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

by The Dreadful Lemon Sky(lit)

  "Mr. McGee?" the polite voice said from the dock. I got up and walked aft to look down. There was Jason with the Jesus face and wire glasses standing under the dock light in a T-shirt with the short sleeves torn off, ragged blue-jean shorts, and a pair of boat shoes so exquisitely and totally worn out it looked as though he had wrapped his feet neatly in rags.

  "Hi, Jason."

  "Permission to come aboard?"

  "Come on."

  He came up the side ladderway like a big swift cat. He accepted a can of beer from the cooler. He had something to say, but he seemed to be puzzling out how to say it. He sat on his heels, on those brown legs bulging with big muscles.

  I finally had to give him some help. "Something bothering you?"

  "Sort of. I mean maybe it isn't any of my business. What I wouldn't want is her having a worse time than she's having already. Okay?"

  "Her being Mrs. Birdsong."

  "She's really a great person. If I could have got to the office quicker, maybe the two of us, you and me, we could have grabbed onto Cal and quieted him down. I know how he could get. Did you hit him with anything? Did you pick up anything and hit him on the head?"

  "I sort of hurried him into the wall once. Ralph or Arthur rapped him on the head with a hickory stick, a couple of good licks."

  "Hey! That's right. I forgot that part. Then maybe it was from them. Look, can you tell-not you but medical doctors-can they tell which knock on the head did the most damage?"

  Meyer answered. "I don't think so. Provided, of course, there's no depressed fracture or anything like that. The brain is a jelly suspended in a lot of protection, and oftentimes the greatest damage happens in the area directly opposite the point of impact. This could be in the form of a subdural hematoma, a bleeding which gradually creates enough pressure inside the brain to suppress the vital functions."

  "Well, she visited him and then went out and got something to eat and went back and found a half dozen people working on him, but he was dead. There's going to be an autopsy. She came back in terrible shape. They gave her some pills. She's asleep now. A girl friend of Oliver's is sitting with her. Bet you it was a heart attack, or maybe a stroke that didn't have anything to do with getting hit on the head."

  My neck was still sprained from being popped on the forehead. I hadn't enjoyed meeting the fellow, but had not wished him dead.

  "Thanks for letting me know," I said.

  "It's okay. I've been here the whole two years, you know. He was a pretty great person until he got to boozing real bad. And until just a little while ago, even though he got too drunk when he got drunk, he wouldn't drink when there was something he had to do that was best done sober. Like when Jack Omaha would hire him to captain."

  "Jack Omaha!"

  He turned toward me. He was slowly and carefully folding his empty beer can the way somebody might fold a Dixie cup, turning it into a smaller and smaller wad. "You knew Jack?" he said.

  "No. But I heard he took off with a lot of money."

  "That's what they say."

  "You don't believe he did it?"

  "No. But that's because somebody told me he didn't."

  "Who would that be?"

  "Somebody that knew him better than I did."

  "Carrie?" I said.

  I heard the air whoosh put of him. He stood up. "Who the hell are you?"

  "Carrie's friend. When she married Ben Milligan she honeymooned aboard this old barge."

  "Hey! I remember something about that. Sure. Have you got a great big shower stall aboard, and a big tub? And... uh..."

  "A big bed? All three."

  He leaned his rear against the rail and stood with ankles crossed and arms folded.

  "Cheez. That Ben came by a year ago. She was still living at the cottage then. She and Betty Joller and Joanna Freeler and some bird name of Flossie. How come she ever married him, I wouldn't know."

  "Nor anybody else. It happens."

  "Mister America. Mister Biceps. He was in some kind of movie deal they were making up in Jax, probably an X movie. He came down to con some money off of Carrie. He'd done it before. She didn't have any. He said he would hang around until she got some. Betty came over and got me. It was a Sunday afternoon. Mangrove Lane is right down the shoreline to the south of us. I got there and he was sprawled out in the living room. I told him it was time for him to get on his Yamaha and into his helmet and head north. So we went out into the side yard and he began jumping back and forth and yelling 'Hah! Hah!' and making chopping motions. He came toward me and I kept moving back. I picked up the rhythm of the way he was hopping, and when he was up in the air, or starting up, I stepped into him and hit him in the mouth so hard it pushed this middle knuckle back in, and the first thing that hit the sod was the nape of his neck. He jumped up with both hands on his mouth, yelling, 'Not in the mouth. My God, not my mouth. Oh, God, my career!' So the girls babied him a little and I stood around until he got on his bike and roared away. I haven't seen him since. I don't think Carrie saw him either before she got killed. Are you coming to the service tomorrow morning?"

  "At eleven? Yes. The sister asked me."

  "She seems nice, that Susan. Carrie was too old for me. Maybe she wasn't, but she thought she was, which is the same thing. We had some laughs. She was making it with Jack Omaha. I told her that was dead end, and she said, What the hell, everything is. And there's not much answer to that, I guess."

  "Where did Omaha keep his boat?"

