He fell back into the portly disguise of William M. Callowell, cushioned with money and authority, shrewd builder and bidder, perhaps privately worried about impotence, audits and heart attacks. I could sense he did not often think of the war. There are middle-aged children who spend a part of every day thinking of their college or their war, but the ones who grow up to be men do not have this plaintive need for a flavor of a past importance, and Callowell was one of these.
He relit his pipe, shifted his weight. “Two years ago there was a short article in Newsweek about our operation, in connection with the Interstate program. They used my picture. I got letters from people I hadn’t heard from in years. Brell wrote me from Harlingen, Texas, sounding like a dear old flyboy buddy, which he wasn’t. Letterhead stationery, thick parchment bond, tricky type-face. Srell Enterprises I think it was. One inch of congratulations to me, and a yard of crap about how well he was doing, closing with the hope we could get together and talk over old times. I answered it with a very short cool note, and I’ve heard nothing since.”
“You didn’t like the man.”
“For no reason I can put my finger on, McGee. We had dull, dirty, dangerous duty over there, but, after all, it was Air Transport Command. Brell was the tailored uniform type, with the hundred mission cap, and when we were in Calcutta he’d put on the right hardware and turn himself into a Flying Tiger and cut one hell of a swath through the adoring lassies. And he toted a thirty-eight with pearl grips instead of the regulation forty-five. And he didn’t like to make landings. He would get very sweaty and overcontrol when he made landings.”
“He would have the information on David Berry, then.”
“If he’s willing to talk. If he was in on it, on any cute money on the side, why should he talk to anybody about it?”
“I’ve leveled with you, Mr. Callowell, but I might try something else with Brell.”
“And use my name in vain, McGee?”
“It might occur to me.”
“I would advise against it. We have lawyers without enough to do. They get restless.”
“I’ll bear that in mind.”
“I don’t often do this much talking for so little reason, McGee. You have a nice touch. You’re an eager listener. You smile in the right places. It puts people on. And, of course, you haven’t leveled with me.”
“How can you say such a thing!”
He chuckled and pulled himself to his feet. “End of session, McGee. Good night and good luck.” At the door he turned and said, “I’ll have you checked out, of course. Just for the hell of it. I’m a careful and inquisitive man.”
“Can I make it easier by giving you my address?”
He winked. “Slip F-18. Bahia Mar. Lauderdale.”
“Mr. Callowell, I am impressed.”
“Mr. McGee, any reasonably honest man in the construction industry either sets up his own CIA or he goes broke.” He chuckled again and trudged toward the elevators, trailing fragrant smoke.
Ocho
IN THE morning I placed a station call to the number listed for George Brell in Harlingen. I got a lazy-toned switchboard operator who put me through to a sharp-voiced secretary who said that Mr. Brell was not in his office yet. As she had no way of knowing it was a long distance call, I side-stepped her request for my name and said I would phone later.
Then I phoned my barge boat. After three rings, I heard her voice, small, tense, cautious. “Hello?”
“This is your night nurse speaking.”
“Trav! Thank God.”
“What’s the matter? Is something wrong?”
“Nothing in particular. Just… I don’t know… tension, I guess. I got so used to you being nearby. I hear sounds. And I jump. And I had bad dreams.”
“Cook them out in the sun.”
“I’m going to. On the beach, maybe. When are you coming back?”
“I’m going to Texas today.”
“What?”
“There’s a man there I want to see. I might be back there by Friday, but I’m not certain. Take your pills, honey. Don’t agitate yourself. Eat; sleep and keep busy. You’re smack in the middle of hundreds of boats and thousands of people.”
“Trav, a woman phoned and she’s most anxious to get in touch with you. She said it’s an emergency. It sort of put her off stride to have a woman answer and say you’re away. I said you might phone and she said to tell you to phone her. Miss McCall. With a very strange first name. I don’t know if I have it right?”
“Chookie.”
“That’s it.”
