Pale Gray For Guilt

Pale Gray For Guilt

John D. MacDonald

Travis McGee #9 Pale Gray For Guilt

John D. MacDonald

“Perhaps no one can be really a good appreciating pagan who has not once been a bad puritan.”

- BOURNE

One

THE NEXT to the last time I saw Tush Bannon alive was the very same day I. had that new little boat running the way I wanted it to run, after about six weeks of futzing around with it.

So on the test run I demonstrated one of our contemporary maladies: You can’t just go out and ride around in car, boat, or airplane-you have to have a destination.

Then you feel purposeful.

So in the early morn on a flat, calm, overcast day I stocked the ice chest on the little Muhequita from my ship’s stores on the Busted Flush, locked up the Flush, dropped down into my new playtoy, and, as what faint breeze there was seemed to be coming out of the southwest, I stuck my nose out of the pass to see if I could run north outside. The long, slow gray-green lift and fall of the ground swell was all of a towering five inches high, so I took it a mile off the beaches and fooled with the rpm and the fuel flowmeter, until she was riding right and sounded right and just a hair under 3,000 on each of the 120-horse stern-drive units. I then turned the steering over to the little Calmec autopilot, took a bearing on the Lauderdale Municipal Casino and noted the time.

That, of course, is one of the fussy little enchantments of a new boat new being either brand-new or secondhand new. What you are hunting for is the optimum relationship between fuel consumption and distance. You tell yourself that maybe someday you are going to get caught very. short, and you are, going to have to squeak back into port with no more than half a cup of fuel left, with luck, and it would be very nice to know what rpm leaves you the least chance of running dry.

But like the exercise of caution in almost every human activity, the fusspots who make it their business to know are the ones least likely to ever have that ticklish problem. It’s the ones who never check it out who keep the Coast Guard choppers busy.

The little boat was aimed back up the Florida east coast toward Broward Beach, where I had picked her up on an estate sale from a law firm. She’d belonged to a Texan named Kayd whose luck had run out somewhere in the Bahamas.

It’s a funny thing about boat names. She had that Munequita across the stern in four-inch white letters against that nice shade of Gulf Stream blue when I brought her on back to Bahia Mar. Spanish for ‘little doll.’ One night Meyer and Irv Deibert and Johnny Dow and I sat around trying to dream up a name that would match the Busted Flush. Little Flush? Inside Straight? Hole Card? The Ante? And I forget. which one we decided was best because when I got around to changing it, I looked at the name it had and I decided that trying to match it to the name on the mother ship was a case of the quaints and the cutes, and I liked the name just fine. It was a little doll and had begun to acquire in my mind a personality that could very well resent being called anything else, and would sulk and wallow.

I switched the FM-UHF marine radio to the commercial frequencies and tried to find something that didn’t sound like somebody trying to break up a dogfight in a sorority house by banging drums and cymbals. Not that I want to say it isn’t music. Of course it is music, styled to accompany teenage fertility rites, and thus is as far out of my range as °Rockabye Baby.“ FM radio was a great product when it was servicing a fringe area of the great American market. But it has turned into a commercial success, so they have denigrated the sound, and they have mickeymoused the stereo, and you have to really search that dial to find something that isn’t either folk hoke, rickyacky rock, or the saccharine they pump into elevators, bus stations and Howard Johnsons.

As I was about to give up I found some pleasant eccentric, or somebody who’d grabbed the wrong record, playing Brubeck doing Cole Porter, and I caught it just as he opened up “Love for Sale” in a fine and gentle manner, and then handed it delicately over to Desmond, who set up a witty dialogue with Joe Morello.

After telling myself that ten of eight in the morning is beer time only for the lowest types, I cracked a bottle of Carta Blanca and stood in the forward well, leaning through the center opening where I’d laid the hinged windshield over to port, out of the way, forearms on the smoke-blue foredeck shell.

Well, I was on my way to see old Tush after too long, and I had wind in my face like a happy dog leaning out a car window. The wake was straight. The engines ran sweetly in sync. I could feel the slow rise and fall in the imperceptible ground swell. The overcast was starting to burn off, the sea starting to glint. I could see pigmy figures over on the beach by Sea Ranch. Even with the investment in the playtoy, I still had a comforting wad of currency back in the cache aboard the Busted Flush at Slip F-18, Bahia Mar.

It had been a fine long hot lazy summer, a drifting time of good fish, old friends, new girls, of talk and laughter.

Cold beer, good music and a place to go.

That’s the way They do you. That’s the way They set you up for it. There ought to be a warning bell on the happymeter, so that every time it creeps high enough, you get that dang-dang alert. Duck, boy. That glow makes you too visible. One of Them is out there in the boonies, adjusting the windage, getting you lined up in the cross hairs of the scope. When it happens so often, wouldn’t you think I’d be more ready for it?

I took my right-angle sight on a water tower just beyond Ocean Ridge, one that measures almost exactly thirty miles north of the Municipal Casino, and my elapsed time was sixty-two minutes. I wrote that down, along with fuel consumption, so I could do the math later, breaking it down in the way that to me is easiest to remember, statute miles per gallon at x rpm.

The wind was freshening and quartering into the south, and though I was still comfortable, I decided it wasn’t going to last very -long, so I went through Boynton Inlet into Lake Worth. The OMC’s were still green enough so that too much constant speed wasn’t the best thing in the world, so as soon as I had a nice open straightaway up the Waterway without traffic, I pushed it up to 4,200 rpm, estimating it at about 45 miles an hour. I estimated I had fifty if I ever needed it, and hoped I’d never get in a bind where I needed it. I held her there for five or six minutes, then dropped it way back, getting it to that minimum rpm that, depending on gross weight at the time, would just hold it on the plane. It wasn’t a rig I was about to take out and see if I could get to Nassau ahead of Wynne and Bertram and those people, taking those thirty-foot leaps and turning your spine into a concertina every time you smash back into the sea, pulping your kidneys and chomping your jaw into the foam rubber tooth guard. The little Munequita would have had to be turned into a racing machine, with a hundred more horses in each mill, special wheels, a lot more bracing and reinforcement to keep the engines in her, and then she would not be much good for anything else.

Besides, I had been talked into trying it once. I think you could maybe argue the point that it is a little more fun than a hungover, carbuncled cowboy might have while trying to stay aboard a longhorn-in a dusty rodeo, but it would be a close decision.

When I reached the bay north of Broward Beach, I had to look at the chart to see at which marker I should leave the Waterway to hit the mouth of the Shawana River. So it was ten thirty of that Tuesday morning, or a little later, when I eased up to one of the finger piers at Bannon’s Boatel, put a line on a piling and cut the engines off.

I stepped high onto the pier decking and looked around. He had a dozen outboards tied up, and maybe half as many inboard-outboard rigs, two smallish cruisers, and, neatly aligned in their slips, the dozen rental houseboats, outboard rigged, fiberglass, white with orange trim. I saw that he’d put up the in-and-out storage he had told me about the last time I’d seen him, over a year and a half ago. Fifteen racks wide and three high. The forklift could tuck forty-five boats in there on monthly storage, but only the bottom row was full, and the middle layer half full.

Up the river from his place and on the other side, where it had all been marshland the last time I was there, I could see, maybe a mile away and more, some squat, pale, technical-looking buildings and a glinting of cars in the industrial parking lot next to them.

There didn’t seem to be anyone around the little marina building, or around the white cement-block motel with the red tile roof that sat parallel to the river and parallel to State Road 80D, and about a hundred feet from each of them. I remember Tush talking about how he was going to expand the motel from ten units to twenty.

“Now that there’s the three kids, me and Janine are taking up two units, and having just eight rentals, I couldn’t tell you the times we’ve had to turn folks away, Trav ”

The slab had been poured for the extra ten units, and the block had been laid up to shoulder-high on about three of them, but some kind of a coarse green vine had taken hold and had crawled along fifteen feet of the wall, spilling tendrils down.

Some of the dock pilings sagged. The pennons on the marina building were bleached gray, windripped and tattered.

“Hey!” yelled Tush. “Hey, now! Hey, McGee!” He had come around the corner of the motel and came toward me in a kind of Percheron canter. A big man. Almost as high as I am, and half again as big around.

Long ago and far away we’d been on the same ball team. Brantley Breckenridge Bannon, second string offensive fullback. First string if he could have gotten into his stride quicker, because he was hard to stop when he was in gear. The nickname had started as BeeBee and had been shortened to Beeb, and it was that season it suddenly turned into Tush. He was a man totally incapable of profanity. The most we ever heard from him, even in the most hideous, unlucky and painful circumstances, was a mumbled “Durn!”

Then in one game we tried running a play that was designed to make up for his slow start. They set him out to the right, and on the snap he had to run to his left, go behind the quarterback who had taken some quick steps back and who had faked a handoff to a wingback slanting right, and who would then spin and stuff the ball into Bannon’s belly on a half cut and an off-tackle slant left.

The first time we ran it, and I was offensive left end at the time, a linebacker thought he smelled a pass, blitzed through, saw what was happening, and rolled his shoulders right into Bannon’s ankles. The second time we ran it, he had a good head of steam but there was absolutely no hole at all, and as he tried to spin along the line and find one they tore him down. The third time we tried it, we were fourth and two at their eleven, so late in the game that we had to go for six points, being four points behind. He got a fine start. We got a good jump and cleared him a big hole. But as he went through the hole he was juggling that ball, hand to chin to chest to forearm to hand, too busy to keep from getting hit, and was hit from the side and the ball floated into the hands of their squatty defensive center, who after a considerable pause to realize he actually had a football right there in his hands, took off in a lumpy little grinning gallop out to their forty before he got pulled down from behind. Bannon, on his knees, ripped off his helmet, whammed it against the sod, stared skyward and yelled, “Oh… TUSH!”

When things went badly for him on one play in the next game, about four of us yelled, “Tush!” And Tush it became, then and forever.

After he was converted to a tackle, he stayed with an AFL team four years, during two of which, being married to Janine, he saved his money. A pinched nerve in his neck turned him into an insurance salesman and he did well but got sick of it, and then he sold houseboats, and then he bought the ten acres on the Shawana River on which to act out and work out the American Dream.

So after the obligatory thumping upon each other, our words of greeting were drowned out by an oncoming roar, deep and grinding, and three big orange Euclids went by on their six-foot tires of solid rubber, loaded high with yards of wet marl, kicking up a powdery dust that drifted north, across the palmetto and scrub pine flats on the other side of the state road. I saw then that the blacktop was gone, and the right of way widened.

“We’re being improved around here,” he said in sour explanation. “Everything is going to be firstclass. By and by.” He stared west, after the fading roar of the big earth movers. “Worries me the way they bucket through here. Janine should be on her way back from town by now, and there’s some bad places where she could meet up with them. She does more than her share of driving now that the school bus can’t come down here.”

“Why can’t it?”

“They can’t use roads that are officially closed, that’s why” He looked toward his waterfront. “What’d you come in. You can’t get the Flush upriver in this tide.”

“Wasn’t there a good deep channel?”

“Until they did a lot of dredge and fill upriver. Now the first half mile from the bay up toward me is pretty bad. They say they’re going to scour it out, but they won’t say when.”

We walked out and I showed him the Munequita.

He knew that good honest T -Craft hull, the semi-V that ftodney Thompson makes in Titusville. When people from the Kansas flats get the marine fever, it is a dreadful addiction, and Tush had a bad case. He looked over the custom installation of the two dualcarb OMC’s and listened to my explanation of why I’d pulled the Chrysler-Volvos the original owner installed. He was intrigued by the special engineering of the Teleflex panel and control system.

I heard myself talking too much. Things were going well for me. And the world was a little sour for my friend Tush Bannon. In repose his broad, heavy, freckly face sagged. So when it happens like that, you talk too much. The small breeze stopped, and the October forenoon heat leaned hard, in that 90°-95°Io humidity that makes the sweat pop out.

So we went up to the motel and sat in the kitchen alcove under the rackety-clatter of an overworked little window air conditioner, drank beer while he said Janine was fine, the boys were fine, and we talked about who we’d heard from and who we hadn’t, and who was doing what. I stood by the window with the cold can in my hand and said, “What’s all the big industry over there, up river?”

“TTA,” he said with a tangible bitterness. “Tech Tex Applications. A nice clean industry, except every now and then any fool fish that comes up the Shawana turns belly-up and floats back down. And sometimes there’s a funny little smell, sort of like ammonia, and the tears run down your face. But they employ four hundred people, Trav. Big tax base. They gave ‘em the keys to the county to move in here.”

“But I thought this county had pretty fair zoning and pollution control and all that. I mean Broward Beach is a-”

“Don’t you know where you are, boy?” he asked. “You’re a good mile west of that county line. You are in Shawana County Mister McGee. A garden spot. Go right over to Sunnydale, to the County Courthouse, and ever one of those happy, smiling five commissioners will tell you a man couldn’t pick a better spot to live and raise his kids and grow with the county.” He astonished me. I had never thought of Tush as being capable of irony. He was a big, amiable, beefy man, with mild blue eyes and stubbly pale lashes and brows, and a pink, peeling, permanent case of sunburn.

I heard a car drive in. He went to the window on the road side and looked out and said, “Oh… no.” I followed him out. Janine had gotten out of the car, a very dusty pale blue sedan about two years old. At twenty paces she still had the gawky, leggy look and stance of a teenager. She stood in an attitude at once defiant and disconsolate, staring at the left rear corner of the car, which squatted expensively low. Their youngest, about two and a half, stood nearby, scowling, giving the intermittent snuffle of tears not long ended. Janine wore bleached khaki walking shorts and a yellow halter in a coarse fabric. The shorts were darkened with perspiration around her narrow waist. She had cropped her black hair very short. With her deep tan, and the length and strength and slender delicacy of her face, her dark eyes, she looked like a young man, Mediterranean, ready to guide you to the Roman ruins, pick your pocket, sell you fake heirlooms, send you out in a leaky gondola with his thieving cousin.

But the shape of the ears was girl, and the corners of the mouth, and the elegance of the throat, and from there on down no doubt at all, even were she clad in a loose-fitting mattress cover, no doubt whatsoever. And I knew her maiden name was Sorrensen, and she was Wisconsin Swede, and she birthed towheaded Swede kids, and so she was one of the improbabilities of genetic mathematics, of maybe one of the Scandinavian raiders who brought home from a far country a swarthy boy to be a kitchen slave.

Tush got down behind the car and rolled onto his back and wormed his way under it. She said, “It was just a half mile this side of the hard top. I guess the rains dug it out and then the dust drifted into it, and I swear, honey, nobody could have seen it.”

He slid out. “Spring shackle.”

“She hit me!” the little kid said. “She hit me awful hard, Pop.”

“Were you going fast, Jan?” he asked her.

She stared at him. She raised a helpless arm and let it flap down. “Oh, good Christ, I was making better time than Phil Hill, laughing and singing because the world is so sweet, and I was probably all boozed up, and I was trying to break the goddamn whatever it is!”

She spun and went by me, giving me a sudden and startled glance of recognition, but too trapped then in the compulsions of the quarrel to deviate from the planned exit.

He shouted after her. “You can say hello to my friend! The least you can do is say hello to my friend!”

She walked ten more strides, shoulders rigid, and then turned at the motel doorstep and, with no expression on her face or in her voice, said, “Hello. Hello. Hello. Come on, Jimmy. Come with mother.” The kid went plodding after her. The door closed.

Tush looked at me and shook his head and tried to smile. “Sorry, boy.”

“For what? There are good days, medium days and bad days.”

“We seem to be getting a long run of one kind.”

“So, for starters let’s fix it.”

He ran it down to, the marina shed, where the tools were. We used the forklift to raise the back end. It took two gallons of sweat apiece to punch the busted pieces out, hacksaw some bar stock clumsy it into place and peen the ends over. We set it down and it sat level, no longer looking like a spavined duck. I stepped on the rear bumper and it didn’t come back up as it should. It oscillated, good proof the shocks were nearly gone, and from the way he sighed I was sorry I’d done it.

I got fresh clothes off the boat, and Tush gave me a motel unit to shower and change in. I was just buttoning the clean shirt when Janine knocked at the door. I let her in. She carried a clinking pitcher of iced tea, and her apologetic pride. She wore a little pink cotton shift and a pale pink lipstick.

She put the pitcher down, put her hand out. “Hello the right way, Travis. Like welcome. Excuse the bad scene.” Her hand was long and brown and slender, and her grip surprisingly strong. She poured the two tall glasses of tea and gave me one and took hers over and sat on the bed. I counted back and realized that this would be the fifth time I had seen her. And, as before, the chemistry was slightly off, as it so often is with the friend who knew the husband before the husband met the wife. It can be a kind of jealousy, I guess, because it is a reminder of years she didn’t share, and of an acceptance of the husband’s friendship, which was in no way her decision. She seemed to relate to me with a flavor of challenge. Prove yourself to me, McGee. But you can’t, McGee, because you aren’t housebroken. Your life isn’t real. You drift around and you have your fun and games. You make my husband feel wistful about the debts he has and the girls he hasn’t. When you come near my nest, just by being here, you remind my man of the gaudy grasshopper years, and somehow you turn me into some kind of guard, or attendant, or burden.

With some of the wives of old friends I have been able to quench that initial antagonism. They soon find out that I am aware of what every single unwed person knows-that the world is always a little out of focus when there is no one who gives the final total damn about whether you live or die. It is the price you pay for being a rambler, and if you don’t read the price tag, you are a dull one indeed.

Jan had obvious warmth. She seemed to have the empathy to realize that I meant her well. But the antagonism wouldn’t melt. She could hide it pretty well. But it was there.

I toasted her with tea, saying, “That was a mere snit, Janine. One of the tizzies you get during the hot months.”

“Thanks,” she said, and smiled. “Tush gobbled and ran. He took over the child taxi service. Come on over in about ten minutes and I’ll have a sort of a lunch.”

She finished the glass of tea, then poured herself another to take with her. As she moved toward the door she shook her head slowly and sadly. “You know, I think it was guilt mostly. Poor darn little Jimmy kid. What’s wrong, Mom? What busted, Mom? Will it run, Mom? So I swatted him a dandy. Much too hard, without thinking. Taking it out on him.” Beyond the wry smile her eyes looked wet. “I don’t know what’s happening to me lately. Oh, how I hate that goddamn car. That goddamn stinking car. How I hate it!”

Two

As I waited, sitting in the full huff of the air conditioner, gulping down the tea, I thought of the little dreamworld called Detroit, fifteen years behind the rest of America, as usual.

Janine had nailed it. People hate their cars. Daddy doesn’t come proudly home with the new one any more, and the family doesn’t come racing out, yelling WOW, and the neighbors don’t come over to admire it. They all look alike, for one thing. So you have to wedge a piece of bright trash atop the aerial to find your own. They may be named after predators, or primitive emotions, or astronomical objects, but in essence they are a big shiny sink down which the money swirls-in insurance, car payments, tags, tolls, tires, repairs.

They give you a chance to sit in helpless rage, beating on the steering wheel in a blare of horns while, a mile away, your flight leaves the airport. They give you a good chance of dying quick, and a better chance of months of agony of torn flesh, smashed guts and splintered bones. Take it to your kindly dealer, and the service people look right through you until you grab one by the arm, and then he says: Come back a week from Tuesday. Make an appointment. Their billions of tons of excreted pollutants wither the leaves on the trees and sicken the livestock. We hate our cars, Detroit. Those of us who can possibly get along without them do so very happily. For those who can’t, if there were an alternate choice, they’d grab it in a minute. We buy them reluctantly and try to make them last, and they are not friendly machines anymore. They are expensive, murderous junk, and they manage to look glassily contemptuous of the people who own them. A car is something that makes you whomp your youngest kid too hard and then feel ashamed of yourself.

