they are wasting their lives. You know they are worth far more than what they have. But they stay on and on. They grow old staying on and on. They say it is love so often to themselves, it does. become love. I can’t understand the Anne Renzetti I was then. I look back and I don’t understand her at all. We’re all lots of people, I guess. We become different people in response to different limes and places, different duties. Maybe in a lifetime we become a very limited bunch of people when, in fact, we could become many many more-if life moved us around more. ”Well, it moved me here and I know who I am now, and I will stay with this life for as long as I can. I never even suspected who I might really be. If it hadn’t been for that new manager falling asleep at the wheel, I might never have known about this Anne. You can’t miss what you don’t know, can you? Maybe that’s why we all have that funny little streak of sadness from time to time. We are missing something and don’t even know what it is, or whether it will ever be revealed to us.“

Meyer looked approvingly at her. “When you know who you really are, you fit more comfortably into your skin. You give less of a damn what kind of impression you make on people. My friend McGee here has never been at all certain of his identity.”

She gave me a quick, tilt-eyed, searching glance. It had an unexpected impact. “Thinking of himself as some kind of rebel?” she asked.

“Something like that,” Meyer agreed. “A reluctance to expend emotion, and a necessity to experience it. Cool and hot. Hard and soft. Rattling around in his life, bouncing off the walls.”

“Would it make you two any more comfortable if I went for a walk?” I asked. “Then you can really dig Into my psyche. Meyer, for God’s sake, what kind of friendship and loyalty are you showing me?”

“Sorry,” he said. “I keep thinking of Anne as an old friend of both of us. As a matter of fact, we only really talked one time, didn’t we?”

“For a couple of hours one night, aboard the Caper, after Ellis went to bed. But it made me feel as if I’d always known you. All the way back to childhood.”

“The way he can do that,” I said, “could have made him one of the world’s greatest con men. But he has scruples. And they get in the way of the con.”

“So you are sort of a team of con men, conning me?” she asked.

“Let’s say we share your interest in finding out more about how Ellis Esterland died,” I told her.

“Perhaps I haven’t got a hell of a lot of real interest left? No. That’s unfair. He was an important part of my life. I worked for him for six years. I can say I never really understood the man.”

“Did any of his wives?” I asked her.

“I don’t know about the first one, Ron’s mother. Her name was Connie, and I’ve heard she was a real beauty. I’ve never seen a picture of her. Ellis didn’t keep pictures of people around. Of course Judy Prisco and Josie Laurant were-are-both handsome. He liked to be seen in the company of women who make heads turn. I would suspect I was low on the list. But in the right light I’ve had my moments. Whenever we went out together he would look me over first. Very critical of the color and design of clothes, the shape of a hairdo, the right jewelry: The marriage to Judy ended very quickly. And she did very well; she walked away with a bundle. Of course, at his death; he was still married to Josie, even though they were legally separated. Maybe she understood him, I don’t really know. I like her.”

“You’ve met her?” Meyer asked.

“Oh, yes. When Ellis went downhill so fast, in the beginning, she flew out. I don’t really know if it was genuine concern or a feeling of obligation. He was sending her almost five thousand a month as support. She spent a lot of time with him during the ten days she was in Stamford. She and I talked a lot, after visiting hours were over. That was after the exploratory. We were wary with each other at first. You can understand that. After all, she was still married to him, and I was the quote other woman close quote. She’s an unusual person. She’s very emotional. I don’t think she knows what she’s going to do or say next. And I will tell you, she at that time was just about the best-looking mother of a twenty-year-old I have ever seen. Wow. Fantastic. And she used to be such a marvelous actress.”

“She gave it up?” I asked.

“Or it gave her up. Ellis talked about it a few times. Too much temperament. Or temper. Too hard to handle.”

“Have you seen her since?” I asked.

“No. But we talked, after Romola was hurt. She would call me up and we would talk. It seemed to help her to talk to me. It seemed to settle her down. She’d be practically hysterical when she would place the call.”

“Did Ellis know how bad off he was?” Meyer asked. “Did the doctors level with him?”

“Oh, yes. They had to. He was quick to detect any kind of evasion. It was almost impossible to lie to him. He had an excellent specialist. Dr. Prescott Mullen. Prescott flew down several times to check him over when we were living on the Caper. We became very good friends, actually. He’s a fine man.” There had been a subtle stress on the qualifying word “very”

“As a matter of fact,” she continued, “I’m expecting him here tomorrow, to stay for a week. He said on the phone he’s been working too hard and needs a break.”

“I wonder if he could add anything,” Meyer said.

“Like what?” Anne asked.

“Well, if Esterland was facing a very untidy end, a highly unpleasant finale to his life; he might not have told you, Anne. I still wonder about his arranging his own death. Was there insurance?”

“Yes. Quite a large policy. But it would have been good even if he had killed himself with a gun. He’d had it a long time.”

“You knew his personal financial affairs?”

“I was his secretary, Meyer. I kept the books, balanced the checkbooks, dealt with the brokers and the lawyers. That was my job. There was a lot to do because he changed his legal residence to Florida and established new banking and trust department connections in Fort Lauderdale. The bank and I were co-executors of his will, so I got a fee for that as well as the money he left me. I can see you both wondering. Was it very much? I’ll tell you. It was twenty thousand dollars. It fooled me. I guessed it would be lots or nothing. I thought it would be nothing because I wasn’t in the will. It was a codicil he’d added a month before he was killed. But to repeat myself, Ellis would never never arrange his own death.”

“The point Ron was making,” I told her, “was that anybody who arranged the death of a dying man shouldn’t inherit. So what we are talking about is the way Josephine Laurant Esterland inherited the bulk of the estate.”

It startled her. She swung her feet down from the railing and turned to face me more directly. “Ron is thinking that? It seems sort of sick. I mean, it seems so… cumbersome. A public place like that. Witnesses. So much could go wrong. I see what he means, of course: that if Romola died in that coma, which she so apparently was going to do and finally did, then Josie would get only a small bequest. The support stopped when Ellis died. We-Ellis and-we were taking it for granted that he was going to outlive his daughter. And we were talking about the foundation. And he had appointments with the lawyers and trust people and his CPA to work out the final details. He died before he could keep those final appointments. He hadn’t really put much thought into the foundation until Romola had that terrible accident. And we knew she probably would die. And yes, it did make a difference of an awful lot of money to Josie to have Romola outlive her dad. Joe+ie would make such a terrible conspirator. She babbles. She can’t keep secrets.”

“Are you in touch with her?” I asked.

“I think I owe her a letter. We’ve been tapering off. After all, Ellis was all we had in common, and memories of Ellis aren’t enough to keep a friendship going. In her last letter she said she was going back to work, that it wasn’t really a very good part, but she was looking forward to it, to working again.”

She sighed, looking downward into her glass. I liked the line of cheek and jaw, the gentle look of the long dark lashes, the breasts small under rosy gauze, the pronounced convexity of the top of the thigh. Except for small lines at the corners of her eyes, a puffiness under her chin, the years had left her unmarked. She checked the glasses, took them to fix another drink.

When she came back out, she said, “I can understand why Ron is suspicious and upset. But I think it just happened. I don’t think anybody planned it. What will you do next?”

“Go to Citrus City and see if the River County sheriff has anything at all,” I said.

“If he had anything, wouldn’t he have arrested somebody?”

“You have to have some pretty solid facts before you arrest anybody. He might have some suspicions he’d talk about.”

“Let me buy you gentlemen some lunch, one of the Eden Beach’s great luncheon taste treats.”

“Why should you buy us lunch?” Meyer asked.

She patted his arm. “Promotion and advertising, dear Meyer. I have a nice expense account all my own and I hardly ever get a chance to use it. So humor me.”

Three

IN THE early afternoon I turned off Route 41 onto 846 and drove the small empty roads over past Corkscrew, Immokalee, Devil’s Garden. The tourists were booming down the big roads, white-knuckled in the traffic, waiting for the warning signals from their Fuzzbusters, staring out at endless strips of junk stores, cypress knees, plaster herons, and instant greasy chicken. We rumbled gently along through the wild country, watching the birds, the dangle of Spanish moss, the old ranch houses set way back under the shade trees, the broad placid faces of the Brahma cattle.

I went up 27 past Sebring, Avon Park, and Frostproof, went over 630 through Indian Lake Estates, and came up on Citrus City from the west. The groves marched over the rolling land, neat as Prussians. Some rain guns were circling, the mist blowing across the ranks of trees.

We agreed on a motel west of the city limits at about six o’clock. Low white frame structure with a central office and restaurant portion looking like a piece of Mount Vernon. Above five cars were lined up in front of their thirty units.

There was a thin, middle-aged, weather-worn woman behind the desk. She had tooth trouble and held her mouth funny when she talked, and quite often put her hand in front of her mouth, the gesture of a child hiding laughter.

Once we had signed in and paid in advance, I said to her, “Say, is Dave Banks still sheriff?”

She stared at me. “Lordie, no! Dave’s dead six year anyway. Guess you have been gone a time. The sherf we got now, he’s new last election. Milford Hampton. They call him Fish, but not to his face, on account he looks kind of like a fish, his mouth and the way his eyes are set. Maybe you heard of the family. His granddaddy had the big Star Bar ranch north of town. Still in the family, what’s left of it after they sold off some for groves and some for town houses.”

“I think I heard the name.”

“He’s trying to do a job, but this place is getting rougher every year. I don’t know what’s doing it. Floaters and drifters. Boozing and knifing folks. Used to be quiet and pretty and nice. Now a lady wouldn’t want to go into town of a Saturday night at all. The good stores, they’re all out in the Groveway Mall. Look, you men want a good honest dinner at an honest price, we’re serving from six to eight thirty. Tonight is ribs and chicken.”

The River County sheriff’s office and jail were in a white modern building diagonally across the street from the ornate yellow turrets and minarets of the old county courthouse. County cars and patrol cars were parked in a wire enclosure beside the building. When we went in, I could hear the flat mechanical tone of voice of the female dispatcher somewhere out of sight. A fat girl in a pale blue uniform with arm patch sat behind a green desk, typing with two fingers.

She glared at us and said, “You want something?”

“Sure do,” I said, “but if I asked you for it, you’d probably bust me alongside the head.”

“Oh, you!” she said, with a chubby simper. “Who you wanna see?”

“Whoever is still assigned to the Ellis Esterland killing.”

“Esterland. Esterland. Oh, the rich millionaire guy. That was a long time ago. Look, what we got around here, we got Sunday evening, which is supposed to be a big rest from Saturday night, but tonight it isn’t, you know what I mean? I got to finish this dang thang. It has to go in. Couldn’t you come back tomorrow, fellas?”

“Would it be assigned to anybody in particular?”

“I wouldn’t rightly know myself. My guess is, it would just be an open file, you know. And in the monthly meeting, the sheriff, he goes over the open files with the officers, to kind of remind them to keep their eyes open and keep asking questions even when they’re checking out other stuff. You fellas from another jurisdiction?”

At that moment a sallow man in baggy yellow slacks and a Polynesian shirt came out of one office, heading for another, a stack of papers in his hand.

“Oh, Barney! Look, can maybe you help these fellas? They want to know who’s still working on that rich millionaire that got beat to death at that rest stop over on the turnpike a long time ago.”

He stopped and stared at us, a slow and careful appraisal, and then managed to herd both of us over into a corner away from the girl typing. He smelled tartly of old sweat.

“My name is Odum,” he said.

“Meyer. And Mr. McGee,” Meyer said. There was no hand extended.

“What would be your interest in that case? We’re short-handed here at the best of times. No time for book writers, newspaper people, or those who’re just damn nosey.”

As I hesitated, hunting the right approach, Meyer stepped in. With a flourish, he handed Odum one of his cards. I knew it was meaningless. But it is a thick card on cream-colored stock with raised lettering. There are a lot of initials after his name, all earned. In the bottom left corner is his adopted designation: Certified Guarantor. He had conducted some field surveys of his own and had weeded his options down to these two words. They sounded official and had the flavor of money and personal authority. People treat a Certified Guarantor with respect. If they asked what it meant, he told them in such a way that respect was increased.

“Mr. McGee is assisting me, sir,” Meyer said. “The Esterland estate is a phased estate, in that certain incumbrances and stipulations have to fall into place in a time frame that takes heed of certain aspects of taxation on properties coexistent with the residual portions. So I’m sure you understand that just as a formality, sir, we have to go through the motions of testifying and certifying that yes, we did indeed proceed to Citrus City and review the status of the open case of murder and report back to the administrators and adjudicators, so that things can move ahead and not be tied up in jurisdictional red tape. Please believe me when I tell you that in return for your cooperation, we will take a minimum of time from busy officers of the law.”

Odum’s eyes looked slightly glazed. He shook himself like a damp dog and said, “You want to just… check out where we are on that thing?”

“On a totally confidential basis, of course.”

“Sure. I realize that. Fine. Well, I guess Rick Tate, Deputy Rick Tate, would be the one who’d have it all clearest in mind. Where’s Rick, Zelda?”

She stopped typing. “Rick? Oh, he’s went up to Eustis with Debbie on account of her mom is bad off again. He’ll be back on tomorrow on the four to midnight.”

“You can get hold of him tomorrow,” Odum said. “He’ll come in about three thirty, around there. I won’t be here.”

“If we could have some kind of informal authorization?” Meyer asked. “Maybe you could just write it on the back of the card I gave you.”

He went over to a corner of Zelda’s desk and wrote on the card, Rick, you can go ahead and tell these men everything we got to date on Esterland, which isn’t much anyway. Barney Odum.

When we walked back out into the warm evening, I said, “Certified Guarantor! You could write political speeches.”

“Let me see. You are a Salvage Consultant. Anne called us a couple of con men. From now until tomorrow what do we do?”

“We can check out the Palmer Hotel. Where Esterland was last seen alive. You did nicely with Barney Odum, friend.”

“Yes. I know.”

Most of the old hotels in the central cities of Florida, in the cities of less than a hundred thousand, have gone downhill, decaying with the neighborhoods. Some of them have turned into office buildings, or parking lots, or low-cost storage bins for elderly indigents.

Though the neighborhood had evidently decayed, the Palmer was a pleasant surprise. A clean roomy lobby, pleasant lighting, trim and tidy ladies behind the desk and the newsstand. Walnut and polished brass.

The dark bar off the lobby was called The Office. Prism spots gleamed down on the bald pate of the bearded bartender, on shining glassware, on good brands on the back bar, on the padded bar rim, on black Naugahyde stools with brass nailheads. A young couple off in a corner held hands across the small table.

The bartender said, “Gentlemen,” and put coasters in front of us. I ordered Boodles over ice with a twist, and Meyer selected a white wine. After serving us he moved off to that precise distance good bartenders maintain: far enough to give us privacy if we wanted it, close enough to join in should we speak to him.

“Good-looking place,” I said to him.

“Thank you, sir.”

“Do much business?”

“Not much on weekends. Big noon and cocktailtime business during the week.”

“This is a very generous shot of gin.”

“Thank you, sir. This is not really a commercial place, I mean in the sense that there is a lot of cost control. It’s owned by National Citrus Associates. The cooperatives and some of the big growers maintain suites here. There’s a lot of convention and meeting business, a lot of businessmen from overseas, a lot of government people, state and federal. It’s something like a club. The number of available rooms is quite limited.”

Meyer said, “A friend of ours from Fort Lauderdale had lunch here the day he was killed at a rest stop over on the turnpike. A year and nine months ago. Ellis Esterland.”

“A tragic thing,” the bartender said. “Beaten to death and robbed. There is so much mindless violence in the world. I’ve been here five years, and I can see the difference in just that short time. Mr. Esterland had a drink here at the bar before he went to the grill room for his lunch. He sat right where you are sitting, sir. He had a very dry vodka Gibson, straight up, and soon after he left there was an order for another one from the grill room. Of course, I did not know his name at that time. They showed me his Florida driver’s license, the police did, and I recognized the little color photograph as the man who was in here.”

“What did they ask you about him?” I asked.

He shrugged. “If we had any conversation beyond his ordering his drink, and I said we didn’t. I had a dozen customers at the bar, and I was quite busy. I had no chance to notice him, really, to guess at his state of mind. That’s what they asked. Was he nervous? Was he elated? I just couldn’t help them at all. From his manner I judged him to be a businessman of some importance, used to good service. He spoke to no one else, and no one joined him. They questioned his waitress and the people at the desk and the girl at the newsstand. I don’t think they learned anything useful. At least they’ve never arrested anyone.”

“It’s puzzling,” I said. “Why would a man pull into a rest stop on the turnpike after he had been driving only six miles?”

“Car trouble?” the bartender said.

“He had a new Lincoln Continental with just over two thousand miles on it,” Meyer said.

