John D MacDonald - Travis McGee 20 - Cinnamon Skin

by Cinnamon Skin(lit)

  Her patients had begun to complain. They were outraged at the calls they were receiving from the thief. Along with all the usual dirty words, he was telling them details of their lives known only to them and to Dr. Honneker.

  She did not want to take the matter to the police. She did not want the responsibility of what that would do to the patient who had taken the files. A mutual friend told her about me, and she asked me to come see her. I explained that I attempted to recover things of value which could not be recovered in any normal manner, and I usually kept half the value. She said that in one sense the files had no value, but in another sense, if the misuse of them destroyed her in Fort Lauderdale professionally, they were very valuable. So we agreed that I would bill her according to the difficulty I encountered.

  She was about my age, maybe two years younger. She was a big Norse-looking woman, fair and well scrubbed, with a trick of establishing very direct eye contact, her eyes a skeptic green. She was tall and aglow with health. I found out that she ran miles on the beach at first light every day, back when it wasn't dangerous.

  I phoned in and brought her crazy man to the office the next day, files and all. He was a heavy little man who believed the world was out to get him, and the best defense was to be offensive. He sat in the corner like a naughty child while she went through the files to be certain they were all there. She asked me if it had been a lot of trouble, and I smiled at the heavy little man and said, "No trouble at all."

  She ordered him into the next room, and he trudged in and closed the door without making a sound.

  "What would be a fair fee for your trouble, Mr. McGee?" she had asked.

  The question seemed to be put in a challenging way. So I had replied, "We should set up an appointment and negotiate it, don't you think?"

  "What did you have in mind?"

  "We could negotiate over dinner."

  She thought that over, smiled, agreed. We set a date. I picked her up at her place. It was a pleasant evening. We had a lot of attitudes in common. The way we negotiated it, she bought the dinner and I bought the wine. I sensed that she had all her defenses ready in case I threatened to presume too much. When we said good night at her door, I said I would give her a ring sometime. She said that would be nice. But we both knew it wouldn't happen.

  About six months later I went to a big party at a conspicuously large and expensive house on the bay. I do not generally go to cocktail parties. I forget why I went to that one. Some people named Hunter gave the party. I arrived late and found, among the celebrants, one Dr. Laura Honneker, solemnly, quietly smashed. She walked and talked very very carefully. She told me in a slow and precise speech pattern that she did not drink, but that the previous night, at 3:00 A.M., a woman she thought she was helping had put the bedside gun in her mouth and pulled the trigger, thus awakening her husband in the ugliest possible way. So she had decided to have a cocktail. Or two.

  I soon discovered she had been targeted by Ron Robinette, who was then living aboard a half million worth of motor sailer over at Bahia Mar, with an income from mysterious sources. He was big and ruddy with hair dyed black, teeth capped white, a lot of chest hair showing, and a constant smile underneath his little mean eyes. He hovered close and managed to keep touching her, establishing management and control. I saw him muttering into her ear and saw her shaking her head no. But Robinette manages to score in situations much less promising than this one.

  So I worked it out and went over to them and said, "Time we took off, Laura honey, or we'll be late for dinner with the others."

  "Others?" she said.

  I got her by the elbow, and she resisted for just a moment and then came along, docile and unsteady.

  "Now hold it, McGee," Robinette said, following closely. He put his hand on my shoulder.

  I spun, shrugging his hand off, and said, "Screw around with me, Ronnie, and I'll do exactly what I did last time."

  He tried to bring himself up to the point of actual resistance, but his memory was too good. He shrugged and gave me an evil look and turned away. Ten seconds after I handed her into the passenger side of my old Rolls pickup, she passed out. I wanted to take her to her place, but I couldn't rouse her. I rifled her purse and found her apartment keys, but they had no number on them. I knew the building but not the number. So I took her back to the Busted Flush, toted her aboard-she was a considerable burden-and laid her down on the bed in the spare cabin. I eased her shoes off. She was so slack I wondered if she had something else beside too much booze, some kind of illness. I took her pulse. It was a heavy, slow ta-bump, ta-bump, ta-bump. She didn't feel feverish. So I left her there. I fixed myself a light supper and then read until after eleven.

  Before I went to bed, I looked in at her. She had pulled her dress off and dropped it on the floor. I put a blanket over her and left a robe and a disposable toilet kit on the chair near the bed.

  By midmorning, when I was on the second half of the paper and the second cup of coffee, I heard the shower. Soon she came out wearing the robe, her head wrapped in a white towel.

  She said she felt rotten. She turned gray at the offer of eggs and settled for coffee, black. She seemed very ill at ease. Finally she said, "What am I doing here anyway?"

  "Nursing a hangover, I think," I told her. And I told her about snatching her away from one Ron Robinette, thinking to drive her home, but having her pass out on me.

  "Robinette. Big fellow with a red face. Smiles a lot?"

