The Scarlet Ruse

by John D. MacDonald

  Cathy left us alone and closed the door. He said, "The absolutely worst part of it, believe me, is to have nobody to tell."

  Nothing could have stopped him telling me. Davis had come aboard the Keynes at one in the morning, roused Meyer, and driven him down to Miami, where they picked up Sprenger and drove on down to Regal Marine.

  Sprenger and Meyer had waited near the public boat ramp while Davis drove to Regal and eventually arrived with the rental boat. Sprenger carried an elegant leather case, the shape of a gigantic dispatch case.

  It was custom fitted for two rifles, two scopes, ammunition, slings, cleaning equipment. Meyer managed to delay their arrival at No Name by routing them across flats where they could not risk planing speed.

  Sprenger had left Davis with Meyer in the boat behind the nearby island.

  He waded to the south end of the island and waited there a long time. He had fired one shot and then, at varied intervals, three series of six shots each. He came back to the boat and had Davis tie Meyer's hand behind him, with one arm through the steering wheel. They left him alone.

  "Distant firecrackers," Meyer said.

  "And then nothing.

  One hell of a lot of nothing. Except heat. And bugs. Finally I wormed around and stood up on the seat and got my fanny on the edge of the steering wheel. I bounced on it three times, and on the third time it broke off. I got out of the boat and found a mangrove stub covered with barnacles and backed into it and rubbed until I frayed the rope in two.

  And lost some skin. There was an old gaff in the boat. I took it along.

  Where do ihose bluebottle flies come from? How do they know? They were so thick on Davis's face, I couldn't tell who he was until I scared them off.

  And the lounge was full of them. I thought you were dead.

  He was lying across you. Then I wondered why you didn't have your share of flies. I put my ear next to your mouth and felt the exhalation. So I lifted him off you."

  "Thanks."

  "Don't mention it. I wasn't tracking well. I didn't know where to start.

  I should have got on the horn and called a Coast Guard chopper in. I never even thought of it. Everybody... everybody was so damned dead!

  You know?

  It makes it hard to think."

  "What killed him?"

  "Five little holes in his chest, right through his black shirt.

  Centered, but just a shade to the right, I think. You could have covered them all with a playing card. Fantastic."

  "He shot her. Where did he hit her?"

  "I don't know. There was a hole right at the base of her skull, big as half an English walnut."

  That fitted the way she had gone down. Her mouth had been sagging open.

  So that was where the little slug had gone, into the back of her throat and on out.

  "I got the boat and had a hell of a job getting the steering wheel back on. I never did. I had to push down on it to turn it. I got you into the boat. I couldn't go back to Regal Marine. I hadn't rented it. I'd taken time out to pull Davis inside and close everything I could and shove clothes into the broken ports and spray those damned hungry flies. I remembered Cathy and figured I could find this place from the Candle Key water tower. So I told her "

  "She picked it up from there.

  I know about Ramirez and Homestead. But what did you do then?"

  "Okay, I had the feeling then that you were going to live. But I couldn't think of any good way to explain what had gone on. I didn't even know what had happened. So on the way back from Homestead, I stopped at Regal Marine. They weren't worried about their boat, not with Davis's car parked in their lot. I told them I was a friend of Davis's, and we'd decided to keep the boat longer. I gave them two hundred dollars and said he was having good luck further down the Keys and sent me up to get his car. I showed them his car keys. I said it might be another few days. I went out and told Cathy not to wait. I drove Davis's car to Miami and left it in a shopping center lot with the windows down and the keys in it. I took a bus to Homestead to see how you were and took another bus down to Candle Key. It was too late to do anything. I slept in this room, and in the morning I took the rental boat back out there. I tied a towel around my face. I had a little bottle with gasoline in it. It paralyzes the sense of smell.

  Every time it started to get through to me, I'd put a little on the towel. Even so, I wasted a lot of time running for the rail."

  "Jesus, Meyer!"

  "By then it was self-preservation. Where would I fit if it all broke open? I'd fit in a cell somewhere. I kept thinking it was what you'd do.

  It was a Mcgee solution. But not my kind of thing. I wrapped them in that blue canvas you had, that roll of it. I sewed them In with that curved needle and that waxed twine. I wired that big rifle case of Sprenger's to his ankles. After he was in the rental boat.

  Bodies are heavy. I cried once, Sprenger was so heavy, and I thought I couldn't get him out of the lounge even.

  Not tears of sadness. Tears of rage. I kicked him. That's a bad reaction. Were you saving that thirty feet of chain for something special, with the big links, this big? I wrapped it around and around her waist and wired it. It won't come off."

  His voice was too thin and fast and high, and his eyes were strange.

  "Meyer, Meyer."

