Cinnamon Skin

by John D. MacDonald

  “I understand her percentages stop now?” Meyer said.

  “You sound like you disapprove. You don’t understand the picture. I’m not running a farm team to train people for the seven sisters to snatch up. It’s all spelled out. She came in with her eyes open. The longer good people stay, the more they make. If they quit, their percentages go back into the pot. If they retire, they keep the percentages until they die, provided they have at least fifteen years in. In case of accidental death, there’s the insurance, and the percentages keep on going for the full calendar year following the year of death, payable to the heirs. So you’ll make out okay. Not to worry.”

  Meyer seemed to swell visibly. He said in a very quiet gritty voice, “I never approve or disapprove of practices with which I am not familiar. I would suspect that when a person becomes contentious and defensive about a given practice, without cause, then there could be reason to doubt either its efficacy or its morality. I did not come here to learn how I would ‘make out,’ as you put it. I came here to see if you could give us any useful information about Evan Lawrence. Mr. McGee and I are quite convinced he killed my niece. If we are ever to find him, we must learn more about him.”

  Dexter stood up from the corner of his desk and stared at Meyer and then at me. “Jesus H. Jumping Christ!” he whispered. “Killed Norma? For the money? Jesus, if he stuck with her, in ten more years she’d be spilling money on the way to the bank. Talk about killing the goose!”

  Then he made a funny little bow to Meyer.

  “Excuse me. I had you all wrong. I thought a band of nuts tried to blow you up but got Norma and her husband by accident. I thought you were here to find out how much you were going to get. In my line of work, there are a lot of people who spend all their time trying to find out how much they are going to get. They generally get less than if they spent less time thinking about it. What did that husband do? Blow up a stand-in?”

  “Good guess,” Meyer said. “No part of any body was recovered. In a photo taken moments before the explosion, from another boat, Norma and Captain Jenkins are recognizable and the third person has been identified, but not officially, as a hired mate. Authorities can find no trace of any such terrorist organization. Of course, there could be an international organization with a compulsion to kill economists, an urge I would find understandable, if not sympathetic.”

  Meyer startled me. It was almost the very first glimmer of humor I had detected in a year, and it came at an unexpected time and place.

  “But you do have more to go on than what you’ve told me?”

  “Just behavior patterns. But convincing,” Meyer said.

  “I think I told you what I know about the husband. A pleasant guy. Maybe not very motivated. Maybe twelve years older than Norma, maybe less. He seemed like the kind of person who makes lots of friends and has lots of contacts. A salesman type. He had a good laugh. I decided he’d make a pretty good husband for Norma. That is, if she had to have a husband.”

  “Any distinguishing marks or characteristics?” I asked. “We had dinner with the two of them aboard my houseboat, and we can’t come up with anything. Maybe five-ten-and-a-half or -eleven. Close to two hundred. But pretty good shape. Brown hair, receding a little. Green eyes, I think. Nose a little crooked. Plenty of tan. Good teeth.”

  “Big hands on him,” Dexter said. “Real big. Thick wrists. Big bone structure. Spoke some Mexican.”

  “We know how they met,” I said. “If he swindled her out of her money and killed her, he’ll make himself hard to find. We want to go down his back trail and see if we can turn up anything. We need a good picture of him. We thought maybe somebody at the wedding took some.”

  He called a plump woman in from the outer office and asked her.

  She remembered that one of the women in the office had taken a lot of pictures of the ceremony. Her name was Marlane Hoffer, and she lived with a friend in a little apartment in the Post Oak area. She went out and typed the name, address, and phone number and brought it in and gave it to Meyer.

  Marlane was on the third floor of a new non-descript apartment building a block off Westheimer Road, behind the Galleria development area. Marlane’s friend checked us through the peephole lens and rattled the lock chain. He was a big man with long hairy legs. He wore short running pants and an unbuttoned yellow shirt. A slab of brown belly bulged over the top of the running pants. He had a big head and a lot of brown hair and blond beard.

  As soon as he let us in he turned and bawled, “Marl! It’s the guys about the pictures. Marl!”

