Travis McGee 09 - Pale Gray For Guilt

“I told Santo about that! I had that same idea. It took me a whole month to get to talk to him face to face, and then I had to chase him up to Atlanta, where they were opening up a hotel he’s got money in, where he’s got a penthouse thing he keeps for himself. I was up there drinking and waiting around maybe an hour and then he was ready to talk and we went back into one of the bedrooms and I told him these Bannons were a nice little family, working hard and doing pretty good, and if he could make them a good offer, which I wasn’t in any shape to do, then we were all ready to move. So he said don’t bother me with the details, LaFrance. He said that if he had to take care of all my. problems, why should I have a slice of the cake. He said that come next May first he’d pay the full two hundred and thirty-four thousand for a clean, clear title to the two hundred and sixty acres to the east of his holdings, or I could forget the whole thing. And that was what I couldn’t do, McGee-forget the whole thing!”

“So you broke them. You busted them down to a price you could afford. You didn’t have any other choice.”

“No other choice in the world, excepting to go broke myself. I swear, if it had been my own brother running that place, it would have had to be just the same. But let me tell you, I never did count on Bannon killing himself. That never entered my head one minute. We were having a late Sunday breakfast in the kitchen when I got a phone call telling me what he’d done, and after I hung up and thought about it, I went right in the bathroom and threw up. I swear, it made me sick. I was in bed most of the day. Suzy wanted to call the Doc, but I told her it was just probably something I ate at the hotel Saturday night, at the testimonial dinner for old Ben Linder, retiring from the law, looking like a little old gray ghost the way the cancer is eating him up.” He sighed. “You know, having you come out of noplace and snatch those ten acres away from me is like punishment for what Bannon did to himself. It’s like getting the word that nothing ever is going to work out right anymore for me, and things used to go so good there for a while.”

“Maybe Bannon didn’t kill himself.”

His sagging head snapped up. “What are you trying to do now? What kind of new game are you playing?”

“Just a thought. I suppose it was pretty well known who was putting the pressure on Bannon and why. Maybe somebody wanted you and Monk Hazzard to be appreciative. Maybe they roughed Bannon up just to prove a lot of real diligence and cooperation and went a little too far. And if Bannon just happened to die on them, it would be a pretty good way of fixing it so that nobody would ever be able to find out that Bannon took a bad beating.”

He chewed a crumb of skin off the corner of his thumb. “Suzy said if it was sure going to crush a man’s head anyway, he might as well be face down so he couldn’t see it falling…” He straightened and shook his head. “No. There’s nobody around who’d do a man that way. Nobody I know. Nobody Monk knows.”

I looked at my watch. “I’ll tell you exactly what you do, Press: I’ll be up there on Thursday the fourth. I’ll have somebody with me who can tell you something you might find interesting. But the only way you can get to talk to them is to have that forty thousand in cash or certified check all ready and waiting, and I’ll have a deed and closing statement and so on. Show me the money and then you can talk to the man I’ll bring along. Then you can decide whether you want to buy the Bannon place. Because that’s the only way you’re going to have any dish to eat out of.”

He stood up. “Otherwise?”

“Otherwise I just wait you out, and I wait until the Calitcon deal is dead, and then I make my own deal with Carbee, because he certainly isn’t going to renew that option with you, and then I see if my buyer can get along without your land and without the Santo land, and I think it’s quite possible that two hundred and ten acres might be enough.”

“You wouldn’t be running a bluff?”

“Prove you have forty thousand to get into the table stakes game, and we’ll give you a little peek at the hole card. Believe me, it’s the last and only chance you’ve got.”

From the dock he looked back toward me, standing on the afterdeck. He shook his head and said, “You know, damn it, McGee, it’s almost easier dealing with that son of a bitch Santo. At least you know more about what the hell is going on.”

I went back in and hollered to Puss that she could come out. I took a yellow cushion off the couch and lifted the little Sony 800 out of its nest and took it over to the desk. We’d used up two-thirds of the fiveinch reel of half-mil tape at three and three quarters ips. I unplugged the mike and plugged in the line cord to save the battery drain and rewound it to the beginning. I stretched out on the couch and Puss sat cross-legged on the floor and we listened to it all the way through. I got up just once and held the rewind key down a few moments, and replayed the account of the talk with Santo in Atlanta, and let it continue on from there.

At the end, Puss got up and punched it off and came over and hip-thumped herself a little room on the edge of the couch. “Is that what we’ve got for a villain, dear? That weak, scared, sly, sorry man? Just scrambling and hustling and trying to keep his stupid head above water? So his stomach hurts all the time, and he threw up.”

“Settle for Santo?”

“Maybe indifference is the greatest sin, darling. I’ll settle for Santo, until a new one comes along. McGee, tomorrow is New Year’s Eve.”

“So it is. So it is indeed.”

“How would you feel about no throngs, dear?”

“I was thinking about trying to prove two is a throng.”

“I think two people could purely lang the hell out of auld zyne if they put their minds to it. Is it zyne, or syne or what?”

“It is old acquaintance ne’er forgot.”

“New acquaintance ne’er forgot. What happens to people who start on Black Velvets and taper off on champagne?”

“They seldom remember their own names.”

“Let’s try for that.”

A slow gray rain came dawn all day long on the last day of the year. We kept the Flush buttoned up, the phone off, ignored the bing-bong of the regulars who were drifting from boat to boat, It was a private world, and she provided a throng of girls therein. Never had she released all that mad and wonderful vitality for so long. She had come all the way out of the shell she had been keeping herself in for the last few days. We peaked at that point where the wine held us in an unreal place, neither drunk nor sober, neither sane nor crazy, where the funny things were thrice funny, where all the games were inexhaustible, where tears were part of laughter or sadness, and every taste was sharpened, every odor pungent, every nerve branch incomparably sensitized. The ones who are half alive can reach that place, perhaps, with their trips and their acids and their freaking, but reality truly felt, awareness made totally aware, is a magic they can’t carry around in powdered form. She was a throng of girls and she filled the houseboat and filled the day and filled the long evening. Some of the girls were ten, and some were fifteen, and some were ten thousand years old. And, like Alice, I had to run as fast as I could to stay in the same place. HAPP-eee New Year, my love…

I awakened on Monday with the impression that I might have to get up and bang my head against the wall to get my heart started. The bedside clock was at seven after eleven. No hangover. Just that leaden heavy contentment of an expenditure so total the account was seriously overdrawn. I plodded my way into the vast shower stall, soaped and then stood swaying, eyes closed under the steaming roar, like a horse sleeping in the rain. Finally out of a sense of duty and character I fixed the heads to needle spray and switched it to cold. As I hopped and gasped, I thought dourly of how inaccurate are all the bridegroom jokes about window shades. A long and private holiday with a sizable, sturdy, vital, demanding and inventive lass leaves you with the impression that you had merely rowed a couple of tons of block across a lake, then ran them up to the top of a mountain with a dozen or so trips with a wheelbarrow, then rolled back down the mountain into the lake and drowned.

As with sad and reminiscent smile I was reaching for my toothbrush, I noticed that hers was gone. Okay. So she had packed early. But while brushing, I reached my free hand up and opened the other cupboard. It was bare. She had taken everything of hers, for the first time in all these months.

I rinsed and spat and wrapped the big damp towel around my waist and went in search of her. Of course there was nothing of hers left aboard. She was gone. She had scotch-taped a note to the side of the coffeepot. It was in her freehand printing, using red ballpoint.

And so, my scruffy darling, cometh an end to all good things. Endeth with a flourish, what? You are the best that could have happened to me. It isn’t Killian and it wasn’t Seattle, so don’t waste time and money. And nothing you said or did. Your saying and your doing are a memorable perfection. I am just not a very constant type, love. For once I wanted to quit when I was ahead. Think kindly of the girl. Because she did love you, does love you, will love you from here on in. Cross my heart. (Say my good-byes to all the good ones.)

Instead of a signature she had drawn a circle with two little almond shapes for eyes, and a great big curved line for a smile. Three tears were dripping down out of each eye.

But, damn it, I wasn’t ready yet.

Those were the words in my mind. I read them back and suddenly understood them, and I sat down in the booth suddenly full of self-understanding and self-loathing.

Sure, Puss-baby. We just hadn’t reached the cutoff point where McGee would make the break on his terms. Which would have kept you from quitting while you were ahead. The key word is ‘Yet.’ So all that’s hurt is pride, you sorry son of a bitch.

I could have done without that kind of selfrevelation. I felt like a very trivial and tiresome animal, a sluggish animal sitting slumped in its tired slack hide-hide that bore the small and involuntary marks of fang and claw of the otherwise gentle she thing now gone for good. Who is the user, Trav baby, and who is the used? And have you ever given anybody anything worth the having.

I clamped my jaw until my teeth squeaked and my ears buzzed. Why such a big hang-up over another promiscuous broad? Town was full of them. Go whistle up another one. Be the jolly old lover-boy, and be glad the redhead left before she turned into a drag, before she started bugging you about making it something legal and forever, and a-crawl with kids. I like last year’s McGee better.

Nine

MEYER WAS back on the second day of the new year, back on Tuesday at ten in the morning, and came over in his New York garments after leaving his suitcase off on his boat, so eager was he to display the fruits of his efforts.

There were two thin sheafs of brokerage house forms, paperclipped together. He sat across from me in the galley booth and said, “That batch is the monthly margin account statements.”

The forms were printed in pale blue ink on a thin off-white paper. The name of the firm was but vaguely familiar. Shutts, Gaylor, Stith and Company. 44 Wall Street. New York 10004. Established 1902.

“And these are the confirmations of purchases and sales. The prices are correct for the date of sale. The monthly statement of account checks against the confirmations, of course. The monthly statements cover eleven months, including last month. I put in several where you bought at such and such a figure and then sold after they’d gone up just a few points. They went up further and then dropped like stones.

I gave you two small losses, short term, on the same basis. In effect in eleven months you built a hundred thousand into almost two hundred and ninety thousand, so that according to the summary, right now you could sell two hundred thousand worth, pay a twenty-five percent long-term gain, and pocket a hundred and fifty thousand, leaving almost your original investment in the securities you’d still be holding.“

“What about anybody checking it out?”

“Your account number… that number there… oh-three-nine-seven-one-one-oh, that’s in legitimate sequence. Somebody started an account eleven months ago, then canceled out. It’s a small, conservative, reputable house. I can tell you that there is not one other person in the world they would do this for. I had to make so many solemn oaths I’ve forgotten half of them. If anybody checks back to the margin clerk he will say it is all legitimate. If anybody tries to go further, they will come upon either Emmet Stith or Whitsett Gaylor, who’ll confirm.”

“So how did I make payment to them?”

“Always by check on the Bank of Nova Scotia in Nassau.”

It was beautiful. There is no way that even a Gary Santo could pry information out of the bank of Nova Scotia. It is a system some call Zurich West.

I leafed through the sheets. I had bought at the right time. I’d done very well.

“So what is wrong with you?” Meyer asked.

“I’m just great. Nifty peachy.”

“You are stimulating. Like a dirge. Where’s Puss?”

“Gone for good.”

“So!”

“So?”

“So I don’t think you drove that one off. So it was her choice. So she isn’t the kind who says it is for good and then come back all of a sudden. With her, gone is gone. Or worse. So if I were you and one like that was gone for good, I’d miss hell out of her and wonder if maybe I’d handled things a little differently somehow, I could have kept her around permanently.”

“That’s enough about ‘so.’ ”

He got out of the booth. “When you want to be civilized, I live over there on a boat. The John Maynard Keynes. Fourteen hundred and forty a year, special annual rate, less a discount for paying the year in advance. Ask for Meyer.”

“Okay, okay. These sheets are perfect. You did a hell of a job up there. You are intelligent, crafty, loyal, persuasive and diligent. Puss or no Puss, the job goes on. LaFrance showed. I’ll play you the tape. It’s interesting. He spilled the name of the company. Calitron. Mean anything?”

“A name only. Listed on the big board. A growth issue, going at thirty times earnings. Volatile. I’ll check it out. Play the tape and I’ll go away and let you sit and chew your hands and moan a little.”

“I’m glad I depend on you for sympathy Meyer.”

“What sympathy should you get? A little arrangement, wasn’t it? A sea urchin arranged the meeting. The urchin didn’t wash up, she didn’t step on it, what have you lost? Don’t answerl Your disposition you’ve lost. Play the tape before I start to cry.”

I put it on. I stretched out on the yellow couch. I closed my eyes. If I opened them quick enough, turned my head quick enough, I would see Puss sitting cross-legged on the floor, scowling as she listened to Preston LaFrance.

When it was through, I turned it off. Meyer sighed. He said, “I think he will have the forty thousand. Even knowing I was hearing nonsense, I could believe you a little. Forty thousand is better than getting poked in the eye with a stick.”

“You left something out. Did you find the kind of a company Gary Santo could invest in?”

After the first five sentences I was totally lost. I stopped him and told him to start over again, and give it to me in baby talk.

He sighed; pondered. “Try this. A company has only so many shares of stock issued. The number of shares is called the ‘float.’ When there aren’t many shares, it is called a ‘thin float.’ Somebody buys ten thousand shares of General Motors, he might move it up an eighth of a point twelve and a half cents a share-just by the effect of his demand on the floating supply. But if he put in an order for ten thousand shares of Peewee incorporated, the demand might shove it right through the roof. It might boost it four or five dollars a share. Are you with me?”

“So far.”

“Every day in every newspaper it shows you, with the two zeros left off the end, how many shares of every listed stock were bought and sold. People watch like hawks. Two kinds of people. One guy wants capital gains. He wants to buy something for twenty dollars a share, hold it for six months and a day, sell it for forty a share, pay Uncle twenty-five percent of the profit in capital gains tax, or five dollars, and put fifteen in his pocket. Other characters are traders. They sit in brokerage offices and watch the tape. They want to buy a stock for twenty a share, sell it next week at twenty-five, when it drops down from twenty-six, buy it back at twenty-seven, sell at thirty, buy back at twenty-eight, sell at thirty-five and so on. They pay straight income tax on their net gain. Gary Santo is the first type, the capital gain guy, because all his income is being taxed at the maximum rate already.”

“Still with you, Professor.”

“Splendid! Now when something good is going to happen to a little company, the number of shares sold and bought every day goes up. It becomes more active. The price of the stock goes up. So it gets noticed. So more people want to get in the act and make a buck. That creates more demand. The demand pushes the price higher. In every trade, Travis, nobody can buy unless somebody is willing to sell. The more people who want to hand on, the fewer shares floating around, and the higher it goes, because the price has to go up to the point where somebody will say: Okay, I’ve made enough off this stock, so I’ll sell it. I’ll put in my order to sell it at two-dollars a share higher than it is right now. It is a big snowball rolling up the hill. Okay?”

“One thing. What keeps Santo from making a lot of money too?”

“Nothing, if he gets out in time. But look at the credentials I fixed you up with. All splendid values back at the time you bought them, at the time you apparently bought them. Stock prices go up because the company is making money, and has the look of making more money than before when they make their next earnings report, So the stock I found, Santo will think it has the same beautiful future like these you made the capital gains out of. They are still all hanging up there pretty good. So why should he be nervous? I tell you, he would be nervous if he knows what a terrible lousy stock I found.”

“What is it?”

“A dog called Fletcher Industries. I read maybe two hundred balance sheets and operating statements. I started with two hundred and weeded down and down and down, hunting for something that looks okay fine on the surface but is rotten underneath. It could win a prize for the worst stock. It has a thin float. It shows sales and profits going up every year. It has a nice profit margin, nice book value, big words in the annual financial report about a glowing future and so on.”

“So what’s wrong with it?”

“This I shouldn’t even try to explain. Listen, there are maybe eight perfectly ethical and legitimate choices a C.P.A. has when he is figuring profit per share. Each choice makes the profit higher or lower, accordingly. You could find some old conservative companies that make the eight choices so they show the lowest per share profit Most companies make is one choice one way, another, another way, so in general it cancels out. But this little Fletcher outfit, they use every chance they have to make profits look bigger. I reworked their statements. The stock sells right now for fifteen a share. Over the last twelve months the earnings reports say they made ninetysix cents a share. This was up from seventy-seven cents the previous year. Use the most conservative methods and you know what it is? It is a lousy eleven cents the previous year, and it is a four-cent loss this year. Such a statement they publish! The book value is all puffed up. The profit margin is nonsense. Even the cash flow is jiggered up.”

“Book value? Cash flow?”

“Forget it. You don’t have to know. All you have to know is that no matter how careful Santo is, the published trading volume will go up, the stock will go up, a lot ®f careless people will jump on the wagon and push it higher. They’ll think a big increase in earnings is going on. Or a merger, or a new product. Like with the ones you are supposed to have bought. But this one has no substance. It will go up like penny rockets and when it starts down, it should maybe end up a two-dollar stock where it belongs.”

John D. MacDonald

PALE GRAY FOR GUILT

“So we con him into buying it, Meyer. So it goes up and up and he makes a lot of paper profit, and then when it goes down, he sells out and keeps the profit.”

“With everybody selling, with. everybody, trying to save out some profit, who will buy it? No buyers and they’ll suspend trading, investigate the heavy speculation, and when it opens again, it will open in the cellar. Santo should lose most or all of his bundle.”

“So how does Janine make the money you were talking about?”

“With the forty thousand from LaFrance we start her off, pick up three thousand shares. As it moves, I use the increased market value to pick up more for her. I watch it like an eagle, and then I start pulling her out of it very, very gently, and putting her into a nice solid little sleeper I happened to find when I was looking for this Fletcher dog. It should give her a hundred-percent gain in a year, along with a nice dividend yield.”

“How much can you make for her if things work out right?”

“If? Did I hear you say if? You get Santo to bite at it, and I’ll do the rest. End of the year? Oh, say the original stake plus a quarter million.”

“Come on, Meyer!”

“Oh, that’s before short-term gains tax on Fletcher. You see, that’s what’ll lock Santo into it. He’ll be hoping to ride the profit for six months. Say a fifty to sixty thousand tax she’ll pay.”

“You kill me, Meyer.”

“Make sure nobody else kills you. It would be boring around here.”

For the first time since I knew Puss would never come back, I felt a faint and reluctant little tremor of excitement and anticipation.

Meyer, frowning, said, “You are going to see 132

LaFrance the day after tomorrow? Does that give us time to do everything we have to do?“

“I was just making him sweaty Meyer. I’ll phone him Thursday night and say we’ll have to change the arrangement. Don’t call us. We’ll call you. And I can get a pretty good indication of whether he has the forty all ready.”

“You know, you look more like yourself, Travis.”

“It’s the sympathy that does it, every time.”

“An obligation of friendship. What do you do first?”

“Find that little pipeline.”

After a long conference Wednesday morning with Meyer about strategy and tactics, and the documentation he ought to have, I went down to Miami. The offices of Santo Enterprises were in an unimpressive six story office building on North East 26th Terrace, a half block east of Biscayne. Reception was on the sixth floor. A wide corridor, glass doors at the end, and beyond them a paneled room, thick blue rug, and elegant blonde desk-table on a raised dais and, behind it with a look of polite and chilly query a slender princess with white dynel hair, glowing in the drama light of a little ceiling spot, who asked me in the beautiful clarity of the English upper class if she might be of service.

When I said I would like to see Mr. Santo, she looked remotely amused. “Soddy, sir, but he is out of, the citeh. Possibleh someone else could help you?”

“I’m inclined to doubt it.”

“Praps if you might tell me the nature of your business, sir?”

“I’d rather not.”

“Actually, then, there isn’t much that can be done, sir. Mr. Santo only sees one by appointment, and he would certainly not relish having his secretry make an appointment… blind, as it were. You see the problem, do you not?”

“Why don’t I talk to his secretary then?”

