John D MacDonald - Travis McGee 20 - Cinnamon Skin

by Cinnamon Skin(lit)

  Meyer did well, hunched forward, hands gripping the wheel at ten o'clock and two o'clock. We traversed the interchange onto the loop Interstate 610, heading west. The average speed moved up to a little above seventy. He took the first exit past the junction of Interstate 10, headed west again, turned south at a light, and after a couple of miles turned into the main entrance of Piney Village, a misnamed development of clusters of town houses and duplexes in stained wood with some stone facing, set at odd angles on curving asphalt to manufacture illusions of privacy. Berms added variety to flatness, and new trees struggled. The architect had been crazy about step roof pitches, a manifest insanity in the Houston climate. Meyer meandered left and right and left, pulled into a driveway barely longer than the orange Datsun, and parked with the front bumper inches from the closed overhead garage door, killed the motor, and exhaled audibly. "Very nervous traffic," I said. "You did good."

  "Thank you. Lately I seem to get along better by focusing on just one thing at a time, pushing everything else out of my mind. Driving a car, shaving, cooking eggs. The other day I was adding figures on a pocket calculator and I suddenly lost track of what I was doing." He frowned at me. "I was adrift all of a sudden, and I had to reinvent myself, find out who I was and where I was and what I was doing. Like waking from very deep sleep. Strange."

  He got out and I followed as he went to the door of D-3 and unlocked it. In the hallway, he pushed a sequence of numbers on a small panel, and a voice came out of the grill and said, "Identify please."

  "Meyer here. Two eight two seven five."

  "Thank you," the grill said, after a short pause.

  "Security," Meyer explained. "All these places are hooked up to a central control. When we sign out, they'll be listening for sounds of break-in or fire or whatever."

  It was a two-level town-house apartment, with two bedrooms and bath off a balcony, with kitchen, bath, and a studio-workroom under the bedroom portion. The two-story-high living room had a glass wall at one end, with sliding doors that opened onto a small garden surrounded on three sides by a seven-foot concrete wall, and a fireplace at the other end. The furniture was modern and looked comfortable without being bulky. The colors were mostly neutral, but with bright prints on the wall, bright jackets on the bookshelves. It had the look of being well-built, solid, efficient, and impersonal.

  "Norma lived here alone before she got married, and Evan moved in with her. She was the first occupant after this unit was finished. She rented it on some complicated lease-purchase arrangement whereby she paid six hundred and twenty-five a month, and two hundred of that went into an escrow account against her decision to purchase for sixty-five thousand when her two-year lease was up. It will be up in October. These places are now going for ninety to a hundred, so I guess she made a good decision. There's a big shopping mall about a mile away, and it's close to a very direct route into the middle of the city."

  He said it would be easier if I stayed in the place, and he assigned me the bedroom on the left. I unpacked in about seventy-five seconds and went down, and he said we could eat at the mall. He checked out over the security intercom and locked up.

  We drove to the metallic acres of mall parking lot. Meyer said it was going to get up to a hundred and five again by midafternoon. It was the fourth day of the heat wave. A lot of old people were dying, he said. They didn't dare leave windows open because the feral children would climb in, terrorize them, and take anything hockable. Their windows were nailed shut. They sat in heat of a hundred and twenty with their bare feet in pans of water, fanning themselves, collapsing, dying. They couldn't afford the cost of air conditioning or, in many cases, the cost of running an electric fan. From where they died, from anywhere in the city, the giant office towers of the seven sisters of the oil industry were invisible.

  We walked through the cool shadowy passageways of the mall, lined with the brightly lighted shops. The tiled pedestrian avenues led to Sears, to Kmart, to JCPenney. There were fountains and benches and guide maps: "You are here." Thousands shuffled through the mall in coolness, children racing back and forth, dripping ice cream. It is contemporary carnival, an entertainment of looking at shoe stores, summer clearance sales, of being blasted by the music coming out of Radio Shack of trying to remember the balance already committed on the credit card account. There was a public service display of security equipment devices, with uniformed officers answering questions. Uniformed guards stood in boredom in the jewelry stores. Young mothers with tired and ugly expressions whopped their young with a full-arm swing, eliciting bellows of heartbreak.

  He led me to a narrow fast-food place with a German name, and we went to a table for two way in the back. He recommended the wurst, the kraut, and the dark draft. So be it.

  Then I had the feeling he had run down. He had pre-planned the airport pickup, the ride, getting me settled, taking me to the mall. But it ended there. He had no key for the rewind.

  "How is it going?" I asked.

  "Going?"

  "Cleaning up her affairs."

  "Well, there is a will. Everything comes to me. She didn't get around to changing it. She previously changed the beneficiary when my sister died."

  "Is there much involved?"

  "It-it seems to be complicated."

  "Okay. So you don't want to talk about it. Okay."