I had just been through the bit. My elderly Rolls pickup, Miss Agnes, was as agile as ever, which meant about 40 seconds from a dead stop to sixty miles an hour. And she had the same reluctance to come to a stop once she was humming along. So she and I were slowly becoming a highway hazard, the narrow shaves getting narrower. So I had gone shopping, test driving, and found they all had fantastic acceleration, and they’d all stop on dimes, and they all bored me to hell.

So I went looking for a boat I could use as a car. I would keep Miss Agnes for back roads and the Flush for open waters, and use the Munequita for errands, and if I had to have a car, there was Mr. Hertz trying hard, and Mr. Avis trying harder, and Mr. National hoping they’d run each other into the ground. Anything in Lauderdale that I wanted to buy, and I could lift, if I couldn’t buy it right at Bahia Mar, I could go off in the Munequita and buy it. And it was nice to poot along an urban waterway and hear the distant clashing of fenders, gnashing of bumpers, and the song of the ambulances.

***

Janine and I ate ham and cheese sandwiches at the breakfast bar, and every time Jimmy came stomping by he got a couple of loving pats from his mother. I had forgotten the names of the older two boys and had to pick them up out of her conversation. Johnny and Joey. Joey was the big kid. Six. Johnny was four and a half.

I realized I hadn’t seen Tyler around, the Negro who had been working for them the other times I’d been there, a tall, stringy, cheerful, ageless man, dark saffron in color, and with a scholarly face, plus an uncanny knack of diagnosing the ailments of marine engines. I asked her if it was his day off.

“Oh, Tyler quit us… it must be eight months ago. Tush was very upset about it. You know how good he was around here. But now… it’s just as well, I guess, because we couldn’t afford to pay him anyway, the way things are.”

“On account of the road?”

“And a lot of other things.”

“Such as?”

“I think if Tush wants you to hear the tale of woe, he better be the one to tell you. But I’ll tell you one thing, Travis McGee!” Her eyes narrowed, and she thumped her fist on the formica counter top. “We are not going to be run off this place!”

“Is somebody trying?”

“You’d best talk to Tush about it.”

“Can you get a sitter for tonight?”

“Huh?”

“Wear your pretties and the three of us will go run-abouting into Broward Beach and track down some booze and some meat and come home late, singing all the way”

Her narrow face lighted up. “I would love it!”

And when Tush got back with the other two towheads, he approved. The sitter was handy. Jan explained they had made a special rate on a houseboat rental to a couple. Young kids. About twenty-one years old. They were in the houseboat where the old yellow station wagon was parked. There was a retired couple in the one on the far end. Those were the only two rented at the moment.

“Arlie and Roger Denn, their names are,” Janine explained. “They’re a little on the weird side. Sort of untidy-looking. He makes little funny figurine things and he makes shell jewelry She does handweaving and she paints these insipid little seascapes, and when they have enough, they fill up the station wagon and go around and sell them to gift shops. Sometimes it takes two days, and sometimes it takes a week.”

Arlie Denn arrived for sitter duty right on time, and I could agree about the untidy part. She was a soft, doughy, pallid girl with a long tangle of dark blonde hair, wide, empty, indifferent blue eyes, a little sing-song voice and a mouth that hung open. She wore a man’s white shirt, dirty. Pale blue denim walking shorts, ditto. Bare feet, also dirty. I could see why Janine had fed the kids before we left.

Once I had the little boat away, from the dock, I turned it over to Tush. And with the sun lowering behind us, we skimmed down the long, broad curves of the Shawana River, past the mangrove and the white herons, and out into the big bay where, corny as any postcard, a ketch was moving northward up the Waterway, sun turning the sails orapge, while a ragged flight of pelicans passed diagonally in front of her, heading for the rookery, pumping then soaring, taking the cue from the flight leader.

With his big paw on the twin throttles Tush raised a questioning eyebrow, and I made a shoving motion with the heel of my hand. Janine sat on a life cushion on the transom engine hatch, in her pretty yellow dress, her short black hair snapping in the wind, her face alight with the pleasure of speed and change and the rush of the soft evening air after the heat of the day.

At the city marina Tush slowed and we went up the channel and under the bridge, and along the bay side of the beaches. I took it into a place called Beach Marine, where the man said nobody would mess with it. We walked three blocks to a good place I knew. Thirty feet from the restaurant entrance Jan balanced herself with one hand on Tush’s big shoulder while she changed from the zoris to the highheeled shoes she was carrying in her straw purse.

The drinks were good, the steaks were good, the evening was almost good. Every marriage at one time or another is going to run through some heavy weather. Heavy weather comes in all kinds of flavors. Slowly going broke, slowly losing the whole stake instead of making it like you thought you would-that can erode the happiest of hearts. With the two of them it wasn’t a continuous thing. It just kept cropping up now and again, and clouding the fun and games.

There was just enough said for me to see the shape of the running quarrel, or argument, or regret. Over a year ago, when they had a chance to pull out, when they had a buyer for the place, Jan had wanted to take the loss and get out. Only about a ten-percent loss on what they’d put into it, but that didn’t count all the hours of their brute labor. But he’d insisted it was just a run of bad luck. Nobody was really trying to stack the cards against them. Things would get better. Things always got better. Except when they get worse.

Tush didn’t want to talk about it at all. To him it was like whining. He would let it go just so far, and then he would reach out, grab the conversational ball, and throw it the hell into center field.

But they seemed to have a good time, on average. Maybe a better time than in many months. It was overcast, and there was pink lightning on three sides of us when we went hurrying back across the bay. Tush picked up the markers for me with the handheld spotlight, with its 45,000 candles and its narrow one-mile beam. We got the boat tied up and the first fat drops were speckling the dust as we made it to the motel. The rain roar was coming. The fat sitter went cantering and bobbling off to her rented houseboat.

Maybe three inches came down in the hour we sat at the Bannon’s breakfast bar and drank kitchen whisky and told lies.

Back in my borrowed motel unit, after starting to get ready for bed, I decided I’d better check the Munequita and see if the automatic bilge pump had handled the heavy rain and turned off, as promised. The air was washed clean, and the hungry mosquitoes hadn’t begun to roam. The wind was rain-fresh, and from the west. The boat was fine, and, as I turned, the bulk of Tush Bannon standing in the night startled me.

“I miss the sound of that old hump-back bridge when the wind’s from upriver,” he said. “Not much traffic over it, but the timbers would rumble. You get so you don’t even hear a sound like that, and then you miss it after it’s gone.”

“They put a new one there?”

He sighed. “Not there. Three miles further upriver. That hurts. It lost me most of the business I was getting from the people that live on the other side. TTA wanted it taken out. They wanted the road to it officially abandoned. We went to the Public Hearing and made a lot of noise, but what TTA wants from this county, TTA gets.”

“Tush, if you need any help hanging on here until things pick up…”

“Forget it. Thanks, but forget it. It would just take that much longer to run down the drain.”

“Is it all going to go?”

“Probably.”

“Can you sell?”

“Sell what? Our equity? Go ask the bank what they think our equity is.” He yawned. “Hell, I can always get a pretty good job selling. I can sell pretty good. Trouble is, I hate the work. ‘Night, McGee. And thanks again. It was a good evening. It helped. We needed it bad.”

I left the next morning. And that was in October, and I kept thinking about them and wondering about them, but I didn’t do anything about it. I didn’t run up there again. I wish I had. There are a lot of things in this life I wish I’d done, and a pretty gamey collection of things I wish I hadn’t done-but the things you don’t do leave the remorses,around a little longer somehow.

The last time I saw Tush Bannon alive was the weekend before Christmas, late on a Saturday afternoon. It was by the kind of accident so unlikely, one has the temptation to call it fate. My friend Mick Coseen was awaiting a very important phone call from Madrid, and he had given my phone number aboard the Busted Flush. So when it was delayed, he asked me if I’d take his car and run down to the Miami International and pick up his date, Barni Baker, a Pan-Am stewardess due in from Rio for a Miami layover. As I was the only other one in the group who knew her by sight, it was more efficient for me to go down.

For company I toted Puss Killian along in Mick’s rental convertible. It was a cool, bright day, and the time of year when the gold coast is as empty as it ever gets. Nervous little men who own points in the big beach hotels brood about their fifth mortgages, and the retailers give fervent thanks that the Christmas pressure on the locals makes up for the lack of snowbird money. Puss is a big, stately, random redhead, a master of the put-on and the cop-out, who believes the world is mad, so she is the best of companions if you can keep up with the slants and shifts of her conversation, and merely irritating and confusing if you can’t. A little herd was assembling, and it was shaping up party time.

We put the car in the lot and went in and checked the board, and the man said that 955 was just touching down. After the passengers had been herded off and aimed in the right direction, Barni, with her peer group, came brisk-clicking along, button-big, button-bright, a little candy-package blonde with eyes of widest innocent blue, eyes casting right and left, searching for Mick, finding me as I moved to intercept her. Big smile, gracious and wary acknowledgement of the introduction to Puss. I told her about Mick and his call, about an independent wanting somebody to take over the camera crew because their chief cameraman had racked himself up on a bicycle in Madrid traffic, and Barni Baker said to give her fifteen minutes, and I said we would be up at the bar on top of the International, and she said just fine and went tap-tapping away, moving firm and well in her uniform.

In the big blue windowed room high in the air, the cocktail business was still thin, because of the hour, and a familiar face was working the quiet and elegant bar, and he remembered The Drink, and seemed so pleased with himself in remembering, that we each had one, sitting and watching the deftness with silent and respectful attention. Two ample old-fashioned glasses, side by side, filled to the two thirds line with cracked ice. A big, unmeasured slosh of dry sherry into each glass. Then swiftly, the strainer placed across the top of one and then the other, as with a delicate snap of the wrist he dumped the sherry down the drain. Then fill to the ice level with Plymouth gin, rub the lemon peel around the inside of the rim, pinch some little floating beads of citrus oil on the surface of the drink throw away the peel, present with small tidy bow and flourish to the folk. “Two McGees,” said he.

“Thank you, Harold,” I said.

He had two new customers and when he moved away Puss hoisted her glass, tinked it against mine. “The instant drink,” she said. “Instant stupidity, or instant rape, or instant permission. Me, what I get is this instant numbness around the chops. Here’s to flying quail.”

“To what?”

“To stewardessesl You’re slow today, lover. You’re not relating now and again.”

“It’s just that I was looking at you. Then I don’t hear so well.” And looking by chance beyond her, I saw Tush Bannon sitting at a deuce against the wall, the shoulder bulk hunched toward a still-faced girl who sat across from him. She had long, straight auburn-brown hair, a pout, impassive little face. She seemed to be listening to him with a thoughtful intentness, and she bit at the heavy bulge of her underlip and closed her eyes and slowly shook her head in a prolonged No.

That is not the point where one goes ambling over to the old buddy and whacks him on the shoulder and asks how Janine is. It was a private conversation, so private and intense they seemed to be inside an overturned bowl of thinnest glass, almost visible.

“Know them?” Puss asked.

“Just him.”

“I’d say he’s going to get called out on strikes. He’s lost his cool. The hard sell makes a gal nervous these days.”

“Hey!” said Barni Baker, and put her overnight case down and climbed up onto the stool on my right. She wore a little pale green sleeveless blouse with a high collar, a darker green short skirt, and she had little gold ladybugs in her pierced ears, and she wanted a bourbon sour.

Puss leaned forward and spoke across me, saying, “God, it must be the most marvelous, exciting, romantic thing in the world, jetting around to marvelously romantic places! It’s really living, I bet. Those fascinating pilot types, and mysterious international travelers and all. I guess you realize how jealous of you all we earthbound females are, Barni.”

There was just the slightest narrowing of Barni’s eyes, gone in an instant. She leaned in from her side and said breathlessly, “Oh, yes! It’s all my dreams come true, Miss Killian. To fly to all the lovely places in the world.” She sighed and shook her pretty little head. “But it seems so… so artificial somehow to have to use an airplane, don’t you think? But with my little broom, I can just barely get above the treelops. Have you had better luck?”

“I think having to carry that damned cat makes the difference,” said Puss without hesitation. “And wear that stupid hat and the long skirts.”

“And it’s hard to enjoy the moonlight when you have to keep up that dreary cackling, don’t you think?” Barni asked.

Tush came up behind me and said, “Talk to you a minute, Trav?” He turned and walked away before I could introduce him. The gals did not notice. I excused myself and followed Tush. Barni Baker moved over onto my stool. As I went out into the corridor, before the glass door swung shut, I heard the contralto bark of one of Puss’s better laughs, in counterpoint with a silvery yet somehow earthy yelp from Barni. Knife-fighting among the females can spoil party time, and it was nice to know that this pair would get along.

I went with Tush past the elevators to the empty men’s room.

“I would have said hello, but you had a friend.”

“Friend! With friends like that, who needs, and so forth. She left. Look, I haven’t got much time. I’ve left Jan alone with the kids for three days and I want to get back. She said a year ago there was a pattern in this whole thing and we should get out, but I wouldn’t believe her. Okay. I believe her now. It’s a business deal. A land development deal. And we got in the way.”

He was as big as ever, but his face looked oddly shrunken. His big hands were shaky. His eyes had a starey look, somewhat like the eyes of people who wear glasses when they have their glasses off.

He tried to laugh. “I thought somebody wanted my marina. So I used money I couldn’t spare to get a local lawyer to see what he could find out. Young guy. Steve Besseker. I thought maybe he was the only lawyer in Sunnydale who wouldn’t scare. I told him everything that had happened to me, and he agreed it couldn’t be coincidence. So he nosed around. Nobody wants the marina, Trav. They want to put together a parcel of four hundred and eighty acres. And my little ten acres is right in the middle of all that riverfront land they want.”

“They?”

“All that area is zoned as an industrial park ever since Tech-Tex came in, across the river. Big high lines come in with all the power anybody would need. They’re going to dredge the river and the channel so barges can come in from the Waterway. Some big corporation wants to come in, apparently, and they’d pay a nice price for the land.”

“So who’s putting it together?”

“A local real estate man named Preston LaFrance owns the fifty acres right behind me. Besseker found out LaFrance has an option on the two hundred acres just east of me, at a price of two hundred dollars an acre. It’s owned by an old boy named D. J. Carbee, an early settler. On the other side of me, to the west, there’s two hundred and twenty acres owned by something called Southway Lands, Incorporated. Besseker found out that Southway is one of Gary Santo’s operations. Do you know him?”

“I know of him. Like everybody else in south Florida.” A few years ago Santo had been the dramatic young swinger, with the touch of gold. Now he is the not-so-young swinger, moving in mysterious ways behind many scenes, behind barriers of privacy and money. The name in Miami has the flavor of penthouses, pipelines, South American playmates, mergers and acquisitions, private jets, and well-publicized donations to local drives in the art and culture areas.

“I don’t know the exact relationship between Santo and Preston LaFrance, Trav. Maybe LaFrance is just acting as Santo’s agent. Maybe it’s a joint venture. Besseker heard a rumor that the plant location experts nosed around the area a year and a half ago and recommended that the big company that wants it could go as high as eight hundred thousand! Seventeen hundred dollars an acre. About the time I learned all this, an old friend came out and told me he couldn’t help it, and didn’t want to do it, but he had to pick up the houseboats. I still owed on them. He told me that one of the Shawana County Commissioners, Mr. P. K. Hazzard-they call him Monk Hazzard-had hinted that if my friend repossessed his houseboats, he’d get a favorable ruling on a zoning application. So when I told that to Besseker, he said that Monk Hazzard was Preston LaFrance’s brother-in-law, and there wasn’t any way to prove a thing. He acted funny. He said he had a lot of things coming up and he couldn’t promise to give me any more time. They’d gotten to him too, I guess. He has to make a living there.”

“All just folks,” I said.

He stared at the paper towel rack. He shook his head. “You know my style, Trav. I don’t like all this round-and-about stuff. Direct confrontation. I’d seen Hazzard at a couple of those public hearings where they’d messed me up, like about taking that bridge out, but I hadn’t talked to him. So I tried to make an appointment and he kept stalling, and finally I took Jan with me and we sat there outside his office until finally he saw us. Smallish man, with a long neck and a little bit of a round head, and big goggly eyes behind his thick glasses. Face sort of like a monkey, and a squeaky voice. I said we were citizens and taxpayers and landowners, and he was a public official, and it was his ethical and moral duty to see that the machinery of government wasn’t used to shove me into bankruptcy so his brother-in-law could make a few bucks. You know about humiliation, Trav?”

“I keep getting a little every once in a while.”

“He strutted around and he squeaked and lectured. Folks come down from the north and think it’s easy to, make a living in Florida. Toughest place in the world. He wouldn’t look at me. He looked out the window part of the time, and at Jan’s legs the rest of the time. He said it wasn’t the job of local government to save a man from his own mistakes and bad judgment. He said that the greatest good for the greatest number meant the best possible land use, and maybe a marina wasn’t the best use when you think of the tax base and employment and so on. He said he’d overlook the slur on his honesty because a man in trouble says things he doesn’t mean. He said people just don’t know how much talent it takes to run a small business, and I’d probably be happier in some other line of work. He said that he didn’t know whether Press LaFrance was interested in my ten acres or not, but maybe if I could talk to him he might make me an offer, but I shouldn’t expect too much because the business was in bad shape. He said that people in trouble get to thinking the whole world is against them, and just because certain necessary county improvements were hurting my business, it didn’t mean it was done on purpose. He said thousands of little businesses go broke every year in Florida, and I shouldn’t think I was an exception. So we left and Jan was crying before we got to the car. Humiliation and frustration.”

“You’re bucking the power structure, Tush. You can’t hardly win.”

“I thought I could. When I saw LaFrance, I went along. He gave me the same line, as if they’d rehearsed it. I told him to make an offer. He said he wasn’t interested. He said maybe if it came on the market later on, he might make an offer on a foreclosure price, but he didn’t think it was worth the mortgage balance. A little over sixty thousand, that is. And we put fifty-one thousand in it. So I had to open my big mouth. I leaned across his desk and told him he was never going to get his hands on my property. I’d leave Jan there to run it and go back to sales work, and put every dime I could spare against that mortgage. So they squeezed a little harder.”

“HOW?”

“First they extended that road contract another hundred days. Then they sent out inspectors from the County Bureau of Services, and they condemned my wiring, and the septic tank drain fields, and my well, and lifted my license to do business. With the license gone, the bank said I come up with the whole amount of the mortgage in thirty days or they foreclose. It’s way past due. We did well for a while there, Trav. I didn’t overextend. If they’d left me alone, I had enough business to pay for the boat storage rack and the motel enlargement. We were going to have one of the best little operations in that whole area. I tried to see Commissioner Hazzard again. I waited and a couple of sheriff’s deputies showed up and said I could either leave or get picked up for loitering. So Jan and I talked it over and decided the best thing to do would be lay it all out for Mr. Gary Santo. We decided he was probably big enough so that he didn’t even know what was going on up there, and would tell them to put a stop to it if he did know. We decided that probably LaFrance just got too eager to do a big job for Santo and do it as cheap as possible. I put it all down on paper. I guess that between us we must have rewritten that letter about nine times, and Janine typed it on the old machine in the motel office, and we sent it down here Special Delivery, marked personal.”

“Any answer?”

“Verbal. From that girl I was sitting with. Her name is Mary Smith. I came down and tried to get to Santo. She was as far as I got. She said she’d meet me out here, because she had to catch a flight. Cold as a meat locker, boy. Yes, Mr. Santo had read my letter personally. Yes, he had an informal agreement with Mr. LaFrance. But Mr. LaFrance is not employed by Mr. Santo. Yes, Mr. LaFrance is under considerable pressure by Mr. Santo to produce the results promised insofar as land acquisition is con cerned. Mr. Santo feels no personal responsibility for your plight. He is not running a charitable organization. I wanted to know if I could see him in prison. No. Sorry. But no.”

“Now what?”