  "Right here. There it is, tied up to that shoreline dock at the end there, past the office, over beyond the lights."

  I stood up. It was hard to see. "Beriram?"

  "Right. Forty-six-foot with all the high-speed diesel you can use. All the extras. One hell of a lot of boat."

  "I can believe it. It's one hell of a lot of price too."

  "You can get that one at a pretty good price right now. The bank wants off the hook on it. I understand they'll take ninety-five cash."

  "They ought to get that with no trouble if it's been maintained."

  "Two years old and clean."

  "Do you mean Omaha couldn't run it himself?"

  "No. He could run it. But you can't fish and run it at the same time. When he got an urge to go billfishing, he'd get Cal lined up. He liked the edge of the Stream up beyond Grand Baharna. That's a good run, so they'd take off way before daylight and come back in by midnight or later. It makes a long day. Sometimes Carrie would go along."

  "When was the last time?" Meyer asked. "Do you remember?"

  "Only on account of the cops being here asking us. It was on a Tuesday, the fourteenth of... this month? Is it still May? Yes, the thirty-first. May is one of the months I always think should have thirty days. Yes, Jack Omaha took off with Cal about three in the morning, and they didn't come back in until after midnight. They questioned Cal about it. Just the two of them alone? Where had they fished? How had Jack acted? What time did they get back? How was Jack dressed? What was he driving? And so on and so on."

  He stood up, shrugged, moved toward the ladderway.

  "What time is it?" he asked. "I've got to go help Oliver lock the place. Anything you want, just ask either one of us."

  After he was gone I strolled over and looked at the Bertram. It was called Christina III. It looked very fit and very husky. When I went back, Meyer was in the lounge. He was tilted back in a chair, hands laced behind his thick neck, staring at the overhead and frowning.

  "Now what?" I asked.

  "Do you know how they locate invisible planets?"

  "No. How do they do that, Professor?"

  "Because the visible ones act in erratic and inexplicable fashion. Their orbits are... warped. So you apply gravitational theory and a little geometry of moving spheres and you say Aha, if there is a planetary body right there of such and such a mass and such and such an orbit, then all the random movements of the other planets become logical, even imperative."

  I sat on the yellow couch. "So what kind of mass
and orbit are we looking for?"

  "Something large, important, illegal, and profitable."

  "Involving a fast cruiser?"

  "Possibly."

  "Okay. Sunken treasure or Jamaican grass, routed via the Bahamas."

  "Isn't there a lot of cannabis coming into Florida?"

  "All the way from Jax around to Fort Walton Beach. Yes. Based on what they've intercepted and what they think they've probably missed, it would be at least ten tons a week. From Colombia, Mexico, Jamaica, and maybe some other BIWI islands."

  "Big money?"

  "Not as big as you read in the papers. Street value doesn't mean a hell of a lot. It passes through a lot of hands. The biggest bite is in getting it into the country and into the hands of a distributor. That's where you double your money, or a little better. Five thousand worth of goodquality, nicely cured Jamaican marijuana will go here for possibly twelve thousand. But if it is intercepted, they'll call it a quarter-million street value. It has to go from distributor to big dealer to little dealer to pusher-user to user. Everybody bites."

  "How do you know all this?"

  "What I don't know, I make up."

  "Seriously, Travis."

  "Boo Brodey wanted me to come in with him on a run last year. He laid it all out, including the comparison with Prohibition and so on. I said, Thanks but no thanks."

  "Didn't he get picked up?"

  "He's out again."

  "Did you disapprove?"

  "Can't you read me on that?"

  Meyer chuckled. "I guess I can. You don't like partnership ventures and middleman status. You don't like large investments. You don't like coming to the notice and attention of the law. You wouldn't want anybody to have the kind of hold over you that Boo would have had. It's not your idea of high adventure. It's what the British would call a hole-and-corner affair. Tawdry. A gesture of defiance for the very young."

  "So why ask questions you can answer?"

  "I guess I meant, Do you disapprove of a person using the weed?"

  "Me? I think people should do whatever they want to do, provided they go to the trouble of informing themselves first of any possible problems. Once they know, then they can solve their own risk-reward ratios. Suppose somebody proved it does some kind of permanent damage. Okay. So the user has to figure it out if there is any point in his remaining in optimum condition for a minimum kind of existence. For me, it was relaxing, in a way, the couple of times I've had enough to feel it. But it gave me the giggles, warped my time sense, and made things too bright and hard-edged. Also it bent dimensions somehow. Buildings leaned just a little bit the wrong way. Rooms were not perfectly oblong any more. It's a kind of sensual relaxation, but it gave me the uneasy feeling somebody could come up behind me and kill me and I would die distantly amused instead of scared witless."

  "I am trying to imagine you giggling."

  "I can still hear it."

  "What about it being sunken treasure, Travis?"

