John D MacDonald - Travis McGee 20 - Cinnamon Skin

by Cinnamon Skin(lit)

  "A little here, a little there. But he keeps moving on."

  "What kind of a delusion would make a man kill women who have fallen deeply in love with him?"

  "Punishing them for loving somebody he knows is unworthy of love?"

  "Come on Annie!"

  "So he's schizo. The lover and the killer. There are mental disorders a lot wilder than that."

  We left it there. I put the picture and the clipping back in my case. We had a late supper in a private corner of the lounge.

  "Okay," I said finally. "What have you got on your mind?"

  "Does it show? I didn't want it to show."

  "Annie, about one minute ago I said that these tiny potatoes are really delicious. And you smiled and said they surely are. And they happen to be sauteed scallops."

  "It's not fair, damn you, to do it that way. That's entrapment."

  "What's going on?"

  "I wasn't ready to tell you yet. I've been summoned to Chicago. I go up Thursday night and come back Saturday."

  "What's going on?"

  A friend in Chicago gave me a tiny clue over the phone."

  "Such as?"

  "Do you remember, when I first went with the company I was secretary to a Mr. Luddwick?"

  "Then he was transferred to Hawaii?"

  "Right. And his replacement got into a one-car accident driving down here, and by the time he was recovered enough to take over this hotel, I was doing so well they decided to let me run it."

  "And you've been doing well ever since."

  "They must think so. The executive vicepresident, Mr. Minter, has had a heart attack and he's taking early retirement. So they're bringing Al Luddwick back from Hawaii to take over. That leaves Hawaii open. It's brand new and twice the size of this one. And lots more money."

  I frowned at her. "They're going to offer it to you?"

  "Why not? I don't mind saying I am doing a hell of a job. All they have to do is look at the ratios. Every computer study they run tells them I'm doing a hell of a job."

  "At least it's nice to be asked."

  "I'm not sure I'm going to be asked, Travis. So far, it's just a rumor."

  "But if they ask you, you wouldn't take it, would you?"

  "Why the hell wouldn't I?"

  "What about us?"

  "Good grief, Travis, what about us? You don't understand how these things work, do you? Right now, I'm red hot. Suppose they offered it and I turned it down. What would that tell them about me? Oh, they'd probably keep me on here, but they'd be... dubious about me. Maybe I was scared to try something bigger. Maybe I have some kind of action going on the side, down here, and they better do some more auditing. The instant I say no, I stop being Golden Girl."

  "So who needs to be Golden Girl? What's wrong with the life you have?"

  "How can you be so chauvinistic stupid?"

  "Hey, wait a minute!"

  "I mean it. Look, when I think of that much bigger a job, I get flutters in my stomach and I can't take a deep breath. My God, honey, that is the direction of the stock options, the bonuses, the eventual seat on the Board. Look, I have something I can do damn well. I love the work. I love the challenge. What am I supposed to do, cut myself back like pruning a bush so I can be your convenient little shack job?" She thumped her breastbone with her knuckles. "I am me in my own right. What do you do in Florida that is so damned important anyway? Of course I don't want to lose you. Why can't you ship the Busted Flush out to the islands as deck cargo? You could have a better life out there than you have here. Those good old buddy boys of yours around Bahia Mar would forget you in three months. What would you be giving up compared with what you're asking me to give up?"

  The food was good, but the appetite came to a dead halt. We went for a walk. We took the quarrel up and down the beach. The breeze had come up, out of the west, shoving the bugs inland. The waves slapped on the starlit sand.

  We took the quarrel, unresolved, to bed, both of us secretly hoping that lovemaking would provide a solution somehow. It was a gentler interlude than ever before. There seemed in it elements of sadness, of regret and farewell. Afterward I kissed her moist eyes and tasted the salt, asked her why she wept. "For what might have been, I guess."

  "Such as?"

  "Had we been younger. I don't know. At my age with this pelvic structure, having a baby would be a very dangerous thing. And you're past changing, McGee. You're past having tots around. But even if I were younger and wanted to risk it, the thing I talked about before would make me wary."

  "What was that?"

  "The way you keep some important part of yourself hidden away. The reserve I can't break through. Maybe you were different a dozen years ago. Maybe then you could give all the way. With me, I get the feeling you are a user, not a giver."

  "And you feel like someone who is only used?"

  "No, dear. Not that harsh. I don't have the right words. What I do know is that I have more energies than you can waste. I can't use all of myself with you because neither you nor the years will let that happen. But I can use all of myself in my work. Believe me, I'm not motivated by trying to make a lot of money, or be important, or force people to respect me. I want to do what I do because it is tricky work, and when it goes well I feel a very intense satisfaction. Can you understand all that?"

  "I can try."

  She made a sound in the darkness almost like a laugh. "Oh, my darling, this has been good. I needed you. I needed more of you than you were willing to give, but it was damn good nonetheless. And now we've bitched it all up for fair."