“But you see, sir, I would have to know the nature of your business to know which secretry you should speak with.”

“Does he have a super-special personal private one?

“Oh yes, of course. But, sir, one must have an appointment to speak with her. And to make the appointment I should have to-”

“Know the nature of my business.”

“Quite.”

“Miss, we’re both in trouble.”

“I wouldn’t really say both of us, sir.”

“If you don’t help me a little bit, and when I do get to Gary Santo, which I most certainly will, he is going to wonder what took me so long, and I am going to tell him that I just couldn’t get past that limey wench with the white hair under the spotlight.”

“But, sir! Really, I have-”

“Your orders.”

“Quite!”

“Do I look like a con artist? Do I look like a salesman? Do I look like a pest? Dear girl, aren’t you supposed to exercise some instinct and judgment about people?”

“Sir, one might possibly say… pest, should this go on too much longer. Oh! My word! Are you a pilot? Is it about that… currency matter?”

“I am not a pilot. But some currency might enter into it. I just remembered something. Somebody said at one point that to get to Santo with a certain suggestion, they had to clear through Mary Smith. Is that a person or some kind of a code name for something?”

“Mary Smith would be a person, sir.”

“A special personal private secretary, maybe?”

“Praps just private secretry, sir, might be suitable.”

“Now, please don’t tell me I need an appointment with her.”

She studied me for a moment, tilted her head, looked slightly quizzical and inwardly-and possibly bitterly-amused. The appraisal was like unto that given a side of beef when the US Grade stamp is not easy to read.

“You could give me your name, sir?”

“McGee. T. McGee.”

“This is teddibly irregular. Just a chawnce, y’know.”

“Tell her I do card tricks, have never been completely domesticated, and show signs of having been struck sharply in the face in years gone by.”

“At least you are amusing,” she said.

“Quite!” said I.

“Please have a seat. I’ll find out what she says, Mr. McGee.”

I sat cautiously in a chair that looked like the slope-end of a blue bathtub resting on a white pedestal, and found it more comfortable than it looked. Windowless rooms always give me the feeling of having been tricked. Now they’ve got you, boy, and they’re going to come through all the doors at once. I opened a mint copy of Fortune and a grizzled fellow looked out at me with alert and friendly squint of eye, advertising my chummy neighborhood power company. I think I could remember having seen him on somebody’s television set shilling an adenoidal housewife into squealing in ecstasy about suds.

The limey maiden murmured into the oversized mouthpiece of one of those privacy telephones. In a little while she hung up and said with a certain air of accomplishment and mild surprise, “She will be out in a few moments, sir.”

A flush door, bone-white, off to the left of the receptionist opened, and little Miss Mary Smith came through and toward me without a glance at the receptionist. I put Fortune aside and stood up. She marched to within four feet of me and stopped and looked up into my face. At least it was not a name they handed around the office. She was the one I had seen with Tush Bannon in the bar lounge atop the International Hotel. The dark and rich brownauburn hair fell in a straight gloss. I had misread, across the room the last time, the expression on her face. It was not petulance, not discontent. It was a total and almost lifeless indifference, a completely negative response. In a special way it was a challenge. It said, “Prove I should relate to you, buddy.” Her eyes were the improbable emerald of expensive contact lenses, made more improbable by just enough eye makeup to make them look bigger than they were. And they were generous to start with. Her skin texture was a new grainless DuPont plastic. The small mouth did not really pout. It was just that both upper and under lip were so heavy it was the only choice it had. They were artfully covered with pink frost. White blouse, navy skirt that nunnery flavor of offices and hospital wards.

She looked up at me, motionless as department store wax, with two millimeters of query in one eyebrow.

“The eyebrow,” I said, “is the exact same shade of those wooly bear caterpillars I remember from my childhood. You’d look for them in the fall to see if they were heading north or south. It was supposed to predict what kind of a winter we’d have.”

“So you’ve verified Elizabeth’s claim you’re mildly amusing. This is a busy office.”

“And I just happened to come bumbling in off the street to bother all you busy; dedicated people.”

She took a step back, a quarter turn. “Then, if that’s all.”

“I want to see Santo. What do I have to say to you? A magic word?”

“Try good-bye.”

“My God, you are a silly, pretentious little bitch!”

“That doesn’t work either, Mr. McGee. The only thing that does work is to state your business. If Mr. Santo did not employ people of some judgment to screen out the clowns, his time would be taken up with clowns… and eccentrics, and clumsy con men. Do you want him to finance a flying saucer?” She rested a finger against her, small chin and tilted her head. “No, you have that deepwater look. A bit salty? This is probably more of that treasure-map nonsense. Spanish galleons, Mr. McGee? And you have some genuine gold coins minted in the New World? I would say we average eight or ten of you people a month. So either you tell me or you don’t tell anyone here at any time. Is that quite clear?”

“All right. I will tell you. I will tell you enough so that you will open the door for me to see Santo.”

“May we call him Mr. Santo?”

“But I am not going to talk standing here like the last guests at a cocktail party. I want to sit at a desk or a table and you can sit on the other side of it and listen to as much as I care to tell you.”

“Or as much as I care to listen to.” She turned to the receptionist and said, “I shall be in Conference D, Elizabeth.”

“Thank you, miss Smith,” said the humble limey. I pushed the glass door open for little Miss Mary Smith and followed her down the corridor. Her walk was engaging, as it seemed to involve a conscious effort to inhibit any swing and flourish of her solid little rear end, and was successful to but a limited degree.

Conference D was a ten by twelve cubicle. But the end wall opposite the door was all window, looking out across Biscayne Bay to the improbable architectural confectionary of Miami Beach, with a. sunlit glitter and shimmer of traffic across the Julia Tuttle Causeway a little to the north, and the residential islands off the Venetian Causeway about the same distance south. It was a gray room with gray armchairs, six of them, around a Chinese red conference table. On one wall was a shallow gray case, glassfronted, wherein a very diversified collection of white nylon gears and cogs and rods and bushings of various sizes had been arranged against a Chinese red background in simulation of some of the art forms of Louise Nevelson.

I could be reasonably certain that as we had walked down the corridor, Elizabeth had, as common practice, turned on whatever bug system was used in Conference D. After all, Elizabeth could look through the glass doors and see which door we had entered.

I had learned the right terms from Meyer. She sat across from me, radiating skepticism.

“I am a speculator, Mary Smith. I’m not a trader. My specialty is in the maximized capital gains area. There is enough income from certain other sources so that the Fed hasn’t, and won’t, class me as a professional and cut it all back to straight income. Is this over your head.”

“Hardly! In fact, you’ve almost run out of time, Mr. McGee.”

“I do not want to sell Santo a hot item. I do not want him in any syndicate operation. I do not want any piece of his action, or even any knowledge of the details just so long as he does move in on it. This is not nickel and dime. It’s a listed security. Now, usu ally I operate in a sort of informal syndicate deal. Every man for himself, but we make the same move at the same time. But we’ve done so well we’ve got some security leaks. I dug this one out and it’s too damned good to get the edge taken off of it by too many leaks. I could probably establish a position in it and then arrange a show of interest on the part of one of the aggressive funds. But they work out in the open, and the blocks they buy are too big.”

I looked at her questioningly. “You haven’t lost me. And your time hasn’t run out,” she said.

“So I have the word here and there that Santo will swing when something looks good. And I think he is smart enough to ease his way into it, because if he comes in too hard and fast, it is going to go up the ladder so fast I’m not going to have a chance to use the buying power on the margin account to keep doubling on the way up. He’ll have to set it up to work through several accounts, and be willing to sell off blocks of it to kill the momentum if it starts to go too fast.”

“You said something about it not being nickel and dime.”

“So it would depend entirely on how far he wants to go with it. If he goes in, it will take a million to create the pressure it needs. I would say he could come in anywhere from one million on up to a tops of four. Over four and it would put it too far out of balance and attract too much attention in the long run. Frankly, I’d be hitchhiking, using his buying pressure to get on for the ride up, and taking the chance he can keep the climb controlled. I could assemble syndicate money because the track record is good, but the leaks would hurt. If I had the million, I wouldn’t be here. Let’s say he can count on three hundred percent long-term gains, if he doesn’t plumber it. This is the kind of thing that comes along every three to five years, where all the factors fit like a beautiful watch.”

“Mr. Santo has very little tendency to plumber anything.”

“That was my evaluation. And when the ride is over, I should be where I won’t have to fool with syndicates and Santo. I’ll be where I can make my own markets.”

“A listed security?”

“And a company in a potentially dynamic growth area.”

For the first time I saw the suggestion of a smile on that heavy little-girl mouth. “And absolutely no point at all in asking you the name of it, of course. But I can ask you for… bank references?”

“That’s a silly question. If he wants to dig around and check me out, lots of luck. He could find worms in the apple. All he’ll be interested in is the track record.” I took the envelope out of my inside jacket pocket and took out the brokerage account forms and flipped them over to her. “Take a look, if you can read them and interpret them, and then you can give Santo a nice verbal reference.”

She went through the margin account monthly summary forms first, sheet by sheet. Midway through she gave me a sudden green glance of reappraisal. On the last one, the December one, I had penciled beside each stock listed in the security position the January second market value. She checked those values against the purchase confirmations-not all of them, just a random few.

“May I hold these for a few days?” she asked.

“No.”

“Can I have them Xeroxed? It would take just a few minutes:”

I hesitated. “On one basis, and I can’t enforce it. You see them and Santo sees them, and that’s it.”

“That would be up to him.”

“So relay my humble request to the great man, sweetie.”

“Do you have to be so sarcastic?”

“Am I supposed to be impressed by Gary Santo? He happens to be my number one on a list of three possibles. Whoever it turns out to be will make a bundle on their terms while they help me make a bundle on my terms. I didn’t come to beg, sweetie.”

“You do make that clear. I’ll be right back.”

“If you ever stoop to manual labor around this shop, I think it would be nice if you did the Xeroxing yourself.”

“I shall, sweetie. And you just made a nice brownie point. Cautious is as cautious does. We treasure that around here.”

She was back in under ten minutes. She did not sit again. I stowed the account forms in the envelope and in my pocket.

I said, “You see, Miss, there’s all those chests of gold coin busted open and spilled out right across the white sand bottom next to Hustler Reef.”

“That was clumsy, wasn’t it? I must stop typecasting. Of course you realize I have no idea whether or not this will appeal to Mr. Santo. The idea, I mean. If it does, he will have to know the security you’re talking about, and he will want to have it checked.”

“Quietly, I hope.”

“Of course.”

“When do I get to see him?”

“How can I reach you?”

“I’m going to be on the move. Suppose I phone you tomorrow afternoon.”

She shook her head. “Friday. Say at four in the afternoon. Ask for me by name and give my extension number or you won’t be put through. Sixty-six.”

“Just what is your job around here, Mary Smith?”

“You might call me a buffer zone.”

“Have I gotten past you?”

“On Friday we’ll both know, won’t we?”

Ten

ON TUESDAY evening I reached Preston LaFrance by phone at his home in Sunnydale. I taped it so that Meyer and I could study the playback.

“McGee? Trav? I’ve been wondering all day-”

“Too much has been happening; Press. I might say that things are shaping up a little better than I’d hoped. I might have some good news for you when I’m able to get up there.”

“I need some good news; and you can believe it. When are you coming up.”

“I’ll have to let you know. That money we talked about. Have you got it set aside?”

“Let me get one thing straight. I get to know about what’s going on before I have to go ahead and buy that damned thing for three or four times what it’s worth, don’t I? I mean I get a chance to make a decision based on what you tell me?”

“Naturally. But as you must realize, I’m not in this thing for that kind of a profit.”

“I can figure that out for myself all right. Okay I’ve got that money set aside, in case I want to go along.”

“You will. I’ll have the papers all drawn and bring them along. But one thing has come up which worries me a little, Press.”

His voice tightened up. “What? What?”

“Have you had any recent contact with Santo?” No. No reason to. Why?“

“I think it would be a very good thing if you make certain he never hears about any kind of deal between you and me.”

“I don’t understand what you-”

“Did you hear anything about somebody topping your offer that same day title reverted to Mrs. Bannon, and I bought it from her?”

“I sure did, and it puzzled the hell out of me. It come through Steve Besseker here, and he won’t say who made it.”

“I have it on pretty good authority that Besseker was representing Gary Santo.”

“What! The hell you say! Steve?”

“Santo sent some woman up to give him his orders, apparently. A tall redhead.”

“By God, somebody was kidding Steve about seeing him over in Broward Beach with a big good-looking redhead sometime just before Christmas.”

“It was probably the same day I bought the Bannon property. And it strikes me that the way things are going, Santo would want to know if there is any present or pending agreement between you and me, and he might have asked Besseker to find out.”

I could hear him breathing, and then he said softly, “Well, I’ll be a son of a bitch! The very next day he asked me if I knew you, and if maybe you were acting for me because, like Whitt Sanders said, that Bannon woman certainly wouldn’t have sold to me no matter what I offered her. What’s going on, McGee?”

“I’m afraid he’s gotten wind of the deal I’m trying to pull off, and it would sting him a little. I suppose Besseker will keep him posted on every move you make. Well, we have to move a little faster than I planned. Santo will hear about you buying the Bannon place from me as soon as the sale is recorded. Until then, keep your mouth shut because I wouldn’t want to have it turn out that you end up with no share in either his deal or mine.”

“Listen, I can’t risk anything like that happen-”

“Sit tight, Press. Hang on. Keep the faith.”

As he started to speak again I hung up on him. About an hour later I played it for Meyer. He listened and then shook his head. “What’s the point, Travis? Why are you confounding that dull boy with all this business of wheels within wheels?”

“For the variation of the pigeon drop, my friend. If suddenly the whole world seems more conspiratorial than he ever believed it was, then he’ll be in a better mood to stand still for the sleight of hand. Confused people are less skeptical. I was going to use Besseker another way, but it had to be through Puss, and she doesn’t seem to be around any more, so I salvaged a piece of the situation anyway.”

“But one thing puzzles me,” Meyer said. “Here you are worming your way into one kind of thing, directly with Santo. And up there you have your thumb in another kind of pie, but that is Santo’s too, but not so direct. Up there you are Travis McGee, this address. And down there in Santo Enterprises, you are Travis McGee, this address. There is the chance that by some accident Santo or one of his people finds out you are into both things. That would immediately alert a man like Santo. He could find the relationship between you and Bannon, and he would smell mice.”

“So?”

“Maybe I should have been the one to set up the investment thing.”

“It would take the joy out of it. He might never make the connection. I need the chance to look him in the eye, laugh at his jokes, share some booze with him, and then sting him where it hurts. Then he can find out why it happened to him. I’ll tell him, given the chance. For the rest of his life, the name Bannon is going to make him feel sick.”

“Maybe he has some people who will make you feel sick in other ways.”

“And sometimes they almost make it.”

“This time they could.”

“You always worry. It’s nice. If you stopped, I’d worry.”

He sighed. “Okay. So look at my expert, specialist, impressive kit. Meyer, the big industrialist.”

He had the aerials of the Shawana River area, and the series of overlays marked as planned. He had soil surveys, water table data, labor supply data. He had business cards on expensive buff- stock, engraved, turning him into G. Ludweg Meyer, Ph. D., Executive Vice President of Barker, Epstein and Wilks, Inc. Management Engineering Services.

“Let us sincerely pray,” he said, “that one of these cards never finds its way back to that very sound and good firm.”

“It might be therapeutic. It might stir them up. Let me see the correspondence file.”

The letterhead startled me. It looked totally authentic. One of the giant corporations that have become household words in these days of electronic fantasy. I stared at him and he beamed at me and said “It was a bit of luck So wonder about it. Note that it is from the office of the President of the corporation. That is his name, truly. Note that it is marked confidential. Note the very impressive carbon ribbon type face. See the secretarial initials at the bottom. Those are the initials of his actual private secretary. The signature is not great. I copied it from a copy of their annual report. The top letters are background. The key letter is about the fourth one down. There. That’s the one. Is it what you had in mind?”

The president called him My dear Ludweg: The first paragraph acknowledged the receipt of reports and recommendations, and then the letter went on to say,

I tend to agree with your appraisal of the competitive implications and possible danger to our industry position in that particular manufacturing division should Calitron establish a branch facility in such close proximity to Tech-Tex Applications, Inc. Though the branch facility we now have in the final planning stage is smaller, one could logically assume that proximity to TTA would benefit profit margin to the same extent percentagewise.

In view of the necessity of moving quickly, and the favorable report our people brought back, you are authorized to make a firm commitment in the name of the Corporation for from 200 acres minimum or 260 maximum either in general area A, or general area B. A separate letter of authorization is appended hereto In In view of the other interest in these industrial lands, you are authorized to bid up to $2 thousand per acre, or a maximum of between $400 thousand and $520 thousand, at your discretion.

“Very nice,” I said.

“What should my approach be up there? How should I act?”

“Self-important, influential, crooked, and careful of being caught at it. Great letters, Meyer. You are showing more and more talent every time you get into one of these things.”

“And getting more and more scared. Isn’t this a conspiracy to defraud?”

“Let’s say to highjack. Now let me tell you how it is supposed to work.”

He buried his face in his hands and said, “I can hardly wait to hear.” After I explained it, it took him a long time to smile.

When I phoned Mary Smith at four on Friday, she said, “Mr. McGee, would it be possible for you to have a drink with Mr. Santo this evening at seven at the Sultana Hotel on Miami Beach?”

“I can arrange it.”

“The Out-Island Room, then, at seven. Just ask for Mr. Santo’s table.”

I arrived at the arched doorway a few minutes after seven. A lackey with a face like a Rumanian werewolf slunk out of the gloom and looked at me with total disdain, as if Central Casting had sent the wrong type with the wrong clothes. It was a cold day, and I had put on the Irish jacket. After five or six years, twigs still occasionally fall out of the dark coarse weave.

“Mr. Santo’s table; please.”

“And your name?”

“McGee.”

He lit up with joy at beholding me. He popped his fingers and a waiter trotted over, bowed several times, and led me back through the labyrinths of partitions and alcoves to a deep corner, to a semicircular banquette big enough for six, and a semicircular table to fit. He pulled the table out, bowed me in, put it back and bowed and asked for my drink order. At ten after he came on the run and pulled the table out again as the Santo party arrived. Gary Santo, Mary Smith, Colonel Burns, Mrs. Von Kroeder. I measured Santo as we shook hands. He was not as tall as he looked in his pictures, but with all the shoulders and chest so frequently mentioned in his publicity. He was shading fifty, but fighting it and winning the same way those more directly in show business win it, with the facials, the luxuriant hairpiece touched just enough with gray, the laborious hours in the home gym, and the sessions on the rubbing table, and the hefty shots of vitamins and hormones, and a hell of a good dentist. He came on all virility, white teeth, wrestler’s handshake, and the knack of looking you squarely in the‘ eye and crinkling his eyes as if you and he shared a joke on the rest of the world.

In resonant boyish baritone he told me I knew Mary Smith, of course, and presented me to Halda Von Kroeder, who had as much thin, pale, graceful neck as I have ever seen, a small, pert head, a tall, slat-thin body, a cascade of emeralds, and a set of breasts so awe-inspiring she gave the impression of leaning slightly backward to keep herself in balance. “So bleezed,” she said in a Germanic rasp, then hiccuped.

Colonel Dud Burns had the look of eagles… defeathered, earthbound, and worried about cirrhosis. Gary Santo arranged the group with himself in the middle and, at his left, first Mary Smith and then me at the end, and with Halda and Burns in that order at his right.

