When I’d finished the whole file, I took it back to Records. Dispatch called Rick Tate, and he told them to tell me he would pick me up out in front of the building in five or six minutes. It was almost six thirty. He came ghosting up to the curb and I got in. Daylight was dying, and I had heard distant booms of thunder as I waited.
“Like the file?” he asked.
“You sort of took it right out to a dead end.”
“What do you make of it, McGee?”
“He got a long-distance call in Fort Lauderdale, aboard his motor sailer, telling him to meet somebody at that specific rest stop on the turnpike six miles southbound out of Citrus City, at a specific time. It was important to him to be there, and he either decided to be alone or it was requested that he be alone. It had to be in reference to something important to him: his illness, his money, his dying child, or the woman he was living with. So he drove on up in plenty of time, got gas, found a good place to eat, waited in the lobby out of the heat until it was time to go to the appointment. He kept it and they killed him.”
“Anything else?”
“It isn’t as bad a place for a killing as I thought. I’m going down the road and take a look at it tomorrow. Apparently, it is screened from the highway traffic. And it is not a high-use facility, especially in the heat of a late July afternoon. A planned killing taking place there would look unplanned, I think. Kind of coincidental. Spur-of-the-moment. And no problem getting away clean, back into traffic.”
“Any more?”
“Not much. Vague stuff. Somebody had to decide on the place. Why up here, all this way from Lauderdale? Did they come and scout it out first? Or is it just a kind of cleverness—that when a well-to-do traveler is killed far from home, it always sounds like a coincidental killing, a robbery with assault. Kill a man close to home and the choices are broader.”
“Ever a lawman?”
“Not quite.”
“I put it together pretty much the same. Except the appointment and the killing could be two different people. If he was early, he could have been killed, and then when the person who called him showed up, they took one look and took off like a rabbit. A few years back in Florida and Georgia we had an M.O. of somebody sneaking up on sleeping truck drivers, shooting them in the head with a twenty-two long-rifle hollow-point, and taking whatever money they had. A long-haul trucker tends to carry a fair piece of cash for emergencies, especially an independent owner. As I remember there were eight or ten incidents. Never solved. They just all of a sudden stopped. My guess is that whoever was working it got picked up for something else. Maybe he’s in Raiford and it’ll start again when he gets out. He had the truckers real jumpy all over the area, believe me.”
“I remember reading about that.”
He started up and cruised toward the center of the city, moving up and down the side streets, looking at the dark warehouses and old apartment buildings as he talked.
“That murderous little bastard had to have some kind of transportation. We gave a lot of thought to that. A report came back from south Georgia, where he killed a driver in a rest stop on Interstate Seventy-five, just up past Valdosta, that a driver turning in had seen a motorsickle taking off like a scalded bat, and the rider didn’t hit the lights until he was back out onto the interstate. The way they think he worked it, he’d sneak in and trundle his machine back into the bushes and hide and keep watch on the night traffic in and out of the rest stop. He might have to wait two or three nights until he got the right setup, a single driver in a truck, the truck parked well away from any others, and enough waiting time to be sure the driver was sacked out. But the killings stopped soon after that, before they could set anything up to try to trap him.”
“What are you getting at, Rick?”
“That old M.O. that never got proved out stuck in my mind, and I woke up before dawn the day after the Esterland killing and went on out there and looked around back in the bushes. You won’t find this in the file because I didn’t put it in the file. We were getting the July rains. The ground was pretty soft. I poked around until I found where somebody had run a real heavy machine back through the bushes and made a half circle and brought it back to the place where it had been driven in. Okay, so it was a brute. It made a deep track, so I’d guess about a five-hundred-pound bike, and where the tread was clear in one place in the mud I saw that funny Y pattern of that rear K-One-twelve of a set of ContiTwins, like those BMW Nine-seventy-two cc come through with. You pay six or seven thousand for one of those, for just the bare-bones machine. I would like to think no biker had anything to do with it.”
