John D MacDonald - Travis McGee 20 - Cinnamon Skin

by Cinnamon Skin(lit)

  "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 face down 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 ro
amed 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 cabana, 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

  John D. MacDonald

  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 Renzetli came back to the cabana 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 110

  CINNAMON SKIN

  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?"

  "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."

  "You say lovely things. Where's Meyer? What did you find out?"

  So I told her the whole thing. It was pitch-black night before I finished. She hadn't seen the photographs of Evan Lawrence, a.k.a. Jerry Tobin, and she wanted to see the Xerox copy of the Texas news story, reproduced from microfilm. We went in and turned on the lights. I fixed fresh drinks while she studied the clipping and the photo.

  "She was a very pretty girl, wasn't she?"

  "Yes indeed she was. They played down the angle that she was probably running away with Evan Lawrence."

  "Was she?"

  "Her big brother, Marty, thinks so."

  I gave her the drink and sat near her. She kept looking at Evan Lawrence's face in the color enlargement, her expression odd.

  "What's the matter, Annie?"

  "What I was going to say before, out on the deck there when you told me all about it, I was going to say I couldn't make it sound like something that really happened, those two things, those two women. It seems so sort of pointless. I mean, they both adored him, right? What was the need? Suppose he was with them for years and years and got tired of them. Like taking out insurance on the wife. That sort of dirty thing. But, looking at him..."

  "Looking at him what?"

  "I can sort of understand. I think this is a kind of man most women never get to see even once in their lives. I knew one like that when I was very young. He used to come to our house. I was about thirteen. He used to bring his wife. She didn't have very much English. I think she was Hungarian. He was trying to make a deal with my father. He wanted a tract of land my father had inherited. He wanted to build some kind of factory on it, and he was trying to get my father to take a stock interest instead of demanding cash for the land. I heard years later that if my father had taken the stock interest, he would have become a very rich person in a very short time. I looked at that man with the Hungarian wife and I fell madly, totally in love with him."

  "Why?"

  "How do I know? I looked at him and I saw strength and kindness and gentleness and love and understanding. I saw right away that he would know every thought and emotion I might have without my having to tell him. I looked at him and something inside me melted. There is something very much like that in this man's face."

  "I can't see it."

  "Another woman would."

  "So why does what you see in his face make
it easier for you to understand what we think he did?" "That man I fell in love with? He turned out to be very corrupt. He cheated his associates. His wife drowned mysteriously in a boating mishap in California. When he was arrested, he posted bail and disappeared. I've heard he is living in Turkey. They have no extradition. He had everything and he threw it away. Just like this person here, whatever his name is."

  "Maybe Meyer will come up with a better name through the university records."

  "Have you wondered if this person might be insane?" she asked.

  "I've thought about it."

  "If a person has built up enough of a structure of delusion, the things they do only make sense as they relate to the delusion. What is he, about forty? Or a little more. He may have been doing this sort of thing for years."

  "Without attracting a lot of attention?"