“Perhaps he felt unwell,” the bartender said. “He didn’t look like a really healthy person. His color was bad.”

Three new customers arrived, laughing and hearty, dressed like Dallas businessmen, ranch hats and stitched boots. Juice moguls, maybe. They called the bartender Harry, and he greeted them by name. Two bourbons and a scotch.

We had a second drink and then went to the dining room for better than adequate steaks, green salad, and baked potatoes, served efficiently by a glum heavy woman who knew nothing about anybody who’d been a customer over a year ago, because she had not been there a year.

Back at the motel, Meyer went to bed with a book called Contrary Investment Strategy. I told him to be sure to let me know how it came out. I tried to think about Esterland’s misfortune, but my mind kept veering into trivia, to a memory of the fine matte finish on the slender Renzetti legs, and the tiny beads of sweat along her forehead at the dark hairline as she sat in silhouette against the white glare of beach. Meyer, in bright yellow pajamas, frowned into his strategy book.

I slipped away into nightmare. I was running after a comedy airplane. Gretel was the pilot, very dashing in her Red Baron helmet, goggles, white silk scarf, white smile as she turned to look back at me. The little biplane bounded over the lumps in the, broad pasture. I was trying to warn her. If she took off, she would fly into the trees. She couldn’t hear me because of the noise of the engine. She thought I was making jokes, chasing her. I could not catch her. The engine sound grew louder and the tail skid lifted and she took off toward the pines.

As I ran, still yelling, I saw her tilt the plane to try to slide through a gap in the trees, saw the wings come off, heard the long grinding, sliding, clattering crash into the stones. I climbed down the slope. The whole, gully was cluttered with large pieces of airplane, but strangely old, stained by time and weather, grass growing up through rents in the aluminum. I couldn’t understand. I kept hunting for her. I flipped over what seemed to be a small piece of wing, big as the top of a card table, and there was a skull in the skull-sized stones; helmet in place, the goggle lenses starred by old fractures, a bundle of soiled gray silk bunched under the bones of the jaw.

Meyer shook me out of it, and I came up gasping, sweat-soaked.

“Okay?” he asked.

“Thanks.”

“A lot of moaning and twitching going on.”

I wiped my face on a corner of the sheet. “Gretel again. She doesn’t seem to want to stay dead.” He went back over to his bed and covered himself and picked up his book. He looked over at me, thoughtful and concerned.

“How is the book coming?” I asked.

“The bad guys are winning, I think.”

“Sometimes they do. Sometimes you can’t tell the bad guys unless you buy a program at the door.” And when my heart slowed back to normal, I was able to go back to sleep.

At breakfast Meyer said, “I’d hoped to be back by early evening. In fact I would very much like to be back.”

It took me a few moments to understand the urgency. Then I remembered that Aggie Sloane was due in on her big Trumpy again, called the Byline. Aggie, an ex-news hen who had married a publisher and assumed the management of the chain of papers when he died, had first come to Meyer as the friend of a friend, with a delicate international money problem. Their friendship had blossomed during and after Meyer’s deft solution to her problem.

Though Meyer loves to look upon the lively young beach girls and is often surrounded by little chittering platoons of them, running errands for him and laughing at his wise jokes, when it comes to any kind of personal involvement, Meyer feels most at ease with-and is usually attracted to-mature capable independent women, the sort who run magazines, newspapers, art galleries, travel agencies, and branch banks: For them, Meyer is a sometime interlude, reassuring, undemanding, supportive, and gentle. They return, refreshed, to their spheres of combat. They are women who take great good care of themselves and are not inclined toward any permanent attachment. Meyer smiles lot.

Aggie Sloane makes an annual pilgrimage. She flies down and boards her big Trumpy in Miami, cruises up to Lauderdale to pick up Meyer, and takes him along on the one-week vacation she allows herself every spring.

“Aggie arrives today?”

“I suppose there’d be pretty good air service back.”

“Would you mind driving Miss Agnes?”

“Not at all. Of course, when I drive that thing, I always feel as if I’m hurrying to catch up with the antique classic car parade. But why?”

“I think a nice inconspicuous rental would be more useful somehow. And-I might go back to Naples and have a chat with that doctor.”

“Just for the hell of it?”

“I’ll give your regards to Anne.”

“I think she might be too involved with that doctor to hear much of what you say. She had that look when she brought him up.”

“I didn’t notice.”

“I think you’d better get back in the habit of noticing everything, Travis. That trait has kept you alive up until now.”

“I’ve noticed one thing I should mention. Whenever you feel a bit guilty about anything, you give these little stern warnings to people, usually me.”

His bright blue eyes looked quite fierce for a few moments. Then he smiled. “All right. The guilt isn’t about Aggie, of course. It’s about leaving you alone with this Esterland thing.”

“I managed everything alone for quite a few years, professor.”

“Always happy to leave you to your own resources. The things you get into make me highly nervous.”

“I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. Give my love and admiration to the lady Sloane. I might be back late tomorrow or the day after. But you won’t be there, will you?”

His smile spread wide under the potato nose, wide and fatuous and tenderly reminiscent. “With any luck, I won’t.”

Four

RICK TATE was a lean, dusty, bitter-looking man with eyes deep set under shaggy brows, narrow nose, heavy jaw-a slow, lazy-moving man who looked competent in his pale blue cotton, black leather, and departmental hardware. I guessed his age at forty.

He took the card and held it by one corner, looking at it with suspicion and distaste as he read it. “Says men,” he said.

“My boss had to get back.”

“Why you got to know this stuff?”

“My boss explained it to Barney Odum. It’s a legal and tax thing.”

He slammed the door of his gray steel locker and twirled the combination dial. We went out the back door into the lot and stood in the shade of the building waiting for the cars to come back in from their shifts. There were only three out, he told me.

“Look,” he said, “instead of your riding around with me, the best way is I give you the file so you read it and then we talk; but I don’t damn well know you at all, McGee, and I don’t feel right about not being with anybody when they are reading a file I put together.”

“Dave Banks could have told you I was all right.”

He shoved his hat back off his forehead and stared at me. “Hell, I married Dave’s middle girl.”

“That would be Debbie?”

“Sure would.”

“How’s Mrs. Banks these days?”

“Not good. Not good at all. She’s up in Eustis, living with her sister. We was up to see her yesterday. Looking terrible. It cut Debbie all up to see her mom looking so poorly. What she’s got is kidney trouble, and they put her on a machine up there once a week. They drive her over to Orlando. Costly.”

“Social Security paying for it? With the Medicare?”

“They pay shit. They pay eighty percent of what it used to cost to have it done eight years ago. With the four kids, we can’t help out as much as Debbie thinks we should. The oldest girl, Debbie’s sister Karen, lives in Atlanta, and she sends what she can. Now they say she should have it twice a week instead of once, and that’s how come she looks so bad. I don’t see how the hell. we’re going to swing it. I really don’t.”

“I’m sorry to hear about it.”

“Well, come on in and I’ll get you the file, and you can set and go through it in one of the interroga tion rooms. Then when you get done with it, take it back to Records and ask them to ask Dispatch to tell me to come in and pick you up.”

The file was thick. There was a sheaf of glossy black-and-white photographs of the body still in the car, and the body on the stretcher. Closeups of left profile, right profile, and full face. Sickening brutality. To hit a man once that hard is brutal. To keep hitting him is sickness.

Fingerprinting got nothing, as usual. There were lab reports on blood samples. Trace of alcohol. Contents of stomach. Decedent had eaten approximately two hours before death, give or take a half hour. There was a long technical report on the physical findings dictated during the autopsy procedure. Cause of death was massive trauma to the brain causing a pressure from internal bleeding that suppressed the functions of breathing and heartbeat. Five broken ribs, all on the left side, indicating a right-handed assailant. Incisions from operations noted. Decedent had multiple areas of evident malignancy affecting the liver, spleen, lymph glands; and soft tissue areas, adjudged terminal.

All the local newspaper coverage had been Xeroxed and put in the file. The Citrus Banner had given it a pretty good play. The rest of the file was taken up with signed statements, depositions, and reports made by the officers assigned. Rick Tate had signed most of the reports.

I read the reports and interviews and statements with care and I made notes of the things I had not known before.

“I would guess he sat there in the chair in the lobby for nearly three quarters of an hour, reading that newspaper. I did notice that every little once in a while he would look at his watch, as if he was waiting for somebody or had to be somewhere at a certain time. I didn’t see him leave. I guess I was busy when he left.”

“It was one hot day in July, and I remember I was hoping it would rain some. But it didn’t. That Lincoln car was parked right out in the sun all closed up tight and locked, and I saw the man come from the hotel, shucking his coat off as he walked. I was just standing in the store, over here by the window, looking out, wishing somebody would come the hell in and buy something. He was parked in that space second from the corner. The second meter. And I saw the red flag was up in the meter, but they don’t check it real careful in the summertime like they do in the tourist season. He unlocked the driver’s side and he pushed on something in there, and all those windows all went down like at once, and I thought how handy that was. He threw his coat into the back, and he got in and started it up, but he yanked his hands back when he touched that wheel. So he got out again and stood around, and I guess what he was doing was letting the air conditioning cool it off in there for him. I’m always watching people, trying to figure out what they are doing and why they do it. Pretty soon he got in and all those four windows came sliding up, nice as you please, and then he turned out of the parking place and headed east on Central. I guess from what I read, he went all the way out Central to where it becomes Seven Sixty-five and takes you right to the interchange. Got on it and went six mile south to get beat to death. Wouldn’t have had an inkling any nasty thing was going to happen to him. Comes to dying, money don’t help you a damn.”

“What I do when I start getting the nods, I pull off soon as I can, make sure I’m locked in good, and I climb into the bunk behind the seat and set this little alarm for twenty minutes and put on my sleep mask and put everything out of my mind. Then when I wake up I get out of the cab and walk around for ten minutes or so to get the blood stirred up, and I’m good for another five or six hours. So yes, I noticed, or half noticed, that Continental when I first stopped. It was parked a hundred feet in front of me, angled in toward those logs they’ve got that mark the edge. I remember wondering what kind of gas mileage they get on those things now with that automatic shift-overdrive deal. There was a big orange moving van parked behind me. I had passed him and pulled into a parking area ahead of him. I think there was maybe a camper van pulled in way beyond the Continental. So I corked off and the alarm went off and I climbed down out of the cab and stretched and started walking around. The Continental was still there, and it seemed strange because that sun was coming down hot, and it wasn’t in any shade. I couldn’t see anybody in it. First I thought maybe somebody had gone off sick into the bushes. They don’t do much business at that rest area. There’s no shade where you have to park and no crapper. There are bushes and trees between it and the turnpike so it’s quieter than most, a good place to nap. I walked on over to it and looked in and seen him on the floor in the back, kind of kneeling and slumped, blood on the side of his face and neck… I ran back to my rig and got onto Channel 9 and told my story and waited until the patrol car came screaming in.”

“He ordered a drink and I went out to the bar and Harry made it right away and I took it back. He was very careful about what he wanted to eat. A green salad with our creamy Italian dressing, and the baby lamb chops, asparagus, boiled potatoes, iced tea, no dessert. It’s not hard to remember about yesterday, because we had a slow day. And he was the kind of man you remember. How do we make our house dressing, and exactly how big are the lamb chops, and is it canned or fresh asparagus. Like I said, he was very careful and serious about ordering. It came to six something and he left me a dollar tip along with the dime and some pennies that was in his change. He seemed, you know, cold. Knew what he wanted and was used to getting it. He certainly didn’t look like any happy kind of person. He wasn’t somebody you’d kid around with when you’re taking their order or anything. He was real tan, but he didn’t have good color under the tan. Yellowish, kinda. What I keep thinking, he wasn’t the sort of person you hit. Not for any reason at all. I know that doesn’t make sense, but I can’t help it. I just can’t imagine somebody hitting that man in the face. It’s a terrible thing to happen. But lots of terrible things are happening everywhere, I guess. Why is everybody getting so angry?”

“I’d say he pulled up to the pump about eleven thirty or quarter to noon. You can see from the ticket he took six and four-tenths gallons of unleaded, which come to eight sixty-four. I did his windshield and he asked me was there a good place to eat and I told him the fast food places were further along, and he said he meant a real good place and I told him to go on into town to the Palmer Hotel, that I couldn’t afford to eat there but it was supposed to be the best. I said it got awards every year for being good. He showed me a bug smear on the windshield I’d missed. Then he signed, and I gave him back his card and his. copy, and away he went.”

When I’d finished the whole file, I took it back to Records. Dispatch called Rick Tate, and he told them to tell me he would pick me up out in front of the building in five or six minutes. It was almost six thirty. He came ghosting up to the curb and I got in. Daylight was dying, and I had heard distant booms of thunder as I waited.

“Like the file?” he asked.

“You sort of took it right out to a dead end.”

“What do you make of it, McGee?”

“He got a long-distance call in Fort Lauderdale, aboard his motor-sailer, telling him to meet somebody at that specific rest stop on the turnpike six miles southbound out of Citrus City, at a specific time. It was important to him to be there, and he either decided to be alone or it was requested that he be alone. It had to be in reference to something important to him: his illness, his money, his dying child, or the woman he was living with. So he drove on up in plenty of time, got gas, found a good place to eat, waited in the lobby out of the heat until it was time to go to the appointment. He kept it and they killed him.”

“Anything else?”

“It isn’t as bad a place for a killing as I thought. I’m going down the road and take a look at it tomorrow. Apparently, it is screened from the highway traffic. And it is not a high-use facility, especially in the heat of a late July afternoon. A planned killing taking place there would look unplanned, I think. Kind of coincidental. Spur-of-the-moment. And no problem getting away clean, back into traffic.”

“Any more?”

“Not much. Vague stuff. Somebody had to decide on the place. Why up here, all this way from Lauderdale? Did they come and scout it out first? Or is it just a kind of cleverness-that when a wellto-do traveler is killed far from home, it always sounds like a coincidental killing, a robbery with assault. Kill a man close to home and the choices are broader.”

“Ever a lawman?”

“Not quite.”

“I put it together pretty much the same. Except the appointment and the killing could be two different people. If he was early, he could have been killed, and then when the person who called him showed up, they took one look and took off like a rabbit. A few years, back in Florida and Georgia we had an M.O. of somebody sneaking up on sleeping truck drivers, shooting them in the head with a twenty-two long-rifle hollow-point, and taking whatever money they had. A long-haul trucker tends to carry a fair piece of cash for emergencies, especially an independent owner. As I remember there were eight or ten incidents. Never solved. They just all of a sudden stopped. My guess is that whoever was working it got picked up for something else. Maybe he’s in Raiford and it’ll start again when he gets out. He had the truckers real jumpy all over the area, believe me.”

“I remember reading about that.”

He started up and cruised toward the center of the city, moving up and down the side streets, looking at the dark warehouses and old apartment buildings as he talked.

“That murderous little bastard had to have some kind of transportation. We gave a lot of thought to that. A report came back from south Georgia, where he killed a driver in a rest stop on Interstate Seventy-five, just up past Valdosta, that a driver turning in had seen a motorsickle taking off like a scalded bat, and the rider didn’t hit the lights until he was back out onto the interstate. The way they think he worked it, he’d sneak in and trundle his machine back into the bushes and hide and keep watch on the night traffic in and out of the rest stop. He might have to wait two or three nights until he got the right setup, a single driver in a truck, the truck parked well away from any others, and enough waiting time to be sure the driver was sacked out. But the killings stopped soon after that, before they could set anything up to try to trap him.”

“What are you getting at, Rick?”

“That old M.O. that never got proved out stuck in my mind, and I woke up before dawn the day after the Esterland killing and went on out there and looked around back in the bushes. You won’t find this in the file because I didn’t put it in the file. We were getting the July rains. The ground was pretty soft. I poked around until I found where somebody had run a real heavy machine back through the bushes and made a half circle and brought it back to the place where it had been driven in. Okay, so it was a brute. It made a deep track, so I’d guess about a five-hundred-pound bike, and where the tread was clear in one place in the mud I saw that funny Y pattern of that rear K-One-twelve of a set of ContiTwins, like those BMW Nine-seventy-two cc come through with. You pay six or seven thousand for one of those, for just the bare-bones machine. I would like to think no biker had anything to do with it.”

