The Dreadful Lemon Sky

There was a huge white ringing crash, blinding light, deafening sound, and I was spun and dropped into darkness, hands out to break the fall that never ended…

I opened my eyes and looked up at a white ceiling. There was an annoying whining ringing sound going on which made it difficult to think clearly. I looked back up over my head and saw the familiar white tubular headboard of your average hospital bed and thought, Oh, Christ, not again! A quarter millimeter at a time I rolled my head to the left and saw a narrow solitary window with the venetian blinds almost but not quite closed. A white floor lamp beside the window was turned on. The chair in front of the window was empty. My head made a funny sound against the pillow as I rolled it back into place. I brought up from beneath the covers a slow brown enormous hand and willed it to feel of my head. It felt bandage and then moved dumbly back to lie inert against my chest. So. The other arm worked. Both legs worked. I wished somebody would turn off the ringing. I rolled my head to the right and saw a closed door. A long sigh ended in sleep.

I woke up. The ringing was not quite as loud. There was night instead of sunshine between the slats of the blind. I thought nothing had changed until I found I couldn’t move my right arm. I turned my head and studied the arm. It was strapped to a board. There was a needle in the vein inside my elbow. The needle was taped in place. I saw a rubber tube that went up to a bottle hanging over me. It seemed to be about half empty. The stuff in it was gray-white and semitransparent. I reached around in my head for the nurse word: IV Meaning… intravenous. Meaning I was having dinner.

After considerable fumbling around I found a push button safety-pinned where I was least likely to be able to reach it with my left hand. But I managed, and I thumbed it down.

After a few minutes the door was slung open and a dainty little white-haired nurse about fifty years old came trotting in. “Oh, hey!” she said. “Oh, good!” Then she said something I couldn’t hear because of the ringing.

“What? Somebody turn off the damn bell.” She leaned close. She laughed. “Bell? It’s in your ears, sweetie. From the bomb.”

“Bomb?”

She checked the IV and said, “You’re doing okay here. They’re not going to have to go into your skull, sweetie. Now be patient. I’m supposed to get Dr. Owings to check you.”

“Where am I?”

“Ask your doctor, sweetie.” And she was gone, the door hissing slowly shut behind her.

Dr. Owings really took his time. I found out later that he was out of the hospital. And I found out that one Harry Max Scorf wanted to be present when I came out of it, if I came out of it.

After an hour, Dr. Hubert Owings came in, wearing that familiar look of the distracted, overworked professional. If you ordered a doctor type from central casting, they wouldn’t have sent Hubert. He looked like a cowhand in a cigarette ad, even to the lock of hair falling forward across the hero forehead. The man who followed him in was small and spare and old. He wore a thick ugly gray suit, a frayed and soiled shirt in a faded candy stripe. It was buttoned at the throat, but he wore no tie. He wore a gleaming white ranch hat, the Harry Truman model, and, as I found out later, gleaming black boots. His face was small, withered, and colorless.

“Mr. McGee,” said my doctor irritably, “Captain Scorf may want to read you your rights.”

“Now, Hube,” Scorf said in a plaintive voice, “it’s nothing like that. Son, I’m Harry Max Scorf, and I just want to know if you’ll freely and willingly answer any questions I might have about the death of Miss Freeler.”

I stared at him. “Miss Freeler?”

“Captain, if you would just sit over there and let me handle the usual questions?”

“Sure, Hube. Sure thing.”

Hube shone a sharp little light into my eyes, first one and then the other. “Your name?”

I gave it at once. He straightened up and stared down at me in perplexity. I didn’t know what was wrong, and then like an echo, I heard my voice giving my name, rank and serial number.

“I don’t know why I did that,” I said.

“What do you remember doing last?”

“While waiting for you, doctor, I’ve been trying to remember. The last thing I know is that I was standing in a very heavy rain under a banyan tree, and a little white dog on a screened porch was barking at me. I was on my way to see… someone at Fifteen Hundred Seaway Boulevard, and I don’t know if I ever got there. I don’t know how I got here, or why. This is Bayside?”

“It is. You were brought in unconscious with a severe concussion and a deep laceration on the back of your head, triangular, with a flap of scalp dangling.”

“What about Meyer?”

“At the time you were brought in-”

“

What about Meyer!“

“He’s jes’ fine,” Harry Max Scorf said.

“Thanks, Captain.”

Looking annoyed, Hube said, “If you’d remained unconscious any longer we were going to have to-”

“What day is this?”

“Thursday evening. Nine thirty on Thursday evening, Mr. McGee. The sixth day of June.”

“For the love of-”

“Hold still, please. I’m trying to check you.” I became aware for the first time of the catheter. He sent Scorf out of the room for no good reason while he uncoupled me from the input and output tubes. He asked me if I thought I could stand up, as if I felt like trying to stand up. I did, in the ridiculous hospital long bib, and walked carefully and shakily around the bed and got back in, sweating with the effort it had taken.

He left me with Scorf, saying, “If you feel you are getting too tired, just say so, and the captain will leave.”

After the door closed, Scorf said, “Now just why did you and your friend come up here from Lauderdale, McGee?”

“No answers at all, Captain. Not until the blanks are filled in. What happened? I remember now that Joanna’s last name was Freeling.”

“Freeler. Now what I know about the bomb comes from the two experts we had come in and check it all over. You and Meyer were on your houseboat Saturday night. It was raining hard. That girl came aboard with a package. She put it on the table and bent over it to unwrap it. It went off. You and your friend were lucky because you were both standing behind her and not too far apart, so her body took the major force of the explosion. It blew the girl practically into two halves. She never knew what happened. It knocked both of you down, you and Meyer. You hit your head and he didn’t. He lost the hearing in one ear, but they think it’s coming back.”

“What did it do to the boat?”

“Blew out all the glass. Blew a small hole in the deck, and blew a great big hole in the overhead, like ten feet by ten feet. Then it rained into the hole all night long. It’s a mess. They’re working on it now.”

“They?”

“At that Westway Harbor Marina. Jason and Oliver and a friend of theirs. With Meyer helping.”

“Where’s Meyer?”

“Waiting for me to get out of here. He got called the first thing. Anyway, it was what they call a primitive-type bomb.”

“Primitive?”

“No timing device or anything like that. They explained it to me after they found enough to know how it probably worked. The package vwas about so big, tied with string. There were four sticks of dynamite in there, taped together and taped into place. There was a battery and a cap and a little switch, a contact switch. What the fella who made it did, he stuck a thick piece of cardboard between the switch terminals. Then he tied string to the cardboard and led the string out a hole in the side of the box and fastened it to the string he tied around the box. So anybody unties it and pulls the string off, they pull that cardboard out and contact is made and it all goes bam. It went off about eight inches from the middle of that girl. Bombs are so damned ugly and messy. I can’t get inside the head of folla who’d use a bomb.”

“Who are you, anyway?”

“Harry Max Scorf.”

“I mean your official capacity.”

“Oh, I should have said. I’m with the City and County of Bayside. Used to be just with the County. What I am, I’m kind of a special inveotigator. Odds and ends of this and that. I work when I please and how I please.”

“Must be nice.”

“It’s worse than having hours. A man works longer. Then again, there isn’t anything I’d rather be doing. No family. No hobbies. Tuesday I drove on down to Fort Lauderdale and I walked around that Bahia Mar Marina and asked questions about you and Meyer. You don’t seem to have much visible means of support, McGee.”

“Salvage work. Here and there. It’s spotty.”

“I combed every dang inch of what’s left of your houseboat.”

“What’s left of it!”

“Steady there. It floats. I came to a conclusion.”

“Which is?”

“I don’t really think you came up here to straighten out the distribution of pot in Bayside County.”

“Thanks, Scorf.”

“Somebody will come along soon. No place along the coast can stay amateur. They’ll take in the ones who’ll play along and kill those that won’t, and turn it from nickles and dimes into big money, like it is other places. I thought they were already here. Maybe they are. But it’s not you and Meyer.”

“Why not?”

“Because the job calls for running the hard stuff, and running women, and selling to everybody, grannies and little kids. It calls for buying the law and buying the courts, and you and Meyer are quick enough in your own way and hard enough in your own way, but you got stopping places that are way short of what it takes. If you got a stubborn bartender and you bust both his arms and change his face, the replacement bartender is willing to do business with you. Bars are a nice distribution point for off-premises use.”

“Are you working on a book?”

“Don’t get snotty with an old man. I could write one.”

“Why are we here?”

“Well, Harry Hascomb has one story, and that Miss Dobrovsky, she’s got another, and Jack Omaha’s wife has another. They add up to Carolyn Milligan having been a friend of yours. But if you thought the girl was killed, and you came here to find out who did it and why, and you didn’t check in with us and show credentials-which you haven’t got-then you’re in trouble, aren’t you?”

“I know she was killed and so do you. I just wonder if it was entirely an accidental death. That’s all.”

“And you wanted to attend the service?”

“Right!”

“Now you lunged at that like a bass, boy.”

“Remember, I hit my head when somebody killed Joanna.”

“We can set here and josh each other from now till the end of time. And you can duck and bob and weave all you want. The thing I’ve got the most of is time. If somebody did kill Carolyn on purpose, who is your guess?”

“Shouldn’t this be some kind of a trade?”

“It is. You’ve been busy. You’ve been lying to people. Maybe you’ve been obstructing justice, or concealing the evidence of a crime, or impersonating an officer. Things like that. I won’t act on any of that, at least right now. That’s the trade.”

“Take me in, officer. Read me my rights.”

He sighed and shoved his white hat farther back on his head. “Well, let’s see now. What have I got to trade? How about this? So far we’ve kept a lid on that autopsy on Cal Birdsong. It was heart, all right. But Doc Stanyard didn’t like the way it looked, that big soft clot in the pleural cavity and no real sign of any aneurysm. He checked it slow and small and found that something went into there on Cal’s left side, between the ribs, smaller than a knitting needle or an ice pick. It could have been a piece of stiff piano wire, sharpened to a needle point. A person could roll it between thumb and forefinger like one of those Chinese needles, to make it go in easy. The heart really hops around in there when it beats. Run that needle in there back and forth a couple of times, and you’d probably pick an artery open or puncture the sac around the heart or mess up a valve somehow. Doc found the entrance track and laid it open and took slides. I saw them this morning, all developed. The track shows up nice.”

“And what was Birdsong doing?”

“Seems he was dog tired. They tried to keep him awake on account of his being hit on the head. They don’t like people sleeping with head injuries. But he was pooped and he slept hard. And forever. It wouldn’t probably wake him, just that little prickle when it went through the skin.”

“Does his wife know this?”

“She was one of the ones with him. We’re keeping the lid on while we watch how people act.”

“One of the ones with him?”

“That’s all the trading material you get for now. Your turn.”

“You probably know everything I could tell you.”

“Try me.”

“Well… Adding two and two, the Christina came in on May fourteenth, on Tuesday night, with over eight hundred pounds of marijuana aboard. Just two people went out before dawn on Tuesday: Jack Omaha and Cal Birdsong. Sometimes Carrie Milligan went, but she didn’t go that day because she was sick and said she would be in when she felt well enough. I would guess that Carrie went to Westway Harbor that night in a panel delivery truck owned by Superior Building Supplies. The boat is docked in a good area for privacy. It’s beyond the range of the dock lights, but you can drive up close to it. The grass was loaded onto the truck. Carrie took it to Fifteen Hundred Seaway Boulevard. After it was offloaded, Mr. Walter Demos took over, and he paid Carrie in cash for the delivery at the rate of a hundred dollars a pound. My guess is that she drove down to Superior and parked the truck where she had picked it up. She had left her own car there. Standard procedure was for her to put the money from Demos into the office safe. She and Jack Omaha had the combination. End of trade. Anything new?”

“Here and there,” he said comfortably. “Here and there. Of course you spoiled any chance of us finding anything at all by scragging Demos in his big love nest. There won’t be a scrap anywhere.”

“He’s anxious to… wait a second. It fades in and out, like a bad projection bulb. Sorry. My memory quits when it comes to Demos. Your turn,” I added.

“Let me see. Oh, here’s something you wouldn’t know. In that rain Saturday night somebody had left off a package on the porch of the cottage, well back under the overhang, for Joanna Freeler. Betty Joller told me that when Joanna came home she knew what was in the package. She said it was some wine and cheese and like that, for a snack, a present from somebody who couldn’t keep a date that night. Now there was just going to be the three of them in the cottage that night. Joanna and Betty Joller and Natalie Weiss. I think it was intended for the package to be opened with the three of them there. Instead, on an impulse, that girl came running through the rain with it. She was a girl who’d rather be with men than girls any time. Your turn, McGee.”

I thought it over and then I decided, What the hell, why not? I went through the whole Carrie Milligan death item by item, stressing the illogic of her supposed behavior, the gassing of her car the previous day, and the signs of fresh tampering with the gas tank drain cock.

He glared down at a freckled fist and said, “Even after years, you miss the damnedest things. You know, I decided that what she was going to do was cross the road and walk to a lighted house and ask to use the phone. With her purse setting there on the front seat in an unlocked car? Nonsense! It was right there and I missed it cold.” He thought it over, and finally said, “That would do for now.”

“You owe me one.”

“I don’t have any more to trade.” He was distracted by the conjectures swarming in his head. He wanted to be up and off and away. I had put him onto the possibility of a new pattern.

He stood up. I said, “When do you lock me up?”

He focused on me completely and silently. Harry Max Scorf was no figure of fun. He was one hard and determined little man.

“I’ll do whatever needs to be done,” he said, and turned and left, tugging his hat to the correct angle as he went through the doorway. Before the door had wheezed entirely shut, Meyer came bursting in, grinning.

Ten

“WELCOME BACK!” said Meyer.

“Thanks. What about the Flush?”

“It floats.”

“Really, how is it?”

“There’s nothing that about ten thousand dollars can’t fix. Don’t worry about it.”

“Good God, what’s left of it?”

“Don’t worry about it. You do a lot of talking about the way possessions hold us all in thrall. Pretty things are chains and shackles.”

It made me gloomy. I could see a listing hulk with huge holes, with wisps of smoke rising from the interior debris. And it worried me that I should care that much. The important loss was the death of that lively girl. Blown in half. Into two girl parts. Such a great and bitter waste.

I realized that if the Flush were entirely gone, if it had burned to the waterline and sunk, I would be able to adjust more easily than to the uncertainty. Baubles and toys should disappear, not become broken litter.

Meyer sat beside the bed. He looked like an apprehensive owl as he said, “I kept wondering what the hell to do if you didn’t wake up. People stay in a coma for years. They seem to have families to look after them.”

“And you could see yourself stuck?”

“I could see myself tottering down to the drugstore saying, Yep, he’s still asleep. Been nineteen year now. Gimme some more of that goo for bedsores.”

“Look, I blank out during my walk that Saturday afternoon. Tell me about Joanna.”

He told me. I could not make it seem real. It was easier to make the service seem real. They did the same thing for her as they did for Carrie. One less girl in a long dress to throw flowers. Good-bye, my sister Joanna. Her widower father attended, full of indignation and stiffness at such an informal heathen ceremony. But, Meyer said, it melted him quickly and he wept with the rest. It loosened the adhesions in his heart, freeing him from other rituals.

“We’re losing too many girls,” I told Meyer.

“You’ve added a new one.”

“Hmm. The spry nurse lady?”

“No. Cindy Birdsong. She’s spent a lot of time here, so someone would be with you when you woke up. She was sure you would. Then she missed by a few minutes. She left a little while before you came out of it, apparently. She’s out there now, waiting her turn.”

“Why the devotion?”

“I don’t know. It’s some kind of penance, maybe. Or maybe she is the kind of person who has to have somebody to fret about. Cal is gone. You were at her marina when we got blown up.”

“What did it do to you?”

“Gave my back a little wrench and gave me a sore shoulder and one deaf ear.”

“So this is Thursday, everybody keeps telling me, June sixth, they keep saying, and it is five days gone out of my life, and what useful thing have you done with those days? I don’t like it any more around here, Meyer. I want to go home. Every time I get blown up by a bomb I get that same feeling. Let’s go home.”

“That wrapped head makes you look strange. It’s like a turban. Lawrence of Arabia, or some damned mercenary. You’re dark enough for an Arab, but the pale eyes make you look very savage somehow.”

“Meyer, what did you find out?”

“Oh. While you were unconscious? Let me think. Oh, yes. That’s quite a nice hangar out there at the ranch. Quonset-type construction. That’s where ranch equipment gets repaired and maintained too. There’s a slow charger for batteries, and a battery cart to boost the aircraft batteries when starting the aircraft up cold. There’s a fifteen-hundred-gallon gas tank and a pump to service the aircraft and the ranch vehicles. There’s about six employees out there, which means a pretty good payroll, wouldn’t you say?”

“Meyer!”

“Are you supposed to sit up like that? There, that’s better. Okay. Travis, he has…”

Meyer paused and took out his little pocket notebook and flipped through the pages, grunting from time to time.

“Meyer!”

“He has a Beechcraft Baron, designation B fifty-five. It has two two-hundred-and-sixty horsepower Continental engines, designation Ten four-seventy L. The fuselage is twenty-nine feet long, and the wingspan is thirty-seven feet ten inches. At ten thousand five hundred feet, at a long-range cruising speed of two hundred and twenty miles per hour, with optional fuel capacity of a hundred and thirty-six gallons, he can carry two people and over eight hundred pounds of cargo for sixteen hundred miles, less ten percent safety factor, which gives us fourteen hundred and forty miles. It has an automatic pilot and a lot of other things which I didn’t write down here. He bought it used a year ago for sixty-five thousand. He financed it. It can carry four people. It is white with a blue stripe.”

I stared at him. “And you went out there and went in the hangar!”

He stared back. “I wish I could say yes.”

“What did you do?”

“You reminded me to be cautious when I looked under that Datsun.”

“What did you do?”

“I did what all economists do. I went to the library. And after a two-hour search I found an article about him and his place in a magazine called Florida Ranchorama. It had a picture of the hangar, with airplane inside. Then I went to the airport, over to the private airplane area, and talked with some mechanics there about airplanes. I asked some questions and then I did a lot of listening. I found out more about airplanes than I care to know.”

“You did very well, old friend.”

“Shall I blush and simper?”

“If you don’t keep it up for long. I hate blushing and simpering in a grown man when it goes on and on.”

“You seem to be doing a lot of yawning.”

“I am dead tired for some unknown reason, and I am starving. I’ve never been so empty.” We got hold of the sprightly little old nurse, who said the kitchen was closed and who then went off and checked with Dr. Ownings to see if it was all right for Meyer to bring food in. He said fine, and he would approve it because I had a private room.

When Meyer left on his errand it was after eleven, and I did not expect Mrs. Birdsong to be waiting that late. But she was. She came in, and her face went from somber to beautiful in the glow of her smile. She came around and sat on the chair and then stood up again. Awkward moment.

“Please sit down,” I said.

“I am so used to sitting right here without…”

“You don’t need any invitation, really. Meyer told me how faithful you’ve been.”

She had seated herself again, on the edge of the chair. She wore khaki slacks, fitted and faded almost white. She wore a tan shirt with silver buttons. She clutched a brown leather purse with both hands. She wore a trace of lipstick, nothing more. When she looked down the dark glossy hair would have swung forward, would have softened her face, had she not worn it cropped so desperately short. In manner and looks it was almost as if she were trying to deny her femininity, or perhaps she was so shrewdly aware of herself, she knew that any attempt to deny it merely emphasized it.

“Faithful,” she said, giving the word a bitter emphasis. “Sure, I guess so. I… didn’t want you to wake up and not have anyone close by to tell you what happened. But I missed out on that… too.”

“I appreciate it. Maybe it was good to have someone nearby. I think that people are never totally completely one hundred percent unconscious. I think that they are always aware to some degree of what is going on around them. I think I knew you were here.”