“We lose it. That’s all. The grace period is about gone. Januae is taking it hard. It’s a lot of money and work and time down the drain, and nothing to show for it. I… I wish I’d come to you sooner, Tray, before it got to be too late. Maybe you could have figured out some kind of a salvage operation. Your kind of salvage. Squeeze them like they’ve squoze me.” He gave me a strange, puzzled, thoughtful look. “You know, I keep thinking about how I might kill somebody. Hazzard, Santo, LaFrance. Somebody. Anybody. I never thought that way in my life before. I’m not like that.”

He grimaced, whirled, kicked the big metal trash basket full of used paper towels. “Aaaah… Tush!” he yelled, and went blundering out.

I collected Puss and Barni. It was after six thirty when we got back to the Busted Flush. Mick had gotten his phone call, made his deal, and set up a Monday morning flight to Spain via New York. And so, though my mood was somewhat soured, there was song and sport, sunburn and music, beach time and nap time, old and new jokes, girls in the galley, new tapes on the music machine, lipstick and sand and the sometime kiss, and the long heavy look through curl of lashes.

Meyer trooped in and out from time to time with little groups of Meyer’s Irregulars and Partisans. We had a slight overflow from the permanent floating houseparty aboard the Alabama Tiger’s big cruiser.

Though it looked as it always looks-so informal you don’t know who is tied up with whom-there is a protocol. There is a very real in-group unwritten list of things you do and things you don’t do, things you say and things you don’t say. And if you are the kind of person who can’t case the scene and know by instinct what the rules have to be, then the blinds are closed, shades drawn, and the freeze is on. But sometimes, as in the case, of one midday visitor on Sunday, someone is so obtuse the action has to be a little more direct.

This one was named Buster or Buddy or Sonny, one of those names, a big loud thirtyish jollyboy type, office-soft overconfident, far from home on a business trip and out beagling for a broad, confident that he was twice the man any of these beach-bum types could be, ready for a nice little roll and scuffle that he could describe to the other JC’s back in God’s Country, and hide from li’1 0l‘ Pegg,y staying back home there with the kids.

So he came up onto the sun deck and sprawled out next to Barni and told her she was cute as any bug in the wide world, and if she would just let him spread a little more of this here suntan juice on that cute little ol‘ back and this here cute little ol’ tummy, why she’d be making him the happiest paper salesman in the southeast territory.

She sat up and frowned into his dumb, happy, smirking face, and as Mick started to get up to heave Buster-Buddy-Sonny over the rail she waved him back.

“Music down and out,” she said. Puss went to the speakers and turned the volume off.

In the silence Barni said, with a brutal clarity, “Puss? Marilee? Come here, dears. Come take a look at this one.”

They came and sat close to her on her sun pad, all of them staring at Buster-Buddy-Sonny. “The type I was telling you about,” Barni said. “One of the charmers that make life hell for a stewardess.”

“Now, don’t you badmouth me, you purty thing,” he said, grinning.

Puss said, scowling, “I see. Of course. All that fatty look around the middle. And that big voice and those dim, nasty little eyes.”

“You funning me, you gals?” he asked, his smile fading a little.

Marilee tilted her head. “Mmmm. The kind you don’t dare turn your back on when you’re on duty. A real snatch-ass Charlie.”

“They have this crazy dream, I guess,” Barni said, “about how you’re going to fall for all that meaty charm and go back to their hotel or motel and climb right into the sack. Can you imagine?”

Puss shuddered delicately. “My God, darlings, suppose we were call girls or something and we had to sleep with one of those.”

“Eek!” said Marilee.

Buster-Buddy-Sonny stood up and the three lovelies looked blandly up at him.

“Coffee, tea or milk?” asked Barni.

“You lousy little bitch!” said he.

Puss laughed. “See? Just like you said, dear. Typical reaction. Look at how red his face is! Let me guess. He’ll be bald in five years.”

“Four,” said Marilee firmly.

“He needs glasses already and won’t wear them,” said Barni.

“He’s going to grow an enormous belly,” Puss said. “And fall over dead of a massive coronary occlusion when he’s forty-five.”

“And when he falls over, it will bust his cigar and spill his bourbon.”

“And some sorry wretched woman is married to him.

Barni shook her head. “No girl who ever spent any time as a stewardess would ever marry one of those. Look at that mouth on it! Imagine having to actually kiss something like that and pretend you were enjoying itl”

“And look at the dirty fingernails, will you!”

***

When Buster-Buddy-Sonny reappeared in view, he was eighty feet up the dock, walking briskly and not swinging his arms at all.

“You girls need your mouths washed out with gin,” Mick said. “That was naughty.”

“A little friendly castration never hurt anybody,” said Marilee.

“Besides,” said Puss, “we didn’t touch on his really filthy habit. Given half a chance, do you know what that dreary bastard might do?”

Marilee, with a dirty chuckle, leaned close to Puss and whispered to her. Puss shook her head and said, “Congratulations, sweetie. You must be leading a full life. But I meant something much worse than that.”

“Like what?” Barni asked, puzzled.

“If you were ever stupid enough to let him get just a little bit past first base, that utter spook would stare right into your eyes and he would kind of gulp and look like a kicked dog and his voice would quiver and he’d say, ‘Darlin’, I love you.‘”

“He would! He would indeed!” cried Marilee. “The lowest of the low. He’s the perfect type for it. A real rat-fink coward.”

Meyer came out of a long and somber contemplation, hunched like a hirsute Buddha, reached a slow ape arm and picked up his queen’s bishop and plonked it down in what at first glance seemed like an idiotic place, right next to my center pawn. A round little lady who was one of his retinue that week beamed, clapped her hands and rattled off a long comment in German.

“She says you give up now,” said Meyer.

“Never!” said I. I studied and studied and studied. Finally I put a knuckle against my king and tipped the poor fellow over and said, “Beach-walking, anyone?”

But before Puss and I went over, I tried once again to reach Tush Bannon at his Boatel by phone. Once again there was no answer. I felt irritation and depression. And, perhaps, the first little needles of alarm.

Three

I AWAKENED at six thirty Monday morning thinking about Tush and his problem. If I hadn’t awakened with that idea in mind, I could have gone back to sleep. But it snapped my eyelids up and held them there. And big as the bed was, the custom job that had been aboard the Flush when I won her in Palm Beach, Puss Killian had left me in precarious balance on the edge. She was curled, her back to me, and there was a solid and immovable feel to the warm and shapely rear that pressed against the side of my hip. She was deeply recharging all her redheaded batteries, in the deep, slow intake and humming exhalation of sleep of the heaviest and best kind.

So I gave up and got up and showered and came back, and tried to quietly get into a white sports shirt and khaki slacks. But in the muted light as I shoved my arm through the short sleeve I knocked a nightcap glass off the shelf and it smashed on the deck. She rolled, rose up slowly, glowered indignantly at me and settled back down into her sleep, nestling onto her other side, a long, tangled tassle of red hair falling across her cheek and mouth, stirring with each breath.

I heard furtive galley sounds and found Barni Baker in a hip-length yellow robe, her hair in a kerchief, doing something to eggs. Her eyebrows went up when she saw me, and she whispered, “You fool. What’s your excuse? Don’t answer. It’s rhetorical. It’s criminal to have to talk in the morning. I found this here good-looking roe and these here good-looking eggs, and what smells like good Herkimer County cheese, and if you want me to double the portion, just nod.”

I nodded. I poured us some juice. She had the water on. I dumped the Columbian fine grind into the Benz filter paper and slid into the booth. She stared at me as I tried the egg invention. The question was in the lift of a little blonde eyebrow. The response was the circle of thumb and forefinger. When she started to tidy up, I told her to leave it until later, and I carried our coffee seconds in the white porcelain pot topsides, and she brought along the mugs.

The morning was almost cold. I dug a blanket out of the forward locker for her to use as a lap robe over her bare legs, and I put on an old gray cardigan I’ve had for seven hundred years. It could now be classified as a missionary barrel reject.

“I think we could have practiced on the snare drum and tuba down there without bothering those two,” I said.

“Mick needs all the sleep he can get. We’ll have to leave by ten o’clock to make that flight. They’re going to work him to death when he gets to Spain. The picture is behind schedule.”

“When do you have to go back to work?”

“Tuesday noon.”

“So come back.”

“Thanks, but I don’t think so. I think I’ll turn the car in and hole up and try to do some thinking. You make damned good coffee, Trav How good is your advice? Like to the lovelorn?”

“The best. But nobody ever takes it.”

“So here is a hypothetical case about two loners, about this little ball of fluff who is an airline stewardess who is twenty-seven all too soon, and likes to be where the action is, but lately she wonders if the action isn’t getting to be all alike. And there is this very special and talented guy who is a cinematographer, and who is a tough and skeptical thirty-two, who is gun-shy from a sour marriage, and who gets so hooked on his work he can’t remember the stewardess’s name, practically. And they are together maybe five times a year, maybe five days a time, and it is always the rightest of the right. The workingest of ever, even though they keep telling themselves and each other that it is going to wear off any minute now. So last time the camera guy wanted to marry the airline girl and she said hell no, so she thought about it a lot, and this time she brought it up and said okay and he said hell no, because he was hurt because she said no the last time. Can these two darling kids find happiness, McGee?”

“You get married when there is no other conceivable course of action, Barni-baby. You get married because you are both compelled to marry each other.”

“Indeed?”

“Don’t get frosty. I’m not putting down your romance. It will either get inevitable or it won’t. It won’t hang where it is. It will get bigger, or it will start to dry up, and either way it goes will be the right answer at that time. Don’t get pushy.”

After a long silence she said, “Anyway, the coffee is good.” She shrugged. “Change of subject. This Puss Killian of yours. I like her, Trav. I like her a lot. But there’s a funny thing about her. You think she’s telling you all about herself, and afterward you know she hasn’t really told you a thing. What about her, anyway?”

“I wouldn’t know. Don’t look at me like that. I’ve known her for four months. She goes away for a couple of days every few weeks. I could do some digging. But it’s up to her. When and if she wants to talk she can talk. I know that she’s from Seattle, that she isn’t hurting for money, that she’s twenty-four or five, that she shed a husband not long before she showed up here, that I met her on the beach only because she stepped on a sea urchin and was cursing billy blue blazes and ordered me to come over and do something about it right now. I know she has enough energy for three stevedores, that she can eat three pounds of steak at a sitting, that she can hold her booze, and she would walk up and spit in a tiger’s eye if she thought it would liven up the idle hour. And I know that once in a while she goes absolutely dead silent, and all she wants is for you to pretend she isn’t there.”

“She has a very soft look for you, Travis. When you’re not looking at her.”

“Troublemaker!”

I tried again and couldn’t get an answer out of Tush. I had the long distance operator run a check on the phone up there, but it was reported in order. At a little after nine I thought I’d better see if Puss wanted to say her good-bye in person or let me relay it. I went in and sat gently on the bed. She was breathing faster. Her hand and arm were twitching as she dreamed, and she made a little whimpering sound. I gently thumbed the red hair back away from her face and saw a wetness of tears leaking out of the closed lids.

I put my hand on her bare shoulder and gave her a little shake. “Hey,” I said. “It’s not all that bad, is it?”

She opened wide blind eyes and snuffled and said in a little-girl voice, “But they keep saying…” She shook herself like a wet red setter. She focused on me, snuftled again, smiled and said, “Thanks, pal. They were about to cut me off at the pass. Whassa time?”

“Nine fifteen.”

“Hmmm. If I’m reading you, McGee, I admire your thinking. It’s very good. Stay right where you are while I go brush my teeth first.”

“Mick and Barni are taking off in a half hour. I wondered if you wanted to wave bye-bye.”

She gave a leonine stretching yawn. “Yes I do indeed. And if you had any sense at all, you big brown knuckly idiot, you’d have come smirking in here at quarter of, not quarter after. Haste makes waste, and what I have is not to be wasted, lad. So set your little clock for siesta time.”

“At siesta time we’re going to be up in Shawana County visiting some old friends of mine with a problem.”

“Really?” She sat up, holding the sheet to her breasts. “Hmm. Then hustle the lady some coffee while she showers. And set your clock ahead.”

***

“… on location like that,” Mick was saying, “It’s the time lag that drives you nuts, not getting to see rushes, and see how the color values stand up until you’re three days or four past that particular point.”

And from the giant shower stall, above the sound of sloshing like unto that which a small walrus herd might make, the three of us could hear Puss in good voice:

“With ‘er ’ead tooked oonderneath ‘er arm, she ’awnts the bloody tow’r. With ‘er ’ead tooked oonderneath ‘er arm at the midnight hour.’

“So I turned around,” said Barni Baker, “and there was that sweet little old man yanking away at the lever on the cabin door thinking it was how you get into the men’s room, and we’re at twenty-eight thousand feet over the Amazon basin. So I got to him at a dead run and steered him gently where he wanted to go. Then he came out and stared at the cabin door and the big lever and rolled his eyes up and fainted dead away. A passenger helped me get him back to his seat and I gave him smelling salts and then I explained to him how the doors are designed so the pressurization clamps them shut so tightly ten men couldn’t open them. But he just kept shaking his head and saying O Dear God.”

Puss appeared just in time, wearing her big white wooly robe and carrying the half cup of coffee left from what I had taken her as she was stepping into the shower. The ends of her red hair were damp. She gathered little Barni into the big white wooly arms, hugged her, smacked her on the cheek and told her she was all doll. We went out the aft door of the lounge and waved them off, and watched them get into the car and drive away.

“Nice ones,” said Puss. “For such a raunchy old beach bum, you know a lot of nice ones. Like me, for example. I was nice enough to leave our coffee and my cigarettes right beside the bed.” She went over to the phone and switched it off. She went frowning to the record bin, made a thoughtful selection of two and held up the sleeves so I could see what she had picked. George Vari Eps guitar, and the Modern Jazz Quartet on Blues at Carnegie Hall. I took them from her, put them on the changer, fixed the volume where she said she liked it.

“Coming, dear?” she said with an excessive primness, and just inside the door of the master stateroom I had to step over the wooly whiteness of the robe on the deck just beyond the sill.

***

The day had warmed up. The Munequita had run handsomely, with a deep drone speaking of a lot more power in reserve. When we had anchored for lunch in Fort Worth, well away from the channel, while we ate the thick roast beef and raw onion sandwiches and shared an icy bottle of dry red supermarket wine, I briefed her on Tush, on how long I had known him, and on Janine and what Tush had told me of his problems.

“No answer at all on the phone?”

“Not a thing.”

“Seems odd.”

“Seems very damned odd, Puss. The thing is, he isn’t a devious guy. And he’s caught in the middle in a very devious situation, with large money hanging on it, and old Tush may try to bull his way through, and he could get hurt twice as bad.”

When we went up the Shawana River, there was a faint, drifting acrid stink. Our eyes watered. When I came around the last bend, I was shocked at the deserted look of the place. The cheerful white houseboats were all gone. All but one storage rack on the in-and-out boat shelter were empty, and the remaining boat was, at a hundred feet, worth perhaps fifty dollars, outboard motor and all. The moored boats were gone, except for a skiff so full of water there were only inches of freeboard left, and an old cruiser hulk that had sunk in the shallows. The forklift truck was gone.

I tied up and we went ashore. Near the cities, all the old highways of America pass businesses that have gone broke. End of the dream. The spoor of a broken marriage can be kept in a couple of cartons on a shelf in the garage. Broken lives can be tucked neatly away in graves and jails and sanitariums. But the dead business in a sub-marginal commercial strip stays right there, ugly and- moldering away, the frantic advertising signs of the final convulsive effort fading and tattering over the weeds. For every one of them was the big dream, the gala opening, the last dusting and arranging before the doors opened. “We’re going to make it big, honey. Real big.” Then there is the slow slide into doubt, into confusion, and into the terminal despair. “So we were going to make it real big, were we? Ha!”

It was a silent place. The acrid river slid by. Dry fronds rattled in the breeze. A sign creaked.

Even the two marine gas pumps were gone. I went to the marina shed. The tools were gone. We asked each other questions in low, graveyard voices. There was a shiny new hasp and padlock on the marina building, along with a printed notification from the County Sheriff’s Department. There was another on the motel office. I could find no note fastened to anything that told how to get in touch with the Bannons.

“Now what?” Puss asked.

“There’s no neighbors, nobody here to ask. I suppose we could run upriver until we come to something.”

She stared around. “Gives me the spooks,” she said. We’d just reached the dock when I heard a car coming. We went back around in front and saw the phone company service truck lurching over the torn-up road. As I moved to wave him down, he turned in and stopped and got out and stared at us as we approached. He looked to be about fifty, a squatty, leathery man wearing silver-rimmed glasses.

“I’d like to find Mr. Bannon,” I said.

“Why?” It was a very flat and very abrupt question, and there was something about the flavor of it that made me wary. So I reached into the old bag of tired tricks and pulled out the one labeled Real Cordial.

“Well, it’s like this. Quite a while back, I can’t remember how many weeks, I had a bilge pump acting up, and I stopped in here and Bannon pulled it and stuck in a loaner, the idea being he’d fix it if he could or sell me the loaner if he couldn’t, but I didn’t get back as soon as I thought. Now it looks like he’s gone out of business or moved someplace else.”

“You could say that. Yes. It surely does. Let me make the disconnect and check in first, then maybe I can tell you what happened.”

He donned harness and spurs with practiced ease and walked up the pole. He made his service disconnect at the lead-in terminals, clipped his handset onto the wires and called in. We could hear his voice but not what he was saying. He came down fast, showing off a little. He took off his gear and tossed it into the truck.

“Well, sir,” he said, “you got here yesterday morning, you’d had some excitement for sure. You’da found Bannon right here. Promised myself I’d take a look and see where it was they found him. Maybe you’d like to come take a look mister. Maybe the young lady should kind of wait on us.”

But Puss tagged along. He went around in back and looked around, grunted and went over to a sturdy and rusty tripod made of heavy pipe, standing about fifteen feet tall. There was a manual winch with a crank, as rusty as the pipe, and a wire cable that went from the winch drum up through a pulley at the top of the tripod. A big, heavy old marine diesel, cannibalized down to little more than the ponderous block hung from the taut cable about five feet off the ground.

The phone man sat on his heels and shook his head and said, “Sure a terrible way for a man to do himself. Look there! There’s still hair and mess on the bottom side a that engine.”

I had thought the stain on the packed oily dirt was merely more oil. Puss went trotting busily away about fifty feet. She stopped and bent forward and coughed shallowly a few times, then straightened up and went over and sat on a sawhorse with her back to us.

“What Freddy said this Bannon done-Freddy is one of Sheriff Bunny Burgoon’s deputies and Freddy is the one that found him Sunday morning-this Bannon must have cranked that block up as high as he could get it, and then he fastened a piece of stove wire to that ratchet there on the side of the drum and lay out on his back right under that thing and give the wire a yank. The wire was still wound around his hand. Mashed him something terrible they say.” He stood up, spat. “Well, you got to say one thing. It was quick and it was for certain. And I guess the poor fella didn’t have much to live for.”

“Because he went broke?”

“Maybe I don’t have the straight of it. You know how people get to talking and every time they tell something, it comes out different. What I hear, he went off to try to raise some money fast to save the business. So when they come out here Friday with all the eviction papers and bankrupt papers and so on, just his missus is here with the youngest. She wanted them to hold off until Bannon got back but till the legal steps had been took care of in proper order, and there was just no choice about it. They waited about an hour for her to pack up personal Stuff and they helped her load the car. They say she was crying but she wasn’t carrying on. She was crying without making any noise about it. She picked up the other two kids from school, and she left off Bannon’s suitcase and a note from her to him with the Sherf, and she just took off. She must have had some travel money saved out, because they say that yesterday after they toted Bannon’s body back to Ingledine’s Funeral Home, Sherf Burgoon opened that note to see where he could get in touch with her to tell her about her husband, but all it said was she was going to go stay with some girl’s first name for a while, and Bannon would have known the whole name, but nobody else does.”

