The Deep Blue Good-Bye

Diez

I DID not know how she would be in the morning. I could only hope that she would not be bubbly, girlish and coy.

She was pouring juice when I went into the galley, and she turned gravely to be kissed, knowing it her due. A little tilt to the dark head. A flicker of appraisal in slanted eyes.

“Temperature normal, pulse normal, patient starving,” she said.

“What?”

“McGee’s clinic. Morning report. I’m having poached.”

“Scrambled medium.”

“Yessir.”.

The breakfast was rather silent, but not with strain.

After pouring second coffees, she sat and looked at me and said, “I’m being a hell of a problem to you, Trav.”

“I worry about it every minute.”

“Thank you for patience and endurance. You have won the Lois Award.”

“Hang it with my other plaques.“

“I watched the dawn from your sun deck. It was a nice one, with thunderheads. I came to the astonishing conclusion that I better not try to give anything until I’ve built up something to give. Otherwise, it’s just taking.”

“In the morning I’m often anti-semantic.”

“Any future aggression, if there is any, will have to be yours.”

“Sounds valid.”

“And if there isn’t any, don’t go around worrying about what I might be thinking. Last night I collected on my assurance. in advance.”

“0kay.”

“Finish your coffee and come see what unskilled labor has done to your barge.”

The work was worth the admiration I gave it. I shooed her off to the beach, with all her gear. She was back in three minutes just to tell me that she couldn’t guarantee she wouldn’t get a little nutty from time to time, but she felt she was past the pill period, and then she headed back toward the beach, a lissome broad in her mirrored sunglasses, walking on good legs and she was far younger than her years, yet old as the sea she approached.

The operator tracked down Harry in New Vork, from one number to the next.

“In answer to your questions, laddy boy, it is mostly a yes. A few months back some very fine items made an appearance here and were you might say classic items, the kind you expect there should be a description, like perhaps on an insurance list. But they are clean, I am told. All Asiatic items, with, as usual, some of the faceted stuff cut freehand enough to take a smidgen off the value. They have appeared here and there and worked their way up through the Street, everybody taking the small edge a quality thing brings, and they are now mostly in the hands of the top houses being mounted in ways worthy of them, and you can find one advertised in The New Yorker as of present, page eighty-one, a retail to curl the three hairs I have remaining. It was a goodly number of top items, a minimum of ten, and perhaps no more than fifteen, unless somebody is holding tight. As to source, laddy boy, on the Street I found a word here, a word there, adding up to a smiling savage man, not by any means a fool, unloading one at a time, without haste, for cash, known to slam one man against a wall, and having no trouble thereafter, claiming he’d be back often with more of the same.”

“What did he walk away with?“

“Forty thousand minimum. These are important items, laddy boy. And he would wait so proof could be had they were not hot. Cash sets up a certain discount situation, of course, but he played one against another, and did well.”

“Could you do as well if you had the same kind of merchandise? Five per cent for your trouble?”

“You take my breath away. I might do even better. For ten.”

“If I had them, we could dicker.”

“You should not put such a strain on this ancient heart.”

“Harry, can you get me a big blue star sapphire, say as big as the average he peddled, a fake that would slow an expert down for a few seconds?”

“There are only two kinds of fakes in that area, laddy boy, the very bad ones and the very good ones, and the good ones come high.”

“How high?”

“Offhand, one large one.”

“Can you rent one or borrow one and airmail it to me?”

“Switching is very unhealthy.”

“It isn’t what I have in mind.”

“I might be able to arrange it.”

“That isn’t the question. I have faith in you. Can you arrange it today?”

“Dear boy!”

“I would hate to have to deal with anyone else, particularly if I get hold of anything genuine later on.”

“My arm is twisted.”

And then, with a thumb in the Yellow Pages, I began checking the marinas. All this great ever-increasing flood of bronze, brass, chrome. Fiberglas, lapstreak, teak, auto pilots, burgees, Power Squadron hats, nylon line, all this chugging winking blundering glitter of props, bilge pumps and self-importance needs dockside space. The optimum image is the teak cockpit loaded soft with brown dazed girls while the eagle-eyed skipper on his fly bridge chugs Baby Dear under a lift bridge to keep a hundred cars stalled waiting in the sun, their drivers staring malignantly at the slow passage of the lazy-day sex float and the jaunty brown muscles of the man at the helm. But the more frequent reality is a bust gasket, Baby Dear drifting in a horrid chop, girls sun-poisoned and whoopsing, hero skipper clenching the wrong size wrench in barked hands and raising a greasy scream to the salty demons who are flattening his purse and canceling his marine insurance.

