“I’m never around when things are going on,” Meyer said.
“Be glad. This time, be glad.”
“How lucky it was that John Tuckerman died of a fall.”
“You remind me of the Sheriff.”
“He keeps saying that?”
“We had four conferences in the hospital. He is a very diligent man. He is a very stubborn man.”
Meyer peered out through the windows of the lounge. “And here he comes again.”
Meyer went and invited him aboard and let him in. He was carrying the solid hunk of canoe paddle with the barnacles firmly fixed to that curved part which was supposed to fit into the palm of the hand of the paddler.
He sat down and sighed and smiled and accepted a beer. He bumped the paddle gently against his knee. “We got the lab report back, McGee. The tissue and blood they got off this thing, off the edges of these barnnacles, match Tuckerman’s type.”
“So he must have fallen on it!” I said.
“You claim you missed him clean both times, when you swung at him and when you threw it at him.”
“Startled him both times and missed him both times.”
“From the shape and location of the wound, the lab people think that it struck the throat, moving from left to right at high velocity, and tore a hole in the artery and a hole in the windpipe. Are you sure there wasn’t some slight little impact when you swung at him?”
“Positive.”
“McGee, you were defending your life against a madman with a gun. The booze and the PCP had turned his brain to hog slop. You thought the sister was dead and he was going to kill you. And you could see the dead bodies in the jeep. What the hell do you think I am trying to do? Railroad you into Raiford, for Christ’s sweet sake? I want to wrap this all up, all the way. I want a grand jury verdict of justifiable homicide. I don’t want a file that says Tuckerman fell down onto some barnacles, dammit.”
“He fell down.”
“What’s wrong with my saying that you hit him a lucky shot anyway, no matter what you say?”
“Sheriff,” Meyer said mildly, “Travis McGee might find the attendant publicity somewhat constraining in his chosen profession of, shall we say, salvage expert. And he would have to be charged, of course, to be exonerated. And in this computerized world, the charge would be a part of his record. Secondly, of course, he is quite interested in Mrs. Howard. If she should recover as fully as they anticipate, she might find it awkward to feel any unmixed emotion toward her brother’s executioner. Lastly, sir, McGee and I are accustomed to exchanging confidences, and if there was any doubt at all in his mind about whether or not he missed the deceased when he swung or when he threw that object, I am certain he would have told me. And you have my word of honor that such has not been the case. Oh, and one other possible solution. Were the object wedged into the ground at about this angle, and were the deceased to fall, left side first, he being a tall and heavy man, the wound might look as though—”
“All right, all right!” Hack Ames said. “You do go on. He fell. The most timely fall in the history of grand larceny and felony murder. You know what I am going to do with this half of a paddle? I am going to hang it on my office wall, and the moral is going to be for me to try not to get too cute.” He finished the beer and stood up.
We both stared at him. I said, “Cute about what?”
“Remember the way we went around and around about that slide, once you found out the bush jacket was still in his closet at home? Hub’s jacket?”
“It still bothers me,” I said. “I can’t see Tuckerman being sly enough to work something out like that, aiming the whole search toward Mexico, knowing Lawless was buried in the sand out there, in the yellow jeep.”
“Stop worrying about it. The little lady that sent us the slide turned up. She came over to see us because she was absolutely certain the body we found couldn’t have been Hub Lawless if the body had been under the sand ever since March twenty-third. She came over because she had broken up with her boyfriend and didn’t have to be careful about talking about Mexico any more. And she wondered if she could cut in on any part of the reward for information in the case. Little bit of a thing. Very excitable and fast-talking. Hops around from this to that. Hard to follow her. Well, it took almost two hours to unravel it. She had gone down to Guadalajara twice. She went down in February with three other girls from the insurance office where she works. A winter vacation. One week. And she met a young Mexican there. An assistant manager of the hotel where they stayed. She went back to see him in April. She took pictures on only one day. Friday, April eighth, when her Roberto was busy and she walked around alone. She had the camera with her. A little Konica range-finder camera with automatic exposure. Had she taken the camera with her the first time she went? Yes. Taken pictures? Yes. Did they get mixed up together? No. Because they were dated. The date of development was stamped right into the cardboard. One batch said F-E-B, and one batch said A-P-R. Did you use the camera between trips to Mexico? No. So then came the key question. Did you take a part of a roll and leave it in the camera between trips? She got real still and stared at me, and those pretty eyes got bigger and bigger, and finally she hit the desk with her little fist and said, ‘Boy, am I some kind of dumb!’ We walked all around it, McGee. She felt terrible. She apologized and apologized. I told her she had been a big help, really. She had helped us unravel Hub’s plan, the one he would have followed if he hadn’t had a heart attack. The warning is clear. Don’t get too cute. Always think of the simplest solution. Tricky stuff will snarl up your head.”
“You do the tricky stuff pretty well, Sheriff,” I said. “Like that expensive painting the Petersen woman left behind.”
