John D MacDonald - Travis McGee 20 - Cinnamon Skin

by Cinnamon Skin(lit)

  "She talks like that a lot!" Evan said proudly. "Isn't she something else entire?"

  Norma flushed. "All geologists talk funny."

  "I kept after her," Evan said. "She finished up and went back, so did I. Every time she'd look around, there I was. So along sometime in March she gave up, and we got married in April. Meyer, we sure wish you could have come to the wedding. That was a handsome check you laid on us, but you being there would have been a better present."

  "It would, really," Norma Lawrence said. "People in this family are always missing ceremonies." She sounded wistful, and her eyes filled with tears.

  Meyer touched her lightly on the arm and said to me, "Remember three years ago when we were in the islands, and I came back and found a threeweek-old telegram about my sister's funeral?"

  "And I was with a crew up in western Canada and didn't know either, until a week later," Norma said. "Her friends in Santa Barbara said the church was almost full. She had a lot of love from a lot of people. And gave a lot of love. And she was so damn proud of me."

  She got up abruptly and went over to the window ports and looked out at the marina in the dusk of the year's second longest daytime. Evan went and put a thick arm around her slender waist, murmuring to her. She leaned her cheek an his shoulder, and soon they both came back to the table.

  He poured her some wine and touched glasses with her and said, "Here's to your never having another gloomy day, Miz Norma."

  We all drank to that. And Evan Lawrence began telling stories of things he'd done. They were disaster stories, all funny, all nicely told. There was the time he had tried out for the University of Texas football squad "as a teeny tiny hundred-and-sixtyfive-pound offensive right tackle, fourth string, and next to those semi-pro freshmen they had on there, I was five foot nothing. Big old boy across from me, looked forty years old, kept 'slapping my helmet and I kept getting up, thinking, Well, this wasn't too bad, and then all of a sudden there were voices yelling at me and I came to and I was standing in the shower with my gear on, shoes and all, and everybody mad at me."

  And then there was the time he "got a job with a crazy old rancher just north of Harlingen. Old Mr. Guffey had tried to buy a Japanese stone lantern for his wife's flower garden and they wanted a hundred dollars for one. Made him so mad he got an import license and imported thirty tons of them. Nine hundred of the forty-pound type and four hundred sixty-pounders. I slept in a shed on his place, and they'd wake me up before dawn to eat a couple pounds of eggs, load lanterns into the pickup, and take off by first sunlight going up and down those crazy little roads, selling stone lanterns. Living expenses plus a ten-dollar commission, payable when the last one was gone. They's never going to need another Japanese stone garden lantern down in that end of Texas. I got bent over with muscle from lifting them fool things in and out of the pickup. Finished finally and got paid off, went into Brownsville to get the first beer in three months, woke up behind the place with my head in a cardboard box, no money, no boots, no watch. I lay there thinking it was a funny place for a fellow with a B.S. in Business Administration with a major in marketing and a minor in female companionship to spend a rainy night."

  And later on, he said, "Good old friend of mine, he said there was good money to be had traveling with the rodeo. SW a lot of new places, pretty girls, people clapping hands for you and all that. He said I should do the bull riding, because I didn't have any roping skills or such. First time I stayed on more than three seconds and got me any prize money, the bull he tore up my left hind leg so bad, I was on crutches a month, but they let me take tickets. Prettiest girl I saw there looked like John Chancellor in drag, and she borrowed my old car, totaled it, and walked away without a scratch."

  "Didn't you ever have a good job, Evan?" she asked him.

  "You mean like making lots of money? Oh, hell yes, sweetie. I worked better than a full year in Dallas, selling empty lots and lots with tract houses on them, out in the subdivisions, working for Eagle Realty. Had me a hundred forty thousand in savings, after taxes and living expenses, and this fellow told me that what I had to have, I was making so much, was a shelter. So he sheltered me. What he sold me was a hundred twenty-five thousand Bibles at one dollar each. He was to hold onto them in a warehouse for a year, then start giving twenty-five thousand of them Bibles away to religious and charitable organizations, and on the inside of the Bible it said, plain as day, Retail value seven fifty. What that meant was each year I'd be giving away a hundred and eighty-seven thousand dollars' worth of Bibles, and half that would come off my tax as a charity deduction. He said it was all legal and I'd be doing a good work. After he was long gone there was a piece in the paper about him. What he was was a Bible salesman, selling fifty-cent Bibles for a dollar each. I went to find the warehouse and look at my Bibles, but the address for the warehouse was pastureland. Honey I made lots of money several times here and there, and what I needed and didn't have was one smart wife to help me hold onto it long enough to get it spent wisely."

  There was a lull in the storm when we got back to Bahia Mar. I parked and locked the station wagon, took Meyer to my place, then took the car keys back to Wendy aboard the 'Bama Gal.

  "Stay with Meyer," she told me. "Stay close to him. Don't let him be by himself too much."

