John D MacDonald - Travis McGee 09 - Pale Gray for Guilt

by Pale Gray for Guilt(lit)

  And why didn't Meyer phone from New York? Too busy having a fine time with old stockbroker buddies, probably.

  At ten minutes after four the slack line twitched. I tested the tension cautiously. It was still through the underlip. I shooed Puss into the master stateroom and invited Preston LaFrance into the lounge. He came in, grinning, hesitant. A gaunt and ugly and sandy one. Maybe the young Sinclair Lewis, if the old photographs are accurate. Fifty percent hick. Fifty percent con artist. Cowlick. Long lumpy face. Lantern jaw. Nervous cough. Ploughboy hands. Brash sports jacket with the wrong button buttoned. A gangly diffidence overlaying a flavor of confidence. When he looked around the lounge, his expression vague, I had the feeling he saw everything that had any bearing on his own aims and motives, and could price the whole layout within plus or minus three percent.

  His big hand was warm, dry and utterly slack. "Mr. McGee, we seem to be aiming in kind of the same di rection on a little matter, and what I thought, I thought it might be time to see if we can eat out of the same dish or spill the dinner."

  "I guess that depends on how hungry we are, LaFrance. Sit down. Get you a drink?"

  "Mostly I'm called Press. Short for Preston. Thank you kindly, and if you would have such a thing as a glass of milk, that would be fine. I had an ulcer and got over it, and they tell me sipping milk instead of kitchen whisky will keep me from having the next one. And I guess you've upped my milk bill by maybe half, Mr. McGee."

  "Mostly I'm called Trav. Short for Travis. And we stock milk because there is very little damn else you can put on cornflakes."

  "You are so right!"

  I brought him his glass of milk, and a beer for me. He sat on the long yellow couch. I pulled a chair a little too close, turned the back toward him and straddled it, forearm along the back of the chair, chin on the forearm, expression politely expectant and benign. It put my face two feet from his, and six inches higher, with the brightest window right behind me. Closeness is a tactical weapon. We do not like our little envelope of anticipated separation and privacy penetrated. It is a variable distance, depending on the needs and necessities of the moment. We endure the inadvertent pressure of the flank of the office worker in the crowded down-elevator at five o'clock. If we are alone with the office worker, if it is male-without overtones of fag-then it is insolent challenge, demanding action. Being jostled in a crowded airport is acceptable; on a wide and empty sidewalk it is not. A fixed stare is a form of penetration -of the envelope, carrying different messages according to the sort-out of sex, station, race, ages and environment.

  Always we want some separation, some tiny measure of distance regardless of how clumsily our culture mechanizes an inadvertent togetherness. The only exception time is when sex is good in all dimensions, so that even in the deepest joining there is the awareness of that final barrier, an aparmess measured by only the dimension of a membrane, and part of the surge of it is a struggle to overcome even that much apartness.

  The lounge aboard the Flush is a sizeable enclosure, and I positioned myself well inside the area of logical separation. Once you learn the expectations of distances, small and great, you can use them in tactical ways, watching for reaction, for a pulling back, a pained stiffness of expression, an awkwardness. Or position yourself beyond the plausible distance and watch for the forward lean, the advance, the slight what-is-wrong-with-me agitation. It is a kind of language without words, a communication, and incites a reversion to the primitive compulsion of the pecking order, the barnyard messages-You get too close so I peck you back to where you belong.

  Press LaFrance sipped his milk, looking down into the glass. He looked to the side and reached and put the half glass on the end table. He then hiked one limber Ichabod leg up, heel on the edge of the couch cushion, long fingers of both hands laced around his ankle, slouching just enough to interpose the knee between us so that he looked at me over the top of it. With that interposition he increased the subjective distance between us.

  "Fifty mortgage plus fifteen cash equals sixty-five thousand," said he. "And that is better than twice what any licensed appraiser would put on it."

  "For the same use Bannon put it to. A man with his house on fire and a man dying of thirst would put a different value on a glass of water."