“How could you know it was me?”

“Maybe just that someone was here who cared.”

“Cared. Yes, that word is okay, Mister McGee. Cared if you lived or died. I’ll buy that word.”

“I’ll give it to you free.”

She smiled and again that transformation, but the smile did not last long enough. She flushed visibly and said, “I didn’t think about it being hard to talk to you when you woke up.”

“Is it hard?”

“Well, I don’t know what to say. We buried my husband Monday. I’ve hired another person. With Jason, Oliver, and the new man, Ritchie, everything can go on… as before. After the insurance people told Meyer that you’re not covered, he said it was okay if I told the boys to work on your houseboat whenever they have the time.”

I sat up. “I’m covered!”

“For lots of things, yes. If your tanks had blown up, yes. Or sinkings or collisions or fire or running aground. But not for people bringing a bomb on board, you’re not covered. Should you be sitting up like that?”

I settled down again. She reached and gave a quick shy pat on my arm.

“It’s sort of in their spare time, so I’m only billing you for supplies.”

“It wasn’t your fault.”

“I don’t know. Sometimes things happen that maybe a person could have stopped.”

“And people can take too much onto themselves. If I had done this… or that… or the other, then maybe this or that or the other would never have happened. The world-mother syndrome.”

She thought it over. “I guess I am sort of that way.”

She looked down and away, lost to me, wandering in the backwoods of her mind. It was a strong clear face, clean and dark and timeless, like the face of a young monk seen in an old drawing. It was somber and passionate, withdrawn yet intensely involved. The curve of the lips, shape of the throat, set of the eyes, all spoke of fire and of need carefully suppressed, held down in merciless discipline.

Meyer came back. She stirred to leave, but he had brought food for her too. He said it had not been easy at that time of night. Quarter-pounders with cheese, in square cartons, still hot. He had brought six of them, and a container of milk and two containers of coffee. Meyer sat on the foot of my bed. I was certain I could eat three of them. I was famished. Yet it was all I could do to finish the first one. I drank the milk. I sagged back. I thought I would close my eyes for just a moment. I heard them talking, and their voices sounded strange to me, as if I were a child again, half asleep in the back seat while the parents talked together in the front seat. When the little whitehaired nurse woke me up to find out if I wanted a sleeping pill, Meyer and Cindy were gone and the room was darkened. I heard a siren far away. I turned back into my sleep, wormed my way back to dreaming.

On Friday at eleven thirty Dr. Hubert Owings changed the dressing on my head, making it much smaller, getting away from the turban effect. He checked me over and approved me for release. I phoned the marina and got hold of Jason, who got hold of Meyer. Meyer said he would be along to pick me up in a half hour. I told him to bring money. And clothes. The clothes I had been wearing when I arrived were too badly dappled with the blood of Joanna to ever consider wearing again.

I borrowed a shower cap and took a shower. Meyer arrived and said he had stopped at the cashier’s office and bought me out, and given the release ticket to the nurse at the floor station. I got up too quickly and felt dizzy. I had to sit down for a minute before I could get dressed. Meyer was worried about me.

“Hube said I’m fine. A heavy concussion. No fracture. I came out of it okay, he says. If I start to have fainting spells, come back in for observation. They are short of beds or they’d keep me longer.”

The world looked strange. There were little halos around the edges of every tree and building. I did very deep breathing. It is strange to sleep for five days and five nights and have the world go rolling along without you. Just like it will keep on after you’re dead. The wide busy world of tire balancing, diaper changing, window washing, barn dancing, bike racing, nose picking, and bug swatting will go merrily merrily along. If they were never aware of you presence, they won’t be overwhelmed by your absence.

On the way back Meyer told me that Cindy Birdsong had made arrangements for me to have a unit at the motel, next to hers. I could not get any rest aboard the Flush because of all the sawing and hammering. I was supposed to get a lot of rest. The prescription would make me drowsy. I said it was a lot of nonsense.

But when I got out of the car I gave up all hope of walking out to look at my boat. I saved everything I had left for the immense feat of tottering over to the motel and collapsing onto the bed which Cindy and Meyer guided me to.

I slept through lunch and woke up at five o’clock. I put my shoes on and latched my belt and went on the long walk out to the Flush. The sun was still high and hot. I heard the power saw long before I recognized who was running it. Jason was brown and sweaty, and he was cutting some heavy-duty marine plywood to size. He let go of the trigger on the saw and put it on the uncut sheet and stuck his hand out. “You don’t look so bad, Mr. McGee.”

“Neither does my vessel.”

“Not so bad on the outside until you notice it blew all the ports out of the lounge. It isn’t so great in there.”

“Do you know how to do… what you’re doing?”

“Does it make you nervous? I can cut plywood to fit, for God’s sake. The thing is to get it sealed before it rains again. We’re into the rainy season now. I fixed the two broken cross members, those beam things. They were splintered. I cut out the bad parts and bolted in new pieces. It’s okay now. Stronger than before.”

“In case I get another gift bomb?”

“Nobody around here makes any jokes about that.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Joanna was an okay person. Not like Carrie, but okay. I mean there was no need for anybody to blow her into pieces.”

I climbed aboard and up the side ladderway. There was one hole left, a neat rectangle about two feet by five feet. There was new plywood over an area at least sixteen by thirty feet, the major portion of the sun deck. Jason came up with the last piece and laid it in place. It fit so snugly he had to stomp it into place with his bare heels. He knelt on it and took the nails from his canvas apron and smartly whacked the nails home. He threw one to me. It had a twist like a screw, and it was heavy-duty galvanized.

“These won’t let go,” he said.

“You’re doing a good job.”

“Ollie and I both think we are. He did part of this. What I plan on doing is caulk all these seams with a resin compound before I lay the new vinyl decking. It doesn’t exactly match this stuff but it’s close. Here’s a sample. Close enough?”

“Nobody will ever notice. What about the ports?”

“That’s another story. I got a guy coming to make an estimate tomorrow morning. At ten, if you want to be in on it.”

I left him to his hammering and went below and went down into the forward bilge area. It took thirty seconds to make certain nobody had located my hiding place between the fake double hull, not even the impressive Harry Max Scorf himself. I checked out three weapons. If he found them, he had had the sense to leave them where they were, entirely legal.

The lounge was a sorry mess. It was damp as a swamp and already sour with mildew, a graygreen scum spreading across the carpeting. The yellow couch lay with its feet in the air, a dead mammoth from earlier times. Shards and splinters of coffee table and chairs lay here and there in profusion. A large splinter protruded from the precise center of a stereo speaker. Another had pierced a painting I was fond of, right between the Syd and the Solomon of the painter’s lower right corner signature. There were thick brown stains of dried blood. There was a chemical smell, like cap pistols and ammonia.

Meyer came hurrying in. “Hello! Should you be roaming around like this?”

“I’m roaming around crying.”

“I know. I know.”

“Is the wiring messed up? Would the air conditioning work?”

“It kept blowing circuits at first, and I found out that it was the lamp that used to be on this bracket over here. It smashed the inside of it. But now things work.”

“Then instead of letting the place rot, let’s get some sheet Pliofilm and staple it over the ports and get the air conditioning going to start to dry it out in here. And let’s pull up this carpeting and get it trucked away”

“All right. But spare me the ‘us’ part of it. Go back and rest.”

“Is there any ice?”

There was. I assembled a flagon of Plymouth and carried it topside and sat at the controls and sipped and watched the sun sliding down the sky on the other side of Florida. That drink really slugged me. I had to pay special attention to every shift of weight and balance as I walked back to the motel. Every footfall was an engineering problem. My ears had started ringing again.

Cindy heard me and opened the interconnecting door and stood staring at me. I realized that I was visibly smashed, and I realized she’d had all too much of that in her marriage.

She shook her head. “Travis, good God. Sit down before you fall down.”

“Thank you very much indeed.”

“Are you going to be sick?”

“I don’t think so. Thank you very much indeed.”

“Here. Let’s swing your legs up. Let me get your shoes.”

“Thank you very much indeed.”

Eleven

I OPENED my eyes. It was night. There was a small lamp with an opaque shade on a table in a corner. Cindy Birdsong slept in the wing chair beside the table, long legs extended, ankles crossed, head tilted way over to rest on her shoulder, mouth slightly agape. I spied upon the privacy of her sleep. She rifled the closets and drawers of memory while her body lay a-sprawl, clad in gray cardigan, pink blouse, dark blue slacks.

I looked at my watch. I pressed the button. No display. The batteries had died. I had such an evil taste in my mouth I knew I had been asleep a long time. I felt as if I could eat a bison. Raw. With a dull fork.

I tiptoed to the small bathroom and eased the door shut before I turned the light on. I looked at a gaunt, weathered, and most unfamiliar face. I brushed my teeth with foaming energy and drank four glasses of water. My tan looked yellowed, as if I had jaundice. The white scar tissue in the left eyebrow seemed more visible than usual, the nose more askew. The eyes looked shifty and uncertain. Some kind of hero. Some kind of chronic girl-loser. Some kind of person on the edge of life, unwilling and/or unable to wedge himself into the heartlands.

When I turned the light off and opened the door, Cindy was sitting bolt upright on the edge of the chair, knees together. She hugged herself, rubbing her left shoulder, and said, “I must have dozed off. I’m sorry.”

“Why be sorry? What time is it?”

She gave a little start as she looked at her watch. “Good grief, it’s a quarter to four! I… I really haven’t been sleeping well lately. Until now. I guess you were so deep in sleep it was contagious. How do you feel?”

“I’m starving. You asked. I have to tell you I’m going to faint from hunger. I’ll fall heavily.”

At her invitation I followed her into the larger unit she had shared with Cal. There was a kitchenette arrangement behind folding doors, scrubbed to a high shine. We inventoried the possibilities, and I opted for Polish sausage and lots of eggs. She went into the bathroom and came out with minty breath and brushed hair.

She made an ample quantity and served herself a substantial helping. It was not a meal where conversation was encouraged. It was a meal which required more eggs, and she hopped up and scrambled more. She served good coffee in big mugs.

At last I felt comfortable. I felt cozy. I leaned back. She caught my eye and flushed slightly and said, “I haven’t been eating hardly anything. Until now. I’ve lost about six pounds in the past week or so. I want to keep it off.”

“You seemed about the right size and shape when I checked into your marina, lady.”

“I get hippy. That’s where it all goes.”

The silence between us was comfortable-and then uncomfortable. The awareness grew, tangible as that ringing in the ears. She looked down, flushing again. When she got up I reached for her and caught her wrist, then tugged her gently around the corner of the table toward me. She came with an unwillingness, looking away, murmuring “Please.” I pulled her to stand by me, against my thigh, and slid my hand to her waist, slid it under the edge of the pink blouse to clasp the smooth warm flesh where the waist was slimmest.

“No,” she said in a soft dragging voice, far away.

“I have been losing girls,” I said. “It has to stop.”

“I’m not a girl. Not any more, I’m not.”

I stood up and put my hands on her shoulders, felt a gentle shuddering that was awareness, not revulsion.

“Cindy I could say an awful lot of dumb things. What it would boil down to is, I’m alive, glad to be alive, and I want you.”

“I… I just can’t quite… ”

And I steered her slowly and gently to the relative darkness of my connecting unit, through the door ahead of me, arm around her waist, blundering together to the bed.

At the bed, after she sat and I began to undo the buttons of her blouse, she pushed me away and said, “I have to say something first. Before anything happens. Listen to me. Wait. Please. When I heard he was dead there was… some kind of dirty joy in me. I cried and carried on because people expected me to.”

“It’s like that sometimes.”

“I don’t want it to be like that for me.” Her voice was uneven. “I know what they think. It was all just dandy great until he got on the booze. Well, it wasn’t all that great. It wasn’t even half good between us. He wanted it to be great. I couldn’t really love him. I tried to imitate loving him, but he knew it had all gone away for me. He knew I felt empty. That’s why he started drinking like that. People got it all backward. And I feel so… so rotten. So sick. So really terrible about… what I did to him.”

It was all the confession she could handle. Guilt broke the dam inside her. I held her and she rocked herself back and forth in her inner agony. Guilt is the most merciless disease of man. It stains all the other areas of living. It darkens all skies.

I held her and eased her and soothed her. When she was nearly quiet, except for the occasional hiccup sob, I wondered if she was too spent for love. I peeled her gently and quietly out of her clothes. When we were naked and enclasped, facing each other on the motel bed, there seemed to be a great deal of her, long and firm and rich, with a body heat degrees above mine.

We were the wounded, she from all the trauma of her tears, me from the concussion and the five lost days. So it was not a physical, sexual greed that motored us.

It was an affirmation, a way to be less alone. In fact for quite a long time it seemed as if it would be love-making without climax, with only slowness, tenderness, and affection.

With the first of morning light she found a slow and lasting release and faded from that crest into the downslope of sleep. I eased out of bed to close the slats of the blinds and shut out the increasing brightness. As I went back to bed I carried an uneasy afterimage of something, some shadow or substance, flickering swiftly away from the space under the window, out of sight.

On Saturday afternoon I left Meyer and Oliver to finish stapling the Pliofilm over the ports and over the smashed doorway, and went back to the motel, feeling pleasantly tired, and curious as to how she would accommodate herself to this new fact of her life.

She wore a brief yellow sun dress. She came, toward me and looked cautiously beyond me to see if we were observed. Then she kissed me quickly on the lips and pulled me inside her quarters for a more emphatic kiss after the door was shut.

She was smiling. She said, “I don’t know what I ought to say. But what I want to say is, Thanks for a lovely evening, for a lovely late date.”

“You are most very certainly absolutely welcome, ma’am.”

“Can you eat beef stew?”

“Indefinitely.”

“I want you to keep your strength up.”

“That’s the best invitation I’ve had today. You’re blushing.”

“The stew is canned, dammit. I had to spell Ritchie at the office and didn’t have time to fix anything special. But I added a couple of things to make it taste better.”

It was excellent stew. We sat across the table from each other, by the window. We could see most of the marina from the window.

I said, “Cindy, my darling, I want to ask you some things. You might wonder why I have to ask them. But it would be a very long story, and I will tell you that long story some day but not right now. Okay?”

“Questions about what?”

“About a lot of things. First question: When Cal went off before dawn on those boat trips with Jack Omaha, where were they going?”

She tilted her head, frowning. “Off Grand Bahama island after billfish, dear. Sometimes little Carrie Milligan went too. Jack’s secretary and… well, playmate. I think it was a chance for them to play while. Cal ran the boat. The other times they were after tuna and marlin and so on.”

“Was Cal getting any extra money from anywhere, in large amounts?”

“Cal? God, no! He was good at spending it, not making it.”

“Did you think those trips were strange in any way?”

“Listen, darling, I didn’t much care if they were strange or not. I didn’t think very much about what Cal did or. didn’t do. There was very limited communication between us. Before I met him I had been going with someone and I was in love with him, very deeply in love. We had the most horrible fight ever, and he went off and got married. So I went off and got married. He showed me and I showed him. I married Cal, and it was a lousy reason to get married. It was sort of okay in a limited way. The physical part was okay at first, and then it didn’t hold up very well, especially not when he was drinking. About his trips, if I thought about them at all, it was to wish they’d happen oftener and last longer. And there was no extra money from anywhere. I guess I ought to tell you that these are almost the same questions our lawyer asked me.”

“Fred Van Harn?”

“Yes. He was very solemn and insistent. He said that he wanted to make certain I wasn’t mixed up in anything that Cal might have been doing that was against the law. I told him exactly what I’ve been telling you. He said that he couldn’t protect me unless I was frank and open with him. He said that anything I told him was privileged information. I had to say I just didn’t know anything, and that it had been a long time since Cal and I had talked much about anything. It wasn’t exactly the friendliest conversation in the world.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Oh, it’s just that Fred is… well, constantly horny. About a year ago he made a pretty startling pass at me. It was in his office. He came up behind me and hugged himself up against me and had both hands roaming all over me. I’m a very strong person.”

“I noticed.”

“Hush. I picked his hand up and set my teeth in his thumb. He screamed. He had to have a tetanus shot. He got over his problem very quickly. So we haven’t been very chummy with each other.”

“I wouldn’t think so.”

“Men like that have an instinct about wives, when they might be vulnerable. Something must show, somehow. For one little instant when he was doing what he was doing, I thought, Well, why not, what the hell? But then I realized that if I was going to say what the hell with somebody, it wouldn’t be with Freddy. He’s too conscious of those long black eyelashes of his. So I bit him to the bone.”

“That pleases me.”

“What was Cal doing on those trips?”

“Smuggling narcotics.”

She stared at me.“You’ve got to be kidding! You really have got to be kidding!”

“Jamaican marijuana.”

“Oh. Just grass. Well…”

“What’s the matter?”

“That’s where he got that stuff. He insisted I try it. A sloppy cigarette, twisted at the ends. A toke, he called it. A joint. He showed me how you’re supposed to do it. Then we made love after he knew I was feeling it a lot. Love was strange and dreamy. I could hear the sound his hand made on my skin, a little brushing sound. Things went on forever, and I knew every part of it while it was going on. And I started crying and couldn’t stop. It was so sweet and sad I couldn’t stop crying. That made him angry and he went storming out. That was the last time we ever made love together, and that was… months ago. I guess that was part of what he was smuggling, he and Jack?”

“Probably.”

“I liked it and I didn’t like it. I would like to try it with somebody I really love sometime, but not until I’d tried everything else first with that person.”

She got up and took the dishes to the sink.

I watched her, appreciating the way the brief yellow dress made her legs look uncommonly tan and uncommonly long.

Yet I had the curious feeling that I had not really made love to her. We could make small, bawdy jokes together. We could kiss in excellent imitation of new-found lovers. I could look upon her in happy memory of the last time and steamy anticipation of the next time, but at the same time feel as if we were theater people, trained to give a convincing imitation of desire. We were close. We knew all the motions. Yet in a way I could not define we were insulated from each other, not quite touching in some deep and important way.

As a test I went up behind her and put my arms around her and pulled her close. She tilted her head back and said, “You risk a tetanus shot, sir.”

“Worth it, ma’am.”

“Listen. Where did the money go? If he was taking risks like that, where is the money?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he hid it in some safe place, or somebody was holding it for him.”

As I turned her around she said, “He used to worry so much about the money we owe on the marina. He used to fret and fume. Hey! What are we doing now?”

“It’s siesta time. This is called getting you ready for your three o’clock nap.”

“Don’t you think you better move back onto your houseboat?”

“Right now?”

“Well… not exactly right now, okay?”

By Sunday afternoon the air conditioning was making good headway against the dampness aboard the Flush. A milky light and blurred outlines of nearby boats shone through the Pliofilm. The carpeting had been jettisoned, and Meyer had samples to study, before rendering advice.

The ninth day of June. I hadn’t adjusted to the five-day gap in my memory. I was being hustled along too fast into the time stream. Ears ringing. A sweet and greedy lady to be with.

“Make some sense of things,” I asked Meyer. He stopped playing solitaire with his carpet samples. “I cannot come up with an overview,” he said. “I can sense no paradigm that later events will prove out. I can construct no model from what we have.”

“Thanks.”

“Believe me, it’s nothing.”

“I know. I know.”

“How about this blue? Indoor-outdoor. Won’t fade.”

“It’s truly lovely, Meyer.”

“Come on. Don’t you care how it’s going to look?”

“Intensely.”

“All things considered, you should be jollier, Travis.”

“Than whom?”

“Than whom has not such a handsome lady tending his convalescence.”

“I feel disoriented. I have a dull ache in the back of my head, and I live in a motel.”