Mary Smith was at that daring outer limit where style becomes comedy. There was more eye makeup, and the mouth more frosted. She wore a gray sweater with a great deal of complex stitchery and welts and seams. It came down to within six inches of her knees. Showing under the sweater was two inches of blue tweed skirt. Below the skirt were sheer blue stockings that were a perfect match for shoes with stubby heels and high, stiff tongues. On her head was a wide-brimmed hat shaped much like the hats the novilleros wear in the bullring. It was of a stiff eggshell fabric in a coarse weave. She had it perched aslant on the gloss of the brown-auburn spill of hair, with a white thong under her chin, a blue wooden thong bead at the corner of her little jaw. The sweater sleeves came midway down her forearms. Her gloves and purse matched the eggshell hat When she pulled her gloves off, she uncovered nails painted a thick, pearly, opalescent white.

She sat bolt upright like a bright and obedient child and smiled at me with wide eyes and careful mouth, and told Santo she would have the regular, which turned out to be a straight shot of Wild Turkey with water, no ice, on the side. When she got it, she went at it with frequent little sippings, each of which must have been three or four drops by volume.

Santo turned finally, after some in-group jokes and conversation I couldn’t follow, and faced me across Mary Smith, his back squarely toward the kraut lady.

“Our little Poo Bear here gives you a good mark, MCGee.”

“Poo Bear Smith?” I asked.

“It’s an office thing,” she said. “I have this instinct or something. He says what about this one and I say Poo. And that one, and I say Poo. Then the next one I say okay for brownie points.”

“She’s got a nose for it. Questions, McGee. If I go for it, if I like the flavor of it, how much do you have to know?”

“The day you start and how much you are going to spring for altogether.”

“Have you taken a position in it?”

“About the same way porcupines make love, but I’m nowhere near as far in as I want to be. It’s been moving in a narrow range and I’ve been buying on the downs.”

“Will you need to know my orders?”

“No. I’ll have a man tape-watching it.”

“There’s one place where we have to be coordinated on it, and that’s getting off it.”

“As carefully as we get on, I hope.”

“And the last thing, of course, is the name of it.”

“Right here?”

“The other two can’t hear, and Mary is the best you’ve ever seen at keeping her mouth shut. About anything.”

“Fletcher Industries. American Exchange.”

“Want to brief me a little?”

“Why should I? It’s a duplication of effort If your people can’t see why it’s as good as it is, you need new people.”

“You have your full complete share of mouth, McGee.”

“Have you gotten too accustomed to total humility on all sides, Santo?”

“Hush, now!” said Mary Smith. “You both hush. You’re both right. Don’t you two go all ballsy and wicked when you’re going to be helping each other.”

Santo threw his head back and laughed his boyish laugh. “Her biggest trouble is making sense. By Wednesday… that will be…”

“The tenth,” said Mary Smith.

“… phone her and she’ll have the Yes or No on it, and give you a probable figure.”

“Will do,” I said.

He smiled down into her face. He said to her, “I think I like your new friend, Mary. I think he’s maybe brought us another winner.” He took out his bill clip, slipped some bills out of it, and put them quickly into her purse. “I’m so sure, here’s an advance on your bonus. Use it to take him to where the steaks are.”

She looked at her watch. “Yes, you’d better start moving it, Gary. Ben will be out there with your luggage. Kiss Bonnie Bea for me.”

He made the smallest of gestures and people came on the run to pull the table away, hand him the check for signature, bow the three of them out and away.

We went up the beach in her little red car to what she called one of “her” places, a little bar dark as pockets. Once we were sitting across a very low and narrow little table from each other, so that we had to hunch over it in intimate arrangement, she figuratively rolled up her sleeves and went to work. She had awaited the pass, and for once there hadn’t been one.

She had put the strange hat aside. She shook out her gleaming hair. A stray pattern of light rested on a long diagonal across her face, from eyes to lips.

She dipped into her shot like a moth, put it down, picked up the stray lip-drop with tongue tip. “Want to know, Travis? Want the crazy message?” It was half whisper, her voice dragging.

“Message by special delivery. Sure, Mary Smith.” She made her eyes very wide and solemn. Her lips parted. She reached and took my hand in both of hers and pulled it slowly to her side of the table. She turned my slack fist over, then put the nails of her right hand high on the inside of my wrist, and slowly drew her nails along my wrist and over my palm, uncurling my slack fingers as she did so. Holding my fingers down, she dipped her head suddenly, pressed the mouth moist against my palm, lifted her head very quickly and stared at me, her face both sly and fake-frightened.

“Is there more?” I asked.

She turned my hand over and formed it into a fist and, holding it in both her hands, lifted it, held it, her elbows braced on the table. She bumped her chin into the knuckles, closed her eyes.

“Pow,” she whispered. “Like right off, the first minute. Pow. I’m never like that.”

“Comes a time,” I said.

“There does indeed, Mr. Travis McGee.” She tilted my fist slightly for a better angle, and went across the knuckle ridge with her warm little mouth, taking a gentle little bite at each knuckle and kissing the space between each knuckle. With each kiss, her tongue tip flicked at the closed apace between fingers.

“When it’s going to be what it’s going to be, there’s that message, don’t you think? An old-timey thing, way deep, that’s been waiting for it special. So very rough crazy everlasting special. And you know it too. Don’t you? Don’t you?”

She sat back there someplace behind those swarming eyes, listening to herself pant, in such a soft little wondrous way. She watched herself work herself up, no doubt measuring the bra-tickle of the nipples becoming erectile, sensing the new softness of thigh and belly. This was one of the new breed who assist the manipulators. Gary Santo, being a manipulator in a large way could be expected to have one who would know her business backward and forward and upside down. He might have two, three or a dozen in the retinue. He would keep them loyal not only with money but with the feeling of being part of an operating team and performing a function for the team.

Sex with a particularly skilled and desirable woman who could convince you that you were the greatest thing since fried rice was a marvelous gadget for one of the manipulators: The bedazzled male is incautious, mazed, thunderstruck. In that condition he can provide the maximum benefit to the manipulator and the least problem. He will come trundling along in the entourage just to be near his brand-new love-light. He will tell her all he knows and all he hopes, and in a frenzy of team spirit and accomplishment, she will bang him out of his mind and drop him right back where she found him when the manipulator has the last crumb of information he can use. But while he’s getting the treatment, he tags along with the team, with the group but not really a part of the group, aware that the team knows the basis for the attraction, aware of a team attitude of kindly contempt for him but so enthralled in his doggy, lolling, bitch-trailing way he will endure the little humiliations to keep getting what becomes more instead of less necessary to him the more he gets of it.

The role requires a woman exceptionally confident and decorative, a woman of a hearty and insistent sexuality, a woman who understands that serving the manipulator in this way is part of the price of the ticket on all the best flights to the best places, and if you want to be coy, or choosy or chicken, you can drop right back to the posture chair and the old electric and the girl’s room scuttlebutt about who might get promoted to what. It takes special gals to travel with the team, so dig in and enjoy the special assignments, because between the romps the guy will talk and you tote the crumbs back to Gary and he fits them together.

The manipulators are the brash gamblers putting little corporations together to make big ones, and they are the talent packagers who stick a half dozen special abilities together and end up with the percentage off the top of the network serial show, and they are the showboaters who take on the tax cases of the mighty and fight the Fed to a draw-or a cheap compromise-and they are the inventive money men who direct the conversion of hoodlum funds into legitimate enterprise, and they are the whiz kids who tear down the honest old buildings and stick up the glittery new boxes on the leaseback, write-off, tax shelter kick, and they are the ones that boost the market price of a stock up and unload and then kick it back down and buy back.

They buzz around the country and the world in little groups, where everybody is always laughing, and at the resorts and airports and executive dining rooms, at the padded bars and the swinging casinos, in the groups there are always the Mary Smiths, pert, tidy, high-style, voracious and completely with it, eyes a-dance, freed by The Pill to happily pull down the game the manipulator fingers for her, the new Gal Friday who has become the Gal Friday Night.

It is a new breed that did not exist a few years back, but cultures seem to have an uncanny way of spawning creatures to fill any need. So situation ethics, plus profitable manipulation, brought this merry regiment out of the wings, as if they had been waiting there all along. It would be pointless to conjecture about immorality or amorality, or make analogies about whoredom, that word with the ring of biblical accusation. A Mary Smith would not even be upset, merely puzzled.

In the diagonal light she rested her chin against my fist, her two warm and shapely little hands holding it there, elbow-braced, and made her eyes huge, then dipped and turned her head first one way and then the other, to slowly drag first one sheaf of the dense and fragrant hair across the back of my hand and then the other.

I remembered the shaggy and ancient joke of the young man in the strange city who had arrived with the phone number of a hundred-dollar girl. He called her up and was invited up to her luxurious apartment, where she cooked him a gourmet meal, recited French poetry, played the piano for him and sang with professional skill. She mentioned that she spoke six languages, had a master’s degree in psychology, and had designed and made the gown she wore on her lovely body. At last as she led him in toward the canopied bed he had to ask. And so he said, “Please would you tell me how a girl like you got into… a business like this?”

She twinkled up at him and sighed and said, “Just lucky, I guess.”

Mary Smith took a deep and shivering breath and said, “There is a steak, darling, and it is not frozen and never has been, and it is in the meat-keeper thing in my apartment, which is, God help us, a condo-min-i-um, which will never cease to sound like a dirty word, and the apartment is twelve and a half minutes away, give or take ten seconds, and the steak will keep for us, darling, until three A.M., or until twelve noon tomorrow for a Texan’s breakfast for us because I don’t have to tend the store until Monday morning, and that twelve and a half minutes might just be the longest twelve and a half minutes in my life up till now.”

The temptation was to accept the whole con. But there is an immense perversity in the male animal at the most unexpected times. And why didn’t you climb Mount Everest, Sir Hillary? Because it was there, fellow. And I could see her in memory in an other bar, by daylight, teeth set in that meaty little underlip, eyes half closed, listening to Tush, and turning her head slowly from side to side in a denial as definite as the slam of a door and clack of the lock. She would be exquisite in all detail, from earlobes to cute little toes to the dimples at the base of the spine. She would be fragrant, immaculate, prehensile and totally skilled, and she would ring all the changes, and pace herself beautifully, and draw me to her pace, and inflate my ego with her breathless astonishment at how it had been the most fantastic and lasting that had ever happened to her and how she had thought it could never even be equaled again, but lo and behold, when it had happened again, it was even more so, and if it ever got to be any more than that, she just couldn’t stand it at all; it would blow her out of her mind, and how did we get to be so great, darling, so that really and truly it is as if it was the very first time ever with anybody.

The temptation was to take the man’s Ferrari around the track a few times, just to prove to yourself you couldn’t get hooked on a great piece of machinery or on the whole speed competition bit.

But it was right there and it was buzzing with it, and how do you sidestep without creating some unhappy suspicions about the whole approach? It would have to be some fancy footwork, and it would have to be on her terms, something she could comprehend immediately.

I slipped into my elk-hide ring-shoes just in time, just as her eyes narrowed and she said, “You’re not exactly overwhelming the girl with enthusiasm, old buddy.”

“Decisions, decisions, decisions,” I said. “I seem to have this hex lately.”

She let my hand go. “What’s to decide?”

“There is this very pigheaded man sitting in a hotel suite and looking at the phone and getting madder and madder by the minute. I have been trying to unload this and that for cash money so I can get the maximum out of our little gem of opportunity. And he flew down from Chicago because this particular item happens to be worth about twenty thousand more to him than to anybody else in the world, for reasons I will not go into at the moment. So I told him I had to delay our meet because of something that came up, and I would try to get there by eight. And right now it is quarter to nine, and he is the type who feels unsure of who he is right down in the gut where it matters most, the type who to prove he is who he thinks he is might wait about one minute more and cut off his nose to spite his face, or he may have cut it off already and be on his way to the airport. I have been looking at you and trying to get a little controlled piece of amnesia about him, but it doesn’t seem to work so good.”

She sat taller and gave a little shake like a toy poodle who has just been lifted out of her doggy-bath, and gave her hair a few pats, and gave a hitch at her complicated sweater and said, “Darling, you are an absolute idiot! Why didn’t you say something? Didn’t you think I’d understand? I’m all grown up and everything.”

“Let’s say I was enjoying myself. I was listening to the message of the Poo Bear Smith.”

She reached and patted my arm and with a crooked little smile and a bawdy wink said, “Let’s put it Us way. The twenty grand won’t keep. You hustle and phone him. There’s a phone at the end of that hallway over there that goes to the biff.”

I went to the phone and lit a match and looked up a random number and dialed it and asked a nasal woman if I could speak to Mr. Bannon. She told me

I had a wrong number and hung up, and so I talked for a while over the empty wire to Tush and told him the news of the moment, with a few comments on the weather. He didn’t have a thing to say.

I went back to the table and told the chicklet that my man was very frosty, very frosty indeed, but still available for negotiation. She said, “Darling, if you’d lost him on account of me, I was sitting here deciding I was going to make one hell of a try at being worth the whole twenty big ones, but no broad in the world carries a tag like that. I might have choked up and blown the whole match.”

“I like a practical woman.”

“Can I drop you at his hotel?”

“Thanks, but I gave myself time to go pick up my car at the Sultana, if you want to drop me there.”

“And wait for you, I hope, I hope?”

“I guess you better wait at your place, because I am not exactly together on price with this clown yet.” She lifted her purse onto her lap, opened it and dug around inside and took out a little flashlight. She gave it to me and I held it for her while she took out a little golden notebook with a snap fastener. She opened it and slipped the little gold pencil out of the little gold loop and said, “I just realized I’m absolutely starving, dear, so let’s say it’ll be ten before I get home. This is the unlisted number. And this is the address, on Indian Creek Drive, on the west side going north. Look for a raspberry-colored thing with a white canopy and white awnings and white balconies. Call me first, love, because I want the delicious feeling you’re on your way ‘to me.”

Again she drove the little red car. She whirred into the Sultana parking area, cutting off her lights as she did so to keep the front boys from noticing us and whistling her up to the entrance. She unstrung her bead, put her hat on the shelf in back, said, “Um” and splayed her little fingers on the nape of my neck and impacted a kiss with sufficient know-how to leave my knees feeling loose and fragile as I strode to my rental car after she had driven away.

At twenty to midnight, aboard the Busted Flush, after I had washed up after my plate of scrambled eggs and onion, I got the little sheet she had torn out of her notebook. It was oyster-colored parchment, thin and stiff, with tear-out perforations down the left side. And in the bottom right-hand corner was imprinted, in the plainest imaginable type face, in gold: Love, Mary Smith.

I direct-dialed her number.

It rang five times, and then her muffled, silky voice said, “Mmmmm?”

“T. McGee, ma’am.”

I heard a small yowly yawn. “W’time zit, sweetie?”

“Quarter to Cinderella, almost.”

“Mmm. I was having the most interesting dream about you. And I have on this interesting little yellow night garment I bought in Tokyo. And I dumped this and that in the big hot tub, and so I smell interesting, sort of like between sandalwood and old rose petals, and something else mixed in. Some kind of spicy smell that makes me think of Mexico. Do you like Mexico as much as I do? How soon will you be here, my darling?”

“That’s a very good question.”

“I don’t like the sound of that, somehow.”

“That makes two of us.”

“You sound so depressed. Troubles?”

“Out of the blue. Now we’ve ordered up some food and we’re waiting for a third party, and by dawn’s early light my guess is that we’ll be a. hundred miles from here looking at the property in question, on the Tamiami Trail, just this side of Naples.”

“Oh poo!”

“I think I’d use a word with a little more bite to it.”

She gave a long sigh. “Well,” she said, “down, girl. Bear me in mind, will you?”

“Get all the rest you need. And I will phone you precisely at twelve noon tomorrow and we’ll get out the old starting blocks again.”

“The old track shoes. Bang. They’re off. Anyway, as long as you might have some faint idea what you’re missing, dear, drive a very hard bargain. You should be motivated, God knows.”

After I hung up, I packed a pipe and took it topsides and stretched out on a dew-damp sunpad, down out of the bite of the breeze, and looked at the cold stars.

Where is the committee, I thought. They certainly should have made their choice by now. They are going to come aboard and make their speeches and I’m going to blush and scuff and say, “Shucks, fellas.” The National Annual Award for Purity, Character, and Incomprehensible Sexual Continence in the face of an Ultimate Temptation. Heavens to Betsy, any American Boy living in the Age of Heffner would plunge at the chance to bounce that little pumpkin because she fitted the ultimate playmate formula, which is maximized pleasure with minimized responsibility. What a nice build, Charlie. With a lot of class, Charlie, you know what I mean. A broad that really goes for ft, and she had a real hang-up on me, Charlie. You never seen any chick so ready, Charlie buddy, to scramble out of her classy clothes and hop into the sack. Tell you what I did, pal. I walked away. How about that?

There had to be a nice medal to go with the National Annual Award. With the insignia of the society. A shield with a discarded bunny tail, and an empty bed, and a buttock rampant of a field of cobwebs, with the Latin inscription, “Non Futchus.”

A nice pink and white old gentleman would pin the medal to the bare hide of the chest, as recommended by Joe Heller, while a violin would play, “Just Friendship, Friendship.”

The ceremonial kiss on the stalwart, manly, unsullied cheek and…

A huff of wind came and flipped the point of my collar against my throat. It ruffled the canvas laced to the sundeck rail. The collar was the tickle of the brisk red hair of Puss, and the canvas sound was her chuckle, and without warning I had such an aching longing for her it was like long knives in my bowels, and my eyes stung.

You never do anything for no reason at all, and you never refrain from doing something for no reason at all. Sometimes it just takes a little longer for the reason to get unstuck from the bottom of the brew and float to the top where you can see it.

I rapped the pipe out and went below. So it wasn’t righteous denial at all. Or a lofty, supercilious disapproval. It was the monogamous compulsion based on the ancient wisdom of the heart. Puss had made of all of herself an abundant gift, not just the giving of the body or the sating of a physical want. And no matter how skilled the erotic talents of a Mary Smith, sensation would not balance out that privacy of self that she could not give, nor would want to, nor perhaps could ever give even if she wanted to.

And I knew just how it would have been with Mary Smith, because Puss was all too recent and all too sadly missed. All the secret elegancies of Mary Smith would merely have told me of wrong shapes, wrong sizes, wrong textures, wrong sounds from her throat, wrong ways of holding, wrong tempos and tryings and wrong oils of a wrong pungency. So it would have become with her a faked act of memory and mourning, to end in an after-love depression that would make the touch of her, the nearness of her, hugely irritating.

Puss was too recent.

After I was in bed, I went back and forth across the same old paradox: Then if Puss gave of herself so totally, opening up all the girl-cupboards in the back of heart and mind, how could she leave? Why did she leave?

There was a little chill that drifted across the back of my mind and was gone, as before, still unidentified.

There had been one cupboard unopened, all those months.

But at least I could now stop making wistful fantasies about the little garden of delights in its yellow garment from Tokyo.

Hogamus, Higamus. Mary’s polygamous. Higamus, Hogamus. Trav is monogamous.

For a while. It won’t be any good until big Red wears off more. It will be a drag. And when it seems time to begin to expect something of it, and the opportunity comes along, don’t risk it with a Mary Smith, whose involvement would be about on the same order as all other kinds of occupational therapy.

Eleven

ON SATURDAY before noon I looked through the stowage areas for fifteen minutes before I found my gadget. It is called the McGee Electric Alibi. The two D cells had expired, so I replaced them with fresh ones and tested it. Once upon a time it was a doorbell, but I removed the bell and replaced it with a piece of hardwood that has exactly the right timbre and resonance.

I direct-dialed my love and hunched over the desk top so I could listen to the earpiece and hold the mouthpiece at the pretested and precalculated distance from the mouthpiece. It only rang twice before she picked up the phone, but twice was enough to give me the duration and interval of the rings.

“Darling?” she said. It was exactly noon, as promised.

I pressed the button, transmitting the raucous clatter of a phone that keeps trying to ring after you’ve picked it up.