He spat again and started to move toward his truck. I walked slowly with him and said, “He seemed like a bright, pleasant guy. He didn’t seem like the kind who’d go broke. But you never can tell. Sometime it’s booze, or the dog track, or other women.”

He got into the truck and stared out at me. “Not this time. They run this boy off. He was in the way, and they run him off. But you didn’t hear me say that, mister.”

“I didn’t hear you, friend.”

He headed back over the lumpy road. I walked around to where Puss still sat on the sawhorse. She looked up at me.

With a small frown she said, “My heart bled for you the way you went reeling around in shock, McGee. You really took it hard. Your dear old buddy has gone to the big marina in the sky. The hard way. Came to get your bilge pump! God’s sake, Travis!”

I sat on my heels and squinted up at her. Dark red hair and disapproval, outlined against a blue December sky.

“Win a few, lose a few, honey,” I said.

“What are you?” she asked.

I stood up and put my hands on her upper arms, near the shoulders and plucked her up off the saw horse and held her. Maybe I was smiling at her. I wouldn’t know. What I was saying seemed to come from a strange direction, as if I were standing several feet behind myself. I said some nonsense about smelling these things out, about sensing the quickest way to open people up, and so you do it, because if you don’t, then maybe you miss one little piece of something you should know, and then you go join the long long line of the dead ones, because you were careless.

“And,” I heard myself say, “Tush killed himself but not with that damned engine block. He killed himself with something he said, or something he did, and he didn’t know he was killing himself. Maybe he didn’t listen very good, or catch on soon enough. I listen very good. I catch on. And when I add up this tab and name the price, I’m going to look at some nice gray skin, honey. Gray and pale, oily and guilty as hell, and some eyes shifting around looking for some way out of it. But every damned door will be nailed shut.”

I came out of it and realized she was making little hiccupy sobs and looking down and to the side, and her cheeks were wet, and she was saying, “Please, please.”

I released her and turned on my heel and walked away from her. I went a little way up the road. I leaned against the trunk of an Australian pine and emptied my lungs a few times. A jay yammered at me. There were tree toads in a swamp somewhere nearby. Puss came walking very slowly up the road. She came over to me and with a quick, shy smile leaned her face into my neck and chest.

“Sorry” she whispered.

“For nothing?”

She exhaled. “I don’t know. I asked you what you were. Maybe I found out, sort of.”

“Whatever it is, I don’t let it show, Puss. Ten more minutes and I would have been kindly Trav forevermore.”

She pushed herself a few inches away and looked up at me. “Just smile with your eyes like kindly ol‘ McGee, dear, to kind of erase that other… that other look.”

“Was it that bad?”

“They could bottle it and use it to poison pit vipers.”

“Okay now?”

She nodded. “Sure.” Her eyes were a sherry brown, almost a tan, and in that good light under the tree I could see the area right around the pupil, a corona of green. “He was a special guy?”

“He was that.”

“But can’t even a special guy… give up?”

“Maybe, but if that one ever had, it wouldn’t have been like that.”

We walked back toward the dead marina, my arm around her strong waist. “Call it enemy country,” I explained. “He’s dead, and it solves some problems for some people. And they’ll want to forget all about it as fast as they can, and they won’t know anything about anything.”

I got the camera off the boat, a battered old Retina C-III, and put in a roll of Plus X. I hand-cranked the block as high as it would go before it wedged against the tripod poles. I got wire and pliers out of the toolbox aboard, fastened wire to the ratchet stop. I took pictures as I went along. When I yanked the wire, the great weight came down to thud against the hard dirt with a shock I could feel in the soles of my feet, while the drum clattered and the cable rasped through the rusty pulley. I craned it up and left it the way it had been.

She watched, and had the grace not to ask why. I didn’t rinse my hands in the river. I waited until we were well out into the bay.

Then I put it at dead slow, right at 700 rpm, and told her to head down the channel. I climbed out onto the forward bow shell and leaned back against the port windshield.

One approach: Go storming into Sunnydale, promising stink and investigations and general turmoil.

Or: Find some kind of cover story that might open up some mouths. See who can be conned. See who can be turned against whom.

Or: Go in fast and quietly and come out with one Preston LaFrance and take him to a nice quiet place and open him up.

Or: What if some mysterious buyer picked up the Bannon property? Then the boys couldn’t put the whole two sections together. And that might bring them out of the woodwork.

The last had the right flavor, if it could be worked. But first there had to be a first thing, and it had to be poor damned Janine. And if I couldn’t get to her before the Sherf told her the bad news, I could at (east arrive shortly thereafter.

So I hopped down and took the wheel and ran at lrlgh cruise to Broward Beach and tied up at the city rnarina. I left Puss at the drugstore counter and shut myself into a booth and made a person-to-person credit card call to Sheriff Bunny Burgoon in Sunnydale. I yapped at him in the excited tones of a writer-wash commercial and told him that CBS news had researched him and discovered he was a truly fine law officer, and had they located Mrs. Bannon yet, and her three kids, and it was a great human interest story and we might do a little feature.

“Sure,” he said. “Just before Christmas and all that. Yeh. Locate her? Well, not exactly yet, but we’re doing everything that any human person could expect or ask for, and that’s the truth. We got aholt of her folks in Milwaukee, and they’re all upset as any human person could imagine, but they haven’t heard a word from her, and they don’t know any friend of hers of the name of Connie. Now if it was to go on national television, she’d turn up right off, I imagine. The name is Sheriff Hadley-that’s an e -y, Burgoon, B-u-r-g-o-o-n. And I’ve been elected here three times as Sherf of Shawana County and-”

“Could you read me the note she left her husband?”

“Did you get the name wrote down with the right spelling?”

“I did, Sheriff.”

“It’s personal-like, but I see no harm in reading it to you, as any human person could tell it’s a public service to find that poor lady. Just a minute. Let me see now. Here it is. It goes like this. ‘Dear Tush, I’m sorry. This last thing was just the bitter end. Somehow it made me so ashamed. The boys are so upset and confused. I had to handle it alone because you weren’t there, and it took the very last bit of strength and courage I had. Don’t be angry with me. I’m worn out. I’m going to go stay with Connie for a while. I’m leaving this note and a suitcase with the things you’ll probably need with the Sheriff. When you get the details and all straightened out, please phone me. Don’t come charging up here, because I might not be ready to see you yet. I have some thinking to do, and then we have a lot of talking to do, about what’s going to happen to you and me. Don’t worry about me or the boys. We’ll be fine. It was all so ugly, the way it happened. I suppose those men tried to be nice, and it wasn’t their fault, but it was a terrible thing. Jan.”

“I certainly appreciate your cooperation, Sheriff. We’ll be in touch. Yes, sir, we’ll stay in close touch with developments.”

I went back to the counter. Puss was sitting on the stool sipping her cola drink, eyes a bit narrow, and on her lips a dangerous little smile. A plump man with a vulgar shirt and a hairline mustache sat two stools away, blushing furiously. He tried to sip his coffee with trembling hand and spilled a dollop of it into his saucer.

“Darling!” she cried, turning toward me, her voice of such a penetrating clarity it reached all the way back to the remedies for iron-poor blood. “This dear little fat fellow wanted to show me all the sights. What’s your name, dear little fat fellow?”

He clapped two bits onto the counter top. “GeeeSUSS!” he muttered. He fled out of the cool into the midafternoon sunlight.

She gazed somberly toward the door. “Seems to have turned chicken. Have you noticed the progressive emasculation of the American male, Travis? Present company excluded, of course.”

She finished the soft drink with a rattling slurp amid the cracked ice, cheeks sucked hollow, and stood up in her sky-blue linen boat shorts, and her basque shirt, shook her hair back and smiled benignly up at me. “I counted myself in,” she said in a low voice.

“How’s that?”

“Since we left the river, I’ve felt like a bulky package you were tired of carrying around, and you were looking for a coin locker. I never knew Tush. I never met Janine. But I have a very hard nose, dear, and I don’t scare, and I want to share.”

“I’ll give it some thought.”

“You do that.”

Four

I HAD to give a lot of thought right then and there to getting a good quick line on Connie. Janine’s parents didn’t know her. But somebody who had been close to the Bannons would know who she might be. I had to dig through the fragments of old memories and piece something together. I tried walking and thinking, Puss quietly, patiently trudging along beside me.

I found a dark little cocktail lounge, and a dark table in a corner. They had one cocktail waitress, and the small percentage of her that was not bare was cruelly bound and laced into the compulsory bunnyfication of tiny waist, improbable uplift and separation of breast, revelation of cleavages front and rear. She had a tired, pretty, sour little face, a listless manner. When she left with the order, Puss clamped her hand on my arm and stared after her, saying, “Santa Claus is coming to town.”

They had their Christmas decoration up. It was a lush plastic spray of mistletoe, affixed exactly where the nubile legions of the Heffner Empire affix their fluffy white bunny tails. It expressed such a perfect comment on commercialized Christmas, it gave Puss a case of gasping chuckles that turned into hiccups, which were soon quelled by her big swallows from the steinkrug of dark beer on draft.

I shoved my memory back to the drinks at Tush and Janine’s breakfast bar two months earlier, when we had played what happened to who. And I finally came up with Kip Schroeder, the quarterback who, after seven years of high school ball, New Jersey AllState, and five years of college ball, a couple of AllAmerican mentions, had been held together with wire, tape and rivets. He had been obsoleted by giant strides in nutrition. He was structured like a fireplug, and every year the line he had to see over was higher and wider. But where the hell was he? He and his wife, whose name I couldn’t remember, had been best man and matron of honor at the wedding of Tush and Jan. I had to have a football buff, one of those nuts who know every statistic and what happened to everybody.

I tried the bald bartender, breaking up his murmured conversation with the mistletoe lass. His frown wrinkled the naked skull almost all the way up to the crown of his head.

“I think maybe Bernie Cohn. He does the sports on WBRO-TV It ought to be a good time to catch him there at the station. Janie, look up the number of the gennaman, and plug the phone in over there, huh?”

It was a little pink phone with a lighted dial. She had to use a lighter to find the baseboard phone connection. She started to tell me the number, then shrugged and dialed it herself and handed me the phone.

I got the switchboard and then I got Bernie, who said, “Yes, yes, yes?” with irritable impatience until I told him my question. Then he sounded pleased. “Let me see now. Schroeder. Schroeder. I’m not drawing a blank buddy. You can put odds on that. I’m running through the career, up to the last thing I heard. Okay. Here it is. Two years ago Kip was athletic director, Oak Valley School, and that’s in… just a minute… Nutley, New Jersey. Right?”

“Sure appreciate it.”

“Did I win you a bet, fella? Express your appreciation by telling all your friends to watch the Bernie Cohn show at six fifteen every weekday on your Big Voice of the Big Bay, WBRO-TV Right?”

Listless Janie came over when I signaled her, and I ordered two more draft and asked her if I could make a credit card call on the phone. When she came back with the beers, she said, “He says okay if I stand here while you make the call. You know. On account of any long distance comes in on the bill, it’s a deduct on him.”

Puss reached out with a foot, hooked a chair over from the nearby table and said, “Rest your mistletoe, honey.”

With her first smile, the waitress sat down, saying, “My feet are like sore teeth, honest to God. I worked waitress three years and no trouble, but in this costume the owner says high heels, and now after three months I hurt all over, honest to God.”

I got through to area information on my station to station call for anyone at the phone listed in Nutley for Kip Schroeder. They didn’t have one. They had a K. D. Schroeder. I tried that and got a Mrs. Schroeder, and she said yes, she was Kip’s wife, Alice. Kip was out.

I said I had met her once, and she pretended politely that she remembered me perfectly. I was glad she sounded so bright. I said I was trying to locate a very good friend of Jan Bannon, named Connie.

“Connie, Connie. Can you hold a minute while I get my Christmas card list? It’s laid out even, but we haven’t gotten started on it yet.”

She came back and said, “I think this is who you want. Connie Alvarez. It used to be Tom and Connie, and he died. I think she was one of Jan’s teachers in school. Here’s the address I’ve got for her. To-Co Groves. That’s capital To, capital Co, with a hyphen. Route Two, Frostproof, Florida. Frostproof! And you should see the sleet coming down here today. It’s worth your life to drive.”

I thanked her and told her to give Kip my best, asked her how he was doing. She said he’d had two good seasons in a row and he was happy as a clam. So she asked how Tush and Jan were. What can you say? I said that the last time I’d seen the two of them, they were fine. It wasn’t a lie. She said that if I saw them soon again, to tell Janine she owed her a letter and she’d write right after the holidays for sure.

I didn’t want to make the next call from there, not with tired Janie listening. So I paid her, and added on top of the tip a little balm for sore feet.

Back toward the city marina, toward the drugstore, and I briefed Puss en route. “She didn’t need much travel money to get there. Less than two hundred miles, I’d guess.”

In the drugstore booth, on the off chance that Jan might answer, I made the call person to-person to Mrs. Alvarez. I heard a maid answer the operator and say she would get Mrs. Alvarez. It was at least two minutes before Connie Alvarez answered, sounding out of breath.

“Yes?”

“Is Jan staying there with you?”

“… I… I’m afraid I’m wouldn’t be interested, thank you.”

“Look, Mrs. Alvarez. This isn’t Tush.”

“Then, perhaps you could explain more about it, Mr. Williams.”

“I get the message. She can hear your end of it Now, listen very carefully. Please. Don’t let her answer any phone calls, and keep her away from the newspapers and the radio and the television.”

“I suppose there would be some reason for that.”

“My name is Travis McGee. I’m going to try to get there this evening. And it might be a good idea if you could have a damned good tranquilizer handy. I’m an old friend of Tush’s. I wasn’t going to tell you this if you sounded bird-brained, Connie. But you sound solid. Tush is dead. And it was messy.”

“In that case, Mr. Williams, I might be willing to listen. Perhaps if you could come out this evening? There’s loads of room here. We can put you up, and it will give us a good chance to talk business. I know a little bit about the sort of proposition you mention, I mean, the background data. I’ll look forward to seeing you. By the way, we’re eight miles northeast of Frostproof. Go north out of town on US Twenty-seven and turn right on State Road Six thirty, and we’re about five miles from the corner on your left. I’ll turn the gate lights on at dark.”

And then came the fat argument with Puss Killian as we walked back to the city marina. At last she said, “Old buddy, you are leaving out one ingredient. You say she was a steady one. Great. She can cope. So maybe she is one of those who can cope with all the mechanics of a situation. A real administrator. But maybe she can’t hold people. Maybe it makes her feel itchy to try to hold somebody and hug somebody and rock somebody. I have this rusty nail for a tongue, and I kick where it is going to hurt the most, but I am a warm broad, like in the puppy sense of touching and being touched. Contact with flesh. That’s where the messages of the heart are, McGee.

Not in words, because words are just a kind of conventional code, and they get blurred, because any word doesn’t mean just the same to any two people. And I am very familiar with that old spook with the scythe and the graveyard breath. And I do not care to be sent back to Lauderdamndale to sit around in that sexpot houseboat and crack my knuckles. Think of me as a kind of tall poultice. Or a miracle drug. Part of your kit. And if the lady administrator can supply the same item, I will not enter a competition. I will stay the hell out of the way. But this is women’s work, and two are better than one, and it is going to be ten times worse for her because she ran for cover, and there will be guilt up to here.“

So I scribbled her a list of my overnight needs and sent her off to a shopping plaza winking and glittering in the distance. I checked the marina office and got the name and location of a place that could lift the Munequita out and tractor it over and put it on a shelf. He phoned for me and said they had space. I ran her over and took out all the stuff I did not want to leave aboard. A boat you can check as if it were a 4,300-pound suitcase is a vast convenience for people who never know what they’ll be doing tomorrow.

I watched them hose down the hull and put Little Doll tenderly on her shelf, and soon a rental sedan arrived for me, tow-barring the little three-wheeled bug that would get the delivery man back to the rental headquarters. I accomplished the red tape on car and boat, locked the gear in the trunk of the maroon two-door, and got back to the cavelike cocktail bar ten minutes before Puss came striding in with a new genuine imitation red alligator hatbox, a blue canvas zipper bag advertising an obscure airline, two suitboxes and a big shopping bag full of smaller parcels.

By five thirty we were making good time up State 710, aimed like a chalk line at the town of Okeechobee, and Puss was in the back seat, happily unwrapping packages, admiring her own good taste, and packing the items in the oversized hatbox. At last she came clambering over the back of her bucket seat, plumped herself down, latched her belt, lit her cigarette and said, “Now about a few little things aboard the Busted Flush, friend. Like the little ding-dong when anybody steps aboard. Like the way it is wired for sound, not the pretty music, but for tape pickup. And how about that cozy little headboard compartment with loaded weapon therein? Also, you have some very interesting areas that look as if you’d have a nice collection of purple hearts, if you got them in a war. And how about the way you go shambling mildly about, kind of sleepily relaxed, beaming at your friends and buddies, kind of slow, rawboned, awkward-like, and you were ten feet from Marilee Saturday night when she stepped on that ice cube on the sun deck and was going to pitch headfirst right off the top of that ladderway, and in some fantastic way you got there and hooked an arm around her waist and yanked her right out of the air? More? How about the lightning change of personality for the benefit of the phone man with the old-timey glasses, the way you turned into a touristy goof so completely I didn’t even feel as if I knew you? How about this con you almost worked on me about being retired. How about the way I tried to pump Meyer about you, and he showed speed and footwork like you couldn’t believe? How about that kind of grim professional bit with the camera and the hoist and the wire and all, so totally concentrated I could have been walking around on my hands with a rose in my teeth without getting a glance from you? How about my gnawing little suspicion that you aren’t going up to Frostproof to comfort this Janine, but to go pry information out of her? Enemy country, you said. Maybe for you the whole world is enemy country McGee. But somehow it would sort of fit one lousy guess, which would be a batch of official cars screaming up and the boys in blue jumping out, and a big loudspeaker yammering for you to come out quietly or they lob in the tear gas.”

“You are a warm broad. You are a warm nosey broad.”

“So I have this eccentricity, maybe. You know, a social flaw. Some kind of insecurity reaction or something. I started sleeping with somebody and I get this terrible curiosity about them.”

“So? I could have the same trouble too. But I haven’t asked questions. Or tried to find out things I could find out, without much trouble, probably”

She was quiet for a long time. I glanced at her. Her hands were folded in her lap and she was biting at sucked-in lips.

“Fair is fair,” she said. “When it’s time to tell you, I will tell you. Not in words, but in writing, so that I get it down exactly right. Not that it is so earthshattering or anything. But for now, for reasons I think are pretty good reasons, I want to keep it to myself. Fair being fair, if you have good reasons, okay, I ask no more.”

So I told her the retirement was accurate, except I am taking it in little hunks whenever I can afford it. “It’s a tricky, complex, indifferent society, Puss. It’s a loophole world. And there are a lot of clever animals who know how to reach through the loopholes and pick the pockets of the unsuspecting. Carefully done, the guy who has been plucked clean has no way of getting it back. There are a thousand perfectly legal acts that can be immoral, or amoral, acts. Then the law officers have no basis of action. Attorneys can’t help. The pigeon might just as well have dropped his wallet into a river full of crocodiles. He knows right where it is. And all he can do is stand on the muddy shore and wring his hands. So I’m the salvage expert. And I’ve ”own a lot of crocodiles. So I make a deal with him. I dive down, bring it up, and split it with him, fifty-fifty. When a man knows his expectation of recovery is zero, recovering half is very attractive. If I don’t make it, I’m out expenses:“

“Or you are a dainty dish for the crocs, man.”