He parked in shadows and turned toward me.
“Listen, we got a group of nice people here. Maybe close to thirty couples in our club. The C.C. Roamers. Me and Debbie, we got a Suzuki GS-550-ET I bought used. We don’t get a chance to go as much as we used to, but we still go when we can. We take tours. Guys and their wives or girlfriends. There’s real estate salesmen, and a dentist and his wife, store managers, computer programmers, a couple of builders, a guy in the landscaping business. People like that. It’s great. We lay out a tour so we can take the back roads, ride along there in the wind. Have a picnic in a nice grove. You can hear the birds and all, those engines are so quieted down these days. I like it. So does Debbie. A lot. We’ve got our own special matching jackets and insignia. But the outlaw clubs give the whole thing a bad name. Like those damn Bandidos out west, and those Fantasies down in south Florida. Some of their officers are into every dirty thing going. Maybe, like they say, most of the troops are pretty much okay, just blue-collar guys from body shops and so on, who like to go roaring around with their women and drink a lot of beer and get tattooed and let all their hair grow and scare the civilians. Little recreation clubs like ours draw a lot of flack, McGee. And when there is biker violence, it reflects on us too, and people look at you funny and make smart remarks. That’s why I hope whoever was on that machine, he just pulled off to adjust something, or get out of the sun, or eat his lunch, or some damn thing. But he could have been an outlaw biker riding alone, and he could have run short of cash money, and so he hid there behind the bushes waiting for somebody to stop who looked worth robbing.”
“And if that’s how it was?”
“He’s away clean. No ID, no witnesses. I couldn’t even get a mold of the tire track. The rain washed it out before I could get back with the kit.”
“What do you really think?”
“I’ve got the gut feeling that whoever was on that machine beat Esterland to death. How long would it take him, a man powerful enough to hit that hard? You saw the autopsy report. They guessed he was hit six or seven times. Pull him out of the driver’s seat, brace him against the car, bang him six times, open the rear door and tumble him in, and slam the door. Fifteen seconds? Twenty seconds? Take the wallet, take out the cash, toss the wallet into the car. Walk back into the brush, crank up, and roll away. Forty seconds?”
“Was it the person he had the appointment with?”
“I’ve got no gut feeling about that at all. Maybe yes, maybe no. When you try to figure out the odds on whether a man setting up a secret meet is going to get killed by somebody else who just happened to be there, you can tend to say it had to be the one he was meeting. On the other hand, it could be just another one of those damn coincidences that screw up the work I do forty times a year.”
“I appreciate your cooperation. And when you see Mrs. Banks, you give her my best wishes.”
“I surely will. Dallas McGee? Is that right?”
“Not quite. Travis. Tell her it’s been ten or twelve years. I was at their house for supper. With them and those three pretty daughters.”
“My Debbie was the middle one. Here, I’ll drop you on back at your car. Seems like a quiet night around here, thank the good Lord. I better knock wood. Soon as I say quiet, those grove workers start sticking knives in each other. Or rolling their pickups over and over, dogs and shotguns flying every whichaway.”
/>
He drove me back to the jail. We shook hands. He went off down the dark streets, a man alone in a county car on an overcast evening, waiting for somebody to do some damn fool thing to himself or to somebody else, wondering, as he made his patrol, if he was going to have to peddle the Suzuki to be able to help out with his mother-in-law’s new schedule of dialysis.
Five
I checked out of the motel after breakfast and headed southwest in my little dark blue rental Dodge, a Mitsubishi, I think, with a VW engine and almost enough legroom. I took it over to Interstate 4 and made the mistake of staying on 4 all the way to the outskirts of Tampa before turning south on 301.