Between the first two imitation rings I heard her say, “… dammit to…” and in the next gap, “… stinking thing… ” I heard the clicking as she rattled the bar. “… n of a bitch…” I gave it eight fake rings and that made ten in all, as they instruct you in the yellow pages, and hung up.

Poor guy calls up all steamed up, right on time, and she isn’t even home. Fine thing. So he thinks maybe her clock is wrong and she ran out for a paper or a loaf of bread or something. Five minutes later I tried again, and she answered, and I rattled her eager, frustrated, infuriated, helpless little eardrum and this time heard her cry over and above the racket, “Goddamn it to hell!”

So on the off chance, the guy would call the office, so I phoned at once before she would decide I might, and a subdued voice said, “Three one two one. ”Is Mary Smith there, please? Extension sixty-six.“

“Miss Smith is not in today, sir.”

“Well… if she should come in or phone in, would you tell her that Mr. McGee has been trying to reach her, and he’ll phone her at home again at three o’clock.”

“Is there a number where she can reach you, sir?”

“No. I don’t expect to be here much longer, thanks.”

She would know I had the right number, as I had reached her before. I had the bell on my phone switched off. I could make outgoing calls, however. So I tried her at twelve thirty. She hung up on the second rasp. At one her line was busy when I tried it. I had been hoping for that. It would be a help. A few minutes later it wasn’t busy. She caught it on the first ring. “Hello?” Raaaasp. Cry of pure despair. Clunk as she hung up.

Snoopy the dog wears a guilty and evil grin from time to time. I couldn’t work one up.

Meyer and I were in the lounge going over final details when I suddenly realized it was exactly three. I had no time to prepare him for the Electric Alibi. I heard a distinct sob before she hung up.

He stared at me as I came back to the chair. “Sometimes you worry me, Travis. It’s something about the way your mind works.”

“I often find it depressing.” I stood up again. “Hell, we’re all set. I’m going to drive up and see Janine and Connie. I’ll stay over, and drive down to Sunnydale early Monday. You get there about noon and get a motel room somewhere, and go to the hotel I told you about for lunch. I’ll show up with our pigeon. I think that sometime about maybe five or six o’clock Miss Mary Smith will show up and beat on the doors. I think I’ve described her well enough. Keep an eye out for her and intercept her and tell her you think I’m on the Alabama Tiger’s cruiser and point the way.”

“Consolation prize?”

“Who for?”

He gave up and sighed and left. I phoned To-Co Groves and Connie’s cry of pleasure at my coming was convincing enough. I buttoned up,, switched the Sentry on, and put my gear in the car. Then I walked to the Tiger’s permanent floating housepariy. Even with the boat closed up, the Afro-Cuban beat was loud. When I opened the door to the big main cabin area the sound nearly drove me backward. The big Ampex system was blasting, and the regulars were all around the perimeter because Junebug had herself a new challenger. She is a rubbery brown solid chunk of twenty-something-year-old girl, a sturdy mix of Irish, Gypsy and Cherokee. She wore a pink fuzzy bikini, and she was a go-going dervish, black short hair snapping, face and eyes a blur, body flexing and pumping to the beat, which Styles was sharpening with a blur of hands on the battered old bongos. The challenger was one of the king-sized beach bunnies, one of the big young straight-haired blondes about nineteen who look so much alike lately they should wear numbers on the side like stock cars. The money was in three piles on the deck by the Tiger’s big bare feet. The big bunny was beginning to lag and flounder, miss the beat and catch up. Her mouth hung open. Her hip action in her zebra bikini was getting ratchety. The Tiger sat in a high glaze, swaying on the stool, smiling to himself, glass in hand. Muggsie Odell gave me her big smile, and I pointed at my watch and raised an eyebrow. She checked her watch, then flashed me seven sets of ten fingers plus four. Except for being so sweaty her body looked oiled, the Junebug looked absolutely fresh after seventy-four minutes of it. Maybe the challengers, can go all day long to the beat they’re used to, but they don’t realize the additional demand on stamina of the Afro-Cuban tempo. One of them is reputed to have lasted over two hours before hitting the deck, but the Junebug wasn’t even close to her own limit.

I crooked a finger at Muggsie. She nodded and followed me out and closed the hatch against the noise. We sat on the wide transom and Muggsie said, “She’s good for five more minutes, if that. I just as soon not be in there. They’re waiting for her to fall down, and she’s a stubborn kid and she’ll keep going until she does drop. I just don’t like to see them fall down like dead.”

“A favor?”

“Depends. Probably yes, McGee.”

“I’m going away for a couple of days. A very very nice little package is going to come right here looking for me. I’m having her steered here. The name is Mary Smith.”

“No kidding!”

“Tell her I was here with the group but I went away and you think I said I was going to come back, so it would be best for her to wait. Meanwhile, has Hero been around?”

I was interrupted by a yell from the group. The door burst open and somebody stopped the tape. The Junebug came out, yelling Ya HAA, Ya HAAA, and jumping into the air with every third stride. Through the open door I could see the bunny face-down on the deck trying to push herself up, with people reaching to help her. Junebug gave a great leap to the dock, spun the valve on the dock hose and held the nozzle aimed right at the crown of her head. After it had streamed down her face and across her smile and pasted her dark hair flat, she stuck the nozzle under the bildni top for a few moments and then under the elastic of the bikini bottoms and, with an ecstatic smile, worked it slowly all the way around to the back and around the other side of that muscular body to the front again.

“Anybody else?” she yelled. “Any new pigeon, step up and put your bread on the decki The old Junebug is ready.”

“I’d watch her fall,” Muggsie said grimly. “I’d watch her fall and hope for a couple of good bounces. What’s this with Hero? What are you asking about Hero?”

“Has he been around?”

“Who can stop him? You know Hero. Every hour, cruising in and seeing if there’s any new stuff he hasn’t seen before. With him it’s a dedication. Are you saying aim Hero at this Mary Smith? What’s the matter? You hate the girl?”

“Let’s say they deserve each other. As soon as he starts trying to snow her, Muggsie, you go back to her and say you just heard that I came here in a bad mood and there was girl who wanted to cheer me up and we went off together, so maybe there’s no point in waiting.”

“Why don’t I just chunk her on the head and help Hero carry her back to his pad?”

“Because at is entirely possible she’ll chunk him on the head and take him back to hers.”

“Oh. One of those. Anyway, Hero certainly is a handsome guy, and he certainly has enough charm for a whole charm school, and he certainly has given an awful lot of lady tourists a vacation they’ll never forget. I was saying just the other day I could really go for that guy, if only he just wasn’t a real rotten person through and through.”

“You mean if you didn’t know him.”

“That’s what I must mean. Wherever you’re going, have fun, Trav. I’ll unite the happy couple and get her off your hands for good.”

As I left I walked by Junebug on the dock, toweling herself dry. “Hey you, McGee,” she said, with the big white mocking grin. “Hey, you never tole me when we’re gonna start to go steady. How about it?”

I looked at all that brown rubbery, arrogant vitality. “I told you, Junebug, the very next time I get a death wish, I’ll look you up.”

“Some coward!”

“You can believe it.”

“Aww. Poor fella. I wouldn’t kill you. Just cripple you up pretty good, hah?”

“I think your trouble is that you’re too shy. You lack self-confidence. Get out and meet people.” When I was a long way away I could still hear Junebug cawing with laughter.

I made good time and got to the Groves an hour after nightfall. We had drinks by the fire of fat pine, and a good dinner, and good talk. Janine got up and came over to me, hesitated, then leaned and touched her lips to the side of my face, and went off to bed. Connie asked me what I thought of how Jan looked and acted.

“Listless. Thinner. More bones in her face.”

“She’s not eating well or sleeping well. She’ll start to read or sew and end up staring into space. I hear her wandering around the house in the middle of the night. She’s not coming out of it the way she should. I don’t know what to do to snap her out of it. She’s a damned fine girl, Trav. She’s turning into a ghost.”

“It’s good of you to have her and the kids here.”

“Don’t be a jackass! I told her she can stay forever and I mean it. Those are three good kids. Five kids make a good kind of noise to have in the house. It’s been quiet around here too damned long.”

She asked about my redhead, and why I hadn’t brought her along. When I said we’d called it off, she was suddenly furious, saying she thought I had more sense than that. I had to explain that it wasn’t my idea and I’d been given no chance to make her change her mind. Then she was merely puzzled, saying it didn’t make any sense at all.

On Sunday the three of us went fifty miles in Connie’s Pontiac at her customary Indianapolis pace up to Rufus Wellington’s law office. He had had his elderly secretary come in, and she was just finishing the typing of the deed and other documents pertinent to my sale of the Bannon property to Preston LaFrance. I had the power of attorney with me that Meyer had given me, which, when signed by Janine and witnessed, would authorize him to buy and sell securities in her name in the margin account he was establishing for her at the brokerage firm he used in Lauderdale.

Rufus eyed me and said, “You sure LaFrance will pay forty for an equity that isn’t even there? Young man, do me the favor of not telling me what kind of persuasion you’re fixing to use on him. I don’t think I would like to know. I don’t even want to know who this Meyer is, thank you. Any member of the bar is an officer of the court.”

“If I have any trouble with the bank approving of the transfer of the mortgage to LaFrance, can you help?”

“I can phone Whitt Sanders and remind him of something that would make him approve transferring it to a little red hen. But I don’t want to use it less I have to, just like I didn’t have to when Connie went on the note with you. I have the feeling LaFrance is going to have trouble making those payments on the mortgage.”

“If you don’t want me to tell you anything, Judge, why do you make leading statements and then wait for me to explain?”

“Because I guess I figure you’re not likely to tell me, son. But I do have a couple of clients here. You, Connie, and you, Miz Janine, and it would rest my mind to feel sure that nothing would come back on these ladies from anything too cute you are figuring on working on some of those folks down there in Sunnydale.”

“Rest your mind, Judge,” I said.

He leaned back, looked beyond us into the misty places of memory and said, “When I was a rough, wild young man, which seems like it was all in a different world than this one, I ended up down in Mexico one time, near Victoria, on a horse ranch. You had to prove you were all man. There was a thing they did, called the paseo de muerte. Maybe I don’t have the lingo just right, but it’s close. It was just riding full out, a full hard run over rocky land on halfbroke horses, and the one who wants to test you, he comes up on you on one side, and he grins and you grin back and kick your feet free of the stirrups and you change horses right there, risking the way the footing is, and spooking one of the horses, or losing ahold. Once you’d show them you were ready to do it anytime, then they’d leave you be, because they weren’t any more anxious deep inside to keep doing it than you were. Any fool could see that every time a man did it, his odds got shorter.” He shook his head and smiled. “Long hours and short money, and one day out of noplace I could imagine came the idea I could start reading for the law. Why dad I start all this? There was some point I was going to make. Oh. You keep in mind, Travis McGee, that the money game is one wild horse, and the vengeance for murder is another wild horse, and you try riding them both, you can fall between and get your skull stamped with an iron shoe. Bannon was your friend, and Connie’s friend, and he was your husband, Miz Janine, daddy of your boys. Murder can come in when the money game goes bad. But don’t think of it as being black dirty evil, but more of it being sick and sad, of some stumbling jackass that didn’t mean it to come out that way, and he wakes up in the night and thinks on it and he gets sweaty and he hears his heart going like mad. Well, you folks have refused my kind offer to come on home with me for kitchen whisky and side meat and fancy conversation, so you will forgive me if I tell you all to be careful, and speed you on your way.”

I phoned Press LaFrance in the late afternoon and arranged to meet him in Sunnydale the next morning. He sounded cautious and nervous and he gave me the impression of a certain evasiveness. He assured me the forty was still waiting, and he was anxious to listen, but I had the uneasy feeling that something had changed.

I went out to the sheds and sat on the truck dock, feeling dispirited. I finally admitted to myself that I felt guilty about Mary Smith. I could rationalize it as an adroit defensive maneuver. Gary Santo had aimed her at me. Maybe the little code word had been “steak.” He had evaluated me and decided there was enough chance of additional useful information to turn her loose. So I had sidestepped her and aimed her at Hero.

But, after all, she knew her way around. She was about as gullible, innocent and vulnerable as those limey lassies who had starred in the Profumo affair. It was a good chance that she would case Hero in about forty seconds and turn him off, because he could certainly never be a business assignment.

I wished, however, that one little comment about Hero had not lodged itself so firmly in my memory. He looked like the big, gentle, slow-moving, kindly star of a hundred Westerns, and he had the charm to make a woman feel admired, protected and cherished, until he could ease her back to his pad, or back to her place, or any nearby nest he could beg, borrow or rent.

And there he would tirelessly demonstrate that degree of satyriasis that stopped short of landing him in various kinds of corrective institutions. He cruised the festive areas and cut his quarry out of merry packs with easy skill and monomaniacal determination. The comment that lingered in my mind came from a weary man who came aboard Meyer’s boat one hot Sunday afternoon and said, “Knowing Hero this long, I sure God should have had the good sense never to let him bring a woman aboard my ketch last evening, but with Myra and the kids off visiting her folks, and the forward cabin empty, and me a little smashed, I said okay and what he had was some young schoolteacher he’d found right over at the Yankee Clipper in a big batch of schoolteachers having a party before going on a five-day cruise to the islands out of Everglades. The ship left this morning and she sure God isn’t going to make that cruise. Giggly woman, kind of mousy and trying to get along without her glasses, and built real good, especially up front. His angle was showing her a Bahama-built ketch on account of she was going to the Bahamas. I left them aboard and that was nine or ten o’clock and I came back at midnight or later thinking they’d be gone. Honest to God, I’m dead for sleep, men. It would get quieted down and I’d be drifting off and it would start up again. With all that whinnying and squeaking and thrashing around, the nearest thing it sounds like, and it’s still going on from time to time, is like somebody beating carpets with a shoat. One day Hero is going to nail him one with heart trouble and she just isn’t going to last it out. I should have had more sense last night Meyer, what would you say to me going below and getting a little nap?”

So maybe, I thought, Hero never came back to the Tiger’s, or maybe Mary Smith never drove up from Miami to try to find me, and if she did, maybe Meyer missed her. Or little Muggsie could have decided she deserved better.

Janine came walking slowly from the house, hands deep in the pockets of a borrowed gray cardigan worn over white ranch jeans. She hadn’t seen me, and when I called to her, she turned and came over.

“Have a good nap?”

“I slept a little.” She sat on an upended cement block and reached and picked up a piece of lath and started drawing lines in the dirt with the sharp end. She tilted her head and stared up at me, squinting against the brightness of the sky.

“Trav,” she said, “I keep wondering about one thing. It keeps bothering me. I keep trying to figure out what happened, but I can’t seem to think of anything logical. It’s sort of strange.”

“Like?”

“How did Tush get out there? I had the car. He was going to come into Sunnydale by bus and phone me to come get him. Did somebody give him a ride, or what?”

“I never thought about that.”

“Then, whoever gave him the ride could tell when he got there. They… found him at what time was it?”

“A sheriff’s deputy found him at nine o’clock approximately. The medical examiner estimated he had been dead from one to four hours at the time he was found.”

“From five thirty to eight thirty, then. In there somewhere, somebody… killed him. But he was so strong, Trav. You know how powerful he was. He wouldn’t just stretch out and let somebody… He was dead when they put him there. Maybe whoever drove him out there saw somebody hanging around.”

“We’re going to get to all that, Jan. Believe me, we’re going to do our best to find out. But first we’ve got to do some salvage work for you.”

She made a bitter mouth and looked down and drew a dollar sign. She reached a foot out and slowly scuffed it out. “Money. It got to mean so damned much, you know. Getting pinched worse and worse, and snapping at each other about it, and being so scared we were going to lose the whole thing we started with. And now it doesn’t mean anything. Nothing at all.”

“With those three kids to bring up? Shoes and dentists and school and presents?”

“Oh, I suppose it will be something I’ll have to think about. But right now I’m just… nowhere. You’re sure you can fix it so I’ll end up with thirty thousand clear, and you seem so sure you can make me a lot more out of that stock stuff I don’t understand at all. I ought to sound grateful and pleased and delighted and so on.”

“Not for my sake. Or Meyer’s.”

“Everybody is doing things for me. But I ran. Everybody knows that. I’m a lousy person. I don’t like myself. Trav, I used to like myself well enough.”

I slid off the dock and took her hand and pulled her up. “Let’s walk for a while.” We walked and I gave her some dreary little sermons about how never quite matching up to what you want of yourself is the basic of the human condition. She heard, but I don’t know if she believed. I was trying hard to believe my own hard sell, because I kept thinking of carpets and shoats and wide wide emerald eyes and a delicately provocative little pressure of teeth against the knuckles of my stupid right hand.

Twelve

I ARRIVED IN downtown Sunnydale at nine o’clock on Monday morning and parked in the bank lot, and walked toward the Shawana River Hotel, where I had arranged to meet LaFrance in the coffee shop.

When I went into the lobby, two men in green twill uniforms moved in from either side to position themselves with an unhurried, competence between me and the glass double doors. A cricket-sized man of about sixty planted himself spread-legged in front of me and said, “Nice and easy, now. You just lay both hands atop your head. You’re a big one, all right. Freddy?”

One of the others came in from behind and reached around me and patted all the appropriate pockets and places. I had recognized the sheriff’s voice from having heard it over the phone. He wore a businessman’s hat wadded onto the back of his head. Straight gray hair stuck out in Will Rogers style. He wore an unpressed dark suit with a small gold star in the lapel. The suit coat hung open, exposing a holstered belly gun small enough to be an Airweight. Small enough to look toylike, but in no sense a toy.

The legal papers, billfold and keys were handed to Sheriff Bunny Burgoon. From his voice I had thought he would be all belly, with porcine features. He opened the wallet, flipped through the pliofilm envelopes. He stopped at the driver’s license and studied it.

“Your name Travis McGee? You can put your hands down, boy.”

“That’s my name.”

“Now we’re going on over to my office and talk some.”

“Can I ask why?”

“It’s my duty to tell you that you got no obligation to answer any questions 1 or any of my officers may ask you without the presence of any attorney of your choice, and you are in your rights to request the Court appoint an attorney to represent your interests in this matter, and anything you say in response to interrogation, with or without the presence of your legal representative, may be held in evidence against you.”

He had run all the words together, like a court clerk swearing a witness.

“Is there a charge?”

“Not up to this minute, boy. You’re being taken in for interrogation in connection with a felony committed in the county jurisdiction.”

“If I’m being taken in, Sheriff, then it is an arrest, isn’t it?”

“Boy, aren’t you coming along willingly and voluntarily like is the duty of any citizen to assist law officers in the pursuit of their duty?”

“Why certainly, Sheriff! Willingly and voluntarily, and not in the cage in the back of a county sedan, and with my keys and papers and wallet in my pockets. Otherwise it’s an arrest, and if so, my personal attorney is Judge Rufus Wellington and you better get him on the horn and get him down here.”

“Read his name in the paper, boy?”

“Instead of bothering the judge, why don’t you just ask Whitt Sanders if the judge represents me?”

I was watching for a shift of uncertainty in his eyes and saw it. Apparently he had not anticipated any connection with the local power structure. He motioned one of the two deputies close, stood tall, and without taking his eyes off me, murmured into the younger man’s ear. The deputy walked out. Burgoon asked me to come over and sit on a couch in the lobby. The deputy was back in five minutes and the sheriff went over and talked quietly with him, then came over and gave me back my possessions. With one of the deputies ten paces behind us, we walked through the morning sunshine to the Shawana County Courthouse and around to the side and into the entrance labeled COUNTY SHERIFF.