Further discussion of my melancholy was terminated by the arrival of Jason-Jesus with Susan Dobrovsky. She looked sallow and subdued, with smudges under her eyes and a listless manner. Jason was being very firm and forthright. The protector. No social strokes. No discussion of the weather. He planted his feet and got right into it. “Susan and I have been developing a useful dialogue about her situation here. We’ve decided that it is more important for her to get away, to get back to Nutley, than it is to hang around while Van Harn takes care of the last little legal details regarding Carrie’s death.”

She sat on the edge of the yellow couch which was going to have to be recovered. “I want to leave,” she said, in a very small voice. “Everything here has been so rotten.”

“Mr. McGee, Susan told me that you told her that you owed Carrie some money. You paid off the funeral home in cash. Is there more money Susan should have?”

“Yes.”

“How much?”

“What’s your special interest in this, Jason?”

“Somebody has to care about situations like this. People have to take care of people.”

“Granted. Let me talk to Susan alone. Meyer, why don’t you go topside with Jason?”

When they had left and the Pliofilm curtain had fallen back into place, I went over and sat beside her on the couch. She became very still, quite rigid. It seemed a curious reaction. I touched her arm and she made a huge flinching motion, ending up two feet farther away from me.

“Hey” I said. “Whoa. Settle down.”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. It’s just that I’m not reacting to things… normally. To being touched by anybody. I can’t help it.”

“What happened to you?”

She gave me a wide, bright terrible smile. “Happened? Oh, I was a guest at the V-H Ranch yesterday and the day before. That’s all. Mr. Van Harn raises Black Angus and breeds horses. He has twelve hundred acres out there, and the old Carpenter ranch house was built out of hard pine in nineteen twenty-one and it’s still as solid as a rock. I… nothing… can’t…”

She bent abruptly forward, face in her hands, hands resting on her knees. I reached to touch her and pulled my hand back in time.

“Were you forced?”

Her voice was muffled. “Yes. No. I don’t know. I don’t know what to say. He kept after me and after me and after me. It went on and on. I got so tired. So I thought… I don’t know what I thought. Just that if I let him that would be the end of it.”

“Susan, I have to know something. Did he ask you anything about Carrie?”

“There wasn’t much talking.”

“Did he ask you anything at all about Carrie?”

“Well, he wanted to know the last time I’d talked to her, and so I told him about the long phone call, the one I told you about too. He made me remember everything she said. One part that I told him was about you. You know. Carrie said to me that if a person named Travis McGee got in touch with me I was to trust him all the way.”

“Did he seem interested in that?”

“Not any more than in any of the rest of it. He just kept me going over it and over it until he saw there wasn’t any part of it I hadn’t told him. That was the only talking there was, mostly.”

“When did this conversation take place?”

“Yesterday, I think. Yes, yesterday. Early in the morning, I think. I remember the sounds the birds were making. Early sounds.”

“How did you get back?”

“He drove me in and let me off at the Inn. He had a meeting. Maybe it was three o’clock yester day afternoon. Jason came over this morning. I… told him about it. I wanted to tell somebody about how damned dumb I was.”

“How did Jason react?”

“He wants to go kill him. What good would that do anybody? I shouldn’t have gone out there with him. Joanna told me enough about him so I should have been careful, more careful. Mr. McGee, is there any more money? And you still have Carrie’s rings. I remember Mr. Rucker giving them to you. He tried to give them to me and I couldn’t take them then. I can now. Is there any money?”

“A lot of money.”

“A lot?”

“Ninety-four thousand dollars in cash.”

Her face went quite blank as she stared at me. She rubbed the palms of her hands on her forearms, one and then the other, “What?”

“Ninety-four thousand two hundred, less six hundred and eighty-six fifty that I paid Rucker. Ninety-three thousand something.”

She rubbed the palms of her hands together. She narrowed those tilted gray-green eyes. She swung her hair back with a toss of her head. “Where would… Carrie get that?”

“From something she was involved in.”

“From smuggling marijuana?”

“Did someone suggest that to you?”

“Betty Joller. It had something to do with why she left the cottage and went to live at that Fifteen Hundred place, Betty said. Would she make that much all for herself?”

“It’s possible.”

“She always wanted to have a lot of money.”

“On the other hand, maybe the money is Van Harn’s.”

Her sallow round face looked stricken. “Would she be mixed up with him in anything? I wonder if he ever… made love to my sister. Jesus! That word doesn’t fit. Love!”

“I wouldn’t know.”

She looked thoughtful. “She was always a stronger type person than me. I mean she could probably handle that kind of a man better than I could. Being older and married and so on. I never knew about men like that. He just kept confusing me. I guess I want that money now. Where is it?”

“In a very safe place.”

“Can you get it for me?”

“Do you want to travel with that much in cash?”

“Oh. No, I guess not.”

“I can get it to you later. What are you going to do with it when you get it?”

“I don’t know. Put it in a deposit box, I guess. I don’t know about taxes and so on. And her estate. On the phone something she said made me think she gave you some money too.”

“She did. I hope it’s going to be enough to get my houseboat fixed up. It was a fee for services. I am trying to find out who killed her.”

“Who killed her! You’re confusing me.”

“Fly out of here. Fly home. I’ll bring the money.”

“When?”

“When I find out what went on here.”

“And you’ll tell me? Did somebody actually kill Carrie?”

“It’s a possibility.”

“Because of what she was doing? Because of the smuggling?”

“I would think so. In the meanwhile, Susan, not one word to anybody. Not even Jason.”

“But I am very-”

“Not even Jason. Damn it, she told you to trust me. So trust me. Don’t stand around dragging your feet.”

“Well, then. Not even Jason.”

As I went out onto the side deck with her, I saw Oliver trotting toward the Flush. He looked solemn. “Judge Schermer wants to talk to you, Mr. McGee.”

“Send him along then.”

“Oh, no. He wants you at his car. He’s up there by the office.”

Twelve

IT WAS a spanking new Cadillac limousine, black as a crow’s wing. It had tinted glass. I saw the black chauffeur walking offstage toward a shady bench.

A young woman stood beside the car. She put her hand out. “I’m Jane Schermer, Mr. McGee. Sorry to disturb you like this, but my uncle is anxious to talk to you.”

She was a young woman with a sunburned flavor of ranchlands, cattle, and horses. She had a prematurely middle-aged face, doughy and slightly heavy in the jowls. She was oddly built, tall and broad, with vestigial breasts and very little indentation at the waist. The accent was expensive finishing school, possibly in Pennsylvania.

Jane opened the rear door and said, “Mr.McGee, Uncle Jake.”

“How do you do, Judge Schermer,” I said politely.

“Jane, you go take a little walk for yourself. This is man talk. Give us fifteen minutes. McGee, come on in here, but don’t sit beside me. You can’t talk to a man sitting beside you, damn it. Open up that jump seat and sit facing me. That’s fine. Please don’t smoke.”

“I had no intention of so doing.”

He chuckled. “No intention of so doing. You ever read for the law? Can’t get the stink out of the upholstery.”

He looked ludicrously like Harry Max Scorf. He looked as if somebody had taken Harry Max and inflated him until his skin was shiny-tight and then had spray-painted him pink. His round stomach rested on his round thighs. He wore khakis and a straw ranch hat. The motor purred almost soundlessly. The compressor for the air conditioning clicked on and off.

“You’re one sizable son of a bitch, aren’t you?” he said. “That’s some goddamn pair of wrists on you. You go about two twenty-five?”

“Few people guess it that close.”

“I guess a lot of things close. It’s been a help over the years.”

“Do you want to get to some kind of point?”

“Saving us both time, eh? I have a protege.”

“Named Freddy Van Harn, who is engaged to be married to your niece, Jane Schermer. People think he has a political future. Then there could be those who don’t think he has any future at all.”

“You are a quick one, all right. You surely are. Frederick and I discuss his future and his current problems from time to time. You came up as one of his current problems.”

“Me?”

“Pure bug-eyed astonishment, eh? Frederick is a lively young man. It’s entirely possible for a fellow like him to become involved in something foolish out of a sense of risk and adventure. At his age-he’s only twenty-nine-a single man can do some foolish things, never quite realizing that he might be destroying his whole future and destroying the dreams of the people depending on him: A man can have his sense of values warped by expediency sometimes, McGee. In Frederick’s case, he’s wanted to make money fast and make it big to wipe out the local memories of his father, a man who made a terrible mistake and took his life. Frederick became overextended, and he took a foolish risk in an effort to make some quick money. I’ve been very severe with him about that.”

“What kind of risk?”

“We don’t have to go into that here.”

“Then let’s say he was flying in grass, dropping it to a friend in a power boat. That would be profitable and foolish enough, don’t you think?”

“Out of the goodness of my heart, I would advise you not to get too smart-mouth and high-ass around me. It makes me irritable, and when I get irritable, I’m harder to deal with.”

“I’m not after a deal.”

“You might be sooner than you know.”

“Whatever that might mean.”

“Frederick Van Harn is a very talented attorney, and he has that special kind of charisma which means he can go far in public service. It’s past time that me and my little group had somebody in Tallahassee speaking up for this county and our special problems here. We’ve all helped him along every way we could, ever since he got out of Stetson and set up practice here. Once he’s married to Janie he won’t have any more money problems to fret about and do foolish things trying to solve them. You get what I mean. Janie inherited ten thousand acres of the most profitable grove lands in this whole state.”

“How nice for her.”

“McGee, we’re talking about image here. We’re building an image people are going to trust. You ought to hear that boy give a speech. Make you tingle all over. What I wouldn’t want to happen, I wouldn’t want anybody to come here, some ntranger, and try to make a big fuss based entirely on the word of some dead thieving slut.”

“You wouldn’t?”

“Especially when it would be bad timing for Frederick in his career. A man shouldn’t lose his whole future on account of one foolish act. It wouldn’t be fair, would it?”

“To whom?”

“To those of us working hard to see dreams come true.”

I shook my head. “Judge, you picked the wrong protege. You picked a bad one.”

“What are you talking about?”

“This Ready Freddy is kinky, Judge. He’s all twisted in the sex areas.”

“By God, there’s nothing twisted about a man liking his pussy and going after it any danged place he can find it. When I was that boy’s age I was ranging three counties on the moonlight nights.”

“He likes it to hurt them, Judge. He likes to force them. He likes to scare them. He likes to humiliate them. He leaves them with bad memories and a bad case of the shakes.”

“I’d say you’ve been listening to some foolish woman with too many inhibitions to be any damn good in bed. I’d stake my life that boy is normal. And when he’s got a wife and career he’ll be too busy to go tomcatting.”

“That sexy wife ought to keep him at home, all right.”

“Watch yourself! You got a lot more mouth than you need.”

“Judge, we have arrived at the end of our discussion. Weird as it may seem to you, I think your protege is a murderous, spooky fellow. I think he has been going around killing people. I think he killed two friends of mine. Tell him that.”

I reached behind me for the door handle. “Wait!” he said sharply. “What are you trying to pull? You can’t believe that shit!”

“But I do!”

We locked stares for ten long seconds. And then he looked down and away, lips pursed. “We couldn’t be that far wrong,” he said softly, wonderingly. He shook himself and glowered at me. “You want to raise the ante. All right. Here is your deal. Twenty-five thousand dollars cash to get out of this county and stay out.”

“Not for ten times the offer, Judge.”

“You are dead wrong about Frederick. Believe me.”

“I’ll have to prove that to myself in my own way.”

“Stop reaching back of you for that door handle. Set a minute. Everybody wants something bad. What is it you want?”

“It isn’t nice to go around killing people.”

“Frederick wouldn’t kill anybody. Have you got some romantical notion about getting even for Carrie Milligan? My God, McGee, these people that get into drugs, they’ve got the life expectancy of a mayfly. That girl probably didn’t know where she was or what she was doing. She walked into traffic.”

“Like Joanna.”

“A bomb? Frederick Van Harn fooling around with bombs? That’s ridiculous. What do you want? What are you after?”

“Nothing you’d understand, Judge.”

“I understand a lot of things. I understand the world is too full of people and half a billion of ‘em are starving this year. I understand there’s a few million tons of phosphate under the ranchlands down in the southeast corner of this county, and the ecology freaks have kept National Minerals Industries from strip-mining it, and there’s a group of us thinks if we put Fred in the State Senate, that might get changed around and a lot of people might make out pretty good. I understand that we’re not going to stand for anybody coming in here and messing up our plans. People are starving because of the shortage of fertilizer. Phosphate is high priority McGee. Now who’s going to do the most good in the world, Van Harn or you?”

“It’s nice to know why you’re so interested in me.”

“You know what I’m going to do for you? I’m going to set up a little session between you and Frederick, and I’ll let him tell you just what his involvement was.”

“Are you sure you want to do that?”

“What’s the matter? Afraid he’ll shoot your theories full of holes?”

“I met him once. He didn’t impress me, Judge.”

“You caught him at a bad time. He told me about it.”

“Why should he tell you?”

“I asked him if he’d ever met you.”

“I’ll talk to him, sure. Send this car back with him in it, and I’ll talk to him right here. Like this. Alone. If he’s willing.”

“He’s willing to do what we want him to do.”

“Let’s make it tomorrow. There isn’t enough of today left. I seem to get tired easily.”

“Tomorrow morning.”

I got out. Jane Schermer was strolling slowly toward the limousine. When she saw me holding the door for her, she quickened her step. The Judge kicked the jump seat back into its niche. I handed her in and closed the door. The driver climbed in and chunked his door shut, and the car moved off through the late heat of the day, with barely audible hum of gears and engine.

Cindy was in the office. A man from Virginia was settling up, preparatory to leaving in the early morning on Monday. He was signing travelers’ checks. He wore red-white-and-blue shorts and a yellow shirt, funny shoes, and a funny hat. He had narrow little shoulders and a yard of rump. He was telling Cindy how great it had been, except when the bomb went off. She said she was sorry about that bomb. He said he didn’t know what people were thinking of these days. Like in Ireland.

He went out with his receipt and with Cindy’s wishes for a good cruise back to Virginia. The door swung shut and she said, “You look practically gray. What is it, dear?”

“The Judge wore me down. I’m going to go lie down.”

“Before you fall down.”

“I’m going to swim in that motel pool first.”

“Should you?”

“If I don’t get the dressing wet.”

“Somebody ought to be with you.”

The new fellow came in. Ritchie. A little older than Ollie and Jason, a lot less hairy. He said Jason was out on the docks and sure, he’d take the desk.

I went to the Flush and got swim trunks. Meyer wasn’t aboard. I changed in the motel, and by the time I got to the pool Cindy was there, taking long sweeping strokes, a fast crawl from end to end, using kick turns. The dusk light was turning orange, making the world look odd, as though awaiting thunder. I sat on the edge of the pool and admired the smooth flexing of the muscles of her back and hips and thighs as she made those turns. Then I lowered myself into the pool and paddled lethargically around, keeping my head high. She wore a white suit, white swim cap.

When I clambered out, refreshed and relaxed, she was still swimming hard, but she was beginning to labor, beginning that side to side roll of exhaustion. At last she came to the edge and clung, panting audibly. I went and took her wrists and hoisted her out. She stumbled against me and recoiled, turning away from me.

“What was that all about?”

“What was what all about?” She walked over to her towel and mopped her face, tugged the cap off, shook her dark hair out, and sat an aluminum chaise and closed her eyes.

I sat on the concrete beside the chaise and took hold of her hand. It was brown and boneless, without response. “What was the compulsive swimming all about?”

“Exercise. That’s all.”

“All?”

“Well. I guess I was fighting us. Working off anger.”

“Why?”

“It just seems too pat. Just too damned easy, that’s all. Nothing comes for free. Everything costs. I walk around all day wanting to be in bed with you. Knowing I will be. But maybe I won’t be.”

“Why not?”

“Weren’t you listening? I said it was too easy for us.”

“And that makes it bad? That makes it ugly?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Meyer is the one with the erudition. Meyer is the one with all the smarts. I can give you something secondhand from Meyer which might help. It comes from a smart tough old Greek by the name of Homer. I’ll tell you what he said… if you’ll use it.”

“I’ll try.”

“He said, ‘Dear to us ever is the banquet and the harp and the dance and changes of raiment and the warm bath and love and sleep.’”

She kept her eyes closed and her face told me nothing. Finally she said, “Dear to us ever. Yes.” She turned her head toward me and opened her eyes and linked her fingers in mine. “Maybe that old Greek meant that a thing in and of itself is okay, without deadlines or promissory notes or anything. Just in and of itself alone.”

“In and of itself together.”

“Well, sure.”

And so we went into the motel where there was a last pink tinge of sunlight dimly reflected on a far wall. Out of the wet suits our bodies were enclasped clammy cool, but swiftly heating. There was no constraint in her, only a merging and changing energy, quite swift and certain of itself, strong and searching.

When I awoke she was gone. There was a rusty old projector in the back of my mind, showing underexposed film on a mildewed screen. The projection bulb kept burning out and the film kept jamming in the gate, but by watching closely I could make most of it out. Memory was healing itself, taking me from banyan shelter in the rain to Fifteen Hundred to my talk with the bald man.

It was all of a piece, but with murky places which I hoped would become more clear to me as time went on.

It was four in the morning. I was on the edge of sleep, beginning to hallucinate back into my dreams, when the creak of the interconnecting door brought me awake. I smelled her perfume. Her groping hand touched my shoulder. She whispered my name.

I turned the sheet back for her and she came shivering in beside me, chattering her teeth. She wore something gauzy and hip-length.

“What’s the matter?”

“I dreamed you were d-d-dead too, darling.”

“I’m not.”

“I just had to come in and hold you. That’s all I want.”

“Everything is all right. It’s all right.”

“I’ll be okay in a little wh-while.”

I held her, close and safe. She felt restless for quite a long time, and then gradually her breathing slowed and deepened. I tried to visualize her face but could not, and at the edge of sleep I had the nightmare vision of face without features, of a rounded, tanned expanse of flesh, anonymous as the back of her shoulder.

When I awoke at dawn she was still with me. I thought I was aboard the Flush, and for a time I did not know who she was. Her leg jumped twice and she made a whining sound before turning back into heavy sleep.

As once again she became restless, I tried to find the answer to my feeling that I could not seem to get truly close to her. I did not know enough about her. Had she fallen out of apple trees, ridden a red bike, built castles in a sandbox, scabbed her knees, worshiped her daddy, sung in a choir, written poetry, walked in the rain? She did not tell me enough. I wanted to know all of the complex-of experience which had finally brought her to this place and time, to this moment with her dark hair fragrant and pressed against the edge of my chin. A widow, now indulging herself in the delights of the flesh, so long denied by the hulking drunken husband, and feeling guilt for such indulgence. I was being used, and wanted a deeper and truer contact. I wondered if I wanted her to be in love with me, as a sop to my ego, perhaps.

There was a change in the feel of her, in the textures of her, that told me she was now awake. Gently, gently, she disengaged herself as I feigned sleep. She sat on the edge of the bed and groped for the short nightgown, then stood and put it on. Through slitted eyes I saw her put a fist in front of a wide yawn, a yawn so huge it made her shudder. She moved silently across the room and slipped through the interconnecting door. I heard the soft click of the latch and the second metallic sound that meant she had locked the door behind her. A gesture for the motel maid? A disavowal? Or the end of the episode?

Thirteen

FREDERICK VAN Harn sat in the same rear corner of the limousine as had the Judge. The black chauffeur sat upon a different bench because the shade patterns were different at ten o’clock on that Monday morning. The engine ran as quietly as before, the compressor clicking on and off.

I sat on the same jump seat, turned to face him. I wore boat pants, sandals, a faded old shirt from Guatemala. He wore a beige business suit, white shirt, tie of dark green silk, dark brown loafers polished to satin gloss. As he looked directly at me. I saw that his sideburns were precisely even. The sideburn hair was long, brushed back to cover the ears. Neat little ears, I imagined. Maybe a bit pointed on the top. Olive skin, delicate features, long dark eyelashes, brown liquid eyes.

