The Green Ripper

by John D. MacDonald

  MacDonald, John D - Travis McGee 18 - The Green Ripper

  To Maxwell P. Wilkinson l Representative and FriendI

  Fanaticism is described as redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.

  George Santayana

  Meyer came aboard The Busted Flush on a dark, wet, windy Friday afternoon in early December. I had not seen him in nearly two months. He looked worn and tired, and he had faded to an indoor pallor. He shucked his rain jacket and sat heavily in the biggest chair and said he wouldn't mind at all if I offered him maybe a little bourbon, one rock, a dollop of water.

  "Where's Gretel?" he asked as I handed him his dnnk.

  "Moved out," I said. He looked so dismayed I quickly added that she had found herself a job, finally, way the hell and gone over in the suburb of Tamarac, west of North Lauderdale and west of the Tumpike, out in the area of the shiny new developments and shopping plazas, near University Community Hospital and Timber Run Golf Club. "Couldn't get any farther away and still be in the same metropolitan area. It tales at least form minutes to drive over there."

  "Doing what?"

  '1he outfit is called, excuse the expression, Bonnie Brae. It is a combination fat farm, tennis club, and real estate development. She works in the office, lives in one of the model houses, gives tennis lessons to the littlies, exercise classes for the baffles, and is becoming indispensable. She can tell you all about it. She'll be here about six or six thirty."

  "I was afraid you two had split."

  "No chance. I'm not going to let that one get away."

  "Splendid judgment."

  "It's a phase, Meyer. She did hard time in a bad marriage and says it stunted her. She has to make it on her own, she says, to become a complete person, and when she is, then we can think about what kind of arrangement we're going to have."

  "Makes a certain amount of sense."

  "Not to me."

  "But you're not... being derisive or patronizing?"

  "Hell, no. I am being full of understanding, and all that."

  I didn't want to try to tell him what a vacuum she left when she packed and moved out. The houseboat was dismally empty. When I woke up, if I wanted to hear clinking sounds from the galley, I had to go make them myself. The winter boats were beginning to come down, filling up the empty berths, spewing out their slender and elegant ladies to walk the area, shopping and smiling, providing what in times past had been like one of those commercial hatcheries where you pay a fee and catch your own trout and take it home to cook. But Grets had made all the pretty ladies look brittle, bloodless, and tasteless, and made the time without her seem leaden and endless.

  In another season there were the girls of summer, robust and playful in their sandy ways, and now here were the winter ones, with cool surmise in the tended eye, fragrant and speculative, strolling and shopping, sailing and tanning, then making their night music and night scent, searching for something they could not quite name, but would know once they found it.

  "How did the conference go?" I asked.

  He shook a weary head. "These are bad days for an economist, my friend. We have gone past the frontiers of theory. There is nothing left but one huge ugly fact."

  "Which is?"

  "There is a debt of perhaps two trillion dollars out there, owed by governments to governments, by governments to banks, and there is not one chance

  The Green Ripper in hell it can ever be paid back. There is not enough productive capacity in He world, plus enough raw materials, to provide maintenance of plant plus enough overage even to keep up with the mounting interest."

  "What happens? It gets written off?"

  He looked at me with a pitying expression. "All the major world currencies will collapse. Trade will cease. Without trade, without the mechanical-scientific apparatus running, the planet won't support its four billion people, or perhaps even half that. Agribusiness feeds the world. Hydrocarbon utilization heats and houses and clothes the people. There will be fear, hate, anger, death. The new barbarism. Thae will be plague and poison. And then the new Dark Ages."

  "Should I pack?"

  "Go ahead. Scoff. What the sane people and sane governments are trying to do is scuffle a little more breathing space, a little more time, before the collapse."

  "How much time have we got?"

  'of nobody pushes the wrong-button or puts a bomb under the wrong castle, I would give us five more years at worst, twelve at best. What is triggering it is the crisis of reduced expectations. All over the world people are suddenly coming to realize that their children and grandchildren are going to have it worse than they did, that the trend line is down. So they want to blame somebody. They want to hoot and holler in the streets and burn something down."

  'whose side are you on?"

  "I'm one of the scufflers. Cut and paste. FLX the world with paper clips and rubber bands."

  "Are you trying to depress me, old buddy?"

  "On Pearl Harbor Day?"

  "So it is."

  "And with each passing year it is going to seem ever more quaint, the little tin airplanes bombing the sleepy iron giants."

  "There you go again."

  He yawned and I noticed again how worn he looked. The international conference had been held in Zurich. There had been high hopes the news- papers said for a solution to the currency problems, but as it went on and on and on, interest could not be sustained, nor could hope.

  "How was the trip back, Meyer?"

  '] was too sound asleep to notice."

  '~id you all just sit around and read papers to each other?"