He parked in shadows and turned toward me. “Listen, we got a group of nice people here. Maybe close to thirty couples in our club. The C.C. Roamers. Me and Debbie, we got a Suzuki GS-550-ET I bought used. We don’t get a chance to go as much as we used to, but we still go when we can. We take tours. Guys and their wives or girlfriends. There’s real estate salesmen, and a dentist and his wife, store managers, computer programmers, a couple of builders, a guy in the landscaping business. People like that. It’s great. We lay out a tour so we can take the back roads, ride along there in the wind. Have a picnic in a nice grove. You can hear the birds and all, those engines are so quieted down these days. I like it. So does Debbie. A lot. We’ve got our own special matching jackets and insignia. But the outlaw clubs give the whole thing a bad name. Like those damn Bandidos out west, and those Fantasies down in south Florida. Some of their officers are into every dirty thing going. Maybe, like they say, most of the troops are pretty much okay, just blue-collar guys from body shops and so on, who like to go roaring around with their women and drink a lot of beer and get tattooed and let all their hair grow and scare the civilians. Little recreation clubs like ours draw a lot of flack, McGee. And when there is biker violence, it reflects on us too, and people look at you funny and make smart remarks. That’s why I hope whoever was on that machine, he just pulled off to adjust something, or get out of the sun, or eat his lunch, or some damn thing. But he could have been an outlaw biker riding alone, and he could have run short of cash money, and so he hid there behind the bushes waiting for somebody to stop who looked worth robbing.”

“And if that’s how it was?”

“He’s away clean. No ID, no witnesses. I couldn’t even get a mold of the tire track. The rain washed it out before I could get back with the kit.”

“What do you really think?”

“I’ve got the gut feeling that whoever was on that machine beat Esterland to death. How long would it take him, a man powerful enough to hit that hard? You saw the autopsy report. They guessed he was hit six or seven times. Pull him out of the driver’s seat, brace him against the car; bang him six times, open the rear door and tumble him in, and slam the door. Fifteen seconds? Twenty seconds? Take the wallet, take out the cash, toss the wallet into the car. Walk back into the brush, crank up, and roll away. Forty seconds?”

“Was it the person he had the appointment with?”

“I’ve got no gut feeling about that at all. Maybe yes, maybe no. When you try to figure out the odds on whether a man setting up a secret meet is going to get killed by somebody else who just happened to be there, you can tend to say it had to be the one he was meeting. On the other hand, it could be just another one of those damn coincidences that screw up the work I do forty times a year.”

“I appreciate your cooperation. And when you see Mrs. Banks, you give her my best wishes.”

“I surely will. Dallas McGee? Is that right?”

“Not quite. Travis. Tell her it’s been ten or twelve years. I was at their house for supper. With them and those three pretty daughters.”

“My Debbie was the middle one. Here, I’ll drop you on back at your car. Seems like a quiet night around here, thank the good Lord. I better knock wood. Soon as I say quiet, those grove workers start sticking knives in each other. Or rolling their pickups over and over, dogs and shotguns flying every whichaway.”

He drove me back to the jail. We shook hands. He went off down the dark streets, a man alone in a county car on an overcast evening, waiting for somebody to do some damn fool thing to himself or to somebody else, wondering, as he made his patrol, if he was going to have to peddle the Suzuki to be able to help out with his mother-in-law’s new schedule of dialysis.

Five

I CHECKED out of the motel after breakfast and headed southwest in my little dark blue rental Dodge, a Mitsubishi, I think, with a VW engine and almost enough legroom. I took it over to Interstate 4 and made the mistake of staying on 4 all the way to the outskirts of Tampa before turning south on 301.

It had been a couple of years since I had driven that route, and I found all north-south highways clogged full of snorting, stinking, growling traffic, the trucks tailgating, the cowboys whipping around from lane to lane, and the Midwest geriatrics chugging slowly down the fast lanes, deaf to all honkings. Bradenton, Sarasota, Venice, Punta Gorda, Fort Myers-all the same. Smoggy vistas and chrome glitterings down the long alleyway between the fast food outlets, the sprawl of motels, car dealerships, shell factories, strip shopping centers, gas stations, and gigantic signboards. It is all that bustling steaming growth that turns the state tackier each year. Newcomers don’t mind at all, because they think it has always been like this. But in two years, they all want to slam the door, pull up the ladder, and close the state off. Once in a great while, like once every fifty miles, I even got a look at a tiny slice of the Gulf of Mexico, way off to the right. And remembered bringing the Flush down this coast with Gretel aboard. And wished I could cry as easily as a child does.

I had phoned ahead to the Eden Beach, and they had a second-floor single for me, with the windows facing inland. After I put the duffelbag in the room, I went over to the lobby to find Anne Renzetti.

I saw her coming diagonally across the lobby, walking very swiftly, her expression anxious and intent. Today she wore an elegant little dress: a cotton dress in an unusual shade of orange coral, which fitted her so beautifully it underlined the lovely fashioning of hips, sweep of waist, straightness of her back and shoulders. The color was good for her too. A small lady, luxuriantly alive.

“Hey, Anne,” I said.

She came to a quick stop and stared at me, an instant of puzzlement and then recognition. “Oh, hello there. Mr. McGraw.”

“McGee. Travis McGee.”

She was looking beyond me. “Yes, of course. I’m so sorry. Travis McGee. Is Meyer with you?”

“He had to get back.”

She started to sidle away. “You will have to excuse me. I really have to-”

“I was hoping you would introduce me to Dr. Mullen. I want to ask him about Ellis Esterland’s condition at the time he-”

Even the sound of his name made her glow. It seemed almost to take her breath away. Her smile was lovely. “That’s why I’m so busy at the moment. He didn’t get in yesterday. He’s due any minute. I just checked the room I set aside for him, and the damned shower keeps dripping and dripping. Excuse me just a moment, please.”

I followed her to the desk. She told Marie about the leak, and Marie picked up the phone to get the maintenance man on it. Anne turned back to me and looked beyond me toward the entrance. Her smile went wider, and she flushed under her tan and slipped past me, quick and cute as a safety blitz. She half ran toward the entrance, arms outstretched, and I heard her glad cry of welcome.

The man was in his middle thirties, with a russet mustache, blow-dried hair, tinted glasses with little gold rims. He had a likable look about him. Strong irregular features, a good grin. And he wasn’t very big. He was a dandy match for Anne Renzetti. Five foot two fits pretty well with five foot seven. He put his hands on Anne’s shoulders, kissed her on the cheek, and then with a gesture very much like a magician’s best trick, he reached behind him and pulled a large glowing blonde. She topped the good doctor by an inch or two. They both wore the same jack-o‘-lantern toothy grin, and over the lobby sounds I heard a portion of his introduction of her: “… my wife, Marcie Jean…”

Anne’s shoulders did not slump. I’ll give her that much. And I think her smile stayed pretty much in place, because she was still wearing it when she turned around and came back, leading them toward the desk. I sensed that this was no time to ask for an introduction to the doctor and his bride. Anne kept smiling while the doctor registered. She pointed out the location of his room on a chart. A bellhop went with them to cart their luggage through the gardens to their room.

The two girls behind the desk had arranged to disappear. They recognized the storm warnings. Anne leaned back against the counter, her arms crossed, staring at me and through me, a glare that pierced me through and through, at chest level.

“Honeymoon!” she said in a half whisper. “Big dumb blond dumpling comes out of nowhere and nails him. And I put two bottles of chilled champagne up there in the room. Shit! Hope the shower never stops dripping.”

“Pretty hard to stop a good drip in a shower.” She slowly came back to here-and-now and focused on me. She tilted her head a little bit to one side and looked me over with great care. She moistened her lips and swallowed. “What did you say your damn name is? McGee? You are a sizable son of a bitch, aren’t you?”

“Wouldn’t try to deny it.”

She looked at me. She was all a-hum with ready. She was up to the splash rails with electric ready. Everything was working: all the blood and juices from eyeballs to polished toenails.

“You better comfort me with apples, fella. Or is it roses? And stay me with flagons, whatever that means. Always wondered. And for God’s sake you better be discreet or it’ll undermine any authority I have left around here.”

“Appointing me an instrument of revenge?”

“Do you particularly mind?”

“I’m thinking it over.”

“Thanks a lot! Take your time. Take four more seconds, damn it.”

“Three. Two. One. Bingo.”

“My place,” she said. “Nineish.”

“Try to remember my name.”

She tried to smile but the smile turned upside down, the underlip poked out, the eyes filled, and she spun and darted away toward her office, the proud straight back finally curving in defeat.

I was on time, after wondering all the rest of the day whether to show up or not. It made me feel ridiculously girlish. Despite all the new freedoms everybody claims they have, I still feel strange when I am the aggressee. One wants to blush and simper. I was dubious about my own rationalization. She seemed a nice person, and her morale had taken one hell of a scruffing whem the Doc had walked in with his surprise bride. What would be the further damage if even the casual semi-stranger didn’t want her as a gift?

Anyway, it seemed to me that after a day of thinking about it, she would have cooled on the whole idea. It had been an abrupt self-destructive impulse that had made her proposition me so directly. She might not even be at her cabana on stilts. And if she was there, and if she said she had reconsidered and it was a dumb idea and all, then it would be time for both of us to disengage gracefully.

She was there. A thread of light shone out under her cabana door. When I knocked the light went out, and she came out onto the porch, shaded from the starlight, carrying two glasses and the ice bucket, and a towel with which to twist out the champagne cork. She wore dark slacks and a white turtleneck against the night-breeze off the Gulf. She said, in too merry a voice, “Champagne for you too, pal, so you shouldn’t feel everything is a total loss.”

“Second thoughts, eh?”

“Definitely. I don’t know what the hell I was thinking of. I mean I do know what I was thinking of, and it wasn’t my very best idea. I was wondering a little while ago, what if you arrived all eager and steamy? Would she or wouldn’t she?”

“You’ll never know. I guessed you’d have second thoughts.”

“Thank you. Any friend of Meyer is a friend of mine. Meyer has pretty good taste in friends. Open that good stuff.”

I unwound the wire and stood the glasses on the rail, where the starlit sand beyond gave enough light for me to fill them properly. Poured. We clinked glasses.

“To all the dumb dreams that never happen,” she said. “And the dumb women who dream them.”

“To all the dumb dreams that shouldn’t happen, and don’t,” I said.

She sipped. “You are probably right. Ellis was dying. Prescott Mullen was an authority figure. He was comforting. When you lean on strength, I think you can get to read too much into it.”

“I thought you seemed very very happy with your job here.”

“Oh, I am! I wouldn’t think of giving it up. He was going to come down and go into practice here. Another segment of the dumb dream.”

We drank chairs close together. Silences were comfortable. I told her portions of my life, listened to parts of hers. We had some weepy chapters and some glad ones. About five minutes after she had snugged her hand into mine, I leaned over into her chair and kissed lips ripe and hot as country plums, and when that was over she got up, tugged at my wrist, and said in a small voice, “I think I, have been talked into it somehow.”

We lay sprawled in the soft peach glow of a pink towel draped around the shade of her bedside lamp, sated and peaceful and somnolent. Big wooden blades of a ceiling fan turned slowly overhead, and I could smell the sea. A passel of marsh frogs were all yelling gronk in a garden pond, voices in contrapuntal chorus.

She propped herself on an elbow and ran her fingertips along the six-inch seam of scar tissue along my right side, halfway between armpit and waist.

“How many wars did you say you were in?”

“Only one, and that wasn’t done there. That was an angry fellow with a sharp knife, and if I could have had it stitched right away, there wouldn’t be hardly any scar.”

“You should put out a pocket guidebook.”

“Some day I’ll arrange a guided tour. Meyer says there isn’t enough unblemished hide left to make a decent lampshade.”

“Are you accident-prone, darling?”

“I guess you could say that. I am prone to be where accidents are prone to happen.”

“Why do you want to ask Prescott about Ellis?”

“I haven’t really got anything specific to go on. It’s what I do, the way I go about things. If I can get enough people talking, sooner or later something comes up that might fit with something somebody else has said. Sometimes it takes longer than other times, and sometimes it doesn’t happen at all. Like finding out last night that whoever beat Esterland to death might have been a motorcyclist, a biker.”

“Why would you think that? I don’t understand.” So I went through it for her, editing it just enough to take out things that were obviously meaningless. Her arm got tired and she snugged her face into the corner of my throat, her breath warm against my chest. I slowly stroked her smooth and splendid back as I talked, all the way from coccyx to nape and back again.

When I finished, she said, “Well, I guess it is interesting, but I don’t see what a motorcycle would have to do with anything, really. The only person I ever met who knew anything at all about motorcycles is Josie’s weird friend Peter Kesner.”

It startled me. “He rides them?”

“Oh, no! He’s what they call out there a genius. He’s a double hyphenate.”

“A what?”

“No, darling, it is not some form of perversion. He made a couple of motion pictures where he was the writer-director-producer. He made them years ago on a very small budget, and they were what is called sleepers. They made a lot of money, considering what they cost. Maybe you heard of them. One was called Chopper Heaven and the other was Bike Park Ramble. It was all a kind of realism, you know. He used real tough bike people and handheld cameras. And they were sort of tragic movies. The critics raved. I saw one of them, I can’t really remember which. It was too loud and there were too many people getting hurt.”

She sat straight up and combed her dark hair back with her fingers and smiled down at me. “Dear, I’m getting chilled. Can you reach the fan switch?” I turned it off. She reached down and got the end of the sheet and pulled it up over us when she stretched out again.

“You said Kesner is Josephine’s weird friend.”

“He came to Stamford with her when Ellis was in the hospital the first time. That’s when I met him. He’s big, maybe about your size, and from what I could gather from Josie, he’s been on every kind of pill and powder and shot ever invented. He was treating Josie like dirt, and she didn’t seem to mind a bit. It’s hard to carry on a conversation with him. I can’t describe it. It’s just… frustrating. And he’s weird-acting. Really weird.”

She kicked at something, then ducked under the sheet and came up with her discarded briefs. She held them to the light and said, “One of my romantic little plans for the good doctor.” They were white, with a regular pattern of bright red hearts the size of dimes.

“Glad he didn’t get a chance to appreciate them.”

“You didn’t appreciate them. I got shuffled out of them too quickly.”

“Protesting all the way?”

“Well-not really. Did you notice how fat her face is?”

“What?”

“The bride. A fat face and piggy little eyes.”

“I didn’t particularly notice because I was watching you, Annie. I lay there in my trundle bed in the Groveway Motel last night and thought about your pretty legs hiked up on that porch railing until I had to get up and take a cold shower. And then I came dashing down here in my domesticated Mitsubishi. Meyer had told me you had eyes for the doctor, but I didn’t want to believe it.”

“Come on! Really?”

“Cross my heart. Hope to spit.”

“You know, that makes me feel a lot better about this whole-uh-happenstance.”

“I’ve really enjoyed happenstancing with you, Miz Renzetti.”

“Always before I felt squeamish about big tall men.”

“And little dark women have not exactly figured large in my erotic fantasies, kid.”

“They might from now on?”

“Front and center.”

“You said enjoyed?”

“I did.”

“Past tense?”

“My dear lady, it is quarter past three in the morning.”

“So?”

“My ramparts are breached, my legions scattered, my empire burned to the ground, my fleet at the bottom of the sea. And you would-”

“Hush,” she said softly.

And so in time the impossible became at first probable and finally inevitable. As before, I found that through her response she led us into the way she most enjoyed. She was not, as I would have guessed, one of the twitchy ones with tricky swiveling, kinky little tricks and games, contortionist experimentations. What she wanted, and got, was to be settled into the unlauded missionary position, legs well braced, arms hanging on tight, and there exercise a deep, strong, steady, elliptical rhythm.

She lay sweat-drenched and spent, small face bloated and blurred, mouth puffed and smiling. “There!” she said. She pulled my mouth down for a sisterly kiss. “Everybody to his own bed, darling. Be sneaky, huh?”

By the time I was dressed she was snoring softly. I pulled the sheet and the thin blanket over her and turned off the light. When I went out the door, I made certain it locked behind me. I walked out to the edge of the water, where the small waves lisped and slapped against the sand. A seabird flapped up, honking, startling me.

The hours before dawn are when the spirits are supposed to be lowest. That is when most hospital deaths occur. That is when the labored breathing stops, with a final rattle in the throat. I tried to heap ashes on my head. McGee, your handy neighborhood stud. Always on call. Will provide references. I tried to summon up a smidgin of postcoital depression. But all I could tell about myself, in spite of all introspection, was that I felt content. I felt happy, satisfied, relaxed-with an overlay of a kind of sweet sadness, the feeling you get when you look at a picture of yourself taken with someone long gone on a faraway shore long ago.

Six

THE DINING room at Eden Beach had a wing like a small greenhouse, with an opaque roof. Broadleafed plants in big cement pots provided the illusion of privacy for each table.

I arrived for brunch at one thirty, and while I was still examining the menu, a pair of unordered Bloody Marys arrived, complete with celery stalks for stirring. A few moments later the lady herself arrived and slid into the chair across from me. She looked shy and a bit worn. Her lips were puffy and there were bruised patches under her eyes.

We looked at each other in that moment which has to set the style for the whole relationship. I had guessed that perhaps we would have a bawdy little chat about how we had missed arranging a nooner, and how exhausted the male might be, and how badly lamed the female.

