I soon discovered she had been targeted by Ron Robinette, who was then living aboard a half million worth of motor sailer over at Bahia Mar, with an income from mysterious sources. He was big and ruddy with hair dyed black, teeth capped white, a lot of chest hair showing, and a constant smile underneath his little mean eyes. He hovered close and managed to keep touching her, establishing management and control. I saw him muttering into her ear and saw her shaking her head no. But Robinette manages to score in situations much less promising than this one.
So I worked it out and went over to them and said, “Time we took off, Laura honey, or we’ll be late for dinner with the others.”
“Others?” she said.
I got her by the elbow, and she resisted for just a moment and then came along, docile and unsteady.
“Now hold it, McGee,” Robinette said, following closely. He put his hand on my shoulder.
I spun, shrugging his hand off, and said, “Screw around with me, Ronnie, and I’ll do exactly what I did last time.”
He tried to bring himself up to the point of actual resistance, but his memory was too good. He shrugged and gave me an evil look and turned away. Ten seconds after I handed her into the passenger side of my old Rolls pickup, she passed out. I wanted to take her to her place, but I couldn’t rouse her. I rifled her purse and found her apartment keys, but they had no number on them. I knew the building but not the number. So I took her back to the Busted Flush, toted her aboard—she was a considerable burden—and laid her down on the bed in the spare cabin. I eased her shoes off. She was so slack I wondered if she had something else beside too much booze, some kind of illness. I took her pulse. It was a heavy, slow ta-bump, ta-bump, ta-bump. She didn’t feel feverish. So I left her there. I fixed myself a light supper and then read until after eleven.
Before I went to bed, I looked in at her. She had pulled her dress off and dropped it on the floor. I put a blanket over her and left a robe and a disposable toilet kit on the chair near the bed.
By midmorning, when I was on the second half of the paper and the second cup of coffee, I heard the shower. Soon she came out wearing the robe, her head wrapped in a white towel.
She said she felt rotten. She turned gray at the offer of eggs and settled for coffee, black. She seemed very ill at ease. Finally she said, “What am I doing here anyway?”
“Nursing a hangover, I think,” I told her. And I told her about snatching her away from one Ron Robinette, thinking to drive her home, but having her pass out on me.
“Robinette. Big fellow with a red face. Smiles a lot?”
“The same.”
“What was wrong with him taking me home?”
“I thought you deserved better. After all, you are an old acquaintance of mine, right? And Robinette has a case of what you professional people call satyriasis. You’d have been screwed lame by now, conscious or unconscious, sitting, kneeling, lying down, or standing on one leg. You’d walk funny for a week. And I didn’t touch you, except to tote you from my pickup to your bed.”
I felt a lot of tension go out of her, tension and suspicion. “Oh,” she said. “And thanks. Who took my dress off?”
“It had to be you, because it wasn’t me, Laura.”
“I can’t even remember,” she said. “I guess you saved me from an ugly experience, which would have been my own fool fault. I was depressed. I hardly ever drink. I had some martinis. Then things got kind of blurred. It isn’t fair. A man can get depressed and drink too much and he … he isn’t vulnerable the way a woman is.”
When her hair was reasonably dry, she combed it out, went in and dressed, and I drove her back to her car. Before she got out of Miss Agnes, she frowned at me and said, “If you hadn’t known me at all, would you have rescued me from that man?”
“I doubt it. I can’t run around under the trees catching everything that falls out of the nests, Doctor. Why should I steer Robinette to somebody else who might have just as bad a time?”
“Then I’m very glad poor Mr. Finch broke into my files and you came to that party. Very glad.” She leaned toward me and put a quick light shy kiss on the corner of my mouth. It was not invitational. It was the kiss a young girl gives her uncle at Christmas.
My upright behavior must have intrigued her, because she began to appear at the right places and right times with such uncanny accuracy that we drifted into an affair which lasted not more than a month and was called off by mutual consent. We were able to say the right things, do the right things, satisfy each other, enjoy each other, but there was something lacking. We were friends making love, not lovers making love. The bodies functioned, but the hearts never took to the wild leaping. So it had a faint flavor of the mechanical, an aura of the incestuous. And, also, I had the feeling she was watching both of us with her professional eye, a surveillance guaranteed to chill any dalliance.
So now, needing advice, I phoned her office. The woman who answered told me the doctor was with a patient, but she could be disturbed if it was an emergency. I said it was a social call and left my name and number.
Laura called back twenty minutes later. “Travis! How good to hear your voice.”
“I’ve been trying to remember when I saw you last. About four years ago, I think.”
“Closer to five. We ran into each other at Sears. Housewares.”
“It’s been five years? How are you anyway?”
“One hundred forty and holding.”
“Married yet?”
