John D MacDonald - Travis McGee 16 - The Dreadful Lemon Sky

by The Dreadful Lemon Sky(lit)

  He was already sitting on his towel at the hightide line when I finished sprinting the last hundred yards of my one-mile run. When I stopped puffing and panting and groaning, I took a final dip and then stretched out close by.

  "You ought to run a little," I told him.

  "Would that I could. When the beach people see you running, they know at a glance that it is exercise. There you are, all sinew and brown hide, and you wear that earnest, dumb, strained expression of the old jock keeping in shape. You have the style. Knees high, arms swinging just right, head up. But suppose I came running down this beach? They would look at me, and then look again. I look so little like a runner or a jock that the only possible guess as to what would make me run is terror. So they look way down the beach to see what is chasing me. They can't see anything, but to be on the safe side, they start walking swiftly in the same direction I'm running. First just a few, then a dozen, then a score. All going faster and faster. Looking back. Breaking into a run. And soon you would have two or three thousand people thundering along the beach, eyes popping out of the sockets, cords in their necks standing out. A huge stampede, stomping everything and everybody in their path into the sand. You wouldn't want me to cause a catastrophe like that, would you?"

  "Oh, boy."

  "It might not happen, but I can't take the chance."

  "Meyer."

  "Once it started, I could drop out and they would keep on going. The contagion of panic. Once you see it, you never forget it."

  "Meyer, do you remember Carrie Milligan?"

  "A thundering herd of... what? Who?"

  "About six years ago. I loaned Carrie and Ben the Busted Flush. Not to take on a cruise. Just to live aboard, during a honeymoon."

  "And told me to keep an eye on them. Very funny. I think I saw them come out into the daylight once. Let me see. She worked in the office over at Peerless Marine. Pretty little thing. I forget why you loaned them the Flush."

  "I owed Dake Heath a favor and that's what he asked for. He was her half brother and he wanted things nice for her. Carrie and Ben were broke and so was Dake. So I broke a rule and said okay."

  "To answer your question, yes. I remember her. Why?"

  So I told all. I had promised Carrie not to tell anyone. But all rules are off when it comes to Meyer. Also, it was a form of protection. When somebody comes up and gives you that much money to tuck away for safekeeping, special precautions are in order. Checking the purse and the car, for example. And telling Meyer everything, including my checking the purse and the car. If the law moved in, I wanted to be able to give some plausible answers, with somebody to verify them if need be. Also, if somebody grabbed Carrie and bent her until she told them where to look for money, it would be nice to have Meyer know exactly why my luck had, at last, run out. And it will run out. Maybe not this time, or the next time. Sometime, though. And like everybody else, I will go down with that universal plea blazing in the back of my mind. "Not me! Not yet! Wait!"

  Meyer was curious about the money, so I described the stacks to him, each neatly tied with white cotton string, each of mixed denominations, each totaling ten thousand. And, of course there were the loose bills, probably from a broken stack, which could mean that she had spent fifty-eight hundred. Each stack had an adding machine tape stuffed under the string. Yes, all apparently from the same machine, but I hadn't examined them closely. It was used money, but reasonably clean and tidy. Under black light, it might fluoresce. Or somebody might have a list of serial numbers. Or it could all be funny, printed in a small room by night.

  "You know her better than I do," Meyer said.

  "I don't know her well."

  "Have you formed any opinions about her and about the money?"

  "Like what? Like did she steal it? I don't know. She's not a bum. She's a worker. Something happened that makes her feel she's got some sort of a right to the money. She arrived physically and emotionally exhausted. She didn't know if she was being followed. She thought she might be. Anyway, I'll hold it for her. If she comes and gets it, no fuss, it's a very easy ten, so easy I'll have an uneasy conscience."

  A late-afternoon breeze riffled the water out beyond the lazy breakers and hustled some candy wrappers down the wet brown beach. Two tall young ladies came sauntering by, brown, brawny, and bikinied, as confident and at home in their bodies as a pair of young lionesses, their hair sun-streaked and salt-tangled, their hips rolling and canting to the slow cadence of their long walk in the sunshine.

  Meyer smiled his smile and sighed his audible sigh. It is both a pleasure and a sadness to watch the very young ones walk by. They know so very little, and so frighteningly much. They are on the edge of life, thinking they are in the midst of it. Pretty soon we got up and snapped the sand off the towels and went trudging back across the pedestrian bridge. We parted, and as I stepped aboard the Flush I had the sudden strong feeling that harm had come to Carrie, that harm had come aboard, a feral, crouching, bone-gnawing creature.

  But all was well. Such hunches happen all the time, for every one of us. We forget them all-except when one turns out to be right. Then we say, I knew! I knew!

  She waited to be awakened, waited there with brushed hair, touch of lipstick, new smudge of eye shadow. She faked a sweet awakening from her drowse to pull me down into the mint taste of my own toothpaste, murmuring, "Hello, hello."