But from the look in her eyes I knew that was not the way to go, and knew that I would have relished that kind of talk as little as she. So I hoisted the glass. “To us.”

“To us,” she said, and we touched glasses. The drink was spice-hot and delicious.

“It’s going to be kind of difficult and awkward, keeping control of my staff, Travis. I really want us to be very very discreet, very careful. This job does mean an awful lot to me.”

I smiled at her and said, “You are implying, of course, that these fun and games are going to continue.”

She flushed and said, “Don’t you want to? I thought we were-”

“Hey! I was afraid you might have second thoughts. Remember, I was sent into the game as a substitute for the doctor.”

“That’s not fair!” she said angrily. I kept smiling. Anger faded. She laughed. “Well, maybe that was the way it started. Okay. Let’s say I got lucky.”

“We both got lucky. It has to happen like that sometimes.”

She reached and touched my hand, her eyes glowing, then looked and saw a waitress coming and yanked her hand back.

“Look,” she said in her business voice, “I have to finish this and run. I really do. I am getting some kind of a short count in supplies, and as it isn’t my people, it has to be the wholesaler, and I had him hold the next truck. I have to go down there with my bookkeeper and prove to him he’s got thieves in his warehouse. I talked to Prescott Mullen this morning-by the way, he looked kind of shrunken and uninteresting-and gave him your name and told him you were checking out how Ellis got killed and said you’d find him sometime today.”

“Thank you.”

“We always put a sprig of mint in the half grapefruit. All the time Prescott was talking to me, Marcie Jean stood there smiling, with a piece of mint leaf stuck on her front tooth.”

“I’ve thought it over and decided she does have a fat face.”

She patted my hand. “Thank you, dear. You know the old joke about the ideal wife?”

“Deaf and dumb and owns a liquor store?”

“Right. Well, you’ve got an old lady now that runs a hotel, and she’s entitled to put dear friends on the cuff, so you better count on coming across the state at pretty regular intervals, hear?”

She got up, touched a fingertip to my lips, and hurried away.

I found Dr. Prescott Mullen on the beach, sitting in a sling chair under a big blue and white umbrella. The bride was face down in the shade beside him, a towel over her head, her legs and back pinked by fresh sunburn. Her new rings winked in reflected sunlight. I introduced myself and he told me to pull another chair over, but I sat on my heels, half facing him.

“I’m just doing a favor for a friend,” I told him. “Ron Esterland is suspicious of the timing. If Ellis had outlived his daughter, a lot of money would have moved in a different direction.”

“Some of it to him?” the doctor asked.

“Yes. But I don’t think that’s the primary motive.”

“So what is?”

“Anxiety. Guilt. A sense of loss. He’s sorry they didn’t get along, and he’s sorry his father didn’t live to see him make it as a painter.”

Prescott Mullen looked thoughtful. “I suppose in some sense it would be an easier murder to justify than if the man was healthy. How many months was he robbed of? If I had to guess, I’d say six at the outside. And the last six weeks would probably not have been what you’d call living.”

“What was his attitude toward his illness?”

“He seemed to think of it as a challenge. To him the cancer was an entity, an enemy, a thing that had invaded him and plotted against his life. I was no fan of Ellis Esterland. He was a highly competitive organism. I used to wonder how Anne could put up with him, why she didn’t just walk out.”

“When did you last see Esterland?”

“Mid-June. About five weeks before he was killed. He looked better than I expected him to look. But he was in pain. He wouldn’t admit it. I know he was in great pain.”

“How could you tell?”

“Observation. You see a lot of pain, you know what it looks like: Sudden sweats. Quick little intakes of breath. A sudden pallor. I think he could probably handle more pain than most, just out of arrogance and pride. He was a stubborn old man. I knew there would be more coming, and it might get to the point where he couldn’t handle it. I tried to get him to admit the pain, and I tried to tell him it would get worse. He told me not to worry about it. He said he was fine. I remember giving him a little lecture about the psychology of pain.”

“Would he have arranged to get himself killed rather than admit he was hurting?”

He shook his head slowly. “No, I can’t see Esterland in that role. I gave him a lecture about the effects of the hallucinogens on pain. We know now that cannabis can quell the nausea some people feel during chemotherapy and radiology. Cannabis and hashish and LSD have an interesting effect on the subjective experiencing of pain. Intense and continuing pain seems to the patient to be a part of him, something swelling and burning inside of him, taking him over. The hallucinogens have the odd effect of making the pain seem aside and apart from the patient. The pain may be just as intense, but it is, subjectively, off to one side. Pain creates a terrible and consuming anxiety, on some very deep level of the brain. Pain is nature’s warning that something is terribly wrong. If anxiety is quelled by any hallucinogen, then pain, though still as intense, becomes less frightening and consuming. That may be the answer. I thought Ellis was fighting the pain relievers because they would dull his wits, dull his perceptions of the world. He wanted to stay just a little brighter than anybody else he knew. I urged him to find a private source for hallucinogens and experiment with them. I explained that it would leave his mind unimpaired but would enable him to handle pain better. I told him that it was the best way for him to get any enjoyment out of the time he had left.”

“Did you tell him how long he had left?”

“I told him my guess. That was our relationship from the start. Total candor.”

“Maybe the pain got worse and he took your advice and went up there to make a buy. That’s why he didn’t take Anne or tell her why he was going.”

“And somebody cheated him and killed him? Possible. I can tell you that if he did buy something, he would take it secretly, and if it helped, he would never have told Anne or me. It would have been his private solution. It would leave his macho image unimpaired.”

“Lovely guy.”

“Prince of a fellow,” Mullen said, grinning. “McGee, I like your reconstruction. It seems to fit what I read about the circumstances of his death. The news accounts implied he was keeping some kind of appointment at a highway rest stop.”

“Did you recommend any particular substance?”

“I think I told him that hashish would be easiest to manage, and probably reasonably available in the Miami area.”

“Everything you ever heard of is available in Dade County. But he couldn’t get much with two hundred dollars.”

“That’s all he had?”

“Anne gave out that figure, and she kept the accounts.”

“I have the feeling that Ellis Esterland could put his hands on money in one form or another without Anne knowing about it.”

“Okay, suppose he was carrying five thousand dollars. If Anne had known that and reported it, the local authorities would have been thinking about a buy that went wrong. There could have been contacts they could have developed. In his condition, at that point in the progression of the disease, how much pain do you think he should have been feeling?”

He thought it over. “Enough to send me running for the needle, whimpering all the way.”

The big bride rolled over, clawing the towel off her head, looking blankly and stupidly at the two of us. One nipple showed above the edge of her white bikini top. Prescott Mullen, smiling, reached down and tugged the fabric up to cover her. A few tendrils of russet hair curled out from under the bikini bottom.

“Whassa time, sweetie?” she asked in a small sweet voice.

“Three fifteen, lambikin. This is Travis McGee. My wife, Marcie Jean Mullen.”

“Oh, hi,” she said. She prodded her pink thigh with an index finger as she sat up, watching how long the white mark lasted. “Honeybun, I better get the hell off the beach. I think the sun kind of reflects in under the umbrella from the sand and sun and stuff.” She stood up, yawned, swayed, and then lost her balance when she bent to pick up her towel. She yawned again. “Marcie Jean Mullen. Still sounds strange, huh?” She beamed sleepily at me. “Used to be Marcie Jean Sensabaugh. Hated every minute of it. Be a rotten world if you had to keep the name you were born with.” She picked up her canvas bag and looked inside. “I got a key, honeybun. See ya in the room.”

“Pretty lady,” I said when she was out of earshot. “Congratulations.”

“Thanks. She’s a great girl. Absolutely perfect disposition. No neuroses. Healthy as the Green Bay Packers. And an absolutely fantastic pelvic structure. She was a delivery-room nurse.”

“That’s interesting.”

“We’ve talked it over. We want as many kids as we can have. She’s twenty-three and I’m thirty-six, and as near as we can tell, she’s two months pregnant right now. We agreed not to get married until we were sure we could have kids. I don’t want her to have them too close together. It wears a woman out too much. They should be two years apart. Okay, she’ll be twenty-four when our first one is born. Her mother had her last baby when she was forty-four. So, with a two-year spacing, we could have nine or ten. Of course, her mother had one set of twins.”

“It’s nice to see people get their lives all worked out.”

“I always wanted a big family. It was a case of finding the right girl before I got too old to enjoy the kids. As it is, if we stay on schedule, the last kid won’t get out of college until I’m about seventy-eight.”

“That’s cutting it pretty close, doctor.”

“I guess it is. But I come of long-lived stock. Both of my grandfathers and one of my grandmothers are still living. Late seventies and early eighties.”

“It’s something to look forward to, all right.”

“I think of it as a very precious responsibility. It’s really the only immortality we have. Did you ever think of that?”

“I guess I think of it all the time.”

“Are you married?”

“No.”

“Then you better find a healthy woman right away, Mr. McGee. Or you won’t be young enough to enjoy your kids.”

I stood up and shook hands with him. “Thanks a lot. That’s probably a very good idea. Nice to have had this chat with you, doctor.”

“If I can be of any help, please call on me. Funny thing. Ellis was dying and I didn’t particularly like the man, but it made me furious that somebody had the gall to kill him. My patient!”

That night in Annie’s cabana, she had thrown a pale green towel over the lampshade. It gave the room an underwater look.

The fan overhead made a small ticking sound. The waves were louder. A mockingbird tried silvery improvisations. She was saying, “And so, of course, Sam couldn’t believe that any of his people were stealing. It had to be my people. He acted as if he was doing me a big favor, checking that big order item by item. But then the discrepancies began to show up. Short cases, opened and resealed. And his face sagged and his voice got tired. I felt so sorry for him. All his people have been with him for years and years, and he has been so good to them. And it did look as if one person couldn’t have done it. It had. to be two working together. I got credits on the other shortages we had picked up. He was really depressed when we left. I found myself wishing I wasn’t a boss. But not for long. Not for long. You talked with Dr. Mullen, I hear.”

“Had a nice chat. Have you got a fantastic pelvic structure?”

“My God! I don’t know. You mean for babies. Well, I’d have a little problem, I guess. I always heard I would. My mother had two Cesarian deliveries. Why?”

“Would you be prepared to watch your final child graduate from college when you are sixty-five?”

“Hell, no! He can carry his diploma home to his poor old mom. What is this about, darling?”

So I told her the conversation with Prescott Mullen. At first she was incredulous. Was I sure he wasn’t joshing? When I convinced her that he was totally serious, deadly serious, in fact, she went into something close to hysteria. That then subsided into a giggling fit, and that turned into hiccups.

“Poor big old brood mare-hic-can hear him saying-hic-roll over, Marcie Jean-hic-time to start number six-hic. And I wanted to get myself into a deal like that?-hic. Oh, God.”

I poured her more wine, and she sat on the edge of the bed to drink it out of the far side of the glass, holding it in two hands like a child. There was a pale narrow stripe across her back matching the pallor of her buttocks.

She lay back again, saying, “All gone. Thanks.”

“Were you there when he gave Ellis the argument about maybe he should try hash or LSD for pain?”

“Oh, yes. The last time he saw him. In June.”

“Did you know Ellis was in pain?”

“I didn’t know how much. He’d get up in the night and go up on deck. Sometimes he would get up from a meal and go walking. His face would twist. But he wouldn’t let it twist if he knew you were watching. Prescott told me Ellis was probably in a lot of pain. After Prescott had gone back north, I tried to get Ellis to do what he had suggested. But he got angry with me. He wouldn’t listen. He said he wasn’t going to baby himself. He said he was not going to turn into a junky at the very end of his life. He said it was demeaning.”

“After talking it over, both Dr. Mullen and I have the feeling he went up there to Citrus City to make a buy. We think that was what the long-distance phone call was about.”

“But wouldn’t it take more money than he had?”

“What makes you think he had only two hundred dollars, more or less?”

“But I took checks to the bank! I knew what we had and what we needed. I paid the bills. I made the deposits.”

“Let me ask it another way, Annie.”

“I’ve never let anybody else in my life call me Annie except you.”

“After he was killed, it was up to you to go through everything on the boat. You and the man from the bank. Tell me this. Did you come across anything-anything at all-which led you to believe that maybe there were some money matters you didn’t know about?”

“How did you know about that?”

“Know about what?”

“The Krugerrands. Those big gold coins from South Africa, guaranteed one ounce of pure gold in each one.”

“I didn’t know about them at all. I just had the idea that he was the kind of man who would have to keep secrets from everybody, even you.”

“There were ten of them. Worth, I don’t know, five or six hundred dollars each at that point. There was no clue as to when or where he got them, or at what price. They were way in the back of the hanging locker, in the pocket of one of his old tweed jackets that he never wore any more. When I lifted it out, it was so fantastically heavy. It made me so damn mad, him hiding something like that, like some sneaky little kid. But what has that got to do with anything, dear?”

“Where there were ten, there could have been twenty, or forty. The ten you found were worth from five to six thousand dollars. What if he took half of what he had stashed?”

“Could be. Yes. Yes, damn it! Damn him.”

“So I’ll go on from there, assuming he left half of them home and took half for the buy. And see what I can turn up. And I will look into the question of bikers, hard core.”

“How?”

“I have a contact who has good reason to trust me.”

“Who?”

“I am very glad you don’t mind my calling you Annie.”

“I see. Okay. When are you leaving, dearest?”

“Midmorning, I guess.”

She dipped a finger in her remaining half inch of Moselle and drew a slow circle on my chest. “Hmmm,” she said.

“Hmmm what?”

“I guess everybody has heard that ancient joke about how do porcupines make love.”

“Very very carefully,” I said.

She reached and set her empty glass aside. Her eyes danced. “So?”

I gathered her in. “Let me know if it gets to be not careful enough.”

Seven

VVHEN I arrived back in Lauderdale the next morning at eleven o’clock I turned the little. car in at the airport and taxied back to Bahia Mar. After I dumped the laundry in the hamper aboard the Flush, showered, and changed to a fresh white knit shirt and khaki slacks, I checked the houseboat over to see if the phone was dead, or the batteries, or the freezer. I was hungry, and I decided I’d go over to the Beef ‘n’ It for their big sirloin-decided to walk over, as the miles in the little car had made me feel cramped. I fixed a Boodles on ice in one of the heavier old-fashioned glasses and carried it up to the sun deck to stand and survey what I could see of the yacht-basin world.

I looked over toward the ships‘-supplies place and was surprised to see the familiar lines and colors of Aggie Sloane’s big Trumpy. I locked up and walked down there, glass in hand. There was a mild fresh breeze off the Atlantic that fluttered the canopy over the little topside area where Meyer and Aggie were hunched over a backgammon board. I hailed them, and Aggie invited me aboard. I went up and took a chair and said, “Go ahead. I don’t want to interrupt the game.”

She said, “It might just be over. Meyer, take a look at this.” She picked up the big doubling cube from her side of the board and plunked it down on his side. The number on top was 16.

Meyer studied the board for a long time. He wore a sour expression. He sighed. “Too slim,” he said. “No, thanks. Travis, if I take the double, she just might close her board on this roll.”

“Class tells,” said Aggie, marking the score pad.

“Aggie,” I said, “you look fantastic.”

In her husky baritone she said, “Just because I had a few more tucks taken in this sagging flesh? Just because I got back down to one thirty? Just because I do one solid hour of disco every morning, starko, behind locked doors? Just because my hair is longer, and this is the best tint I’ve had in years, and my new contacts are this nice lavender color, and I’m off the booze, and after three years of shame I’ve been able to get back to bikinis? Thank you, darling McGee. I think I do look rather fantastic, comparatively speaking. I went through all this hell as a special present for good old Meyer.”

“Good old Meyer appreciates it, dear lady,” he said. “It all fills me with awe. But I think you did it for the sake of your own morale.”

“Why is he so often right?” she asked me.

“Because he is Meyer. It’s a character flaw. What are you doing here anyway?”

She looked exasperated. “We are waiting for some kind of a turbo-seal whatsit that has to be flown down from Racine. It blew yesterday. Made a noise like a gigantic fart. My dear little captain will not proceed without it. Some sort of fetish, no doubt. It is going to shorten our little cruise, maybe down to no cruise at all. But what the hell. Lovely place here. Not a trace of mal de mer. Of course, it does work out a bit more pricey than a hotel suite. But the two dear little papers I added to the chain last year are churning out money you wouldn’t believe. It’s almost vulgar what you can make these days out of a monopoly morning paper in a city of forty thousand people, after you really get into automation and electronics and all.”

“Jay Gould would have loved her,” Meyer said.

“Too,” she said. “My taste would have run more to Diamond Jim Brady. Or John Ringling.”

“How did you make out?” Meyer asked me.

“The doctor arrived,” I said. “With new bride. Blond. With a fantastic pelvis.”