But they have to park.

And while the outboarders have infinite choice, those that can house forty-footers are merely legion. I made over an hour of phone calls with the simple query, “Had the Play Pen in there lately, forty-foot Stadel custom?”

The assumption was he’d put the damned thing somewhere handy when he’d visited the Mile O’Beach, but that assumption began to grow wan under the negative chorus. So somewhere unhandy, and I began to get into the toll call area, questing up and down the Waterway.

Lois came back from the beach. I sat glowering at the phone. She came back pinked, sun-dazed and slow moving, with spumesalted hair and a sandy butt, displaying upon a narrow palm, with a child’s innocence, a small and perfect white shell, saying in a voice still drugged with sun and heat, “It’s like the first perfect thing I ever saw, or the first shell. It’s a little white suit of armor with the animal dead and gone. What does it mean when things look so clear and so meaningful? Silly little things.”

I sat on a low stool, hating the phone. “What’s wrong?” she said, and leaned a hip against my shoulder, a weight oddly warm and heavy and luxurious for such slenderness. It was an uncontrived gesture and in a moment she was aware of it and moved away quickly, startled by herself.

“Where did Junior Allen like to tie up?”

She moved uneasily away, sat on a curve of the couch. “Little places, mostly. Not the great big marinas. I think he liked places where his boat would be biggest. A hose connection and power outlet and fuel. That’s all he had to have. And privacy. He liked finger slips where he could tie up with the bow toward the main dock.”

“I’ve been trying the small ones too.”

“But after what he did to Mrs. Kerr, wouldn’t he go away?”

“I would think so. But where was he beforehand? He couldn’t have known that was going to happen. I’d assume he’d move along, thinking she would tell the police.”

“Back to the Bahamas?”

“Maybe. I thought I could find where he was, and ask around and get some idea where he was headed. Did he ever say anything about things he wanted to do, or places he wanted to go?”

“He said something one time about going around the Gulf Coast and over to Texas.”

“Oh, fine.”

“Trav, you know he could be tied up at some private place, like he was tied up at my dock.”

“That’s a lot of help too.”

“You asked me. I’m trying to help.”

She looked at me with gentle indignation. She was what we have after sixty million years of the Cenozoic. There were a lot of random starts and dead ends. Those big plated peabrain lizards didn’t make it. Sharks, scorpions and cockroaches, as living fossils, are lasting pretty well. Savagery, venom and guile are good survival quotients. This forked female mammal didn’t seem to have enough tools. One night in the swamps would kill her.

Yet behind all that fragility was a marvelous toughness. A Junior Allen is less evolved. He was a skull-cracker, two steps away from the cave. They were at the two ends of our bell curve, with all the rest of us lumped in the middle. If the trend is still supposed to be up, she was of the kind we should breed, accepting sensitivity as a strength rather than a weakness. But there is too much Junior Allen seed around.

“Find me that boat,” I told her.

“What do you mean?”

“What specific or general thing do I have to know that will enable me to locate it?”

She stood up slowly and thoughtfully and went off to take her shower. I knew it was an emotional strain for her. She was trying to wipe every memory of that period out of her mind. And now I was forcing her to remember. They would be tangled memories, filtered through alcohol.

Suddenly she came racing into the lounge. She wore one of my big blue towels in sarong fashion, and had a white towel wrapped around her head. Her face looked narrow and intent. Her features looked more pointed.

“That last trip,” she said. “I don’t know if it will help. We stopped at some sort of a boat yard in Miami. I can’t even remember the name. Something about a new generator. He kept complaining about the noise the generator made. They took up the hatches and got down in the bilge and did a lot of measuring. The man said it would take a long time to get the one Junior Allen wanted. It made him angry. But he ordered it anyway. He left a down payment on it. He ordered some kind of new model that had just been introduced.”

She sat beside me and we looked at the Yellow Pages. She ran a slender fingertip down the listings. She stopped. “That’s it. That’s the one.”