“Almost was, but I backed out at the very last moment, almost when he was putting the ring on me. Turned chicken. I know you aren’t.”
“How would you know that?”
“Let’s just say that your social circles and my professional clients overlap a little here and there. And sometimes we talk about you.”
“Favorably?”
“Sometimes, sure.”
“The reason I called, I want to pick your doctor brains over dinner. I want to tell you what I know about someone, and you tell me what you can guess about him. I buy the food and the wine.”
She said she was free that very evening, but she had some dictation to catch up on and had planned to stay in the office for a couple of hours after the last patient, so she thought she had better meet me at the restaurant. She named one of the new French ones. She said she would make the reservation.
They are popping up all over Florida like toadstools after a rain. They vary from wretched to superb. The very best one I know, and I think it the best between Miami and New Orleans, is over on the west coast of Florida, at a shopping mall called Sarasota Square. It is outside the mall, in an area containing a Kmart and a supermarket. It is called the Café La Chaumière and is owned and operated by an agreeable type named Alain who used to be a chef at the Rive Gauche in Washington.
When I got there at eight, they were all smiles when I said I was joining the Doctor Honneker. Would I go to the table? No, thank you, I would wait here at this little corner bar. She came in looking elegant in her office business suit. A little heftier in the hip, a trifle thicker around the waist, some horizontal lines across the throat and verticals bracketing the mouth. But a fine figure of a woman, with a lovely green-eyed smile.
I carried my drink to the table and we ordered her one. She told me her practice was booming, due mostly to having some luck with the nose-candy crowd: young lawyers, doctors, contractors, merchants, dentists, politicians. “I get them of course after they are finally willing to admit they are in serious trouble. So they are pretty well habituated by then, and very jumpy. Have you ever used it?”
“Tried it twice and didn’t like it either time. The great big rush of confidence and well-being is just fine, but when it fades it’s hard to remember just exactly what it was like. You just remember you felt real good, and now you don’t feel so great.”
“My reaction exactly. I’ve been having some luck with diet, drug therapy, and analysis. One thing I am sure of: when I have a patient who backslides and com
es back to me six months later, there is a discernible diminution of intelligence and awareness. I’m administering standard intelligence measurements to all my cocaine patients now as standard procedure. If I can accumulate enough data, I’m going to try to do a paper on it.”
Over the soup she asked me what I wanted to ask her. I had gone through some mental rehearsals. “Here is your hypothetical patient, Laura. He is now forty-two. When he was thirteen, his mother died suddenly. He had one sister, five years older. When he was fifteen his father married a twenty-five-year-old woman who worked in his office. She was a very sexy item, with a chronic case of the hots. The father was promoted to a job where he had to travel three and four days a week and stay away overnight. When he was seventeen, after his sister married and moved out, the patient was seduced by his stepmother and they entered into a relationship that lasted perhaps three years. Call it two years, plus the vacations when he came home from college when he was twenty.”
“That’s really a fairly common form of incest, Travis, and—”
“That’s just part of it. After the end of his freshman year, the boy came home from college and they picked up where they left off. The father came home unexpectedly one night, heard them, listened at the bedroom door, got his gun, and stepped in and killed her with one shot to the back of the head, near the nape of the neck. From the evidence at the scene, the woman was on top, her feet toward the doorway. The boy squirmed out from under her, and we do not know what happened next. There was evidence of a struggle. So either the father tried to kill the boy or tried to kill himself. They fought for the gun and the father was shot. He died soon after they found him. A neighbor heard the two shots and saw the boy as he drove away in the father’s car. The car was found weeks later at the bottom of a canyon, with nobody in it or near it.”
She dropped her soup spoon into her shallow bowl and stared at me. “Good grief! What was the boy’s relationship to his father?”
“The boy loved and respected his old man.”
“Worser and worser. What kind of boy was he?”
“Standard issue. Athletic. Not a great student. Interested in theater, I guess. He was in the drama club. Reasonably good-looking. Big shoulders and hands.”
“Are you quite sure he’s alive?”
“It is a reasonable certainty.”
“Is the sister alive?”
“Yes. He sends cash to her, secretly. He has a way of keeping track of where she is. He’s sent her the better part of a hundred thousand dollars over the past fifteen years or so.”
“Does she condone his behavior?”
“She says it was all the fault of the second wife.”
“Is he still a fugitive?”
“Technically, I guess. Nobody is really looking for him for that early shooting.”
“But they are looking for him for something else?”
“I’d rather not say yet. What would it do to a person, that kind of history?”
“I don’t think … I don’t believe anyone would be strong enough to walk away from something like that undamaged. If he loved his father, then he hated the stepmother. The long history of betraying his father every time they had a chance, that isn’t something he could get used to. It would just pile guilt upon guilt, higher and higher. He would have contempt for himself, for being unable to stop. He would feel weak and used and contemptible.”