It had been a couple of years since I had driven that route, and I found all north-south highways clogged full of snorting, stinking, growling traffic, the trucks tailgating, the cowboys whipping around from lane to lane, and the Midwest geriatrics chugging slowly down the fast lanes, deaf to all honkings. Bradenton, Sarasota, Venice, Punta Gorda, Fort Myers—all the same. Smoggy vistas and chrome glitterings down the long alleyway between the fast food outlets, the sprawl of motels, car dealerships, shell factories, strip shopping centers, gas stations, and gigantic signboards. It is all that bustling steaming growth that turns the state tackier each year. Newcomers don’t mind at all, because they think it has always been like this. But in two years, they all want to slam the door, pull up the ladder, and close the state off. Once in a great while, like once every fifty miles, I even got a look at a tiny slice of the Gulf of Mexico, way off to the right. And remembered bringing the Flush down this coast with Gretel aboard. And wished I could cry as easily as a child does.
I had phoned ahead to the Eden Beach, and they had a second-floor single for me, with the windows facing inland. After I put the duffelbag in the room, I went over to the lobby to find Anne Renzetti.
I saw her coming diagonally across the lobby, walking very swiftly, her expression anxious and intent. Today she wore an elegant little dress: a cotton dress in an unusual shade of orange coral, which fitted her so beautifully it underlined the lovely fashioning of hips, sweep of waist, straightness of her back and shoulders. The color was good for her too. A small lady, luxuriantly alive.
“Hey, Anne,” I said.
She came to a quick stop and stared at me, an instant of puzzlement and then recognition. “Oh, hello there. Mr. McGraw.”
“McGee. Travis McGee.”
She was looking beyond me. “Yes, of course. I’m so sorry. Travis McGee. Is Meyer with you?”
“He had to get back.”
She started to sidle away. “You will have to excuse me. I really have to—”
“I was hoping you would introduce me to Dr. Mullen. I want to ask him about Ellis Esterland’s condition at the time he—”
Even the sound of his name made her glow. It seemed almost to take her breath away. Her smile was lovely. “That’s why I’m so busy at the moment. He didn’t get in yesterday. He’s due any minute. I just checked the room I set aside for him, and the damned shower keeps dripping and dripping. Excuse me just a moment, please.”
I followed her to the desk. She told Marie about the leak, and Marie picked up the phone to get the maintenance man on it. Anne turned back to me and looked beyond me toward the entrance. Her smile went wider, and she flushed under her tan and slipped past me, quick and cute as a safety blitz. She half ran toward the entrance, arms outstretched, and I heard her glad cry of welcome.
The man was in his middle thirties, with a russet mustache, blow-dried hair, tinted glasses with little gold rims. He had a likable look about him. Strong irregular features, a good grin. And he wasn’t very big. He was a dandy match for Anne Renzetti. Five foot two fits pretty well with five foot seven. He put his hands on Anne’s shoulders, kissed her on the cheek, and then with a gesture very much like a magician’s best trick, he reached behind him and pulled a large glowing blonde. She topped the good doctor by an inch or two. They both wore the same jack-o’-lantern toothy grin, and over the lobby sounds I heard a portion of his introduction of her: “… my wife, Marcie Jean …”
Anne’s shoulders did not slump. I’ll give her that much. And I think her smile stayed pretty much in place, because she was still wearing it when she turned around and came back, leading them toward the desk. I sensed that this was no time to ask for an introduction to the doctor and his bride. Anne kept smiling while the doctor registered. She pointed out the location of his room on a chart. A bellhop went with them to cart their luggage through the gardens to their room.
The two girls behind the desk had arranged to disappear. They recognized the storm warnings. Anne leaned back against the counter, her arms crossed, staring at me and through me, a glare that pierced me through and through, at chest level.
“Honeymoon!” she said in a half whisper. “Big dumb blond dumpling comes out of nowhere and nails him. And I put two bottles of chilled champagne up there in the room. Shit! Hope the shower never stops dripping.”
“Pretty hard to stop a good drip in a shower.”
She slowly came back to here-and-now and focused on me. She tilted her head a little bit to one side and looked me over with great care. She moistened her lips and swallowed. “What did you say your damn name is? McGee? You are a sizable son of a bitch, aren’t you?”