He shrugged again. “I’d counted her dead before that. John Tuckerman took her keys after he’d killed her, drove in after dark, packed her stuff, loaded it in the red car, and drove it to Orlando. That was before he was so far gone. His head was still working. Remember your guess? I think he bought a plane ticket to somewhere. Maybe Miami. Checked her baggage through and tore up the ticket. So it’s in an airline warehouse somewhere. Left the car in a rental car space. Probably took a bus right back to Timber Bay.”
After he left, Meyer said, “I don’t think John Tuckerman was sane from the moment he came back with Kristin and found Hub Lawless dead or dying. He’d given his life to Hub. Clown, errand boy, hunting companion. And probably the woman turned her back on Hub lying there and demanded the jeep and the money. Or just the money. So he hit her and buried them both, and that was the end of him. Maybe on a half-conscious level his relationship to Hub was something he couldn’t admit to himself, something a good ol’ boy is not ever supposed to feel.”
“Thanks for helping with the Sheriff.”
“Just don’t tell me whether you did or didn’t.”
“I don’t plan to.”
Epilogue
On a July afternoon, late, we came trundling down the Gulf in the Busted Flush, just the two of us. We came down the length of Longboat Key, where the condominiums stand tall off Sarasota, and when we passed St. Armands Key, I told her about the famous shopping circle there and promised her I would take her to it and buy her something ridiculously expensive. It would be something useless and important and would have to do with some of the slice of the recovery awarded me by the committee headed by J. Devlin Boggs.
Some days we made good miles, some days zero. She had fallen deeply in love with the old houseboat, had learned how to cope with the trickeries of the galley and the cranky plumbing in the head. She wasted fresh water in long showers when we had it and did without when we didn’t. She learned how to read the charts and operate the radio and the RDF, synchronize the diesels, and cook up Chili Meyer.
On this uncounted day in July, we came into Big Pass at dusk, on a tide so low I had to creep through the shoaling waters, bumping lightly twice. The charter boats were coming in off the Gulf. The sun was a forest fire in the west, and the distant downtown window
s winked red in response. I chugged slowly by Sand Dollar Island and over to an anchorage area I had used before, happy to see no other craft there swinging on their hooks. We were well out of the channel, in about seven feet of water and about a hundred and fifty feet off a sandy beach, when I put down the two bigger Danforths, cut the power, swung on the lines, tested them, and found them firm.
While I made drinks, Gretel checked the larder and said she’d better make out a list in the morning. We had both spent all day in a sun so hot, so burning bright, that we radiated heat. Her brown hair had grown out to about an inch and a half. She had been shaved bald as an ostrich egg, and had given me no glimpse of her skull during the bristly time. Now it was revealed. Crowning glory, she called it. The constant sun was baking it lighter. I might end up with a blond person, she told me. She thought it made her look like a boy, hair that short. I told her that from the eyebrows up, in a certain light, at a certain angle, she might look somewhat like a boy. But include any other parts of her, and the illusion was lost. Smashed-all-to-hell-and-gone lost. That kind of lost. She asked if I was trying to call her hippy. I said she was hippy, busty, waisty, lippy, throaty, that she was all thighed, bellied, eyelashed, ankled, all ladied up just fine.
Today she had been quieter than usual, and I knew she had been thinking about the life I wanted for us.
After we ate and had tidied up, I went on deck to check the weather and the bugs. It was a splendid night, mild and sweet, frosted with stars. The western sky was black, where thunder bumped and muttered, and the breezes came from there. I got the inflatable mattresses out of the locker, put them side by side on the sun deck, pumped them firm with the pedal pump, spread a blanket over them.
There was a strawberry glow over the city. The lights winked out in the houses along the Siesta Key side of Big Pass. We lay on our backs and identified the constellations, and we both saw the same shooting star.
“Hey, do you wish on those?” she asked. “I forget.”
“There’s no rule against it. I wish you’d make up your mind. That is, if I’m entitled to a wish.”
“I think maybe I have. To review the proposition you made me, you want me to share your life on any basis I choose, just so long as I understand it’s permanent.”
“Properly stated.”
“I think it is very probably exactly the right time in your life for this to happen, maybe even the last chance you’ll have.”
“Something has been happening to me these last few years,” I said. My voice sounded rough and uneven. “A bleakness. I don’t know what to call it.”
“No, darling. Don’t go grasping at me. I’m not saying yes. Let go. There. Now listen to me. I really do love you. And much as I love you and want you, I can’t be … somebody’s remedy. Some kind of medicine for the soul.”
“But that isn’t—”
“Listen to me, please. I have to be my own person. I have to take complete charge of my life. I did the hard-scrabble years for somebody else, for some idea that was never going to work anyway. I’m not talking about lib or chauvinism. I’ve got kind of an alarming capacity for blind loyalty. Like my brother had. Fierce loyalty. I know that in some very final way, dear, we are all absolutely alone. The relationships people have are an attempt to deny that aloneness, but it doesn’t go away. I want my loyalty to be to me for a while, and maybe for all the years I might have left. I have to be complete within myself and stand by myself in order to really become a person.”