I was aware of a particularly avid curiosity on the part of the desk personnel and the communication clerk as he led me back into his office. The slats of the blinds were almost closed. He turned on the ceiling fluorescence and his desk lamp. He had me sit in a straight chair facing his desk and six feet from it. The sheriff looked at the papers on his blotter, put them aside and sat in his big black chair. A portly man in deputy uniform came in and sighed and sat in a chair back against the wall. “Willie will be bringing it along, Sherf.”

Burgoon nodded. There was silence. I looked at the framed testimonials on the walls, and the framed pictures of Burgoon taken with various political notables, past and present., Some file drawers were partially open. The contents looked untidy, with documents sticking up out of the file folders.

“Make that deal with Harry?” Burgoon asked.

The portly one said, “He give me an estimate of over seventeen hundred. And it was supposed to be a twenty-year roof I told Cathy we could buy a lot of buckets to set under the leaks for seventeen hundred.”

“Harry does nice work.”

“Wisht I’d used him when I was building.” Burgoon looked at me. “You made up your mind about a lawyer yet, mister?” I had been promoted from boy.

“Sheriff, I think it would be easier for me to make that decision if I had more information about what you think I did. It could be something we might be able to straighten out without bothering anybody”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

“When and where did the alleged crime take place? That might give me something to go on.”

“It took place, mister, on the morning of December seventeenth last, and it took place at a marina on the Shawana River just about eleven miles east of here.”

“That was a Sunday morning?”

“Yes it was.”

“Would you be trying to make a capital case, Sheriff?”

“Murder first.”

I remembered that Sunday with no trouble. Puss, Barni Baker, Mick Coseen, Meyer, Marilee, in fact a lot more people than we had needed or wanted aboard, and a dozen ways to refresh their memories that it was that exact day.

“Just one more question and I can give you an answer. Am I supposed to be connected with it in some way, or are you trying to say I was there at that time?”

“There at that time and did commit an act of violence which resulted in the death of one Brantley B. Bannon.

“Then, I don’t think I need a lawyer to straighten things out.”

It seemed to startle Burgoon. He said irritably, “Tom, what the hell is holding up that damn Willie?”

“Right here, Sheriff. Right here,” said a thin young man who came in carrying a tape recorder. He put it on the corner of the sheriff’s desk, knelt on the rug and plugged it in. “Sheriff, you just push-”

“I know, I know! Get on back to work and close the door.” When the door was closed, Burgoon said, “We took this with the court reporter and on tape at the same time, and there hasn’t been time to transcribe it yet. You get to hear it on account of now we’ve got that damn new law on full disclosure, and the defense would get a certified copy of the transcript anyways, and the State’s Attorney said it was all right I should do it this way. You listen, and then you answer questions and make a statement, and then we hold you and this goes to a special meeting of the Grand Jury for the indictment so you can be arraigned proper.”

He punched it on and leaned back and closed his eyes and rested his fingertips together. The tape had a lot of hiss. Apparently nobody ever bothered to clean or demagnetize the heads. But the questions and answers were clear enough.

I recognized the flat, insipid, dreary little-girl voice before she even gave her name, saying that she was Mrs. Roger Denn, Arlene Denn, and that she had been living with her husband at the Bannan Cottages, Cottage number 12 ever since the tenth of December, that she was twenty-two years old and that she was self-employed, as was her husband, making and selling art objects to gift shops. Prior to that time they had lived aboard a houseboat the Bannons had rented them, tied up at the Bannon Boatel on the river, and had lived there eight months.

“What were the circumstances of your leaving?”

“Well, they had to come and take the houseboats back. They owed on them and some men came and towed them off, I don’t know where. That was… early in December, I don’t know exactly what day.”

“What happened then?”

“We put all our things in the two end units of the motel just for a while, until we could find something, because Mr. Bannon said it looked like he might lose the place. We went looking and we found a place at the Banyan Cottages and moved in on the tenth, and we were making trips in the station wagon to bring our supplies and so on back to the cottages.”

As she spoke on the tape, through the hiss, I could picture her clearly, pallid and sloppy and doughy, with dirty blonde hair and a mouth that hung open, and meaningless blue eyes.

“What was the occasion of your last visit to Bannon’s motel.”

“It was because of missing some silver wire. We use it in the jewelry. On Saturday, that was the sixteenth, we looked all over for it and it was just gone. We knew then that the place was foreclosed out there, but we still had a key to the end units on account of Roger forgot to leave it off when we made the last trip. I kept thinking that maybe what could have happened to it, we had a lot of supplies piled on the beds and maybe the wire slipped down and caught somehow like at the headboard or the footboard, because I had crawled around looking to see if we’d left anything on the floor the last trip we took. Roger kept saying to forget it because it was real trouble going into a place sealed off by the court, and maybe they’d changed the locks. But it was twenty dollars’ worth of wire and maybe seventeen left on the roll, and we don’t do so good we can just throw away seventeen dollars. So we sort of had a fight about it, and I said I was going to go out there whether he was or not, so I went out when it was just getting to be daylight the next day, which was Sunday. I drove right on by, slow, to see if anybody was there and I didn’t see anybody, so I went a ways up the road and put the station wagon in a little kind of overgrown place that used to be a cleared road once. I backed it in. You know, kind of hiding it, and I went back with the key and when I was pretty sure nobody was around, I tried the key and it worked and I let myself in and started hunting for that wire.”

“What happened next?”

“I guess I was hunting for maybe ten minutes or fifteen minutes. I don’t know just what time it was. Maybe sometime between seven and seven thirty and I heard a car coming, so I squatted down so nobody could look in and see me when they went by. One of the windows, those awning kind of window things, was open three or four inches. So I heard the car drive in and it stopped and then I heard a car door slam and then I heard another car door slam and I heard men’s voices.”

“Could you hear what was said?”

“No sir. They were loudest near the car and then kind of faded when they were walking toward the marina. I couldn’t hear words but I had the feeling they were mad at each other, almost shouting. I think one word that was shouted was Jan. That was Mrs. Bannon’s name. Janine. But I couldn’t be sure.”

“What happened next?”

“I didn’t know what to do. I was afraid to leave. I tried to peek out the windows and see where they went to, to see if it was safe for me to sneak out.”

“Could you see the car?”

“No sir. But I knew I would hear it if it started up.”

“Then what happened?”

“Somebody shouted a lot louder, and further away, and I knew they were real mad. It sounded to me like Mr. Bannon. Then it was quiet. Then maybe five minutes later I looked out the back window that looks toward the river, and I saw a man dragging Mr. Bannon across the ground. He had his arms wrapped around Mr. Bannon’s ankles and he was leaning forward and pulling hard and pulling Mr. Bannon along. I was kneeling and looking out a corner of the window, like with one eye. He dragged him right to that old hoist thing and then kind of rolled and shoved and pushed him under the motor. Mr. Bannon was real limp, like unconscious or dead. The man stood up and looked at him and then he looked all around. I ducked down and when I got up enough nerve to look again, he was walking toward the hoist thing again from the marina and he was carrying something small, some wire and something. I watched him and he kneeled down and did something to Mr. Bannon I couldn’t see, and then he worked some more at the hoist thing. Then he turned the crank and the motor went up real slow. I could hear the clickety sound it made. Then he stood near the gear part and bent over and did something and… the motor fell down onto Mr. Bannon. There was a rackety sound when it came down and the wire ropes slapped around and hit those poles and made a ringing sound.”

“And then?”

“He cranked it up halfway and looked at Mr. Bannon close, and cranked it up the rest of the way and let it fall on him again. When he cranked it up again, Mr. Bannon looked… kind of flattened out. He didn’t put it all the way up again. He just let it fall from there and he left it there and picked up some thing off the ground and then kind of stopped and dropped it and then picked it up and wiped it on some kind of a rag and dropped it again. He was nearly running when he left. And then I heard one car door slam and after a little while the car started up. I stayed way down until it was gone.”

“Which way did it go?”

“Back this way, toward Sunnydale.”

“Did you get a good look at the man?”

“Yes Sir, I did.”

“Had you ever seen him before?”

“Yes Sir.”

“Would you recognize him if you saw him again?”

“Yes Sir.”

“Do you know him by name?”

“Yes Sir.”

“What is his name?”

“His name is Mr. McGee.”

“Under what circumstances did you first see Mr. McGee?”

“I only saw him two times before that, both on the same day. It was back in October. I don’t know the exact day. He was a friend of theirs and he came in a nice boat to visit them. He took them over to Broward Beach in the boat that night for dinner and I sat with the little boys. So I met him when I came over to sit, and then I saw him again when they came back.”

“Did they seem friendly, McGee and the Bannons?”

“I… guess so.”

“You seem hesitant. Why?”

“I had the feeling it was Mrs. Bannon he came to See.”

“What gave. you that feeling?”

“Well, actually I saw him three times that day. It was an awful hot day. Mr. Bannon and Mr. McGee had fixed Mr. Bannon’s car. Then Mr. Bannon went off to get the boys from school. I saw Mrs. Bannon taking a pitcher of iced tea to one of the units. I wanted to ask her about something she was going to bring me from town, to save a trip. I needed it in my work and I went down there to where she took the iced tea, thinking she would come right out. When she didn’t, I sort of looked in the window. I didn’t know his name then, not until later. But I saw Mr. McGee and Mrs. Bannon laying on the bed, kissing.”

“Did you notice anything else that day in October that seemed odd or unusual to you?”

“No sir. Nothing else at all, sir.”

“What did you do after McGee drove away?”

“Well, I thought I better wait a little while in case he forgot something and came back. So I looked for the wire some more and I found it. I left and made sure the door was locked and then I ran all the way to our car. I threw the key in the bushes when I was getting into the car, the room key.”

“Why did you do that?”

“I was very frightened, I guess. I didn’t want anybody to know I’d been in the motel.”

“I show you a motel room key. Is this that same key you threw away?”

“I think so. Yes sir. That’s the key.”

“Did you relate all this to your husband?”

“No sir. I didn’t tell him anything.”

“Why not?”

“Because he said I shouldn’t go out there, and even though I did find the silver wire, he was still right about that. I wish I hadn’t gone out there that Sunday morning.”

“Will you tell us why you finally came forward, Mrs. Denn?”

“I thought they would catch Mr. McGee. But they didn’t. I worried and worried about it and the other night I told my husband the whole thing and he said I had to come and see you. I begged him not to make me do it but he said I had to. That’s why I’m here.”

Sheriff Burgoon turned it off. “There’s more. But it covers the same ground. It doesn’t bring up anything new. It’s an eyeball witness, boy, with nothing to gain or lose. We took her out there and she showed us the window and you get a real good view from there.”

He had demoted me back to boy, heartened by his evidence.

“I think she saw almost exactly what she says she saw, sheriff.”

“Want to change your mind about a lawyer?”

“Motive, opportunity, weapon, and an eyewitness. Sheriff, don’t you think it’s all wrapped up just a little too neatly?”

“A man can be damn unlucky.”

“How true. I wonder just who he is.”

“Suppose you make a little sense.”

“Okay. Here is something that the unlucky man, whoever he is, had to take a chance on. He had to take a chance on there being some probability or possibility of my being in this area at that time, and my having no way to prove I wasn’t.”

“It’s going to take a pretty good piece of proof.”

“I can place myself aboard my houseboat where I live, the Busted Flush, Slip F-18, Bahia Mar, Fort Lauderdale, at nine o’clock that Sunday morning. Does the rest of the tape establish her best guess as to the time I’m supposed to have left after the murder?”

“Maybe eight thirty, give or take fifteen minutes,” he said. “But let’s get to just how you place yourself there and how come you’d remember it so good.”

“Because I arrived at Bannon’s place the following afternoon and found out he was dead. I found out he had died the previous morning. Somehow you remember what you were doing at the time a good friend died.”

“And just what were you doing?”

“Socializing, Sheriff Burgoon. Being a jolly host, right out in front of everybody. I think that I could probably come up with the names of at least twenty people who saw me and talked to me between nine and ten o’clock that morning. Some of them are totally unreliable. I don’t pick them for social standing and credit rating, and I wouldn’t ask you or anyone to believe them if they swore on every Bible in Shawana County. But there are a half dozen well worth believing. Suppose you write down the names and addresses and pick a couple of names off the list and question them by phone right now any way you feel like. Try any trick or trap you can think up.”

“What did you mean saying she saw almost exactly what she says she saw, mister?”

“She saw everything except me doing it. She saw somebody else do it, and that changes your theory about nothing to gain or lose.”

“How do you mean?”

“Somebody prepped her pretty good, Sheriff. I might even have thought that she saw somebody she sincerely mistook for me. But the iced tea sequence was a little too much.”

“Didn’t happen?”

“I got hot and sweaty helping Tush fix the spring shackle on his car. I showered in the motel unit they loaned me. I had just finished dressing when Jan brought the pitcher of tea and two glasses. We talked about the problems they were having. Maybe fat-girl even looked in the window. But no bed and no kisses. Nothing like that between us. Not even any thought of it on either side. At the moment I happen to own the Bannon place, Sheriff. I bought it from Jan Bannon. Why in hell would I do that?”

“You are the one bought it!”

“I’m here today to try to resell it to Press LaFrance.”

Burgoon looked very thoughtful. “He’s surely been wanting it so bad he could taste it. Trying to put some kind of parcel together for resale. Don’t he own a patch out there, Tom?”

“Fifty acres right behind.”

Burgoon nodded. “Probably could move it if he had river frontage to go with it.”

Tom scrubbed his snow-white brush cut and coughed and said, “Bunny, that Bannon woman didn’t seem to me to be that kind of woman when I had to go out there and roust her and the kids out and seal it up. That’s one part of this job I surely hate. We tried to make it easy as we could, but there isn’t any good way to make it easy. She was one upset woman and you can believe it.”

The sheriff asked me for the names of my witnesses and wrote them down.

I thought of something else. How come they had been waiting for me at the hotel? And did that have anything to do with LaFrance’s evasiveness when I had phoned him?

“Who told you I was coming to the hotel, Sheriff?”

“Wasn’t it Freddy dug that up, Tom?” Burgoon asked. When Tom nodded, Burgoon said, “Didn’t you say you were coming here to see Press LaFrance? Then, that answers it, sure enough. Freddy Hazzard is Press’s nephew, his sister’s eldest boy. He’s my youngest deputy, mister. You saw him at the hotel, the lanky one.”

“Is he the son of one of your County Commissioners?”

“Sure is. Monk’s boy. But that’s got no bearing on me taking him on. Freddy came out of service with a good record in the M.P and he earns his pay right down the line.”

“Didn’t somebody say that it was somebody named Freddy who found the body?”

“That’s right. On a routine patrol at nine thirty. You see, I had a note for Bannon from his missus, and she’d left a suitcase here for him, and I didn’t know but what Bannon might hitch a ride to his place or come by boat or something. She’d said he was planning to be back Friday or Saturday, so I had the boys keeping an eye on it out there off and on.” He peered at me. “You getting at something?”

“I don’t know, Sheriff. I’m going to check out all right. You have a hunch I will, and you hate to admit it to yourself because it’s such a nice neat painless little case.”

He slapped his hand on the desk top. “But why would some other damned fool, if somebody else besides you did it, why would they want to pick you for it? They should know there was a chance you’d be in the clear. Why not some description to fit somebody we’d look for and never find?”

“Suppose this person heard, second hand, that I had a theory somebody had done too good a job of working Tush Bannon over and killed him, then dropped the engine on him to hide the traces, and fixed the wire to make it look like suicide?”

“If you can prove you said that to anybody at any time, mister, it might be more help than this list of folks I wrote down.”

“I told that same person that maybe it was somebody who was trying to do him a favor and do Monk Hazzard a favor, by trying to take some of the spunk out of Bannon so he would leave quietly. Because the person I was talking to has been trying to get that land.”

“LaFrance?” Burgoon said, almost whispering it.

“Tom, you think Press ought to come in for a little talk?”

“Can I make a suggestion, Sheriff?” I asked.

“You mean you’ve got another way to make things worse than they are right now?”

“Isn’t the weakest place the fat girl? She lied and she’ll know who made her lie. Don’t you think she could be brought in to make a positive identification?”

“You ever been in this line of work?”

“Not directly.”

“You got a record, mister?”

“Four arrests. No convictions, Sheriff. Nothing ever even came to trial.”

‘Now, just what would those arrests have been for, mister?“

“Assault, which turned out to be self-defense. Breaking and entering, and it turned out I had the owner’s permission. Conspiracy, and somebody decided to withdraw the charges. Piracy on the high seas, dismissed for lack of evidence.”

“You’re not exactly in any rut, are you? Tom, send somebody after that Arlene Denn.”

After he left, I said to the Sheriff, “When did she make that statement?”

“Saturday, starting about… maybe eleven in the morning.”

“Did you try to have me picked up in Lauderdale?”

“Sure did.”

“And Deputy Hazzard found out yesterday in the late afternoon that I would be at the hotel this morning?”

“He got the tip last night and phoned me at home.”

“Did he have any objections to the way you set it up to take me?”

“Well… he did say maybe if I stationed him across there, like on the roof of the service station with a carbine, it would be good insurance if you smelled something and decided not to go into the hotel at all.” He shook his head. “Freddy is a good boy. It doesn’t fit the way you want me to think it fits.”

“I’m not trying to sell you anything.”

In twenty minutes Tom brought her in. She stopped abruptly just inside the door and gave me a single glassy blue look and looked away. She wore a paint-spattered man’s T-shirt hanging outside her bulging jeans, and apparently nothing under the T-shirt.

“Move over near Tom and let her set in that chair,” he said to me. She sat and stared at Burgoon, her face so vapid she looked dimwitted.

“Now then, Arlie,” said Burgoon, “we had a nice talk day before yesterday and you helped us a lot and we appreciate it. Now, don’t you be nervous. There’s another part of it you’ve got to do. Do you know that man setting over there by Tom.”

“… Yes sir.”

“What’s his name, Arlie?”

“The one I told you about. Mr. MeGee.”

“Now, you turn and look at him and be sure and if you, are sure it’s the man you saw dropping that engine onto Mr. Bannon, you point your finger at him and you say, ‘That’s the same man.’ ”

She turned and she looked at the wall about a foot over my head and stabbed a finger at me and said, “That’s the same man.”

“You had a clear view of him on the morning of December seventeenth? No chance of a mistake?”

“No Sir!”

‘Now, don’t be nervous. You’re doing just fine. We’ve got another little problem you can help us with. It turns out Mr. McGee was way down in Fort Lauderdale that same identical morning at the same time you think you saw him, and he was on a boat with some very important people. A federal judge and a state senator and a famous surgeon, and they say he. was right there at that same time. Now, Arlie, just how in the wide world are we going to get around that?“

She stared fixedly at him, her mouth sagging open. “Arlie, are those big people lying and are you the one telling the truth, so help you God?”

“I saw what I saw.”

“Who told you to make up these lies, Arlie?”

“I told you what I saw.”

“Now, Arlie, you recall what I said before, about you having the right to be represented by a lawyer and so on?”

“So?”

“I’m telling you again, girl. You don’t have to answer any questions. Because I think I’m going to hold you and book you.”

She shrugged plump shoulders. “Do what you feel like.”

Crickety little Burgoon glanced over at Tom and then looked at the fat girl again. “Girl, I don’t think you rightly know just how much trouble you’re asking for. You see, I know you’re lying.”

Tom, responding to his signal, came in on cue. “Bunny, why in God’s name you being so kindly to this fat dumb slut? Let me run her on out to the stockade and turn her over to Miss Mary. Leave her out there three or four days and Miss Mary would purely enjoy sweatin‘ off fifteen pounds of slop and teaching her some manners. She’d have a nice attitude when you have her brought back in.”