I had been an annoyance to him when we had met at Jack Omaha’s house. He studied me quietly, very much at ease, not the least bit uncomfortable. His hands were long and sinewy, and he clasped his fingers around a slightly upraised knee.

“Mr. McGee, you got under my skin pretty good when we met at Chris’s place.”

“You went into a massive tizzy.”

He smiled. “Are you trying to do it again?”

“I don’t know. What are you trying to do?”

It was an engaging smile. Very direct. “I’m trying to get you off my back. Uncle Jake thinks you could hurt me.”

“Don’t you?”

The smile faded. He looked earnest. “I really don’t see how. Oh, if you were politically inclined you could give me some static by bringing up the dumb-ass bit about flying marijuana in, but you’d have no proof of that, and I think I could deny it convincingly. Besides, I don’t think people are as dead set against it as they used to be. The use of it is too prevalent. I hear that a long time ago the rumrunners were folk heroes along this coast. It’s getting to be much the same with grass. I’m not sure you could hurt me.”

“What if somebody got notarized statements from Betty Joller and Susan Dobrovsky? Do you think your kinky love life could hurt you any if it came out?”

He colored but recovered quickly. “People must find it remarkably easy to talk to you, McGee. I don’t think there’s anything kinky about enjoying the hard sell. Reluctance stimulates me. Maybe in retrospect they see it differently than it was. But in both those cases there were plenty of squeals of girlish joy.”

“Joanna thought you were tiresome.”

“Please stop trying to bait me. Let’s try to get along at least a little bit. Try to understand each other.”

“What do you want me to understand?”

He shrugged. “How I was such a damned fool. I’d flown to most of the islands. I’m a good pilot. I’ve got a good airplane and I keep it in first-class condition. As lawyer for Superior Building Supplies, I knew Jack and Harry were in bad shape and things were getting worse. I think it was Jack who brought it up, like a joke. I had said something about falling behind on the ranch payments and trying to get an extension on the loan. He said we ought to work out a way to bring grass in. He said he could find a nice outlet for us. We met again and planned how we could do it, still treating it as a joke. Finally I went down and lined up a source in Jamaica and then we… went ahead. We couldn’t afford much the first time. But it all worked out okay.”

“Tell me about it.”

He shrugged again. “We’d rendezvous off the north shore of Grand Bahama. The coast was always clear because it’s difficult water. I’d circle and drop the stuff. We would have put the big bags inside plastic bags from Omaha’s stock and tied the neck so they’d float and the seawater couldn’t get to the grass. They’d gather them in with a boat hook. Very simple.”

“How about the last trip?”

“What about it?”

“Who was involved?”

“Just the four of us. Carrie went with me. Jack and Cal were aboard the boat. I had headwinds and I was a little late coming to the rendezvous point. At about five fifteen Carrie started horsing those sacks out the door. She was a strong person. They picked them up. Nine, I believe there were. So I put my ship right down on the deck and crossed the coast north of here and came down to the ranch and landed. She got in the little truck and went to the marina late that night, and they loaded the stuff into the truck. She drove it to the outlet and got paid off and took the money down and put it in the safe at Superior.”

“What happened to Jack Omaha?”

“I have a theory.”

“Such as?”

“I think some professionals were moving in on us. It was too easy to score. I think they got to Jack and scared him badly. I think that he stayed with Carrie and they went down and emptied the safe and went their separate ways. A lot of that money was supposed to be mine. It would have helped me a lot to have it. As it was I had to arrange to… borrow it.”

“From Uncle Jake Schermer?”

His smile was ironic. “And a lot of advice went along with the money. He was upset about the whole thing. I couldn’t make him understand that it wasn’t as important as he was making out. It was… a caper. It was fun, damn it. Everybody in the group got along all right. Low risk and good money. We were planning on making one or two more trips and then splitting the money and calling it a day. I wanted to come out of it with two hundred thousand clear. And that’s what Jack Omaha felt he needed to save the business.”

“Harry Hascomb wasn’t in on it?”

“Harry talks to make himself important. He talks in bars. And bedrooms. Harry is a jerk. I’m talking to you now, McGee, but there is no part of this you can prove. There is no basis for indictment by anybody.”

“And the Judge and his group are going to make certain you have a nice clean record because you are going to make them all rich and happy.”

After a flash of anger he spoke slowly and judiciously. “I don’t know how much good I’m going to do them. I really don’t. The timing is right. I can get elected. The campaign will be well financed. The incumbent is senile. I’ve built a good base here. I plan to announce right after the wedding. I love this part of Florida. I’m not at all certain I’d be in favor of a new deepwater port and a lot of phosphate mining and processing. It’s a dirty industry. The port will bring in other industries. Maybe a refinery. But those are low employment prospects. They won’t keep young people from leaving the Bayside area. And they will pollute the water and the air. On a risk/reward basis I can’t make it add up. I have the feeling I want to work in the best interests of the people who will vote me into office, not the few men who have been grooming me for office.”

He was impressively convincing. He emanated a total sincerity. Right at that moment he had my vote. I could see what it was about him that made the Judge label him charismatic. He talked to me as if I were the most interesting person he would meet this year.

“What do you think I ought to do?” he asked me.

“Do what you think is right.”

“That sounds so easy. Right and wrong. Black and white. Up and down. It divides the substances of life unrealistically. The world is often gray and sideways. According to the game plan, if I go to Tallahassee I ought to be able to move the situation along in five to six years. If there is world famine by then, it will be the thing I should do.”

He sighed and shrugged.

“Well, it’s my problem and I will have to make the decision. I know I’m going to run for the office. I’ll just have to take one step at a time. McGee, I want to thank you for listening to me. I haven’t killed anybody. I don’t know where the money went. I got into a foolish situation because I didn’t weigh all the consequences. And I’m glad now that it’s over. I know that the chemistry between us is not good. I can’t help that. I don’t expect everybody to like me. I’ll depend on, your sense of fair play.”

I found myself shaking hands with him. I got out of the car hastily, and after it drove away I wiped my hand on the side of my trousers. I felt dazed. He had focused a compelling personality upon me the way somebody might focus a big spotlight. He had that indefinable thing called presence, and he had it in large measure. I tried to superimpose the new image upon the fellow I had met in Jack Omaha’s house, listlessly tying his tie after a session in Jack Omaha’s bed. That fellow’s anger had been pettish, slightly shrill. I could overlap my two images of the man. I wondered if my previous image had somehow been warped by the great blow on the back of the head when the explosion had hurled me off my feet.

This man had been engaging, plausible, completely at ease. He made me feel as if it were very nice indeed to be taken into his confidence. There were dozens of things I wanted to ask him, but the chance was gone. The chance had driven away in a gleaming limousine, cool in the heat of the morning.

Yes, if he could project all that to a group, he could be elected. No sweat.

Yet where were you, Van Harn, when big Cal Birdsong was dying in the hospital, with a thin wire sticking him in the heart? Were you beside the bed, charismatic and relaxed? When your men clear new ranchland, do they blow the pine stumps with dynamite? Did those lean sinewy hands hoist Carrie into the front corner of the Dodge truck? Exactly how did you make Susan look so sick at heart, so defeated and sad?

I had been trying to make it all a single interrelated series of acts of violence. But his convincing presence was making it all come unstuck, turning it all into unrelated episodes.

Harry Max Scorf said, “Have a nice chat?” Usually I can sense people who move up close behind me. Something gives me warning. Not this time. I leapt into the air.

“Jesus!”

“Nope. Only me. Harry Max Scorf.”

“Of the City and County of Bayside. I know. I know.”

“Your nerves aren’t real good, son.”

“Yes, I had a nice chat. What else is new?”

“Let’s set,” he said, leading the way to a shady bench.

I sat beside him, leaning back, squinting from the shady place out at the white dazzle of boats at the marina. I could see a brown lady in lavender bikini prone on the foredeck of a Chris, her head near the gray bulk of a big Danforth. Nearby was the silent gleaming bulk of Jack Omaha’s muscular Bertram. Was it beginning to look slightly dingy? The unused boat so quickly acquires that abandoned, unloved, uncherished look. Chrome gets foggy. Bronze turns green. Aluminum pits and flakes. The lines get whiskery and the fenders get dirty. By looking to my right I could see into the office to where Cindy Birdsong stood, working on a ledger, elbow on the counter, fingers clenched in her hair, tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth. Looking beyond the Bertram, beyond the bikini, I could see Meyer and Jason working, sweat-shiny on the sun deck of the Flush, setting and cementing the vinyl sheets. Behind me was the traffic roar of the busy Monday streets and highways. Florida no longer slows down for June. A pity.

Harry Max Scorf produced a blue bandanna and flicked a shadow of dust off the toes of his gleaming boots. He took off his white Truman hat with care, wiped the sweatband, and placed it between us on the weathered wood of the bench. He seemed to doff force and authority along with the hat. His head was oddly pointy.

“What is new,” he said, “is that the special task force hit Fifteen Hundred Seaway Boulevard at first light this morning. And some sight it was. Nine cars. Twenty-five men. Feds and state people. I was local liaison, sort of observing. They tested me out long ago and know I can keep my mouth shut. I went along with the four who hit Walter J. Demos’s apartment. He’d been entertaining a little schoolteacher person in his bed. They found about thirty pounds of cannabis in a plastic bag hanging on a hook about three feet up inside his fireplace. I can tell you it was sorry shit, my friend. Weak and dusty, a lot of big lower leaves cured bad, powdery as senna leaves. Well, those two had got some clothes on and they stood in the living room, both of them crying. The little schoolteacher was crying because she was ashamed and scared for her job, which she will lose. And that ball-headed Demos was crying because he was so goddamn mad at himself he couldn’t hardly stand it. All the other men were going through the other apartments. There was one crazy scramble of folks trying to get back to their own beds. I think I’ve got the figure right. They made fifteen arrests for possession, not counting Demos and the teacher. Of course with Demos with that quantity; it will be for dealing, and that is heavier. You want to put it together for me?”

“You already have.”

“I know. I know. But you tickle me. You’ve got cop sense.”

“I can’t remember a word of my little talk with him.”

“What do you think you might have said?”

“Oh, something to open him up. Come on very very heavy, like somebody from the Office taking over the operation. An amateur like Demos would buy an act that wasn’t exactly plausible. Then I suppose I would have told him to hold onto his money and wait for a delivery and not get impatient.”

“You just suppose you might have said all that?”

“And left him a posture he couldn’t maintain. He is big jolly old Uncle Walter, head of the family. He is supposed to take care of everything and provide everything to make life juicy for his tenants. So when somebody showed up with some product, Uncle Wally bought it, and then they turned him in. I’d say that he was put out of business by the real professionals, easily, quietly, no fuss. He was buying enough for Fifteen Hundred, to maintain the life-style there. The squire of swingleville. The professionals wouldn’t bother to work him over. The professionals use the law to weed out the amateurs.”

“Did they weed out that girl, that Carolyn Milligan?”

I didn’t have to think long. “You don’t like that any better than I do, Captain. Makes no sense. I could never believe that.”

He sighed and said, “Neither can I. I tried to figure they’d wipe out the supply group: Omaha, Birdsong, Milligan. Then go after distribution. The trouble is, they wouldn’t get into that much trouble for the sake of one channel of supply in Bayside County. There’s three or four other groups. It isn’t all that big. It’s all businesslike. Nobody kills anybody unless there is absolutely no other way at all. This whole thing won’t hang together because I don’t know some things I ought to know. That’s always the way it is. When you know enough, all of a sudden you know it all.”

“What about Carrie? Did you look into that?”

“I got with Doc Stanyard on that. We went over his autopsy notes. Her left arm was badly abraded on the outside of the forearm and upper arm, with some paint fragments driven into the skin. See what that means?”

“No.”

“Use your thick head, McGee.”

It took about twenty seconds before light dawned. “Okay, if she was sober enough to pull her car off the road, then she was alert enough to have the normal instinct of lifting her arm to ward off the truck bearing down on her. She would step out and try to ward it off and dodge back. Her arm was hanging at her side when she was hit, so the assumption is that she was unconscious.”

“Or suiciding. Waiting for the right vehicle. Left her purse in the car. Shut her eyes and stepped out. Bam.”

“Which do you think?”

“I think that unless I learn more, I won’t ever know which it was. Why did you have a conference with the Judge yesterday and a talk with Freddy this morning?”

“We were talking about his appeal to the electorate.”

“His daddy was pleasant. Weak and pleasant and crooked. Funny thing. They say Freddy won’t ever have his hand in the till because of what happened to his daddy. It did him good instead of bad. They like the way he’s come up so fast.”

“Too fast, Captain?”

“They changed the retirement rules when it got to be City and County of Bayside. I’ve got thirteen months to go. If somewhere down the road, before thirteen months are up, I get thrown off, I ride an old bicycle and eat dog food. If I last it out, I’m better off than I would have been under the old rule. If Judge Jacob Schermer and his buddies are playing poker some night and somebody at the table says they’ve got tired of my face, I’m through the next day.”

“Scare you?”

He turned and looked at me. Those old eyes had seen everything, twice. They had looked into a lot of people. An echo of a smile touched the corners of his mouth. “Scared shitless,” he murmured.

“Then I better not tell you Freddy was flying the grass from Jamaica and air-dropping it to Omaha’s boat off Grand Bahama.”

“No, you shouldn’t tell me because it would fit too close with the arithmetic I’ve worked up about Freddy. He dresses fancy, drinks fancy, drives fancy. He’s got the ranch and the airplane and forty pair of boots. But then you got to remember that Miss Janie has ten thousand acres of grove, and under management it must turn her sixty dollar an acre a year net, on which she can afford Fred Van Harn as a play toy, but if I were Jake I wouldn’t be hoping my niece would marry up with a fellow with some kind of wrong twist in his head. Two years ago something got hushed up. They got delay after delay so by the time it was ready to go to court that girl had grown some inches taller. It’s said he claims he never had any idea she was only fourteen. Anyway, she got taller and older and smarter, and settled for the money. They’ve been grooming him for politics, first the State Senate, then maybe Governor. They really don’t give a damn what kind of a man he is. What they care about is that, he goes on local television on a public issue, you never seen such mail as comes in. Begging him to run for office. That’s all they care about. In fact the other stuff kind of helps them out because it makes it easier to control him. Oh, they’ll have him married to Miss Janie, and she’ll be a good hostess, and she’ll bear him some healthy kids, and there you are. He can turn that charm on. He can charm a five-thousand-dollar fee out of a five-hundred-dollar case and make the sucker come back for more advice. What did he tell you?”

“He told me he didn’t kill anybody.”

“My hunch is he probably didn’t. But he sure got into the pants of just about ever‘ woman involved in it. You got a list?”

“Carrie Milligan. Joanna Freeler. Betty Joller. Chris Omaha. He made a try at Miz Birdsong, but she bit him.”

“Good for her.”

“And Susan Lobrovsky.”

He stared at me, registering shock. “That girl too? Son of a bitch!”

“He took her out to the ranch. She was supposed to leave for home this morning. Jason was going to see her off.”

“Ever since that boy was fourteen damn years old, he’s been lifting every skirt he sees. There’s stories about him. He goes after ever‘ one as if there was never going to be any more. And there’s something about him, they say. The ones you’d never expect, their eyes cross and they lay back and put their heels in the air for him. There’s no law against it, at least no law anybody enforces. And he doesn’t seem to ever get tired of looking for it. And he finds it places you wouldn’t even think of.”

I had to admit to myself there were, indeed, a lot of places I would never think of. And a fair portion of every day when I did not think of it at all, at all.

“Vote for Van Harn,” I said.

“They’ll do that. Senator Van Harn. They need a man up there riding point on what they want around here. Deepwater port for the phosphate down in the south county. Refinery. And all the goodies that go along with it that only a few fellows get a piece of.”

“The Judge offered me twenty-five big ones to go away and forget all about Freddy.”

Harry Max Scorf looked mildly startled. “What do they think you know?”

“No more than I’ve told you. That he’s a kink. He rapes people and kills people and spends too much money and flies grass in.”

He stood up and carefully fitted his white hat back over the pointy skull, tugging it to the right angle. He gave me a sharklike smile. “What the hell do they want for a front-runner? Some kind of nance fellow? See you around, son.”

When I went into the office, Cindy looked up with her customer face, cool and polite. Then the great warm smile came. “Hello,” she said. It was just one word, but it was about fifteen words long. “And hello to you. Books balance?”

“They do now. What I did, I wrote a hundred and sixteen dollars when it was supposed to be a hundred and sixty-one. I saw you out there. Captain Scorf has been around forever, and they say he’s always looked exactly the same. Was he being rough with you?”

“No. He says I’ve got cop sense.”

“Is that a good thing to have?”

“They have finished the noisy parts of repairing the Flush. I think I better pay my motel bill and move my toothbrush back to the boat.”

She showed quick sharp dismay and disappointment before she caught herself. “Anything you wish, dear.”

“If you want to bring a small portable fire extinguisher, I’ll talk Meyer into cooking some of his renowned chili tonight.”

“That would be nice,” she said, forcing it.

“Anything wrong?”

“Nothing at all, thank you.”

“Are you sure?”

“Certainly I’m sure!”

There is no going past that point. All the roads are barricaded and all the bridges are blown. The fields are mined and the artillery has every sector zeroed in.

So I went and moved my toothbrush and accessories out of the unit, went to the front, and paid a fat lady my accumulated charges. She asked me if I was feeling better, and I said I was feeling just great. She said, “It’s so nice that Mrs. Birdsong has a friend nearby in her time of need. Have you known her long?”

“A very long time.”

“He drank, you know.”

“Yes. Cal drank.”

“In a way, it’s a blessing.”

“There are a lot of ways of looking at everything, I guess.”

“Oh, yes, that’s so true.”

A small fire fight, with no decision. Both sides retreated.

When I got to the boat, the glass people had arrived. There were four of them, in white coveralls, with the pieces all cut to size, tempered glass for marine use. The foreman said they would be through by four at the latest. Jason and Meyer were celebrating the completion of the vinyl job on the sun deck by having a cold beer in the shade of the canopy over the topside control panel. I inspected the job and gave my approval. I am skeptical of all of the so-termed marvelous advances of science. And I am suspicious of anything which tries to look like something it isn’t. Thus it would seem that a coal-tar derivative patterned to look like bleached teak would turn me totally off. But it is so damned practical. If you should ever have an artery which can’t be repaired, it can be replaced with woven Dacron. And, wearing that in your gut, it would be unseemly to go about muttering about the plastic world full of plastic people.

So I stand on my plastic deck and mutter whatever I please. When did I make any claim about being consistent? Or even reasonable?

I went below and checked out my stereo set. I put on the new record, Ruby Braff and George Barnes. It is nice to have one that is just out and know that it is destined to become one of the great jazz classics. I knew I had lost one speaker. I suspected I had lost more. Delicate microcircuitry cannot take that kind of explosive compression. When the noise came out, sounding like someone gargling a throatful of crickets, I snapped it off in haste.

Back to the shop. No new components. Get the Marantz stuff fixed. I did not think I could placidly endure another gleaming salesman tell me that I had to have quadraphony sound, coming at me from all directions. I have never felt any urge to stand in the middle of a group of musicians. They belong over there, damn it, and I belong over here, listening to what they are doing over there. Music that enfolds you, coming from some undetectable set of sources, is gimmicky, unreal, and eminently forgettable.

Jason went back to work his turn in the office. Meyer and I made some sardine sandwiches. He was glad to learn I was back aboard for good. We out at the booth in the galley and ate. And compared notes and reports.

“We are absolutely nowhere,” Meyer said.

“A perfect summary.”

“Are you sure you feel okay?”

“Don’t I look okay?”

“Glassy. You stare at me in a… goggly way.”