  "How so?"

  "If they offer me the job, I'll take it. But if the rumor is wrong, and they don't offer it to me, and I stay here, I don't want this relationship with you to continue."

  "Why not?"

  "The fact you could ask that question is one of the reasons."

  "Maybe I'm not very bright."

  "Okay, you are a no-win situation for me. You unfocus my attention on my work. You create little problems with the hotel employees. Some of them think they can get a little smart-ass, as if they have something they can use against me in some way, and I have to smack them down. After you have been here, my bed is always too empty for night after night. Yet when I know you are on your way over, I feel a funny resentment. As if I'm some kind of chattel. You and my work overlap in a way that makes me irritable. Can you understand?"

  "I think maybe I'm beginning to. Maybe we can leave it that you can come over to Lauderdale whenever."

  "I don't think so. Thank you, but I don't think that would be wise. Besides, I really do expect to get the position in Hawaii."

  She turned her head and looked at her bedside clock. Ten past three.

  "Travis?"

  I slipped my arms around her and pulled her closer.

  "Travis, do me a favor."

  "Sure."

  "Just get up and get dressed and get in your little rented car and go home."

  When I started to speak she pressed two fingers against my lips.

  "Please, dear: I want to cry in peace. I want to cry for a long long time, and then sleep like death: Please go. Please don't say anything. We've said it all."

  And so I dressed in darkness, picked up my gear, let myself out, making certain the door was locked. One of her alert security guards checked me, grunting recognition after putting his flashlight on my face.

  And here is how it was for me, as I droned across Alligator Alley in the little tin car. I told myself there was no understanding women. I told myself she didn't understand what she was throwing away. I told myself I would probably read about her in the papers, years hence, a hard-bitten little gray-haired woman who had been made head of something or other.

  I felt lost and lonesome and, in a curious way, unworthy. I still kept telling myself there was no understanding them.

  But honesty cannot be indefinitely suppressed. Yes, I knew exactly what she meant. I knew exactly why she had made her decision, and I was forced to admit that n
o matter what I thought of it, it was the right decision for Anne Renzetti.

  Then came the hard part. I had suffered loss. I had been rejected. I was the lover cast out I was alone. And when I tried to plumb the depths of my grief and my loss, I came finally upon a small ugly morsel way down in the bottom of my soul. It was a little round object, like a head with a grinning face. It said ugly things to me. It kept telling me I was relieved. I strained for the crocodile tears, but the little face grinned and grinned. It shamed me.

  And as I unlocked my houseboat and got ready to go back to bed, I realized that Annie had perhaps suspected that the little ugly feeling of relief and release would be there. We are all, says Meyer, in one way or another, large or small, hidden or revealed, rotten at the core.

  Goodbye, Annie girl. I loved you as much as I can love. And I will feel an aching need for you for a long time.

  So what if I did put the Flush aboard a freighter as deck cargo and go out to the islands? New place. Cleaner skies. Hadn't I been saying sour things about all of Florida going down the drain under the polluting weight of an unending invasion of new residents?

  Florida was second rate, flashy and cheap, tacky and noisy. The water supply was failing. The developers were moving in on the marshlands and estuaries, pleading new economic growth. The commercial fishermen were an endangered species. Miami was the world's murder capital. Phosphate and fruit trucks were pounding the tired old roads to rubble. Droughts of increasing severity were browning the landscape. Wary folks stayed off the unlighted beaches and dimly lighted streets at night, fearing the minority knife, the ethnic club, the bullet from the stolen gun.

  And yet... and yet...

  There would be a time again when I would canoe down the Withlacoochee, adrift in a slow current, seeing the morning mist rising at the base of the limestone buttes, seeing the sudden heartstopping dip and wheel of a flight of birds of incredible whiteness.

  On an unknown day dawn the road ahead, I would see that slow slide of the gator down the mudbank into the pond, see his eye knobs watching me, see a dance cloud of a billion gnats in the ray of sun coming through Spanish moss.

  And once again maybe I would be wading and spincasting a pass at dawn, in an intense, misty, windless silence, and suddenly hear the loud hissy gasp of a porpoise coming up for air just a few feet behind me, startling me out of my wits, and see his benign, enigmatic smile as he sounded again.

  Wild orchids, gnarls of cypress knees, circlets of sun slanting down onto green marsh water, a half acre of-wind moving across the grass flats, fading and dying, throaty gossip of wild turkeys, fading life of a boated tarpon, angelfish-batting their eye lashes moving coy and elusive between the sea fans, the full, constant, mind-warping, roaring, whistling scream of full hurricane.

  Tacky though it might be, its fate uncertain, too much of its destiny in the hands of men whose sole thought was grab the money and run, cheap little city politicians with blow-dried hair, ice-eyed old men from the North with devout claims about their duties to their shareholders, big-rumped good old boys from the cattle counties with their fingers in the till right up to their cologned armpits-it was still my place in the world. It is where I am and where I will stay, right up to the point where the Neptune Society sprinkles me into the dilute sewage off the Fun Coast.