  It was supposed to be very easy. No need for talk, for claiming and disclaiming. All inevitable because she had made it so through contrivance and through the directness of invitation. Worm my way out of the swim pants and glide sweetly into the lady. Thank you, ma'am. The goodboatkeeping seal of approval. Only a total fink person would decline an offer so frankly made. But the problem of her motive got in my way. Was this supposed to be in addition to the ten? Was it supposed to cloud my mind and make me less curious? Was she setting up some justification or rationalization of her own? The problem of playing somebody else's game is the problem of finding yourself stuck in a role you can't play. You can't say your lines.

  So I disentangled her and sat up from the steamy kiss and smiled down at her and thumbed a strand of hair back from her round forehead. "You certainly needed a lot of sleep."

  "I guess I did," she said, looking sullen. "While you were sleeping, I was thinking."

  "Goody!"

  "Let's say it gets to be June fifteenth and Carrie doesn't come for her money. Don't you want me to try to find out why you couldn't make it? Or who kept you from making it?"

  "It wouldn't matter a damn to me by then, would it?"

  'That's what I'm asking."

  "The answer is no. Just get the money to my sister. That's all."

  "And she'll want to know where it came from."

  "Tell her it's from me."

  "Maybe she's so straight she might not take it. Then what?"

  She bit her lip and looked thoughtful. "I could write her, I guess. Phone her. Something to clue her a little."

  "Want to clue me too?"

  "No. I don't want to talk about it and I don't want to think about it, okay? It's my personal problem."

  "You're paying me enough so you can ask for help."

  "I better not try asking for anything else, huh? A girl shouldn't make it too obvious. Not and get turned down."

  "I just get suspicious of free gifts."

  "Some gift. From a fire sale. We had us one night, a long time ago. Remember? I was okay for you then, but not now. Not the way I am now. It was a dumb idea. Sorry, fellow."

  I took her hand and then despised myself for checking to find those little fingertip calluses acquired from operating office equipment. McGee checks everything, as do all paranoids.

  I kissed her slack, cool, unresponsive mouth, and as I straightened up she said, "No charity, thanks. The impulse has come and gone."

  "Suit yourself."

  "Am I doing something to spoil your day?"

  "You don't leave me any options. Any move I make is wrong."

  "That's
the way it goes. Check with an expert."

  "At least I can tell you that you are still very attractive to me, Carrie."

  "Sure, sure, sure."

  "I mean it."

  "Six years ago you meant it, but that was a different girl, six years ago."

  "You confuse two things. Okay, I didn't react the way I was supposed to. My guard is up. What do you expect? After six years you show up with a bundle of money and want me to keep it for you. You claim you've shed Ben. I stay alive by keeping my inputs open. Is it gambling money? Is it street money? Is it ransom money? I know some people who are hungry enough to nail me, they'd unearth a girl from six years ago and use her to get to me, to set me up. Marked money. Counterfeit money. Nearly everybody can be manipulated. McGee is alive and well because he is very very careful about a lot of things. Carrie, if you had been Miss Universe stretched out here waving your eyelashes at me, the word would have been the same word. Whoa! Look out for free gifts. I check everything I can check. What I found in your purse about working in an office matches the fingertip calluses on your hands. The industrial goop in the trunk of your car feels and smells like legitimate industrial abrasive solution."

  She spun quickly and stuffed her hand under the mattress, looking for the purse.

  "It's there," I said. "I put it back."

  She sat up, hauling the sheet up under her chin. She stared at me. "Jesus! You are jumpy."

  "And alive. Be glad you are leaving your money at the right place, if you still want to leave it here."

  "I still want to leave it. It could have been more."

  "It's a tidy sum. You are overpaying me."

  "I'll decide that. Look, don't worry about the money. Okay? It isn't marked or anything. It's sort of... my share of some action. But somebody might grab it." Suddenly she grinned. "Hey! Thanks for giving me back my pride."

  "Any time. Want some steak and eggs?"

  She looked wistful but refused. She wanted to be on her way. She wore the borrowed clothes and carried her soiled ones in a brown paper bag. She waited for full dark before she left. She marched away under the dock lights, taking a roundabout route to her car. I expected her to look back, but she didn't.

  There was a residual affection for her. The six years had aged her more than she could reasonably expect and had tested and toughened her. Her eyes were watchful, her merriment sardonic. There are too many of them in the world lately, the hopeful ladies who married grown-up boy children and soon lost all hope. They are the secretaries and nurses and switchboard people, the store clerks, schoolteachers, cab drivers, and Avon ladies. They lead the singles life. Lots of laughs and lots of barren mornings. Skilled sex, mod conversation, and all heartaches carefully concealed. They are not ardent libbers, yet at the same time they are not looking for some man to "take care." God knows they are expert in taking care of themselves. They just want a grown-up man to share their life with, each of them taking care. But there are one hell of a lot more grown-up ladies than grown-up men.

  I wished her well. Lonely ladies can get into damned fool capers. I wished her very well indeed.