  “Okay, okay,” yelled a voice from behind a closed door.

  She came out in a few minutes in a floor-length white terry beach robe, her hair turbaned in a blue terry towel. She was a small woman with a pert, friendly face. The friend had gone over to an alcove off the living room and was stretched out watching automobiles racing somewhere, noisily.

  She spoke over the roar of engines. “I want to go down to the pool, but he says it’s too hot. Here’s the pictures I took. I didn’t do so great with them. What I got, it’s this Pentax he used to use until he got a Nikon, and he never explained all the buttons so I could understand.”

  We stood and looked at the pictures together. There was one where she had evidently tried to get them both in a close-up. It was an outdoor shot, under some trees. In that picture Evan was looking directly into the camera, with a slightly startled expression. Norma was beyond him, out of focus.

  “It was in this sort of garden out behind a restaurant, a really great place to get married. The food was absolutely delicious, and I kind of busted loose on the wine. They said it was Spanish champagne, but what do I know? Look, take the whole thing. She was my friend and now she’s dead and I don’t want her picture around, okay?”

  “If you’re really sure you don’t …” Meyer said.

  “You can bet your ass I’m sure. You, being her uncle, I can understand how you’d want pictures. But she wasn’t one of my best friends, you understand? It’s a hell of a thing, dying on a honeymoon. But there you are.” She whirled and yelled, “Can’t you turn that shitty noise down?”

  “You don’t like it, go out in the hall!” he yelled.

  We thanked her and left. Through the closed doors, as we walked toward the stairs, we could hear her squalling at him and him roaring back.

  I made sure we had the negatives, including the one of Evan. “Now we find a good lab,” I said.

  • • •

  On Monday morning we brought the four color prints back to the condo at Piney Village. The professional lab had done good work on the eight-by-ten enlargement. The Pentax lens had done the original good work. It was unmistakably Evan Lawrence, every pore, blemish, and laugh line. He was half smiling, startled, one eyebrow raised. The lab had put them in gray portrait folders.

  Meyer sat at Norma’s desk in the little office she had fixed up. The file cabinets had been taken away.

  Outside, the rain fell in silver-gray sheets out of a gun-metal sky. A tropical disturbance had moved in off the Gulf, a rain engine that had broken the heat wave. All over the city the body and fender shops were accumulating backlogs.

  I leaned against the angled drawing board, one foot on the rung of the stool she had sat on when she worked at the maps, my arms crossed.

  “One thing we know is that he left almost no trace of himself here,” Meyer said. “He lived here for almost three months. No possessions. No personal papers. Just some rough cheap chain-store clothing. This was going to be his home. It isn’t normal that he should leave so little hint of himself.”

  “You said there were letters she wrote to him when she was out in the field. No hints in those? No clues?”

  He frowned. “When I found them I thought he was dead too, and it seemed a terrible invasion of privacy. I threw them out, and then I retrieved them and put them with her personal papers. I just scanned a couple of them quickly. There’s about a dozen, I think. She was very much in love.”


  He went off and found the letters and brought them back to me. “Travis, I don’t think I want to read them. If you wouldn’t mind …”

  There were twelve of them, written on whatever paper was handy at the time. Yellow legal sheets, office memo paper, the blank backs of obsolete printouts. She wrote in the hasty scrawl of a busy person, using abbreviations, leaving out words. She talked of her work but without the technical details he would probably not have understood.

  They were all dated and could be divided into small batches. Apparently she wrote frequently when she was out in the field. Three consecutive days in March, four in April, two in mid-May, and three in June.

  Darling, having dreadful time today with a ranch woman who refuses to believe we will repair their land when we’re through. Kept coming out, whining about the ruts and how we were scaring her animals. We’re were using some new equipment, and I had to make certain it was placed just where I had marked the aerials. If, when all the reports are in, we decide to try to make a well, she will really go out of her mind.

  Miss you so much I can’t believe it. I think of your hands touching, and I feel all weak and dizzy, and I forget what it is I’m supposed to be doing here. I can close my eyes and look into your eyes and see my whole life there. You can never ever love me as much as I love you. I never thought I could feel like this, not in my whole life. I never thought I could feel this kind of physical hunger for someone. Tomorrow night I will be home, darling, and we will be together, and I will be in your arms, and we will make it last and last until I go out of my mind.