  When I got back to the Flush I found Meyer fixing himself a very stiff arrangement of Boodles gin and ice. "Sleep insurance," he said. I fixed one half that size for myself, and we went up to the topside controls, under the shelter of the overhead there. He swiveled the starboard chair around and stared through the night toward the place where, for years, The John Maynard Keynes had been berthed. He hoisted his glass in a half salute. "Damn boat," he said. "Bad lines. Cranky. Not enough freeboard."

  So we drank to the damn boat.

  In a little while, in a very gravelly voice, Meyer said, "I feel gutted. Everything was aboard her. All my files and records. Copies of all the papers I've had published. All the speeches I've given, except the ones I updated and took to Toronto. Letters from the long dead. From my father. From old friends. Photographs. My professional library. Unanswered letters. My address book. I feel as if, on some strange level, I've ceased to exist. I've lost so many proofs of my existence."

  "Safety deposit box?"

  "Yes. A few things there. Passport, birth certificate, bearer bonds." He swiveled the chair back around so the dock light angled across the right side of his face. "It's so damned senseless! I had nothing to do with the overthrow of Allende. What is that word used by the agencies? Destabilization. When I was in Santiago, the military was busy returning to private ownership the hundreds of companies nationalized by Allende and badly run by Allende's people. Who is most hurt by hyperinflation? The old, the poor. So I helped them as much as I could. We devised and recommended the controls, enough controls to put a leaky lid on inflation without stifling initiative. Nobody in Toronto had ever heard of that group. What do they call themselves?"

  "The Liberation Army of the Chilean People. Two men will be here to talk to you in the morning. They were here this afternoon. I couldn't give them much help."

  "Who has jurisdiction?"

  "Hard to say. State of Florida. Coast Guard. Federal agencies. The State Attorney's people are investigating, but they aren't what you'd call eager." "Can we find out, Travis, the two of us?"

  I tried not to show reluctance as I said, "I promised you we'd give it a try."

  He was still there when I went to bed. He'd made a fresh drink. He knew how to lock up. After I turned the bed lamp off, I kept thinking about Meyer. The fates were trying to grind him down. And almost doing the job.

  The hard rains had begun again. Soon I heard water running in the head, saw a light under the door. Then it went out. I knew he'd sleep.

  I reconstructed from memory the bilge of The John Maynard Keynes, the twin engines, the shafts and gas tanks-gasoline, not diesel. I marked the mental spot where I would place the heavy charge, right where the heat of it would tu
rn the two gas tanks into additional explosive force, going up simultaneously with the charge, blowing the boat to junk and splinters. Perhaps it had been detonated by a timer. But how could whoever planted it be certain the boat would be out in relatively deep water when the timed instant arrived?

  Had it blown at the dock with that much force, it would have taken the neighbor vessels as well, and a lot more than three lives. People who have tried to put bombs on airliners have used timers or fuses that worked on reduced atmospheric pressure. A bomb aboard a little pleasure boat couldn't reasonably be hooked up to the depth finder.

  Interesting problem. What does a boat do out in deep water that it doesn't do at the dock? Answer: It pitches and tosses. Very good, McGee. So you use a battery and you get a very stiff piece of wire or leaf spring and you solder a weight to the end of it. It will not bend down to touch the contact, closing the circuit, firing the cap that fires the charge, until it has started oscillating in rough water. That would be efficient, because the whole device could be selfcontained and would take only a moment to place below decks. It could have been placed there while they were gassing up at Pier 66.

  What if out in the channel somebody came from the opposite direction, throwing a big wash? Okay, so it was a little more sophisticated, perhaps. It had a counting device, a cogwheel arrangement. On the twentieth big lift and drop, or the fiftieth, bah-room!

  And maybe it had been stowed aboard weeks before Norma and Evan arrived. Maybe a fake factory rep inspecting the new sniffer Meyer had installed had brought it aboard back in January, tucked it into the recess aft of one of the tanks.

  When the mind starts that kind of spinning, sleep becomes impossible. So I wrenched my thoughts away from explosives and thought about Annie Renzetti, about all her sweetness and unexpected strength. I reinvented her, bit by bit, portion by portion, and went trotting down after her, into sleep.

  Four

  THE NEXT morning came with a black sky low enough to touch, and about the time I heard Meyer in the shower, the two men from Washington returned. The big natty one with the white hair and red cheeks was Warner Housell, and he called himself a staff person on Senator Derregrand's AntiTerrorist Committee, and the terrier type with the hair-piece and the hearing aid was Rowland Service, a specialist from the Treasury Department.

  They both carried dark brown dispatch cases with brass hardware. I told them Meyer would be out in a few minutes, and would they like coffee, and they said they would, no sugar no cream. They were less friendly with each other than they had been the previous afternoon.

  Meyer came out wearing a bathrobe and a headache, and after I had introduced him, he poured himself some coffee and put a chip of ice in it so he could get to it quicker.

  Warner Housell asked the questions. Since he had last called on me, he had briefed himself on Meyer's career, and he was properly respectful. He just took a few quick dabs at Meyer's background and then said, "How did you get involved in the Santiago conference?"