  "Hard to put a value on 'if,' Trav. Link three or four ifs together and it comes out long odds, so you can't go very high."

  "There are some men, Press, who get a little confused between greed and shrewdness. Maybe they are a little bit shrewd, and then they want to buy at the lowest dollar and sell at the highest, and finally it comes out as if they weren't shrewd at all. They end up doing the very same thing as if they were stupid to begin with."

  The knobbly face colored a little and the mouth stiffened then relaxed as the color faded. "A fella could have made an offer way back, through a third party, and a fair offer, all considered, but somebody could have been too bullheaded to listen."

  "Fair offer?"

  "We aren't talking marina, McGee. We aren't talking motel. You know that and I know it. We are talking ten acres."

  "Ten acres in the middle of the deal, smack in the middle of it, like a June bug in the birthday cake."

  "So I was coming up with thirty two hundred and fifty an acre for those ten acres."

  "Which gives you sixty acres, if you'd gotten it. What did the fifty behind Bannon's place cost you?"

  "A fair price."

  "One thousand dollars in nineteen fifty-one, according to the tax stamps on the deed as recorded in the Shawana County Courthouse, which comes out to twenty dollars an acre. That was probably a fair price in nineteen fifty-one. We can do a little arithmetic, Press. When you pay me forty thousand for clear title to the Bannon place, and assume the mortgage, then you have a ninety-one-thousand cost figure on the sixty acres, or just about fifteen hundred an acre. That will turn you a profit of five hundred an acre on resale, or thirty thousand, and because you are a reasonable man and because you are in a bind, you are going to be sensible and take it."

  He was absolutely immobile for long seconds. I think he even stopped breathing. He dropped the knee, swiveled and got up and peered down at me. "Man, you lost your cotton-pickin' mind for surel That would be two thousand an acre on resalel The deal with my buyer is for nine hundred. I couldn't pay you any forty thousand and take over a fiftythousand mortgage! I'd come up with a loss of six hundred an acre. Where do you get this crazy twothousand figure?"

  "Why, Press! You'd make out just fine on nine hundred an acre! You've got old D. J. Carbee screwed. You pay him two hundred an acre, or forty thousand, and you resell it to Gary Santo for nine hundred, which comes to a hundred and eighty thousand. So deduct that thirty-six thousand you'll lose on that sixty acres, and there you are, fat and sassy, and a hundred and forty-four thousand ahead."

  He picked up the glass and drained the milk, wiped a chin-drip on the back of his wrist. "D.J. told me he didn't tell you a thing about that option. So by God, you knew about it when you went and offered him five hundred an acre. You upset that old man something pitiful."

  "Maybe I was trying to upset you, Press."

  He sat down on the far end of the yellow couch. He shook his head like a sad hound. "What in the world are you after, McGee?"

  "Money. Just like you, Press."

  "You knew I had to show up here. You left a trail and you left loose ends. But you didn't do all this just to charge me forty thousand for something that cost you fifteen."

  "That isn't much profit, come to think of it. What do you think I ought to charge you? Sixty? A hundred?"

  "Oh, come on!" he wailed.

  "You can't come up with much. You've got the shorts, haven't you? Overextended?"

  "Don't you worry about me!"

  "But I do! I'll tell you what I'll do for you, LaFrance. I'll pay you fifty thousand dollars in cash for your fifty acres and the option you've got on the Carbee acreage. Then you're out of the whole thing with a nice profit."

 
; He stiffened. "Hell no! Then you got the whole two hundred and sixty acres Santo wants to buy."

  "But I wouldn't sell it to him. The price isn't right."

  "But you can't move it, McGee, unless you move Santo's parcel at the same time! Calitron has to have the whole four hundred and eighty acres. You know the rest of it, so you have to know that much."

  "I know the Calitron Corporation will go as high as seventeen hundred an acre to Gary Santo." It was nice to have the name of the corporate buyer.

  Preston LaFrance brooded about it. "He never did let on what he expects to get. But there's not a damn thing anybody can do about that. Hell, Santo can just let his land sit there for ten years. He doesn't have to sweat these things out."