“Wouldn’t try to deny it.”
She looked at me. She was all a-hum with ready. She was up to the splash rails with electric ready. Everything was working: all the blood and juices from eyeballs to polished toenails.
“You better comfort me with apples, fella. Or is it roses? And stay me with flagons, whatever that means. Always wondered. And for God’s sake you better be discreet or it’ll undermine any authority I have left around here.”
“Appointing me an instrument of revenge?”
“Do you particularly mind?”
“I’m thinking it over.”
“Thanks a lot! Take your time. Take four more seconds, damn it.”
“Three. Two. One. Bingo.”
“My place,” she said. “Nineish.”
“Try to remember my name.”
She tried to smile but the smile turned upside down, the underlip poked out, the eyes filled, and she spun and darted away toward her office, the proud straight back finally curving in defeat.
I was on time, after wondering all the rest of the day whether to show up or not. It made me feel ridiculously girlish. Despite all the new freedoms everybody claims they have, I still feel strange when I am the aggressee. One wants to blush and simper. I was dubious about my own rationalization. She seemed a nice person, and her morale had taken one hell of a scruffing when the Doc had walked in with his surprise bride. What would be the further damage if even the casual semi-stranger didn’t want her as a gift?
Anyway, it seemed to me that after a day of thinking about it, she would have cooled on the whole idea. It had been an abrupt self-destructive impulse that had made her proposition me so directly. She might not even be at her cabana on stilts. And if she was there, and if she said she had reconsidered and it was a dumb idea and all, then it would be time for both of us to disengage gracefully.
She was there. A thread of light shone out under her cabana door. When I knocked the light went out, and she came out onto the porch, shaded from the starlight, carrying two glasses and the ice bucket, and a towel with which to twist out the champagne cork. She wore dark slacks and a white turtleneck against the night breeze off the Gulf. She said, in too merry a voice, “Champagne for you too, pal, so you shouldn’t feel everything is a total loss.”
“Second thoughts, eh?”
“Definitely. I don’t know what the hell I was thinking of. I mean I do know what I was thinking of, and it wasn’t my very best idea. I was wondering a little while ago, what if you arrived all eager and steamy? Would she or wouldn’t she?”
“You’ll never know. I guessed you’d have second thoughts.”
“Thank you. Any friend of Meyer is a friend of mine. Meye
r has pretty good taste in friends. Open that good stuff.”
I unwound the wire and stood the glasses on the rail, where the starlit sand beyond gave enough light for me to fill them properly. Poured. We clinked glasses.
“To all the dumb dreams that never happen,” she said. “And the dumb women who dream them.”
“To all the dumb dreams that shouldn’t happen, and don’t,” I said.
She sipped. “You are probably right. Ellis was dying. Prescott Mullen was an authority figure. He was comforting. When you lean on strength, I think you can get to read too much into it.”
“I thought you seemed very very happy with your job here.”
“Oh, I am! I wouldn’t think of giving it up. He was going to come down and go into practice here. Another segment of the dumb dream.”
We drank, chairs close together. Silences were comfortable. I told her portions of my life, listened to parts of hers. We had some weepy chapters and some glad ones. About five minutes after she had snugged her hand into mine, I leaned over into her chair and kissed lips ripe and hot as country plums, and when that was over she got up, tugged at my wrist, and said in a small voice, “I think I have been talked into it somehow.”
We lay sprawled in the soft peach glow of a pink towel draped around the shade of her bedside lamp, sated and peaceful and somnolent. Big wooden blades of a ceiling fan turned slowly overhead, and I could smell the sea. A passel of marsh frogs were all yelling gronk in a garden pond, voices in contrapuntal chorus.
She propped herself on an elbow and ran her fingertips along the six-inch seam of scar tissue along my right side, halfway between armpit and waist.
Free Fall in Crimson Page 5