  "There was some of that. Yes. But most of it was workshop, computer analysis. Peed all the known, unchangeable factors into the program, and then add the ones that can be changed, predicating inter- dependence, making the variations according to a pattern, and analyzing the shape of the world that emerges, each one a computer model. Very bright young specialists assisted. We came out all too

  The Green Ripper close to the doom anticipated by the Club of Rome, no matter how we switched the data around. It comes down to this, Travis there are too many mouths to feed. One million three hundred thousand more every week! And of all people who have ever been alive on Earth, more than half are living right now. We are gnawing the planet bare, and technology can't keep pace with need."

  I had never seen him more serious, or more depressed. I fixed him a fresh drink when Gretel arrived. I met her, and after the welcome lass, she looked over my shoulder and gave a whoop of surprise and pleasure at seeing Meyer. She thrust me aside and ran into his delighted bear hug. Then she held him off at arm's long& and tilted her head to give him her brown-eyed measuring stare.

  'Lou look awful!" she said. Thou look lice you just got out of jail."

  "Fairly good guess. And you look fantastic, Gretel.,'

  Yt goes wi& the job. I got sort of sloppy living on this barge, eating too much and drinking too much Today I jogged wi& four sets of raffles.. I must have done seven miles. I've got the greatest new job."

  "Travis was telling me about it."

  "You'll have to come out and let me show you around." Quite suddenly the enthusiasm had faded out of her voice. I couldn't imagine why. She gave me a quick look and looked away, and went to the galley to fix herself one of her vegetable juice cocktails.

  I followed her and said, "Is something wrong out there?"

  "No. Of course not."

  "Hey, Grets. This here is me. Asking."

  HI hear you asking. I think I might fall right off the wagon right now. I'm down to where I can spare a few pounds. Straight Boodles and rocks, okay?"

  "When you come down off it, you come down a way."

  She leaned against a storage locker as I fixed her drink.
I looked at her, a great lithe woman who, on tiptoe, could almost look me in the eye. Thick brown sun-streaked hair, dark brown eyes, film jaw, broad mouth, high-bridged imperious nose. A woman of passion, intensity, good humor, mocking grace, and a very irritating and compelling need for total or almost total independence. During all the lazy weeks aboard The Busted Flush when, after the death of her brother in Timber Bay, I had brought her all the way around the peninsula to Fort Lauderdale, we had arrived at last at a relationship she had decided did not threaten her freedom. She was a hearty and sensuous woman, and for a long time she was suspicious and reluctant in lovemaking, apparently feeling that my in- creasing knowledge of her body's resources, its needs and rhythms and special stimuli, was some

  16

  Lee Green Ripper how an exercise in ownership. But after she decided to accept completely, she became herself forthright, evocative, and deliciously bawdy when the mood was upon her.

  After she took a sip of her drink I put fingertips under her chin, tilted it up, kissed her gently on the lips, and then said, "Whatever it is, I would like to know. Okay? Like management trying to slip up on your blind side?"

  She grinned. "That I can handle, McGee. What makes you think there's a blind side?"

  "If there isn't, what are you doing here?"

  She frowned into her drink. "I think P11 tell both of you. I think I could use more than one opinion."

  We went back in and she sat next to Meyer on the yellow davenport. "What it is," she said, 'I think something other than what is supposed to be going on out there, is going on out there."

  "Bonnie Brae is a front for something else?" I asked.

  "Not really that," she said. "I mean, it's pretty big and elaborate. Mr. Ladwigg and Mr. Broffski borrowed a fantastic amount of money to buy the land. It's twelve hundred and eighty acres. There was a big stone-and-cypress house on it, and outbuildings. It was called the Cattrell place and was empty for years while the estate was being settled. They put a half-million dollars into renovating the house and some of the other buildings. And they put in roads and a sewage-treatment plant, water supply, and all that. And they fixed the old airstrip near the barns. They digging lakes, and building and selling houses, and selling building sites. We can accommodate twenty-four raffles in the main house at one time, feed them from the diet kitchen, and keep them busy. They pay twelve hundred a week, and there's a waiting list. And there's a waiting list for membership in the tennis club too. I mean, without knowing all the financial details, I'd say it's going very well. Mr. Ladwigg and Mr. Broffski have both built houses for themselves in the best part of the development, where the lots have to be two acres each, and Mr. Morse Slater, the manager, has a new house near theirs. There are twenty-five or thirty new houses occupied, and room for an awful lot more, of course. There are some staff quarters in the baclc of the main house, because it is sort of like a small hotel, or hospital. There is a nice flavor. I mean it's a good place to work. We have some laughs. People get along." Her voice trailed off and she sipped and frowned.

  "And now something doesn't seem right?" Meyer asked, prompting her.

  She smiled and leaned back. "Maybe I was lied to for too many years. Husband Billy was a world- champion-class liar. Brother John wasn't exactly clumsy at it."

  "What's my rating?" I asked.

  The Green Ripper

  "All the returns aren't in. What I'm saying, maybe I get suspicious when there's no real need."

  "We've got the whole evening, my dear," Meyer said. "If we're all patient, you'll probably get to the point sooner or later."

