John D MacDonald - Travis McGee 20 - Cinnamon Skin

by Cinnamon Skin(lit)

  We sat in the lounge with cold beer in hand, and I said, "Maybe we won't ever find him, Meyer and I. But suppose we do. Suppose we find him and walk up to him. He is going to know us. How will he react?"

  She took a long time thinking it over. She said, "You must realize that he has been wondering for years what he would do if that happened, if somebody was able to unmask him. Since you say he is likable and plausible, I think he will give you a totally fabricated account of what actually happened. He will make it sound real. He has depended on charm for a long time. I think you will have to pretend to believe him."

  "Why?"

  "He's a murderer, Travis. He has developed his capacity for violence. There will be no hesitation in him at all. Believing his story, you will have to maneuver him to a place and time where he can't hurt you and can't get away from you. Then and only then do you start casually dropping the names of the dead. Not accusatory. Affable. Almost laughing at him. Doris Eagle. Isobelle Garvey. He will not know how much you know, and suddenly you will seem to be all-knowing. You will become the God/Daddy here to punish him at last, and I think he will come completely, totally apart, with no hope of ever putting himself together again. I have broken people that way so that I could put them back together again in a better pattern, with their help. The more you look amused at their lies, the wilder the lies become. And quite suddenly they break."

  "And if he just denies it? Maybe I didn't get it across to you. This is a very plausible, likable man. If he can hold himself together, no jury will convict."

  "If he just denies it, you must edge very very carefully into the Coralita situation."

  "Why delicately?"

  "There is such a phenomenon as denial. By now he may well have convinced himself that it didn't happen. Confrontation would reinforce the denial. You would have to ask him about little things. What color were Coralita's eyes? Can you think of the unimaginable hell it must have been for that boy when his father was home? To sit at dinner with his father and Coralita. To try not to look at Coralita's breasts and her hips and her mouth for fear his father would guess what was going on between them. To lie in bed and hear his father in another bedroom, perhaps in the same bed where he had had sex with Coralita. It must have been an unimaginable misery for the boy, and then to have it end with the death of both of them...." She shook her head. "It would just be too uncomfortable for him to carry that around. It would be too vivid. And so the brain would wall it off. Be very careful with him if you find him. Don't give him any chance at all. People who are quite mad-a very unprofessional word-have enormous quickness and strength. We see a lot of it in mental hospitals. It will take four or five husky young attendants to overpower some frail little old man who has decided he does not want his medication."

  After we had worn out the topic of Cody T. W Pittler, his life and times, she cocked her head and said, "You seem troubled about something else, too."

  "I had no idea it showed."

  "I'm a trained observer, and once upon a time I knew you pretty darn well."

  "I remember. Well, I'm having a little trouble with my old lady, to put it in the chauvinistic pig manner."

  "The nice little hotel executive?"

  "How do you know about her?"

  "Somebody once defined gossip quite properly as emotional speculation. And I am interested in you and your life."

  "She is being promoted and sent to Hawaii. End of whatever it is we've been having."

  "An arrangement?"

  "Good enough word, I guess. There was no abused party in the deal. It seemed okay for both of us."

  "Do you think it should be more important to her than moving ahead in her job?"

  "I don't know exactly what to think. I just feel sort of depressed about it."

  "Do you love her?"

  "What can I say? I feel very good being with her. I like to look at her. I like to listen to her talk. We have a lot of dumb little private personal games we play. When I'm away from her I miss her."

  "How does she feel about you?"

  "Sort of the same. But she says it has never been enough. She says she has never been able to really let go completely with me because I keep a certain distance from her. Perhaps I do. If so, maybe it's a flaw in my character. She says we're a convenience to each other, a handy shack job without complications or obligations, and she says that it is not a very noble preoccupation for either of us. She says that at first she thought it was going to be everything, because each time we were together, we got further and further into each other, into knowing and understanding. But it went only so far and then stopped. I did not stop anything on purpose. The accusation makes me feel... sort of puzzled and inadequate."

  "Does she really want the job?"

  "As badly, she says, as she ever wanted anything in her life."

  "Why don't you follow her out there?"

  "I belong right here."

  "With all anchors set, all lines made fast?"

  "I guess so."

  "Want to marry her?"

  "I don't want to marry anybody."

  She smiled, hitched closer, took my hand in both of hers. "Hey, can you remember back eleven years?"

  "Of course."

  "We had the same problem, my dear, in a different degree. I really wanted to fall in love with you. I thought it would be good for me. Turned out we could love each other in a physical sense, but we couldn't fall in love. We fell into like, not love. And that isn't ever quite enough. Bawdy as we got at times, we were still, in an unfortunate sense, brother and sister. So we knocked it off. Without rancor. And I confess to a little sense of relief when it ended. I could stop pretending to be in love. Got a feeling of relief about her? Are you tucking it away, as an unworthy emotion? Is that making you a little ashamed of yourself, and is that why you feel depressed?"