Arlene Denn turned and stared at Tom. She bit her lip and swallowed and looked back at Burgoon, who said, “Now, if we have to come to that, Tom, we’ll come to that. But this isn’t any ninety-day county case. And this isn’t any one to five up to the state women’s prison. What the law of the State of Florida says is that giving false testimony in a capital case, or withholding evidence in a capital case is punishable by a maximum sentence of imprisonment for the rest of her natural life.”

She stiffened as much as her figure permitted, sat up straight and said, “You’ve got to be kidding, Sheriff!”

“You know how to read, girl?”

“Of course I know how to read!”

He dug a battered manual out of a desk drawer, licked his thumb and found the right page. He handed it across to her. “Second paragraph down. That there is sort of a short form of everything against the law. It’s what new deputies have to study up on and pass a test.”

She read it and handed the manual back. She looked over at me. The look of vacuous stupidity was gone, and I realized it was the mask she wore for the world she was in.

“Now, without me saying I would change my story, Sheriff, let’s suppose I did. What would happen to me?”

“Would the new story be the exact truth, Arlie?”

“Let’s say it would be.”

“Would it have you out there seeing anything at all?”

“Let’s say it would have me seeing somebody else instead of Mr. McGee. Let’s say that when I looked in the window, Mr. McGee and Mrs. Bannon were just talking.”

Burgoon said, “What do you think, Tom?”

“I think she ought to do some laundry work for Miss Mary for thirty days.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. I’d say it’s going to depend on why she showed up with those lies.”

“Regardless,” said Arlie, “would you bust me for any more than thirty days?”

“Only if it turns out you’re telling more lies. We are going to check this new one out every way there is, girl.”

“Okay then, here is the way it really was…” The sheriff told her to wait a moment. He spoke into his intercom and got hold of Willie and told him to bring in some fresh tape, and told him the Denn girl was changing her story, and stop the transcript on the old story. Willie groaned audibly. He came in with the fresh tape, took the old one off the machine and set it for record.

“It’s mostly all still good what I said before,” Arlene said. “I just have to change some parts. I mean it would save doing the whole question bit right from the start, wouldn’t it?”

“Then, save that tape, Willie,” said Bunny Burgoon, “and close the door on the way out.”

He started the tape rolling, and established time and place and the identity of the witness.

“Now, Mrs. Denn, you have told us that you wish to change portions of your previous statement.”

“Just two… no, three parts.”

“What would be the first change?”

“I didn’t hear anybody say anything that sounded like Jan. The two men were mad at each other, but I didn’t hear any word like that.”

“And what is the second change you wish to make?”

“What if you decide to protect your own and throw me to the dogs, Sheriff?”

“What is the second change you wish to make?”

“Well… it wasn’t Mr. McGee I saw. The man I saw did everything in the other statement the way I told it. But it was Deputy Sheriff Freddy Hazzard.”

“Oh, God damn it!” said Tom.

“Hush up,” said Bunny.

“And the third change?”

“I looked in the window back in October but they were just talking. Drinking tea. That was all.”

“Now, hold it a minute, girl. Tom, you go tell Walker and Englert to pick Freddy up and bring him back here and… Damn it, tell them to take his weapon and put him in the interrogation room and hold him until I can get around to him. When does he come on duty, Tom?”

“I think tonight he’s on the eight to eight again. But you know Freddy.”

“Sheriff?” the girl said as Tom left the office. “You weren’t having me on, were you? About how big I could get busted for telling something that didn’t happen?”

“I never said a truer thing in my life, Mrs. Denn.”

“Why box me?” I asked her.

The vacant blue look she gave me was a total indifference. “Every straight one looks exactly alike to me.”

Tom came back in looking distressed. “Damn it all, Bunny, he was out there checking the skip list when you came over the box telling Willie this girl was changing her story. And he walked right out and took off. He’s in uniform, driving number three. Terry is trying to raise him on the horn but no answer. All points?”

Burgoon closed his eyes and rattled his fingers on the desk top. “No. If he’s running, there’s eighty-five back ways out of this county and he knows every one of them. Let’s see what more we’ve got here.” He leaned wearily and put the recorder back on.

“Who induced you to lie about what you saw that Sunday morning, Arlie?”

“Deputy Hazzard.”

“What inducement did he offer you?”

“Not to get busted for possession, and some other things he said he could bust us for.”

“Possession? Do you mean narcotics, girl?”

“That’s your word. That’s the fuzz word. But all we had was acid and grass. Booze is a lot worse for you.”

“Arlie, are you and your husband addicts?”

“What does that mean? We’re affiliates with the group up in Jax. And we get up there now and then. We take trips sometimes here, but it’s a group thing. You couldn’t comprehend, Sheriff. We all have our own thing. We don’t bug the straights, and why shouldn’t they leave us alone?”

“How did Deputy Hazzard learn you’d been a witness?”

“Like an accident. Last Thursday night out at the Banyan Cottages there was a complaint from somebody, and I guess it would be on your records here someplace. I didn’t even know Hazzard’s name. But he was the one who came there. Five of the kids had come down from Jax, three of them gals, in an old camper truck in the afternoon, from the Blossom Group in Jacksonville, and they had some new short acid from the Coast that never gives you a down trip and blows your mind for an hour only. We had almost two lids of Acapulco Gold, and we just started a lot of turn-ons there in the cottage, relating to each other, that’s all. At night, sometime, I don’t know what time, maybe the music got too loud. An Indian record. East Indian, and the player repeats and repeats. Maybe it was the strobes. We’ve got one and they brought two, and each one had a different recycle time, so there was a kind of pattern changing all the time. I guess you have to know the way it was when Hazzard came busting in. We had the mattresses and the blankets on the floor, and one of the gals was a cute little teeny-bopper and I’d painted her all over eyes.”

“Ice?” said the sheriff.

“Eyes,” she said impatiently. “Like eyeballs and eyelashes. All colors. And one boy and girl were wearing just little bells and rattles. You do whatever. Who are you hurting? It was blossom-time. A love-in, sort of, and our own business. Just with the strobe-lights and the samisen music and he came breaking in because maybe we didn’t hear him. Him and his gun and his black leather evil thing for hitting and hurting. You can’t turn off a high like in a second. So he found the lights and ordered things in a big voice and nobody did what he said or cared. So he starts yelling and chunking people. The teeny-bopper wanted to tune him in and turn him on I guess and she started throwing flowers at him and he chunked her too. Of the seven of us he chunked the four that were turned on to the biggest high, chunked them cold, and he chunked the record player, busted it all to hell and got the other three of us finally sitting in a row on the cold bare bed springs holding onto the backs of our necks. Not scared or angry or anything. Just sorry there’s no way of ever getting through to that kind of a straight. All he thinks of is busting people and busting things. And he chunked all the three strobes and broke them up. They’re expensive and hard to find ones that don’t overheat and burn out when you keep them cycling a long time. In my high I understood all about him. He was breaking things and hitting heads because he hated himself, and I had seen him mushing Mr. Bannon with that heavy motor, and I knew that was why he hated himself. He collected up all the grass and the three little vials of powdered acid, and he picked up all the color po laroids laying around that a boy had taken earlier to take back to Jax to the group on account of the girl painted all over eyes was a big turn-on for him.”

“Lord Jesus God Almighty,” said the sheriff in a hushed voice.

“He was going to radio for help and take everybody in and bust them, and I just felt sorry for him being so empty of love and so I said to him that he hated himself for what he did to Mr. Bannon. He looked at me and he picked up a blanket and wrapped it around me and took me out in the night. He shoved me up against his car and I told him the whole thing, just the way I saw it. I told him he could trade in his hate for love, and we could show him the way. I could feel myself beginning to come off the high, because I began to think about it being a lot of bad trouble, and it was a poor time to get busted because of orders Roger and I had to fill. He kept wanting to know who I’d told about it, and while I was coming off the trip I got smart enough to say maybe I had and maybe I hadn’t. So he said he was going to keep the evidence and think about what he was going to do, and we should cool it and he would come talk to me the next day.

“So in the morning the kids headed on away in the camper truck and the first thing I did was tell Roger the whole thing. That was Friday, and Hazzard came out in the afternoon and sent Roger out of the place and talked to me. He said he’d put the evidence away in a safe place, and in the pictures he had proof on both Roger and me on the teeny-bopper on corrupting a minor, and lewd and lascivious conduct. Then he questioned me over and over on what I saw that Sunday. Then he brought up if I knew a friend of Bannon’s named McGee. I told him about just that one day, and he made me remember every little part of it. So he walked back and forth and then he told me I was going to come in and make a statement and what I was going to say. I asked him why I should do anything he said, because if he left us alone, I wouldn’t say anything about him. He said if I didn’t do it, he would bust us both good, and he had enough proof and enough charges to get us both five to ten anyway. And I said if he tried to bust us that way, when he took us in, I’d tell what I saw him do. And he said then it would be pretty clear to everybody that I was making it up just to try to get him in trouble for doing his job and nobody would believe it because nobody ever believes an acid head about anything, and those pictures would make a hog sick. He said if I did my part, then after McGee was convicted, he’d give back everything he took. Then he gave me a chance to talk it over alone with Roger and for a while we thought maybe we ought to just take off and go merge into a colony someplace, but we went that road for a while and we relate better like plastics.”

“What? What?” asked the sheriff.

“Take the group thing now and then, and have a square thing we do for bread. We take off and we lose the trade we’ve built up that comes to maybe a hundred and fifty a week on average, and then maybe that Hazzard could get us brought back anyhow.” She combed the fingers of both hands back through the dark blonde stiffness of her long hair, shook it back and said, “So we decided okay, only what we didn’t know is how I could get busted a lot bigger for the statement than for what he’s got on us, and I didn’t know McGee would be in the clear, because he said maybe McGee might not even get to answer any questions at all. So where are we?”

“Where are you?” the sheriff asked. “Honest to God, I don’t even know what you are, girl.”

I looked at my watch. It was just eleven o’clock. The sheriff told Arlie he’d like to hold her and her husband in protective custody on a voluntary basis, and she agreed. I knew that part of the case against Freddy Hazzard would be Press LaFrance’s testimony about whatever conversation he’d had with his nephew, triggered by my comment to LaFrance about the possible reason why Tush had been killed. But had I reminded Burgoon of that point, he was going to mess up my timing, which was already two hours off. So I wondered out loud if Tush could have come in by bus early Sunday morning and if Hazzard, cruising around, had picked him up near the bus station and driven him out there.

Arlie had been taken off to the female detention tank. Tom, the chief deputy, said that if anybody could place Hazzard and Bannon together in town at dawn on Sunday, it would lock it up tighter.

“Tighter than the way he run?” Burgoon asked. “He was a good boy. He worked harder than any two others I got. Just a little bit too handy with that mailorder pacifier sometimes. But you take a county where you got some hard cases back in the piney woods, a little head-knocking keeps things leveled off. He lived clean and straight. It must have shook that boy when he checked out that complaint, walking in on that. Like looking into a bucket of mealy grubs. What’s going wrong with folks lately McGee?”

I had neared the ultimate promotion to Mr. McGee.

“It’s a mass movement against head-knocking, Sheriff.”

“What kind of a joke is that?”

“All kinds of head-knocking. Commercial, artistic and religious. They’re trying to say people should love people. It’s never been a very popular product. Get too persistent, and they nail you up on the timbers on a hill.”

He stared at me with indignation. “Are you one of them?”

“I recognize the problem. That’s all. But the hippies solve it by stopping the world and getting off. No solution, Sheriff. I don’t seek solutions. That takes group effort. And every group effort in the world requiring more than two people is a foul-up, inevitably. So I just stand back of the foul line and when something happens that doesn’t get called by the referees, I sometimes get into the game for a couple of minutes.”

“Around here today,” he said sadly, “it’s beginning to seem to me like in my sleep last night I must have forgot half the English language.”

“Can I go take care of my business matter?”

He looked at Tom, got some signal in reply; and said, “Stay in the area, Mr. McGee.”

Thirteen

I SAW PRESTON LaFrance sitting at his desk inside his little real estate office in a converted store on Central Street. He had his head in his hands, and he was alone.

When he heard the door open, he looked up with the beginnings of the affable show you-a-fine-parcel smile, and it froze there partially developed. He jumped and boggled and said, “McGee! You… you’re alone? But I saw you with… you were…”

“Sorry I couldn’t keep the coffee date, Press. I had to go answer some fool questions the sheriff wanted to ask me.”

“Bunny… let you go?”

“What’s the matter with you? Are you disappointed?”

“No! Hell, no! Sit down! Sit down, Trav! Cigar? Take that chair. It’s more comfortable.”

I sat down. “Did you have the same weird idea Burgoon had? Did you think I killed Bannon?”

“But Freddy said an eyewitness had turned up, and they were going to grab you down there in Lauderdale and he was going to go down and bring you back.”

“It would have been an exciting trip.”

“What happened? What about the eyewitness?”

“Burgoon satisfied himself that she was lying and I wasn’t.”

“Freddy said everything fitted together.”

“It did.”

“What? What do you mean?”

“It worried you a little, Press, when I told you that maybe somebody was trying to give you and Monk Hazzard a lot of cooperation in rousting Bannon out of his property, and maybe they busted him up too much. And you said that there wasn’t anybody involved who’d do a thing like that, but you hesitated a little. So you were thinking of Nephew Freddy, the head-knocker. So you came back and laid some very indirect questions on him and he convinced you he was absolutely innocent, and then you told him who had been feeding you such crazy ideas. So, lo and behold, the eyewitness was brought in and she changed her story and the sheriff let me go.”

“I guess then we can… talk business?”

“Sure, Press. That’s what I’m here for. By the way, the eyewitness identified Freddy as the killer. He heard about it by accident and took off. They’re running a manhunt right now. So it was a pretty good guess.”

“I got the money together, but first I have to… What did you say? Freddy? Come on!”

“He ran, Press. He took off. Check it out. Call Burgoon.”

He reached for the phone, hesitated, then picked it up and ran a thumbnail down the typed list of numbers under the desk-top glass. He dialed and asked for Burgoon. “Okay, then give me Tom Windhorn. Thanks… Tom? This is Press. Say, Tom, is Freddy in some kind of a… Huh? No kidding! But look, it couldn’t really be that he would… Oh… I see… Yeh… Boy, some mess. Anybody get hold of Monk yet?… Oh, that’s right I forgot… No, Tom, I don’t even know what route they were taking. Monk said he was going to take his time and see the sights. Sis will be out of her mind. Tom, is everybody absolutely positive he… All right. Sure. I’ll be over later.” He hung up and shook his head in bewildered fashion. “I just can’t believe it. He’s a nice clean-cut boy.”

“I’m afraid you’ve got too much on your mind. This is no time to talk business. We’ve got another deal we can work out. So let’s forget the whole thing. Okay?”

“But I… but I need-”

“Just hang onto your fifty acres and use the forty thousand to pick up that Carbee land. The way the area is going to go, you ought to make a nice profit in a couple of years. Just sit tight.”

His smile was slightly ghastly in its attempt to be reassuring. “Listen, Trav. Believe me, I can keep my mind on your proposition. I mean this is a terrible tragedy in the family and all, but it isn’t going to do anybody any good for me to lose out on something.

“Maybe you won’t like it anyway” I said. “Give me a piece of paper and a pencil. I’ll show you how it works.”

I wrote down a little tabulation on the sheet:

Carbee 200 acres @

$2000 = $400,000

LaFrance 50 acres @

2000 = $100,000

McGee 10 acres @

2000 =$20,000

Total purchase price =

$520,000

Cost to LaFrance:

McGee 10 acres $90,000

Carbee 200 acres $40,000

$130,000

Total available for split:

$390,000

To LaFrance:

$265,000 $135,000

McGee (+ 40,000 from LaFrance) $95,000

X $60,000

$390,000

“Who is this X? What does your ninety-five thousand come out of? I don’t understand this.”

“Mr. X is the man we’re going to meet at the hotel for lunch. The point is, I don’t trust him completely. But he has the authority to buy-from one single owner-those two hundred and sixty acres at two thousand an acre. And because he’s going to the top limit authorized, he wants a cash kickback, under the table. The trouble is, he wants it now. And I don’t think we ought to turn it over until we get the full amount on the land. If something went wrong, we couldn’t prove a thing. Right?”

“Yes, but-”

“Listen, can you get my forty thousand in cash instead of by certified check?”

“I… I guess so. Sure. But-”

“Then, maybe there’s a way we can work it so we won’t end up with the dirty end of the stick, Press.”

“But what’s this ninety-five thousand for you?”

“For putting this thing together. You are going to sell me a twenty-five percent share of that option for five thousand.”

“The hell I am! I can sell that Carbee land for-”

“Forget it. Forget Calitron. You’ll see why when you see the correspondence X has. If X can’t deal with us, he’ll deal with Gary Santo and we’ll be out in the cold. Why are you crying anyway, LaFrance? You get all your bait back, all hundred and thirty grand, plus a hundred and thirty-five on top. That’s fifteen thousand over a quarter of a million.”

We had lunch with Meyer at the hotel. He was superb. He told us where he was staying. I went to the bank with LaFrance and got the papers on our land sale signed and notarized, and he got the forty thousand cash. I drove him to the motel where Meyer was waiting, and before we went in, I unlocked the trunk compartment and dug out the little package of currency I had taped to a far dark corner. It was my total war fund, and it made me feel uneasy carrying it around. Meyer showed us the rest of the correspondence and the overlays. He took them out of the bulky dispatch case. He was properly arrogant, properly shifty. LaFrance bought the con. I could read it on his face and in the sweatiness of his hands, leaving damp prints on the papers.

“So, if we can settle the last little detail, gentlemen?”

“Doctor Meyer,” I said, “We get… I mean Mr. LaFrance gets the point five two million check or definite confirmation from topside that it has gone through, then you get the money we agreed on.”

He stared at me with a heavy, convincing contempt.

“And sue you if I don’t get it, Mr. McGee? Where? In Small Claims Court? You see the correspondence. You see the authorizations. It will go through. Believe me.”

“And at the last minute they change their minds. What have we got to make you give it back, Doctor?”

“‘There will be nothing in writing. You understand that. You have my word.”

“But you won’t take ours, Doctor?”

“So forget it, gentlemen. Impasse. I’ll resume the negotiations for the other tract.”

“There’s one possible solution, Doctor, that might satisfy both sides. It would be safe for both of us.”

“Which is?”

I took out the two packets of money and dropped them on the coffee table. “Seventy-five thousand dollars, Doctor Meyer.”

“So?”

“Let’s seal it in an envelope and we can put it in the hands of a local attorney, and give him instructions about it.”

“To do what?”

“I’ll tear a dollar bill into three pieces. We each keep a third. The attorney is authorized to surrender the envelope to whoever shows up with the three pieces, or to any two who, between them, have all three pieces.”

“Kid games!” said Meyer. “Nonsense games!”

“The extra fifteen, Doctor, is a bonus for doing it this way. Does the game sound better?”

He nodded. “A little. But you can save fifteen by giving me the sixty now.”

“We’ll pay the extra fifteen for insurance, Doctor.”

“Sometimes being too careful is stupid,” he said. “I’ll play your game.”

The good doctor had a fresh Manila envelope in his dispatch case. He handed it to me. I put the money in it and sealed it and handed it to LaFrance, saying, “Which lawyer do…:”

“I think,” said Meyer, “as long as we are not trusting one another, I will choose not to trust any lawyer of your selection, gentlemen. The old hotel where we lunched has a safe, no doubt. And some sort of claim check arrangement. The claim check could be torn into three portions, and the manager instructed not to surrender the envelope except for an entire claim check taped back together. Satisfactory?”

“Suits me,” I said. “Press?”

“Sure.” So we went back downtown in my car, Press beside me, Meyer in the rear. I parked and we went in. Meyer hung back while Press and I went to the desk. The girl greeted him by name and Press asked for the manager by name. He came out of his office.

“Can I help you, Mr. LaFrance?”