  Three

  SO TWO WEEKS went by. A pair of lovely weeks in May. A steady breeze off the Atlantic kept the bright tacky strip of Florida seacoast reasonably free of smodge; fugg, and schlutch. Old parties tottered out of their condominiums and baked themselves black in the white high glare of the beaches, pleased that their eyes didn't water and they could breathe without coughing.

  On the tube the local advertising for condominiums always shows the nifty communal features, such as swimming pool, putting green, sandy beach, being enjoyed by jolly hearty folk in their very early thirties. These are the same folk you see dancing in the moonlight aboard ship in the tour ads. These are the people who keep saying that if you've got your health, you don't need anything else. But when the condominiums are finished and peopled, and the speculator has taken his maximum slice of the tax-related profits and moved on to crud up somebody else's skyline, the inhabitants all seem to be on the frangible side of seventy, sitting in the sunlight, blinking like lizards, and wondering if these are indeed the golden years or if it is all a big sell, an inflation game that you have to play, wondering which you are going to run out of first, your money or your life. The developers leave enough to go wrong in each condominium apartment that it becomes an odds-on bet the money runs out first. Nursing homes are a big industry in sunny Florida.

  Anyway, it was Meyer who picked it up, a minor item on a back page, and brought it over to the Flush on the thirtieth day of May. It was early afternoon and I was topside, wrestling with too many yards of white nylon canvas, and with a borrowed gadget which, when properly operated, puts brass grommets into the fabric. I was irritated at how slowly my self-imposed chore was going. I was dripping sweat onto the grommet machine and the clean white nylon and the vinyl imitation-teak decking.

  "Now what?" I asked sourly

  "This is what," said Meyer, and handed me the clip he had torn out of the paper.

  PEDESTRIAN FATALITY

  The City of Bayside registered its fourth traffic fatality of the year when Mrs. Carolyn Milligan was struck and killed at 10:30 Wednesday night while walking on County Road 858 just inside the city limits.

  Roderick Webbel, 24 driver of the farm truck which struck and killed the Milligan woman, claimed that he did not see her until the moment of impact when she apparently stepped from the shoulder of the road into the path of the vehicle.

  Mrs. Milligan, who lived alone at 1500 Seaway Boulevard, was employed by Superior Building Supplies, Junction Park Bayside. Police are investigating the accident and no charges have been filed as yet.

  A fat drop of sweat fell from the tip of my nose and made a dark pattern of a sloppy star on the newsprint, the same color as the sweat smudge from my fingers. Meyer followed me into the shade of the canopy over the topside controls.

  I leaned my rear against the instrument panel and propped one bare foot on the pilot's chair. The breeze began to cool me off.

  "Accident?" Meyer asked. When I stared at him he said hastily, "Rhetorical question, of course."

  "Of course. And who the hell knows? Damn it, anyway!"

  I am cursed by an imagination which turns vivid when I wish it would turn itself off. She had been sturdy bone and sinew, sweet flesh and quick blood. She had been scents and secrets. Then a great bewildering bash, a tiny light in the back of the brain flickering out, as spoiled flesh, crushed bone, ripped connective tissue went slamming off into the roadside brush, spraying blood as it spun.

  "Meyer, she gave me the orders. Just get the money to my sister, she said. That's all, she said. She said that if she couldn't come back and get the money, she wouldn't give much of a damn who kept her from it."

  "And," Meyer said, "she paid you to do just what she said."

  "I know."

  "But?"

  "I look at it this way. Two thousand would have been more than fair. It would have paid my way to Nutley and back, with a nice hunk left over. So she's got eight thousand worth of service coming."

  "Posthumous service?"

  "Which she didn't want." I doubled my right fist and gave myself a heavy thump on the top of the thigh. Painful. "It is the merry month of May, Meyer, and the lady is going to be dead for a very long time. I would be doing what she wanted. Giving the money to the sister. And making certain there are no strings attached, nobody following the scent, nobody mashing the sister too."

  "I admire your talent for instant rationalization."

  "This is not romanticism, dammit."

  "Did I say it was?"

  "By the expression on your face. Patronizing, amused, superior."

  "You are reading it wrong. The face is just some skin and fat and muscle stretched over bone. I was actually looking apprehensive."

  "About what?"

  "About what you might be getting me into."

  "You can stay right here and work on your treatise."

  "I'
m at a stopping point, waiting for translations of some Swedish journals to arrive. I could struggle through them myself, but..." He shrugged and went over and picked up some of the canvas inspected a grommet. "Is this crooked?"

  "Very."

  "Then it won't look very good, will it?"

  "No. It won't."

  "Travis, do we know anybody at all in Sayside?"

  "I keep thinking there was somebody."

  So we went below, and while I checked out the book in the desk, Meyer opened a pair of cold Tuborgs. No friends in Bayside. None. Meyer blew across the top of the Tuborg bottle, a foghorn note far away. "So why are we up there fussing around?" he asked.