“So far I’ve been indigestible. Now Janine Bannon is a client. She doesn’t know it yet. Tush would have been. A client in the classic sense of the legal squeeze. I don’t understand the killing. They didn’t need that. I know one thing. I have to watch myself on this one. Strangers make the best clients. Then -I can play the odds and stay cold. Here I’m too emotionally hung up. I’m too angry, too sick at heart. A dirty, senseless act. So I have to watch it.”

She pondered it for a time. “Just one thing that bothers me, darling. How do you find… enough new clients?”

I told her how I had found the last one, by combing very carefully through all the local items in the fat Sunday edition of a Miami paper. Of the items I marked that looked interesting, one was an apologetic announcement from a stamp collector’s club that Mr. So-and-So, a very long and complicated Greek name, the well-known restauranteur had, at the last minute, decided to withdraw from the exhibition and not show his complete and extremely valuable collection of Greek postage stamps, which had included the famous 1857 Dusty Rose, which had brought $21,000 at a New York auction house in 1954:

I’d called an officer of the Philatelic Society who said the old gentleman was not mad at anybody, that he took a lot of pleasure in exhibiting his collection and having it admired, and that though he had sounded upset, he had not given any reason for withdrawing.

It had taken a little more research to find out what company insured the collection. An agent who said he had never met the old gentleman gave me his card. So I took his card and his name and presented myself to the old gentleman and said we wished, to make a new appraisal of the collection. He stalled. The collection was in the vault at the bank. He was very busy. Some other time. So I said we had reason to believe he had disposed of some of the collection.

He broke down. He had been remounting the collection under glass for the exhibition. He had to leave his home for a doctor’s appointment. He returned. Twenty-two of the most valuable stamps, including the Dusty Rose, were missing.

“So he was the patriarch of a big family, all very close, all sensitive to scandal, and his wife had died, and he had been remarried for two years to something of the same coloring, general impact and impressive dimension of the late Jayne Mansfield, a lassy big enough to make two of the old boy, and he was so certain she had clouted his valuable toys he’d been afraid to make a report to the cops or claim insurance. So I followed the lady to an afternoon assignation with the hotel beachboy who’d blackmailed her into heisting the stamps, and after I got through shaking him up and convincing him that the old gentleman had arranged to have her last two male chums dropped into the Florida Straits wired to old truck parts, he produced eleven stamps, including the gem of the collection, and was so eager to explain where and how he had fenced the other eleven he was letting off a fine spray of spit. I helped him pack, and put him on a bus and waved good-bye and had a nice little talk with the big blonde about how I had just barely managed to talk two tough old Greek pals of her husband’s from hiring local talent to write a little warning with a hot wire across her two most obvious endowments. A cop friend shook the missing items out of the fence, and I told the old man it hadn’t been his wife at all, and he had every reason to trust her. So he hopped around and sang and chuckled and we went to the bank and he gave me thirty thousand cash, a generous estimate of half the value, and he gave me a note that gives me free meals for life in the best Greek restaurants in four states, and the whole thing took five days, and I went right back to my retirement, and maybe three weeks later one Puss Killian came along and enriched it considerable.”

“Pull over,” she ordered. I found a place where there was room to park on the grass between the two-lane road and the canal. She unsnapped the seat belt, lunged expansively over, a big hug, a big kiss from a big girl whose eyes danced and sparkled in the fading daylight.

“Drive on,” she said, snapping the belt. I did. “Whatever it was for, it was nice.”

“Well, this is a very long day, and it was partly for way way back, having that coffee-with. And it was for getting so damned scarey furious-because maybe there isn’t much real anger around any more. It’s for appreciating mistletoe. It’s mostly for being what you are, doing the nutty things you do, and letting me for once be… Sancho Panza.”

“Please! Sancha.”

“Of course.”

Five

THE ENTRANCE gate was very wide, very high, with a floodlight shining on the clean white paint and on the sign that hung from chains from the top of the arch. To-Co Groves, Inc.

It was nine fifteen. We had stopped in Okeechobee for a hasty meal of some fresh bass, fried in corn meal and bacon fat. I turned into the graveled drive and `a figure stepped out of the shadows into the headlights, raising a casual hand to stop me. Ranch hat, faded blue denim work jacket and jeans. She came to my side of the car and said, “McGee? I’m Connie Alvarez.”

I got out, leaving the door open, shook hands, introduced Puss. Connie leaned in and shook her hand, then straightened again. In the glow of the courtesy light I had my first good look at her. A strong-looking woman, chunky, with good shoulders, a weathered face, no makeup, very lovely dark longlashed eyes.

“You would have helped them if they’d hollered, McGee?”

“All I could.”

“Me too. Pride. Their lousy, stiff-necked pride. How many good people has pride killed? She’s up there at the house thinking the roof has fallen in on her. She doesn’t know it’s the roof and the chimney and the whole damn sky, and it is a lousy time to have to tell her. What happened?”

“He was on his back on the ground and about five hundred pounds of scrap iron dropped on him from ten feet in the air. Head and chest, I’d imagine. I haven’t seen him, and probably wouldn’t know who I was seeing if I did.”

“Jesus Christ, man, you don’t tiptoe around things, do you?”

“Do you want me to?”

“I think already you know me better than that. Are they trying to call it an accident?”

“Suicide. He’s supposed to have run a wire to the ratchet stop, lay down and yanked it loose. They found it still fastened and wound around his hand. Yesterday morning.”

Suddenly her brown strong fingers locked onto my wrist. “Oh my dear God! Had he gotten the note she left him?”

“No.”

I heard the depth of her sigh. “That could have done it. That could have been the one thing that could have made him do it. I think I got to know him that well. I think I know how much Jan meant to that poor big sweet guy.”

“Not even that, Connie. At least not that way. He was murdered. But we’ve got to swallow the suicide story. All of us. We’ve got to act as if we believed it.”

“Why?”

“Why do you think?”

“I think why use amateur talent when you can hire professionals.”

“Rest your mind, Mrs. A.”

“We’ll talk after we get this sad thing done.” She leaned abruptly into the car again. “You, girl. Do you dither? Do you bleat and snuffle and carry on?”

“Go grow yourself an orange, lady.”

She threw her head back and gave a single bark of humorless laughter. “Maybe you’ll both do.” She pulled my seat back forward and scrambled into the back seat, rustling the discarded wrapping paper. “Let’s go, McGee. The gate light turns off up at the house.”

I wasn’t prepared for a full half mile of drive, nor for the house at the end of it, big and long and low, with upswept drama of roof lines, something by Frank Lloyd Wright out of Holiday Inns. She had me park around at the side. “I’ll have my people take care of the car and bring your gear in. You people use one bedroom or two.”

“Two, please,” said Puss.

“Well, at least the thundering herd is sacked out by now. Her three and my two.” She looked up at the stars. And we squared our shoulders and went in to drop the sky down upon Janine, to change the shape of her world and the shape of her heart forever.

It was one thirty in the morning when Puss came walking slowly into the big living room, yawning. Connie and I had been sitting for a long time in the dark leather chairs near a small crackling of fat pine in the big fireplace of coquina rock. We’d done a lot of talking.

“I think she’s good until midmorning anyway,” Puss said.

“But Maria better sit there by her just in case.”

“She’s there, Connie. If Jan wakes up, she’ll wake us up. But it isn’t likely.”

Puss went over to the little bar in the corner, put two cubes in a squat glass, poured some brandy over them and then came over and shoved the footstool closer to me, sat on it and leaned her head against the side of my knee and yawned again. “She was trying to be so damn brave,” Puss said. “She wouldn’t let go, and she wouldn’t let go, and then she did. And that’s the best thing. Did you get the calls through, Connie?”

“I got that Sheriff and told him she knew and she was resting, and I’d call him back tomorrow and let him know what she’s going to do next. I got her people and got them calmed down. She’ll have to phone them tomorrow. And the boys have to be told.”

“Jan said not to tell them,” Puss said. “She said it’s her job. She keeps asking how we can be sure he never got her note.”

Connie swirled the ice in her drink and then slugged it down. “Know what I can’t forget? Can’t and never will? Five years and it’s still so clear in my mind. Every word that was said. Oh, it was a typical brooha. Tommy and I had hundreds of them. Yell and curse, but it never really meant anything. We both had strong opinions. What we quarreled about that morning doesn’t matter. After he went crashing out, I ran and yanked the door open and called after him. ‘And don’t be in a great big hurry to come back!’ Maybe he didn’t hear me. He had his jeep roaring by then. He never did come back. He didn’t see the sinkhole and drove into it, and he stayed alive in the hospital two days and two nights without regaining consciousness, and he died there.” She stood up, wearing a crooked smile, and said, “The guilts. That’s what they leave you. Tomorrow is going to be a long rough day too, people. ‘Night.”

I was on the downslope into sleep when the bed tipped under Puss’s stealthy weight and she slipped under the sheet and blanket to pull herself long and warm against me, fragrant and gentle, with some kind of whisper-thin fabric between my hands and her flesh.

“Just hold me,” she whispered. “It just seemed like such a dark, dark night to be alone.” Her words were blurred, and in a very little while her breathing changed and deepened and her holding arms went slack and fell away.

The four of us arrived in Sunnydale three days later, at a little before noon on Thursday. Connie Alvarez drove the lead car, a mud-caked black Pontiac convertible of recent vintage and much engine. Janine was beside her. When the road was straight, I had all I could do to keep them in sight. Puss mumbled now and again about Daytona and Sebring.

“The whole thing sounds so nutty,” she said. “Do you really think that funny-looking little old judge knows what he’s doing?”

“That funny little old Judge Rufus Wellington knows what everybody is doing. And he’ll have had the whole morning to pry around.” I braked at the last moment, pulled the rental around a bend and peered ahead for the distant dot that would be the Pontiac. “Have you got any questions at all about your little game?”

“Hah! Can the gaudy redhead from the big city dazzle the young, earnest attorney with her promissory charms? Will Steve Besseker, the shy counselor from the piney woodlands reveal the details of local chicanery to yon glamorous wench? I might have a question at that.”

“Which is…”

“You were a little vague about the details, McGee. Do I give all for the cause? Do I bed this bumpkin if it seems necessary, or don’t you care one way or the other?”

I risked a high-speed glance at her and met the narrowed quizzical eyes of sexual challenge. I said, carefully, “I’ve always had the impression that if the string on the carrot was too long, and if the donkey snapped at it and got it, he’d lose his incentive and stop pulling the load.”

“I resent the analogy and approve the sentiment, sir.”

But challenges have to go both ways or there is no equality among the sexes. “On the other hand, I imagine that you’re the best judge of your own motivations, and you would be the best judge of the appropriate stimulus and response. Such situations vary, I imagine.”

“Are you trying to be a bastard?”

“Aren’t we both trying?”

After a thoughtful silence she said, “Just for the hell of it, McGee; what would be your reaction if I said I’d keep the carrot on a mighty short string?”

“Killian, I would have to admit that I am just stodgy and old-fashioned enough to enjoy being the dog in your manger. I like a kind of sentimental exclusivity.”

“Romantic exclusivity?”

“If you prefer.”

“I prefer, thank you. So be it. I am now motivated to defend my honor. So suppose you watch yours.”

The appointment had been set for twelve noon with Mr. Whitt Sanders, the President of the Shawana National Bank and Trust Company. I saw the empty Pontiac in the bank lot and parked near it and sent Puss on her way, wishing her luck. When I went into the bank, I could see Connie and Janine sitting in a glass-walled office in the rear, facing a big man across a big desk. The receptionist took me back, tapped on the door, and held it open for me.

Sanders stood up and reached across the desk and gave me a bully-boy handshake. He had tan hair and a big, sun-reddened, flakey face, a barrel of belly, a network of smile wrinkles and weather wrinkles, big red hands like ball gloves, and eyes that seemed to have the same size and expression as a pair of blueberries. “Mr. McGee!” he bellowed. “Pleasure! Sit right down and rest yourself.”

I did and he said, “I was just telling the ladies that my sympathy goes out to Mrs. Bannon in this tragic time. You can rest assured, Mrs. Bannon, that the bank is doing everything in its power to liquidate the properties in question at the maximum figure obtainable. Of course certain unfortunate situations in that area have made it a difficult piece to move at this time, but we have negotiated something which I think anyone would agree is more than fair. As a matter of fact…”

And in came little old Judge Wellington with his cream-colored ranch hat shoved back locks of white hair escaping in random directions, in his dusty dark suit and gold watch chain, carrying a briefcase that had perhaps first seen duty during the LincolnDouglas debates, his face remarkably like one of Disney’s seven dwarfs, but I couldn’t remember which one. “Hidey, Whitt,” he said, “New paneling, eh? Purty.”

“Rufusl I heard somebody say they thought they saw you over at the courthousel Glad to see you.”

“No. I’m not going to let you get aholt of my hand, Whitt. Not with my arthritis laying quiet for a change. So set.”

Whitt Sanders looked confused. “Rufus, if you wouldn’t mind waiting outside until I finish with-”

“Finish with my client? Now, even a jackass like you knows you can’t keep a lawyer away from his client.”

“You are representing Mrs. Bannon!”

“Why not? Mrs. Bannon is a dear friend of Mrs. Connie Alvarez here, and Miz Connie owns and operates To-Co Groves up to Frostproof, right in my backyard, which you may have heard of even down here in the wilderness, it being near three hundred thousand trees, prime Valencia on sour orange root stock, and she has enough legal battles going at all times with the Citrus Commission and the growers association and the concentrate plant she’s got a stock interest in to keep me right busy in my declining years.”

Watching the bank president, I realized it is possible for a big man to slowly come to attention while seated, and even give the impression of saluting. Connie had taken me on a tour of the groves, and I could see why Whitt Sanders reacted. For the first year after her husband had died, a management outfit had operated the groves on contract Connie had spent every daylight hour with the crews and every evening studying, and at the end of the year she said she had been willing to take the risk of being able to do the job herself.

When we had come upon a trio of big spray trucks lumbering down the geometric lines, the nozzlemen garbed like astronauts, and I’d asked if bugs were a big problem, Connie had planted her feet, rolled her eyes skyward and chanted, “Kill off the burrowing nematode, the aphid, the rust mite, white fly, white fly fungus, Mediterranean fly, red mite, six-spot mite, rust mite, Texas mite, mealy bugs, cushion scales, black scales, soft scales, yellow scales, wax scales, snow scales, purple scales, dictyospermum, melanose, citrus scag, mealy bugs and orange-dog caterpillars, and keep killing them off, and if you don’t get a hard freeze, you’ve got half a chance, man, of hitting today’s market with a hell of a nice crop, which at today’s prices costs me one dollar and sixty cents more per box to raise than I get for them.” She had shrugged, scuffed at the sand. “I counted on the overproduction and set up a reserve. These prices are going to sink the half-ass operators and that’ll cut production back to balance and bring back a fair price.”

In the president’s office the president said, “I didn’t realize you were the Mrs. Alvarez.”

“So I asked the judge if he could do anything to help my friend here, Jan Bannon.”

Janine sat silent and motionless, dressed in darkness, and the blueberry eyes of Whitt Sanders seemed to slide uneasily past her.

Sanders said, at last, “I guess I don’t know what you’re driving at, actually. The business holdings don’t fall into the estate because there was an actual foreclosure before the time of death, with all proper advertising and notifications. So title passed. It’s a standard first mortgage agreement, Rufus. Title passed to the bank.”

“That so?” said the Judge. “Funny. I got the impression that when I turn over to you the certified check I got here for ten thousand dollars in the name of Mrs. Bannon, that is going to cover back payments on principal, plus interest, plus fees and expenses, and leave a little over which you can apply on the next payment, and I got the impression that title is going to ease right on back to her.”

“But the grace period is up! It isn’t possible now!”

Judge Wellington sighed. “Bullshit,” said he. Then he swept his hundred-dollar ranch hat off in courtly fashion, nodded toward Connie and Janine and said, “Begging your pardon, ladies.” He dropped the hat on the floor beside his chair and said, “Whitt, I can’t remember you ever being admitted to the Florida bar, so there’s no point in me citing the pertinent and appropriate cases where the courts have ruled that in the cases of widows and orphans, especially where the widow was one of the parties on the mortgage, foreclosure action can be set aside provided the bank has not yet passed title on to a third party in a liquidation of the recovered assets.”

“But we’ve accepted earnest money from-”

“One Preston LaFrance in the amount of three thousand two hundred and fifty dollars, representing ten percent of the agreed price on the foreclosed business property on the Shawana River, and the acceptance of that money did not constitute a change of ownership on the property, and here is the certified check for ten thousand, Whitt, and I request a signed receipt, with the date and the hour thereon.”

“I can’t accept it until I find out-”

“You take it and you make out the receipt saying you are taking it and holding it in escrow pending the decision of your legal people, or you and me are going to go around and around right here, boy. Besides, here is a situation where, by accepting the mortgage obligation and paying it up to date, Mrs. Bannon is putting that mortgage back on the books, sound and whole, in the amount originally owed and paid down to where this check puts it, and it would seem like a bank officer thinking of his stockholders-and thinking of the State Banking Commission-would snap at the chance to keep from showing a loss. Why do you seem to be holding back, Whitt?”

Sanders patted his red forehead with a handkerchief. “As you pointed out, Rufus, I’m not a lawyer. I don’t know what our obligation to Mr. LaFrance might be.”

“Absolutely no obligation, I can tell you, but you’ll feel cozy hearing it from your own people, so we’ll give you a chance to do just that. Suppose we come back at two thirty?”

“That… that ought to be time enough. Uh… Mrs. Bannon, do you intend to operate the business there yourself?”

“She’s going to think about it,” Judge Wellington said. “When her husband couldn’t keep up on his insurance, he had the good sense to tell the company to apply the cash value to the premiums instead of drawing it out, so she has a little money to give her time to do some planning. We’ll let you get on back to work, Whitt.”

We left the bank and walked two blocks to the old Shawana River Hotel, and got a corner table in the dark-paneled, high-ceilinged old dining room. Janine was at my right, and the judge across from me. Connie and the judge and I ordered drinks. Jan didn’t want any. There was a yellowish look to the tan of her lean, Mediterranean-boy face, and the skin of her face and hands had a papery look.

I touched her hand and said, “Okay?”

She gave me an abrupt nod, a smile that appeared for but a moment. The judge seemed lost in private thought. Finally he gave a dry little cough and said, “McGee, you seem to know what you’re trying to do for this little lady, and I know Connie well enough to know she’ll go along with some pretty wild ideas. But I’ve heard a few hints around the courthouse, and a few rumors, and I can put things together, and I wouldn’t be doing right by my client not to give advice, whether it’s wanted or not.”

“I want your, advice, Judge,” Janine said.

He sipped his bourbon and licked his lips. “These little counties all got what you could call a shadow government: These folks have known each other for generations. They got to putting this land deal together, and there is a little business right in the way and doing pretty good. Expanding. So they use the county government to stunt that business and knock it down to where the price is right. It doesn’t take all five county commissioners. Just a couple, plus the other three needing favors themselves sometime, with no need of anybody asking too many questions. You depended on highway trade and river trade, and giving service to local residents. Now they could have kept that road open to traffic and in pretty good shape too while fixing it, and set up a short-term contract on it. There’s pollution-control ordinances on the books to keep that river in better shape. They could have denied that Tech something outfit when they petitioned to have the bridge taken out. When you didn’t drop off the vine as fast as they wanted, then they put those regulatory services people onto you and really closed you down. Okay, Miz Bannon, you got squoze bad. So what I say is this. I say don’t mess too fancy with these folk because in the long run you can’t win. You can lay the squeeze right back onto them. I know how these folks think. You just say a hundred and twenty-five thousand, plus the buyer takes over the mortgage. No dickering. No conversations: Let them make the offers. When time starts to run out on them, somebody is going to get nervous and offer a hundred thousand, and then you by God grab it and walk away, and you’ll know you’ve skimmed some good cream off their deal.”

“That isn’t enough,” she said in a barely audible voice.