  "The thing I used for the third one, Davis, you'd described him, the moustache, Joe Namath haircut, I don't know what it was, down in the aft bilge, heavy, like the end of an iron cage. Then when they were in the boat, I covered them with that big net, that gill net. I put two rods in the rod holders."

  "Take it easy."

  "I drank some of your gin. Out of a cup. Warm. A whole cup. I gagged and gagged, but I kept it down. Then I went across and under a highway bridge, and I went outside. I don't even know what bridge. I wanted it to be calm out there, but it wasn't. Whitecaps. I had to throttle way down, and it took forever to get out to where the Keys were just a line on the horizon. What do you say when you dump over three people in blue bags? My head is full of things. I couldn't find anything I wanted inside my head. Then I remembered something. I looked it up later. From the Book of Mormon, the Book of Ether, chapter three."

  "And the Lord said, For behold, ye shall be as a whale in the midst of the sea; for the mountain waves shall dash upon you. Nevertheless, I will bring you up again out of the depths of the sea; for the winds have gone forth out of my mouth, and also the rains and the floods have I sent forth. And behold, I prepare you against these things; for ye cannot cross this great deep save I prepare you against the waves of the sea, and the winds which have gone forth, and the floods which shall come. Therefore what will you that I should prepare for you that ye may have light when ye are swallowed up in the depths of the sea?"

  Why did I remember that? I wish I knew.

  "So I said amen and tipped them over the rail, and they went down. That cage thing caught in the net, and it took it along too. I had some headway, and the steering was stiff, so it held into the wind until the last and it started turning. When I got to the wheel, the wheel came off and before I could get it back, a wave came in and filled it half-full.

  The engine started missing, and I turned it toward land and opened it up. It drained the water out. I bit my tongue. I lost my lucky hat."

  "The Lion Country hat?"

  He tried to laugh, but his face twisted and broke, and he put his head down into his hands and sobbed. It is the gentle people who get torn up.

  They can cope. They can keep handling the horrors long after the rest of us fade out. But it marks them more deeply, more las tingly This was role reversal at its most bitter. I knew what he had to have, and I wondered for a moment at my own hesitation.

  Life seems to be a series of attempts to break out of old patterns.

  Sometimes you can. I reached and touched him on the shoulder.

  "You did well," I said.

  "You really did a hell of a job.

  You did exactly what you had to d
o. It was the right choice."

  So he straightened up, dabbed his eyes, blew his nose, smiled in a wan way. In a level, unemotional voice he told me the rest of it. There had been time to intercept the letters he'd left with Jenny Thurston, but he knew I hadn't signed them. So let them go. Let the people look for Sprenger and Mary Alice. Take the chance that there were only five people who knew Mary Alice had left via Lauderdale aboard the Flush, and three of them were dead.

  He had returned the rental boat, paying for the broken wheel, and had used Cathy's old skiff to get out to No Name, day after day, cleaning up the evidence of violence, repairing the places where bullets had struck.

  He got the generator and the air-conditioning operational. He threw out the perishables, which had spoiled in the heat. He did not get rid of Mary Alice's belongings until he had found the treasure in the hidey hole he himself had invented. He had floated the Munequita the hard way, with a hand pump. He had taken the lights off her, the fittings that had been damaged by Sprenger's sniper fire, deep-sixed them, bought replacements, and with Davie Kerr's help, rewired them.

  They towed the Munequita to Candle Key, to a small marina with a good mechanic. The engines had been in the salt water too long. He had pulled them, rebuilt one, was nearly finished with the other. On an especially high tide they had left Christine, Cathy's sister, to watch me, and Cathy, Davie, and Meyer had gone out and brought the Flush back and tied it up at the dock near the old house. He and Davie and Cathy had done a lot of work on it.

  I asked him about Hirsh and the murder investigation.

  He shrugged.

  "The guilty flee when no man pursueth The law leaned on my old friend, but he had nothing to say. Yes, he had an investment arrangement with a Mr. Sprenger, who was in the bond business. The amount invested was a matter between the two of them. If Mr. Sprenger was dissatisfied, the money would be returned.

  Hirsh had to go to the bank when the tax people opened the box and took what was in it. He had to sign a release saying the contents were Sprenger's. He gathered from the tax people that every single piece of paper relating to Sprenger's personal affairs had disappeared along with Sprenger. When I gave him those three brown envelopes and he opened them and saw what they were, he asked me three times how I came to have them.

  I told him if he asked me once more, our friendship was over. He asked me what he was to do with them. I said that because, according to his own explanation, they were not sufficiently unique to be traceable as individual items, they should go back into stock. He said they would go into his box at the bank, in case somebody should come to claim them. He was eighty years old when I got there. When I left, he was fifty, going on forty-nine. He and Miss. Moojah are running it alone."

  "Didn't Goodbread come looking for me?"

  "Oh yes. And Captain Lamarr. They came down here together, the two of them, after you were out of the hospital. They went to the hospital too.