“Come to think of it, I feel goggly and glassy.”

“Just this minute. Or…”

“Most of the time. The light seems too bright.”

“When the windows are done-”

“The ports.”

“When the windows are done, we could go.”

“Home?”

“And forget this whole mess, Travis.”

“Tempting. Who are we supposed to be, going around finding out who did what and why?”

“That’s why they have police.”

“Right!”

We beamed at each other, but we both knew we were talking nonsense. The habit of involvement is not easily broken. It is even more pervasive than the habit of noninvolvement, the habit of walking away when the action starts.

I told him we couldn’t leave because we had a guest coming for dinner. I told him he was cooking chili.

Fourteen

WE THREE had sat with tears running down our cheeks and told each other in choked voices that the chili was truly delicious. She and Meyer had cleaned up, telling me that I was still on semьnvalid status.

By the time they were through, there was a large dark night outside, wide as a country, high as the stars, and hot with the night winds of June.

We killed the lights and went topside to a shadowed part of the sun deck, out of the reach of dock lights. The sky was pink orange over Bayside, all its outdoor advertising glowing against a mist made of hydrocarbon fartings of trucks and other vehicles. We aligned deck chairs on the newly repaired decking so as to look out at the stars over the Atlantic. We were into the rainy season now. The night of June tenth. Bulbous black lay low to the southeast, sullenly flickering an unseen artillery of lightning.

She on my left, Meyer on my right, the night alr stirring across us and then fluttering back to stillness. Her hand had crept over to my thigh, wtealthily, nudged a welcome, and was enclosed my my hand, unseen by Meyer, as if we were children in church. With my thumb I rubbed the thick warm pads at the base of her fingers. I wondered if she had been told or had guessed that her husband had not died of natural causes. They would have to tell her, sooner or later, no matter how pessimistic the law felt about catching whoever had done it. Harry Max Scorf had indicated quite plainly that she was on his list of suspects. Though I knew her very well in certain limited ways, I knew her not at all in many aspects. But I could not imagine her killing in that stealthy way, jabbing a wire into the great chest while the king slept.

Harry Max Scorf, in a dogged and plodding pattern, would have long since established the identity of every person who could have gotten close to Cal Birdsong long enough to do him in.

“It always seems such a waste when it rains way out there,” she said. “Sort of badly managed, to rain into the sea.”

“It’s moving this way,” Meyer said. “But your average thunderstorm has a total life span of fifty-five minutes.”

She sat up and looked across me at Meyer. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Believe him,” I said.

“When the conditions are right a pod will be forming in the area as the older pod is dissipating its energies. Thus we get the impression of one single storm lasting for hours. Not so.”

She settled back and made a small sound of mirth and wryness. “The rest of my life,” she said, “I’ll see a thunderstorm and say to myself they only last fifty-five minutes.”

Her hand still rested on mine, her hand warm and dry. I thought of lies and polygraphs and biofeedback. One type of biofeedback machine requires strapping a pair of electrodes to the palm of your hand. When you are tense and nervous, your palm is moist and cool and the conductivity of your skin is increased. The machine has a dial and a little electronic tone, thin and insectile. As you make yourself more calm your hand becomes more dry, the dial needle swings slowly downward, and the electronic note moves down the scale. By giving you the visible and audible results of different mental and emotional postures, in time you learn, without the machine, how to impose a great calm upon yourself, an alpha state, if you will.

Soon she would be told her husband had been murdered. The required Grand Jury hearing could not be delayed indefinitely. I rubbed my thumb back and forth across the pads of the palm of her hand, and tried to think of how to word my trick remark, and felt disgusted with myself. A rotten game to play with this woman.

Suddenly, without a word being said, I felt her palm go cold and wet. She tugged her hand away and got up and moved over to the rail and turned to lean against it, her arms folded, her rlioulders hunched forward.

“What’s wrong, Cindy?”

“I guess somebody walked over my grave.” She was silhouetted against the intermittent glow of distant lightning.

“Did you think of something that upset you?”

“I think I’ll go home now,” she said.

“I’ll walk you.”

“I’m okay.”

“No trouble!”

I tried to make conversation as we walked to the motel, but she gave one-word responses. She unlocked the door and pushed it open and turned to me. I took her in my arms. Her lips were cool and firm. There was no response in lips or body, and then there was a lot. A hungry lot.

We went in and the door clicked shut. “No lights,” she said. “Don’t let me think about anything. Don’t give me time to think about anything. Please.”

The bed was by big windows. The draperies were open. The storm moved closer. The lightning flashes were vivid. Each one made a still picture of her in black and white. Black eyes and lips and hair and nipples and groin. White, white, white all the rest of her. The lightning arrested movement. It caught her in a fluid turning, mouth agape with harsh breath and effort. It froze a leg, lifting. It stopped her, astride, arms braced, halting the elliptical swing of hips, turning her into a pen and ink drawing of greatest clarity. I kept her for a long time within the prison of her own tensions, though she escaped to partial release from time to time. Each lightning stroke seemed to be brighter, each stroke bringing the thunder closer and sharper. At last the lightning made a ticking sound, filled the room with a strange hard blue light, and the great following bang of thunder made her gasp and leap. The ensuing crashing downpour of the rain was like a signal to us.

We lay damp and slack in a close and sweaty embrace, content, heavy-breathing, detumescent. The storm air moved across us, cooling our bodies. The intensity of the downpour began to slacken, but it was still a heavy tropic rain. “Ruthie took those pills,” she said.

“What?”

“You didn’t know her. It was a long time ago. Bud-he was her husband-ran off a curve and hit a big tree. They gave her pills to make it easier. God, she took so many pills you couldn’t talk to her, hardly. Huh? She’d say. Huh? Wha‘? And sleep? She’d sleep twenty hours a day. Toby-you didn’t know him either-his wife went back to see her sick mother and the airplane fell out of the sky. For Toby it was booze. After a year they had to put him away and dry him out. People use things, don’t they? I’m using sex. I want it to be more and more, every time with you. It was more this time than ever. When it’s so much, I can’t think about anything else. The thing about me is, I’m not like this. Not really. I told you Cal hadn’t touched me in ever so long. But it didn’t make me feel… deprived. I mean it was okay. I guess I’m the way I am now, with you, because I try so hard to get my mind turned off. I try so hard, I get way way into the sex thing, like I couldn’t before. I always felt a little odd about it. Ashamed, almost. I mean being so big and strong and healthy and looking… as if I would like it.”

“You need never feel odd again.”

“I won’t. I won’t.”

“And you’ve got a talking jag.”

“I know. And you have to listen, don’t you? We don’t really know each other. It’s strange. I guess the way men think about these things, without me sounding like an egomaniac, what you did was luck out. You came along at the time when any presentable and sympathetic guy would be right where you are right now, doing what you were doing.”

“Flattery will get you everywhere.”

“Trav, please don’t make flip little remarks. What our relationship is, it’s backassward. It started at the end, and I want to find our beginnings. I want to know you as a person, not just want you terrible for the way you can turn my head off. It’s a genuine compulsion; really.”

“Okay. No flip remarks. No bedroom comedy. I saw the vulnerability and I took advantage. So that makes it seem unreal to me too. But it’s more than pure physical hunger.”

“What else is it?”

“Liking you. Wanting things to be right for you. Wanting the world to be a special place for you. Also, there’s guilt.”

“About what?”

“About knowing that Cal was murdered. Harry Max Scorf told me. I don’t know if he knew I’d tell you.”

She sat up, with sharp hissing exhalation. “How?” she whispered.

I told her. She made a sick sound and closed her fingers around my arm with impressive force.

“Jason,” she whispered.

“Are you sure?”

“I can’t prove anything. Once… after things had been very bad-Cal was drunk and he beat me-Jason came to me and said that there were ways Cal could be killed that nobody would ever know. I made him be still. I knew he was going to say he’d do it for me. And he would have. He’s a strange boy. He can’t stand any kind of cruelty. He was a battered child. He nearly died of it. And he has been… a little bit in love with me, I think.”

“It showed, after Cal knocked you out.”

She settled slowly back down again, cheek against my chest, arm heavy across me. “I thought I saw him at the hospital the evening Cal died. I was going out to eat. I thought I saw Jason riding his bike toward the hospital at the far end of the parking lot. I didn’t think any more about it until now. When I came back from eating, all those people were working on Cal so frantically. What it probably was was a piece of stiff leader wire. Cal was in one of those security rooms, single rooms, but he wasn’t guarded. But I don’t really know. So I don’t have to go and tell anyone, do I?”

“Are you angry at Jason?”

“I don’t know. Cal was killing himself in any case. They’d told him his liver was going bad and he shouldn’t drink at all. I can understand why Jason did it. If he did it. Trav, help me.”

“Captain Scorf will ask questions of you, sooner or later. It would look better if you went to him. Ask him if your husband died of natural causes. If he levels with you, register shock and then tell your suspicions. It will have to be your choice as to whether you tell Jason you’re going to see Scorf and, if Jason runs, how much lead time you give him.”

“Okay. I’ll do it that way. But I wish you hadn’t told me anything, dear.”

“Why did you get upset tonight when we were looking at the stars and the storm?”

“Upset? Oh, I just remembered a nightmare Cal had, about a week before he died. He woke up roaring. I couldn’t seem to make him wake up. I looked up at the dark sky and remembered. He had a nightmare about something falling toward him out of the sky that was going to kill him, that was going to land on him and kill him, and he couldn’t get out from underneath it. He was so really terrified that I guess it left a mark on me. Half nightmare and half delirium, I guess it was. His mind had. gone all warped and nasty from the drinking. Then he didn’t want me to tell anybody about his nightmare! As if anybody in the world would give a damn! Tonight I remembered, and it made me feel weird and crawly.”

The rain stopped. Another pod formed and came grumbling toward us through the night. She talked in a slumbrous, murmurous voice, and then the voice ended and her breathing changed, slow, deep, and warm against my throat. I watched the flashes against the window and against the ceiling. The new storm moved closer, and at last the thunder became loud enough to awaken her. She started, then settled back. “I was dreaming,” she said.

“Pleasant dreams?”

“Not really. I was in front of a judge’s bench. It was very high, so high I couldn’t see him at all. They wouldn’t let me move back to where I could see him, and it made me angry. I knew he would never believe me unless I could see him and he could see me. I was accused of something about Jason, doing something wrong.”

“Such as?”

“I don’t know. I guess I was guilty of something, all right. I mean when somebody is attracted to you, you know about it. And it feels good to be admired that way. So you… respond to it. Do you know what I mean? It changes the way you look at the other person, and the way you walk when you walk away from them, and it changes the pitch of your voice when you laugh. So I guess… those little things would add up, and maybe that’s why he did what he did. If he did it.”

“Don’t go around looking for guilt.”

“I miss Cal. I miss him every single day of my life. It had gotten to be a rotten marriage, and I miss him terribly.”

“Involvement doesn’t have to be good or bad. It just is. It exists. And when it stops, it leaves emptiness.”

“Something happens, and I think how I’ll have to tell Cal about that. Then I know I can’t. Oh, hell.”

She began to weep, without particular emphasis. Gentle tears for a rainy night. When they subsided she began an imitation of need, a faking of desire. But the textures of her mouth were unconvincing. The storm time had worn us both out. I was glad she did not persist, as male pride would have made the responsive effort obligatory. The second storm was upon us, the wet wind blowing across weary bodies. I covered us with the sheet. The lightning once again took still pictures of the room, of her head on the pillow beside me. After the crashing downpour turned to a diminishing rain, she slept. When the rain stopped I slipped out of the bed, closed the draperies, groped my way into my clothes, and left without awakening her, testing the door to be sure it had locked behind me.

The storm had knocked the power out. There were stars in half the sky. My eyes were accustomed to darkness. I found the path without difficulty and walked between the black shapes of shrubbery, down the slope past the office, and out onto the dock.

Meyer had locked the Flush and gone to bed. I found the right key by touch. In the darkness of the lounge I gave my left shin a nasty rap against the new coffee table. I limped to the head and, by darkness, took a long hot sudsy shower. The great bed swallowed me up like a toad flicking a fly into the black belly.

Fifteen

BY THE time I came out to fix my breakfast, Meyer was having his second cup of coffee. “You are running for office?” he asked.

“I thought you knew I owned a white shirt and a tie.”

“I guess I’d forgotten.”

“I want to look safe and plausible.”

“To whom?”

I poured my orange juice and selected a handful of eggs.

“Five eggs?” he asked.

“These are the super supreme extra large eggs, which means they are just a little bit bigger than robin eggs. Stop all this idle criticism and take a look at the back of my head, please. I took the dressing off.”

I sat on my heels. He came from the booth and stood behind me and turned my head toward the light. “Mmm. Looks sort of like the stitching on a baseball. Nice and clean, though. No redness that I can see.”

He went back to his coffee. I broke the eggs into the small skillet, sliced some sharp cheddar and dropped it in, chopped some mild onion and dropped it in, folded that stuff in with a fork, took a couple of stirs, and in a couple of minutes it was done.

When I sat down to my breakfast Meyer said, “You were saying?”

“I’m saying something new now. We’ve been playing with a short deck. With a card missing, the tricks won’t work. Maybe it is a variation of your invisible planet theory. I’ll describe the missing card to you. The Van Harn airplane comes winging through the blue, and in the late afternoon it spots the Bertram off the north shore of Grand Bahama, as before. There are eight or nine bags of gage, plastic-wrapped to keep the water out. They are about a hundred pounds each. Van Harn makes a big circle at an altitude of a couple of hundred feet. The circle is big so that each time he comes around, Carrie has time to pull and tug and wrestle one of the bags to the passenger door and shove it out on his signal. That would be the way to do it, right? Nine passes. They hope to drop them close enough so they can be picked up quickly with a little maneuvering and a boat hook. Cal Birdsong and Jack Omaha are busily and happily hooking the bags aboard. Probably Birdsong is running the boat and Omaha is doing the stevedore job. Van Harn and Carrie are having a dandy time too. A little bit of adventure, a nice piece of money, and all the bugs have been worked out of the system. The payoff is big. Have you got the picture?”

“It seems plausible. What are you getting at?”

“Cindy told me that a week before he died Cal had a nightmare about something falling out of the sky and killing him.”

I saw Meyer’s face change. I saw the comprehension, the nod, the pursing of lips.

“One drop was too good,” he said.

“And Jack Omaha was careless. He wasn’t watching. He was maybe leaning to get the boat hook into a floating bag. There would be a hell of a lot of impact. A good guess would be that it hit him in the back of the head and snapped his neck. And all of a sudden it wasn’t a party any more. It wasn’t fun any more.”

Nodding, Meyer spoke in an introspective monotone. “So Birdsong wired weights to the body and dropped it into the deeps, after dark. Van Harn flew back to the ranch with Carrie. When Birdsong was due in, she was waiting here at the marina with one of the little panel trucks. Birdsong loaded the sacks into the truck. They got their stories straight. She drove to Fifteen Hundred where the truck was unloaded and Walter J. Demos paid her off. She drove the truck down to Superior Building Supplies. She had probably left her car there. She put the money into the safe and took her share, because she knew the game was over. And she brought her share to you to hold. Travis, how do you read Van Harn’s reaction?”

“Sudden total terror. I don’t think the money mattered one damn to him any more. Marrying Jane Schermer would take care of the money problem forevermore. He knew he had been taking a stupid chance, perhaps rebelling against a career of fronting for Uncle Jake and his good old boys. He would know that if it all came out, it would finish him. It wasn’t a prank. He was involved in the death of a prominent local man while committing a felony. Good old Jack Omaha of Rotary, Kiwanis, and the Junior Chamber. He wouldn’t even keep his ticket to practice law. So I think that all of a sudden he was very anxious to please Uncle Jake.”

“The eyewitnesses were Carrie Milligan and Cal Birdsong.”

“Exactly, Meyer. A hustling lady and a drunk. I just thought of something else: Freddy’s matinee with Chris Omaha. There probably isn’t a better way of finding out how much the lady knows about anything. He wanted to know how much Jack had told her about the smuggling, or if he had told her anything at all. He evidently hadn’t.”

“And the burgled apartment?” Meyer said.

“Same reason. Find and remove any written evidence.”

“What about Joanna and the bomb?”

“That won’t make any sense until we know more.”

“If you can ever make sense out of a bomb. The Irish tried it. Except for the people getting killed, it’s turned into a farce to amuse the world. The Irish have forgotten why they set off bombs, if indeed they ever knew. It’s probably because there’s so damned little else to do in that dreary land.”

“You won’t be popular in Ireland.”

“I’ve never had any urge to go back, thank you.”

“Joanna came aboard bearing goodies. A little feast left off at the cottage for her. Meyer, we were both moving toward her as she started to open the box. If she had been a string-saver, a careful untier of knots, we’d both be dead. But she was the rip and tear type. God, I can still smell the stink of explosion in here.”

“I know. It’s a little less every day.”

After I finished off the eggs, I answered his first question. “I am going to visit the brilliant young attorney at his place of business. And I may have to see Judge Schermer. And I may have to see the Judge’s niece.”

“With what objective?”

“Application of pressure.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Be right here where I can get you if and when I need you.”

Cindy Birdsong was alone in the office when I walked up there from the docks. She got up from the desk and came around the end of the counter quickly, then glanced guiltily out of each of the windows before tiptoeing to be kissed. A brief kiss, but very personal and empathic. “You sneaked away,” she said.

“Like a thief in the night.”

“I slept like dead. I woke up and didn’t know where I was or who I was, darling.”

“I’ll try to keep track.”

She became more brisk and businesslike as she backed away from me. “Something strange, Travis. Jason was supposed to tend the office this morning. Ollie says he isn’t around. And Ritchie has got some kind of a bug.”

“Where does Jason stay?”

“He and Ollie have been living aboard the Wanderer. Over there at the end. It’s ours… mine, I mean. But she needs new engines and an awful lot of other things.”

I could see that the Wanderer was an old Egg Harbor fly bridge sedan, white hull and a rather unhappy shade of green topsides, something under forty feet in length.

Ollie came into the office, round, brown, and sweat-shiny, and gave me a good morning and gave Cindy a dock slip and said, “I put that Jacksonville Hatteras in Thirty-three instead of Twenty-six. It’s new and he can’t handle it worth a damn. It’s easier to get in and out of Thirty-three. Okay?”

“Of course.”

“They’ll sign in personally when they get it hosed down. They’re very fat people, both of them. Not real old. Just fat.”

“Oliver,” I said, “do you think Jason took off for good?”

He stared at me. “Why would he do that?”

“I don’t know. He’s missing. That’s one possibility, isn’t it?”

“I didn’t think of him exactly as being missing, Mr. McGee.”

“Did you notice if his personal gear was gone?”

“I didn’t even think to look.”

“Could we take a look right now?”

He looked at Cindy and when she nodded he said, “Why not?”

We both stepped aboard the Wanderer at the same moment, making it rub and creak against the fenders. As we went below Oliver said, “We slept here in the main cabin, Jason in the port bunk and me over here. If anybody was entertaining anybody, the other person slept up in the bow. There’s two bunks up there. You can see that he slept in his bunk at least for a while and… you know something? I don’t see his guitar anyplace.”

We checked the locker and stowage area. His personal gear was gone.

“What kind of car does he have?”

“No car. A bicycle. Ten speed. Schwinn Sports Tourer. Blue. He keeps it chained to a post behind the office under the overhang. His duffel bags are the kind that hang off the back rack on a bike. Panniers, they call them. The guitar has a long strap so that he can sling it around his shoulder so it hangs down his back. He loves that bike. He does the whole bit. Toe straps. Racing saddle. Hundred miles a day. That’s how come those fantastic leg muscles.”

I sat on Jason’s bunk and said, “I don’t even know his last name.”

“Breen. Jason Breen,” he said, sitting facing me.

