Cinnamon Skin

by John D. MacDonald

  He put four eagles on the little shelf and stepped back and made a little sound of satisfaction and went around his desk and sat down and gestured toward a nearby chair.

  “It’s going to look okay in here when we get organized,” he said. “Nice building, don’t you think?”

  “Very nice, Marty. My name is Travis McGee.”

  “Trav, my friend, you have given me invaluable advice about my wall over there. I am in your debt. What can I do for you? Like a good price on a nice little house? Why live in Florida when you can live in Texas like a human being? Bring the wife around. In a week we’ll have our new slide show deal going and it will be computerized. The way it works, a man says he can spend from eighty-five to a hundred and five thousand. He wants at least a half acre of land. He’s got to have two bedrooms. Okay, we save a lot of time by showing the slides before we go out driving around in traffic. What can I do for you?”

  He was a jolly man with a happy face. Dark hair combed all the way forward and then curved off to one side and sprayed into place. He was carrying a little too much weight, but he looked comfortable with it. Fawn-colored slacks, white shoes, yellow sports shirt with a little eagle embroidered over the left pocket. Gold chain around the neck and the right wrist. Gold watch on the left wrist. Gold ring on the right-hand pinky, with an eagle on it.

  “I wanted to ask a couple of questions about a man who used to work here.”

  “I’m telling you, Trav, we try to screen them all as well as we can, but these days it’s a real burden. A man fills out an application, and it costs you real money to check out all the references he gives you. What I do, and sometimes I’m sorry, I size them up myself. We have a little chat. Take for example yourself. If you wanted to work here, I’d say okay. I’d teach you the ropes, help you get the licenses. But I wouldn’t let you handle any cash money until I was damn well sure you were okay. I’m telling you that over the years we’ve had some bad apples. They float around like used car salesmen. But we’ve had some real good ones too. Who are you looking for?”

  “Evan Lawrence.”

  “Evan? Evan Lawrence?” He shook his head slowly. “No, that doesn’t ring any kind of a bell at all.”

  “He said he worked here for at least a year, and he made quite a lot of money selling tract houses and lots for you.”

  “Listen, anybody who makes money for me, I remember. Because when they make money, I make money. A year, you say? Trav, my friend, somebody is kidding you, or you are kidding me. What did this fellow look like anyway?”

  I took the portrait folder out of the small leather portfolio, stood up, and leaned over and handed it to Marty Eagle across his big new desk.

  Still smiling, he flipped it open.

  All expression ceased. The blood drained from his face, leaving a yellowish cast to his tan. He seemed to stop breathing. Suddenly he looked alarmed, heaved himself up, and trotted to his personal executive washroom and slammed the door. I heard him in there retching, heard the water running, the toilet flushing. When at last he came out there was a gray tired look about him. There was a water stain where he had dabbed at his yellow shirt. He brought a faint sharp aroma of vomit, quickly dispelled by the air conditioning.

  He sat heavily behind the desk and shook his head. “Never had that happen to me before. Never.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “So don’t be sorry. How could you know? When was this taken?” He was studying the picture carefully.

  “Last April.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “I have absolutely no idea.”

  “I think, why I threw up, we were always a close family, me and my two sisters. This man isn’t any Evan Lawrence. His name is Jerry Tobin. Everybody working here at the time liked him. That was five years ago. And I have thought about the whole thing ten thousand times. Doris, she was my kid sister, she fell head over heels. What can you do? I didn’t want her marrying any con artist like Jerry Tobin. He was very slick. He could really close a sale. Hell, Dorrie hadn’t turned twenty-one even. But she got her money when she was eighteen. We all did. That was the way Poppa’s will worked. I told her that she was going to have to wait a year and see if she still loved Jerry enough to marry him. She was furious. She didn’t want to wait. She was pretty. And she wasn’t thinking straight because good old Jerry Tobin had gotten into her pants, and she couldn’t get enough of it. They called from the bank and said they had tried to keep her from cleaning out her accounts, but they had no legal way to stop her. She didn’t come back home, not ever again. She was dead by evening of the next day. Down near Kerrville, just past a little town named Ingram, on a back road. It was her car, her white Buick. She was driving. They missed a turn and went off the road and hit a live oak a kind of glancing blow. It threw him clear when the car rolled. They think she was knocked out. They couldn’t tell because the car burned. It burned her all to hell. They had to identify her from dental work to be sure. People saw the fire and stopped. Jerry Tobin was facedown on a stony bank, all scuffed up. He didn’t come to until he was in the ambulance. He came to the funeral service here in Dallas. He cried like a baby. He still had some small bandages on. But she was dead. Where was the money? It had burned up with her and her luggage and clothes and car, and his luggage and clothes. Too bad. All gone.”

  “Much?”