  "The same."

  "What was wrong with him taking me home?"

  "I thought you deserved better. After all, you are an old acquaintance of mine, right? And Robinette has a case of what you professional people call satyriasis. You'd have been screwed lame by now, conscious or unconscious, sitting, kneeling, lying down, or standing on one leg. You'd walk funny for a week. And I didn't touch you, except to tote you from my pickup to your bed."

  I felt a lot of tension go out of her, tension and suspicion. "Oh," she said. "And thanks. Who took my dress off?"

  "It had to be you, because it wasn't me, Laura."

  "I can't even remember," she said. "I guess you saved me from an ugly experience, which would have been my own fool fault. I was depressed. I hardly ever drink. I had some martinis. Then things got kind of blurred. It isn't fair. A man can get depressed and drink too much and he... he isn't vulnerable the way a woman is."

  When her hair was reasonably dry, she combed it out, went in and dressed, and I drove her back to her car. Before she got out of Miss Agnes, she frowned at me and said, "If you hadn't known me at all, would you have rescued me from that man?"

  "I doubt it. I can't run around under the trees catching everything that falls out of the nests, Doctor. Why should I steer Robinette to somebody else who might have just as bad a time?"

  "Then I'm very glad poor Mr. Finch broke into my files and you came to that party. Very glad." She leaned toward me and put a quick light shy kiss on the corner of my mouth. It was not invitational. It was the kiss a young girl gives her uncle at Christmas.

  My upright behavior must have intrigued her, because she began to appear at the right places and right times with such uncanny accuracy that we drifted into an affair which lasted not more than a month and was called off by mutual consent. We were able to say the right things, do the right things, satisfy each other, enjoy each other, but there was something lacking. We were friends making love, not lovers making love. The bodies functioned, but the hearts never took to the wild leaping. So it had a faint flavor of the mechanical, an aura of the incestuous. And, also, I had the feeling she was watching both of us with her professional eye, a surveillance guaranteed to chill any alliance.

  So now, needing advice, I phoned her office. The Noman who answered told me the doctor was with a patient, but she could be disturbed if it was an emergency. I said it was a social call and left my name and number.

  Laura called back twenty minutes later. "Travis! How good to hear your voice."

  "I
've been trying to remember when I saw you last. About four years ago, I think."

  "Closer to five. We ran into each other at Sears. Housewares."

  "It's been five years? How are you anyway?"

  "One hundred forty and holding."

  "Married yet?"

  "Almost was, but I backed out at the very last moment, almost when he was putting the ring on me. Turned chicken. I know you aren't."

  "How would you know that?"

  "Let's just say that your social circles and my professional clients overlap a little here and there. And sometimes we talk about you."

  "Favorably?"

  "Sometimes, sure."

  "The reason I called, I want to pick your doctor brains over dinner. I want to tell you what I know about someone, and you tell me what you can guess about him. I buy the food and the wine."

  She said she was free that very evening, but she had some dictation to catch up on and had planned to stay in the office for a couple of hours after the last patient, so she thought she had better meet me at the restaurant. She named one of the new French ones. She said she would make the reservation.

  They are popping up all over Florida like toadstools after a rain. They vary from wretched to superb. The very best one I know, and I think it the best between Miami and New Orleans, is over on the west coast of Florida, at a shopping mall called Sarasota Square. It is outside the mall, in an area containing a Kmart and a supermarket. It is called the Cafe La Chaumiere and is owned and operated by an agreeable type named Alain who used to be a chef at the Rive Gauche in Washington.

  When I got there at eight, they were all smiles when I said I was joining the Doctor Honneker. Would I go to the table? No, thank you, I would wait luere at this little corner bar. She came in looking elegant in her office business suit. A little heftier in the hip, a trifle thicker around the waist, some horizontal lines across the throat and verticals bracketing the mouth. But a fine figure of a woman, with a lovely green-eyed smile.

  I carried my drink to the table and we ordered bc-sr one. She told me her practice was booming, alI due mostly to having some luck with the nosecandy crowd: young lawyers, doctors, contractors, merchants, dentists, politicians. "I get them of course after they are finally willing to admit they are in serious trouble. So they are pretty well habituated by then, and very jumpy. Have you ever used it?"

  "Tried it twice and didn't like it either time. The great big rush of confidence and well-being is just fine, but when it fades it's hard to remember just exactly what it was like. You just remember you felt real good, and now you don't feel so great."

  "My reaction exactly. I've been having some luck with diet, drug therapy, and analysis. One thing I am sure of: when I have a patient who backslides and comes back to me six months later, there is a discernable diminution of intelligence and awareness. I'm administering standard intelligence measurements to all my cocaine patients now as standard procedure. If I can accumulate enough data, I'm going to try to do a paper on it."