“Okay to work with?”

“Sure. Why?” He looked defiant.

“How much do you really know about him?”

“What business is it of yours?”

“The boss lady has had enough trouble, don’t you think?”

He looked uncertain. “I know. But what has that-?”

“Jason could have done something very bad and very stupid, because he thought he was helping Mrs. Birdsong. I want to get a reading from you about his capacities. You strike me as being very bright and observant, Ollie.”

He blushed. “Well, not as bright as Jason. He reads very heavy things and he has very heavy thoughts.”

“About what?”

“Free will, destiny, reincarnation. Stuff like that.”

“What kind of person is he?”

Oliver pondered, his forehead wrinkling. “Well, he’s a mixture. He likes to be with people. People like him. When there’s a group, people end up doing what he wants to do without him having to push. When he’s having a good time, everybody Is having a good time, and when he isn’t, nobody is. At the same time he’s a loner. You never really know what he’s thinking. He does nice things for people without making a big fuss about it. The ladies really like him a lot. You saw how he sort of stepped in and took care of Carrie’s sister, Susan. Got her on the plane and everything. About doing anything wrong, I don’t think he’d do anything he thought was wrong. But there would be no way in God’s world of stopping him from doing something if he thought it was right.”

“Did he have a thing about Mrs. Birdsong?”

Oliver blushed more deeply. “No more than… anybody. I mean she’s a very decent person. And she looks… so great. And Cal was such a son of a bitch to her. Really dirty mean. He’s no loss to anybody.”

“Except to her. She misses him.”

“That’s her, all right. She’s the kind of a person who could even forgive that rotten bastard. Look, I know what’s going on with you two. If you give her a hard time, I’m going to take my best shot.”

“I think you really would.”

“Believe it.”

“What do you think is going on, anyway?”

“Jason told me. He’s never wrong about things like that. He sleeps a couple of hours at a time. He prowls around a lot. He always knows what’s going on over at the cottage and on the boats and in the motel and the whole neighborhood.”

“How did he act about it when he told you? Just how did he tell you? Can you remember the words?”

“Close enough. I came in the other night and he was in the bunk reading and he looked over and said, ‘McGee is screwing Cindy.’ It was just a statement of fact. It stung me, you know. I said you were a bastard to be laying her so soon after Cal died, and he told me that was a sentimental and stupid attitude. I couldn’t tell what he thought about it.”

“Current girl friend?”

“He hasn’t got any particular person at the moment that I know of. He goes over and sees Betty Joller. You know, she’s alone in the cottage now. Unless she can get somebody to come in with her, a couple of girls, she can’t swing the rent and upkeep.”

“Wasn’t there another girl there?”

“Two. Nat Weiss and Flossie Speck. After the bombing, Nat went back to Miami and Floss decided to try it out in California. She was bored with her job here anyway. She was working for the phone company.”

“Didn’t Jason have something going with Carrie and with Joanna?”

“Probably. Sure. It wouldn’t be any great big deal in either direction. It would just have to be the right time and place is all, and it would just happen.”

“Would Carrie have confided in him?”

“What about?”

“Anything that might have bugged her.”

“I don’t see why not. People talk to Jason about the goddamnedest things. He doesn’t pass it along. You know you can tell him things. Funny, come to think of it, how he never tells things about himself to other people. I guess he’s had a hard life. He was in foster homes. They took him away from his own folks because they nearly killed him beating him. He wasn’t even two years old. That’s the only thing he did ever tell me. He had about six broken bones. Maybe more. I forget.”

“Did the storms wake you up last night?”

“Hell, yes!”

“Was Jason in this bunk?”

“Let me think. No, he wasn’t. I could see in the flashes of lightning. I mean it wasn’t anything unusual. He’s always roaming around by himself. Or visiting people. He’s a very restless person.”

“But he’s been here two years, ever since they opened.”

“I don’t mean restless like that. We’ve talked about moving on, but we never do. You get kind of hooked. Boats and water and working outside mostly.”

“But now he’s packed his gear and moved on.”

“I can’t believe he’d just go without a word. But maybe he would. Maybe he would. He’d have pay coming. I don’t know why he’d leave without picking up his pay. Maybe he figures on sending for it. Or maybe he didn’t leave. Maybe he moved into the cottage.”

“Want to check that out for me?”

“For myself too. Sure.”

As I walked slowly back to the office, alone, I could guess at what would convince Jason Breen it was time to pack and leave. If he had been under the open awning windows, crouched a couple of feet from the bed, he would have heard a conversation about Cal’s murder. A little bonus for the restless voyeur of the marina. A little lead time on the blue bike. I wondered if he had sheathed his guitar in rain-proof plastic.

I briefed Cindy and we waited for Oliver. He came back panting for breath, overheated. “Not there,” he said. “Betty hasn’t… gone to work yet. She said… she hasn’t… seen Jason.”

After Oliver left Cindy said, “You don’t suppose Jason… could have listened?”

“Could be. He’d know you were going to talk to Scorf.”

“But does a person… flee on a bicycle?”

“A person flees on what they have at hand, if they are anxious to flee.”

“It makes me feel… sort of rotten to think anybody could have been listening.”

“Ollie says Jason did a lot of prowling.”

“But he seemed so nice!”

“We like the people who like us.”

“I suppose. Rats. Phone call? Sure. Here’s the book.”

I phoned the offices of Frederick Van Harn, Attorney-at-Law, in the Kaufman Building. A soft-voiced girl answered by speaking the number I had just dialed.

“May I speak to Mr. Van Harn, please?”

“Who is calling?”

“A certain Mr. McGee, my dear.”

“Is it a business call or a personal call?”

“Let’s say business.”

“He won’t be in the office today.”

“Out of town?”

“No, sir. He won’t be in today.”

“Where can I get in touch with him?”

“You could phone here tomorrow, Mr. McGee.”

“What if I said personal instead, of business?”

“You already picked one, sir.”

“Is he out at the ranch? What’s the number there, please?”

“Sorry, sir. That is an unlisted number. You can reach him here tomorrow morning.”

I thanked her and hung up. I wondered vaguely if Freddy was stupid enough to be making another run to Jamaica and decided he wasn’t. I asked Cindy if she could aim me toward the Van Harn ranch. She was blank on that, but she knew the road to take to get to Jane Schermer country, out amongst the grapefruits, and Meyer had told me they were adjacent.

I threw jacket and tie into the back seat of the bright little oven, opened all windows, and headed a little bit south and then turned west on Central Avenue. At first it was a six-lane avenue fringed with motels, the Colonel’s chicken, steak houses, gift shops, dress shops, savings and loans, and small office buildings. After a few blocks of this, I was in used-car country speckled with tired old shopping centers and convenience stores. After a mile or so of that, the road became divided and I went through a long expanse of decaying residential. The pseudo-Moorish and old frame houses had once been impressive-and expensive.

They were cut up into apartments and rooming houses. The yards were rank and littered, and the palms in the medial strip looked sickly. The road became two lane, and I went through an area of huge new shopping centers and small dreary-looking developments where, on the flat-lands, the developers had peeled off every tree and had big bonfires before putting in the boxy little houses. As these dwindled I saw For Sale signs on raw acreage, and at about nine miles from where I had made my turn, I came to the first ranchlands, with some Brahman, some Black Angus, some Charolais. Windmills flapped near the water holes. Salt blocks were set out in little open sheds. Where there were trees, the cattle had eaten the bottoms of the boughs off in a straight line, so that at a distance it had something of the look of African landscape.

There was more contour to the land on the right of the road, and more of that was used for geometric groves, laid out with a painful precision. I saw some spray trucks working in the groves, tall booms hissing white into the trees, agitating the leaves and the young fruit.

Big trucks used the narrow road and used it fast. Their windy wake snapped at my little rental. The landscape was beginning to turn a rich and glorious green with the heavy rains. Kingfishers sat on high wires, looking optimistically down into the drainage ditches. Grease-fat bugs burst on my windshield.

The entrance was so inconspicuous I nearly missed it. The narrow driveway was marked with two gray posts. A varnished sign not much larger than a license tag was nailed to one post, saying V-H Ranch. The entrance drive was lumpy and niuddy. Wire fencing was snugged close on each side of it. Ahead was a distant grove of pines. On either side was a hell of a lot of empty space, flat as a drafting table, with some faraway clots of cattle wavering in the heat shimmer. The fencing on both sides turned away from the road just befare the grove. The grove was a huge stand of ancient loblolly, home for hawk and crow and mockingbird and some huge fox squirrels which menaced me with fang and gesture of profane chatter. Once through the grove I could see the house a couple of hundred yards away, spotted in the middle of giant live oaks hung with moss.

It was squarish, two stories, with two broad verandas which encircled it completely, one at each level. Steep tin roof, big overhand. Porch furniture. The house looked rough and comfortable. A pair of dogs came around the corner of the house at a full run, arfing toward me. They were part German shepherd, but broader across chest and brow. One put his feet up on the side of the yellow Gremlin and grinned at me, tongue lolling. He lifted his lips to show me more tooth and made a sound like a big generator running in a deep basement. My window was up before he could draw breath.

An old man came out onto the porch, shaded his eyes, and then put fingers in his mouth and blew a piercing blast which silenced birds and dogs and could possibly have stopped traffic on the distant highway. The dogs backed away and dwindled. They walked sideways, knees bent, tails tucked under. They swallowed, lapped their jowl, and looked apologetic.

“Git on out back!” he yelled, and they did git, in scuttling fashion. Then he stood on the porch, feet planted, arms crossed, and waited for me to approach, and waited for me to say the first word. He was a tall scrawny bald man with tufts of white over his ears. He was all strings, except for his watermelon belly, and he wore crisp khakis and new blue sneakers.

“It’s nice to see animals pay attention,” I said.

“They know I kicks their ass nine feet in the air ef’n they don’t. State your business.”

“I would like to see Mr. Van Harn.”

“Sorry.”

“He isn’t here?”

“I didn’t say that, did I?”

“Then he is here?”

“He could be.”

“My name is Travis McGee. To whom am I speaking?”

“I’m Mr. Smith.”

“Mr. Smith, your loyalty is commendable. I would like you to take a short message to Mr. Van Harn. I think he will want to talk to me.”

“I don’t know as I want to do that. He’s in a real bad temper this morning. He had to shoot Sultan. Busted his fool leg. Fifteen-thousand-dollar horse. He don’t want no help with it. He’s got a backhoe down there, and a jeep with a blade, and he’s burying that fool horse by himself. He sent Rowdy and the boys off to string fence. Wants to be alone with the fool dead horse. I don’t want to mess into that, Mister McGee.”

“The message is very important to him.” Smith studied me for long long seconds. This was a character reading. “You say you snuck by here after I told you to git?”

“I put my car back in the pines and snuck by. Where did I go to when I snuck by, Mr. Smith?”

“You followed the ruts there to the side of the house. Two hundred yards, you came to a plank bridge. Cross it and turn left past a stand of live oaks and you can see the stables and some storage sheds, and past that the hangar and the landing strip. He’ll be on high ground right across from the stables. You’ll see the backhoe and jeep before you can make him out.”

“Mr. Smith?”

“Yes.”

“What about those dogs?”

He took me around the house. The dogs crawled forward and I extended my hand. They both snuffed my hand. “Leave him alone, hear?” Smith roared. The dogs nodded. “They won’t bother you none,” he said.

Smith was right. I saw the vehicles first. The yellow jeep with a front-end blade was crawling slowly across the infield of a rough track, dragging the glossy red-brown body toward the slight rise and the cabbage palms at the far side, where the backhoe stood near a large mound of dirt.

Van Harn saw me walking toward him and stopped the jeep.

“What are you doing here, McGee? How’d you get past the house?”

“Smith told me to get lost. I parked in the pines and snuck around. Sorry about your horse.” He had wrapped chain around the hind legs and fastened it to the tow hook on the back of the jeep. The great head of the horse was at rest. I had seen it bobbling across the stubble. The visible eye bulged nastily from the socket. The shot had been perfectly centered, above and between the eyes, making a caked mess of the brown gloss. A swarm of bluebottle flies settled onto the horse when the jeep stopped. He was a grotesque parody of a horse at a full run, front legs reaching, back legs extended, head high. “What do you want?”

‘I tried the office first.“

“What do you want?”

“Why don’t you go ahead and bury the horse and then…”

“What do you want?”

He wanted the leverage right away, right in the blazing sun of midmorning, in the infield of his little track. He wore big oval sunglasses, aviator type, and a white canvas cap. He was stripped to the waist. He wore dirty khaki pants and old white boat shoes. I was surprised at how tanned his body was, and how slender and fit he looked. Thin tough musculature made ridges and knots under the tan hide at each slight move. He had a medallion of black hair in the middle of his chest, big as a saucer, turning into a thin line of black hair that disappeared behind his brass belt buckle.

Plausibility is the key. I said, “When we had our little talk in the limousine, there was an area we didn’t get to.”

“Such as?”

“Uncle Jake offered me twenty-five thousand to pack and leave. I wanted to talk to you about whether it is all the traffic will bear.”

“It sounds like too much as it is. What can you do?”

“I can put things together. Carrie gave me enough to go on. It’s a case of filling in the blanks.”

“Blanks?”

“Such as who decided to fasten ballast to jack Omaha and drop him in the sea after he got hit by the bag of grass when you and Carrie were air-dropping the stuff to Cal and Jack aboard the Christina III.”

He opened his mouth and closed it, opened it again, and said, “You lost me on the first curve, McGee.”

“I think you waited too long.”

“Maybe I did. I’ve got to bury Sultan.” He started the jeep up and once more the big head bounced along the ground, tongue protruding between the big square teeth. I followed along at walking speed. He went to the left of the big hole, as close as he could get to it, and cut to the right as soon as he was past it. When he stopped, the horse lay with his back at the edge of the hole. He backed to slack off on the chain, got out and unfastened it from the jeep and the horse’s legs, and dropped it into the jeep. Next he bent and picked up the hind legs and pushed at them, rolling the horse onto its back. It slipped over the edge of the hole and fell four feet, turning the rest of the way over, gases bursting out of its body as it thudded against the bottom.

I backed out of the way when he got back into the jeep, after setting the blade to its low position, and began shoving dirt into the hole. It was pale dirt, a mix of sand, topsoil, and surface limestone which contained billions of small fossil shells.

A buzzard began a big lazy circle overhead. I squinted up at it against blue sky, wondering how it knew. The abrupt roaring of the jeep shocked me out of my stupid trance. The onrushing blade was a yard from my legs by the time I took a frantic sideways leap, like a man going into second base in a headlong slide. I sprawled and rolled and came up onto my feet with the jeep right behind me. I feinted one way and dived the other way, came to my feet, and ran around to the other side of the horse grave.

He idled down and stopped. Oval lenses looked at me from under the stubby bill of the white cap.

“You move good for the size of you,” he said.

“Thanks. And what’s one more dead person?”

“At this point in time, not very much.”

“But you can’t make it, not the way you’ve tried to make it, Freddy. You dropped the rock in the water, and you can’t move around fast enough to flatten out all the ripples.”

“I can give it a goddamn good try. I didn’t know if you had a gun. I guess you don’t.”

“I should have. It was an oversight.”

“Final mistake.”

“What was Carrie’s final mistake?”

He seemed puzzled. “Mistake? Walking in front of a truck?”

“Didn’t you close her mouth for good?”

“Didn’t have to. Carrie was bright. She was involved in Jack’s death too, you know. And she had less leverage than I have.”

It was convincing. I felt confused. I couldn’t see him as the murderer of Cal Birdsong or the builder of the bomb which killed Joanna. So why was he so obviously intent on doing away with me?

“I think we ought to talk,” I said.

“Make your move.”

“What move? Run for it? How far would I get?” He gunned the jeep toward the right. I lunged to the left, dipping to scoop up a handful of ancient oyster shells from the pile of dirt. They were thick, calcified and heavy, dating back to the time when the V-H Ranch had been on the bottom of a shallow sea. I wound up quickly, stuck my leg in the air, threw a shell with a follow through that brought my knuckles to within an inch of the ground. I really whistled it, but it curved low and outside, missing his right shoulder narrowly. He backed away quickly and, out of range, stood up and pulled the windshield up and fastened the wing nuts before rolling back to position.

“That was very cute,” he said.

“Freddy I’ve talked to a lot of people about you.”

“I’m sorry about that. But it doesn’t change anything.”

“Your odds are impossible already.”

“You don’t know how bad they really are, McGee. But they are the only odds I’ve got, and it’s the only game there is.”

I tossed the other shells away. They weren’t going to help me. I could guess what he would do. He would start circling that big grave as fast as he could go. I could stay out in front but not for long, not in such heat. And as soon as I slowed, or headed for the trees or the stables, he’d have me. I didn’t have much time to do any thinking.

In such a situation it is difficult to believe it is completely serious. A yellow jeep is a jolly vehicle. Pastureland is not menacing. The hour before noon is not a likely time for dying. It was some odd game of tag, and when it ended the eventual loser would congratulate the winner. Let’s try it again someday, pal.

But it was real. A jeep with or without a blade la a lethal weapon. I could tell from the way it tracked that he had it in four-wheel drive. He was Rkilled, and the jeep was agile.

I thought of alternatives and discarded them as fast as they came up. I could head across the field and try to trap him into a circle out in the open. I could turn a smaller circle than he and maybe get near enough to the side of the jeep to Jump him. No chance. He would read it, accelerate out of the circle, and swing around and come back at me. Or I could slow him enough, maybe, to go up over the blade and hood and drop in on him. But how do I slow him down that much?

Suddenly I thought of one slim chance. If I couldn’t make it work, I was going to be no worse off. I was going to be dead. And if I didn’t try it, I was going to be dead. A mockingbird flew over, singing on the wing, a melody so painfully sweet it pinched the heart. I do not want to leave the world of mockingbirds, boats, beaches, ladies, love, and peanut butter from Deaf Smith County. Especially do I not want to leave it at the hands of a fool, at the hands of this Van Harn who thought he could wipe out an event by killing anybody who knew anything about it. It has been tried. It never works. Any lawyer should know that.

I had to get him going counterclockwise around the horse grave. So I moved to my left end he gunned the motor and took the bait. He came on so fast he gave me a very bad moment. The big hole was a sloppy rectangle about ten feet by eight feet. Before I could get my feet untangled and get around the first corner, he nearly clipped me. He had shoved about three blade loads in on top of the dead horse, and so that side was filled to within about two feet of the original ground level, the whole front half of the horse still uncovered.

He pressed me. I had to lope around pretty good, with a constant fear I might slip and fall on the corners. He held it in an almost continuous controlled skid, the back wheels staying farther away from the hole than the front wheels. His reasoning was obvious. In such heat I could only make so many circuits. I had to make enough circuits to lull him. The sweat was running into my eyes. Each time I passed the decision point, I mentally rehearsed exactly how to do it. And I had to do it soon, before I was exhausted.

At last I felt ready. I rounded the corner, dropped down two feet onto the loose dirt, spun and leapt up beside the jeep, and dived for the top of the wheel. He tried to accelerate but I was able to stretch the necessary few inches. I snapped my right hand onto the top of the wheel and pulled it hard over, toward me. The jeep swerved into the horse grave, dropped, and piled into the straight side of the hole, over where it was deeper.

The left rear fender had popped me in the side of the thigh, throwing me into a deep corner of the hole, in considerable torment. I scrabbled and pulled myself up and saw Van Harn fold slowly sideways out of the jeep. The four wheels were still turning, settling it deeper, and then it stalled out.

His legs were still hung up in the jeep. One eye was half open, the other closed. He had a high white knot in the middle of his forehead, growing visibly. I hobbled to him and bent over him. He hit me in the mouth and knocked me back into the same corner of the hole. Before I could get up, he sprang out of the hole and went racing toward the backhoe. I came lumping along behind him, with no hope of closing the distance.