“You are a person, a damned wonderful—”
“Hush! I’m not going to run away. I love you. I want to stay near you, but if you won’t accept my terms, I’ll have to run away. I’ll come to your town to live and work. We’ll find me a place. I want demanding work that I can be good at and get better at. We will be friends, and from time to time, for as long as we both want, we’ll be lovers. But nobody is going to try to manipulate or change or control or smother anybody else.”
“But I don’t—”
“Think about it, darling. Tell me tomorrow. I’m trying to be wise about myself. I can’t be rushed. I have to reinvent myself. By myself. I don’t want to sign on.”
“But you’ll be nearby.”
She got up and went over to the rail. I followed and stood beside her, resting a hand on the warmth of her waist through the T-shirt. She moved to lean against me, head against my shoulder. She was a strong and accessible magic.
“I don’t think he would have hit me,” she said. “I’ve thought about him all day.”
“You’ve been quiet.”
“I know. I think there was somebody else there.”
“There could have been,” I lied. “We’ll never know.”
“No matter what that stuff did to his brain. I can remember up to the point where he sprang up out of bed in his room and went yelling outdoors as if he was answering somebody. I just can’t remember past that.”
“Don’t keep trying.”
She looked at the lights of Sarasota. “We don’t know anyone here. We’re not in their minds,” she said. “So in some kind of funny way, we’re dead. Nothing stopped in Timber Bay. They’re stirring around up there tonight, laughing and hurting and hating and making love. Some are trying to live and some are trying to die. We’re fading out of their minds. I’m fading out of the memories of the people I’ve known back in my other life. And as they are fading out of my memory, it is as if they were dying. Dying is all forgetting, maybe. Nothing more. You are not dead until there isn’t a crumb of memory left anywhere in the world.”
“You come up with some pretty strange stuff, lady.”
“So why do you want me around for keeps anyway?”
“Two or three minor reasons. Nothing important.”
“Settle for my being sort of a neighbor?”
“Like you said, I’ll let you know tomorrow.”
She turned into my arms. The thunder boomed closer. It was using up more of the sky.
It was clear that the rain would come. We went back to the mattresses. When the first big drops did come, they fell splatting unheeded and almost unnoticed upon my bare back and on her upturned face, vivid in the first stroke of lightning.
BY JOHN D. MACDONALD
The Brass Cupcake
Murder for the Bride
Judge Me Not
Wine for the Dreamers
Ballroom of the Skies
The Damned
Dead Low Tide
The Neon Jungle
Cancel All Our Vows
All These Condemned
Area of Suspicion
Contrary Pleasure
A Bullet for Cinderella
Cry Hard, Cry Fast
You Live Once
April Evil
Border Town Girl
Murder in the Wind
Death Trap
The Price of Murder
The Empty Trap
A Man of Affairs
The Deceivers
Clemmie
Cape Fear (The Executioners)
Soft Touch
Deadly Welcome
Please Write for Details
The Crossroads
The Beach Girls
Slam the Big Door
The End of the Night
The Only Girl in the Game
Where Is Janice Gantry?
One Monday We Killed Them All
A Key to the Suite
A Flash of Green
The Girl, the Gold Watch & Everything
On the Run
The Drowner
The House Guest
End of the Tiger and Other Stories
The Last One Left
S*E*V*E*N
Condominium
Other Times, Other Worlds
Nothing Can Go Wrong
The Good Old Stuff
One More Sunday
More Good Old Stuff
Barrier Island
A Friendship: The Letters of Dan Rowan and John D. MacDonald, 1967–197
4
THE TRAVIS MCGEE SERIES
The Deep Blue Good-By
Nightmare in Pink
A Purple Place for Dying
The Quick Red Fox
A Deadly Shade of Gold
Bright Orange for the Shroud
Darker Than Amber
One Fearful Yellow Eye
Pale Gray for Guilt
The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper
Dress Her in Indigo
The Long Lavender Look
A Tan and Sandy Silence
The Scarlet Ruse
The Turquoise Lament
The Dreadful Lemon Sky
The Empty Copper Sea
The Green Ripper
Free Fall in Crimson
Cinnamon Skin
The Lonely Silver Rain
The Official Travis McGee Quizbook
About the Author
John D. MacDonald was an American novelist and short story writer. His works include the Travis McGee series and the novel The Executioners, which was adapted into the film Cape Fear. In 1962 MacDonald was named a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America; in 1980 he won a National Book Award. In print he delighted in smashing the bad guys, deflating the pompous, and exposing the venal. In life he was a truly empathetic man; his friends, family, and colleagues found him to be loyal, generous, and practical. In business he was fastidiously ethical. About being a writer, he once expressed with gleeful astonishment, “They pay me to do this! They don’t realize, I would pay them.” He spent the later part of his life in Florida with his wife and son. He died in 1986.
The Empty Copper Sea Page 23