“But, girl, you’d be hurting them in the place that hurts the most. What are you trying to get out of this? Lord God, you can’t make anybody ashamed of how they did you, even if they’d ever admit it wasn’t just kind of a series of accidents. They just say it’s dog eat dog and lots of businesses fail all the time.”

“But they had Tush killed.”

That little embellishment had been kept from the judge. He leaned forward, his old eyes wide. “You say killed? Now, young lady, I can understand how you could come to believe it was like that, but these folks just don’t operate that way. That man of yours worked hard and long and it was all going down the drain, and sometimes a man gets to the point where he-”

“You didn’t know Tush Bannon,” Connie said. “I did. And Travis McGee knew him longer than either Jan or me. We’re not taking any votes, Rufus. We’re not talking about probably this or probably that. We’re telling you he was killed.”

Judge Wellington leaned back, so upset he tried to drink out of the glass he had already emptied. “Well now! Then, it must have been some fool mistake. It must have been something else that went wrong. Then, by God, the thing to do right now is put it in the hands of the State’s Attorney for this Judicial District and…” He stopped suddenly and frowned at Connie. “By God, I must be getting old. He’d turn it over to the Assistant State. Attorney for Shawana County, and the Shawana County Sheriff’s Department would make the investigation, and the Shawana County Medical Examiner would do the autopsy, and all these folks are elected to office, and there’d be all the pressure to cover it over and forget it, and even if it went to a Grand Jury if it got that far, who’d get indicted? I’m getting so old I’m forgetting the facts of life. Second childhood. I’m thinking the world is like I thought it was when I was back in Stetson Law School.” He scowled into his empty glass. “Maybe bring in somebody from the Attorney General’s office to poke around?”

“Maybe,” I said. “But first maybe we should blow some smoke down into the burrow and see what comes running out.”

He thought and nodded. “Now I see why you want to do what you’re doing. I won’t say it has much chance of working. But it’ll sure stir things up.” He gazed at Jan. “Miz Bannon, I know it’s a great and sad and tragic loss. And doing something about it can make a person feel better somehow. But don’t aim all of yourself at that one thing, of paying somebody back. Revenge. Because it can turn a person sour through and through.”

“I don’t care what I turn into, Judge,” she said.

He met her dark gaze, then opened his menu and said, “We better get our order in.”

I went alone to Ingledine’s Funeral Home and arrived at quarter of two. It was on a lateral street, and was a small version of Mount Vernon, set between a Savings and Loan branch and a used car lot. I asked for Mr. Ingledine and the stealthy, earnest, unctuous young man told me that Mr. Ingledine had retired, and that he was Mr. Farris, Junior, and that he and his father owned and operated the establishment, and how could he help me, sir.

We tiptoed past an arched doorway where, under a rose-colored spotlight, a waxy pink and white old man rested, propped up in his bronze box, with floral offerings concealing whatever the box rested upon. Two old women sat on a couch on the other side of the room, holding hands and murmuring to each other.

Mr. Farris, Junior, opened a desk drawer in a small office and took a folder out, and extracted the death certificate signed by the County Medical Examiner.

“We obtained the vital statistics from available local records, sir. You might check them over for accuracy.” Brantley B. Bamzon, and the age looked right, and he had the next of kin right. The doctor had listed it as accidental death. I asked about it and he said that in the absence of any suicide note or any witnesses, and in view of the fact that he could have been working on the diesel engine, it would have been unfair to assume suicide.

“Would you care to… uh… view the remains, sir? I would not advise it. It’s quite a… an extensive and nasty mutilation. There is absolutely no possibility of any reconstruction of the features. And I think it would be wise for you to discourage the widow from viewing the deceased. A memory like that would be… difficult to forget.”

“What work have you done?”

“Well, a great deal of the blood was gone, of course. We trocared the rest of it as best we could, and the body fluids and so on, and by clamping some of the major vessels in the chest and throat area, we did manage to embalm to a certain extent. Let me see. Oh, yes, we were able to make positive identification so that we do not have to trouble anyone about that. They had at one time sold sandwiches and coffee at their marina, and the County Health Department requires a health card with a photo and thumbprint, and the Sheriff’s Department verified the identity by taking a print from the body.”

“You’ve been very efficient.”

His smile was shy and pleased. “I am sorry, but I do not quite understand… what your function is in this, Mr. McGee?”

“Friend of the family, you could say. Here is a limited power of attorney, notarized, empowering me to make the arrangements in the name of the widow.”

He looked at it with a faintly pained expression. “There’ll be no services here, I would assume?”

“No. You can expect shipment instructions within the next few days.” He led me back into the display room. The lids were propped open, the linings glossy, the handles burnished. They ranged from two twenty-five on up: I picked a three-hundred-dollar box. We went back into the office.

He said, “I’d recommend that we take the remains out of the storage vault and place the body in the casket and seal it, sir.”

“I suggest you leave it right where it is, Mr. Farris, under refrigeration, until you get shipment instructions. And then please don’t make a permanent seal. There could be an insurance question, on an accident indemnity clause.”

“Oh. I see. But you should know that storage is costing eleven thirty-three a day. That’s with tax, of course.”

“Of course. Now may I see your statement on this?”

He took the statement from the folder and took it into the next room. I heard the slow tapping of unskilled typing. He brought it back and handed it to me. He had added the box and two more days of vault rental. The total was seven hundred and fifty-eight dollars and thirty-eight cents.

“Mr. McGee, I am sure you will understand our position when I point out that it is our information that the deceased was a bankrupt, and we will have to have some assurance that…”

The certified check for a thousand dollars that I placed in front of him stopped him abruptly. I said, “Is this top copy mine? Just acknowledge the receipt of a thousand dollars on it, Mr. Farris, and when the body leaves here, deduct any further charges from the credit balance and mail your check to Mrs. Bannon, To-Co Groves, Route Two, Frostproof. And I see you have a photocopy of the death certificate, so you can let me have the original? Thank you.”

He went with me to the front door, through the ripe smell of flowers in full bloom, through the muted organ music.

He put his pale hand out, smiled his pale smile, and said, “Please express our sympathy to the bereaved.”

I stared at his hand until he pulled it back and wiped it nervously on the side of his jacket. I said, “Junior, you could make a tangible expression of your sincere sympathy.”

“I don’t believe I follow you.”

“Before you send her the check for her credit balance, just refigure your bill. She’s a young widow with three boys to raise. You padded it by at least two hundred and fifty dollars. I think it would be a nice gesture.”

His face went pink. “Our rates are-”

“Ample, boy. Real ample.”

Outside I took a deep breath of Shawana County air, but there was something vaguely industrial in it, some faint acid that rasped the back of my throat.

We were moving in, stirring them up with a blunt stick. The old judge, with good law and good timing, was snatching the ten acres right back out of the hands of LaFrance, just when he thought he had his whole deal lined up. And soon he would know a stranger was moving into the game, buying some chips, asking for somebody to deal. When in doubt, shove a new unknown into their nice neat equations and see how they react.

Hungry men think everybody else is just as hungry. Conspiratorial men see conspiracy everywhere. I strolled through industrial stink toward the bank.

Six

WE GATHERED again in the bank president’s office at two thirty. Sanders had the Bannon file on his desk, and a Mr. Lee, an attorney for the bank, sitting near his left elbow. Lee had a round, placid face and a brushcut. He could have been thirty or fifty or anything in between.

With obviously forced cordiality, Sanders said, “Well, Mrs. Bannon, the bank has decided to accept your payment and mark the mortgage account current and in good order.”

Judge Wellington yawned. “You say that as if you had choice in the matter, Whitt. All right. My client is grateful. She thanks you.” He opened his old briefcase and pawed in it and took out the papers that had been prepared Wednesday afternoon in the judge’s law offices. He flipped them onto the desk in front of Whitt Sanders, saying, “Might as well get this taken care of too, as long as we’re all foregathered here. Everything is all ready to record, but what we need is the bank’s approval of the transfer of the mortgage from Mrs. Bannon to Mr. McGee here.”

Mr. Lee hitched closer to the president as Sanders leafed quickly through the legal documents. He stared at Judge Wellington with a look of astonishment. “But… according to this, she’s selling her equity in the property for fifteen thousand dollars, Rufus!”

“Wouldn’t you call that a pretty good deal? Sixty thousand mortgage balance, and you were going to sell the whole kaboodle for thirty-two five and have a judgment against the estate, if any, for twenty-seven thousand five. So she pays the mortgage down to fifty thousand, then, sells for fifteen thousand, which puts her five ahead instead of twenty-seven five behind. Why, this little lady is thirty-two thousand five hundred better off right this minute than she was when she walked in here. Or maybe you just looked surprised she did so good. Remember, she’s got a good lawyer.”

“But we can’t just… approve this transfer. We don’t have enough information. Mr. McGee, we’ll have to have a credit report on you, and we’ll have to have a balance sheet and income statement. This would be highly irregular. I have a responsibility to…”

“The stockholders,” the old judge said. “Whitt, you went through those papers too dang fast. Try it a little slower.”

He did. He came to an abrupt stop. He stared at Connie. “You’ll be the guarantor on the mortgage note, Mrs. Alvarez?!”

“That’s what it says there, doesn’t it?”

“If you’re still nervous, Whitt,” said the judge, “go look up To-Co Groves in your D. and B.”

“Oh, no. I didn’t mean anything like that. It was just… ”

The judge sighed. “Could we just stop fumbling and get. the red tape done so we can get this stuff recorded and set out for home?”

“Excuse me just a moment,” Sanders said. He took Mr. Lee out of the office with him and over to a quiet corner of the carpeted bullpen. They held about a forty-second. consultation. I hoped I knew exactly what it was about. I looked to the judge for reassurance, and got it in the form of a slow wink an almost imperceptible nod.

Mr. Lee came back in with Sanders. He was apparently nominated by Sanders to put the matter into careful legal jargon.

“Mrs. Bannon,” he said, “whether or not your sale of your interest to Mr. McGee is final at this moment, the bank feels that it is ethically obligated to inform you that shortly after two o ‘,clock this afternoon a local attorney contacted Mr. Sanders here and asked him if the sale of the foreclosed properties had been consummated. When Mr. Sanders said that it had not, this attorney then said he was representing a party whose name he could not divulge, but who had directed him to inquire of the bank if, in the event the properties had not been sold, a firm offer of eighty thousand dollars would be sufficient to acquire it.”

Sanders then interrupted, making Lee look exasperated for an instant. “It isn’t a firm offer,” he said to Janine. “But I don’t think young… the local attorney would make a trivial inquiry. You see, if your arrangement with Mr. McGee isn’t firm, or if he would like to withdraw, this might be a lot more advantageous for you. You would get back your ten thousand, plus the overage above the sixty thousand mortgage, or another twenty thousand.”

Jan had been coached in how to react, by the Judge, if Puss had been successful in conning the young attorney, Steve Besseker.

“But couldn’t this mysterious party be the same Mr. Preston LaFrance you were going to sell it to?” Janine asked.

“I don’t think it would be very likely that Press would-”

“But haven’t you told Mr. LaFrance he wasn’t going to get my property?”

“Well… yes,” said Sanders uncomfortably.

“Then, couldn’t he turn right around and make a bigger offer through a lawyer, if he wants it bad enough?” she asked.

“It might be possible. Remotely possible.”

“But don’t you see,” she said, frowning, earnest, leaning forward, “Mr. LaFrance owns the acreage directly behind us. He’s been after our property all along. He’s schemed and plotted to drive us out of business, Mr. Sanders, so he could buy it, and so he’s responsible for what… my husband… responsible for…”

She snuffled into her handkerchief and Sanders, edgy and uncomfortable, said, “Now, there. Now, now, Mrs. Bannon. We all like to have some specific thing or person to blame when… when things don’t go right. I’m sure Press LaFrance wouldn’t-”

“My husband was convinced of it, and that’s enough for me,” she said spiritedly. “Why, I wouldn’t accept any blind offer like that if it was… twice as much. Three times as much! I would rather sell it to Mr. McGee for eleven cents than see that man get it!”

Whitt Sanders fussed with the documents in front of him. He looked over at Rufus Wellington. “Rufius, I’d be way out of line, as you well know, if I made any comment about… about the resources of anybody doing business with us. All I can say is that… it is remotely possible the attorney is representing Press LaFrance. But it isn’t very damn probable.”

“You telling me, Whitt, it’s pretty much a known fact around town this LaFrance couldn’t scratch up eighty thousand?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Around the courthouse this morning, Whitt, talking to the County Clerk, and passing the time of day with your Assessor, I got the feeling things are a little slow lately in the land business in Shawana County. Now if this LaFrance is up to his hocks in land deals, he might be like the fella with the itch who was juggling the family china and walking a tightrope, and a bee stung him right square on… Sorry, ladies, we’ll leave that one right there. Probably got a goodlooking balance sheet, all considered, and you got some of his notes, but you won’t go one more dime, and you’re a little nervous about him.” The judge laughed suddenly and slapped his thigh. “By God, Whitt, that explains how come you acted sorry as a skunked hound you couldn’t sell off the foreclosure to this LaFrance. He must have some deal in the making that would get him free and clear. He into you a little deep, boy?”

“Now, Rufus,” Sanders pleaded. “I haven’t told you a thing, and I’m not about to.”

“Not in words,” the judge said. “But we’ve set in poker games together, Whitt, and I never had much trouble reading you.”

So then the red tape was taken care of, and the necessary documents were recorded at the courthouse. I walked with the judge to his black airconditioned Imperial and he stopped out of earshot of his driver, who had gotten out and opened the door for him.

“Son, we sure God rammed a crooked stick into the hornet nest and stirred it up. There’ll be folk sitting up half the night trying to make sense out of it all, not knowing it doesn’t make sense-not the way they’re thinking. Make sure you keep back far enough from the hornets.”

“I’ll be careful, Judge.”

“You tell that big sassy redhead she did good. That’s as much woman as a man is likely to see in a long day’s journey. Where are you meeting up with her?”

“Not anywhere near here,” I said. “Back at Broward Beach. She said she could probably get Besseker to drive her over there, and if she couldn’t, she could get there somehow”

He squinted into the late afternoon sunlight and said, “There’s a gal like that so clear in my mind it’s like yesterday, son. And that was nineteen twenty and six.” He turned to me with a look of dismay. “And if she’s alive anyplace in the world, she’s somewhere in her sixties. Hard to believe. Know something? I wrote poems to that gal. First, last and onliest time in my life. You let me know how you make out with that old swamp rat, that old D. J. Carbee, will you? McGee, tell me one thing. Are you going to let the angries get in the way of pumping some cash money out of this for that widow girl and her kids?”

“The money first, Judge.”

He looked at his watch and grinned. “The way Connie drives, they’re probably halfway back to Frostproof by now.”

It took me a long time to find anybody who could give me any kind of clear directions on how to find the Carbee place. He had no phone. He had a post office box in Sunnydale, and it was his habit to come in no oftener than once a week to pick up his mail.

In the end I had to go over the unending construction project that ran by my new property. Florida is full of long-range, unending road jobs that break the backs, pocketbooks and hearts of the road side businesses. The primitive, inefficient, childlike Mexicans somehow manage to survey, engineer and complete eighty miles of high-speed divided highway through raw mountains and across raging torrents in six months. But the big highway contractors in Florida take a year and a half turning fifteen miles of two-lane road across absolutely flat country into four-lane divided highway.

The difference is in American know-how. It’s know-how in the tax problems, and how to solve them. The State Road Department has to take the low bid, by law. So Doakes Construction says a halfyear contract will cost the State ten million, and a one year contract will cost nine, and a year-and-ahalf deadline will go for eight. Then Doakes can take on three or four big jobs simultaneously, and lease the equipment from a captive corporation, and listlessly move the equipment from job to job, and spread it out to gain the biggest profit while the only signs of frantic activity can be two or three men with cement brooms, looking at first like scarecrows but, when watched carefully, can be perceived to move, much like the minute hand on a clock.

Of course if some brisk, hustling firm moved into the state and started bidding what the jobs are worth and doing them fast, it would upset the tax teacart. Some have been foolish enough to try it, and the well-established Contractor’s Club has just taken round-robin turns low-bidding the interloper to death. When he has quit for lack of work, things settle down to the cozy old system whereby, through some miraculous set of coincidences, all the big boys have exactly the amount of work they need at all times.

A couple of governors ago, when too many road jobs were not up to specification, somebody ratted and there was a big hassle about the State Road Department engineers and inspectors getting envelopes with cash money therein from some of the club members. Those contractors were restrained from bidding for a little while, and the engineers and inspectors were suspended. But it died down, as it always does, and the companies were reinstated with authorization to bid on upcoming work, and the state employees were put back on the job also, with the governor explaining that men should not be judged too harshly for a “moment of weakness,” even though it had been made quite clear they’d had their little moments of weakness every Friday afternoon for a long, long time.

The Shawana County project of repaving 80D was the same thing on a smaller scale. Though the workday was not over, the only sign of roadwork I saw was one bulldozer and one scraper parked and unattended off the side of the rutted road. I stopped at my dead business property, tore off the official notices of foreclosure, and decided against busting the shiny padlocks with a tire iron. Near the far end of 80D I found the sand road I was told to look for. It wound through scrub toward the bay shore, and when I drove into the clearing at the end I saw the traditional old Florida shack of cypress and hard pine set high on pilings, so that looking under it I could see the bay water and a crooked little dock with a skiff tied up.

There was a twanging of dogs toenailing the wire of their run, and a heavy throated Arooo, Arooo of the indigenous hound. I was standing by the car looking at the hounds when the voice directly behind me said, “Evenin‘.” It gave me a violent start and when I whirled, I could see from the glint in his faded old eyes that he enjoyed the effect.

In the days before age hunched him and withered him, he could have been nearly my size. His sallow jaws were covered with long gray stubble, and his head was bald except for a sparse white tonsure. He wore torn, stained khaki pants with a narrow length of hemp line for a belt, and an old gray twill work shirt. His feet were broad and. bare, and standing near him was like standing near a bear cage, but with a slight spice of kerosene amid the thickness of the odor.

I gestured toward the dog run. “Red Walkers?”

“Got some Walker in ‘em. I don’t sell no dogs this time of year. Got just one bitch carryin’ but she got loose on me just the wrong time, so God knows what she’ll drop.”

“Mister Carbee, I didn’t come by to look at dogs. I came on a business matter.”

“Waste of time. I don’t buy a thing except supplies in town and send for the rest out of the Sears.”

“I’m not selling anything.”

“They say that and I ask them to set, and it turns out they are after all.”

“It isn’t like that this time.”

“Then, you come set on the stoop.”

“Thank you. My name is McGee.” When we had climbed the steep steps and were seated, Carbee in a rocker and me in an old kitchen chair that had several generations of different shades of paint showing, I said, “I just bought the Bannon place on the river from the widow.”

“Did you, now? I seen her once and him twice. Heard he kilt himself last Sunday morning when he found he’d lost the place. Great big old boy he was. Him and that Tyler Nigra come on me one morning drifting on the bay. Year ago maybe. Heavy fog, and me out too deep to pole and the ingin deader’n King Tut. That Tyler knows ingins like he invented them. Spring thing busted on the little arm for the gas feed, and that Tyler fixed it temporary with a little piece of rubber, got it running good. That Bannon wouldn’t take a thing for it. Neighborly. Couldn’t been too much longer after that Tyler quit him. Heard Tyler is working at the motorsyckle place in town. Anywhere there’s ingins he’s got a job of work. Maybe Bannon knowed and maybe he didn’t that when Tyler quit him, it was because no Nigra with sense like Tyler’s got is going to stay in the middle of any white man’s fussing. If you’re going to run that place, Mr. McGee,, the first thing you better do is get Tyler back, that is if you’re peaceful with everybody.”

“I’m not going to run it, Mr. Carbee. I bought it as an investment.”

“Lease it off to somebody to run?”

“No. Just let it sit.”