  It has too many magic moments that make up for all the rest of it. Too many flashes of a pure delight. I realized there was no point in trying to sleep. I dug out the tallest glass I owned, found four oranges in the cold locker that had no soft spots, made a tall mourner's breakfast of juice, cracked ice, and Boodles gin, and took it up to my fly bridge forward of the sun deck, swiveled my captain's chair, and put my heels on the starboard side of the control panel. The promise of dawn was a salmon thread over by the Bahamas.

  I realized that Annie might never be aboard again, and there was a sudden sickening wrenching sense of loss, a kind of vivid despair. Loss with no dilution of relief.

  When the drink was half gone my phone began ringing. I hurried on down, knowing who it was, hoping she wouldn't give up. She was still there. "Yes?"

  "Look. Not like this."

  I exhaled a long breath. "You're right. Not like this, Annie."

  "Because, plus the rest, we were friends."

  "Are friends," I said.

  "And we keep the friends part."

  "You let me know what they say in Chicago."

  "I will."

  "I hope they offer it and you take it and work your tail off."

  "Thank you. But of course it will take some time to turn this over to somebody else. Properly. So...''

  "We'll see each other again."

  "So there'll be time to end this a little better thar we did tonight. I was rotten. I'm sorry."

  "We're both sorry."

  "How come two people can be more than the sum of the two individuals, and then so much les than the sum?"

  "Comes of being some kind of human person Annie."

  "Okay, I had to call. Good night or good mornin, or whatever. Were you asleep?"

  "I was topside with a cold drink, thinking Iong sorry thoughts and watching for the dawn. You?"

  "I went down and sat at the water's edge. Long sad thoughts. So I finally had to call."

  "Good luck to you, friend."

  "Good luck to both of us," she said and hung up. I went back and nursed the rest of the drink, finishing it when the sun came up into the smutcl oozing red, bulging with the promise of angry burns on the young white hide of the visitors, and another deepening of the tan on the spare leather bodies of the lizardlike octogenarians on their retirement terraces. I went down and fell into sleep using it like a giant Band-aid. When the phone woke me at noon I felt an unlikely confusion, a sense of not knowing who I was or where.

  Twelve

  "WHERE ARE you?" I asked Meyer.

  "In a Holiday Inn in Austin. What I have to report - is nothing to report. Except eyestrain." He sounded tired and discouraged.

  "You got my message?"

  "About the name Jerry Tobin. Yes. My friend is on a sabbatical, but the graduate student who works for him had your letter here for me. I would say it helps confirm what we already suspected."

  "I agree."

  "Travis, I selected the seven most likely years, making the best possible estimate of the man's age. I found that the Office of the Director of Development and Endowment has a library facility, and they were kind enough to provide me with adequate space and access to their complete collection of yearbooks, from the university facility here and also from the branches in Arlington, Dallas, and El Paso. They also have yearbooks from every other facility in the state. So I can state that the man did not graduate from any division of the University of Texas, or from Texas Christian in Fort Worth, Texas Tech in Lubbock, Texas Wesleyan in Fort Worth, Texas Southern in Houston, Texas Eastern in Tyler, Texas Lutheran in Seguin, Texas A and I at Kingsville, Texas A and M at College Station and Prairie View, East Texas Baptist at Marshall, East Texas State at Commerce, North Texas State at Denton, or West Texas State at Canyon. Or the University of Dallas at Irving."

  "Did you-"

  "Let me finish. I found lots of people named Lawrence and lots of people named Tobin. I could not match them up in any productive way. I made the assumption that he may have attended without graduating, so I have been poring over the group photographs in all the yearbooks, one hundred and twenty-five, to be precise. One from East Texas Baptist, an unlikely place and an unlikely year, was missing. If it is possible to wear out a rather large magnifying glass, I have done so. I have had the picture of the man at hand to constantly refresh my memory. Have you ever realized how much most young men look like one another? Just as we, I suppose, look rather alike to them. I have made some reference notes as to certain possibles. Such and such an institution, yearbook for such and such a year, page fifty-six, football squad, second row from rear, fifth fellow from the left. There are about fifteen possibles, and I want to go back to t
hem once I have gotten some transparent plastic for overlays, and a grease pencil to add facial hair in the same pattern as the possibles. I don't expect to be able to eliminate them all. Whatever number is left out of the fifteen, I will assemble vital statistics for each."

  "That sounds like a lot of drudgery."

  "It is, it is. Research is part of my basic training. The accumulation of facts. One expects it to be dull. When enough facts are assembled, a conclusion can be drawn. That's the interesting part."

  "Have we got a choice of conclusions?"

  "I will find him, and we will learn who he really is, or was. I will not find him and we can conclude he did not graduate from a Texas institution and probably did not attend one or, if he did, was inactive in extracurricular activities."