I had her look in my book and give me the number. By the time I hung up, Lois sounded pretty good. I wondered if I had been a damn fool not to lock up the liquor supply or at least to arrange to have somebody stay with her. Hurry home, Mother McGee. People have their acquired armor, made up of gestures and expressions and defensive chatter. Lois’s had all been brutally stripped awy, and I knew her as well as anybody ever had or ever would. I knew her from filled teeth to the childhood apple tree, from appendix scar to wedding night, and it was time for her to start growing her new carapace, with me on the outside. I caught her raw, and did not care to be joined to her by scar tissue when healing began.
Chook’s phone went to nine rings before she answered in the gritty rancor of interrupted sleep. But her voice changed when she recognized mine. “Trav! I phoned you last night. Who is that Mrs. Atkinson?”
“One of your more successful rivals.”
“I mean really. Is she the one that whosis took on when he dropped Cathy?”
“Yes.”
“Trav, I phoned about Cathy. She worked the first show last night. She seemed fine. And then they found her unconscious out on the beach there at the hotel. She’d been terribly beaten. Her face is a mess. Two broken fingers. They don’t know yet if there’s any internal injuries. She regained consciousness before they got her to the hospital. The police questioned her. She told them she went out to walk on the beach and somebody jumped her and beat her up. She couldn’t give them a description. I talked to her next, after they’d given her a sedative. She acted very strange about it. I think it was him, Trav. She won’t be able to work for two weeks anyway, maybe longer. She’s really a mess.”
“Does she want to talk to me?”
“She doesn’t want to talk to amybody. It’s in the paper today. Show girl assaulted on private beach. Mysterious assailant and so on.”
“Are you going to see her today?”
“Of course!”
“I might not get back before Saturday. Look in on Lois Atkinson if you get a chance. Our friend left her in pretty sad shape. She’s a lady.”
“Oh, really?”
“With ragged edges. You’ll like her, I think. Make girl talk. Then I’ll try to phone you tonight at the hotel, for a report on both of them.”
“McGee’s clinic?”
“The Junior Allen discard club. Take care.”
A travel office at the hotel helped me find the best way to get to the Rio Grande Valley. A direct 707 out of Idlewild to Houston, a two hour layover and then a feeder flight down to Harlingen with one stop at Corpus Christi. I had barely missed a better deal, and so I could take my time getting out of Idlewild.
The flight took off with less than half the seats occupied. The whole country lay misty-bright, impersonal, under a summer high, and we went with the sun, making noon last a long time. The worst thing about having a hundred and eighty million people is looking down and seeing how much room there is for more.
A stewardess took a special and personal interest in me. She was a little bigger than they usually are and a little older than the norm. She was styled for abundant lactation, and her uniform blouse was not. She had a big white smile and she was mildly-bovine, and I had the curious feeling I had met her before, and then I remembered where-in that valuable book by Mark Harris, Bang the Drum Slowly, the stewardess that “Author” runs into when he is on his way out to Mayo’s. My stewardess perched on the
edge of the seat beside me, back arched, smiling.
“ Houston is going to be wicked hot,” she said. “I am going to get me into that motel pool as fast as I can, and come out just long enough every once in a while to get a tall cold drink. Some of the kids just stay in the rooms, but I think they keep them too cold. It gives me the sinus. I layover there and go out at ten tomorrow, and somehow Houston is always a drag, you know?”
The mild misty blue eyes watched me and the mouth smiled and she waited for my move. You can run into the Tiger’s Perpetual Floating House Party almost anywhere. At 28,000 feet, and at the same 800 fps muzzle velocity of a.45 caliber service pistol. Nobody leaves marks on anybody. You meet indirectly, cling for a moment and glance off. Then she would be that hostess in Houston and I would be that tanned one from Florida, a small memory of chlorinated pool water, fruit juice and gin, steak raw in the middle, and hearty rhythms in the draperied twilight of the tomb-cool motel cubicle, riding the grounded flesh of the jet-stream Valkyrie. A harmless pleasure. For harmless plastic people, scruff-proof, who can create the delusion of romance.
But it is a common rudeness to refuse the appetizer without at least saying it looks delicious.