  "In a smaller sense, Press, that's my policy too." He looked startled, and then alarmed. "Now, you wouldn't squirrel up the whole deal by setting on that little ten acres forever, would you. Jesus, man, Calitron will go somewhere else if they get held up! Then where are we?"

  "Maybe I've got a buyer who doesn't need that much room. I'm thinking of your health, Press. Fifty thousand and no more worries, and your ulcer will feel fine. You can pay off some of the notes at the bank and make Whitt Sanders happy."

  His jaw firmed up. "I'll play it like a Mexican standoff, mister. I'll squat on my fifty and you squat on your ten."

  "It's like what you said when you came in. Do we learn to eat out of the same dish or do we spill the dinner? Know what the difference is, Press? I'm not hungry and you are."

  He cracked the knuckles of both hands, methodically, one at a time. "Now you said something about being shrewd. and being greedy both and how it turns out stupid, Trav. I've been working on this thing one way or another for a year and a half, about. The way things are, I have to make it big, and that's the truth. Not big the way Santo thinks about money, but big for me. I'm leveling with you. I've got to come out of this six figures ahead anyway, or with the present timing I'm going to end up way the hell back where I started in forty-six when I got out of the service, and I don't want for that to happen. I had it within an inch of being home free, and you slipped in out of nowhere and bollixed it all up for me. Okay, it was smart business and you're pretty cute. So right now I think it's up to you to find some way to fix it so we get to eat out of the same dish, each to his need. I've got my good option out of old Carbee, even if he is thinking about shooting me since you went to see him. And I got the fifty acres behind your place."

  "As long as you're leveling, you can settle one thing that bothers me a little. Back when you found out Bannon wouldn't sell and wouldn't budge, and if you had the shorts so you couldn't offer him enough, why didn't you turn the problem over to Gary Santo. With what he'd stand to make, he could have paid Bannon twenty cents for every dime he had in that business, and bought him a new location."

  "I told Santo about that! I had that same idea. It took me a whole month to get to talk to him face to face, and then I had to chase him up to Atlanta, where they were opening up a hotel he's got money in, where he's got a penthouse thing he keeps for himself. I was up there drinking and waiting around maybe an hour and then he was ready to talk and we went back into one of the bedrooms and I told him these Bannons were a nice little family, working hard and doing pretty good, and if he could make them a good offer, which I wasn't in any shape to do, then we were all ready to move. So he said don't bother me with the details, LaFrance. He said that if he had to take care of all my. problems, why should I have a slice of the cake. He said that come next May first he'd pay the full two hundred and thirty-four thousand for a clean, clear title to the two hundred and sixty acres to the east of his holdings, or I could forget the whole thing. And that was what I couldn't do, McGee-forget the whole thing!"

  "So you broke them. You busted them down to a price you could afford. You didn't have any other choice."

  "No other choice in the world, excepting to go broke myself. I swear, if it had been my own brother running that place, it would have had to be just the same. But let me tell you, I never did count on Bannon killing himself. That never entered my head one minute. We were having a late Sunday breakfast in the kitchen when I got a phone call telling me what he'd done, and after I hung up and thought about it, I went right in the bathroom and threw up. I swear, it made me sick. I was in bed most of the day. Suzy wanted to call the Doc, but I told her it was just probably something I ate at the hotel Saturday night, at the testimonial dinner for old Ben Linder, retiring from the law, looking like a little old gray ghost the way the cancer is eating him up." He sighed. "You know, having you come out of noplace and snatch those ten acres away from me is like punishment for what Bannon did to himself. It's like getting the word that nothing ever is going to work out right anymore for me, and things used to go so good there for a while."

  "Maybe Bannon didn't kill himself."

  His sagging head snapped up. "What are you trying to do now? What kind of new game are you playing?" "Just a thought. I suppose it was pretty well known who was putting the pressure on Bannon and why. Maybe somebody wanted you and Monk Hazzard to be appreciative. Maybe they roughed Bannon up just to prove a lot of real diligence and cooperation and went a little too far. And if Bannon just happened to die on them, it would be a pretty good way of fixing it so that nobody would ever be able to find out that Bannon took a bad beating."