“Harry, this is sort of a wager. Can you put this in the safe for me and give us a claim check. We’re going to tear it into three hunks, and don’t surrender it unless you get the whole claim check.”

Harry, was affable about the whole thing. He took the envelope into his office and came back with the other half of the perforated tag he had affixed to the envelope. I had a five-dollar bill ready and reached and laid it on the counter and said, “For your trouble,” and he gave me the tag, telling me it wasn’t necessary to… uh…

“Go ahead, Harry,” I told him. I turned away, and walked over to Meyer, with LaFrance hurrying to keep up with me. I tore the tag into three parts, making them irregular, and ceremoniously put a third on each of their outstretched palms.

Meyer sighed. “Games for children. An expensive game for you, my friends.” We walked out and stood by my car. I offered the doctor a ride back to his motel. He got into the front seat. I closed the door and turned and held my hand out to Preston LaFrance.

“Press, I think we’re really in business. I’ll be seeing you in a few days. You draw up the agreement on the Carbee option.”

“Sure, Trav. I’ll sure do that.” His expression was doleful and earnest and anxious, like a dog hoping to be let in out of the rain.

“I hope you get your trouble worked out all right.”

“What? Oh, that terrible business about my nephew.”

“The boy just got too eager, I guess. He knew you and his father were using every legal means to run Bannon out of business. He probably tried a different way of discouraging him.”

“That’s probably it. And he tried to cover up. It was sort of an accident, I’d say. Freddy wouldn’t want to kill anybody. When they find him, I think if he tells exactly what happened, they might agree on letting him plead guilty of manslaughter. Monk has got a lot of leverage in this part of the state. T’rav, how… how soon do you think our deal will go through?”

“A matter of days. Don’t worry about it.”

“I think I’ll go over to the sheriff’s office and see what’s happening.”

He walked away. I walked around the car and got in and drove away. “Pigeon drop, smigeon drop,” said Meyer. “How was I?”

“Like a pro. Great natural talent, Doctor.”

I reached into my breast pocket and took out the intact green claim check and handed it to him. He took the little tin tape dispenser out of his pocket and tore the check in thirds and stuck it back together with the tape.

I made two right turns and parked on the side street behind the hotel. He gave me the claim check and said, “So soon?”

“Why not? While we know Harry is still in the office and we know where ol‘ Press is. Wait right here. Don’t go away, pro.”

I walked around the corner and went in the side door of the hotel and across the old-fashioned lobby to the desk. Harry was alone, sticking mail into the room boxes.

I handed him the check and said, “The winnah!”

“That was a quick one, sir.”

“Wasn’t it, though!”

He brought me the envelope and I said, “Harry, if you want to keep on being friends with Mr. LaFrance, you’d better not mention this little fiasco to him. He was so sure he was right he’s going to be very grumpy about the whole thing.”

“I know what you mean, sir.”

I walked back to the car and drove Meyer to the motel. I gave him the forty thousand, and taped my emergency fund back into its inconspicuous place in the car trunk.

It was just three thirty. When I walked back into the motel unit, Meyer was on the phone talking with his Lauderdale broker. He hung up and looked at the figures he had scribbled down.

“I think the answer is right here, Travis. I don’t think it has to come from Mary Smith. Fletcher Industries moved up one and an eighth today, to sixteen and three eighths on a volume of ninety-four hundred shares. So Janine Bannon has made eleven hundred and twenty-five bucks today.”

“Today?”

“Well, so far. I mean the final returns for the day aren’t in, but it will be pretty close to that. The Dow is off a little over five points. You look astonished. Oh, I see why. This morning before I left I opened her margin account with cash money, pending the power of attorney that you forgot to give me. I put in enough to buy her a thousand shares, and I got them at fifteen and a quarter.”

I gave him the power of attorney. He put it in his dispatch case, and took out all the fake correspondence to My dear Ludweg and the fake reports on plant location data.

“So,” he said, “it was worth the chance and now I reimburse myself out of this money and put the rest into her account to cover the order I placed for the opening tomorrow. Another twenty-five hundred shares. That will commit her account up to maximum. Then I have to go sit and stare at the tape, day after day, ten in the morning to three thirty in the afternoon. Bring me sandwiches.” He waved the sheaf of counterfeit letters and documents. “When these are confetti and flushed away, my heart might slow down some you think?”

He went into the bathroom with them and I placed a credit card call, station to station to the Santo offices, and after a short wait I got Mary Smith.

The approach, to be convincing, had to be that of the male who’d been brushed off.

“McGee here,” I said. “What was Santo’s decision?”

“Oh. Trav. I’ve been so impatient for you to call, darling.”

“I bet. What did he decide.”

“I want to tell you something else first, because I have the hunch that if I tell you first, you’ll hang up.”

“Can you think of any good reason why I shouldn’t?”

“Darling, I can think of a very good reason. My darned telephone was acting up. I knew it was you, but it just kept making a horrid ringing sound in my ear when I picked it up.” Her voice was intimate, cheery, persuasive.

“Nice try, kid.”

“But I’m telling the truth! Really I am. What could make you possibly think I wouldn’t be there? If you want to be such a grouchy old bear, you can call the phone company and ask them if a certain Mary Smith raised absolute hell with them Saturday afternoon. I got the message you left at the office, and I left one for you, hoping you’d call back.”

“At least you make it sound good; Miss Smith.”

“Travis, I know how disappointed and angry you must have been.”

“How come the phone company couldn’t fix the phone?”

“Actually they swore there was nothing wrong with it. They tested and tested, and when I made them come back the second time, they took out the instrument and put in a new one.”

“Which didn’t work either. Which didn’t work on Saturday night.”

“I… wasn’t there.”

“You said you had the weekend open. So why didn’t you hang around? How about four o’clock Sunday morning, kid?”

“I… I was told you’d made other plans, dear.”

“By who?”

“To tell you the truth, I drove up to Lauderdale just to find you. I saw that fantastic boat of yours, dear. It must be a marvelous way of life. A man told me you might be at a party on another boat and I went there, but a very odd-looking girl told me I’d missed you and you might come back. So I waited there. You can ask those people. A lot of them are your friends, I guess. It is quite a… lively group. Then that strange girl came and told me that she found out you had left with another girl, so you probably wouldn’t be back. So… you see, I really tried.”

The persuasive lilt of her tone was dying away, fading back into the monotone of a deadly exhaustion. “So even at four in the morning, you weren’t home yet? I guess you had a good time.”

“Not terribly. But it was pleasant. I… called up an old friend and she invited me over, and it got to be too late to drive back so they put me up for the night, dear.”

“So when did you get home?”

“I think it was about… ten o’clock last night. I spent the day with them. Why, dear? You had a date, didn’t you? There was hardly any point in roaring home and sitting panting by the phone, was there? Listen, dear, I don’t blame you for having a date. After all, it was perfectly reasonable for you to assume I stood you up, and so you said the hell with Mary Smith and her lousy steak. Don’t I get any points for driving all the way up there to find you?”

I said in a marveling tone, “And all it was was a phone out of order. You know, there must be a hex on us.”

“I guess there must be,” she said. She sighed audibly and heavily.

“So expect a man at about nine tonight, honey, Okay?”

“Oh no, darling! I’m sorry.”

“What now?”

“Well… I guess the hex is still working. I… uh… my friends have this little boat at their dock. They live on a canal. And they were going to take me out in the boat, and like a clumsy idiot I tripped somehow and fell headlong, right off the dock into the boat. Honestly I’m an absolute ruin. I was waiting for you to call so that I could get out of here and go home and take a hot bath and go to bed. I’ve been tottering around here today like a little old lady.”

“Gee, honey, that must have been a nasty fall. Where did you hurt yourself?”

She gave a tired laugh. “Where didn’t I? There were a lot of… you know… fishing tackle things in the boat. I must have hit my mouth somehow because it’s all puffed out, and when I looked at myself head to toe in my mirror this morning, I swear I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I’m battered and bruised from head to toe. I couldn’t let you see me like this. I’m a fright.”

“That could be dangerous, Mary, a fall like that.”

“I know. I strained my back somehow, I think. It’s such a shock I guess it takes a lot out of you. My bones ache even.” She sighed again. “Darling, give me time to get all well again, just for you. Please?”

“Sure. Take care of yourself, kid. Sorry our luck was running bad.”

“Friend McGee, you are not one tenth as sorry as I am,” and there was total conviction gleaming through the drag of her words. “The decision was yes, by the way.”

“Good. How much.”

“He said it depends on how it goes. At least one and a half. Maybe up to three, or anywhere in between. He said to tell you he’ll be doing it through different accounts, scattered across the country. He wondered if you mind the amount being a little vague.”

“I expected that. If it gets too much play from the traders, he won’t be able to slow it down enough.”

“Dear, may I wish us better luck next time?”

“You may indeed. Hurry home to bed, honey.”

I hung up and looked into the bathroom in time to see Meyer sprinkle the last of his confetti and flush the toilet.

“The evidence is destroyed,” said Meyer, with big smile and big sigh.

“And Santo has climbed on.”

“May he enjoy the trip in good health. May he have asked a few friends to join him even.”

I gave him my third of the other claim check and he put it carefully into a pocket of his wallet. “So tomorrow,” he said, “I drive up to Broward Beach and go out A-One-A and find a place called the Annex, and at seven I am sitting at the bar, waiting for the pigeon. Correct?”

“Looking important and shifty. Correct.”

“Shouldn’t you ask me what it is I checked when I arrived for lunch? Don’t you care?”

“I do now. Now that I know it must be interesting.”

“Here is the scene. Mr. LaFrance rushes to the desk at the hotel. He has the three parts of the claim check taped together. He is panting, right?”

“His hands are trembling. He can’t wait for Harry to give him the money,” I said.

“So Harry takes the check and he doesn’t come back with a big brown envelope. He comes back with a small white envelope. Number ten. Greeting card size. The envelope I checked when I arrived for lunch, so I could get a claim check, so you could make the substitution and tear it up into three pieces and give him one.”

“Meyer, remember me? I know all this.”

“Shut up. Let me enjoy. So he asks Harry, where is the brown envelope? Where is the money? So Harry says the other fellow claimed it ten minutes after it was checked. Yes, Mr. LaFrance, he had the right three pieces stuck together. He said I shouldn’t mention to you that you lost the bet. I know, Mr. LaFrance, this check is torn in three pieces, too, but it isn’t the check for the money. It’s the check for this card.”

“And so,” I said, “stunned, bewildered, shocked, our Mr. LaFrance wobbles over to a lobby chair, falls into it and thumbs the white envelope open. Come on, Meyer! What does the card say?”

“Don’t rush. It says on the front: ‘Congratulations from the Gang at the Office.’ You open it. Inside it says: ‘It couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.’”

“That is very wicked, Meyer.”

“But the signature. That’s the good part.”

“What did you do? Forge my name?”

“Not exactly. He saw your houseboat. He saw the name. Inside the greeting card he finds five playing cards I took out of a deck. I threw the rest of the deck away. The five, six, seven and eight of hearts. And the king of clubs. Right? A busted flush?”

I looked at him admiringly. “Meyer, you have great class. You have an instinct for this kind of work.”

“It was nothing, really. Just innate good taste, a creative mind, and high intelligence. It will make a nice signature anytime you want somebody to know who gave it to them good.”

Fourteen

AT NINE that evening Sheriff Bunny Burgoon sent word out from his office that he could see me. His chief deputy, Tom Windhorn, was planted in the same chair against the wall as before. They both looked as if they’d had a very hard day.

“From the talk out front I know you haven’t gotten him yet. But have you gotten any kind of line on him, Sheriff?”

“What I got doesn’t exactly boost up my spirits, mister. And it’s no joy having every newspaper and TV and radio station yappin‘ on and on about Shawana County having a deputy that turned bad. And it didn’t help any to have Monk Hazzard chewing me up long distance and telling me I was crazy as hell. But when I told him about car number three, it slowed him some.”

“Where was it? I heard you found it.”

“Just before sunset. The Highway Patrol chopper spotted it way over in the southwest corner of the county, run off into a marsh and bogged up to the top of the fenders. I got a call from the boys that went to check it out. There’s little places along the lake shore there, spread out. They were checking all Ihe driveways and heard somebody yelling in one of the places. Retired couple, trussed up, scared, and inad as puckered owls. Seems that Freddy drove in, kmocked, real polite, a little after two in the afteriaoon. Asked to come in. Said it was on a complaint an the fish and game laws. Head-knocked them both, tied them up, stuck dishtowels in their mouths: The boys say it’s a big tall old man, so his clothes fit Freddy good enough. Left the uniform. Put on the old man’s best suit, packed a bag with other clothes and toilet articles. Picked up what money they had around. Thirty or forty dollars. Drove off in the county car. Came back on foot and drove off in their Iwo-year-old Plymouth station wagon. Said he seemed nervous. Told them he was sorry he had to do them that way. Seemed right sorry about it. The old man tongued the towel out of his mouth after a while. When he heard the boys drive down his drive, he started bellering. So we put the car and the clothes on the wire. From there he’s twenty miles from the interstate. If he pushed it hard enough, he could have crossed into Georgia before we got the word out.”

“Once they calm down,” Tom said, “if we get all their stuff back to them and fix up anything busted or lost, and talk nice, they might not press charges.”

“We sort of reconstructed the thing with Bannon,” the sheriff said. “I say he must have come across Bannon on the road, hiking out to his place and told him he’d been foreclosed and his wife had took off on him; and he must have wanted to drive Bannon back here, but Bannon just wouldn’t believe him and wanted a look, so when he insisted, Freddy drove him the rest of the way out. That would account for the fat girl thinking they were talking ugly to each other. Now I’d say Bannon lost his head and tried to bust into the place that used to be his. Now that’s against the law and Freddy tried to gentle him some, but that was a lot of man and if he didn’t drop with the first knock, and if he rushed Freddy, that boy in his excitement just swang too hard is all. Caved his head bone in, maybe. And he knew Tom and me had chewed him for being too goddang quick with that mail-order pacifier, and I guess Freddy just lost his head is all. Having that girl see how he covered it up was just plain bad luck.”

“And was he in line to be the one to come to Lauderdale and bring me back if I was picked up there?”

The sheriff looked uneasy. “That was what was planned, mister.”

“I guess I would have tried to open the car door and jump out when we were going seventy-five or eighty. After I got through bounding along the pavement, nobody’d find a little extra lump on my skull.”

“Now you can’t be sure that would have happened that way.”

“I wonder why he told anybody about hearing from his Uncle Press that I was going to be here this morning?”

“Because,” said Tom Windhorn, “he knows I play golf Sunday mornings in a foursome with Press LaFrance every week of my life, and Press knew we were hunting you, and Freddy knew there was no way in the world of stopping Press from telling me. So he brought it in first. And the fool thing about it is that Press never did play yesterday. He phoned in he was feeling poorly, too late for us to get somebody to fill out, and so they stuck some old coot in with us that couldn’t hit the ground with his hat.”

“That poor boy just had plain bad luck all the way around,” I said. “He never did get a chance to kill me.

“He’s no killer,” the sheriff said. “He just lost his head some.”

“Nice I get to keep mine. Find the stuff he picked up out at the cottages?”

The sheriff nodded. “It was at his place, under his clean shirts. The narcotics we got packed up to mail in for analysis. No case on that because, without Freddy we can’t prove the chain of possession.” He opened the shallow middle drawer of his desk and then held an envelope toward me. I reached and took it.

The color prints were sharp and clear. I leafed through them. They did not leave the feral and cynical impression that the posed product of the hardcore studios’ induce. This was a tumble of aging children, most of them rather badly nourished. In spite of their placid, dazed, beatific smiles and grimaces, they were a kind of curious sadness, in their weird, bright patterns of love-paint on the scrawn of flesh, in their protest bangles and their disaffiliated bells, crushing the flower blossoms in a dreamy imitation of adult acts that for them had all been bleached of any significance or purpose. The rites of the strobe, frozen in such a sharpness it caught forever a wistful dirtiness of knuckles, the calico of bad bleach jobs, the moles and the blemishes and the sharp, helpless angle of shoulder blade. This was not a rebellion against mechanization, or emotional fraud. This was denying life itself in all eras and all cultures, and instead of being evil or outrageous was merely empty, bland and slightly saurian somehow, as though in a vain attempt to warm the blood that had begun to turn cooler in some gigantic and total regression that would take us all back through geological time, back into the sea where life began.

Said Tom, “Ain’t that Arlie the damnedest sight a man would ever want to behold?”

“Unforgettable,” I said, and put the envelope on the edge of the desk. “I’ve been waiting around to ask permission to leave your area, Sheriff. Here’s the address where you can get me. I’ll come back if you need me. But now I’d like to drive up to Frostproof and see Jan Bannon.”

“Get your business done with Press?”

“Yes, thanks.”

“Well… I guess there’s no call to keep you waiting around. Thank you for your cooperation, Mr. McGee.”

“Thank you for your courtesy and consideration, Sheriff.”

When I phoned ahead, Connie said that Janine had heard the news and that she was very upset and puzzled. I said it would be well after midnight before I could make it, and she said that it had been too much of a long, hard day to wait up. I told her my day had been on the same order, and told her that everything had gone very smoothly so far.

It was ten after one when I got there and turned under the arch and through the glare of the gate light and drove to the big house. The night was cool and the stars looked high and small and indifferent.

Jan stood in the open doorway waiting for me. And she leaned up to rest her cheek for a moment against mine, with a quick, soft touch of her lips. “You must be exhausted, Trav!”

“And you shouldn’t have waited up.”

“I couldn’t have slept.”

I went in and sat down into the depth and softness of a big leather couch. There were two red embers among the silvery ashes of the hearth. She wore a floor-length navy robe with a white collar. She said, “Connie left orders to give you a great wallop of bourbon to unwind on.” I said it sounded great. She drifted out of sight and I heard the clink of cubes and the guggle of a generous dose.

“Water?”

“Just the ice, thanks.”

She brought it over and fixed the cushions at the end of the couch and told me to lie back and put my feet up. She moved a footstool close. The light behind her from the corner lamp, the only one on in the room, shone through the fine ends of her cropped black hair. Her face was in shadow.

I sipped the strong drink and told her about Deputy Hazzard. “That’s what I couldn’t believe,” she said. “He and the older one, with the funny name. Not the Sheriff.”

“Windhorn?”

“Yes. They were the ones who… came out with the padlocks and the notices. And he, the young one, seemed so very shy and nice and troubled about everything. There was no point in taking it out on them. They had their orders.”

“Had he been out there before?”

“Several times, yes. To serve papers, and the time they checked to see about the licenses we have to have for the houseboats. A lanky boy with a long face, kind of a red, lumpy face, but sweet. But very official about what he had to do. All leather and jingling and creaking.”

“That reconstruction of it doesn’t fit,” I said. “It doesn’t fit Tush.”

“I know. He never got mad that way. Not like me. I fly off the handle and want to hit everything I can reach. He’d just get very very quiet and sad-looking and he’d walk slowly away. It’s better for me to… to be absolutely positive once and for all that he didn’t kill himself, Trav. But it just seems to be such… a stinking trivial way to die, to be killed by that harmless-looking young man.”

“Most of the ways people die are kind of dingy and trivial, Jan.”

“It just shouldn’t have been that way for Tush. But how in the world did that Freddy person get Arlie Denn to tell such an ugly lie about you? She always seemed to me to be sort of dull and placid. She never seemed mean or vicious or anything. It must have been horrible for her-watching like that. I would think she would just… have never told anybody at all, ever.”

And that took some explaining and finally I managed to make her comprehend it, up to a point. But comprehension was comingled with revulsion. “But we let that wretched girl sit with our boys a lot of times! She could have taken something… and hurt them.”

“I doubt it.”

“What kind of people were those others? How old were they?”