  "No, Travis. It's not that. I don't want to compromise what you might think by telling you in advance what I think."

  "In advance of what?"

  "I made an appointment for us with Roger Windham."

  "Her lawyer?"

  "At three o'clock in his office in the Houston Trust Building."

  "Let's cover a couple of things first," I said. "Take a good close look at this." I handed him the Kodacolor print.

  He looked at it and gave me a puzzled look. "So?"

  "Take a closer look at the man's hand."

  His eyebrows lifted in surprise. "Good Lord! I remember Pogo telling me how he lost those fingers. He was boating a mako, and a loop in the wire leader slipped around his fingers just as the shark shook his head for the last time. Nipped them right off. Now I can see that it really is Pogo. In the picture in the paper I thought-"

  "So did I. Then I wondered if maybe Evan Lawrence had been below when that woman took the picture. I tried to check it out. I went to the gas dock over at Pier Sixty-six. I went from boat to boat along Charterboat Row. Here is my best guess. Evan Lawrence was-handy. He caught on quickly. There was no need for the expense of a mate aboard when Hack took Evan and Norma out. In the rough chop out beyond the sea buoy Hack would want to stay at the wheel. So when Evan couldn't make it, he hired Pogo. Norma was hooked on game fish. If Evan wasn't feeling too great I don't think she would have stayed ashore in some motel room just to hold his hand, even if it was a belated honeymoon. So with no proof at all, it is my belief that Evan didn't get blown to bits. He seemed like such a hell of a nice man, it's hard to take the next logical step."

  "He arranged to blow up my boat."

  "Exactly. And living aboard for a couple of weeks, he had a chance to go through your papers and come up with that Chilean connection to use as a red herring. Why did you jump an the idea so quick and easy Meyer?"

  "You'll know after you hear Windham."

  I waited until it became obvious he wasn't going to say any more. So then I gave him the next chapter, about Hack Jenkins giving the boatyard, Dalton and Forbes, thirty-eight thousand in advance to turn the HooBoy into a fifty-mile-an-hour bomb, and it would be finished within a week.

  "Young Dave came to me with the information. He was very upset. Couldn't see his daddy mixed up in drug running."

  "Can you?" Meyer asked.

  "I don't know. I don't know what pressure could have been brought to bear against him. Maybe he was tired of seeing his friends making it big. But the thing that bothers me there is that his friends make out pretty well using the same old slow fishing machines, just by knowing their way around the area."
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br />   "It doesn't sound like Hack. He was about the best in the whole marina," Meyer said. He shrugged. "On the other hand, these are the days when people are turning strange. Doing things they never thought they would do."

  The food was better than I had any right to expect. Walking back through the mall to the exit nearest our part of the parking lot, we passed one shop which sold computers, printers, software, and games. It was packed with teenagers, the kind who wear wire rims and know what the new world is about. The clerks were indulgent, letting them program the computers. Two hundred yards away, near the six movie houses, a different kind of teenager shoved quarters into the space-war games, tensing over the triggers, releasing the eerie sounds of extraterrestrial combat. Any kid back in the computer store could have told the combatants that because there is no atmosphere in space, there is absolutely no sound at all. Perfect distribution: the future managers and the future managed ones. Twenty in the computer store, two hundred in the arcade.

  The future managers have run on past us into the thickets of CP/M, M-Basic, Cobal, Fortran, Z-80, Apples, and Worms. Soon the bosses of the microcomputer revolution will sell us preprogrammed units for each household which will provide entertainment, print out news, purvey mail-order goods, pay bills, balance accounts, keep track of expenses, and compute taxes. But by then the future managers will be over on the far side of the thickets, dealing with bubble memories, machines that design machines, projects so esoteric our pedestrian minds cannot comprehend them. It will be the biggest revolution of all, bigger than the wheel, bigger than Franklin's kite, bigger than paper towels.

  Eight

  DOWNTOWN HOUSTON seemed an empty place on a Friday afternoon. Bulky skyscrapers faced with granite and marble stood in a kind of gloomy silence in the golden smog. There was light traffic, few pedestrians, few stores, a broad deserted public square. Meyer ducked down a ramp into an underground parking garage.

  Once we left the garage, I realized why there were so few pedestrians out on the streets. The underground tunnels were cooler and busier. We missed an important sign and had to double back to an intersection before we finally found the elevator bank for the Houston Trust Building.

  The law offices of Sessions, Harkavy and Windham were on the twenty-seventh floor. We waited ten minutes on plastic furniture looking at sections of newspaper before Roger Windham's secretary, a rangy graying redhead, led us back to a small conference room.

  Roger Windham was waiting for us. He was tall, in his early thirties, with red-blond bangs, a ragged reddish mustache, pale blue eyes that looked red and irritated. He was in shirt sleeves with a conservative tie, perfectly knotted. I wondered how many ties you could find in downtown Houston when the temperature was over a hundred.