  "Doctor, you are too damned smart."

  "Just be awfully awfully glad you and she had a good run at it. That's all. And be glad for her if she's getting what she wants. And for heaven's sake, don't try to punish her as she leaves, like a little kid who's losing all his candy."

  "Am I like that?"

  "You poor dummy, everybody is like that!"

  So we kissed and I walked the doctor to her car, held the door open, and gave her a proprietary pat on the behind.

  When l closed the door, she ran the window down and leaned to look up at me. "I don't want to make you angry."

  "Then don't."

  "Please, Travis. Don't obstruct. What I want to say, which may make the whole situation easier for you to understand, is that maybe your hotel executive friend has more capacity for genuine maturity than you have."

  "Thanks a lot."

  "It need not be an insult, if you don't take it as one. You have been living your life on your own terms. You need make only those concessions which please you. There are always funny friends, parties, beach girls, and the occasional dragon to go after. I don't pretend to know any of the circumstances that shaped you. I would guess that at some time during your formative years there was an incident that gave you a distaste for most kinds of permanence. None of us decide arbitrarily to be what we are. We just are what we are, through environment, heredity, and the quality of our mind and our emotions. Are you ashamed of what you are?"

  "No, but..."

  "And that, dear heart, has to be everybody's answer: No, but.... And I can finish your sentence. No, but I wish I were a better person."

  "You too?"

  She rested her hand on mine. "I've got your disease, Travis. That's why I chickened out on marriage. I didn't think I could handle the role. I know I couldn't. But I do get so awful damn lonely sometimes." Her hand tightened on mine.

  "And they tell me it can get even lonelier."

  "I know."

  "So, Doctor Laura, after my bird has flown, maybe you could offer some physical comfort, and accept some."

  "I think I would like that very much. It doesn't have to be a case of turning the clock back. Somebo
dy to hang onto in the long long dark night, somebody warm, somebody breathing warmth against my flesh. Somebody giving a damn. Even just a little damn."

  I bent clumsily through the window and kissed her mouth. When I straightened I thumped my head on the top of the opening. She laughed. I told her doctors should have more sympathy, and she laughed again and backed out and drove away.

  Meyer arrived at a quarter past one, as I was getting ready for bed. "Who stays open this late?" I asked him. "Barbers or clothing stores?"

  "Was I supposed to report?"

  "Don't get stuffy. I just thought you might be here while I was out to dinner, to take any call that might come from Sigiera."

  "I came back and dropped off the clothes I bought. And then I went back to that Rawson again. The old lady had me stay and eat with her. And we've been talking. Her name is Margaret Howey, and she is really a hell of a woman."

  "Going to buy it?"

  "What? The boat? Yes, of course. It's a good buy, and it's roomier than the Keynes was. The insurance will cover most of it."

  "What are you going to call it?"

  "Times have changed. Perceptions change. Fashions change. Also, a boat has to fit its name. I thought first it might be the Adam Smith. But Margaret and I decided that the Tharstein Veblen would be nice."

  "The who?"

  "Veblen died in 1929 at the age of seventy-two. He was an economist, and some of his theories became clouded by his sociological theories. His book The Theory of the Leisure Class, with its ideas about conspicuous consumption, had a vogue for a time. I have never been a Veblenian myself. But Margaret thinks it makes a neat name for a boat."

  "Whatever Margaret thinks."

  "It will be utterly meaningless to everyone who graduated from high school in the past twenty years. That's the nice part of it."

  "What will you call it for short?"

  "For short? The Thorstein Ueblen is quite short enough."

  When he is in that mood, there is nothing reasonable that you can say to him. He told me Margaret would move north in two weeks, and he could have possession on August sixteenth, and on that day he would move it to the berth where The John Maynard Keynes had always squatted, with its meager freeboard making it look underprivileged.

  Twenty

  TUESDAY, THE third of August, was one of those rare Atlantic coast days with no wind at all. Every scrap of cloth on every boat docked at Bahia Mar hung limp as rejection. The endless midday traffic droned past the marina and motel, under the pedestrian bridge over to the beach, leaving an oppressive chemical stink in the air.

  There was a sheen of oil on the boat basin. Compressors chugged, cooling stale air belowdecks. Brown girls lay stunned on open decks, sweat rolling off them. A ship's cat lay in the shade of a tarp aboard a nearby motor sailer, sleeping on its back with all four feet in the air.

  Sigiera phoned at one fifteen.

  "McGee? This here is your smart Texican law officer speaking."

  "Glad to hear from you."

  "Thought you might be. I didn't go bulling into this thing. What I did, I tried to think of the angles. I tried to add up everything I'd ever heard about the Chappel family, and I didn't move in on Mrs. Chappel until I had a real good angle to play. This is my angle. A bunch of good old boys are going to try to put Sid Chappel in the state legislature next chance. He's willing. God knows he's willing. He's taken to shaking hands with people on the street he doesn't hardly know.