  That erotic strain ran through all the letters, those written before the marriage and those written afterward. It was a very strong physical infatuation. I could guess that she had been a shy person, not pretty, uncertain in any kind of sexual relationship, dedicated to her work. At twenty-nine, awakened by Evan Lawrence, she wanted to catch up on everything she had missed, and from the letters she was making a pretty good try.

  But I was after hints and clues. What about the money? What kind of a man was Evan Lawrence?

  I came upon a comment in a June letter that puzzled me.

  When we talked the other night, Evan, I guess I seemed too nervous about the arrangement. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to sound that way. It’s just that I’ve been so damned orderly all my life. Oh, I’ve taken big risks in my work, but not in my personal life. I pay every parking ticket on time. I know you are amused by that, and maybe you are a little irritated by it too. I agreed, and I’m not going to back out. The only thing is, we have to turn it around by April of next year. You say we will, so okay. And, darling, I can understand how just as a matter of personal pride, you want to make a contribution to our future. But it really doesn’t matter that much to me. I don’t think of things like that. I love you just as you are, and it would not matter to me if you had five million dollars or twenty-eight cents. I trust you with my life and everything that goes with it. Now it is Cinderella time, and I am yawning, and this gasoline lantern in the van is hurting my eyes and attracting every bug in Louisiana, and tomorrow is the day when we’ll find out—not for sure but for maybe—if we want to keep this lease. If we want to keep it, we have to start making a hole in the ground by August at the latest.

  I marked the passage and took it over to Meyer. He read it carefully. “So! She filed a quarterly estimate in addition to the deductions they took from her salary at Amdex. And she would have to pay the estimate plus last year’s tax on April fifteenth. She was telling him that she had to have the deal consummated, whatever it was, and get enough money back so she wouldn’t be caught short when tax time rolled around. He had some kind of scheme and he talked her into letting him have the money quietly and secretly so he could, perhaps, double it.”

  “That makes her sound like a dummy, Meyer.”

  “What could she say to him? ‘No, thanks. I don’t want you investing my money. I don’t trust you. You’re not smart enough, Mr. Lawrence. I earned it and it’s mine.’ Think of all the ways he could have worked on her, and then see if you really want to call her a dummy.”

  I told him it was probably the wrong word to use, and I went back to my reading and rereading of that highly personal mail. I marked a few short passages and finally, when I was certain there was nothing else, I read each one aloud to Meyer.

  You must have lots and lots of friends, darling. Don’t they know where you are living? It seems odd that you don’t get any mail or phone calls at all, only from my friends—or I should say our friends.

  And, in another letter:

  I don’t know what I did to make you so angry. I wasn’t jealous. I was just curious. I want to know what every minute of your life has been like. If you don’t want to talk about her, I’ll never bring it up again.

  And finally:

  I don’t care how beautiful Cuernavaca is, darling. Anywhere we can be together will be wonderful enough. I just can’t run out on Am Dexter at this point. Can’t we just begin to make plans instead of being so abrupt? In two years I could arrange to be as free as a bird. But I don’t really know how well I would adjust to being unemployed. I shouldn’t have brought this up in a letter. Don’t be angry with me.

  Meyer shook his head and sighed. “So he was going to double her money and they would then live forever in Mexico in peace and luxury. And it is a fair guess he was married before.”

  “Where does all this leave us?”

  “Only a little better than nowhere at all. I’ve been trying to reconstruct some of the history he told us that night aboard the Flush. He worked on time-sharing sales with somebody named Willy in Cancún. He has a degree in Business Administration from the University of Texas. He worked for a Mr. Guffey, a farmer living north of Harlingen, selling Japanese stone lanterns. He worked for Eagle Realty in Dallas. He worked in a rodeo for a short time. Can you remember anything else?”

  “Not a thing.”

  “Where do you think we should start?”

  “You’re the academic type, Meyer. So you go to Austin, and I’ll go to Dallas.”