Robinson-Rand, down below Dinner Key, off the Ingraham Highway. Shipyard, storage, No job too large, no job too small.

“Maybe it hasn’t come in yet,” she said in a thin little voice. She shivered. “I’m scared, Trav. I hope it came in and he got it and went away. I hope you never find him.”

I had bought Lois a lunch and sent her back to the houseboat. I parked Miss Agnes in Robinson-Rand’s sizable lot. Even in the summer doldrums, it was a brisk place. Their storage areas looked full. They had long rows of covered slips, and two big in and out structures for small craft. The shop areas were in big steel buildings. Saws and welding torches and power tools were in operation, even on a Saturday afternoon, but I could guess it was only a skeleton crew working. They had a lot of big cradles and hoists, slips and ways. The office area was built against one end of one of the shop buildings, near a truck dock.

There was one girl working in the office, a plump, impersonal redhead with one eye aimed slightly off center.

“We’re not really open,” she said.

“I just wanted to check on a generator that was ordered, find out if it has come in yet.” She sighed as though I had asked her to hike to Duluth. “Who placed the order?” Sigh.

“A. A. Allen.”

She got up and went over to a bank of file cabinets. She began rifling through cards. “For the Play Pen?” Sigh.

“That’s right.”

She took the card out and frowned at it. “Ordered June second. That’s a Kohler 6.5A-23. Goodness, it should be in by now.”

“Doesn’t it say on the card?”

“No, it doesn’t say on the card.” Sigh. “All I can tell from the card is that it hasn’t been delivered or installed.” Sigh.

“Does the card say who handled the order?”

“Of course the card says who handled the order.” Sigh. “Mr. Wicker: He isn’t here today.”

“Joe Wicker?”

“No. Howard Wicker. But people call him Hack.”

“Do you keep a running list of the boats you have in?”

“Of course we keep a running list of the boats we have in.” Sigh. “Down at the dock office.”

“Of course you keep a running list of the boats you have in. Down at the dock office. Thanks a lot.”

She looked momentarily disconcerted. “Excuse me. The air conditioning isn’t working right. And the phone keeps ringing. And people keep coming here.” Sigh.

“I’m sorry too. Be of good cheer, Red.”

She smiled and winked the crooked eye and went back to her gunfire typing.

I phoned the only listing for a Howard Wicker from a chilly saloon. A very small child answered and said, “Hello.” No matter what I said, it kept saying hello. I kept asking it to get its daddy and it kept saying hello, and I began to feel like Shelley Serman. Then the child gave a sudden howl of anguish and a woman with a tense exasperated voice came on the line.

Hack was out in the yard. Hold the line. The child came back on and started giving me the hello again. Tearfully.

“Yes?” Wicker said.

“Sorry to bother you on your day off. I understand you installed a Kohler 6.5A-23 on a forty-foot Stadel custom, and I’d like to know how it worked out.”

“What? Oh. I don’t know what you mean. It’s a good rig. If there’s room for it, and you don’t hit over a second thousand watt peak demand, it’s going to be okay, isn’t it?”

“I mean noise and vibration and so on.”

“It’s quiet enough for that rating. You’re asking about a boat called the Play Pen?”

“I think that’s the name.”

“We got the generator in last Monday or Tuesday, and it hasn’t been installed yet. They’ve phoned in a few times asking about it. I expect they’ll phone in again this week. Then bring the boat around and we’ll put it in. You want to see how the job goes, I could let you know. What have you got now?”

“An old Samson 10KW diesel. Manual and noisy. And big.”

“It would depend on peak load, if you could get along with less.”

I told him I would appreciate it if he’d give me a ring when the appointment with the Play Pen was set up. A collect call in Lauderdale. He wrote the number down and said he would.

“It won’t be too long, will it?” I asked. “The Play Pen is in the area?”

“Far as I know. He knows it’s due about now.”

I drove back through late afternoon heat. The world darkened, turned to a poisonous green, and somebody pulled the chain. Water roared down the chute. Rose-colored lightning webbed down. Water bounced knee high, silver in the green premature dusk, and I found a place to pull off out of the way and let the fools gnash each other’s chrome and tin-work, fattening the body shops, busying the adjustors, clogging the circuit court calendars. The sign of the times is the imaginary whiplash injury.

