A Deadly Shade of Gold

by John D. MacDonald

  I went and sat in my old car of vulgar blue, and remembered the lovely, shy, mischievous face of Teresa, the night swim in a moonlight sea, the talk and the singing. I remembered her coming out of the sea in moonlight, combing her soaked hair back with her fingers, the phosphorescence twinkling around the wading thrust of her white thighs, seeing me waiting there, stopping, shielding herself for a moment with hands and arms, then lifting her chin and coming on toward me, boldly, making a single sound, deep in her throat, like a laugh. She loved her tropic sea and it had killed her dead, in the hot blazing days of August.

  That's why they can never make it. They kill off the good ones. They gut their dreamers. Their drab stone discipline is a celebration of mediocrity. If we can restrain ourselves from killing off our own rebels, our doubters and dreamers, all in the name of making ourselves strong, then we can prevail. But if we use their methods, then any victory will be but the victory of one iron symbol over another, and mankind will have lost the battle whichever way it goes.

  I drove north at a sedate pace, measuring the new reality of Carlos Menterez y Cruzada, collector of gold, of women, and of many kinds of pills. He seemed the type who would have a special talent for survival. Bombs kill their chauffeurs. They catch the last flights out. They change their money in the right places at a favorable rate the day before the currency collapses.

  I was very tired. I went back to Bahia Mar. As I approached the Busted Flush, I heard sweet and cautious singing, and I found that it was coming from my topside sun deck. I stepped over the chain, went aboard, and climbed the ladderway. In the starlight and the random lights of the yacht basin, I saw Meyer with four of the little seasonal girls, all bundled in sweaters, sitting on the deck in a close circle, singing one of the old English rounds Meyer liked to teach them. They were always about maidens fair, deadly knaves, lonely death in the castle tower.

  They ended on a sweet synchronous chord of girl voices and Meyer congratulated them extravagantly. "Excuse the invasion, my boy," Meyer said. "Junior here has a dull young man prowling around trying to create scenes. We're in hiding. This group is in very good voice. Lassies, if any of you do not know him, this is the crude fellow who owns the boat. His name is McGee. Excuse me a moment. Practice that last one again, please."

  He took me over to a far corner of the sun deck. Behind us, the girl voices were heartbreakingly sweet and clear.

  "A man named Branks was here, looking for you, Travis. He had some questions."

  "Such as?"

  "Your habits, your livelihood. Rather a clever fellow, I suspect. He leaps on any nuance, any mild hesitation."

  "What kind of billing did you give me?"

  "Why should I lie to him? I said you are a beach bum, a reasonably pleasant companion, that you seem to make a living from small speculative ventures, that you seem to enjoy practically anything, in moderation, in accord with your somewhat quaint standards of behavior."

  "You two had quite a chat."

  "It took a philosophical turn, the role of man in modern society, the decay of morals, the new permissiveness, group standards versus inner values. He said he would try to get in touch tomorrow."

  "Did he seem hostile?"

  "Not at all. Not at all. Quite amiable, and curious. I can depart with my little flock now, or, if you feel festive, we can all go below, for an hour of song and discussion."

  "I don't feel that festive."

  "Can I offer you a flower from my little garden? The one facing us, the alto, with the perfectly straight strawberry blonde hair?"

  "Meyer, this is not like you!"

  "She is more than old enough to vote, and she met you the other day and was curious about you, and she is in a horrid emotional state, on the verge of scampering off to commit untidy indiscretions with bad companions. Better a devil I know than several she doesn't know. I cannot keep her in my little gaggle of sweet geese much longer. She is disaster prone, compelled by a bruised heart. Otherwise... I would not step so far out of character."

  I looked and saw the girl's eyes intently watching me, the mouth making the round tones of the song, and was tempted. But any man who thinks of himself as therapy should not have a license to practice. If it could be guaranteed that she would remain a thing, a pleasure item, a recreation device-as recommended by Playboy, then the diversion would be so meaningless as to make the decision easy. But she would insist on being a person, a special soul hunting its own special agonies, and we would try to make those marks upon each other which prove that nothing is ever casual. I was wearing all the old marks I could handle, never, having been quite able to play the recreation game, not for itself alone. So let her go find her own untidiness, her own bad companions, as I had done in my own seeking way. Any bandage presupposes a wound, and in these brave, hearty days there are more than enough wounds to go around. So take your strawberry hair elsewhere, dear. McGee's Clinic is closed for repairs.

  "No thanks, Meyer."

  "Too bad. She is in need of a rare additive. Kindness. Scientific tests show that with that special additive-KDS we call it-any woman fresh out of the show room, right out of dealer stock, will travel an additional eight hundred and seventy-one yards before stalling."