I let him ponder that one, and at last he said, “Excuse me, but it don’t make good sense, unless you got it for the land value alone. The buildings are worth more than the land.”

“It depends on who wants the land.”

He nodded. “And how bad.”

“Mr. Carbee, I’ve been checking land ownership at the courthouse. You own the two-hundred-acre piece that starts at my east boundary”

“Could be.”

“Ever thought of selling it?”

“I’ve sold a little land now and again. I’ve got maybe seventeen, eighteen hundred acres left, scattered around the east county, and except for this hundred right here, my home place, I imagine it would all be for sale if the price was right. You thinking of making an offer? If so, you better come up with the best you can do right off, because I don’t dicker. Man names a price, I say Yes or I say No, and that’s it.”

“Best offer, eh? I better tell you, Mr. Carbee, that I would be gambling on being able to pick up other parcels too, and gambling on being able to do it while my chance of resale is still good, resale of the whole two sections. And I’ll tell you right now that if everything does work out, I’ll make a nice profit, but if it doesn’t, I’ll have some working capital tied up until I can find some way of getting it back out. The best I can offer on an immediate sale-provided the title is clear of course-would be five hundred an acre.”

He rocked forward and slapped his big bare feet on the boards and peered at me. “One hunnerd thousand!” he whispered.

“Less your share of the closing costs.”

He got up and stamped over to the railing and spat. I knew the turmoil in his mind. He had wanted to check and see if he had optioned the two hundred acres to Preston LaFrance at a good figure. Two hundred dollars an acre had seemed like a good deal until I named my price. I could assume Tush’s investigation was correct, and LaFrance’s option was good until April. He wouldn’t dare tell me about the option, for fear I would make my deal with LaFrance. And he was afraid that if he told me the land was not for sale, opportunity might move on to some other location and then he might not even get his two hundred an acre.

It was a pretty problem, and I wondered how he would handle it. He came back and sat down. The chair creaked. “Tell you what,” he said placidly. “I have to think on that. And I should talk to the man that turns in the government figures for me when I sell things and see where that would put me on taxes and so on. Let me see now. This being Thursday the twenty-third day, that would mean two weeks from today would be… January fourth. Then I’ll know more what I should ought to do. A man can’t jump at a piece of money like that right off. He has to set and taste it a time.”

“I understand. But you will have to tell me Yes or No when I see you again.”

“One other thing. You said you were taking a gamble. What you might do is figure on maybe me taking some of the risk too, Mr. McGee.”

“How so?”

“From what you said, if your deal doesn’t work, then you got a hundred thousand tied up and it will take a long time to move that land at that price. But if it goes like you’re hoping, you turn a good profit on it. Maybe double?”

“Maybe not.”

“Let’s think on it being double. One thousand dollars an acre, two hundred thousand all told. So maybe we could get a paper drawed up between us, a contract saying that you give me five thousand cash money in hand that says come next… oh let’s say April the fifteenth… you got the right to buy the land from me for four hundred an acre if you’re willing to buy and I’m willing to sell. And if it works out that way, then if you resell it any time inside two years or three, you agree to pay me half the difference between what you bought it for and what you get for it. So if it was for one thousand, you’d for sure clear three hundred an acre profit, and no chance getting stuck with it. Of course if I want to sell on April the fifteenth and you don’t want to buy, I keep your five thousand. But if you want to buy and I’ve decided not to sell, you get it all back.”

He looked at me, benign and gentle and O so eager to be agreeable and fair to all. Way up the coast from us were the little nests of the hideaway rnansions of the international bankers, and to the south of us was all the trickery and duplicity of hotel and resort syndicate financing. He had the precise look of a man betting into a pair of kings showing, and him with a three in the hole and a pair of threes up, and a perfect recollection of having seen the other two kings dealt to hands that had folded, one of them a hole card inadvertently exposed when the hand was tossed in.

“Mr. Carbee,” I said. “I think we’ll get along fine. You might even sell me an undivided half interest for two hundred an acre, and we could make it a joint venture.”

“It’ll be a pleasure to do business with you, Mister.” It seemed to me that old Mr. D. J. Carbee could have floated very nicely in the tricky currents of Hobe Sound or Collins Avenue, and I had a sudden respect for the guile of Preston LaFrance. But I did not envy him the little talk he was going to have to have with the old man just as soon as the old man could catch up to him. There was a shaggy old highsided International Harvester station wagon parked over near the dog run, and it seemed probable that D.J. would be going into Sunnydale either this evening or early in the morning.

It was full dark when I drove into the city of Broward Beach. The stores were open, because tomorrow was Christmas Eve. Hefty Salvation Army lassies in their wagon-train bonnets dingle-dangled spare change into their kettles, and fat foam Santas were affixed to the palm boles and light standards, high enough to keep the kids from yanking their foam feet off. “Adeste Fidelis” was coming from somewhere, possibly a downtown church, electronic chimes that could rattle fillings in teeth, and overpowered the retail sound tracks of sprightlier seasonal music. I went through town and out to the beach and parked in the lot of the place I had told her to be, an expansive, glossy, improbable motel called Dune-Away, with a place pasted to it called The Annex, where food and drink was worth the prices they charge, even in the off season, and where if an attractive lassie wishes to be picked up, the hard-nose management will smooth the way, and if she doesn’t, those same professionals can chill the random Lothario quickly, quietly and completely.

I looked at the lounge from the doorway and saw her alone at a banquette against the far wall. As I headed across toward her I was aware of a wary waiter also moving on an interception course. But he and I saw her quick recognition and saw her face light up in greeting. So he held the table out for me to sit beside her, and went off with our order.

“You missed our boy by ten minutes,” she said. “He was very dear. Not my type. One of those narrowboned dark ones, a bit stuffy. He wants to be with it, but he laughs a little too soon or a little too late, and he seems to sit and steer his car instead of drive it. Let me see. He’s thirty-one and he’s been married to Linda for five years, and they have two kids and she is a fantastic golfer, and her father owns the Buick Agency in Sunnydale, and he is worried about her drinking. He kept giving me a certain business with the eyebrows that maybe he learned in front of his mirror, and I made his hands clammy when we sat close. He didn’t have the guts to take a hack at me right out of the clear blue. He’d have to be encouraged so that then he could tell himself he hadn’t started it, and he’s only human, isn’t he? He’s very nervous about the impression he makes, and he’s steeped in all that radical right wing hoke about conspiracies and a bankrupt America and Chinese bombs, and it was a drag to listen big-eyed to that fired gunk and say Oh and Ahh and Imagine that! He does a lot of civic stuff and joins everything, and thinks of himself as being the fearless attorney, standing up for right and purity. As the dear judge would say-Bullshit. He tried to help Tush Bannon, and then when it got a little sticky, he dropped him. Know how he explained it to me? This is precious!”

She paused for the waiter to serve the drinks, then went into an imitation of Steve Besseker. “So long as we are operating under the Capitalistic System, Puss, and remember it is the best the world has yet devised, men will take business risks and some will win and some will lose. I won’t deny there were certain pressures on Bannon, but he got so he thought everything was some kind of a plot. He started whining and stopped fighting. That’s when I lost my respect for him and washed my hands of him.”

“Yes,” I said. “That is precious. That is very dear.”

“I never met your friend Tush, Travis. But I don’t think he ever whined.”

“He wouldn’t know how. Congratulations. You snowed him very nicely. Have any trouble with it?”

“None! I hitched my chair closer and closer to his and I kept my voice very low and full of secrets, and I kept my eyes wide and I put my fingertips on his arm. I told him that I was employed by Gary Santo and we had investigated him and it was Mr. Santo’s decision that he could be trusted with certain delicate and private negotiations involving one of Mr. Santo’s operations in this area, and could be trusted not to reveal the name of his client. I explained that it was so hush-hush that if he was foolish enough to even try to reach Mr. Santo by phone or in person, he would ruin everything for himself. But if things went well, then he could think in terms of a retainer of five figures annually. You know, when he began to swallow it, his eyes looked glazed and his mouth hung open. I almost started laughing. So he phoned the query about the eighty thousand to the bank like a good little fellow, and he was so upset when he met me later and told me that Mrs. Bannon had regained title and then sold it to some mysterious stranger named McGee from Fort Lauderdale. I thought he would cry. I told him I was sure that Mr. Santo would be convinced that he had done all he could. I told him he would get his instructions from me by phone or in person. I asked him if he would be willing to meet me sometimes, if it was necessary. In Miami, or even Havana or New York. All expenses paid, of course.”

“Who told you to say that?”

“I made it up. It seemed like a good idea. I mean it makes him think more about me and not so much about it being a pretty funny way for a man like Santo to do business. Was I wrong?”

“No. I like it. And the final little hook? Did you remember to get that in?”

“Yes, but very casual, and not until he came in here to have a drink with me. I just said that I know the way Mr. Santo’s mind works, and he would certainly wonder if there was any connection between a Mr. Preston LaFrance and Mr. McGee, any business connection, and if he could find out in advance of my phoning him about it, it might make a good impression on Mr. Gary Santo.”

“Reaction?”

“Nothing in particular. He said he’d try to find out.” She shrugged. “He’s just a trivial little man, honey, really. And this is the first little whiff he’s had of something big and important and kind of glamorous, and he can’t hardly stand it. Feed me, please. I’m sitting here aching and gnawing, and I keep looking at that door where the waiters go by with those steaks.”

She ate with a savage and elegant precision, and an occasional little sound of contentment. I told her that as a reward for special sly services and for being a persuasive liar, I would take us to the most elaborate accommodations the Dune-Away could provide.

“And go back in the boat in the morning?” she asked. “Would it be vulgar, dear, if I asked a special favor? So much has happened and I am so pooped, really, that all I can think about is that gigantic, fantastic, marvelous bed aboard the Flush, and it would be a nice place to wake up on the morning before Christmas, and I want to get to that bed faster than your pretty little boat can get me there. Possible?”

“Race you to the car, Red.”

She was asleep by the time I hit the first stoplight, and slept all the way back, and groused about being shaken awake to walk from the car to the houseboat. I made her stand on the dock while I went aboard and, before unlocking the door, checked the little bulbs behind the sliding panel in the outside port bulkhead of the lounge. The bulbs were out, so I turned the knife switch below the bulb, turning off the little Radar Sentry that monitored the belowdecks areas of the Flush while I was away from her. Had anyone broken in, their mass and movement would have closed the circuit that lighted the two hidden bulbs, or lighted one of them if by any chance the other had burned out. The gadget can be rigged if anyone wants, to turn on floodlights or sound a siren or even phone the cops. But I didn’t want an alarm system that would spook the intruder. I just wanted to know if I’d had visitors, and then I could take the necessary steps to make them welcome if they happened to be still there.

I beckoned her aboard, and she came inside, stumbling and yawning. We shared a shower, and then we shared a lazy, easeful, gentled quarter hour of love, wherein she murmured she didn’t think she could but don’t go to any special trouble, darling, it doesn’t matter that much, and then she murmured that if it wasn’t too late for a lady to change her mind, sir, and it was just barely not too late to be able to wait just long enough, and so she rose, and caught, sighed long, and fell away purring. She called me back from my edge of sleep by gently thumbing my left eye open and saying, “Are you there? Listen, for making all these days and nights so full, the lady thanks you. Thanks for letting me come along for more than just the ride, McGee. Thanks for helping me cram three bushels of living into a one peck basket. Are you there?”

“You are O so welcome, lady.”

Seven

MEYEx CAME over on Christmas morning with a cumbersome vat of eggnog and three battered pewter mugs. We had a nice driving rain out of the northwest and a wind that made the Flush shift and groan and thump. I put on Christmas tapes because it was no day to trust FM programming. Sooner or later daddy would see mommy kissing Rudolph. Meyer and I played chess. Puss Killian, in yellow terry coveralls, sat and wrote letters. She never said who they were to, and I had never asked.

He won with one of those pawn-pressure games, the massive and ponderous advance that irritates me into doing the usual stupid thing, like a sacrifice that favors him, just to get elbow room on the board.

As we finished, Puss came over, shoving her letter into her pocket and said, “Should we call Jan and say merry merry? Which is worse, I guess, to call her or not call her?”

“There’s one of Meyer’s laws that covers it. Tell her, Meyer.”

He beamed up at her. “Of course. In all emotional conflicts, dear girl, the thing you find the hardest to do is the thing you should do. So I guess you call.”

“Thanks a lot. Trav? Will you do it? Please? Then you can turn it over to me. Okay?”

So I placed the call. Connie sounded too hearty. I guess it wasn’t such a great day at the groves. Janine imitated the requirements of friendship and holiday. But there was deadness under her tone of voice. I knew she would not break up, not with that weight of the deadness holding her down. After all the things to say I could think of, most of them so trite I felt like both Bob and Ray I gave the phone over to Puss. She sat at the desk and talked for a long time with Janine, in low tones. Then she said Connie wanted to talk to me again. She said Janine had gone to her room, so she could talk freely. She asked me when the body would be picked up. I said I’d made arrangements and they would come and get it tomorrow. The holidays had caused a delay.

“Any communication from sunny Sunnydale, Connie?”

“Nothing at all. Nothing yet.”

As I hung up I turned and saw Puss leaving the lounge, almost at a gallop, and heard her give a big harsh sob.

I looked at Meyer and he shrugged and said, “The tears started to drip, and then she started to snuffle and then she took off.”

I filled our mugs and brought him up to date on my financial affairs in Shawana County.

He pondered the situation and said, “It’s pretty flexible. There’s a lot of ways it could go.”

“That’s the general idea. To keep my skirts clean I have to have a legitimate sale of my legitimate ownership in that marina and motel. I think that’s where I pick LaFrance clean. If he could offer thirty-two five, I’ll settle for forty thousand, and he assumes the mortgage. He’ll have to go for it because that’s the only way he’ll have a package he can provide Santo-his own fifty acres, my ten, and the option on old Carbee’s two hundred. Now this LaFrance is a greedy and larcenous bastard. He was trying to make the deal as sweet as possible for himself by driving Tush into the ground and getting those ten acres cheap. I think he will continue to be a greedy and larcenous bastard, and I think that if I can offer him a little extra edge, for cash under the table, he’ll get the cash somehow, and I hope it will be from that brother-in-law of his on the County Commission.” I went and checked the name in my notebook. “P K. Hazzard. Known as Monk. He-meaning Preston LaFrance-is going to be very jumpy, so you and I are going to work a little variation on the old pigeon drop.”

His big bushy brows climbed his Neanderthal forehead. “We are?”

“Meyer, I think you’d make a nice plant location expert, somebody with the authority to make firm recommendations to a nice big fat rich company.”

“It is an exact science, my good fellow,” he said. “We take all the factors-labor supply, area schools and recreation facilities, transportation costs, construction costs, distance from primary markets, and by adjusting these by formula before programming the computer, we can arrive at a valid conclusion as… Travis, what is a pigeon drop?”

“Unlike what might first come to mind, Meyer, this is something one drops onto a pigeon.”

“You couldn’t have made it more clear. One thing. Aren’t you on a little dangerous ground on this bodysnatching thing?”

“Body-snatching! Me? Meyerl A perfectly legitimate funeral home in Miami is going to pick up that body in a licensed hearse and bring it back to Miami and air-ship it from there to Milwaukee.”

“And the place is run by a man who owes you a big favor, and that hearse is going to make a stop at a very well equipped and staffed pathology lab during the off hours, where two more of your strange friends are going to determine if there was some cause of death besides dropping an engine block on him.”

“Meyer, please! It’s just normal curiosity. Jan gave her permission. Is there an ordinance against it?”

“What about concealing evidence of a crime?”

“If you’re nervous about evidence we don’t even have yet, you don’t have to help me play games with LaFrance.”

“So who’s nervous?”

“I am. A little.”

We sat in silence. The tape had run out and turned off. I wondered if I should go in and give Puss a little comforting pat to cure the Noel blues. Too many pasts crowd in on you at mistletoe time. It’s the good ones that hurt.

“Meyer?”

“At your service.”

“On the sale of the marina thing to LaFrance, Jan will end up with thirty thousand, net. If we can work that pigeon drop, she’ll get maybe fifty maybe a hundred on top of that. Money won’t buy what she’s lost, but it would be nice to get her a really good big chunk. If I could find out that Gary Santo knew about what was being done to the Bannons, knew about it and didn’t give a damn because he was pressuring LaFrance into assembling the adjoining parcels so he could buy them for resale, then it would be nice to take a slice of his bread too.”

“Now wait a minute! This is not somebody that goes for your pigeon drop. This man operates very big, my friend. He has lawyers and accountants double-checking every move.”

“I was thinking of something legitimate. Something in your line. Like some kind of an investment where you would know it was going to go sour and he wouldn’t. Then couldn’t there be some way of… funneling money out of the same proposition into Janine’s pocket? Hell, Santo is a plunger. With all the protection, he’s still a plunger. Some kind of a listed stock, maybe, like those they were rigging on the American Exchange you were telling me about one time.”

“So why should Gary Santo listen to Meyer?”

“Because first we build you a track record. You dig into those charts of yours and make some of those field trips and surveys and come up with some very very hot growth items. And I think I’ve got just the pipeline, once I develop it a little, to feed them to him. The pipeline is named Mary Smith. She has brown straight glossy hair. She is small, and stacked, and she looks sullen and hungry.”

“So if the great Gary Santo knew nothing about your friend Bannon?”

“I know Ttьsh tried to get to him and couldn’t get past the girl-curtain. He didn’t think Santo was the kind of man who’d want the little guy crushed under his wheels. Somehow Santo squeezed LaFrance and LaFrance squeezed various folk, which happened to include Tush. If Santo knew-and let the roof fall on Tush-for a lousy little crumb of the acreage he needs up there, then I would like to have him get it where it stings. And, if so, can you work up something?”

Meyer got up and plodded back and forth, all hair and simian concentration, and scowling little bright blue eyes. He stopped and sighed. “McGee, I don’t know. I just don’t know. The problem divides itself into two interdependent parts. First I would have to get a line on a dirty situation like Westec before it leaks out. Those people falsified their earnings statements to keep the stock at a high level so they could pick up smaller companies on favorable merger terms. Then one executive put in for eight million worth of the stock, traded on the American Exchange, and he couldn’t come up with the money to pay for the stock and that’s when trading was suspended. Now I could smell out something like that, heading for disaster, and then if I can pick a few legitimate winners to make him feel as if I-”

“Or as if you had picked some winners, Meyer.” He looked startled for just a moment, and then came that broad Meyer smile that turns one of the ugliest faces of the Western World into what one of the articulate lassies among the Meyer irregulars one season called “a beautiful proof that someday, somehow, the human race is going to make it.”

“Dated, official, machine-printed confirmations of stock purchases on official forms from a reputable brokerage house! Hindsight! Perfectl One day, maybe two, in New York and I can come back with proof I’m such a genius I bought-”

“You had me buy…”

“Yes. I see. I had you buy highfliers right at the point where they were taking off, and I don’t have to go back far, less than a year in every case. Gulton, Xtra, Leasco Data, Texas Gulf Sulphur, Goldfield Mohawk Data. Fantastic performers! Listen, I won’t make it too good. If every buy was at the bottom, there’d be suspicion. Like instead of Gulton at fifty dollars a share, you get on at sixty-five.”

“Where is it now?”

“It went up to nearly a hundred and ten, split two for one, and the last time I looked it’s maybe sixty dollars.” He sat down and emptied the nog mug again. “Travis, how rich do you want to be? I can use an old and dear friend who will be delighted to help, so I can get you monthly margin account statements showing the security position, the debit and so on.”

“Say I started a year ago with a hundred thousand.”

“Congratulations! You are now worth a quarter of a million.”

“Success hasn’t spoiled me, Meyer. Have you noticed?”