Meyer looked startled and then amused. “Not according to Anne’s plan at all. So you were the catcher in the awry.”

“Please!” Aggie said. “Not when I’m thinking of eating. I’ll go down and make sure they are fixing enough for three.”

“I can’t stay, Aggie. Really.”

“Nonsense, dear boy. I would really resent it if you left. Today we are eating Greek. With the feta cheese, the moussaka, the grape leaves, and all. And they always fix tons, so there’ll be enough for them too.”

She went off belowdecks. I said, “That has really turned into some kind of special lady.”

“Always was, had you but the eyes. How is Anne?”

“Recovering from the shock. She really runs one of the better places around. Anyway, I can give you a very quick rundown of the facts and hunches so far. Ellis was hurting badly, refused to admit it. The doctor tried to talk him into one of the hallucinogens to moderate pain. Good chance pain was getting worse. Ellis set up some kind of contact. They called back with a time and place for the meet. He went up there with a batch of Krugerrands to pay for his hash or fix or whatever. Traces found of a heavy motorcycle in the shrubbery. Possibility that the vendor, confronted with an elderly fellow, decided to keep the product and the money both. Or perhaps it was a scam from the beginning. Come to the place alone, Dads. Or no sale. Knowing there would be no sale anyway. Oh, one more thing, which may or may not fit: Josie’s boyfriend, since the separation, is one Peter Kesner, weird cinematic genius who made two motorcycle movies on small budgets and got a big reputation. I mention it only because motorcycles have started cropping up. I thought I might go see my friend Blaylock about people who peddle from their bikes. I mean, if it’s a common practice or what. I can see the advantages. Nares can stake out street corners, but they can’t stake out the countryside.”

“Why so far upstate?” Meyer asked.

“That’s a question for Blaylock. It might be a territorial thing.”

Aggie came back up and said it would be twenty minutes. We fixed another drink from the little rolling bar. It was nice under the awning, watching the pedestrian traffic, laughing at bad puns. We went below and ate in the alcove off the main lounge, served there by a very skilled Cuban lad. A slightly resinous wine went beautifully with the mountains of Greek groceries. I left in good season, full of resolve. But once I was aboard my houseboat, my knees began to buckle. I nearly dislocated my jaw yawning. I stripped down and fell into my gigantic bed.

The rattlesnake buzz of the bedside phone awakened me and I groped for the phone in the dark, wondering how it had gotten to be night.

“Uh?” I said.

“Well, hi! Were you asleep?”

“Certainly was. What time is it?”

“Little after nine. Missed you, love.”

“Me too.”

“Wondered if you made it back okay. Tell you the truth, I found time for a little nap today myself.”

“Good for you.”

“I know you will be as upset as I am to know that the bride picked up another dreadful sunburn this morning and is in bed with chills. And terrible little runny blisters all over her big meaty thighs.”

“You are a mean one, aren’t you?”

“Not really. I feel sorry for both of them. As a doctor, he should have seen what was happening to her and gotten her out of the sun.”

“Interrupted honeymoon.”

“I had a drink with him before dinner. She was sleeping, finally. I really looked at him and listened to him. You know, he is a very good-natured, sweet, earnest, solemn, dull little fellow. He chuckles a lot, but he hasn’t any sense of humor. He laughs in the wrong places. Really, he’s a very good doctor. Practically any cancer clinic in the world, you go in and mention Dr. Prescott Mullen… Travis, I just don’t know how there got to be such a difference between what I thought he was and what he really is.”

“Myths. Meyer says we build our own myths. We live in the flatlands and the myths are our mountains, so we build them to change the contours of our lives, to make them more interesting.”

“I haven’t had such a dull life so far. I invested some of my very good years in Ellis, of course.”

“Right now is your very best year, maybe.”

“I see what Meyer means about myths. I mean you take some bored little suburban wife who plays bridge at the club every Thursday, she can dream that she and her tall brown tennis pro have something going, something unannounced, that they can never dare admit to each other. And that’s her myth. If she tries to carry it to the point of its actually happening, it will blow up in her face.”

“Like that, I guess.”

“And right across the front of her, just above the cleavage, she’s got a lot more of those runny little blisters. Hey Travis?”

“What?”

“I didn’t call you up to talk about the blisters on the doctor’s bride. I had something profound to say. About us. Now it sounds trivial, I guess. The point is, I don’t really want to think about us, about you and me, in the way I thought I would always have to think about somebody I was falling in love with.”

“Love, Annie?”

“Let me just barge ahead and leave explanations until later, okay? Being in love has been to me a case of being up to here in plans. Whatever you might think, I wasn’t being some kind of opportunist with Ellis. He was a very autocratic man, and he was very very experienced as far as women are concerned. I was dumb about him, and it is still sort of blank in my mind the way he hustled me into bed that first time. Then a person says, Oh, hell, whatever harm is done is done, and you get hung for a sheep as high as for being hung as a lamb. I think it goes like that. And l got to love him. He was a dear man in lots of little ways nobody knew about because he kept himself so much to himself. But let me tell you that anybody who had the wives he had certainly wasn’t an unattractive man. I hope you are following all this. Anyhow, with love came plans. I worked it all out. Some day he would divorce Josie and marry me, and do it soon enough so I could have a child with him, and the child would make him a warmer person to be with. Then came the news about the cancer, and so that plan was shot to hell. Right? So there was another plan. I would nurse him and care for him and he would live a long time, and the sickness would purify him. It would burn away the nasty. Then he. was killed and I was really really down. But I,put my life back together, and I am a very fulfilled woman, businesswise. Now here I am falling in love, and I don’t find myself planning anything about us, and that makes me wonder if it is love, really. All I think about is that maybe our lives are like the end of some long period of planning. I am here and you are there, and we are going to see each other now and again until we are too old and rickety to make it across Florida. But I know I am falling in love because I think of you and I turn hollow inside, and the world kind of veers. You know? Like it goes a little bit sideways for an instant. Hey I wanted to tell you all this as if it was something important. And when I stop talking to you, I don’t. want you to feel any kind of obligation to say anything about love. Men hate being pinned to the wall like that. If you feel it, someday you’ll say it,, and that will be okay. And if you don’t ever feel it, that will be okay too, as long as you don’t ever try to fake it.”

“Listen, I-”

“Don’t say anything, dear. I can talk enough for two. Any time. Anywhere. So go back to sleep. Good night.” Click.

I reached and put the phone back. We had been hooked together for a time by General Tel, and the softness of her voice in my ear in the darkness had recreated for me a world long forgotten, when I had stretched out on the leather couch in the hallway, phone on my juvenile chest, and while the family was in the next room listening to the radio, to Fred Allen or Amos and Andy I was linked to the erotic, heart-stopping magic of leggy Margaret who, at fourteen, kissed with her eyes wide wide open.

I remembered the previous night when, with her head resting on my chest, Anne had stared off into some thoughtful distance. I could look down and see the black lashes move when she blinked. I could see a tiny slice of the gelatinous eyeball: You can repeat a word over and over until it means nothing, until it becomes just a strange sound. You can do the same thing looking at a familiar object until you see it in an entirely different way. Here was a strange wet globe, a shifting moving thing of fluids and membranes and nerves, tucked into muscle that could move it this way and that, that could shutter its lid to remove any dust, to moisten the surface of it. It had looked at me and relayed images of me into the gray suet of the brain behind that eye, where they would remain, instantly available whenever she remembered me. I stroked the dark hair. The wet eye blinked again. The dreaming thoughts behind it were unfathomable. I could never truly reach them, hers or anyone’s. And mine would always be as opaque to others.

The phone rang again and she said, “I was so darn busy exposing my beautiful soul, Travis, I forgot to tell you another thing I called about.”

“Such as?”

“I talked with Prescott about the drugs for Ellis. He told me. that after he got back to Stamford he had a call from Josie. She knew he had flown down to check Ellis over, and she called to find out how he was. He told her what he thought Ellis’s life expectancy was, and it depressed her. He knew that Josie still had a certain amount of influence with Ellis, so he told her to tell Ellis that there was really no point in his being so damned brave about his pain and to encourage him to make a connection and buy something. I think she must have tried to do that, because in early July he had several calls from her, and they all made him cross. Crosser than usual. He just didn’t like people meddling in his life.”

“But it was okay if he meddled in theirs.”

“Exactly. That’s just how he was. You know, you are really very good at sizing up people. It makes me nervous, in a way.”

“Exactly how?”

“Well… anybody who is really good at reading people can be very good at finding the areas where they are vulnerable and then taking advantage of that vulnerability. You know what I mean.”

“I will have to get Meyer to explain me to you.”

“Can’t you do that yourself?”

“Not as well as he can. According to him I take all emotional relationships much too seriously.”

“It is very nice for a person to be taken seriously.”

“I had this same conversation with a girl named Margaret before you were born. She was fourteen. She wanted to be taken seriously.”

“And did you?”

“To the point where I couldn’t eat and I walked into the sides of buildings.”

“I’m jealous of her. And so, good night again, my love.”

Once again she hung up quickly, before I could equivocate.

Meyer says that if I could, for once and all, stop my puritanical ditherings about emotional responsibility, I would be a far happier and less interesting man. In childhood I was taught that every pleasure has its price. As an adult I learned that the reprehensible and dreadful sin is to hurt someone purposely, for no valid reason except the pleasure of hurting. Gretel, in her wisdom about me, said one night, “You are never entirely here. Do you know that? You are always a little way down the road. You are always fretting about consequences instead of giving yourself up totally to the present moment.”

Add those ingredients together and stir well, and you can come up with a lasting case of psychological impotence. Meyer said to me, “You spend too much time in the wings, watching your performance onstage, aching to rewrite your own lines, your own destiny.”

“And just what the hell is my destiny?”

I can never forget his strange smile. “It is a classic destiny. The knight of the windmills. The man rolling the stone up the mountain. The endlessness of effort, Travis, so that the effort becomes the goal.”

Right, in a sense. But Meyer is not all that infallible. There are times. Annie had been totally now. An immersion. So vital and hungry I had no need to be the man in the wings. I turned on the handy projector in the back of my head and ran through a box of slides, of still shots of her in the underwater green of the towel over the bed lamp, when she was biting into her lip and her eyes were wide and thoughtful, and she was shiny with the mists of effort. Being the neurotic that Meyer believes I am has the advantage of giving me a far narrower focus of pleasure than if I did not truly give a damn. The now is that unexpected, unanticipated place where the mind and the body and the emotions all meet in a proper season,. destroying identity, leaving only an intensity of pleasure that celebrates all parts of that triad: body, mind, and spirit.

It is the difference maybe between gourmet and gourmand. In a world of fast food chains, the gourmet seldom eats well. But this again is too much of a celebration of sensitivity: “Oh, my God; look at how vulnerable and sensitive I am!” Which becomes a pose. And turns one into that kind of gourmet who looks for sauces instead of meat. The only suitable attitude toward oneself and the world is the awareness of pathetic, slapstick comedy. You go staggering around the big top and they keep hitting you with bladders, stuffing you into funny little cars with eighteen other clowns, pursuing you-with ducks. I ride around the sawdust trail in my own clown suit, from L.L. Bean’s end-of-season sale: marked-down armor, wrong size helmet, swaybacked steed, mended lance, and rusty sword. And sometimes with milady’s scarf tied to the helmet, whoever milady might be at the time of trial.

Meyer has pointed out that condition, that contradiction, which afflicts everyone who thinks at all. The more you strive to be sensible and serious and meaningful, the less chance you have of becoming so. The primary objective is to laugh.

Eight

FRIDAY MORNING I drove the Rolls pickup up past Deerfield Beach, turned inland on 887, and after nine miles of nothing much, I came to Ted Blaylock’s Oasis, looking not much shabbier than the last time I had seen it.

The long rambling frame structure paralleled the highway, obviously built a piece at a time over a long period. Most of it had a galvanized roof. The sign out at the edge of the right-of-way had been assembled in the same manner, one piece at a time. THE BIKER-BAR. Happy Hours 3 to 7. CustomizingTrikes, Shovels, and Hogs. Chili and Dogs. Service on Carbs, Brakes, Tires, Spokes, Tanks, Frames, and Springers. Tank art. Body Art. Paraphernalia.

I could look right through the open shed structure at one end, and it looked as though Ted had put up some more cabins out back. Men were working in the cement-floor shed, and I heard the high whine of metal being ground down. One portion had a display window with decals of trade names pasted on it and racks of shiny chrome accessories visible between the decals, next to some motorcycles in rank, new and.shiny bright. There were some dusty motorcycles parked in front of the center part, in no particular pattern, along with a couple of big brutish pickups, on top of their aversized tires, and a rack with a few bicycles. As I got out of the car, somebody dropped a wrench and it rang like a bell as it bounced off the floor.

I went in through the screen door and, it slapped shut behind me. Ceiling fans were whirring overhead. The combination bar and lunch counter stretched across the back of the room, with a dozen stools bolted to the floor in front of it. There were a half dozen wooden tables, each big enough for four chairs. There were new posters behind the bar, big bright gaudy ones, showing semi-clad young ladies who, according to their expressions, were having orgasmic relationships with the motorcycles over which they had draped themselves. Another poster showed a cop beating on a biker’s skull and had the big red legend ABATE.

Three of the brotherhood were on barstools, all big, all fat, all bearded. They wore sleeveless tank tops, denim vests with lots of snaps and pockets and zippers, ragged jeans, boots, a jungle of blue tattooing on their big bare arms, and wide leather wristlets, studded on the outside of the wrists with sharp metal points. Their vests were covered with bright patches and faded patches, celebrating various runs, meets, and faraway clubs. Their helmets were on a table behind them. All three heads were going thin on top but had long locks down almost to the shoulders.

They stopped talking and gave me the look. It is supposed to instill instant caution, if not terror. The girl behind the counter gave me a different kind of look, empty as glass. She was apparently part Seminole, thin as sticks, wearing white jogging shorts with red trim and a tight cotton T-shirt with, between the widespread banty-egg lumps of little breasts, the initials F.T.W.

I said to her, “Ted around?”

“Busy.”

“You want to tell him McGee wants to see him?”

“When he’s through in there, okay?”

“Coffee, then. No cream.” I took the end stool, and the mighty threesome lost interest in me and went back to their conversation.

“Well, what that dumb fucker did, he put in that time pulling out what he had and fittin‘ in them Gary Bang pistons and that Weber carb and all, and when he got it all done, that shovel wasn’t worth shit. Man, he couldn’t hardly get out of his own way. We come down from Okeechobee first light Sunday, rammin’ it all the way, heads all messed up from that shit Scooter was mixing with ether, Whisker and me racing flat out. I come in maybe fifteen seconds behind Whisker and we could have took naps before Stoney come farting in. After all that work on it, he was so fuckin‘ mad, he jumped off ’n it and just let it fall. And then he run around it and kicked it in the saddle, screaming at it, and he was still so mad he run over to a tree and swung on it and cracked his middle knuckle and got a hand that swole up like a ball. We like to had a fit laughing. That old boy just ain’t handy, and that’s all there is to it.”

“Hey,” said the one in the middle, “we got to move it, you guys. See you around, Mits.”

“Sure thing, Potsie. Have a nice day, guys.”

They worked their helmets on as they walked out, swung aboard, and started their engines, and after some deep garoong-garoong-garoong revvings they went droning and popping out onto the empty highway, turning toward the west, riding three abreast.

Mits gave me sly, glances as she cleaned the counter where they had been. I said, “Wouldn’t hurt to just let him know.”

“You selling anything?”

“I’m an old friend.”

She shrugged and went out. She was back quickly. “Hey, you can go in. He asked her and she said it was okay you could watch.”

“Watch what?”

“He’s into body art, and this one is kinda pukey, but it’s what she wants, I guess. Go on through to the second room there.”

When I opened the door and went in and shut it behind me, Ted looked up from his work and said our traditional greeting. “Hi, sarge.”

“How you, lieutenant?”

“Come see what you think of this.”

He had his wheelchair rolled up close to a cot which was elevated on four concrete blocks. A doughy broad-faced young girl lay on the cot. Her denim shorts were on a nearby chair. She wore a yellow T-shirt, and she was naked from the waist down. Ted had his tray of needles and dyes close at hand. There was a broad strip of masking tape placed to keep her big dark bush of pubic hair pulled down out of the way so that he could start his design right at the hair roots. It was almost done. It was a pattern of three mushrooms, growing up that white-as-lard lower belly, chubby romanticized mushrooms, the kind under which would squat a Disney elf. There was a book open nearby with a color drawing of three mushrooms growing in a cluster. Ted had simplified the drawing somewhat.

He went to work. The girl compressed her lips and closed her eyes. The needle machine buzzed. The window air conditioner rattled and thumped. She snorted and her belly muscles quivered.