  He chewed a crumb of skin off the corner of his thumb. "Suzy said if it was sure going to crush a man's head anyway, he might as well be face down so he couldn't see it falling..." He straightened and shook his head. "No. There's nobody around who'd do a man that way. Nobody I know. Nobody Monk knows."

  I looked at my watch. "I'll tell you exactly what you do, Press: I'll be up there on Thursday the fourth. I'll have somebody with me who can tell you something you might find interesting. But the only way you can get to talk to them is to have that forty thousand in cash or certified check all ready and waiting, and I'll have a deed and closing statement and so on. Show me the money and then you can talk to the man I'll bring along. Then you can decide whether you want to buy the Bannon place. Because that's the only way you're going to have any dish to eat out of."

  He stood up. "Otherwise?"

  "Otherwise I just wait you out, and I wait until the Calitcon deal is dead, and then I make my own deal with Carbee, because he certainly isn't going to renew that option with you, and then I see if my buyer can get along without your land and without the Santo land, and I think it's quite possible that two hundred and ten acres might be enough."

  "You wouldn't be running a bluff?"

  "Prove you have forty thousand to get into the table stakes game, and we'll give you a little peek at the hole card. Believe me, it's the last and only chance you've got."

  From the dock he looked back toward me, standing on the afterdeck. He shook his head and said, "You know, damn it, McGee, it's almost easier dealing with that son of a bitch Santo. At least you know more about what the hell is going on."

  I went back in and hollered to Puss that she could come out. I took a yellow cushion off the couch and lifted the little Sony 800 out of its nest and took it over to the desk. We'd used up two-thirds of the fiveinch reel of half-mil tape at three and three quarters ips. I unplugged the mike and plugged in the line cord to save the battery drain and rewound it to the beginning. I stretched out on the couch and Puss sat cross-legged on the floor and we listened to it all the way through. I got up just once and held the rewind key down a few moments, and replayed the account of the talk with Santo in Atlanta, and let it continue on from there.

  At the end, Puss got up and punched it off and came over and hip-thumped herself a little room on the edge of the couch. "Is that what we've got for a villain, dear? That weak, scared, sly, sorry man? Just scrambling and hustling and trying to keep his stupid head above water? So his stomach hurts all the time, and he threw up."

  "Settle for Santo?"

  "Maybe indifference is the greatest sin, darling. I'll settle for Santo,
until a new one comes along. McGee, tomorrow is New Year's Eve."

  "So it is. So it is indeed."

  "How would you feel about no throngs, dear?"

  "I was thinking about trying to prove two is a throng."

  "I think two people could purely lang the hell out of auld zyne if they put their minds to it. Is it zyne, or syne or what?"

  "It is old acquaintance ne'er forgot."

  "New acquaintance ne'er forgot. What happens to people who start on Black Velvets and taper off on champagne?"

  "They seldom remember their own names."

  "Let's try for that."

  A slow gray rain came dawn all day long on the last day of the year. We kept the Flush buttoned up, the phone off, ignored the bing-bong of the regulars who were drifting from boat to boat, It was a private world, and she provided a throng of girls therein. Never had she released all that mad and wonderful vitality for so long. She had come all the way out of the shell she had been keeping herself in for the last few days. We peaked at that point where the wine held us in an unreal place, neither drunk nor sober, neither sane nor crazy, where the funny things were thrice funny, where all the games were inexhaustible, where tears were part of laughter or sadness, and every taste was sharpened, every odor pungent, every nerve branch incomparably sensitized. The ones who are half alive can reach that place, perhaps, with their trips and their acids and their freaking, but reality truly felt, awareness made totally aware, is a magic they can't carry around in powdered form. She was a throng of girls and she filled the houseboat and filled the day and filled the long evening. Some of the girls were ten, and some were fifteen, and some were ten thousand years old. And, like Alice, I had to run as fast as I could to stay in the same place. HAPP-eee New Year, my love...