“All I notice are your criminal instincts, my dear Travis, and how rash you are with your queen, which lets me whip you at chess, and how right now you are too tightened up over this Tush business. You are too close to this one. Be careful. I don’t want to lose you. Some terrible people might take over Slip F-18. Nondrinkers, going around saying shush.”

Puss Killian came drifting back into the lounge, looking wan. Her face was puffed, her eyes red. She snuffled and then honked into a Kleenex, and said, “Give me that Meyer’s Law again, please? The exact words.”

“In all emotional conflicts the thing you find hardest to do is the thing you should do.”

“I was afraid that was what you said, Meyer. What we all do is make excuses why we shouldn’t do the hard things. Like apologize. Like visit the dying. Like spend a little time with bores.”

“Stop short of masochism, dear girl,” Meyer said. “I always have. Too far short, maybe. Gad! I feel as if I’d been pressed flat and dried out, like an old flower in a bad book. Do something, gentlemen!”

And so we did. Meyer and I went off in opposite directions, head-hunting. He had a quota of fivethree female and two male. I went after two couples.

It is an old contest. They can be friends, or acquaintances, or absolute strangers. After the festivities, we rate them on a scale of ten, the measurement being whether or not you’d be willing to spend a month on a small boat with them. We made a good Christmas bag, because there was a compulsion to have a good time. We unfastened all the umbilical devices affixing the Flush to her mooring space, and, with eighteen yuletide souls aboard, chugged down into the breadths of Biscayne Bay under clearing skies, edged the old girl as close as I could get her to good beach with good protection near Southwest Point, stayed the night in drink, argumentation, minimal sleep, beach walks, a touch of skinnydipping for those brave hearts who can stand the December waters, and came trundling back up to home base the next day.

Sometimes it doesn’t work at all, but this time it had jelled. There had been some good minds, outrageous opinions, furious squabbles, laugh-till-you-cry incidents, games and contests, confessions and accusations, tears and broad smiles. But no sloppy drunks, no broken crockery, or teeth. We aimed homeward tired and content and, for the- most part, friends. Waterborne group therapy, Meyer calls it. It restored Puss Killian. Late on Tuesday afternoon as we were scoring our recent boatmates, with Puss as arbiter when we disagreed, she said, “Does anyone else have the feeling that little jaunt lasted at least a week?”

“When they don’t seem to,” said Meyer, “they haven’t worked.” Which could be another one of Meyer’s Laws, but he says it is too close to aphorism to be significant.

Eight

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 27th, before Puss and Janine and I had to catch the flight out of Miami to Milwaukee for Tush’s funeral the next day, I had a chance to talk with Dr. Mike Guardina at the lab. I left the gals with the car and told them I wouldn’t be long, so not to wander too far.

Mike took me into a small office and closed the door, and took a folder out of the locked file. He is thin, intent, strung on taut wires, totally intent on finding out why people die: He is qualified in about all the kinds of pathology they have.

“Trav, the first impression was of too much damage. Way too much to go with the way it was supposed to happen, from what we found on your roll of film once we made prints. So much damage that actually trying to locate any specific tissue damage or bone damage not likely to have been caused by the impact of that weight dropping on him would have been pretty iffy. About all we can say for certain is that there is a good chance he wasn’t shot in the head first, nor much of a chance that there was any blow that struck him from behind. Now you did want a cause of death to a reasonable medical certainty, but I gathered from your conversation over the phone with me that you want suicide ruled out if possible.”

“But if you can’t-”

“This is another approach. Take a look at these.” He put three 8 x 10 glossies on the desk top. He pointed with the eraser end of a yellow pencil. “This is a blowup of the central portion of one of your pictures, Trav, where you had that block cranked high and you aimed up at it. See these rusty hexagonal nuts along here, toward what we will call the rear end of the block? Look at this one in particular. Somebody apparently tried to knock it off with a cold chisel, and knocked off a third of it before they gave up. Now this next print is full frame, of the chest area of the subject. Note these three marks circled with a grease pencil, and marked A, B and C. This third print is actually a triptych, an enlargement of A, B and C. The area marked A shows a clear imprint or incised impression of that damaged nut. The encircled B area shows the same imprint exactly, and it is about four inches from the point marked A, in a lateral direction across the crushed chest, from right to left. Imprint C is, as you can see from the print of the whole chest area, another inch and a quarter or inch and a half further, going from right to left, from imprint B. But here, as it struck, or would seem to have struck a previously damaged area, we do not have as obvious an identical match. However, if you want me to project the thirty-five millimeter color slides we took of points A, B and C, I think you will see that it is reasonable to suppose that impact area C represents the same deformed nut.”

“In simply lousy English,” I said, “you are certain that the engine block was dropped onto him twice, and you can make a case that it could have been dropped, cranked up, dropped again, cranked up, and dropped the third time.”

“Yes,” said Mike. “It wouldn’t be consistent with suicide.”

Long ago and far away I could see Tush Bannon under the needle spray in the long shower room that smelled of old socks, soap and disinfectant, rubbing up a suds on that barrel chest and bawling, off-key, “… and this is my storrrreeee, as you can plainly see. Never let a sailor put his hand above your kneeeeeeee.”

“Spare me the slides, Mike: Can I have dupes of these?”

“Got them right here for you. Smaller. Five by sevens. OW.”

“Fine. And what about a grand jury? Will it make you nervous if we don’t do a thing?”

“What could you do with it? Somebody got clumsy. They found him crushed under that thing and so they cranked it up and it slipped and fell on him again and they cranked it up again and locked it. He was obviously dead, so why make a big statement about the crank slipping? We can’t prove the third drop, even though I feel certain it happened. You understand what I’m saying, Trav. In a court of law any neophyte defense attorney could set up an area of reasonable doubt you could take a truck convoy through.”

“But if there ever comes a time for affidavits?”

“Me and Harry Bayder, and the tape going as we worked, and a resident in pathology taking notes. Time and place, and an accurate identification of the body, and signed statements in the file from all three of us. Just in case. If and when you ever get something else to go with it.”

“You are a good man, Guardina.”

“Beyond compare, surely. Keep in touch, hombre.”

All I could tell Janine, or wanted to tell Janine, was that any last faint possibility of suicide was long long gone. I told her on the way out to the airport. She didn’t say a thing. I had my hands on the wheel at ten of and ten after. She reached up and put her long fingers on the ten after wrist. At the chapel in Milwaukee, when we bowed our heads in prayer, I looked down at the underside of my right wrist and saw the four dark-blue half moon marks where her nails had bitten deep. Her parents thought she should have brought her three young sons to the services. They thought Tush should have been shipped sooner and buried earlier. They thought she should come home with the boys and stay. They thought her tailored navy-blue suit was not proper attire for a widow. They thought it odd she had brought along this McGee person and this Killian woman when there were so many old friends who were-or should have been-so much closer in a time of need. They resented not knowing Connie Alvarez. They had remembered that she had been at Janine’s wedding, but they let it be known she had struck them as a rather coarse and peculiar person, not at all the ladylike type their daughter should cultivate. They made it clear that it was an affront to them that poor Janine should go back immediately to Florida with these… these strangers.

On the flight back we had three side by side. Janine was in the middle. She said, turning her face from Puss to me and back, “I’m sorry. They just… they aren’t…”

Puss hugged her and said, “Honey, if you put the knock on them you’ll feel like a traitor. Everybody has people, and their people don’t want to let them go or admit they’re gone when they’re gone. They love you. That’s good enough. Right?”

“Should I have brought the boys? That’s what I keep wondering.”

“Ask each one of them when he gets to be twentyone, dear. Ask them if they felt as if they had been left out of anything,” Puss said.

So they sat, holding hands, and Jan fell asleep. Puss gave me a sleepy wink and then she was gone too. I looked out of the jet at December gray, at cloud towers reaching up toward us. Tush was gone, and too many others were gone, and I sought chill comfort in an analogy of -death that has been with me for years. It doesn’t explain or justify. It just seems to remind me how things are.

Picture a very swift torrent, a river rushing down between rocky walls. There is a long, shallow bar of sand and gravel that runs right down the middle of the river. It is under water. You are born and you have to stand on that narrow, submerged bar, where everyone stands. The ones born before you, the ones older than you, are upriver from you. The younger ones stand braced on the bar downriver. And the whole long bar is slowly moving down that river of time, washing away at the upstream end and building up downstream.

Your time, the time of all your contemporaries, schoolmates, your loves and your adversaries, is that part of the shifting bar on which you stand. And it is crowded at first. You can see the way it thins out, upstream from you. The old ones are washed away and their bodies go swifdy by, like logs in the current. Downstream where the younger ones stand thick, you can see them flounder, lose footing, wash away. Always there is more room where you stand, but always the swift water grows deeper, and you feel the shift of the sand and the gravel under your feet as the river wears it away. Someone looking for a safer place can nudge you off balance, and you are gone. Someone who has stood beside you for a long time gives a forlorn cry and you reach to catch their hand, but the fingertips slide away and they are gone. There are the sounds in the rocky gorge, the roar of the water, the shifting, gritty sound of sand and gravel underfoot, the forlorn cries of despair as the nearby ones, and the ones upstream, are taken by the current. Some old ones who stand on a good place, well braced, understanding currents and balance, last a long time. A Churchill, fat cigar atilt, sourly amused at his own endurance and, in the end, indifferent to rivers and the rage of waters. Far downstream from you are the thin, startled cries of the ones who never got planted, never got set, never quite understood the message of the torrent.

Tush was gone, and our part of the bar was emptier, and the jet raced from the sunset behind us to the night ahead, and beside me slept the two women, hand in hand, their lashes laying against the high flesh of their cheeks with a heartbreaking precision, a childish surrender, an inexpressible vulnerability.

By Saturday, the next to the last day of the year, I was beginning to feel surly and uneasy. I held a slack line. I felt that I had deftly pulled the barbed hook through the underlip of one Preston LaFrance, and that boating him was inevitable. He had to come aboard the Flush, flapping, gills working. The name McGee had suddenly cropped up at too many points in his life. McGee at the bank with the widow. McGee at Ingledine’s, making the arrangements about the hoody. McGee out at the old shack, souring his deal with old D. J. Carbee. McGee, the new owner of the property he wanted.

But the line lay slack on the water, without the slightest twitch or tension. Puss and I drove up to Broward Beach early Saturday morning, turned the car in, and came back down the Waterway in the Muneguita. I made a fast run, thinking I might find LaFrance when I got back to the Busted Flush. Nothing. Puss was withdrawn, remote, and did not help my mood by telling me she was going away Monday morning for a little while. A few days. No clue as to where or why. And be damned if I’d ask. As she packed a bag it seemed a gratuitous affront that she should hum to herself. What was she so cheery about?

And why didn’t Meyer phone from New York? Too busy having a fine time with old stockbroker buddies, probably.

At ten minutes after four the slack line twitched. I tested the tension cautiously. It was still through the underlip. I shooed Puss into the master stateroom and invited Preston LaFrance into the lounge. He came in, grinning, hesitant. A gaunt and ugly and sandy one. Maybe the young Sinclair Lewis, if the old photographs are accurate. Fifty percent hick. Fifty percent con artist. Cowlick. Long lumpy face. Lantern jaw. Nervous cough. Ploughboy hands. Brash sports jacket with the wrong button buttoned. A gangly diffidence overlaying a flavor of confidence. When he looked around the lounge, his expression vague, I had the feeling he saw everything that had any bearing on his own aims and motives, and could price the whole layout within plus or minus three percent.

His big hand was warm, dry and utterly slack. “Mr. McGee, we seem to be aiming in kind of the same di rection on a little matter, and what I thought, I thought it might be time to see if we can eat out of the same dish or spill the dinner.”

“I guess that depends on how hungry we are, LaFrance. Sit down. Get you a drink?”

“Mostly I’m called Press. Short for Preston. Thank you kindly, and if you would have such a thing as a glass of milk, that would be fine. I had an ulcer and got over it, and they tell me sipping milk instead of kitchen whisky will keep me from having the next one. And I guess you’ve upped my milk bill by maybe half, Mr. McGee.”

“Mostly I’m called Trav. Short for Travis. And we stock milk because there is very little damn else you can put on cornflakes.”

“You are so right!”

I brought him his glass of milk, and a beer for me. He sat on the long yellow couch. I pulled a chair a little too close, turned the back toward him and straddled it, forearm along the back of the chair, chin on the forearm, expression politely expectant and benign. It put my face two feet from his, and six inches higher, with the brightest window right behind me. Closeness is a tactical weapon. We do not like our little envelope of anticipated separation and privacy penetrated. It is a variable distance, depending on the needs and necessities of the moment. We endure the inadvertent pressure of the flank of the office worker in the crowded down-elevator at five o’clock. If we are alone with the office worker, if it is male-without overtones of fag-then it is insolent challenge, demanding action. Being jostled in a crowded airport is acceptable; on a wide and empty sidewalk it is not. A fixed stare is a form of penetration -of the envelope, carrying different messages according to the sort-out of sex, station, race, ages and environment.

Always we want some separation, some tiny measure of distance regardless of how clumsily our culture mechanizes an inadvertent togetherness. The only exception time is when sex is good in all dimensions, so that even in the deepest joining there is the awareness of that final barrier, an aparmess measured by only the dimension of a membrane, and part of the surge of it is a struggle to overcome even that much apartness.

The lounge aboard the Flush is a sizeable enclosure, and I positioned myself well inside the area of logical separation. Once you learn the expectations of distances, small and great, you can use them in tactical ways, watching for reaction, for a pulling back, a pained stiffness of expression, an awkwardness. Or position yourself beyond the plausible distance and watch for the forward lean, the advance, the slight what-is-wrong-with-me agitation. It is a kind of language without words, a communication, and incites a reversion to the primitive compulsion of the pecking order, the barnyard messages-You get too close so I peck you back to where you belong.

Press LaFrance sipped his milk, looking down into the glass. He looked to the side and reached and put the half glass on the end table. He then hiked one limber Ichabod leg up, heel on the edge of the couch cushion, long fingers of both hands laced around his ankle, slouching just enough to interpose the knee between us so that he looked at me over the top of it. With that interposition he increased the subjective distance between us.

“Fifty mortgage plus fifteen cash equals sixty-five thousand,” said he. “And that is better than twice what any licensed appraiser would put on it.”

“For the same use Bannon put it to. A man with his house on fire and a man dying of thirst would put a different value on a glass of water.”

“Hard to put a value on ‘if,’ Trav. Link three or four it’s together and it comes out long odds, so you can’t go very high.”

“There are some men, Press, who get a little confused between greed and shrewdness. Maybe they are a little bit shrewd, and then they want to buy at the lowest dollar and sell at the highest, and finally it comes out as if they weren’t shrewd at all. They end up doing the very same thing as if they were stupid to begin with.”

The knobbly face colored a little and the mouth stiffened then relaxed as the color faded. “A fella could have made an offer way back, through a third party, and a fair offer, all considered, but somebody could have been too bullheaded to listen.”

“Fair offer?”

“We aren’t talking marina, McGee. We aren’t talking motel. You know that and I know it. We are talking ten acres.”

“Ten acres in the middle of the deal, smack in the middle of it, like a June bug in the birthday cake.”

“So I was coming up with thirty two hundred and fifty an acre for those ten acres.”

“Which gives you sixty acres, if you’d gotten it. What did the fifty behind Bannon’s place cost you?”

“A fair price.”

“One thousand dollars in nineteen fifty-one, according to the tax stamps on the deed as recorded in the Shawana County Courthouse, which comes out to twenty dollars an acre. That was probably a fair price in nineteen fifty-one. We can do a little arithmetic, Press. When you pay me forty thousand for clear title to the Bannon place, and assume the mortgage, then you have a ninety-one-thousand cost figure on the sixty acres, or just about fifteen hundred an acre. That will turn you a profit of five hundred an acre on resale, or thirty thousand, and because you are a reasonable man and because you are in a bind, you are going to be sensible and take it.”

He was absolutely immobile for long seconds. I think he even stopped breathing. He dropped the knee, swiveled and got up and peered down at me. “Man, you lost your cotton-pickin‘ mind for surel That would be two thousand an acre on resalel The deal with my buyer is for nine hundred. I couldn’t pay you any forty thousand and take over a fiftythousand mortgage! I’d come up with a loss of six hundred an acre. Where do you get this crazy twothousand figure?”

“Why, Press! You’d make out just fine on nine hundred an acre! You’ve got old D. J. Carbee screwed. You pay him two hundred an acre, or forty thousand, and you resell it to Gary Santo for nine hundred, which comes to a hundred and eighty thousand. So deduct that thirty-six thousand you’ll lose on that sixty acres, and there you are, fat and sassy, and a hundred and forty-four thousand ahead.”

He picked up the glass and drained the milk, wiped a chin-drip on the back of his wrist. “D.J. told me he didn’t tell you a thing about that option. So by God, you knew about it when you went and offered him five hundred an acre. You upset that old man something pitiful.”

“Maybe I was trying to upset you, Press.”

He sat down on the far end of the yellow couch. He shook his head like a sad hound. “What in the world are you after, McGee?”

“Money. Just like you, Press.”

“You knew I had to show up here. You left a trail and you left loose ends. But you didn’t do all this just to charge me forty thousand for something that cost you fifteen.”

“That isn’t much profit, come to think of it. What do you think I ought to charge you? Sixty? A hundred?”

“Oh, come on!” he wailed.

“You can’t come up with much. You’ve got the shorts, haven’t you? Overextended?”

“Don’t you worry about me!”

“But I do! I’ll tell you what I’ll do for you, LaFrance. I’ll pay you fifty thousand dollars in cash for your fifty acres and the option you’ve got on the Carbee acreage. Then you’re out of the whole thing with a nice profit.”

He stiffened. “Hell no! Then you got the whole two hundred and sixty acres Santo wants to buy.”

“But I wouldn’t sell it to him. The price isn’t right.”

“But you can’t move it, McGee, unless you move Santo’s parcel at the same time! Calitron has to have the whole four hundred and eighty acres. You know the rest of it, so you have to know that much.”

“I know the Calitron Corporation will go as high as seventeen hundred an acre to Gary Santo.” It was nice to have the name of the corporate buyer.

Preston LaFrance brooded about it. “He never did let on what he expects to get. But there’s not a damn thing anybody can do about that. Hell, Santo can just let his land sit there for ten years. He doesn’t have to sweat these things out.”

“In a smaller sense, Press, that’s my policy too.” He looked startled, and then alarmed. “Now, you wouldn’t squirrel up the whole deal by setting on that little ten acres forever, would you. Jesus, man, Calitron will go somewhere else if they get held up! Then where are we?”

“Maybe I’ve got a buyer who doesn’t need that much room. I’m thinking of your health, Press. Fifty thousand and no more worries, and your ulcer will feel fine. You can pay off some of the notes at the bank and make Whitt Sanders happy.”

His jaw firmed up. “I’ll play it like a Mexican standoff, mister. I’ll squat on my fifty and you squat on your ten.”

“It’s like what you said when you came in. Do we learn to eat out of the same dish or do we spill the dinner? Know what the difference is, Press? I’m not hungry and you are.”

He cracked the knuckles of both hands, methodically, one at a time. “Now you said something about being shrewd. and being greedy both and how it turns out stupid, Trav. I’ve been working on this thing one way or another for a year and a half, about. The way things are, I have to make it big, and that’s the truth. Not big the way Santo thinks about money, but big for me. I’m leveling with you. I’ve got to come out of this six figures ahead anyway, or with the present timing I’m going to end up way the hell back where I started in forty-six when I got out of the service, and I don’t want for that to happen. I had it within an inch of being home free, and you slipped in out of nowhere and bollixed it all up for me. Okay, it was smart business and you’re pretty cute. So right now I think it’s up to you to find some way to fix it so we get to eat out of the same dish, each to his need. I’ve got my good option out of old Carbee, even if he is thinking about shooting me since you went to see him. And I got the fifty acres behind your place.”