  He repaired a shaky lyric, coached them in a chord, then trooped his little flock off and away, the girl voices calling their goodnights. One goodnight in a sad alto echoed in an empty corridor in my mind, and after I had at last fallen asleep in the vast custom bed in the master stateroom, I stood on a dream bridge and looked down and saw an open boat drift under the bridge on the black tide, full of a lost tumble of dead maidens, all with strawberry blonde hair, wide marbled eyes accusing.

  Ken Branks, in yellow knit shirt, shapeless felt hat and racetrack tweeds, sat in my lounge and took cautious sips from the steaming mug of coffee and made small talk and watched me with clever eyes in a supremely ordinary face.

  Finally he said, "You've been questioned a few times, McGee. Here and in Miami."

  "I haven't been charged with anything."

  "I know. But you seem to get a piece of the action on little things here and there. It interests me."

  "Why?"

  "Sam Taggart's death interests me too. It didn't check out the way I thought it would. We worked all the bars and came up with nothing. You know, I thought it was an amateur hacking, some guy working blind in the dark, drunk maybe, chopping at him, finally getting him."

  "Wasn't it like that?"

  "I thought maybe the murder weapon could have been ditched behind those cabins, somewhere in all those junked automobiles, so I had a couple people check it over. They found it. A brand new dollar-nineteen carving knife. Fifty supermarkets in the area carry that brand. There was some other stuff with it. One brand new cheap plastic raincoat, extra large. One brand new pair of rubber gloves. One set of those pliofilm things that fit over shoes. The stuff was bundled up, shoved into a car trunk, one with a sprung lid. Except for the blood, which is a match for Taggart's, the lab can't get a thing off that stuff. What does that all mean to you?"

  "Somebody expected to get bloody."

  "Somebody didn't like Taggart. They wanted it to last. They were good with a knife and they made it last. They wanted him to know he was getting it. Look at it that way, and study the wounds, and it was a professional job. Somebody played with him, and then finished him off. We traced Taggart's car. It was bought for cash off a San Diego lot nearly two weeks ago."

  "What do you want to ask me?"

  "Who could take that much of a dislike to him?"

  "He's been gone three years. He never wrote."

  Branks scowled at his coffee. "You saw him that afternoon. You'd take an extra large size. Maybe he came back to find out if you were still sore at him. Maybe you got back to your boat minutes before Nora Gardino arrived there."

  "If you could sell yourself that idea, you wouldn't be trying it on me."

  His smile was wry. "You're so right. We're understaffed, McGee. We haven't got time to
futz around with something that gets too cute."

  "A man would get an extra large size to cover more of himself."

  "Sure. I don't want pressure. I don't want newspapers howling about a mystery slaying. So I'm trying to keep it on the basis of a brawl, a vagrant, a dirty little unimportant killing. No release on the blood-proof clothing. I've asked California if they've got anything at all... I've checked him out three years ago here, and I don't find anything special. He had a job. He worked at it. He took off. What did the two ofyou talk about that day?"

  "People we'd both known, where are they, how are they. Do you remember this and that. He said he was back for good, and he borrowed forty dollars."

  "He was right about that. He's back for good. A man doesn't get burned that black in any kind of job except on boats."

  "I got the idea that's what he'd been doing."

  "Out of California?"

  "Or Mexico. I told you before he said he'd spent some time in Mexico."

  "You take a man on boats, and an international border, and you can come up with reasons for somebody getting killed. Smuggling. Maybe he was a courier, and he kept the merchandise and ran with it."

  "He had to borrow forty dollars."

  "Maybe he had something he could change into money. And somebody came after him and took it back. Maybe he tried to make a deal."

  "Aren't you reaching pretty far?"

  "Sure. Maybe there were two of them, and he didn't say anything to you about the other party."

  "Maybe they couldn't agree on how to split it up. Maybe it was woman trouble, and the husband followed him. I can reach in a lot of directions, McGee. It doesn't cost anything: It's just that something like that, a man carefully dressing up to do bloody work, it bothers me. If he took that much care, he took a lot of other kinds of care too. I don't think my chances of unraveling it from here are very good. I can't believe anybody was waiting here three years to do that to him. They came with him or followed him, or agreed to meet him here. That's what my instinct says."

  "I'd have to agree."

  All the questions were about as welcome as a diagnosis of Hansen's Disease. He was noodling. Good cops have that trait and talent. The mediocre ones pick a theory that pleases them and try to make the facts fit it, one way or another. The good ones keep dropping a little bit at a time, so that you have no way of knowing how much or how little they know, and then they watch how much effort you make to cover yourself regarding information you think they might know.

  The best solution is to give them a little bit, particularly when you suspect they might already have it.

  "I may have misled you about one thing, but I don't think it's too pertinent," I said.

  "Did you now?"