  “Depends on who is counting. Two hundred and twenty something thousand. I didn’t buy it. I didn’t buy the story. I drove way down there and looked at where it happened. I looked at what was left of the car. There was a police investigation. They cleared him. Dorrie’d had a couple of minor accidents and a whole bundle of moving vehicle violations. She always drove too fast. He knew that. Everything fitted together. I hired private investigators. I wanted them to find him loaded with money. I wanted to get the whole thing opened up. But all of a sudden he just took off. He left a note on my desk. There are too many sad memories around here, Marty. I can’t take it any longer. Good-by and good luck.”

  He tried to smile.

  “I thought I was past being really hurt about it and then I saw that face, that goddamn smirk of his, and it got to me. Why do you want to find him?”

  “Maybe the same kind of thing. A little bigger stake. And more risk.”

  “How much bigger?”

  “Half again.”

  He whistled without making a sound. “Maybe there’s some law about using a false name.”

  “And maybe he had it legally changed. If I can’t locate him, what difference does it make?”

  “She was so alive! Look, if he did it twice, then he killed them both.”

  “Just an assumption, Marty.”

  “You sound like some kind of lawyer. You know what I did? When they weren’t finding out anything about him—those investigators I was paying—I asked one of them if he knew of a good safe way to find somebody who’d be willing to kill Tobin. It made the investigator very nervous. He didn’t seem to want to ask around. I was going to try some other way of finding somebody when all of a sudden Tobin took off. I am not a violent-type guy, as you can probably guess, McGee. But she was my kid sister, and that son of a bitch came into her life and ended it. Maybe it happened just like he said. So what? He was still to blame, wasn’t he? I’m not hurting for money. I could hire the best there is.” He tried to force a laugh, but his eyes filled with tears and he hopped up and stared out his window. “We were always such a close family,” he said in a hoarse voice.

  “Did you try to trace him?”

  “For a while. It’s a big country. Even back then all the rules were beginning to break down. You know, about new identities. People drifting all over, calling themselves anything at all, buying new names with driving licenses and passports and the whole thing. They say you can trace people through Social Security numbers. If a person stayed put, maybe you could. But a drifter can invent a new number for every job he has. I traced down the number Jerry gave when we hired him. It took months for the report to come
back through the local office. It was a number issued to a woman with an Italian name.”

  “Was he a good salesman?”

  “I don’t know how he’d have done in the market we got now, but five-six years ago he was a killer. He could close a deal while the next guy would just be getting around to showing the bathrooms. I would say he cleared somewhere in the low six figures in the time he was here.”

  “Would you know about him getting ripped off by somebody with a tax-shelter scam?”

  “Jerry? Ripped off? Not likely.”

  “Buying a bunch of Bibles to donate them later to schools and churches for four times what he paid?”

  “No way at all. He had a good business head. Very very sharp. I’ve got some pretty good moves myself. But I think he could have come up with better ones. I kept telling him I should open a branch of Eagle in Fort Worth and he could run it, but he didn’t want any part of it. He said he was lazy. I don’t think so. I think it was something about the exposure, about attracting too much attention to himself.”

  “Did he get into any kind of trouble while he worked for you?”

  “Not money trouble. And not really what you’d call trouble. We were peddling a development called Crestwinds, and we put together a model house with the contractor and some decorators. During open house the salesmen had to take turns manning the place. So they had keys. One of our saleswomen went back after hours one night looking for a gold earring she could have lost there, and she found Jerry in the sack with the wife of the contractor. It was a second wife, a young one. That was before he took aim at my sister Doris. The woman that found them raised hell, and I told Jerry to find a better place for his fun and games. It didn’t happen again, at least that I know of.”

  Finally there was no more information to be gained. He was dispirited, quite unlike the mood he’d been in when I arrived.

  As I was getting ready to leave he gave me his card. “Look, stay in touch, Trav. You get a line on him and need any kind of help at all, phone me. Okay? A promise?”

  “Sure.”

  “What is inside the head of a man like that? I mean, assuming he killed Doris or any other girl, what’s the point?”

  “I read somewhere that the average bank robbery nets eighteen hundred dollars. That could have something to do with it.”

  “But he couldn’t have been hurting for money. He made good money. He didn’t have a lot of expensive habits.”

  His last question was, “Where do you go from here?”

  “When did the accident happen?”

  It took him a moment to count it out. “In May. A Saturday, the twenty-first. Five years and two months ago.”

  “Did the press cover it?”

  “Yes. On Monday morning. It didn’t make the Sunday papers.”

  “So from here I go and look up the report.”

  “I came across the clippings a year or so ago and wondered why I was saving them. I tossed them out.”

  Eleven

  Wednesday the twenty-first of July in Naples was one of those rare mousse-mist days of summer, a heavy overcast, no wind, and an invasion of almost invisible bugs from the swamps and inlets, driving the tourists off the beach in front of the Eden Beach Hotel and its bungalows, sending them into the lounges for listless sessions of Scrabble or backgammon or into their rooms for the dubious diversion of daytime television.