“I’d settle for Houston,” I said with a manufactured wistfulness. “But I’m ticketed through too Harlingen.”
The smile did not change and the eyes became slightly absent. She made some small talk and then swayed down the aisle, smiling, offering official services. Most of them find husbands, and some of them are burst or burned in lonely fields, and some of them become compulsively, forlornly promiscuous, sky sailors between the men in every port, victims of rapid transit, each night merely a long arc from bed to bed.
I saw her later in the Houston terminal, stilting along, laughing and chattering into the face of a big florid youngster in a nine-gallon hat.
I was in Harlingen at a little after five, the sun high and blazing, the heat as wet and thick as Florida ’s. I rented an air-conditioned Galaxie and found a tall glassy motel with green lawns, pool and fountains, and checked into a shadowed icy room facing the pool. I showered and changed to sport shirt and slacks. I drove around. it was a village trying to call itself a city. Pale tall buildings had been put up in unlikely places for obscure reasons. it was linked to Brownsville by the twenty-five mile umbilicus of Route 77.
The George Brell residence was at 18 Linden Way, Wentwood. Big plots, big sweeping curves of asphalt. Architectured houses, overhangs, patios, sprinklers, driveways wad turnarounds pebbled in brown, traveler palms, pepper trees, Mexican gardeners, housewives in shorts, antique wrought-iron name signs. Number eighteen was blond stone, glass, redwood, slate. Formal plantings. A black Lincoln and a white Triumph in the drive, a black poodle in a window of the house, glaring out at the world.
I went back among the common people and found a beer joint. Standard opening conversation gambit. “Sure hot.” Standard answer. “Sure is.”
The beer was so cold it had no taste. The juke played hill country laments. I found a talkative salesman. Local economy: Damned town had been too long at the mercy of the Air Force. Close the base, open the base, et cetera. Oranges and grapefruit were basic. Bad freeze year and everything goes to hell. Little winter tourist business building up pretty good. Padre Island and so forth. More transient traffic through into Mexico now the Mexicans fixed their damned road decent from Matamoros to Victoria. Quickest way from the States to Mexico City. He was talkative and cranky.
I got him onto local success stories, and when he got onto George Brell I kept him there. “Old George is into a lot of things. His wife had some groves, and now he’s got more. His first wife, dead now. God knows how many of these Beeg-Burger drive-ins he’s got now. A dozen. More. And the real estate business, and warehouse properties, and the little trucking business he’s started up.”
“He must be a smart man.”
“Well, let’s say George is a busy man. He keeps moving. They say he’s always in some kind of tax trouble, and he couldn’t raise a thousand dollars cash, but he lives big. And he talks big. He likes a lot of people around him all the time.”
“You said he married again?”
“Few years back. Hell of a good-looking girl, but I don’t think she’s more than maybe three years older than his oldest girl from his first wife. Built her a showplace house out in Wentwood Estates. Gerry, her name is.”
My salesman had to get on home, and after he had gone I went back to a booth and phoned George Brell. It was ten to seven. I got him on the line. He sounded emphatic. I said I wanted to see him on a personal matter. He became wary. I said that Bill Callowell had suggested he might be able to help me.
“Callowell? My old pilot? Mr. McGee, you come right on out to the house right now. We’re just sitting around drinking, and we’ll have one ready for you.”
I drove out. There were a half-dozen cars there. A house man let me in. Brell came hurrying to me to pump my hand. He was a trim-bodied man in his late forties, dark and handsome in a slightly vulpine way, and I suspected he wore a very expensive and inconspicuous hair piece. He looked the type to go bald early. He had a resonant voice and a slightly theatrical presence. He wore tailored twill ranch pants and a crisp white shirt with blue piping.
Within ten seconds we were Trav and George, and then he took me out to a glassed back deck where the people were. A dozen of them, seven men and five women, casually dressed, friendly, slightly high. As he made the introductions he managed to give me the impression that all the men worked for him and he was making them rich, and all the women were in love with him. And he made it known to them that I was a dear friend of one of the most influential road builders in the country, a man who had flown desperate missions with George Brell, and had survived only because George was along. His wife, Gerry, was a truly stunning blonde in her middle twenties, tall and gracious, but with eyes just a little cold to match a smile so warm and welcoming.