  I saw Windham trying to put a label on me as we were introduced, and as we sat in three chairs at the end of the conference table. I manage to look out of place in an office. Too much deep-water tan, too much height, too many knuckles, too many fading scars of past tactical errors and strategic mistakes. Had I come to repair the wiring in the overhead ducts, he would have had not a glimmer of curiosity about me.

  Windham opened the folder in front of him, closed it again, and sighed. He scratched a freckled wrist. His shirt sleeves were turned back, midway up the tendoned forearms of the tennis buff.

  "As I understand the situation, Mr. McGee, you are here as a friend of the deceased's uncle."

  "And someone," I said, "with a lot of curiosity about how it happened to happen."

  "You're not alone," he said tiredly. "I'd handled Norma's legal affairs and advised her on financial matters for probably four years. The longer I knew her, the better I liked her. I must confess to a certain bias in this whole affair. I did not realize what a complete damn fool I had been until all of a sudden I discovered that she was in love with Evan Lawrence, he had moved into her place with her, and they were going to be married. She was one hell of a woman. I didn't know how far I'd fallen for her until... it was too damn late. I wasn't planning to tell you this, Dr. Meyer-"

  "Please, I am just Meyer. McGee is Travis. You are Roger. We're talking personal things, so it will be easier without formalities."

  "Okay. Let me give you the financial picture the way it was before she went to Mexico. She was very bright. I guess you knew that already, Meyer. She got her degrees at a tender age. Am Dexter, who is wise in the ways of geologists, snapped her up six years ago. He hired her away from Conoco and talked her into a long-term contract, with a smaller royalty override than she was maybe worth then, and certainly smaller than she was worth at the time... at the time she died."

  It was hard for him to say. His throat worked. It was something he didn't like to swallow.

  "Anyway, even being paid less than her market value, she was able to accumulate a substantial amount after living expenses and taxes. I had her tax returns done here in the firm. I tried to talk her into investing in private drilling programs with people in the industry, people she knew and respected. I told her it would be a good tax shelter for a single person with her income. But she was not interested in manipulating money and making it grow. She wanted to tuck it away and forget it. So three years ago I had her open a discretionary trust account at Houston Bank and Trust and empty her savings accounts into it. The trust officer, Phyllis DeMar, consulted with me about what we should recommend to Norma. We put her into growth stocks, because it was not appropriate for her to invest for income. And we put her into tax-frees. It made a suitable portfolio."

  "Very sound," Meyer said.

  Windham turned the folder to where both Meyer and I could see a page of columns of figures, and then he came around the table to lean between us and point to the appropriate places.

  "This is a summary printout made by the Trust Department. It shows the contributions in this column, withdrawals in this, and the total value of the trust based on market value of the holdings, at the end of each month since the account was established.

  "As you can see, the total value of the account reached a peak of three hundred and fifteen thousand, seven hundred and twenty-eight dollars and forty cents on the last day of February this year. There were no more contributions made after that date. In the period from March first to June fifteenth, three and a half months, the account balance was drawn down to this figure here, which is approximately what is in the account today, nine thousand three hundred and something.

  "Though it was a substantial amount for her to have saved, it is but a tiny driblet of the money that surges through the banks in this city. In each case she authorized the sale of the securities, signed the authorization, and deposited the checks in the account she maintained at First National. Then she cashed a large number of checks over that time span. As she made me and the Houston Bank and Trust co-executors, I was able to get access to the checking account records. The summary is on this next sheet. This column here is normal account activity: charge accounts, bills, etc. These are the checks she cashed. One hundred and fifty-two, all in the fifteen-hundred- to twenty-five-hundred-dollar range. About ten a week. Two every working day. But because she was on field trips from time to time, the incidence had to be higher than that when she was in town. She went around to branch offices of the bank. She evidently wanted to accumulate cash without attracting any kind of attention. And it worked."

  "What do you think was going on?" Meyer asked. "Take a guess."

  Windham went back to his chair and slouched into it, leaning his chin on a steeple of long fingers. "My bias comes into the answer. Where did this Evan Lawrence come from? Maybe she married some kind of con man, or somebody given to harebrained schemes to make a million. Even though Norma wasn't interested in money for its own sake, she was a very smart woman. She had a good mind. Could she have been cheated?"

  "Probably," Meyer said. "She was deeply in love. Trust becomes very important then. You suppress doubts for fear of offending the loved one. Her man and her work they were the important things in her life. If he asked
for a loan, made a plausible sales pitch, she would have given it to him."

  "But why such stealth?" Windham said. "If she had doubts, she knew she could come to me for advice."

  "Tell him, Travis," Meyer said.

  I didn't want to, because I knew it was going to have a very ugly effect on Roger Windham.

  "It was a very violent explosion," I said to him. "I read the reports. I know. Explosions are the big thing lately. How many school kids can you kill with a car bomb?"