  "I guess I'm dragging my feet because it sounds so weird I hate to mention it. Last week I had a batch of fatties down by the barns in the middle of the morning, making them do exercises, when a pretty little blue airplane landed on our strip. When I went back to the office, I asked Mr. Slater who had come in and he said that it was somebody to see Mr. Ladwigg, he didn't know what about. I asked because sometimes a buyer flies in, and when they buy something, it means more paperwork for me. Now we come to the coincidence part. I woke up real early the next morning. It was brisk and clear. The model house I'm living in is about a half mile from the office. A couple of days before, I lost a pin I like very much while leading a group jogging. So I put on a heavy sweater and went out to retrace our route, thinking maybe I could find it in the grass. I was over by the airstrip, searching near a patch of palmetto, when I heard a motor. For a moment I thought it was a plane, and then I stepped out almost into the path of Herman Lad- wigg's Toyota, going cross-country. It's like a Land Rover, tall and open, with winches and things, and huge tires. It's white with red trim. Mr. Ladwigg was driving, and it startled him as much as it did me, I guess. I dodged back, and I was on the passenger side of it as it went by. So the face of the man riding with Mr. Ladwigg was not more than a yard away from me. I saw him very very clearly. And I knew in that split second I had seen him be- fore. He looked right at me, and I saw the flicker of his recognition. He knew me too. But I couldn't remember where or when. All I could remember was that it had been an unpleasant experience."

  "You can describe him?"

  "Oh, sure. Big, but not fat. Big-boned. About forty, maybe a lithe less. Kind of a round face, with all his features sort of small and centered in the middle of all that face. Wispy blond hair cut quite short. No visible eyebrows or eyelashes. Lots and lots of pits and craters in his cheeks, from terrible acne when he was young. Little mouth, lithe pale eyes, girlish lithe nose. He was wearing a khaki jacket over a white turtleneck. He was holding onto the side of the passenger door because of the rough ride. His hands are very big and... well, brutallooking."

  Meya said, ']t doesn't sound as if there could be two like that. But it's possible, of course. Maybe his change of expression was not recognition, but surprise at seeing somebody pop up like that."

  "No. He knew me. Because I remembered two nights ago, in the middle of the night, where led seen him. As soon as I remembered, I knew it was the same man. Five years ago Billy's sister, my kid

  The Green Ripper sister-in-law, Mitsy, disappeared. The family was frantic. She'd been in school up near San Francisco. She had just taken her things and gone away. Billy got time off from work and went up to San Francisco and nosed around and found out she had been hanging around with some kids who were connected with a religion called... damn! It will come to me."

  "The Unification Church, the Moonies?" Meyer asked. She shook her head. "Hare Krishna? Scientology? Children of God? The Jesus People? The Church of Armageddon?"

  She stopped him and said, '`That's close, that last one. It's like Apocalypse. Wait a minute. Apocry- pha! The Church of the Apocryphal"

  "Very interesting!" Meyer said

  '~Vhat's an apocrypha?" I asked.

  "It's plural,": he said. "Fourteen books or chapters which are sort of an appendix to the Old Testament and are not acceptable to the establishment. Seldom printed. They are bloody, merciless, and, some say, divinely inspired. Authorship unsubstantiated. I suspect that a religion based upon them would be... severe indeed."

  "A postcard finally came from Mitsy," Gretel said. "It was mailed from Ukiah, California. It was to her mother, father, her two brothers, and me. All it said was, 'Remember that I will always love you, but I will never see you again in this life.' You can imagine how that hit us ale Mitsy was such a... such a merrier little gal. Pretty and bouncy and popular. Your standard cheerleader type. No steady boyfriend. She wanted to be a social worker and work with handicapped children.

  "Anyway, her father hired an investigator, and he located an encampment of the Church of the Apocrypha about twenty miles southwest of Ukiah, off in the woods. He had tried to get in to find out if Mitsy was there, but he couldn't learn a thing. Just about that time, her father my father-in- law had a stroke, a severe one. His right side was totally paralyzed, and he couldn't speak or understand what anyone said. He died of pneumonia about four months later. Billy's younger brother was working in Iran.
So when we could, Billy and I drove up to the encampment, using the map the investigator had marked.

  '4There were little winding roads, and finally we came to the private, no-trespassing signs he had told us about, and the wire gate across the road. A young boy came out of a lean-to. He wore a direr white smock and he was trying to grow a beard. We said we wanted to visit Miriam Howard, Mitsy Howard. He nodded and walked away up the curving road beyond the wire gate, and out of sight. We waited and waited and waited. Billy got very angry. I had to keep talking him out of going over the gate. It was over an hour before that man came down the road. That same marz. He was five years younger, of course. He wore a white tunic with a

  The Green Ripper

  Chinese collar, and white trousers tucked into shiny black boots. He came right to the high fence and looked us over very carefully. He completely ignored the angry questions Billy was shouting at him.