We sat around on the sling chairs and leather stools, and talked the dusk into night. Two batches left, cutting the group down to five. They made it unthinkable not to stay to dinner. The Brell’s, a young couple named Hingdon and me. A little while before dinner, Brell took Hingdon off to discuss some business matter with him. Mrs. Hingdon went to the bathroom. Gerry Brell excused herself and went to see how the preparation of dinner was coming.
I went wandering. A harmless diversion. It was a big rambling house, obviously furnished by a decorator who had worked with the architect. And they had not been in it long enough to add those touches that would spoil the effect. There was a room off the living room, a small room with lights on inside. I saw a painting on the far wall of the small room that looked interesting. I listened and there was no sound of voices from the small room. I thought Hingdon and Brell might have gone in there. So I wandered in for a closer look at the painting. Just as I reached the middle of the room I heard a gasp and a scuffling noise. I turned and saw there were two people on a deep low couch to the right of the doorway. The couch had high sides, and I had not noticed them.
One was a pale-haired girl of about seventeen. She was slumped back in the couch against pillows. She had on short khaki shorts and a pale gray blouse unbuttoned to the waist. She had the long sprawled luxurious body of maturity, and she was breathing deeply, her face revealing that telltale slackness, the emptiness of prolonged sexual excitement. It was a child’s mouth and a child’s eyes set into a woman’s face. Her lips were wet and her nipples swollen, and she was very slow in coming back from the dreamy land of eros. The boy was older, twenty possibly, and he was a massive brute, all hair and muscles and jaw corners and narrow infuriated eyes.
Left to my own devices, I would have gone very quietly away from there. But her warrior gave me no chance. “Why don’t you knock, you silly son of a bitch?” he said in a gravelly voice.
“I didn’t know it was a bedroom, boy.”
He stood up, impressively tall and broad. “You insulted the lady.”
> The lady was sitting erect, buttoning her blouse. The lady said, “Deck him, Lew!” Sick him, Rover. He swarmed at me, obedient as any dog.
I am tall, and I gangle. I look like a loose-jointed, clumsy hundred and eighty. The man who takes a better look at the size of my wrists can make a more accurate guess. When I get up to two twelve I get nervous and hack it back on down to two oh five. As far as clumsiness and reflexes go, I have never had to use a flyswatter in my life. My combat expression is one of apologetic anxiety. I like them confident. My stance is mostly composed of elbows.
Lew, faithful dog, wanted it over right now. He hooked with both hands, chin on his chest, snorting, starting the hooks way back, left right left right. He had fists like stones and they hurt. They hurt my elbows and forearms and shoulders, and one glanced off the top of my shoulder and hit me high on the head. When I had the rhythm gauged, I counter punched and knocked his mouth open with an overhand right. His arms stopped churning and began to float. I clacked his mouth shut with a very short left hook. He lowered his arms. I put the right hand in the same place as before and he fell with his mouth open and his eyes rolled up out of sight.
The little lady screamed. People came running. I massaged my right hand. “What’s going on!” Brell yelled. “What the hell is going on!”
I was too angry for polite usage, for the living room turn of phrase. “I walked in here to look at the painting. I thought the room was empty. This crotch jockey had his little girl all turned on and steaming and they resented the interruption, and she told him to deck me. But it didn’t work out.”
Brell turned on the girl, anguish in his voice. “Angie! Is this true?”
She looked at Lew. She looked at me. She looked at her father. Her eyes were like stones. “What do you really care who gets laid around here anyway!” She sobbed and brushed by him and fled. After a stunned hesitation, he ran after her, calling to her. A door slammed. He was still yelling. A sports car rumbled and snorted and took off. Rubber yelped. it faded, shifting up through the gears.
The Deep Blue Good-Bye Page 8