  "So I got out there this morning about ten, and Miz Clara was in the pool, and the maid took me out and left me. I can tell you, it's hard to believe she's got to be forty-seven if a day. Pretty little thing, built like a schoolgirl. I just come back from there."

  "And?"

  "Don't try to rush me along. In some cases it's smart to kind of hem and haw and beat around until they finally ask. And she did. She said she would sure like to know what I had on my mind. That's when you kind of blurt it out, like you just hated to say it. So I said I'd come to do her a favor. I said some political enemies of her husband had me checking out the old Cody Pittler file, because they had the idea of using it against him when he would up and run for office. She asked me what that could possibly mean to her. She said I should talk to Sid. And I told her I was talking to her because she was the one who kept in touch with Cody, as a favor to Helen June. I tell you, McGee, she came up out of that pool water like a porpoise. One minute she's in the water, and the next minute she's standing in front of me, sopping wet. She asked me where I'd heard a damn fool thing like that, and I said Helen June tended to talk when she had more than three, and she said some words about Helen June that I didn't think a lady like that would know. She knew lots of them, and how to hang them together in chunks."

  "And so?"

  "And so I asked her if she'd heard from Helen June lately, and she said she'd gotten a call yesterday in the afternoon, and she had written down what Helen June told her, and she had planned on driving the fifty-five miles up to Del Rio, like she usually did with messages for him, and mailing it from there. So I told her that what she could do would be give it to me quiet like, and if it ever came up, I would swear that she had been intercepting messages and turning them over to me, and it would turn back on whoever was after Sid's hide. And if she didn't want to-right here I slapped my pocket-I'd just have to hand her this here warrant that I didn't have-and search the house. So she called me some of the names she called Helen June, and she was so darn cute, I was willing to forget the seventeen years she's got to have on me and tote her right over onto one of those big sun cots they got. And she knew what I had in mind and liked stirring me up that way, and pretty soon we both started to laughing. She went and got the letter, and I got it right here. The note inside was typed. It didn't say dear anything, and there was no name at the end. I'll read it to you."

  "That would be nice."

  " `Two men came here with your recent picture, claiming you have been killing women for their money and using other names. One was a professor named Meyer and he is a very nice man. He said you blew up his niece named Norma in a boat with two other people. He said you killed somebody named Doris and somebody named Isabel and maybe more. They made me believe you really did. It makes me feel sick. If you are doing things like this, terrible things, then the police should stop you. The other man is a lot taller and he has sort of a mean look sometimes. And he can fight. Be careful. I tried not to tell them anything. They got my address from Boomer: I think you would remember him.'

  "So I asked her if those were the exact words and she said they weren't. She said she had taken notes and then put it down in a better way than Helen June had told it. She said Helen June had cussed a lot. I suppose you want the address to where she was sending it."

  "It would be nice."

  "It was going to Senor Roberto Hoffmann, Apartado Postal Number seven one oh, Canciin, Cluintana Roo, Mexico. Did you get that?"

  "I wrote it down," I said, and read it back.

  "Now what will you do?" he asked.

  "We'll go down there and show the picture."

  "Well, did I do good?"

  "You were practically perfect."

  "I hope you two know you are dealing with a flake, a weirdo."

  "We know that. We plan to be very careful."

  "Let me tell you something about old Mexico. If he's been down there a long time, with money to spend, then he is dug in, and he'll have some good Mexican connections. You try to put local law on him and you will be the ones on the inside, rattling the bars."

  "What's to keep her from writing the same thing over again and mailing it?"

  "She and me, we reached an understanding. I told her if she did that, I would go to Sid and tell him how she has been screwing around writing notes to a guy that is still wanted for killing his own father. And I would tell him she had been doing it behind his back. I took a chance there. Maybe she told Sid. But she hadn't, and it scared hell out of her. He is known as a hitter. Besides, she feels like Hel
en June betrayed her. They swore never to tell anybody. She looked like she'd like to kill Helen June. There's another thing too."

  "Such as?"

  "It was sort of play pretend for her. It took her back to when she was twenty and Cody was fifteen and she wished he was older, back to when she and Helen June were real close. She'd bought Helen June's idea of how it happened, Bryce Pittler trying to kill himself and finally shooting himself when they struggled for the gun. And all the trouble was on account of Bryce marrying that trashy little second wife, who got what she deserved. All she ever had to send before was addresses, and a note saying she and Helen June hoped he was okay. He had phoned her a couple of times, making sure she never told Helen June his address. But then all this comes up, the idea he could have been killing people. Little old Clara, she doesn't want any part of that kind of going on. That could be some kind of trouble that would hurt her husband and her and spoil the life they've built up. And Helen June had been kind of hysterical over the phone. That took the fun out of it too. Okay, I did good, but it was ready to come apart anyway. You two did even better up there. He kept his two lives fastened together with a very thin thread, McGee, and it took hard work and luck to even find out it existed."