“It’s wearing off again,” she said. “Jesus!”

“Almost through. Hang on.”

It took about five minutes more. The buzzing stopped. He caught a corner of the tape and ripped it free.

“Ouch! Goddamn it, that hurt!”

“Stop being such a baby, Lissa. Go look at yourself.”

She swung her legs off the couch and slipped down to the floor and walked over to a narrow wall mirror. She had a white hippo rump, a bushel of meat jiggling and flexing as she walked. She stared at herself and giggled and said, “Wow. This’s gonna blast ol‘ Ray right out of his skull.”

“I can believe it,” Ted said.

She came walking back and picked up her shorts. Before she put them on she gave me a speculative look and said, “Whaddaya think?”

“Well, I’d say it’s unusual.”

“You bet your ass it’s unusual. And I got your word of sacred honor, right, Ted? Nobody else gets the same thing?”

“Not from me, they don’t. Even if they get down on their knees and beg.”

She put her shorts on and fastened the snaps. He said, “Here, I forgot. Rub this into the design now and when you go to bed and in the morning. It’s an antiseptic cream. For three or four days. Don’t forget. No, go in the can and do it, hon. I’m a little tired of looking at you.”

She shrugged and left, slinging her big plastic purse over her plump shoulder.

When the door shut, Ted said, “Play your cards right, Trav, and you could cut a piece of that.” He rolled himself over to the sink with his tray of equipment.

“‘Mirror, mirror, on the wall. Who’s the fairest one of all?’ I think I’d be overcome by all that gentle beauty. You know, you’re pretty good at that, Blaylock.”

“Necessity is the mother of income. Tattooing is very very big lately. You should see my dragons and snakes. The mushrooms took a little over an hour. For eighty bucks. I’ve got one crazy broad for a customer, I’ve put over a thousand dollars’ worth of dye under her hide. Very strange stuff. No anesthetic cream for her. The thing for her is that the pain of the needle is a turn-on. It’s all a marine motif. Dolphins and pirates and old ships; mermaids, things like that. I wish you could see her. Unlike dumpy little Lissa, she’s got a hell of a nice bod. Too nice for what she’s having done to it.”

I sat down beside his desk, and when he came rolling over I got a better look at him. He was even thinner than before. His color was bad and his thinning hair looked dead.

“You feeling all right?” I asked.

“Not too damn wonderful. Like they told me in the beginning, I’m severed so high up, I got what they called a limited life expectancy.”

“Where’s Big Bess?”

“Well, there was a very very flashy Colombiano pistolero came in, and he really took to her, she being about twice his height and weight, and she was tired of waiting on a paraplegic crip, so now he has her stashed down in the Hotel Mutiny there, eating chocolates and watching the soaps, while he is out around town gunning down the competition. But I’ve got Mits, my little Indian, and she is a wonder. She’s quicker and better and a lot cleaner than Bess. And my God, that little bod is strong. She can pick me right up and walk with me. Loyal as hell. I wonder why I put up with Bess for so long. Or she with me.”

“Business going okay?”

“Real well. I really like this body-art work.”

“You draw pretty pictures.”

“That was what I was going to be, several thousand years ago. I had two years at Parsons.” I knew we were both thinking of what had come after that. Basic training, OCS, battlefield promotion, and finally a morning of hard cold rain and incoming mortar fire when I had helped carry the litter down the hill and prop it in the weapons carrier.

“In the VA hospital,” he said, “I did a lot of sketches of the guys. I wanted to try to be a commercial artist-not enough mobility to make it. Then this came along. I studied up, mail-ordered the gear, started practicing on my friends. It’s a gas. Want one on the arm? Eagle? Anchor? Hi, Mom? Semper Fidelis? F.T.W.?”

“No, thanks a lot. I always figure a tattooed man either got so sloppy drunk he didn’t know what was happening, or he needed to have a tattoo to look at to reassure himself he was manly. That F.T.W. is what’s on the T-shirt out there, on Mits. What is it?”

“It’s been around awhile, Trav. It’s the outlaw biker’s creed. It stands for Fuck the World.”

“Oh.

“Something special on your mind?”

“I shouldn’t come out here and ask for favors.”

“This is the second time in… what is it?… Anyway, lots of years. I just hope to hell there’s something I can do.”

I leaned back and rested the heel of one boat shoe on the corner of his desk. “What I need to know is how much the bike clubs are into the drug traffic.”

He closed his eyes for a moment. It accentuated the death look of the long bones of his skull. “So far, the question is too loose. The answer is too complicated.”

“Ramble a little.”

“Well, take the Fantasies. The insignia is the black fist and the yellow lightning, with a red circle around it. With the local affiliated clubs they could maybe put five to six hundred machines on the road, as against the two thousand the Bandidos could mount out west. Now most of these guys are factory workers and warehousemen and mechanics and such. They have meets and shows, smoke pot, wear the sincere raggedy garments and heavy boots, get tattooed, sport a lot of chains and medals, grow big bushy beards, zoom around on weekends with their so-called foxy ladies hanging on behind, drink a lot of beer, smoke a lot of pot, blow coke. What they have, Tray, is a kind of brotherhood hang-up. Anybody is in trouble, they all help. They look a hell of a lot nastier than they are. It’s a charade. You get hard with them, they’ll stomp you flat into the ground. But if there’s no provocation, they have nothing to prove.

“Now as to trafficking in drugs, the story is a little different. There are the club officers, with what the law calls no visible means of support. The officers are the link between the troops and the drug importers and distributors, the money washers, the mafia accountants. Now say we take some group leader captain, call him Mother Machree, and he gets hold of one of the troops, Tom Baloney, and he tells Tom that when he gets off work at the body shop he is to go to the corner of First and Main and sit idling his engine and somebody will hand him a package, and he’s to run it up to such and such a corner in Hialeah, weaving around through the back streets, shaking any tail, and get there at seven on the nose and hand it to the woman in the red dress who asks him how many miles he gets to the gallon in that thing he’s riding.”

“What’s the payoff to Baloney?”

“That’s one of the points I want to make. He gets the knowledge that he has been full of brotherhood and loyalty, and he knows that Mother Machree will toss five hundred bucks into the pot for the next beer bust. But the troops are getting restless. They know that maybe Mother got six thou for setting up that foolproof run, and there’s the feeling around that maybe the officers are getting too far into the business. Some of them have taken to wearing the corporation garments, blow-dry hairstyles, limos with Cuban drivers. Too much separation between the officers and the troops. That is the kind of bitching I hear. They are being used, and they know it.”

“Do any of the troops do any retailing on their own?

“It could happen, but I don’t think it would be a big thing. It really wouldn’t go with the image they try to project. It would have to be a situation where there was a heavy cash-flow problem; a man out of work. Or maybe a favor for a friend.”

“Suppose a man in Lauderdale got a call that somebody would meet him at such and such a time way up the line, over a hundred miles away. And when he went up there to buy, the man who called him wasted him, and though there were no witnesses, maybe the machine the biker was using was identified as to make.”

“Recently or way back?”

“Two years in July.”

“That’s very heavy action, Sergeant McGee. What kind of machine?”

I dug the piece of paper out of my shirt pocket. “The man who saw the track says it was the rear K-One-twelve of a set of ContiTwins, deep enough to indicate a quarter-ton machine, so he guessed a BMW Nine-seventy-two.”

“Pretty reasonable guess. But it could have been an HD, or a Gold Wing Honda, or a Kawasaki KZ series, or a big Laverda or Moto Guzzi, or a GS series Suzuki, or an XS series Yamaha. All burly machines. Big fast bastards. But sweet and smooth. You almost can’t stress them. And they could all wear ContiTwins. Where did it happen?”

“Up near Citrus City, on the turnpike: A man named Esterland who was dying of cancer.”

“I think I remember news an the tube about that. Sure. But there wasn’t any mention of drugs or bikes.”

“Not enough to go on, so it didn’t get in.”

“Where do you come in, Trav?”

“A little favor for the guy’s son. Ron Esterland. By the way, he’s an artist too. Had a big sellout show in London.”

“Hey I know the name. Didn’t make the connection. Saw some color plates of his work in Art International. Pretty much okay”

“So what should I do next?”

“I don’t understand why the buy should have been set up so far out in the boonies. But I can tell you that any one of those kinds of horses I named would be owned by somebody known to the brotherhood. Up by Citrus City and from there on up, it’s a different turf. Up there you’ve got the Corsairs. But there’s a lot of interclub contact, when bikers from both clubs go to out-of-state rallies and rendezvous. I think that maybe, if it was nearly two years ago, it’s become part of the legend.”

“How so?”

“Trav, these people go back to a kind of tribal society. Myths and legends. Whoever was involved would keep his mouth shut and make his woman keep her mouth shut. But after a long time there’s not much heat involved. Maybe his woman has switched riders. With lots of beer and grass and encampments in the night, the word gets out. A little here and a little there, and it gets built up into something a lot wilder and more romantic than it was. Do you understand?”

“Sure. I think so.”

“If you can find a legend that seems to fit and then unravel it all the way back to the way things really were, you can maybe-just maybe-come up with a name. And even that won’t mean much. It’ll be a biker name: Skootch or Grunge or BugBoy. And there’s turnover among the troops. Some get into heavy action and get put away. Some of them, when the fox gets pregnant, decide to pack up and get out.”

“Can you find out if there’s a legend about Esterland?”

“I can listen. I can poke around a little but not much, because it makes these people nervous. I get along fine because I carry good merchandise, and my people do good work, and the prices are right, and the law has never learned a thing out here. And if you learn anything from me about that little party…”

“You don’t need to say it. Now, something else. A couple of biker movies a few years ago. Chopper Heaven. Bike Park Ramble.”

“Saw them when they came on the cable. What do you want? Some kind of critique?”

“Whatever.”

“The outlaw bikers came off meaner and nastier than they are as far as tearing up civilians is concerned. And they came off a little more clean and pure than they are the way they act within the group. Enough stimulation, and they get into gangbang situations. And if anybody finks to the law, man or woman, they can be a long slow time dying in the piney woods. Technically there were very few mistakes. A lot less than usual. I understand they used outlaw bikers as technical advisers. The sound track was too loud. And those pack leaders were just a little bit too evil to be real. They came out close together, those two movies, at least five years ago. Probably seven years ago. The straight clubs are still bitching about those movies because they think the civilians can’t tell the difference between outlaw and straight. I see they still run them on syndication, late at night. Why do you ask?”

“Ted, I’m just rummaging around in this thing, kicking stones, shaking the bushes. The fellow who wrote and produced and directed those two movies stood to maybe get hold of a lot of money due to the killing of Esterland.”

“How could that be, for God’s sake?”

“Esterland’s daughter was dying, in a coma. No chance of recovery. If Esterland survived her, most of the money would go to a foundation. If he died first, the daughter would get it; and then it went to the mother, who was still legally married to Esterland, on the death of her daughter a couple of weeks later. And that movie person, Peter Kesner, is or was close to Mrs. Esterland.”

“Way way out there on the end of a long stick, pal.”

“For two and a half mil, net, you can think up some very strange things. People will take a lot of pains over that kind of money.”

“Did Kesner need money that bad?”

“I’ll probably go out there and see what’s going on. I haven’t really decided. I’m on expenses, but I don’t want to waste my friend’s money.”

“I heard over the grapevine you’d tapped out, Trav.”

“In what way?”

“The quiet life. The straight life. Peddling boats or some damn thing. Heard you got scuffed up and turned into a nine-to-five person. When I heard it, I said there was no way. I said you were too used to conning the world, knocking heads, saving maidens. I said that you could lose an arm and a foot and an ear, but when they rang the bell, you’d still slide down the pole and hop onto the truck.”

“Meyer said the same thing, but in a slightly different way.”

“How is that old egghead?”

“As hairy and beloved as ever. He’s being entertained by a chain of small newspapers.”

“That’s nice.”

“You’ll be in touch?”

“I get even a whisper, I’ll give you a call. Look, send Mits on in with a Dr Pepper. Thanks.”

I went out and found her rinsing glasses and told her what Ted wanted. She nodded and I said, “He doesn’t look too great.”

She straightened up and turned to face me. “He isn’t too great. That’s for sure. These last weeks, he’s been going down. It makes me nervous.”

“Can you get him looked at?”

“I’ve tried. You better goddamn believe it.”

“I believe it. He is a strange and special guy.”

“I know.”

“He’s very fond of you, Mits.”

“I know that too.”

“Look, here’s my number. Any real bad turn, you can phone me and I’ll be out here with a doctor.”

“You can’t get a doctor to make a house call.”

“How much would you like to bet?”

The shiny black eyes looked me over, and suddenly the impassive brown face broke into a big smile that wrinkled the nose and squeezed the eyes almost shut. “No bet. Thanks.”

When I went out, there were two large bikers staring into the front of my pickup. They had opened it up.

“Something I can do for you?”

They turned to stare at me. Whiskers and hair and hard little eyes, like professional villain wrestlers.

“That’s a Merc you got in there, right?”

“Close. It’s a big Lincoln.”

“Custom heads?”

I edged past them and closed the hood. “Yes, and some other goodies.”

“What’ll it do?”

“Absolutely no idea.”

“Too chicken to take it all the way?”

“Not exactly. The needle sits against the pin at one twenty.”

“Why do you keep the outside looking like shit?”

“I wasn’t aware that it did.”

One looked at the other and said in a higher voice, “He wasn’t aware that it did. Look, you use it to run something? Is that why it looks cruddy?”

“Right now, I run myself home. Okay?”

The near one grabbed, me by the arm and pulled me back as I started to step up onto the running board. “Maybe you’re not through answering questions, Ace.”

It made me feel tired. I took his hand off my arm. “Friend, it has been nice having our little chat here. I do not want any childish hassling. Nobody has to prove anything. Okay?”

The screen door opened and Ted came wheeling out onto the concrete walk. He said, “Hey Mike. Hey Knucks. What’s happening?”

“You know this guy?”

“I know him. So?”

“Do you know he’s got funny-looking truck?”

“My sincere recommendation, don’t mess with him.”

“Don’t mess with Ace here? You kidding? This cat is over the hill.”

I looked at Ted, wondering why he was setting me up. I said, “What are you trying to do?”

He shrugged. “It’s been dull around here, sarge. And good old Knucks here has a nasty habit of trying to grope Mits every time she walks by.”

With an inward sigh I moved a few inches farther out of range. I’d been working out faithfully of late, and was right at two-oh-five, which is a very good weight for my six foot four. I look as if I would go about one eighty. The big advantage I had over these too-lardy fellows was a great deal of quick. Quick is what counts. Without the quick, they get to hit you in the face, and that is both demeaning and discouraging. Also, it hurts a lot. The secondary advantage is, of course, quite a few years of scrabbling a smart mouth and a Knucks, would be around, learning that the healthiest attitude is to inflict maximum pain in minimum time.

And the way to create an opening is to create rage. I smiled at them. “Knucks? Ah, you are Knucks. You better recheck your tendency to grope the ladies. You look faggoty to me, pal.”

He came roaring and swinging, big roundhouse right and left blows, too smart to be a headhunter. At least not yet. He wanted to cave my ribs in first. I trotted about twenty feet backward, just out of range, and when I estimated he had picked up enough speed to compensate for the heft of him, I clapped both hands on his right wrist, rolled backwards, got my feet into his belly just as he was tumbling over me, and gave him a very brisk hoist, while still clinging to the wrist. He whomped the dust like a sack of sand dropped off the top of a building. As I released him, rolled to the side, and came up, I guessed from the sound of impact that good old Knucks was out of the game.

I focused on Mike, coming at me at a half run, right fist cocked. I had time to decide whether to go under it, inside it, or outside it. Outside seemed best, but he waited so long I had to do a Muhammad Ali lean to get my face the final inch out of the way. I felt the breeze of it. He ran on by and was just starting to turn when I heel-stomped him in the back of the knee. He went down and came up, fighting for balance, arms spread wide. I hopped very close, braced my right heel, and pivoted so as to put my hips, back, shoulder, and arm into a very short straight right that went wrist deep into the bulge a few inches above his very fancy brass belt buckle.

He lay down in a fetal position and began throwing up. Knucks was sitting up cradling his right arm. His face was all screwed up like a schoolyard child trying desperately not to cry. His arm came out of the shoulder at a slightly unusual angle.

Ted said, “You’re not getting older. You’re getting better.”

“They might not take kindly to all this, later on.”

“You heard me advise them not to mess with you.”

“They are fat and they are slow. Not exactly a proud victory.”

“And they are not legitimate members of any club, Trav. Anybody moves against me, and the Fantasies take care of it. Right, Knucks?”

“Jesus, Ted! Jesus Christ! I can’t stand it. Help me, somebody.”