  "I am thinking back to the money. How it was packaged. Hundreds on the bottom, then fifties, twenties, tens. Some had fives on top. Tied with white cotton string, in both directions. With an adding-machine tape tucked under the string. Bricks of ten thousand. Somebody very neat. It smacks of retail business, my friend. Think of it this way. Suppose you are taking in a lot of cash from various sources, and you use that cash to buy from several other sources, after removing your own share. Assume you do not want to change little ones into big ones at your friendly bank. Okay, if you put all the hundreds together, you have some thin little bricks to buy with. But at the other end you've got some great big stacks of little bills to add up to the same kind of round number. So you mix them up, and you have fairly manageable sizes."

  "Sounds less and less like doubloons," Meyer said.

  "Yes, it does."

  "When I get this pain right between my eyes it means I've done enough thinking for now-on a conscious level. Now the subconscious can go to work. Do you have the gut feeling Jack Omaha is dead?"

  "Yes."

  "Then that makes the Christina III a very unlucky vessel."

  "Jack Omaha, Carrie Milligan, and Cal Birdsong."

  "And," he said, "the invisible planetary body which warped the other orbits. Good night." After I had puttered around aimlessly and had at last gone to bed, I found myself reliving the memory of Boo Brodey when he tried to recruit me. He's big and red and abraded by life-by hard work and hard living, by small mercenary wars and thin predatory women. Yet there is something childlike about him. He paced up and down in front of me, his face knotted with anxiety and appeal, chunking his fist into his palm, saying, "Jesus, Trav, you know how I am. Somebody tells me what to do and when, it gets done. I work something out myself and it's a disaster. Trav, we're talking about the money tree. Honest to Christ, you wouldn't believe it, the kind of money. Kids, weird little kids, are bringing in bags of grass right and left. Anything that'll fly, that's the way to do it. You can lease an airplane to fly up to Atlanta and back. Okay, you put it down on the deck and go to Jamaica and buy ten thousand worth and come back, and you got thirty thousand before the day is over. It's coming in on boats and ships and everything, Trav. Come on! The narcs aren't all that hard-nose about grass. They know they can't keep it out, and a lot of them, they don't know for sure it hurts anybody anyway, right? Come on in with me and help set it up. You know, the contacts and all. Help me out, dammit!"

  When I told him I didn't want in, he wanted me to set it all up for him. I could stay outside and get a piece of it in exchange for management skills. I said no, I didn't want to go down that particular road. If you make it with grass, you find out that hash and coke are more portable and profitable. You kid yourself into the next step, and by the time they pick you up, your picture in the paper looks like some kind of degenerate, fangs and all. And all you can say is, gee, the other guys were doing it too.

  If I were really going to do it, I would refit the Munequita for long-range work. Tune her for lowest gas consumption and put in bigger tanks. She's already braced to bang through seas most runabouts can't handle. Then I would...

  Whoa, McGee. There is larceny in every heart, and you have more than your share. So forget how far it is across the Yucatan Straits, leaving from Key West.

  Seven

  IT WAS an overcast morning with almost no wind at all. The wide bay was glassy calm, the outlying headlands misted, looking farther away than they were.

  There was a narrow, scrabbly, oyster-shell beach beside the cottage at 28 Mangrove Lane where Carrie Milligan had once lived. A narrow wooden dock extended twenty feet into the bay. It was still solid, just beginning to lean. It was good, I guessed, for another couple of years. Two old skiffs were high on the beach, overturned, nosing into the sea grapes.

  Jason sat on the end of one of the skiffs. He wore a white shirt and white trousers. He had a big plantation straw hat shadowing his face. He was playing chords quite softly on a big guitar with a lot of ornate fretwork against the dark wood. The chords were related but did not become any recognizable song. They were in slow cadence, major and minor.

  Meyer and I joined the group, standing a bit north of most of them, in the shade of a small gnarled water oak. I saw Harry Hascomb and the young man who had been counting stock in the warehouse. I saw Mrs. Jack Omaha, Gil from Gil's Kitchen, Susan Dobrovsky, Frederick Van Harn, Oliver from the marina, Joanna from Superior Building Supplies, and a man it took me a few moments to place. He was Arthur, the younger of the two cops who had subdued Cal Birdsong.

  There were seven young ladies in long pastel dresses. The dresses were not in any sense a matched set. They were all of different cut and style, but all long and all pastel. Susan wore a long white dress which was just enough too bigso that I suspected it was borrowed. Susan and the other girls all had armfuls of the lush Florida flowers of late springtime.

  A young man stepped out of the group and turned and faced us. He had red hair to his shoulders and a curly red beard.
He wore a sports jacket and plaid slacks.

  In a resonant and penetrating voice he said, "We are here today to say good-by to our sister, Carrie." The guitar music softened but continued. "She lived among us for a time. She touched our lives. She was an open person. She was not afraid of life or of herself. She was at home being Carrie, our sister. And we were at home with her, in love and trust and understanding. In her memory, each one of us here now most solemnly vows to be more sensitive to the needs of those who share our lives, to be more compassionate, to give that kind of understanding which does not concern itself with blame and guilt and retribution. In token of this pledge, and in symbol of our loss, we consign these flowers to the sea."