He went to the back of it and wrenched a spade out of some spring clips, a spade I wished I had seen earlier.

He darted to meet me and swung the spade, blade edgeways, at my middle. During my screeching halt I managed to suck my stomach back out of the way. He swung back the other way, from left to right, aiming at my head. I couldn’t back away in time. I dropped under it, dropped to my hands and knees, felt it whip the hair at the crown of my head. That made everything real and deadly. A tenth of a second faster and he would have cleaved my skull.

From knuckles and knees I launched myself forward, getting one foot under me, coming up under him like a submarining guard, getting a shoulder tucked cozily into his gut, clapping an arm around his heels as he tried to bicycle backward. He smacked down hard and lost his spade. I crawled up him; straddled him. He was yipping, bucking, writhing. I didn’t want to break my hands on the bones of his skull or face. I came down with a forearm across his throat, my other hand locked on my wrist for leverage. I tucked my face into the curve of my arm as protection from his flailings. After a frantic spasm he fluttered a little and went still. I kept the pressure on to be sure of him. Then I rolled off and got onto my knees and sat back on my heels, blowing hard. His white cap lay nearby. I picked it up and wiped the sweat off my face and out of my eyes.

His face was puffy and suffused with blood. His chest was moving. It seemed very quiet out there in that pastureland. I listened to the songs of the midday bugs and the liquid call of a distant meadowlark. Time to wrap him up and make delivery.

Sixteen

WHEN AT last I felt partially restored and was not gagging with each breath, I got up onto my feet. My right thigh was cramping with the muscle bruise the jeep had given me. I managed a deep knee bend without screaming, and the second one did not hurt quite as much.

The jeep offered the best chance of something with which I could tie him up. I trudged toward the horse grave. If he could have come the whole distance across grass, he would have had me. He had to cross some of that dirt from the hole. The brittle limestone crackled under his running feet. I jumped sideways, ducked, and spun all in a single terrified bound. I heard the spade hiss past my head. His momentum carried him toward the hole. He tried to turn, tripped, stumbled, fell and rolled down the slope, and ended up beside the Jeep.

I was after him quickly and got there as he lifted the spade over his head. I reached up and got hold of the handle. As soon as I had the handle he let go of it and hit me three very fast and very good shots. He had screwed his feet into the dirt. He had very good leverage, and he was too able to attempt the roundhouse blows of the beginner. He slammed them home, very close straight shots. They darkened the sky. The spade slid out of my hand. I stepped into him and hugged him like a big sick bear. I bore him down and suddenly he was in back of me instead of in front of me. I was on my hands and knees in the soft dirt and he had a wiry arm locked around my throat.

My air was shut off. Dazed as I was, I could not get the leverage to get out of that position or to throw him off. I tried to crawl to the jeep. He somehow held me back. I scraped with both hands like a dog digging a hole as I tried to plunge forward. The world swam. My lungs heaved against the obstruction. I began to feel a lazy floating pleasure. Oxygen starvation. Rapture of the deeps. I folded down and with darkening sight stared into the hole I had dug with my hands. I saw a piece of blue pipe, very pretty blue pipe. And just under it, as in some grotesque still life, I saw an unmistakable segment of suntanned wrist, dirt caught in the sun-bleached curling hair.

The dimming brain works slowly and with difficulty. Clean blue tubing. An azure blue. The size used for a bicycle frame. And why was that fellow under it, under the dry dirt that had come from a hole too deep for all the recent rain to reach?

There was a stupid rhyme in the fading brain: Jason Breen and his Azure Machine.

The realization pierced the darkness that was closing in on me. What happened in my mind was not fright, not anger. It was an overwhelming dismay. A veritable crescendo of dismay, enough to galvanize my slackening body into a few moments of a terrible, terminal strength. I will never know how I was able to come to my feet with Van Harn plastered to my back. I took a single wobbly step and then fell toward the jeep, turning as I fell, so that I smashed him against the metal. I rebounded onto hands and knees, the stricture gone from my throat. I stretched out and breathed until the shadows lightened and the sun came out again. In sudden fright I pushed myself up and spun around. Freddy lay on his side.

I had the feeling he was going to bound to his feet and we were going to have to do it all over again, as if he were some mythological creature which could not be slain.

First I got the chain from the jeep. I rolled him onto his face, and chained his wrists together, tyIng a clumsy knot, and used the surplus to chain his ankles.

Then I knelt by the hole and carefully pulled the dirt away until I could see a hand, and most of a forearm, and more of the tubing of the blue bicycle.

From the angle, the rest of him was under the Jeep, and under a foot of dirt. Somewhere under there could be found the stillness of the Jesus face, the wire glasses, the crushed guitar, the brown legs sturdy with the bicycle muscles. And somewhere in his head, lost forever in the death of the synapses, were the jellied memories of why he had come out here and what Van Harn had done to him. The idea had been splendid. Dig a big hole and bury the body under a horse. Who would ever look farther than the horse?

I dragged Van Harn up the slope toward the back of the jeep and left him in the shade of the rear overhang. I felt his throat. The pulse was strong and regular. Except for the knot on his forehead, there wasn’t a mark on his face. The left side of my underlip felt like half a hot plum. When I opened my mouth to yawn width, experimentally, the hinges creaked. I had a dull headache behind my eyes. He could blow them in pretty good. His dark glasses were missing. I looked around and found them; stomped flat.

Just as I climbed out of the hole I heard the oncoming drumbeat of a galloping horse. It was one great big dark brown horse, and she looked good in her cowgirl hat, yellow shirt, and twill britches. But when she pulled it up short and slid off, she turned back into Jane Schermer, with pudding face, minimal neck and neuter body.

“Smith said Frederick had to shoot…” She saw Freddy in the shade of the jeep. “What are you doing to him?”

“Nothing, at the moment. But he’s kept me pretty busy.”

“Get that chain off him at once!”

“First come take a look at this.”

She hesitated, then dropped down into the hole. She had let the reins hang free. The big horse made munching and ripping sounds in the stubbly grass. I pointed to the hole, big around as a bushel basket and half as deep, with the arm, the hand and the portion of blue bike in the bottom of it.

She stared and sprang back and turned quickly, making a shallow, gagging little coughing sound. “Who? What-”

“I’m pretty sure it’s Jason Breen. He worked at Westway Harbor Marina.”

“But did you…”

“Did I? God’s sake! Sure, I came out here and sort of borrowed that backhoe, which I don’t know how to operate. Then I dug this big son of a bitch of a hole. Then I put Jason and all his gear at the bottom of said hole and covered him over good. Then I shot this horse and… look. Forget it.”

“But Frederick couldn’t have done it.”

“Lady Jane, I don’t think there’s anything in this world that you or I could think of that Freddy wouldn’t do, if he happened to feel like it.”

She hustled over and knelt by Freddy. She felt his forehead with the back of her hand. She put her ear against his bare chest to hear his heart. She stood up and looked at the visible half of the horse. “Poor darling,” she said softly. “Poor Sultan. Poor beast. My Graciela foaled him. He grew up on my place. I gave him to Frederick.”

“That’s nice.”

She went to the front legs of the horse, lifted, and tested with strong hands. “Must be a hind leg,” she said. “Take that stupid chain off of Frederick-right away!”

“I don’t think it’s a hind leg either.”

She stared at me. “What do you mean?”

“I think Freddy needed a dead horse.”

“He has other horses here. Sultan was valuable.”

“He needed a dead horse that was so valuable and he liked so much that it made sense for him to send his ranch hands off on other work while he took care of it himself.”

“What makes you think a hind leg isn’t broken?”

“I watched him slide it up to the edge of the hole and roll it in. By then he didn’t care what I saw because he had already decided to put me in the hole next to Jason. Under the horse.”

“You make him sound like a… Could you uncover those back legs? Please?”

I walked over and got the spade and went to work. Once I got into the rhythm of it, it didn’t take long. Before I finished, her fool horse finally caught on to the fact there was a dead horse in the area. He came over and stared into the hole, then screamed and backed away, shaking his head, rolling his eyes, and clacking his teeth. Jane hustled and caught him and led him all the way to the trees and tied him to a branch and left him there, squealing and pawing at the ground.

She hunkered down and checked each back leg in turn, then stood up and dusted her hands and climbed up out of the hole. I followed her. She looked thoughtfully down at Freddy, and she didn’t say anything about the chain.

“I raised Sultan,” she said.

“I better go to the house and use the phone.”

“Phone?”

“To report a body.”

“Oh, of course. There’s one in the tack room, an extension. Are you going to leave Frederick… like this?”

“I know. That chain looks as if I’m overacting. But I feel a lot better with it wrapped right where It is.”

She looked at me and through me. Her eyes were small and of no particular color. Dull hazel, perhaps. “The things people said about him. I knew they were all lies. They were jealous.” She focused on me. “Is this all some kind of terrible trick? Did you shoot Sultan?”

“I am not terribly fond of horses, but I’ve never shot one.”

“I have to believe somebody.”

“It might as well be me. Freddy tried to kill me. He made some good tries. He tried with the jeep. He tried with the spade. He tried manual strangulation. He is a very tough animal. He is about twice as strong as he looks.”

“Jane?” Freddy said weakly. “Jane, dear?”

“Yes?”

“Help me, please.”

“You shot Sultan because he broke his leg?”

“No other choice, dear. Please help me. Unfasten the chain, please.”

She moved closer, looking down at him. “‘I don’t think I can help you, darling. I don’t think anybody can help you. Just be patient. We’re going to make a phone call. You won’t have to stay there very long.”

I was halfway to the stables and the tack room before I could no longer hear his voice calling her name. She cantered past me when I was almost there. I found the phone while she was shooing her horse into an empty box stall.

Captain Scorf was not available, so I asked for someone to whom I could report a dead body, a murdered body. Then I gave a very simple report and explicit directions.

Jane Schermer sat with her back against the box stall door, her knees hiked up. There was a broad overhang shading the walk which led by the stalls. I sat beside her.

After a long time she said, “They were telling the truth and he was telling the lies.”

“What?”

“Nothing. I’ve been going over things that troubled me, that I asked him about. I’ve been such a fool.”

“That is a very convincing fellow when he wants to sell you.”

“I was too easy to sell. I wanted to get married.”

“So you’ll get married. But not to Freddy.”

She turned and looked at me. “Men have never paid much attention to me. I know when it’s the money. A person can tell. I wondered about him. I was never sure.”

“Maybe it wasn’t.”

“You’re trying so hard to be kind, aren’t you? Why would he… spoil everything for himself?”

“In big ways, and little ways too, people do that all the time to themselves. We can’t stand prosperity. We have to tinker with the machinery.” She looked out across the track at the distant scene, at the canted top half of the yellow jeep. She touched my arm suddenly. “Look!”

I looked out there and saw that Freddy had performed a feat I would have called impossible. With wrists chained behind him and ankles chained together, he had managed to worm his way out from under the back end of the jeep and get himself up out of the hole and onto his feet. He was on the far side of the hole, hopping up and down with terrible demonic energy, managing somehow to retain his balance, though without seeming to make any progress. He was springing high into the air. I thought I heard a distant shouting. Then we saw him fall, roll, and disappear back into the hole.

We both got up. Jane said, “Something’s the matter with him.”

“I could make you a list.”

But she had started off at a flat-out run, too concerned to remember she could ride that big horse out to him. I loped along, feeling the lumpy pain in my thigh with each stride. When we got there she jumped down into the hole where he was flapping and churning around and yelled, “Fire ants! Fire ants! Help me with him.”

I think he had five thousand ants on his face, arms, and torso, swarming and biting with that dedicated aggression peculiar to that innocent looking little red-brown ant.

I jumped down and grabbed him and wrestled him up out of the hole and half carried, half dragged him about forty feet and put him down on the grass. All this while he was moaning, cawing, and whimpering, and Jane was slapping and brushing at the ants. About a hundred turned their eager attentions to me, so after I dropped him I hopped and slapped and brushed until the frequency dropped to a random nip from time to time. They are called fire ants because the bite feels like a very tiny red-hot coal on the surface of your skin.

She kept on getting rid of the ants while I quickly took the chain off ankles and wrists. He had stopped being a dangerous person. Though his gestures seemed weak and uncertain, he was of some help in removing the ants. The ones that were being brushed off were climbing back onto him, so I got him onto his feet and trundled him another fifty feet before he stumbled and fell.

When he was down I pulled his shoes and socks off, undid the brass buckle, and pulled his khaki trousers off. The ants were thick on his legs, way up to the upper thigh and the groin. I pulled his underwear shorts off and wadded them up and used them to brush away the ants. I noted that, dimensionally, he more than lived up to the billing Joanna had given him. I rolled him over and over, away from the area where the brushed-off ants could get back on him.

They are aggressive, these red ants, but they are certainly not the menace the farming fraternity and the petrochemical industry would have us believe. If you stand too near a nest, they will come out and climb up your shoes and sting your ankles. You know immediately, and you move away and knock them off. The bites make little white blisters which, if untended, are likely to fester. The easiest remedy is rubbing alcohol applied as soon as possible after being bitten. Vodka or gin will do.

Ninety-nine out of a hundred fire-ant horror stories are false. Freddy was the one in a hundred. I had never heard of anybody being so completely bitten. We had him free of the ants at last. He made said weak sounds as he rolled his head from side to side. He was gray and sweaty. I wedged him back into his pants and clinched the big brass buckle.

I now knew why he had been so anxious to do me in. But it seemed idiotic to have killed Jason Breen.

I leaned close to him and said, “Hey! Why did Jason come out here?”

“Money.” he said in a dull voice. “Called me at four in the morning on the private line. I chained the dogs. Waited in the grove. Twenty thousand.”

“Why?”

“He’d snooped. Figured it all out. Saw the Christina come in without Jack. Told me he had killed Cal with a wire and he had to run, and unless I gave him money he’d claim I paid him to kill Cal. I said okay. He was very jumpy. Then he said he was going to beat up on me anyway, on account of what happened with the Dobrovsky girl. He hit me and I hit him. I caught him in the throat. It broke something. He grabbed his throat. Tried to breathe. Fell onto his knees. Made choking noises. Fell over dead in less than two minutes. By dawn light his face was black and his eyes bulged out. I dragged him down to the stables. Wheeled his bike down. Oh; Christ, everything is getting so… so far away.”

He was looking worse by the moment, face bloating, tongue thickening. His lips were fat. He was close to blacking out.

“He told me once a bee sting can make him real sick,” Jane said. “What’s keeping… them.” A moment later we both heard the distant hooting as the cruiser blew its way through the highway traffic. When in another minute it drove into sight around the stand of trees, I stood up and waved my arms at it. It came bounding across the track and the infield, stopped near us, and two deputies piled out, very smart in pale blue shirts, dark blue pants, and trooper hats. They were big, young and ruddy, creaking with equipment.

“Hey, Miz Jane!” one of them said.

“Why, hello, Harvey!”

“Now just who is this here, Miz Jane?”

“You know him! This is Frederick Van Harn.”

Harvey stared. “You’ve got to be kidding,” he said in an awed voice. “What in hell happened to him?”

“He got into fire ants,” I said, “and he’s allergic. He’s going into shock. Can you get a radio patch through to hospital emergency?”

“Yes, but-”

“You better get on it and tell them you’re heading in there wide open. Tell them it’s shock from insect bites. They’ll know what to have ready. I think it’s called anaphylactic shock.”

“But-”

Jane stepped closer to him and said, “Maybe you want to explain to my uncle Jake why you let Frederick die?”

That is one of the interesting things about power. Everybody who really has it seems to know exactly how to use it. The ones who pretend to have it make the wrong moves.

While he was on the radio, the other deputy and I lifted Freddy and put him in the back of the cruiser, on his back on the seat. The deputy said, “There’s supposed to be a body here?”

“There is.”

“Harv, I’ll stay here and look into what the call was about. You come back or have them send somebody, okay?”

Jane had gotten in the back and she was kneeling on the floor, holding Freddy’s hand. Harvey made a tight circle and went bucketing out of there. We heard him hooting his way down the highway toward the city.

The one left behind said, “Those far ants are mean.”

I inspected the bites on the backs of my hands and between the fingers. “They’re very convincing.”

He took out his notebook. “Who was it phoned in?”

“Me. Travis McGee.”

“My name is Simmons. Frank Simmons.” He almost started to shake hands and apparently decided it wasn’t professional.

“Have you been a deputy long?”

“Just over three weeks. Address, Mr. McGee?”

He wrote the ID information down, slowly and carefully. “Now where’d this dead body be?”

“Over there in that hole.”

“Is it a real old dead body? I mean dead long?”

“Only since last night.”

We walked to the hole. In a higher voice he said, “That there is a dead horse! You funnin‘ me? What’s that jeep doing down in there?”

“Frank, there’s a small hole I want you to look in, there by the front of the jeep.”

He went over and looked down into the smaller hole. There were some flies on the brown arm. He swayed slightly, then whirled and took two big steps and threw up. When he was finished he straightened up slowly and said, “That didn’t give me a damn bit of warning. It just come on me all at once.”

“It can happen that way.”

“This is my first one on duty. Jesus! Look, don’t tell Harv about my barfin‘, okay?”

“I’d have no reason to.”

“He rides me. He thinks I won’t make it. I’ll make it. Now, who discovered the, body? You or Miz Schermer or Mr. Van Harn?”

“I discovered it.”

“Who put it there?”

“Mr. Van Harn.”

“The hell you say!” He bent and slapped at his ankles. “Far ants all over the place. Let’s get out of this here hole. You think there’s a water tap around here anyplace?”

“Over there at the stables.”

“Let’s us walk over there. Now, you got any idea who the deceased is?”

“I think it is a fellow named Jason Breen.”

“From Westway Harbor? With the beard?”

“Right.”

“I’ll be a son of a bitch,” he said softly and stopped long enough to write the name in his notebook.

Seventeen

CAPTAIN HARRY Max Scorf questioned me at the scene. By the time he was through they had Jason and his bike and his smashed guitar and his duffel bags out of the ground. I followed Scorf over and took a look at the body. The eyes glared up at the sky. The beard was chalked with limestone dust, giving me a hint of what he would have looked like as an old man, had the world given him a chance to live that long.

It had taken Mr. Smith a long time to notice that something was wrong. He came trotting across the field as they were loading Jason. “What are all these damn cars coming in and out? Is that fellow dead? He looks dead. Where is Mister Fred? Who’s in charge here anyways?”

Scorf settled Smith down with an admirable economy of word and gesture. Then he suggested that I drive him to the hospital in my rental car, which would give him a chance to go over my story with me once more.

We turned the vent windows so the hot air blew in. I drove slowly. I went through the play-by-play description of our battle again. He chuckled and I told him that it did not seem funny at the time, and it did not get any funnier with the passage of time. I told him that he could maybe think of a nice funny way to tell Uncle Jake that he was going to have to arrest Frederick Van Harn.

“While we’re both being funny, McGee, you can tell me how you happened to know that Breen was buried under that dead horse.”

“As I said, Captain, I was scrabbling in the dirt, trying to get a purchase, trying to crawl to the jeep so I could grab onto it and stand up. Which I finally did. But I uncovered part of Breen and the bike first.”

“It’s nothing you can prove, and I want to see just how Van Harn’s story matches yours. I’ll buy the story about how he killed Jason; because Jane Schermer heard that part of it too. And maybe the autopsy will verify. We know the autopsy verifies the way Birdsong died. But I would be a happier man if I could get a better way to tie Breen to that killing. He was on my list and looking better every day. But it isn’t solid.”

“I can make you happier. I think Cindy Birdsong will be willing to tell you without much urging that once upon a time after Cal beat her up, Breen went to her and said he could arrange to kill Birdsong very quietly for her. No one would suspect. She was horrified and told him to forget it. The same day I arrived; when Birdsong got ugly with me, he backhanded his wife in the office and knocked her cold. Jason Breen was the one who got to her and picked her off the floor.”