By then the mechanics had moved in. They gave me quick looks in which wonder and disbelief were mingled. Mike was moaning to himself and trying to sit up. They were being given all necessary assistance, so I waved to Ted and Mits and got into Miss Agnes and drove off eastward toward the coast, wondering if this would become one of the ongoing legends and be distorted out of all relation with reality. Showdown at the Oasis. Fat and slow and dumb. Dumb was the most serious sin. Without the dumb additive, they would not have charged, would not have tried to hit. They would have waited, circled, grabbed, and given me a very bad day. Pale eyed stranger whips over five hundred pounds of angry meat in a shade over fourteen seconds. It had worked very very well, better than I had any right to expect. So I should not get carried away and come on fearless with the next couple of bikers, who might very well be just as quick and just as able. Or might feel more comfortable with knife or gun or piece of pipe.

What I did not want, most of all, was to become some kind of symbol of challenge, so that their buddies would look me up to take a chop and try their luck. I wanted no part of any OK Corral syndrome. I had long outgrown that kind of testicular lunacy. People who become legends in their own time usually have very little time left.

Nine

ON SATURDAY morning I saw that the Byline was gone and knew Meyer would have a shortened cruise rather than none at all. I had some ideas to throw at him. He always seems to know which ones to field and which ones,to let roll on out to the warning track. I took a swim, took a beach walk, and intercepted a Frisbee with the back of my head, an incident that seemed to strike horror into a group of fourteen-year-old ladies. I gave it back, into the wind, with all the wrist flick I could put on it, and by great good fortune it stood still after it reached them. They stared at it, and one of them reached out and picked it out of the air.

So it made a game. Three of them on one side, one of me on the other. It is a great game for running, stretching, and leaping. Usually in any group of teens, one out of three will give promise of growing up into a dog. But not one of these. Comely maidens all, and very competitive. They whirred that championship plastic at me with sincere attempts to whack my head off with it. They were practicing catching the Frisbee behind their back and under a leg, and I served up floaters to give them a sense of achievement. Their brown leaping bodies and half-formed breasts and hips instilled in me such a wistful lechery, I wondered if it might be best if I turned myself in. They could put me away where I’d do no harm.

The game broke up. We had never exchanged a name. They went trotting into the sea, and I went walking back to Bahia Mar. After my shower, I got out the battered old looseleaf address book and sat in the lounge in my robe, turning pages, looking for the right California connection: And in the L’s I found Walter Lowery, both his business phone in San Francisco and his home phone in San Mateo. I brought the phone on the long cord over to the curved yellow couch, swung my feet up and tried the San Mateo number, got a recorded announcement, got a different number from information and entered it in my book, and tried it.

“Hello?” said a cautious female voice.

“Marty.”

“No. This is Ginny. Who is this?”

“My God, you sound all grown up, Gin. This is T. McGee, your honorary uncle in Florida. Your father around?”

“Hi! I’ll get him. Hold on.” After a long minute he came on and said, “Obviously, sir, you are an impostor pretending to be a friend I used to have.”

“Time flies, friends flee, temperance fuggit. Look, maybe I’m coming out there.”

“People usually know whether they are coming out or not.”

“Then let’s say I will be out. When is not certain. I am out of touch. You still have the office in Los Angeles?”

“Yes, we do.”

“Is Lysa Dean still a client?”

“Let’s say she doesn’t have as many legal problems as she used to. But yes. We’re still on a retainer arrangement.”

“And you do remember recommending me to her?”

“Indeed I do. Let’s say she was very satisfied with your performance professionally, and furious as hell at you about something else, which she never explained.”

“I get the impression she’s doing a lot of game shows.”

“Indeed she is. At very good rates. She’s in demand because she is really very quick and often very funny, which is rare out here with most actresses. And she gets some cameo roles now and again.”

“She gave me the impression-back when I knew her-of knowing everything about everybody out there.”

“Gossip is a hobby with Lee.”

“Did she ever marry that forty million dollars from Hawaii?”

I heard him sigh. “She came close, buddy. Really close. He was on the verge of getting his annulment through the Vatican when his wife came down with leukemia. So what could he do? He settled a nice little bundle on Lee, and they kept up the relationship, and he died of a heart attack last year. His wife is still living.”

“Lee live in the same place?”

“Same house. Beverly Hills. She redecorates it every twenty or thirty minutes.” I read him the address out of my book and he confirmed it.

“Have you got her unlisted number?”

“Before we go into that, Travis, if she feels toward you like I think she feels toward you, you won’t get past hello. Secondly, it is quarter to ten out here, and she won’t even lift the edge of her sleep mask or take out an earplug until noon.”

“So I’ll call her at four o’clock my time. And I will never tell her where I got the number. And I will try to keep her from hanging up on me.”

“I’ll give you the number if you tell me what you did to make her so furious.”

I thought it over. It certainly wasn’t in the kiss-and-tell category. “Well, Walter, our business was finished. She had the photographs and the negatives back. I was at her place to pick up the money I had coming, by agreement. She started worming around on my lap, starting to shuck herself out of her tight knit pants, and I suddenly wanted no part of her. So I gave her a big push and she went flying back and landed on her fanny on a white furry rug and rode it backward all the way across the room. I told her I would take the short count on the money but I would like to skip the thankful bang, as it would mean very little to me and less than nothing to her. So I left, dodging, elephants from her little collection. And she knew a lot of ten- and twelve-letter words. Knew them real loud.”

“Mother of Moses in the morning,” he said in an awed hushed voice. “I doubt there’s three idiots in the world have turned that down. Maybe there’s only one. And you think she won’t hang up?”

“Time has passed, Walter. Woman’s curiosity. Maybe she has a little feeling of disbelief Maybe it didn’t really happen that way.”

“Can I ask you why you want to talk to her?”

“To get a line on some other people out there.” He waited and when I didn’t go into it any further, he said, “If they’ve had any connection at all to the Industry Lysa Dean will know when and where they got every traffic ticket.”

I wrote down the number he gave me, and then we chatted a little while about old times, old places, old friends. He said it wasn’t the same out there, wasn’t as much fun. The money had gotten too heavy. You get a budget over twenty million dollars, a lot of the fun goes out of moviemaking. But people were getting in trouble as often as before, and he was kept busy. He said Ginny had grown into a truly beautiful girl, and if she ever tried to get into the Industry, he would shave her head, bind her feet, and have all her teeth extracted. Marty got on to tell me how much they both missed me, and why not come out once in a while, and I said that from now on I would.

That is one of the great troubles, I thought, after I hung up. The people you have great empathy with are never conveniently located nearby. Many are, but the rest are scattered far and wide. You see them too seldom. But you can always pick up right where you left off. You know who they are. They know who you are. No reintroductions required.

I took the robe off and worked with the weights until I needed another shower. Had a drink, fixed a light lunch, went to bed and set the alarm for four. When it awakened me, I looked in the address book and checked out her new number and dialed it. I had made some notes beside her name. Little things she had told me, accidentally or on purpose. I looked at the notes as the phone rang.

A woman’s voice answered by repeating the last four digits of the number, on a rising intonation of question, “Three three five five?” She had a subtly Japanese way of handling the consonants.

“Lysa Dean, please.”

“I will see if she is in at the moment. May I say who is calling?”

“Tell her I have a message from Walter Lowery’s office.”

“You may give me the message, sir.”

“My instruction is to give it to her personally.”

“Just a moment, please.”

I sat listening to the electronic humming.

“Who are you?” demanded Lysa Dean. “What the hell does Walter want told me on a Saturday? That I’m being audited again? I already for Christsake know that.” The throaty, furry, flexible voice had a steely ring behind the fur.

“I scampered out of your life in a hail of elephants, love.”

“What?”

“This is Lee Schontz, isn’t it? From Dayton, Ohio. Would it have been 1610 Madison Street? Was daddy a fireman? Do you photograph well in the buff, love?”

“Could it be… No! McGee? Is this you, McGee, you rotten dirty son of a bitch?”

“Lee, it’s so damn wonderful to hear your voice.”

“Let me sit down. Jesus! You got me out of the shower. What the hell do you mean, calling me? What a nerve! Where did you get this number? I had it changed two weeks ago. Did you get it from Walter? I’ll tear him to ribbons!”

“I wouldn’t put a friend on a spot like that. I got your number from another source. You remember how resourceful I am, don’t you?”

“Look, let me go get a robe on and take this in the bedroom.” Several minutes passed. She came back on, a half octave lower. “Now I’m comfy. Are you in Florida, dear?”

“Aren’t you going to hang up on me?”

“No, dear. I shouldn’t be angry at you. You did me a great favor, actually. You made me take a good close look at Lysa Dean. And I wasn’t too enchanted with what I saw. I saw myself through your eyes. And I felt cheap. Yes, cheap. I thought that anything Lysa did was acceptable because it was Lysa doing it. But it wasn’t, was it?”

“How much of that is bullshit, Lee?”

“Practically all of it, Travis. Nobody else ever made me that mad. I steamed for months.”

“But you got over it.”

“Hell, yes. My dearest hope would be that you have thought about me for years and years, and you want to come out here and pick up on what you turned down a long time ago. I would lead you on, baby, and then I would cut you right the hell off at the pockets. Or nearby.”

“Wouldn’t blame you a bit.”

The voice softened. “You know what really hurt me? What really really hurt me? The way you said that making love with you would mean less than nothing to me. You were wrong, dear. Wrong, wrong, wrong. I was infatuated with you. And it would have meant a great great deal to me. I was going to prove to you how much it meant. Oh, hell. This sounds like bullshit too, doesn’t it? I guess it is.”

“Heard about your bad luck with Mr. X in Hawaii. Sorry it had to come out that way.”

“Thanks, dear. Louie was an okay person all the way. He couldn’t leave Muriel once she got sick. It would have poisoned our marriage, building it on that kind of luck. But he was very good to me. I’ve sort of forgotten what the wolf looks like.”

“I ran into you twice on game shows, when I was spinning the dial. You were in a little box up in the air, looking very very good.”

“I’m keeping well, they tell me. I can’t exactly pass for twenty. Or even twenty-seven. No mere slip of a girl. Can’t get away with the cutesy stuff any more. Elfin old me. I work because I like it, dear. Are you still slipping about, doing shifty things for people?”

“It’s a living. Salvage consultant.”

“Boy, you sure salvaged me that time. I’m forever grateful.”

“How’s Dana Holtzer?”

“Great. Her husband finally died. She’s Dana Maguire, and she’s still making babies. She found out she’s good at it. Four, and one in the oven. Darling kids.”

“Say hi for me when you see her. I want to know something about a couple of people you probably know. I guess I want to know everything you might know about them.”

“Who?”

“Josie Laurant Esterland and Peter Kesner.”

“That’s what they mean when they talk about a bucket of worms. Look, are you in town? Could you come over here?”

“I’m in Florida.”

“Oh, heck, I thought you could come over and maybe we could level with each other, and I’d cancel my tennis date and we’d sort of mess around a little and get reacquainted. With no cutting off at pockets or anywhere else. Afternoons are fun. Look, it will cost you a hell of a phone bill if you listen to all of this.”

“Let me ask a couple of questions, and then maybe I’ll come listen in person.”

“Okay.”

“Are they together?”

“God only knows. That is what is called a volatile relationship. They are somewhere in Indiana or one of those states there in the middle, making a disaster movie.”

“A disaster movie?”

“A financial disaster. That’s what they call those around here lately. Disaster movies. Never never work in something your boyfriend is directing. Romance ends.”

“What kind of a movie is it? What about?”

“It is rumored to be about balloons.” ‘Balloons?“

“You know. Little baskets hang under them, and they have gas burners, and they are all pretty colors, and you go sailing away over the pretty farmland, saying oh and ah. Hot-air balloons.”

“It’s an independent production?”

“Like practically everything else except for comicbook stuff like the Empire series at Fox. And it is pretty well established here, among those who like to snigger, that Josie is helping bankroll it. I hear they had a long long struggle with script, and finally Peter rewrote it himself, poor lamb. Then they scrounged some bank money and some money from the distributor and went out on location a few weeks ago. And they’ve had rotten weather. They are together in the balloon picture, but elsewhere, as in the sack, I don’t know. Hey, you better come out here, McGee. I’m getting such a nice little rush out of just talking to you. Really. You’re filed under Unfinished Business.”

“I don’t know. Bits and pieces have to come together. I’m like an old blue tick hound, running back and forth at the edge of the swamp, nose in the air, wondering if there’s a trail worth following and kind of hating the idea of going into the mud and the snakes and the gators.”

“Goodness, how quaint! How picturesque! I hope that when you are trotting back and forth with your tongue hanging out, you’ll get downwind of me. I’ll be sending out a message.”

“What’s happening to ladies? What’s happened to buttons and bows, and shy sidelong smiles, and demure blushes?”

“You must be some kind of old-time chauvinist. What’s the matter? We alarm you?”

“Sort of, I guess.”

“When you were solving my little problem were you thinking of it in terms of swamp and snakes?”

“I think so. Walk into the back of anybody’s skull, be they born-again, big mullah; or resident of the death house, and you’ll come to the edge of a swamp that stretches as far as the eye can see. It’s part of the human condition.”

“How cynical!”

“Not really. Meyer says that knowing it is there is half the battle. Beware of those turkeys who really believe they are absolutely pure, decent, honest, God-fearing, hard-working, patriotic Americans. They’ll slip a rusty blade into your belly, look upward, and proclaim it God’s will. They’ll believe they’ve done it for your own salvation.”

“Then you have no need to beware of me, my dear. I am impure, indecent, dishonest, lazy, and permanently randy. You can trust me all the way. I’ve got a swamp you wouldn’t hardly believe.”

I thanked her for her help and broke off with cheery goodbyes. I had not known how she would react to me. I had inflicted such a deep wound in her pride, it was probably still draining. There she was at that time, Lysa Dean, a genuine celebrity, a sex symbol, a box-office draw, mobbed wherever she went, star player in the erotic fantasies of a million men she would never meet, and when, out of gratitude, out of affection, she tried to bestow upon a nobody from Fort Lauderdale a warm morsel of all her international magic, giving him a memory that would make him vibrate for the rest of his life, the dreary ungrateful damn fool had turned it down. And, given the insecurity of the aging actress,

I could guess that the rejection haunted her in the bleak hours of the night when the sleeping pill had worn off. She wanted to get her hands on me, and there were two ways she could go. She could either build me up to an overpowering urgency and turn it all off, or she could really devote herself to proving what a hell of a deal I, in my ignorance, had turned down. Prudence said to stay the hell away from her. I remembered her slanted green eyes, very handsome, and merciless as a questing cat.

Ten

AT NOON on Sunday Annie phoned me and told me she had just had a full hour of good sun right out in front of her cabana, had come in and had her shower, and was stretched out on the bed under the fan, letting the moving air dry her off and thinking of me.

“Cut it out, Annie!”

“Saturday morning I got word that they’re going to let me have the extra wing I’ve been asking for. Twenty more rooms over on the other side, twostory. The architect is coming down.”

“That’s nice.”

“We’ve been out of balance here. When we’re full, we have more bar and dining room and kitchen capacity than we’re using. I hate to encourage a lot of outside business coming in, just to eat and drink. Sooner or later that creates problems. If we make it with our guests, it’s more like a club. If it could possibly be done by December, I can really show them one hell of a season next year. Already we are reserved almost full for the first quarter. Are you interested at all in this kind of stuff? I have nobody else to brag to.”

“Of course I’m interested, Annie.”

“I bet. It’s exciting to me. It is kind of like farming. I mean you have a nice harvest of tourists coming up, and all of a sudden you get a tornado, or a red tide, or a big oil spill, or the country goes on gas rationing. So it’s always a little bit nervous. Or a hurricane will come and wash us away. We’re pretty exposed here.”

“Sooner or later one will. Just hope it’s later.”

“Very cheery.”

“Any chance of you ever getting away, Annie? Like for a week or two. A little boat ride to no place in particular?”

“Not anytime real soon. I fired my assistant manager. He kept telling me how wonderful I am and slicing me up whenever I turned my back. Caught him at it. I’ve got a new guy now. And I think he is going to work out. He hasn’t had a lot of experience, but he knows food and liquor service and he gets along with the guests and the employees. It looks as if by maybe sometime in July I could give him a trial run, by going where he can’t ask me questions. Is July okay?”

“Great. Maybe I’ll bring the Flush around and pick you up over there and we’ll flip a coin for which direction we go. North or south.”

“Beautiful. I wouldn’t want to stay on a boat too long. I spent too much time on the Caper with Ellis. There’s no place to put anything, and no real privacy. It was like the walls were closing in.”

“The bulkheads.”

“The walls, honey. Walls and floors. Kitchen and bathroom. Upstairs, downstairs. Inside and outside. Ellis was so damn picky about being seamanlike, I decided after he died that the whole thing is a crock. I lived aboard until it got sold, and I called everything by the civilian name for it, and it made me sort of happy.”