  Over the soup she asked me what I wanted to ask her. I had gone through some mental rehearsals. "Here is your hypothetical patient, Laura. He is now forty-two. When he was thirteen, his mother died suddenly. He had one sister, five years older. When he was fifteen his father married a twenty-five-year-old woman who worked in his office. She was a very sexy item, with a chronic case of the hots. The father was promoted to a job where he had to travel three and four days a week and stay away overnight. When he was seventeen, after his sister married and moved out, the patient was seduced by his stepmother and they entered into a relationship that lasted perhaps three years. Call it two years, plus the vacations when he came home from college when he was twenty."

  "That's really a fairly common form of incest, Travis, and-"

  "That's just part of it. After the end of his freshman year, the boy came home from college and they picked up where they left off. The father came home unexpectedly one night, heard them, listened at the bedroom door, got his gun, and stepped in and killed her with one shot to the back of the head, near the nape of the neck. From the evidence at the scene, the woman was on top, her feet toward the doorway. The boy squirmed out from under her, and we do not know what happened next. There was evidence of a struggle. So either he father tried to kill the boy or tried to kill himself. They fought for the gun and the father was shot. He died soon after they found him. A neighbor heard the two shots and saw the boy as he drove away in the father's car. The car was found weeks later at the bottom of a canyon, with nobody in it or near it."

  She dropped her soup spoon into her shallow bowl and stared at me. "Good grief! What was the boy's relationship to his father?"

  "The boy loved and respected his old man."

  "Worser and worser. What kind of boy was he?"

  "Standard issue. Athletic. Not a great student. Interested in theater, I guess. He was in the drama club. Reasonably good-looking. Big shoulders and hands."

  "Are you quite sure he's alive?"

  "It is a reasonable certainty."

  "Is the sister alive?"

  "Yes. He sends cash to her, secretly. He has a way of keeping track of where she is. He's sent her the better part of a hundred thousand dollars over the last fifteen years or so."

  "Does she condone his behavior?"

  "She says it was all the fault of the second wife."

  "Is he still a fugitive?"

  "Technically I guess. Nobody is really looking for him for that early shooting."

  "But they are looking for him for something else?"

  "I'd rather not say yet. What would it do to a person, that kind of history?"

  "I don't think... I don't believe anyone would be strong enough to walk away from something like that undamaged. If he loved his father, then he hated the stepmother. The long history of betraying his father every time they had a chance, that isn't something he could get used to. It would just pile guilt upon guilt, higher and higher. He would have contempt for himself, for being unable to stop. He would feel weak and used and contemptible."

  "How would it have ended if the old man hadn't caught them?"

  "I don't know. I can guess. The stepmother was turned on by the danger of it, by the 'badness' of it. She was walking a very dangerous tightrope and knew it. One scenario would be for the boy to kill her, to strangle her or beat her to death. That would be an understandable way of seeking punishment for all his sinning. That would give themmeaning society-the excuse to jail him for life, put him away, out of touch with decent people. A less dramatic and probably more plausible reaction would be for the boy to just run away, leave it all behind. Killing himself would be one kind of running away. Killing himself and the woman must certainly have occurred to him as a way of expiating guilt and punishing both the guilty parties. Guilt is a powerful and frightening thing, Travis. He might just have disappeared into limbo. A wander ing migrant worker. A future bum on a park bench somewhere. But when it was all taken out of his hands in such a gaudy brutal way, before he could plan and make expiation, I... I just can't predict the effect. I do have the gut feeling that this might be a terribly dangerous personality, a man completely dead inside. I think he would probably be ritualistic. He... he would want to take revenge on his own sexuality as being the agent that caused the trouble."

  "How would he do that?"

  "Self-mutilation would be understandable. Or total denial and deprivation."

  "How would he react toward women?"

  "Oh, God. That would be a bucket of worms: I think he would want to punish them for their sexuality, for being the symbol of the temptress. What are you getting at?"

  "Try this. Would this be possible? For him to hunt down women, one after the other, young attractive women, seduce them, enchant them into a very physical and erotic affair, actually seem to love them, sometimes even marry them, and then kill them?"

  For a moment she frowned, and then her eyes widened. "It would be ritualistic. He would be punishing her for her sexuality, and
he would be punishing himself by depriving himself of her passion. It's intricate, Trav, but I could buy it. Yes. And he would acquire a very special knack of making himself attractive to women, of always saying the right thing, doing the right thing. He would have to keep changing his identity, wouldn't he?"

  "I know the name he started with and three more, and know of three dead women."

  We were side by side on a banquette. She grabbed me so strongly just above my right knee I could feel her nails through the fabric of my trousers. "My God, tell me about him! Tell me all about him!"

  It took a long time. She asked questions. We suddenly stirred ourselves, realizing the check had been on the table for a long time and the waiters were circling at a discreet distance, coughing, and the place was absolutely empty except for us. So, in apology, I overtipped, and she followed me in her car, back to the Busted Flush so we could keep the discussion going.