  "I was invited by the chairman. Dr. Isling from the London School of Economics. I imagine there was some sort of selection process, but I don't know what it was. It was an interesting group."

  "Had you been associated with any of the members before?"

  "Only very indirectly. Good people. Academics with a good sense of what is practical, of what might actually work."

  "Are you aware of and have you expressed any opinions in your speeches or your writings about the way the military regime treats dissidents?"

  "I've expressed no opinions except to friends, like Travis McGee here. Yes, I've been aware of the reports of violations of human rights."

  He turned to me. "Can you recall any such opinions expressed by Dr. Meyer?"

  "Not in his exact words. We've discussed what he calls the Shah of Iran paradox. When you crush a rebellion by killing people who are trying to overthrow your government and install their own, at what point are you violating their human rights, and at what point are they violating yours? The Shah let Khomeini escape to Paris. And Batista let Castro leave the country. At what point on the scale are people dissidents, and at what point does it become armed rebellion?"

  Meyer nodded at me approvingly. Warner Housell took notes. "Now then," he said, "are you aware of any threat on your life as a result of the Santiago conference? Any threat, no matter how indirect?"

  "I didn't expect any, so I really wasn't being observant. No strange letters, phone calls, confrontation. Nothing."

  "Mr. Service, for reasons of his own, considers this a fruitless line of interrogation. Your turn, Mr. Service."

  Rowland Service took out a small notebook and, in silence, leafed through page after page, his forehead furrowed. It is a tiresome device.

  "What is your source of income, Dr. Meyer?" "Please, I do not like doctor used as a form of address except for brain surgeons and such. I am used to being called Meyer. My income comes from lecturing, from consultant work, and from dividends, interest, and capital gains from my investments." He snapped his ferret head around to stare at me from those two pale close-together eyes. "And you, sir?"

  "Me what?"

  "What is your source of income?"

  "A little of this and a little of that."

  "Impertinence makes me uncomfortable, MeGee."

  "Me too, Service."

  Housell broke in. "Please, let me explain what he's trying to establish-"

  "Damn it, I'll ask my own questions!"

  "After I explain the background. Two organizations in Washington have contacts within the underground groups in Chile, with information contacts arranged through our embassy. The regime has an information network as well. Mr. Service here spent most of yesterday and yesterday evening drawing a complete and total blank not only on the so-called Liberation Army of the Chilean People but on any antipathy toward any economist who attended the Santiago conference three years ago. Things have quieted down a great deal there. There has been enough economic progress to make people look with more favor on the generals. Within the context of everything those groups know, the attack upon Dr. Meyer here is incomprehensible to them. And so the-"

  "I'll take it," Service said. "The way we see it, that phone call claiming responsibility was a cover story, intended to mislead. It is far more likely that the explosion was connected to the drug traffic that has proliferated along the Florida coast."

  Meyer set his coffee aside and stared at the man. "Drug traffic!" he said incredulously. "Drug traffic! My niece was a respected geologist who worked for-"

  "Don't get agitated. She checked out clean as a whistle. We are wondering about her husband"-he turned a page in his notebook and read off the names-"Evan Lawrence, and the boat captain, Dennis Hackney Jenkins, a.k.a. Hacksaw Jenkins."

  "Not likely in either case," I said. "Evan Lawrence came over here with his wife from Houston because she wanted to have him meet her uncle, her only living blood relation. Hacksaw was a successful charterboat captain. He had a long list of people who wouldn't fish with anybody else. He had a talent for finding fish. He kept that fishing machine of his in fine shape at all times. He was booked solid every season at premium rates. Once upon a time he was a professional wrestler. Once upon a time he spent a year in a county jail. He was raised down in the Keys. There are dozens and dozens of Jenkinses there, all related to him. He settled down when he met Gloria. He was fifty a couple of months ago. I went to the birthday party. They have three sons. The youngest is fifteen. Neither Hack nor the kids would be into drugs in any way, shape, or form."

  The ferret looked bleakly at me. "We'll check all that out, of course."

  The big florid staff person said, "Please forgive my temporary associate here. He has an unfortunate manner."

  "I'm here to do my job," Service said, "not beat the bushes for votes."

  "Do it elsewhere," Meyer said.

  They both looked at him. "What was that?" Service asked.

  "That was the end of cooperation. No more questions and
no more answers. End of interview. Leave."

  "I know all about you high-level experts," Service said angrily. "Next time you come sucking around the government for a consultant contract, maybe you'll find-"

  Housell stood up abruptly. "Come on, Rowland, for God's sake. You're acting like a jackass."

  "And you don't know the first thing about interrogation!" Service yelled.

  Housell led him off, still protesting, and turned to smile apologetically at us. The door closed. The bell bonged as they stepped on the mat at the head of my little gangway to the dock. Meyer went over to the galley and poured himself fresh coffee. I saw the cup tremble slightly as he lifted it to his lips for a cautious sip.

  He sat and frowned down into the cup. "I wanted them out of here so I could think. They were a distraction."

  "An incompetent distraction?"