“I want to ask you something else. You told me Josie called Ellis a couple of times. Several times, I believe you said. Early in July. At that time she must have been terribly concerned and depressed about the condition of her daughter, Romola.”

“Oh, she was. Of course.”

“You said that the phone calls from her made him cross.”

“I see what you mean. I knew that they weren’t about Romola or any change in her condition, because he always told me things like that. And news of his daughter would make him either very depressed or very jubilant. Not cross. That’s why I think she must have been urging him to buy something for pain, the way Prescott had asked her to do.”

“Josie was willing to do that in spite of her major worry?”

“Look, she couldn’t do anything about her major worry. There was Romola all hooked up to a lifesupport system that was even breathing for her, all tubes and wires and things, and nothing to do but wait. She didn’t die, legally, until August tenth. I would guess that Josie was very restless. She’d welcome anything that diverted her from her worry. I would guess that she wanted Ellis to come back to her and stay with her. Maybe she brought that up too. And that was what made him cross. He always told me she was a very nice woman, and absolutely impossible to live with.”

“I might be going out there.”

“What for?”

“Josie Laurant has been financing a motion picture project for Peter Kesner. She’s acting in it, I think.”

“Oh, God, that’s terrible!”

It was a lot more reaction than I had expected. “Terrible?”

“I should have told you. Ellis, through his banking connections, arranged a personal report on Peter Kesner. An absolutely, totally unreliable person. A disaster area. He had the discipline to make those two little films that got rave reviews and made a lot of money, but it went to his head and he blew the whole thing. They gave him a big-budget film to produce and direct, and he went way over budget and it turned out to be a dog. They gave him a chance to do a little picture, like his early two, and it was so completely bad they never released it at all. By then his money was gone, of course. Tax judgments, the whole thing. It was clear that Josie was supporting him. I remember when Ellis dictated a three-page single-spaced letter to her, telling her to have as little to do with Peter as possible and saying why. Knowing Josie, I knew she’d turn it over to Kesner. I told Ellis I thought that would happen, and he said he wouldn’t mind if she did. There was nothing actionable in the letter. It was all fact. He said maybe it would give Kesner a better look at himself. When I typed it I softened it a little bit, but he caught it and marked up the original and had me type it all over again. What this really means, I guess, is that the money Josie got from Romola’s estate is down the drain, or soon will be.”

“Ellis didn’t put any strings on it?”

“He talked about it, but he never got around to doing it. He talked about setting it up as an annuity for Romola, but then when we were both certain Romola was going to die before he did, he put all his attention into refining that foundation concept of his. Which never got used.”

“Important question: Would Kesner know the terms of the will?”

She thought for a moment. “I would certainly think so. Josie knew, long before we moved down here from Stamford, that Romola would get the bulk of it, and if Romola died first it would go to a foundation. Yes, she asked me and I told her about it. I think she was wondering what would happen to her support, to that fifty thousand a year, and I didn’t blame her for wondering. I told her I thought she would get a hundred thousand and that would be the end of it. Yes, I told her that’s what she would get. And anything Josie knows, Josie tells anybody she happens to find sitting next to her at the table.”

“And so Kesner was vitally interested.” There was a long long silence. “You still there?”

“Yes, I’m here. I had a kind of an ugly thought.”

“Such as?”

“You remember how Romola got hurt?”

“Nobody ever told me. I assumed it was a highway accident.”

“It was a bicycle accident, yes. She was way over by Thousand Oaks, twenty tough miles from home. There were witnesses. She was going along pretty fast on a ten-speed. A dog rushed her and she tried to dodge, but she hit the dog and went over the handlebars and fractured her skull on some curbing. What she was doing out there was a big mystery. Josie thought she was in class in UCLA. It turned out-I don’t really know how they discovered it-she was using a little house out there owned by a woman who was temporarily in London, doing a screenplay over there for a British company. The neighbors had seen Romola coming and going for a couple of months. They said she rode the bike a lot. Oh, I remember how they found the house. Romola’s little car was there, some kind of an MG. And with her car keys in her pocket she had a key to the little house. There was evidence she had been staying there for some time. She had moved some of her things from the Beverly Hills house to the little house, without Josie noticing. She had not been in classes since early February. She was an exceptionally beautiful girl. I saw her just once, when she was fourteen, and she was breathtaking. The extraordinary secrecy was very strange. It was a place of assignation, apparently. But there wasn’t any real urge to find out who because she was in such critical condition.”

“And the ugly idea?”

“Maybe it’s too ugly. Peter Kesner knew that Ellis had terminal cancer. And he knew that Josie would get a lump-sum settlement that wouldn’t be enough to support him for very long. And he knew Romola would inherit. He was perfectly capable of seducing Romola. And that would have made her very very careful to keep it a secret from her mother. I’ll bet you a dime that lady screenwriter is an old pal of Peter’s. It was the screenwriter’s bike, by the way.”

“Yes, that is an ugly idea. And if the fall had killed her outright, then when Ellis died of his problem, the foundation would have gotten the money.”

“But she hung on. And suddenly Peter realizes that if Ellis should die before Aomola, he will still be in clover. Or even better off than before. He can finance another chance at moviemaking, possibly. But, Travis, it is one long long shot, isn’t it, to try to connect Peter Kesner with something that happened so long ago near Citrus City?”

“Very long.”

“I didn’t call you up to talk about that!”

“What did you have in mind?”

“Do you want five hundred guesses?”

“I give up.”

“That’s sort of what I had in mind.”

“Once I get onto the Alley it is only eighty-four miles. But aren’t you a working woman on weekends?”

“All I have to do from now on is take one of my famous walks through the bar area and the dining room between seven and nine, check a couple of empty rooms at random, and take the totals off the register tapes. A grand total of-call it forty minutes. And as soon as I hang up I am going to have a nice nap, and then I am going to put little dabs of scent here and there. Park at the far right end of the lot and take the path down past that fountain with the stone benches, and you’ll come out right behind my place, and the rear door will be unlocked. Welcome, darling.”

And she hung up before I could change the plan in any way.

I stayed in her place with her Sunday night, in the queen-size bed under the fan, with a yellow towel over the lampshade and with pretty good surf thudding onto the beach in a steady rhythm all night long.

We knew a lot more about each other, the things that quickened and the things that delayed. She was joyfully diligently sensuous. She just purely enjoyed the living hell out of it. She was a kid, and bed was the big candy store, and she had the keys to every cabinet.

At one point, resting, she said, “Look, do you mind about me and Ellis?”

“In what way?”

“Him being so much older. I’m younger than his son. Did I tell you that already?”

“I think so. So what?”

“You take a younger woman who moves in with a well-to-do old man, it looks as if she’s going where the money is. I don’t give a damn what most people think, but I want you to know that it wasn’t like that. It really wasn’t. Two years before he got sick we went down to a meeting in New York when there was an industry-wide convention. He always picked me when there was work he wanted done just right. By then’I was almost over a rotten affair with the man I had wanted to marry until I learned he had a boyfriend on the side. Ellis landed a huge consultant contract at the convention, and we had wine in his suite-I lived across the hall-and he managed to hustle me into bed somehow. I told him I had to quit. I wasn’t going to be a sleep-in secretary to anybody. He said if I had to quit, I had to quit. Okay. The next day I quit, and he said the fair thing to do was to stay on until he could find somebody just as competent. Later he said that inasmuch as I was quitting anyway, and as long as we had been to bed together once, it would be stupid not to continue while he looked for a new girl. I felt a little bit crawly about him being so old. But it turned out to be all right. Then on account of the chemotherapy and the radiation, he all of a sudden couldn’t. He was sorry and I was sorry, but, as I told,you before, I had a moral and emotional commitment to him. He was mean, but he never cheated me. He never lied to me. And he was always pleased when I looked nice, so it was fun to dress up for him. And because I never did really quit the job when I said I would, I felt I owed him. And I had to believe it was a kind of love that kept me with him. Hey! Are you asleep?”

“No. Heard every word. Understand the whole thing.”

“And now what do you think you are doing?”

“In the immortal words of Burt Reynolds, something has come up.”

“Which, all things considered, love, is very very flattering.”

“I know.”

By twenty minutes after dawn I was on my way back across the peninsula, yawning and singing, beating time with the heel of my hand on the steering wheel. “Roll me over, in the clover… With ‘is ’ead tooked underneath ‘is arm, ’e ‘aunts the bluiddy tower… Never let a sailor put his hand above your kneeeee…” And other tender love songs and ballads of the years gone by.

When I awakened in my own bed at noon, I put a call through to Ted Blaylock. Mits answered in a small uncertain voice. He had lost consciousness Saturday evening and had been rushed to Broward Memorial. His condition was not good. She had just come from there. She was going back in the late afternoon.

“What is it?”

“Kidneys. That’s what he’s been afraid of. You saw how kind of yellowish he looked.”

“I noticed, yes. Can I get to see him?”

“He wants to see you. He told me how to get you by phone, but I didn’t even try on account of I don’t want to do anything to tire him out. Anyway, I don’t think they’ll let you in. I told them I’m his wife.”

“Does he have something to tell me?”

“I think so.”

“Get him to tell you, then. I don’t want to tire him. You can tell me. You got a ride in?”

“One of the guys is taking me and waiting.”

“What room is he in?”

“Why?”

“So I’ll know where to wait for you when you come out.”

“I can only be with him like five minutes. I guess if you want to come meet me, five o’clock would be okay. Across from the main entrance.”

I got there at four thirty. I looked around the area and I found a big silver and black Harley Davidson parked in the shade, a thin brown Indian-looking fellow standing by it, smoking, leaning against a tree.

“You bring Mits in?” I asked him.

“You McGee?”

“Right.”

“She told me you’d be around. I’m Cal. I’m her cousin. She’s really nuts about that Blaylock. You the one messed up Knucks and Mike?”

“They kept pushing me.”

“They’re like that. Be a long time before they do any more pushing. You tore up Knucks’s shoulder pretty good. And Mike is in the hospital, this one right here, for observation on account of something might be busted inside. He can’t keep food down. A lot of people are glad they got wiped out. They get too much kicks out of beating on people.”

“I have the idea those two are dumb enough and ugly enough to take another try at me when they feel up to it, but not with the bare hands.”

He nodded. “Sure. That would be the way they go. But they been given the word you’re under the protection of the Fantasies.”

I looked at his rear mudguard and saw the emblem. “That’s nice. I really appreciate it. That pair doesn’t fill me with terror, but I don’t like having to look around behind me all the time. Why the favor?”

“You did the Fantasies a favor, okay? Knucks had been told about groping Mits. He was told not to do it. It was like some kind of a joke to him. Mits is my first cousin, so she’s in like an affiliate. Fantasy Foxes, under our protection. Like the Oasis is under our protection because Blaylock has been a true friend to the club. So some people were going to get around to Knucks and maybe break his hand or something. But you worked him over. So if you want, you can wear the pin. There’s one for associates, without the red circle around it.”

The keen dark eyes stared at me, and I knew I was on very delicate and dangerous ground. Ridicule is unforgivable. But I had the feeling I’d been transported back to one of the schoolyards of my youth, where if you belonged to the right group, the big kids wouldn’t beat you up and take your lunch money.

“I’d be very honored to have the pin and wear it, Cal.”

The tension went out of his shoulders. “I’ll see you get one. What my squad captain, did, he checked you out with Blaylock, and he got a good reading. Hey, here she comes. I guess things aren’t so great.”

Mits came slowly toward us. Though she was expressionless, tears were running down her brown cheeks. She was in jeans and a blue work shirt, both too big for her. Her helmet was slung on the machine, next to Cal’s.

She acknowledged my presence with a nod, went to Cal, held his forearm in her two hands, and rested her forehead against his shoulder for a moment. “In’t gonna make it,” she said in a muffled voice. “Din’t hardly know me at first. Then he came back, like from far off, like from being dead.”

She took a deep breath and let it out, and then turned to me and said, “Other things are going bad. Inside. Like he knew they would sooner or later. But, damn it, this is sooner. It isn’t fair.”

“Can we get going now?” Cal asked.

“I can see him another five minutes at six o’clock. I think I better stay here.”

“Maybe I can get back. I don’t know, Mits. I’ll have to get off work.”

“I’ll stick around and run her home, Cal.”

She looked at me dubiously. “Sure you wouldn’t be too much put out?”

“Sure.”

Cal handed her her helmet, swung aboard, cranked up, and went droning out of the shade and into the road and away.

She looked around and saw a bus bench in the shade and headed toward it. I followed her. She took cigarettes out of her shoulder bag, offered me one which I refused, and then lit up, sucked the smoke deep, huffed it out to be pulled away by the late-afternoon breeze.

“They said I should expect him to die tonight or tomorrow.”

“Soon.”

“Everything has gone bad. They say he had to be in pain for a long time, saying nothing about it. I knew he hurt. He’d make a sniffy sound if I lifted him wrong. How old do you think I am?”

The question startled me. “Nineteen? Twenty?”

“Hah! I’m twenty-eight, man. Half Seminole. A skinny Seminole, you can’t tell the age. With the fat ones you can tell. Okay, except for my little brothers when I was growing up, nobody in my whole life has ever really needed me except Ted. I mean really. He turned that place into home for me. So now what? I have to make some kind of plans, get some kind of work. But I can’t even think about it.”

“Don’t try. There’ll be time to think about it.”

“McGee? What was he like when he was young?”

“I knew him in the service.”

“That’s what I mean.”

“He was a good officer. He didn’t showboat and draw fire. When stupid orders came down, he’d drag his feet until they were out of date. He tried to make sure everybody got shelter and rations and transport. He didn’t mind the kind of goofing off that didn’t matter, but if anybody didn’t do their job when it did matter, he’d chew them out good. He was an okay officer, and he was down in a little ravine helping a medic slide a wounded man onto a litter when he got a mortar fragment in the back, right through the spinal cord.”

“Did he ever laugh, joke, smile?”

“As much as anybody”

“Did he have a girl?”

“I don’t recall hearing anything about her if he did.”

“It’s been a lot of work taking care of him. It makes a long day and into the night seven days a week.”

“Must have been very hard.”

“I would have done it if it was twice as hard. Oh, I asked him if there was something I should tell you. It doesn’t make sense to me. I hope it does to you. His mind seemed to be kind of wandering. Here is exactly what he said: ‘Tell Sarge there is a legend about how Dirty Bob and the Senator made it all the way in fifty hours flat out, popping Dexamyls, and then faded away.’ Mean anything?”

“Not right off.”

“I think his head has gone all weird. I held his hand. It was like ice.”

“Say it again?”

“‘There is a legend about how Dirty Bob and the Senator made it all the way in fifty hours flat out, popping Dexamyls, and then faded away.’ He made me say it twice too.”

I found that interesting. It meant the message was significant in the shape and form it was told. “Could those be biker names, Mits?”

“Oh, sure. I’ve heard about Dirty Bob, but I don’t know where or when. And when they take a long hard ride, they do it on uppers and coffee. Night and day, they really go. And it’s safer there’s two at night, riding side by side, with the two headlights showing, the two tail-lights in back.”

“Fifty hours would be how many miles?”

“All the way acrosst. I knew a cat went from Toronto to Mexico City without sleep. A while back, there was kind of a thing about setting records. But it’s dumb. People got killed. You can lose your best troops that way.” She picked up my wrist and looked at my watch. “I think I’ll head back in there. I’ll stay as long as they let me. You sure you don’t mind?”

“You go ahead. I’ll wait. Good luck.”

“There isn’t any more of that left. But thanks.” She came back at ten after six, dry-eyed. “Look, you want to take off, it’s okay. They’re going to let me set with him. They got curtains around the bed. He doesn’t know me any more, or know anything, I guess. But everybody has to be somewhere, and I might as well be here.”

“You going to get anything to eat?”

“I couldn’t eat.”

I gave her my number again. “You call me when you want to leave. It will take me fifteen or twenty minutes to get here. Is that all right?”

“I hate to have you doing this for me.”

“If I didn’t want to, I wouldn’t.”

There was a nod and a fleeting smile and she turned and went back to the hospital.

The phone woke me a little after three in the morning. She was waiting by the bench where we had sat. She climbed up into the Rolls, chunked the door shut, and said, “He died at a quarter to three. He stopped breathing and then tried to kind of rise up and fell back with his eyes half shut and his mouth open. I got his stuff here in my bag they took from him. The watch and ring and wallet and keys.”

“I’m sorry, Mits.”

“F.T.W.”

“What? Oh. Right.”

“I signed a couple of things there. I signed them Marilyn O. Blaylock. They didn’t ask for any ID. I always liked the name Marilyn. I think what they do, maybe, they get to collect from the VA somehow.”

“Probably. Did he have any living relatives?”