  They were sorry you were so badly hurt. I think I had to tell them six times how you got hurt. When they talked to Ramirez, he remembered picking mangrove bark and splinters out of your face. It was a big help to have him remember that. There was a big fuss about the murder.

  General Lawson made a thirty-second television spot, offering a hundred thousand dollars for information leading to the whereabouts of Mrs. Mcdermit and/or Mr. Sprenger. It's quieted down. It was a long time ago.

  The universe continues to unfold."

  It was after midnight. We were both exhausted. He stayed over, sleeping aboard the Flush. When I saw him at midmorning, he showed me what he had forgotten to show me the night before. He had a little folding viewer in his pocket, and he unfolded it and put a 35mm slide in it. I turned it toward the segment of sky in the top corner of my window. It was Hirsh's photographic handiwork. It was the same lady I had seen in another world. In that world she had been in profile. On these three stamps, a strip of them without the little holes to tear them apart, she was turned and looking out at me. What had she said before?

  "Oh no, not you again!" She was in a different color this time, curiously close to the same color as that hat Mary Alice said Sprenger would recognize.

  The lady in the stamp had a small, sulky, oddly erotic mouth and an expression of arrogant challenge.

  "Who is she?" I asked.

  "A gift from Hirsh to you. A personal, private gift."

  "I mean, did the lady have a name?"

  "Are you serious? Her name was Queen Victoria!"

  "Pardon me all to hell, Queen."

  "Here is the certificate of authenticity from the Royal Society. It's an unlisted error, a double error, the wrong color and printed on both sides."

  I looked at the certificate. New Zealand Number 1, a horizontal strip of three, printed in scarlet vermilion instead of dull carmine. Recess printed. Fainter impression in same colour on reverse. Unlisted.

  Unique. Authentic.

  "What's it worth?"

  "Ten years ago an appraiser from Stanley Gibbons said forty thousand dollars. Hirsh says if you want currency, there is an auction coming up where it should be entered. I forget the details. For a while I thought you really needed the money."

  "You think I don't? I'm down to "

  "I know, I know. I was going to buy you an apartment near Bahia Mar. A legal address. Near where your roots are. We've both been there too long to get rousted now by politicians."

  "Something changed your mind? You want to move away?"

  "No. We had it wrong. You know how rumors are around Bahia Mar. It affects the squatters, that new ordinance. But it doesn't affect commercial marinas. It doesn't affect us. There's been a celebration ever since Irv set us straight."

  "The Flush is at a good anchorage right here, Meyer." He looked very thoughtful.

  "I know. A man in your condition shouldn't make too many decisions, maybe.

  Should I put Hirsh's gift in the auction?"

  "I... I think I'll hang onto it for a while."

  "That means you'll have to find a salvage job pretty soon, doesn't it?"

  I sensed the very first small tingle of anticipation, very faint, buried very deep. But authentic.

  "I Just might," I said.

  "I just might."

  There came a cold day in January, cold and fiercely bright, when I put on the sweater and wool pants she had brought -me from a clothes locker aboard The Busted Flush, and I went downstairs with her and out through the wind. I was lighter than I had been since the operations long ago on my leg. I felt as if I was made of cornflakes, stale rubber bands, and old gnawed bones. I had come out of an endless old movie into arctic glare.

  We went out to the Flush. She wanted to get me inside, out of the wind, but I wasn't ready for that. I climbed the steep ladder way to the sun deck with convalescent care, crossed to the starboard rail, and stood looking out across the steel-gray bay under the hard blue sky.

  The old houseboat did not welcome me. It was not my boat. It had a problem in its guts, blood and stillness and bluebottle flies.

  Cathy sensed something wrong and put her hand over mine where I grasped the rail. Something in her touch told me to remember the sweetness. I turned and looked down into those brown eyes, into that strange mix of humility and knowingness and pride.

  I had to bend nearer to hear her as the wind tore at her words.

  "Like before," she said.

  "Like it was if that's what you want, what you need, when you're ready.

  I could say it didn't matter to me, I'd be lying." She lifted her chin a little.

  "But either way, it wouldn't be no obligation to you, Travis."

  "Cathy, I "

  "Don't say about it now. Wait until you're up to it."

  She heard her own words and looked startled and then blushed a marvelous pink and hid her face against my sweatered shoulder. It took her a few seconds before she could join my laughter. And right then I felt the deck change under my feet. The Flush seemed to shrug off her grisly preoccupatio
n and look around and recognize me.

  She made us welcome. She had been as far away as I had, perhaps.

  Cathy and I went below and had mugs of hot tea with cinnamon, and then she walked me back to the old house.

  Over the sound of the afternoon game on her television set, I could hear her out in the kitchen, singing as she fixed dinner, as far off key as she used to be, the last time I had lived here on Candle Key.