“How would it have ended if the old man hadn’t caught them?”
“I don’t know. I can guess. The stepmother was turned on by the danger of it, by the ‘badness’ of it. She was walking a very dangerous tightrope and knew it. One scenario would be for the boy to kill her, to strangle her or beat her to death. That would be an understandable way of seeking punishment for all his sinning. That would give them—meaning society—the excuse to jail him for life, put him away, out of touch with decent people. A less dramatic and probably more plausible reaction would be for the boy to just run away, leave it all behind. Killing himself would be one kind of running away. Killing himself and the woman must certainly have occurred to him as a way of expiating guilt and punishing both the guilty parties. Guilt is a powerful and frightening thing, Travis. He might just have disappeared into limbo. A wandering migrant worker. A future bum on a park bench somewhere. But when it was all taken out of his hands in such a gaudy brutal way, before he could plan and make expiation, I … I just can’t predict the effect. I do have the gut feeling that this might be a terribly dangerous personality, a man completely dead inside. I think he would probably be ritualistic. He … he would want to take revenge on his own sexuality as being the agent that caused the trouble.”
“How would he do that?”
“Self-mutilation would be understandable. Or total denial and deprivation.”
“How would he react toward women?”
“Oh, God. That would be a bucket of worms. I think he would want to punish them for their sexuality, for being the symbol of the temptress. What are you getting at?”
“Try this. Would this be possible? For him to hunt down women, one after the other, young attractive women, seduce them, enchant them into a very physical and erotic affair, actually seem to love them, sometimes even marry them, and then kill them?”
For a moment she frowned, and then her eyes widened. “It would be ritualistic. He would be punishing her for her sexuality, and he would be punishing himself by depriving himself of her passion. It’s intricate, Trav, but I could buy it. Yes. And he would acquire a very special knack of making himself attractive to women, of always saying the right thing, doing the right thing. He would have to keep changing his identity, wouldn’t he?”
“I know the name he started with and three more, and know of three dead women.”
We were side by side on a banquette. She grabbed me so strongly just above my right knee I could feel her nails through the fabric of my trousers. “My God, tell me about him! Tell me all about him!”
It took a long time. She asked questions. We suddenly stirred ourselves, realizing the check had been on the table for a long time and the waiters were circling at a discreet distance, coughing, and the place was absolutely empty except for us. So, in apology, I overtipped, and she followed me in her car, back to the Busted Flush so we could keep the discussion going.
We sat in the lounge with cold beer in hand, and I said, “Maybe we won’t ever find him, Meyer and I. But suppose we do. Suppose we find him and walk up to him. He is going to know us. How will he react?”
She took a long time thinking it over. She said, “You must realize that he has been wondering for years what he would do if that happened, if somebody was able to unmask him. Since you say he is likable and plausible, I think he will give you a totally fabricated account of what actually happened. He will make it sound real. He has depended on charm for a long time. I think you will have to pretend to believe him.”
“Why?”
“He’s a murderer, Travis. He has developed his capacity for violence. There will be no hesitation in him at all. Believing his story, you will have to maneuver him to a place and time where he can’t hurt you and can’t get away from you. Then and only then do you start casually dropping the names of the dead. Not accusatory. Affable. Almost laughing at him. Doris Eagle. Isobelle Garvey. He will not know how much you know, and suddenly you will seem to be all-knowing. You will become the God-Daddy here to punish him at last, and I think he will come completely, totally apart, with no hope of ever putting himself together again. I have broken people that way so that I could put them back together again in a better pattern, with their help. The more you look amused at their lies, the wilder the lies become. And quite suddenly they break.”
“And if he just denies it? Maybe I didn’t get it across to you. This is a very plausible, likable man. If he can hold himself together, no jury will convict.”
“If he just denies it, you must edge very very carefully into the Coralita situation.”
“Why delicately?”
After we had worn out the topic of Cody T. W. Pittler, his life and times, she cocked her head and said, “You seem troubled about something else, too.”
“I had no idea it showed.”
“I’m a trained observer, and once upon a time I knew you pretty darn well.”
“I remember. Well, I’m having a little trouble with my old lady, to put it in the chauvinistic pig manner.”
“The nice little hotel executive?”
“How do you know about her?”
“Somebody once defined gossip quite properly as emotional speculation. And I am interested in you and your life.”
“She is being promoted and sent to Hawaii. End of whatever it is we’ve been having.”
“An arrangement?”
“Good enough word, I guess. There was no abused party in the deal. It seemed okay for both of us.”
“Do you think it should be more important to her than moving ahead in her job?”
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