  Even though Annie Renzetti had been free of her fifty-three proctologists since Monday, she did not seem to be unwinding completely. I sensed a reserve. I roamed the area while she did her office work. Even though we had been circumspect for over a year, it is just not possible to conceal a relationship in a hotel setting. She was the boss lady, and I was “him.” I was her “him,” my status known to the bookkeepers, the room maids, the dishwashers, the bartenders, the waitresses, the girls at the desk, the grounds keepers, the pool sweeper, the beach tenders, the lifeguards, the tennis pro, and the in-house maintenance men. So I was conscious, and had been for some time, of a discontinuous but consistent appraisal.

  Gossip can exist only when the relationship gossiped about can have some effect upon the community, good or bad. What are they really like when they’re together? Do they say anything about us? Will they break up? Will that change her? Will somebody else come along? What will that do to the situation here? What does he/she see in her/him?

  She was the queen bee of the hotel and I was the prince consort, the sporadic visitor, and a source of some concern and uncertainty to them. By instinct Annie had fastened upon a very good personnel management technique. She treated every employee with courtesy, fairness, and impartiality. She pitched in on any kind of unpleasant work when there was an emergency. She did not make a confidant of any employee and thus kept a certain distance from them all. She listened to complaints, prowled the whole area at unexpected times, rewarded top performance with raises, and fired the lazy, the indifferent, the thieves, and the liars. I was proud of the job she was doing, and at the same time felt a little uncomfortable with it. She was a paragon. And she was making a hell of a lot of money for the chain.

  I bought myself a Bloody Mary at the pool bar and borrowed some of the bartender’s Cutter’s. He was stiff and formal with me. “Yes, sir. Celery, sir?” The safest place to keep me was at full-arm’s length. It can make a person lonesome.

  I went back to her cabaña, the last one in the row, up on six-foot pilings, let myself in, positioned myself in the middle of her small living room, and tried to undo some of the damage of too many days spent sitting in cars and offices and airplanes. One very sound rule for the care of the body is always to keep in mind what it was designed to do. The body was shaped by the need to run long distances on resilient turf, to run very fast for short distances, to climb trees, and to carry loads back to the cave, so any persistent exercise you do which is not a logical part of that ancient series of uses is, in general, bad for the body. A succession of deep knee bends is destructive, in time. As are too many pushups. As is selective muscle development through weightlifting. As is jogging on hard surfaces. A couple of years of such jogging and you are very likely never to walk in comfort again. Man is a walking animal, perfectly designed for it. The only more efficient human energy use is the bicycle.

  So what I am after when I have been too sedentary, and feeling bad because of it, is limberness. The unstretched tendons try to lock in place, resisting extension and contraction both. Stretch slowly like a cat awakening. Then twist and bend slowly, as far as you can, in any position where you can feel the muscles pulling. Hold that position, then push it a little farther. Hold it, then push again. Loosen all the fibers in that fashion, slowly and without great strain, until you have limbered your entire body. Then play the Chinese morning game of imitation slow-motion combat, striking the long slow blow, balancing on one leg, retreating, defending, striking again. Then it is time to take the long slow swim along the beach, breaking it up with little speed sprints. Crawl, breaststroke, backstroke, working the muscles you’ve limbered up.

  Anne Renzetti came back to the cabaña after I had finished my swim and my shower and had stretched out on the long padded window seat in the living room to scan a magazine called Motel and Hotel Management Practice. It said the shape of the soap makes a big difference in how long it lasts.

  As she was apologizing for having to take so long over her management chores, I scooped her up. She clung in warmth and fragrance, with a soft and smiling mouth, and I backed to the couch and sat with her, holding her on my lap, holding her close—a small and tidy woman, as electrically alive as a basket of eels.

  A long time later, as the sun was dipping down into the red-brown smog that now greases the edge of the sky all along our coasts, I made us our drinks and we took them out onto the shallow porch, in the deck chairs side by side.

  “I flew into Tampa,” I said, “got a connection to Fort Myers, and picked up a rental car there and drove down.”

  “Down I-Seventy-five?”

&nb
sp; “No, down the old coast road, the Tamiami Trail. An exercise in masochism. I get the feeling that if I’m away for three days, I can see the difference.”

  “Maybe you can. My company subscribes to a service for me, and the last issue had an article about Florida population. We’re getting a thousand new residents a day. Permanent residents. A little family every six minutes. In the public restaurants of Florida, one and a half million people can have a sit-down meal at the same time.”

  “No more. Please.”

  “We’re the seventh largest state. We get thirty-eight million tourists a year.”

  “And the rivers and the swamps are dying, the birds are dying, the fish are dying. They’re paving the whole state. And the people who give a damn can’t be heard. The developers make big campaign contributions. And there isn’t enough public money to treat sewage.”

  “Poor baybee!”

  “Poor Florida. Everything is going to stop working all at once. Then watch the exodus. Okay, coming down that way this morning depressed me. But you cured the depression. You’re a natural resource they can’t drain and pave.”