  Ten

  On Monday afternoon in Dallas, I found Eagle Realty with a certain amount of difficulty because it had no sign. They had just moved into larger quarters, into a new building, and the sign hadn’t arrived yet.

  The car rental woman at the airport had been helpful in getting me to the general location, north of 1–30 and east of the North Tollway, over in the vicinity of Southern Methodist, but once I was in the area I had to ask three times before I finally found it near a giant shopping mall, a long low building with lots of windows, faced with pale stone and redwood, with a big carved golden eagle over the double doors in front. Something had been there first and had been torn down. Heaps of rubble were shoved to the back of the raw lot, waiting to be trucked off. They were starting to pave the parking lot. Some very small trees had been put into the planters, and a man was watering them.

  I pushed my way into the air-conditioned reception area, where a man in khakis was slowly stripping transparent plastic from the reception-area chairs and couches.

  A big nervous young woman came trotting back to the reception desk, stared at me, and said, “Thank God! At last!”

  “At last what?”

  “You’re from the electric, aren’t you? My God, you’ve got to be from the electric!”

  “I’m from Florida.”

  “If you’re here trying to sell something, I can tell you that you are going right back out that door so fast—”

  “I’m not selling anything, buying anything, or fixing anything.”

  She finally smiled. “Then you’re not going to be much good to us, are you? Honest to God, I’ll quit before I get involved in moving the office again.”

  “I’m trying to find out a couple of things about a man who used to work for Eagle. His name is Evan Lawrence.”

  “Doesn’t mean a thing to me. Not a thing. How long ago?”

  “I’m not too definite about the date.”

&n
bsp; “We get a big turnover on salesmen, especially the last few years. You know how it is. The old personnel records are on floppy disks, and unless somebody comes from the electric and gets that back office juiced up, nobody is ever going to read them. We’ve got four tabletop IBMs back there, with data-processing programs and printers, and our information about current sales and rentals is all on the disks, and we can’t run anything because the current keeps cutting out.”

  “Who’s around who’s been here the longest?”

  “Well, I guess that would be Martin Eagle.” She reached toward the phone. “Who will I say?”

  “McGee. Travis McGee from Fort Lauderdale.”

  She picked up the phone and said a very ugly word. Her face turned red. “Now the effing phone is effing well dead too. You wait here.”

  She trotted off. The man uncovering the furniture was chuckling and shaking his head. She came back and beckoned to me, and I followed her to Martin Eagle’s big corner office with a view of the rubble piles and a corner of the mall and ten thousand automobiles winking in the heat waves. She waved me in and closed the door.

  Martin Eagle looked over his shoulder at me and smiled and nodded and turned back toward the perforated section of white wall where he was hanging trophies and credentials on little hooks that fitted into the perforations.

  He hung a framed scroll which said in Olde English that Martin Eagle was Junior Chamber of Commerce Man of the Year. It was dated three years ago.

  “You think it’s maybe too close to the award from the city? What do you think?”

  “I guess it would depend on how much you are going to hang there.”

  “Good thinking. McGee, is it? Call me Marty. I don’t know if I should hang all this shit or not. Look, I got the top of the desk covered. Maybe I shouldn’t even hang that JC scroll. They gave it to five of us that year. I was the third runner-up. All this stuff could be, you know, ostentatious. But you take doctors. They hang stuff all over. Gives the patients confidence, I guess. I’m doing the same thing. Eagle Realty gives you a fair deal, buying or selling. That’s the only thing I’ve ever learned about this business. You screw somebody, it comes back to haunt you. Even when you don’t screw somebody, it comes back to haunt you. People don’t listen and people lie. What am I doing in a new building anyway? In these times. You want to know why? We got too big for the old place and we were going to stay right there, all packed in, no matter what, and they decided to tear down the whole block and put up another gigantic building. So here I am. Wait a second. I want to put up this little shelf thing and put some eagles on it. I’ve got a big collection of eagles. Pottery, silver, stone, wood. You wouldn’t believe how many I’ve got at home. Everybody knows I collect eagles, and there you are.”