Miss Agnes squatted, docile under the roar of rain, and I tried to pull Junior Allen into focus. Like the most untidy little hoodlum knocking over a Friendly Bob Adams Loan Office, he was on a short rein. Or reign. In these documented times, where we walk lopsided from the weight of identifications, only the most clever and controlled man can hope to exist long on a hijacked fortune. And Junior Allen was a felon. Maybe he was clever, but certainly not controlled.

Returning to Candle Key to rape and corrupt the lonely woman who found him distasteful had been foolish. Bashing Cathy had been idiotic. Showing gems to the little Haitian bitch had been the act of a careless, over confident man. He was a swaggering sailor with money in his pocket, and if he kept on being careless, neither he nor the money could last very long. Viewed in that light, his luck was impressive. His victims, thus far, had kept their mouths shut. Perhaps his present victim, whoever she might be, might not be so obliging. And I might not have very much time.

A sulphur sun pierced the gloom, and the rain stopped and I drove to the hospital.

She could look at me out of both eyes now, and the shape of her mouth looked more familiar. Chook had brought her a pretty new robe. With the nurse’s permission, she moved from the bed into a wheel chair, and I pushed her to the sun room at the end of the corridor.

“Tomorrow I can go home,” she said.

I moved a chair closer to her. Old bruises turn green and yellow. The old swelling kept her brown eyes pinched small.

“Maybe I’m going to catch up with him soon, Cathy.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Play it by ear.”

“I’d like it fine if you could kill him some way you wouldn’t get into trouble about it.”

“I didn’t know you were so savage about it.”

“Savage? I’m not savage about it at all. The way that man does you, he’s better dead. I was plain foolish, Trav. Even after everything. I was still hoping. You know? He’d find out it was best he should be back with me. Now wasn’t that dumb? I couldn’t even let myself know that was what I was wishing on. Then when he taken me and hammering me there in the dark, nobody to hear, not caring if he killed me dead, that killed it for good. I saw his face once when he’d spun me toward the palm tree lights, and he was smiling.”

“Had he come looking for you?”

“He didn’t say.”

“Do you think he did?”

“I think it was just accident. There aren’t so many places with a summer show, and a man roving around could come there and be as surprised as I was to see him. Trav. you be careful getting near him. He’s mean as anything you like to find in a swamp.”

“I’ll be careful.”

“I have the feeling he’s not long for this world, and I don’t want him taking you with him when he goes. I think when they had him locked away for five years, something went wrong with him. Something stopped. Something other people have. And he’s sly. He must have tricked my daddy, and my daddy was real sly hisself, they say.” She stared thoughtfully at me. “I guess you have to be a sly man too. Your face doesn’t show much. But go careful with him, like as if he’s a snake.”

I got back to the Busted Flush at six-thirty. The rain had washed the sunset time to a lambent beauty. A fine east wind had driven the bug life inland. Scores of little groups were cocktailing aboard their craft, lazy-talking, working themselves into Saturday night.

Buddy Dow, hired skipper of a big lunker owned by an insurance company in Atlanta, had enlisted two recruits and was despairingly in need of more. He tried to enlist me, and I paused for a moment to say no politely. He had them primed. A plain hello was a comedy line that set them all giggling. What Buddy calls the dog-ratio ran pleasantly low on this group. I had the feeling that if I got too close, greedy secretarial hands would haul me aboard, kicking and screaming. They all work toward a memorable vacation.

I went on along to my broad scow, and for a time it seemed as if she wasn’t going to unlock it and let me inside. When she did, she went running to the couch and threw herself face down, rigid.

“What’s the matter with you?”

An agony had blanched and dwindled her face. “He’s here,” she whispered.

“Junior Allen?”

“He saw me.”

She was too upset to be very coherent, but I got it all out of her. She had gone down to the marine supply place to look for some kind of a small present for me. Just to give me a present. And she had wandered out onto the gas dock just beyond the offices and the tall control tower for the marina. And the Play Pen had been there, gassing up. Junior Allen had straightened up, stared at her, grinned at her, and she had fled.

“He didn’t follow you?”

“No. I don’t think so.”

“Was he alone?”

“No.”

“Who was with him?”

“I don’t know. Young people. Three or four. I don’t know. All I could see was him.”

“What time was all this?”

“A-about quarter after five, I think.”