He turned in the seat and I could feel him looking at me. “That means that I can’t let you go back there alone. You could coach her. I want to come up on her cold with this.”

“Captain, what difference does it make anyway? You don’t have to build a case against Jason Breen. It doesn’t have to stand up in court. It gets Birdsong off your books.”

“I am a careful man, McGee. I like people, alive or dead, to get charged with what they did, not what somebody else did.”

When we got to the hospital, we were told that Frederick Van Harn was in Intensive Care. I followed Scorf up to the fourth floor. A young doctor was sitting in the small waiting room outside the closed double doors, talking quietly to Jane Schermer. Tears were running down her prematurely middle-aged face. The doctor came and talked to us in the corridor. He said they had tried, but they just couldn’t reverse the severe shock, not even with every radical treatment they could think of. He had responded slightly to massive injections of digitalis but had faded again until his heart had stopped and they had been unable to restart it. An intense allergic reaction, he said. Massive fluid imbalance. A pity, he said. Such a young man.

Harry Max Scorf looked indignant. One cannot ask questions of the dead. People were eluding him. He acted as if he thought it was unfair, a kind of trickery.

The murder and the poetic justice of the macabre death made the event a twenty-four-hour sensation. The wire services picked it up. It had the right words. Prominent attorney. Political hopeful. Possible blackmail. Involvement in drug smuggling suspected. Murdered man believed intimate of ex-model recently slain by bomb aboard houseboat.

But a news story is a fragile thing. It is like a hot air balloon. It needs a constant additive of more hot air in the form of new revelations, new actions, new suspicions. Without this the air cools, the big bag wrinkles, sighs, settles to the ground, and disappears.

Judge Jacob Schermer put the clamp on any flow of additives. He and his minions spread the word. They apparently had leverage to use on the local radio stations and the Bayside television station and the monopoly newspaper. They also had the City and County Police Department, the banks, the Chamber of Commerce, the service clubs, and every phase of local government.

No one knew a thing about anything. A blank stare was better than no comment. The reporters who had come in from Jacksonville, Miami, and Orlando went hurrying right back out of town toward the next story. People could barely remember what,Van Harn looked like or what he did. The usual eruption of sick, sad, violent events continued throughout the nation and the world, like an unending, eternal string of those little Chinese firecrackers called ladyfingers.

By Saturday morning, when Harry Max Scorf came to see us aboard the Flush, the news story was so dead it might as well have happened in some other year.

He sat in the cool lounge, took his spotless white hat off and wiped the sweatband with a bandanna, and placed it back on his head carefully, at exactly the right angle.

“My feeling,” he said to us, “is that I ought to waltz you people to and fro and bounce you up and down gentle-like until you let loose of something that makes sense out of where you fit in this picture. But it’s one of those feelings I don’t get to enjoy.”

“Orders?” I asked.

“The official position is that there’s no loose ends at all. Everything is solved and filed away. The Milligan woman was an accident. Jack Omaha lit out for places unknown. Jason kilt the Freeler girl with the bomb and kilt Birdsong with a wire. Then Freddy kilt Jason and the ants kilt him. And that’s all she wrote, boys. You two fellas know, just like I know, that it adds up to a crock of shit.”

“We really can’t help you at all,” Meyer said.

He sighed. “Anyway, one things looks better. There’s pretty fair grass coming in at a reasonable price. Somebody has knocked all them amateur wholesalers into a tight line. Some professional outfit has moved in like overnight and took over the whole county. Speaking purely as a cop, it’s a relief. It’s the amateurs screw everything up. With these pros, I know which way they’ll jump, and what will make them jump and what won’t. If they keep it tidy, we’ll lay back and let it roll. When customs picks up forty-two tons at a time on the Mexican border, it’s a signal that it is too big a business to hope to stop entire. If these pros start to get into any heavier action around here, then what we’ll do is make their operation so expensive it’ll take the cream off, and they’ll back off to what they’ve got right now. It’s the amateurs who drive you crazy. That Walter J. Demos would drive anybody crazy, the damned fool. Every time I try to talk to the son of a bitch, he starts crying. He sits down, wraps his arms around his bald head, and starts bellering. What I come by for is to say you can make everybody happy by going back where you come from, as soon as you can untie your ropes and start your engines.”

“This is a roust, Captain?” I asked.

“Not right at this minute, it isn’t. It starts to be a roust when I tell somebody you won’t move. Then that somebody goes to all the city and county departments that have got anything to do with boats and navigation. Then they come around here and check you and your boat for every little paragraph in city, county, state, and federal law going back to when Lincoln got shot. Like any boat operating in county waters has got to carry two brass kerosene lanterns at least fourteen inches high as spare equipment, one with green glass and one with red glass, and if you can’t show them to the inspector, it’s a hundred dollars a day and costs for every day of violation, whether you’re tied up or running. That’s when it gets to be a roust. Want any more?”

“When you want us to move out, Captain,” I said, “you just give the word and we’ll move. You’ve convinced us.”

He looked puzzled. “I thought I’d just given you the word.”

Meyer cleared his throat arid said, “I suppose you could change that official position you described if you could come up with something new?”

Scorf frowned. “It would have to be hard evidence. Very hard. I told you, people want this all forgot. Right now. If anything gets stirred up and it comes to nothing, I am retired with no pension.”

“Sometimes you can’t help thinking,” I said.

“About what?”

Meyer said, “We did a lot of thinking and talking last night, Captain. We decided to check just a little bit further and then bring it to you. But you’ve rushed us. It’s still all theory.”

“Theory,” he said, and seemed to be looking around for a place to spit.

I said, “Carrie Milligan’s share of the ill-gotten gains was a little better than a hundred thousand dollars.”

He snapped his head around and stared at me. “That sounds more like a fact than a theory, McGee.”

“She gave it to me to hold for her, and to give to her sister if anything happened to her.”

“We can come back to that,” Scorf said. “Where does it lead you?”

“We had four people in business together. Carrie Milligan, Freddy Van Harn, Jack Omaha, and Cal Birdsong. Carrie had her own kind of twisted integrity. She’d take no more than what was hers. But she was afraid somebody might take her share away from her. With Freddy supplying the plane and Jack supplying the boat, and probably the two of them supplying the financing, would Carrie have been in for a full quarter of the pie? I’d say no. I would say a top of twenty percent. Jack was the banker. He was keeping it in the safe at the business. Carrie was the bookkeeper and courier. New buys were financed out of that money in the safe. When they eventually decided to call it quits, they would have divided it up according to the formula and gone their separate ways. If a hundred thousand equals twenty percent, then there was four hundred thousand left in the safe after she took hers.”

“Four hundred thousand!” Scorf said slowly.

“Maybe more,” Meyer said. “It is hard to read the motives of a dead man you never met, but it struck us last night that Jack Omaha was setting himself up for total departure, deserting hearth and home, cashing in everything, even cleaning out the partnership. Maybe he left that money in the safe with the group funds, or maybe he hid it somewhere where he could get to it quickly.”

“So maybe he did take off,” Scorf said, “and took Van Harn’s money and Cal Birdsong’s money with, him.”

“Or, like I told you before, a bag of grass fell on his head and killed him, and that’s why Freddy told me that Jason saw the Christina come in without Jack Omaha.”

Scorf frowned. “So… Van Harn would want his money and he’d know where it was and who could give it to him.”

I said, “There’s a chance he would want to leave it right there for the time being. Jack and Carrie had the combination. Jack was dead and he could trust Carrie. It would be there when he needed it.”

“You mean it could still be there?” Scorf asked, frowning in puzzlement.

“Suppose,” Meyer said, “that Harry Hascomb walked in on Carrie when she was taking her share out of the pot that night of the day Jack Omaha died. He would know there was big money there, but no way to get to it. Harry was the outside man. Because Omaha and Carrie handled all the accounts and financial records, they would be the only ones who needed to know the combination of the safe. Insurance people like to ask that the number of people with access be kept to a minimum. Two is ideal. Because Harry saw her take the money, it would account for her being uneasy and leaving the money with Travis McGee in Lauderdale. Just in case.”

Scorf displayed the quickness of the cop mind by saying, “And after he found out that Omaha was planning to clean him out, and maybe guessed from the Milligan woman’s reactions that Omaha was already dead, the simplest way into the safe would be to have the Milligan woman die by accident so he could call the safe company and have them drill it open. It would be the reasonable thing for him to do.”

I said, “We can assume Van Harn went there as soon as he heard of Carrie’s accident. All Harry would have to do is act totally blank about there being any money in the safe. Van Harn wouldn’t dare press it. Besides, Uncle Jake had already taken him out of his financial bind.”

Scorf sighed. “All theory. Pretty theory.”

“How about some fact?” Meyer asked him. “In the building supply and construction supply business, Hascomb either handled dynamite and caps and wire and batteries or knew how to get what he needed. He was the outside man, not the desk man, and apparently had some mechanical training or ability.”

“And,” I said, “Joanna Freeler told me she could retire, if she played it right.”

“Are you trying to say she could have known that Hascomb killed Carrie, and she would blackm-”

“No! It really shook her when I told her I thought Carrie had been pushed in front of that truck. I think Carrie told Joanna there was a bundle of money in the office safe. They were the only two girls working in that office. And that would give her some leverage to use on Harry Hascomb. That could have been her retirement. If she played it right.”

“She didn’t play it right,” Scorf said.

Meyer said, “We decided last night that if Harry had asked Joanna for a date she would have accepted. They’d had an intimate relationship for several years. Then, if he couldn’t keep the date, he could have left off a consolation prize, a box of wine and cheese.”

“Loud wine and cheese,” Scorf said. He got up and roamed the lounge. He stopped and looked around. “This place was one damn mess when I checked it out. Sickened me. Dead girls get to me. A bomb is a cruel and ugly thing. Any kind of death is cruel and ugly, I guess. Except as a merciful end to pain. The worst are bombs and fire and knives. Look, I know about girls in offices. Jack Omaha and the Milligan woman were the two supposed to have the combination. Bet you a white hat Joanna Freeler knew it too, or knew where Miz Milligan had it wrote down. Know where every damn person in America writes down the combination to a safe? They write it on tape and stick it to the backside or underside of the top middle desk drawer. Half the safe jobs in the country are easy because everybody knows where to look for the combination.”

“We don’t want to start the voyage home just yet,” I said.

“Whatever you’ve given me, I can handle,” he said. “It’s all theory. If Joanna let it be known to Hascomb that she accepted the date so they could have a little chat about how the Milligan woman died, she set herself up with wine and cheese.”

“If we worked it out right,” Meyer said, “it would be… gratifying if we could be present when you interview Mr. Hascomb.”

Scorf looked bleakly at him. “Gratifying, eh?”

“So few things in life work out neatly, Captain Scorf, it would be reassuring to be in on one that does.”

“And you think that this whole mess is neat?”

Meyer looked troubled. “Not in the usual sense of the word.”

Scorf thought it over. “‘It’s hardly one damn thing to go on. I don’t want a committee, for God’s sake. McGee, you can come along with me and watch me mess it up. Meyer, you better stay right here and get this thing ready to move on out into the channel. My orders are clear. I have to get you started on your way. And we’ll be back soon.”

I had expected Scorf to sit bolt upright behind the wheel of the dark blue unmarked Cougar and fumble it along at a stilted thirty-five. Instead, after he had belted himself in, he tipped his white hat forward to his eyebrows, lounged back into the corner of the driver’s seat, put his fingertips on the wheel, and slid through heavy traffic like an oiled eel. He moved to where the holes were, moving the oncoming traffic over, and was able to avoid accelerations, decelerations, and the use of the brakes. He had looked too underprivileged to be an expert, but he was, indubitably. And I said so.

With mirthless smile he said, “I wasted a lot of time and money, ramming stocks around the dirt circuits. I felt easy riding with you the other day. Except you’re not good on picking lanes at the lights.”

“Is there a secret I don’t know?”

“Always haul in behind local plates on older cars with kids driving and crowd them a little so they’ll pile on out of your way. Haul in behind local delivery trucks. On three lanes run the middle one, and swing to the curb lane when you’re going to miss the light. A man turning is out of your way fast.”

“Where are we going?”

“Pineview Lakes Estates. Twenty-one Loblolly Lane.”

It was low land, five miles out. The developers had used the fill from the dug lakes to lift the ranch-type homes out of the swamp. It was eleven in the morning when we pulled into the river-pebble driveway of number 21, a long low cypress house with a shake roof out of some kind of fireproof imitation of cedar. It was stained pale silver and had faded blue blinds by the windows, the kind that are fixed in place and never cover the windows.

Two tanned skinny boys were working on a stripped VW with wide oversized tires. They gave us a sidelong glance and no further acknowledgment of our existence, even when we stood beside the VW.

“Either of you a Hascomb?” Scorf asked.

“Me,” the skinnier one said.

“Your daddy around?”

“No.”

“Miz Hascomb?”

“No.”

“If it wouldn’t strain your brain, sonny, maybe you could break down and tell me where I could find your daddy.”

The boy straightened up and stared at him in bleak silence. “What’s this shit about brain strain, gramps?”

“I am Captain Harry Max Scorf, and I am tired of the hard-guy act from young trash. I get cooperation from you, and I get manners from you, and I get respect from you, sonny, or you go downtown for obstructing a police officer in his line of duty.”

The bleak stare did not change. “Oh, goodness me,” the boy said in a flat voice. “I did not for one moment realize. Tsk tsk. From what I overheard I believe you will find my dear father down at his place of business, Superior Building Supplies, at Junction Park. Actually it is no longer his place of business because the silly shit has lost it because he didn’t know how to run it, and his partner screwed him and ran with the cash. But Cowboy Harry is just as bigmouth as ever. He is down there because some pigeon from Port Fierce wants to buy the junk that didn’t get cleared out in the clearance sale. And now if you will give me your gracious permission to get back to work here.”

Scorf smiled sadly and shook his head. “Thank you kindly, sonny. I am sure we will meet professionally one day.”

“You can count on it,” the boy said.

As we drove out Scorf said, “What makes so many of them so damned angry at everything lately?”

“It’s a new preservative they put in the fried meat sold at drive-ins.”

“As good an answer as any.”

There was one car behind Superior Building Supplies, a recent-model Ford wagon with local plates, dinged and dusty, with a cracked window and a soft tire. One of the big sliding doors that opened onto the loading dock was ajar about three feet. We climbed onto the dock and went into the shadowy echoing areas of the empty warehouse. The air conditioning was off.

“Hascomb?” Scorf shouted.

“Yo! Who is it?”

Harry came out of the shadows, a pair of pliers in his hand. He peered and said, “Oh, hey, Harry Max! You were against the light.” He looked at me. “What was your name, friend?”

“McGee.”

Hascomb was stripped to the waist, the sweat rolling off his soft torso. His cowhand pants, cinched with a wide belt, were sweat-dark around the waistline. His abundant red-brown hair was carefully coiffed and sprayed into mod position, covering his ears. His boot heels clicked on the cement floor.

“You caught me, Harry Max,” Hascomb said. “What I’m doing, I’m taking off the big junction box over there. I don’t rightly know if it’s mine or the owner’s, so in case of doubt I’m taking it. The fellow from Port Fierce offered twenty bucks, and that is twenty bucks I wouldn’t otherwise have. He took a lot of the small stuff and he’s sending a bigger truck back for the desks, safe, chairs, and those two generators over there. And that cleans me out.”

“Sorry to hear it,” Scorf said.

Hascomb sighed and shrugged. “Hard times and a thief for a partner.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I think we’ll head out to Wyoming. Out to the mines. I can fix any damn thing that’s got moving parts. New start. The equity in the house will give us stake. Were you boys looking for me?”

I wondered how Scorf would approach it. Suspicion without proof is a dangerous thing and a clumsy thing.

Scorf said, “Harry, I hope you won’t take this wrong, I surely do. In my line of work I have to do a lot of fool things I don’t believe in, but I guess every line of work is the same. Anyways, I guess your prints are on file from army duty, but it would take a time to get them out of Washington or wherever the hell they keep them, and so they said to me, Captain, you go bring Harry Hascomb in voluntary and take his prints. You won’t put up a fuss, will you?”

“Me? No. Hell, no. I won’t put up a fuss, but what in the world is the point of it, Harry Max?”

“Maybe I shouldn’t even tell you this, but we’ve known each other a long time. Maybe you know or don’t know, a fragment of a print isn’t worth a damn. This piece they got looks like it is one half of the pad of the third finger right hand.”

“A print on what?”

Scorf scuffed at the cement floor. He shook his head. “Now you’ve got to understand how they think, Harry. It certainly wasn’t exactly a big secret around the town that you and Joanna Freeler had a lot more than a business relationship. And lovers can have quarrels. Anyway-and don’t get sore-the bomb experts, they recovered a piece of battery casing about so big, and they used some kind of chemical treatment to bring out the fragment of the print enough to photograph it. Once they compare yours, then you’re off the list for keeps, Harry. It’s something I plain have to do, and I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”

Harry Hascomb whacked the smaller man on the shoulder. “Chrissake, Harry Max. Don’t feel sorry. I know when a man has a job to do, he has to do it. Right? You want me to go in right now? Let me get my shirt.”

I noticed that Harry Max Scorf drifted along behind Hascomb as the man got his shirt, and I noticed that Scorf’s heavy, drab suit was unbuttoned, and I could guess at the presence of the belly gun clipped to the waistband of his trousers.

Hascomb shouldered into his ranch shirt and tucked it in and buttoned it as we walked out. He slid the big door shut and snapped the heavy padlock on the hasp and smiled and said, “Have to finish stealing that box later.” We were parked beside the Ford wagon, just to the right of it. Hascomb started to get into the Cougar and then he said, slapping his jacket. “Just a second, Harry Max. Let me get my other pack of cigarettes.”

He leaned into the wagon and thumbed the button that dropped the door of the glove compartment. He was very good. Scorf was standing outside the open door of the two-door Cougar, holding the driver’s seat tilted forward so that Hascomb could climb into the back. I was opposite the hood, walking toward the door on, the passenger side.

Hascomb snatched an ancient weapon out of his glove compartment. Officers have smuggled them home from the last five wars. The Colt.45 automatic. I caught a glimpse of it as he turned and fired at Scorf at point-blank range.

Scorf got his left hand up to ward off the big slow slug. He was reaching for the belly gun with his right hand. The big slug went through the palm of his left hand and hit the shelf of brow over the left eye. The resistance of the thick ridge of bone snapped his head back and broke his neck. The white hat went sailing over the hood of the car. The relentless chunk of lead plowed through the brain tissues and took off a hunk of the back of the skull as big as an apple. It was all very immediate and messy. It splattered blood and tissue over the front half of the Cougar. I saw it all in slow motion. It was in the hard and vivid light of the hour before noon. It was a day of almost stagnant air. The wind had been moving steadily from north to south, bringing to Florida’s east coast all the stained and corrosive crud of Birmingham and the rest of the industrial South. The horizons were whiskey-stained, and the sky above was a pallid saffron instead of blue. The bleared sun made harsh studio lighting on the parking lot scene. And Harry Hascomb saw Captain Scorf’s horrid death under the dreadful lemon sky.

Scorf lay poised halfway across the dark blue hood. Meyer had been so right about the vivid reality of death. Harry Hascomb’s face was absolutely slack, his eyes blank and dulled. He had expected to see the picture of the dead grackle. Here was the genuine article, smashed, leaking, stinking, and so sickeningly vivid that it immobilized him, froze him in an incredulous horror. I was caught on tiptoe for an instant, knowing that we were in a deserted parking lot in a deserted area, knowing that I could not expect any Saturday noon curiosity-seekers.