  "Maybe I understated the relationship between Nora Gardino and Taggart. I told you she was fond of him. I guess it was a little more than that. And I guess Sam had some business he wanted to take care of before he saw her again, because he told me to tell her he wasn't going to be in town until the next day, Saturday. I guess you could say they were in love with each other."

  "And he went away for three years? Were they in touch?"

  "No. It was a misunderstanding."

  "So if this was a lover's reunion, what the hell were you doing there, McGee?"

  "She didn't know where he was staying."

  "So what made her think you'd know?"

  "Well... I'd told her he was due back in town."

  "Now how would you have known that?"

  "He phoned me Thursday from Waycross, Georgia, to ask me if she was so sore at him she never wanted to see him again. I said no."

  "Couldn't he wait to get here to find out?"

  "Maybe he wasn't even going to come here if I told him she was too angry or married, or moved away."

  "Okay, so why didn't you just tell her where she could find him?"

  "Sam wasn't in very good shape, and that was a crummy place he was staying. And I didn't want him to think I'd tipped her off that he'd come in Friday instead of Saturday. I thought it would give him a chance to pull himself together, and go out to the car. It wasn't much of a setting for a reunion, you see."

  "I can buy that. It ties up a few loose ends, McGee. Like the way she damned near passed out on Thursday night out at the Mile O'Beach."

  "That's when I told her he was coming back. Did you think that's when I told her somebody was going to kill him?"

  "The thought passed through my mind. I even wondered if last night in Miami you were trying to find the Cuban who did it."

  "You're pretty good."

  "I wondered if you went to New York to find out which Cuban to look for."

  "You make me very happy I leveled with you."

  "Did you?"

  "And I intend to keep right on leveling with you. Nora is still pretty shaky about this whole thing. We're old friends. She has a gal who can run the store. I think it would do her good to get her away from here for a while."

  He thought that over. "Mexico?"

  "It might be a nice change at that."

  "You are a brassy bastard, McGee. Don't push it too hard."

  "Listen to me. I did not kill him. Nora did not kill him. Neither she nor I have any idea who did kill him. We would both like to know. You have a limited budget and you have a limited jurisdiction. And a lot of curiosity. And some anger about the way it was done. We're angry too. What do you know that could be any help to us? I trade that for my confidential report to you about how it all comes out. If you don't want to play, you won't get a chance to listen."

  "My God, you are a brassy bastard! If there's anything that turns my stomach, friend, it is the amateur avenger sticking his civilian nose into a rough situation, muddying everything up."

  "I've seen it rough here and there, around and about."

  He thought it over. He leaned back and looked at the lounge, tilted his balding head and gave me an oblique glance. "Just what is it you do?"

  "I do favors for friends."

  "Did Taggart want you to do him a favor?"

  That damned instinct of his. "I don't know. Either he didn't get around to bringing it up, or he changed his mind."

  "Nobody gives me the same story on you, McGee."

  "I never exert myself unless I have to. A genuinely lazy man is always misunderstood."

  "l even heard that you won this barge in a crap game."

  "A poker game."

  He waited, and then gave a long sigh. "All right. Except for this little morsel, I would have taken you in, just for luck. I don't think it's going to do me much good to sit on it. A bartender made him from the picture. A highway bar a half mile south of here. He came in about quarter of nine. He made a call from the pay booth. He sat at the bar and nursed beers. At maybe quarter after he got a call on that phone. He seemed jittery. A half hour later a well-dressed man arrived, carrying a briefcase. Dark, medium height, maybe about thirty. They seemed to know each other. They went back to a booth. They had a long discussion. They left together, somewhere around eleven. This was a handy bartender. Observant. The well-dressed type did not drink. He kept his hat on. Dark suit, white shirt, dark tie. The bartender said they seemed to be dickering over something, making some kind of a deal, and they didn't seem very friendly about it."

  "It isn't very much."

  "It's something, but not very much. It's enough to take pressure off you. He called somewhere and left a number. Briefcase phoned him back and he told him where to come. When Taggart thought he had the deal made, he took Briefcase back to the cabin. Assume Taggart was selling something. Two cars. Briefcase followed him. They make the deal. Briefcase leaves.

  "He goes down the side road, parks by the car dump, puts on his blood suit, takes the knife and comes back, having cased the cabin. Maybe his orders were to make the deal, but rescind it good if Taggart gave him half a chance. Five dirty minutes used up in killing Taggart. Recover the money. Stash his costume in a junk car, drive away."

  "In a rental car? B
ack to the Miami airport?"

  He looked at me approvingly. "Maybe you're not a clown after all."

  "But you couldn't check it out?"

  "How many phone messages come in? How many cars are checked out? How many medium-sized, dark-haired guys, thirty years old fly in and out every day? Maybe it's an organization thing, and Briefcase is a local operator. It fades out into nothing, McGee. When it's professional, it always fades out into nothing, unless we get one hell of a break."