“I’d say Roger and Arlie were the oldest. The others looked nineteen and twenty. And the one girl about fifteen or sixteen.”

“What are they trying to do to themselves?”

“Drop out of the world. Hallucinate. Turn on. Dig the sounds and colors and feels. Be at one with the infinite something or other. I can’t lay too big a knock on them, you know. In another sense I’m a dropout. I don’t pay for my tickets. I jump over the turnstile.”

“I think I’ve been dropped out somehow. For good.”

“Now I am supposed to tell you about how you’re a young woman still in your twenties with most of your life still ahead of you.”

“Please don’t.”

“A guy will need you in the right way sometime.”

“Tell him not to really need me. That’s when I run like a rabbit.” She took my empty glass and said, “Another?”

“No. That one is going to do it.”

“I made you talk too long. There’s more I want to ask. But I’ll wait until tomorrow.”

She got up and took the glass away. I decided I’d better get up and head for bed while I could. I closed my eyes for a moment and opened them again and a high sun was shining and her middle boy was standing holding a saucer with both hands, and he had his tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth to help with the chore of keeping the coffee from spilling out of the cup.

“Everybody’s been up a long time,” he said disdainfully. “Mom said bring you this and if I stood here, the smell would wake you up. I think it’s a lousy crummy old smell and I’m never going to drink that stuff. Oh. Good morning.”

My shoes had been removed, belt loosened, necktie removed, collar unbuttoned. There was a blanket over me. The lady had given me bourbon and loving care. I hoped that it would be at least another full year before I had to put a necktie back on.

I sat up and took the coffee.

“You spilled a little bit,” he said. “I didn’t.”

“Like it here?”

“It’s neat. Today there’s a teacher’s meeting, so we don’t have to go on the bus. Charlie’s going to let me ride on the tractor again with him. It’s real neat. I gotta go.” And he went at a full run.

I dialed Press LaFrance direct at twenty after ten.

I wanted him to have a lot of time to make some collections. Just as I was ready to hang up, he answered, out of breath.

“Who? Trav? Where are you? What’s up?”

“Miami, boy. And I’m getting a little sweaty. Maybe we’re in trouble!”

‘How? My God, Trav, I thought everything was-“

“I’ve been making some long distance calls, Press. And it looks as if everything might go through okay. I was with Doctor Meyer a few minutes ago and he as much as admitted that he might wait until Roger Santo gets back from abroad and see if he wants to make a better deal on the side, a fatter deal for Meyer. I told you he’s slippery.”

“But what are we going to do?”

“If we play it his way, the way he suggested in the beginning, he’ll move right ahead with it. But it has to be today. He’s on his way up to Broward Beach. Do you know a place called The Annex?”

“Yes, but-”

“I had to take the chance, Press. I had to move fast. I gave him my third of the claim check. Now he’s going to be at the bar at The Annex at seven o’clock tonight. I told him that you would meet him there and give him his damned sixty thousand in cash for the two thirds he’s holding.”

“Where am I going to get that kind of money before seven?”

“The minute after you get back to Sunnydale and walk into the hotel, you’ll have it back, won’t you?”

“Yes, but-”

“Scrounge it somehow. You could pay somebody a very fat amount of one-day interest out of that fifteen extra, couldn’t you?”

“But, Trav, suppose he takes the sixty and then screws us and makes his deal with Santo? What can we do?”

“Absolutely nothing. But stop running around in crazy circles, man, and listen to me. I’m assuming the risk. Got that? It’s my money sitting up there. Give me a week and I could scrape up three or four times sixty in cash, but I damned well can’t do it today. If it falls through, what are you out?”

“There’s… maybe one possibility.”

“Now you’re beginning to think. I’ll phone you back. How long will it take you to find out?”

“I… I should know by… you phone me back right here at two o’clock?”

The shape of larceny is, in time, written clearly enough on a man’s face so that it can be read. Constant greed and sharp little deals and steals had left the sign on Preston LaFrance. There is the old saying that God and your folks give you the face you’re born with, but you earn the one you die with.

I went back into the house at two o’clock and phoned him. I knew just how he had probably worked it out in his mind. Get hold of sixty thousand cash to buy the claim check to seventy-five thousand in cash. Nobody ever gets hurt taking a profit. The small towns of Florida are peppered with old boys who don’t like to have too much information on record about the deals they make. And they like to keep a little leverage around in the form of cash money. LaFrance would know a couple of those shrewd old hawks. He’d hunt one up, probably put up his fifty acres and the Carbee option as security, if the bank wasn’t holding them, and pay the old boy a thousand dollars or five hundred for the loan of sixty thousand in cash for a few hours. Then he’d hike the interest rate as high as he dared when he reported to me.

“Trav?” he said. “I’ve been dreading this call, cause there’s something I hate to have to tell you.”

“You couldn’t get the money!”

“No, no. I got the money. I got it locked up right here in my office. I got it from a fellow that keeps cash on hand. Trouble is, he knows I’m spread thin. Maybe I got too anxious. Anyway, he gave it to me good. The only deal I could make was to pay him the whole fifteen thousand. Honest to God, Trav, when a man gets the tights, all the money dries up on you. There just wasn’t anybody else who’d give me the lend of it.”

“Pretty damned steep, Press.”

“Like you said, this is an emergency.”

It was the perfect example of the philosophy behind all kinds of con, big and small: You can’t cheat an honest man. I gave him a B in the course. B for Brass.

“When I get back,” he said, “that old boy is going to be right there in the hotel lobby with his hand out, and there won’t even be any point in unwrapping it, except he’ll want to count it slow and careful, and then go on rattling home in his old pickup truck, smiling like a toad in the moonlight. Trav, it was the pure best I could do on short notice, and that’s God’s truth.”

“Okay, then. Tote it over to The Annex and give it to Doctor Meyer, and don’t lose it on the way. Then we’ll just have to keep calm and wait for the corporation check to come through.”

“How long will it take?”

“Ask the Doctor.”

I hung up, knowing it was going to work. The secret of the big con is to move the victim, bit by bit, into increasingly implausible situations. At last, in the act of plucking him clean, you have him performing such a damned-fool act he will never understand how he came to do it, why he didn’t see through it. He was blinded by the conviction he couldn’t possibly lose a dime. And when he learned he’d been conned, he couldn’t take it to the law. He’d have to tell them he had been taking a sixty-thousand-dollar bribe to a man pretending to be a field representative of a huge corporation. He would have to tell them he’d paid forty thousand dollars for worthless equity in a defunct marina. If a story like that got out, every member of the Sunnydale business community would laugh himself sick. So he didn’t have a chance. Poor LaFrance. Exactly the same situation he put Tush in. Smashed flat, plucked clean. No mercy for Tush. No mercy for LaFrance.

I walked out and found Connie by the equipment barn. We strolled over and sat on the mossy old stone bench under the huge banyan tree in the side yard.

I told her that our fish had gobbled the hunk of ripe bait, and the hook was perfectly set. A very greedy fish, that one.

Her weather-beaten face twisted in mocking amusement. “Maybe he’s just greedy enough so your friend should be a little careful leaving that place, Trav.”

“He’s got a self-addressed envelope with him, and he walks right from The Annex through into the motel lobby and drops it in the slot. It’s got more than enough stamps on it. It’ll be solidly sealed with tape, and the money will have cardboard and a rubber band around it. Connie, again thanks. I’m going to head back.”

‘You come anytime, hear? Are you going to make our gal rich?“

“Let’s say reasonably comfortable, if all goes well.”

“And you’ll have sixty more to fool with?”

“Meyer wouldn’t like that verb.”

“Ahh, McGee, all those poor bastards who’ll wish that Tush Bannon never had a friend like you. Anyway, when things get just a little quieter-if they ever do-please let me know because then I think would be a good time for you to phone Jan and tell her that there are papers to be signed or something, any excuse for her to come down there. I’ll talk her into it and keep the kids here, and when she gets down, you make her stay awhile. She needs a change. She needs to get away from the kids and away from here. She ought to get a lot of sun, and walk on a beach and swim and catch a fish and hear music and be near happy people. Okay?”

“Okay Connie. Soon.”

At eight thirty that evening the bing-bong announced that somebody had stepped over the gangplank chain and come aboard. I looked out and saw Meyer. I let him in.

He had a grin like a piano keyboard. He fell onto the yellow couch and said, “Build me one of those death-dealing in-and-out jobs named after somebody who’s name escapes me.”

“You’ll get maudlin.”

“So?”

“Any trouble at all?”

“None. You know, I have seldom seen or touched a greasier, grimier wad of money. I didn’t know hundred-dollar bills ever got so cruddy. They must have come from a fondler.”

“LaFrance was calm?”

“He stammered and sweat and his eyes bulged and he spilled his drink and mine. Otherwise, a cucumber. By now he’s got the greeting card. By now he knows how it was done, by you switching claim checks as you turned away from him to walk over to me. By now he knows you picked it up ten minutes after it was checked. By now maybe he has leaned across the desk and hit Harry in the mouth. What a pity not to see him read the nice card I bought him.”

“You’ll get to see a certain amount of agitation.”

“You can arrange that?”

“The phone is turned off. He’ll be here in the morning. Count on it. Come over early. We’ll play a little chess.”

“I should be down watching the board. Today it moved almost too good. Volume is picking up. Very close to two points. Seven grand, practically, for the widow. I’ve got a friend on the floor of the exchange keeping in close touch with the fellow who maintains the position in Fletcher, and he calls me at my brokers the minute anything starts to look sour. And I should put in some orders for her out of the sixty. We’ll have five days to meet the margin call. I don’t think the mail takes that long from Broward Beach to here. At least not usually.”

“We could be having a little game on the sun deck. The forecast is warm and bright. We invite him aboard. We have a little chat. He goes away.”

“So I could phone in the first order. So it isn’t as risky now in the beginning as it is going to get. Also, there is a variation of the queen’s pawn opening I think I can break your back with. You know, you don’t look so great.”

“I brood a lot.”

He finished the last of the drink in one huge gulp. He shuddered and got up and said, “Now if I can be standing by the bunk when that hits me…”

Fifteen

WE HAD placed the chess table and chairs near the rear of the sun deck so we could look down onto the dock. We surveyed the morning traffic between moves. At one point Hero went by, swaying his big shoulders. The usual lock of hair was combed to fall just right over his forehead. He was taking a morning saunter through the game preserves, just in case he might flush something even at an unlikely morning hour. His gray slacks were tightly tailored to his narrow hips, and the broad belt was cinched tightly around his improbable waist.

He crinkled up at us and said in his mellow bassbaritone, “Morning, gents. Nice day out today.”

“Getting any?” Meyer said contemptuously.

“Can’t complain, gents. It’s the best season for it.” He came to a momentary point and then lengthened his relaxed stride. I turned and saw two girls in beach togs with pale northern faces and legs, heading from the dock area toward the shops. Just as they disappeared from sight beyond the palm fronds Hero was ten feet behind them and, I suspected, clearing his throat and checking the third finger, left hand. That was his quaint little conceit, his only concession to any rule of human behavior. He proclaimed it often, with great conviction and emphasis. “I hold marriage sacred, and never in my life have I knowingly courted nor touched a lady united in the holy bonds of matrimony, no sir. It’s something no gentleman would do.”

A little later Meyer went below and phoned his broker and came back acting less restless. “It opened up a whole point, and then a couple of pretty good blocks came on the market and knocked it down to an eighth below yesterday’s close. Insiders unloading, maybe. If so, in another week or two, they’ll be slitting their throats at what they could have gotten.”

At a few minutes before eleven, Preston LaFrance came along the dock at a half lope. He looked rumpled. He hadn’t shaved. He came to a lurching halt and stared up at us.

“Doctor Mey…” It came out falsetto, so he coughed and tried again. “Doctor Meyerl”

“Hidey, Press,” I said. “How you, old buddy? Come on aboard. Ladderway up here is on the port side.” He came clambering up and came over and stood beside us. We studied the chess pieces.

“Doctor Meyer!”

“Just Meyer,” he said. “Plain old Meyer.”

“But don’t you work for-”

“Work? Who should work? I’m an economist. I live on a little cruiser that has a case of dry rot lately. If I decide to get out the tools and go to work on it, then I’ll be working.”

“Then there isn’t any… offer for the land?”

We both looked up at him: “Offer?” I said.

“Land?” said Meyer.

“Oh Jesus, you two were in this lousy racket together. You are a stinking pair of con men. Oh Jesus God!”

“Please!” said Meyer. “I’m trying to figure out why he moved his bishop.”

“I’m going to have you two bastards thrown in jails.”

“McGee,” said Meyer, “let’s finish the game after the noise stops.” He stood up and leaned against the rail. Meyer in his white swim trunks reminds me a little bit of a man who is all dressed to go to a masquerade as a dancing bear. All that is left to do is put on the bear head and the collar. He stared at LaFrance? “Jail? For what?”

“You two took a hunnert thousand dollars away from me! More than that! That Bannon place isn’t worth half the mortgage on it!”

“Mr. LaFrance,” I said, “the records will show that I paid a legitimate fifteen thousand for Mrs. Bannon’s equity in the Bannon Boatel, and then I turned around and sold that same equity to you for forty thousand. And I think that your banker will remember how anxious you’ve been to get your hands on Bannon’s ten acres on the river.”

“But… but… damn it, that was because you said…” He stopped himself and took a deep breath. “Listen. Forget the forty thousand. Okay. You suckered me. But the sixty thousand I gave this man last night, that’s something else again. I’ve got to have it back.”

“You gave me sixty thousand dollars!” Meyer said in vast astonishment. “Look. Stop standing in the sun. Get some rest.”

He stood there, blinking, clenching and unclenching his boney fists. His color was bad. He smiled what I would imagine he thought was an ingratiating and friendly smile. “You took me good, boys. Slick and perfect. You made a nice score off ol‘ Press LaFrance. And I guess you’re not going to give it back just because I say pretty please with sugar. But you don’t understand. I had to put up the Carbee option to get the sixty thousand. Now, if I had it back, I could go ahead and make my deal with Santo. That’s what I got to trade with, boys. We’ll draw it up legal. You’ll get the sixty thousand back that you stole off me, and twenty more to sweeten the pot.”

“If I had sixty thousand,” said Meyer, “would I be hanging around with such riffraff? I would be riding around in a white convertible with a beautiful woman in furs and diamonds.”

“How can you lose?” LaFrance said. “There’s no way you can lose.”

“No thanks,” I said. “What shape does that leave you in, buddy?”

He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I just plain can’t afford to get left in the kind of shape I’d be in. Why I would be worse off than dead broke. I would be a mile underground, boys. I would be attached and garnisheed the rest of my natural life. I would never have dime one to call my own the rest of my days.”

“Now you know how it feels, Press.”

“How what feels?”

“How some of the people felt who got in your way. Like Bannon.”

He peered at me. “You bleeding for Bannon? That was straight-out business. He was squattin‘ right in the way of progress, and he was so dumb it took him a long time to catch on, is all.”

“It would have helped him a lot if he’d had a brother-in-law on the County Commission.”

“What in the wide world is eating on you, McGee? My God, there’s a whole world full of Tush Bannons stumbling around, and they get et up left and right, and that’s what makes the world go ‘round. I put Monk onto some good things and he owed me a favor.”

“And you and Monk let Freddy Hazzard know you’d appreciate him leaning a little hard on Bannon any chance he had?”

“Now, we never meant anything like that!” He smiled. “You’re just trying to sweat me up a little. Isn’t that right? Look boys, it won’t improve the deal any. Twenty more on top of the sixty is the best I can do.”

He was such a weak miserable, unsatisfying target. He still thought he was one of the good guys. I tried to reach him, just a little.

“If you could bring in a thousand-percent profit a day, LaFrance, I wouldn’t throw pocket change on the deck there in front of you. If I was on fire, I wouldn’t buy water from you. I came prowling for you, LaFrance. If the thing you cared most about in the world was that face you wear, I would have changed it permanently, little by little. If your most precious possession was a beautiful wife, she’d be right down there below in the master stateroom waiting for you to leave so I could get back to her. If you juggled for a living, friend, you’d now have broken wrists and broken elbows.”

“What the hell is the matter with you?”

“Get off the boat. Go ashore. Tush Bannon was one of the best friends I ever had. All you give a damn about is money, so that’s where I hit you.”

“Best… friend?” he whispered.

And I watched the gray appear. That gray like a wet stone. Gray for fright. Gray for guilt. Gray for despair. His mouth worked. “You… rooned me, all right. Ever’thing I worked all my life for is gone. You finished me off, McGee.”

“Wait a minute,” Meyer said. “Maybe I’ve got an idea.”

LaFrance came to point like a good bird dog. “Yes? Yes? What?”

Meyer smiled at him benignly. “The answer was staring us right in the face all the time. It’s so simplel What you do is kill yourself!”

LaFrance stared at him, tried to comprehend the joke, tried even to smile, but the smile fell away. Meyer’s smile stayed put. But not one gleam of hunior touched Meyer’s little bright blue eyes. And I do not know many people who could have stared into that smile for very long. Certainly LaFrance couldn’t. In the same soft persuasion a lover might use, Meyer said, “Do yourself a favor. Go kill yourself. Then you won’t even know or care if you’re broke. Maybe it hurts a little, but just for a split second. Use a gun or a rope, or go jump off something high. Go ahead. Die a little.”

It is a kind of rat-frenzy I suppose, that dreadful and murderous fury of the weak ones when the door of the trap slams shut. With a mindless squalling he plunged at Meyer, long yellowed ridged thumbnails going for the meat of the eyes, knees jacking at belly and groin. The squalling and flailing and gouging lasted perhaps two and a half seconds before I clamped my forearm across his throat. I pulled him back away from Meyer, spun him and let go. He ended up against the far rail.

Obscenities are tiresome. He kept repeating himself. I cuffed him quiet and he went down the ladderway and I helped him along the way and onto the dock.

He stayed there perhaps three minutes. He was going to come back with a gun. He was going to bring friends. He was going to have my boat blown up. He was going to have it burned to the waterline. He was going to hire some boys from back in the swamps to come with their knives some dark night and turn us into sopranos. We were going to be awful sorry we’d ever messed with Preston LaFrance and you can by God believe it.

His eyes bulged and his voice had hoarsened and the saliva shone on his chin. And finally he hitched up his pants and walked away. His walk was that of a man wearing new bifocals and not being very sure of how far away the ground might be. Meyer was able to stand up straight without much discomfort, and I dabbed iodine on the thumbnail gouge under his left eye. He seemed troubled, thoughtful, far away. I told him LaFrance wouldn’t make any trouble. I asked him what was bothering him.

Meyer, scowling, pinched the bridge of his nose. “Me? Did you hear me? On the sidewalk if there is a bug, I change my step and miss him. For me the business of the hooks almost spoils fishing. Me! I don’t understand it. Such a rotten anger I had, Travis! Thick in the throat like a sickness. Oh, he won’t kill himself. Not that one. He’ll live on and on so he can whine. But it was like changing your step to squash the bug, not flat, just a little squash so he can crawl a little bit, slow, leaking his juices. McGee, my friend, I am ashamed of that kind of anger. I am ashamed of being able to do something like that. I said to myself when I first got into your line of… endeavor, I said forgive me for saying this to you-I said I will go only so far into it. There are things McGee does that somehow hurt McGee, hurt him in the way he thinks of himself. I talked to Muggsie. This business of the pretty little woman who just somehow happened to go off with Hero, that wasn’t pretty, and you were punishing something in yourself. Now I find myself a little bit less in my own eyes. Maybe this is a bad business you’re in, Travis. Is there this kind of ugly anger in a man that waits for some kind of virtuous excuse? Was it there in me, waiting for a reason only? Travis, my friend, is this the little demonstration of how half the evil in the world is done in the name of honor?”