I gave my spiel, adding that the lady next door told me she would be the one to ask. She asked me if I had a card, and she had me poke it through the mail slot. I wondered why she sounded so out of breath.
I heard chains and locks, and she pulled the door open and said, “So come in.” She wore a floor-length terry robe in wide yellow and white stripes, tightly belted. Her short, blond, water-dark hair was soaked. “I was in the pool. Daily discipline. Come on out onto the terrace. I’m too wet to sit in the living room.”
She was a stocky woman with good shoulders and a slender waist. She had a tan, freckled face, broad and good humored, pale lashes and brows, pretty eyes. The terrace was screened, and the big pool took up most of the space. Sliding glass doors opened the terrace up into the living room. The yard beyond the screening and beyond the flowerbeds sloped down to a small concrete dock where a canopied Whaler was moored.
She invited me to sit across from her at a wrought iron table with a glass top.
“Try that on me again, Mr. McGee. Slowly. Is this the check?”
She picked it up and put it down and listened as I went through it again. “A claim for what?” she asked.
“Mrs. Dressner, it’s company policy not to discuss casualty claims and settlements. I’m sure you can understand why.”
“Mr. McGee, may I ask you a personal question?”
“Of course.”
“How come you are so full of bullshit?”
I stared at her merry face and merry smile. But above the smile the hazel eyes were expressionless as poker chips.
“I … I don’t quite understand.”
“Go back to Harry and tell him that this didn’t work, either. What does he think I am? Some kind of idiot, maybe? Good-by, Mr. McGee.”
“This isn’t for Harry. This is for me.”
“So who the hell are you?”
“How friendly are you with Mary anyway?”
“Very very very. Okay?”
“What happened to her when Wally got killed?”
She frowned at me. “She came apart. She flipped.”
“And a man took her on a boat ride?”
“Right. And the way she talked about him, that’s the one she should have played house with instead of Harry Broll.”
“I almost thought about it seriously.”
“You?”
“Travis McGee. The Busted Flush. Cruised the Keys and up the west coast to Tampa Bay. Taught her to sail. Taught her to read a chart. Taught her to navigate.”
She put her determined chin on her fist and stared at me. “That was the name. You, huh? So what’s with the funny games, coming here with your funny card and your funny check? If you knew we’re close friends, why not start honest?”
“I have not seen her or talked to her in over three years, Holly. And don’t jump on my knowing your first name and try to make anything out of it. The woman next door clued me.”
“Hitting the whole neighborhood?”
“One at a time. Mary is … low-key intense. She hides a lot of herself. She doesn’t make friends easily. But she needs people, so I thought she’d have to have a friend in the neighborhood. A friend, not an acquaintance. Right?”
“So right, McGee. Coffee and tears. Most women bug me. Mary doesn’t. I … still don’t feel right about you. About taking you for granted. It could be some kind of a trick. I want to ask you things, but I can’t think of anything to ask that you couldn’t have gotten from Harry.”
“He’s trying to find her.”
“You know it! I thought the silly son of a bitch was going to try to shake it out of me.”
“When was this?”
“A couple of weeks ago. He’d had a couple. He got all weepy. He insisted I had to know where Mary is.”
“Do you know where she is?”
“McGee, I know why Harry wants to find her. He wants her to come back to him and sign something and live happily ever after.”
“It might be an ugly shock if she did come back.”
“How?”
“She’d find the house empty, and she’d go look for Harry at the Casa de Playa, where he just so happens to be shacked with a divorcing blonde named Betsy Booker. In apartment 61.”
I couldn’t read her expression. “So?”
“So isn’t that where Mary found him with the Canadian?”
“Only two people could have told you that. Or three. Harry, Mary, or Lisa—the Canadian quiff.”
“Wrong.”
“The hell you say.”
“I got it out of Betsy Booker’s best friend, Jeannie Dolan, also from Columbus, who got part of it from Betsy and part of it from the housekeeper. Jeannie and Betsy take turns manning the sales desk at the Casa de Playa.”
I saw her buy it and give a small nod. “So help me. That rotten Harry. Jesus! The way I read it, Lisa was not the first. Just the first she caught him with. He really is one sorry bastard.”
“How did she find out?”
“She thinks it was one of the girls in his office or a girl he’d fired, trying to make things rough for him. She got a phone call. The person on the other end whispered. Mary said it was spooky. Something very much to the point. ‘Mrs. Broll, your husband has loaned apartment 61 in his new building to Lisa Dissat, and he’ll be taking another long lunch hour today so he can drive out there and screw her.’ So she drove out and hid somewhere until he arrived and went upstairs. Then she went up to the sixth floor and waited around until the door opened and he started to come out. She took a quick run at the door and knocked it open and charged past him and found the bareass Canadian getting ready to take a nice nap. I take it there was a certain amount of screaming going on for a while.”
“Then Harry got rid of the girlfriend?”
“She was packed and out of there the next day. Back to Canada, Harry told Mary. He confessed his sad story. He had gone to Quebec for business conferences with his Canadian partners. He had to dictate new agreements. They sent the secretary to the hotel. They worked very late. He was too tired to think clearly. She was pretty and available. It went on for the three days he was up there. He came back. Two days after he was back, she phoned him at his office from Miami. She had quit her job and followed him back to Florida. So he told Mary that while he was trying to talk Lisa into going back, he put her up at the apartment. I guess he was having a hard time convincing her. He talked from the end of November till two days before Christmas. That’s a lot of long lunches and a lot of evening conferences.”
“But Mary didn’t leave him until January fifth.”
“Harry told you that?”
I laughed. “I thought the silly son of a bitch was going to try to shake it out of me, too. This was just the other day. And he got weepy.”
“So you’re finding her for him?”
“May I ask you the same personal question you asked me?”
“Okay. Okay. I’m sorry. Why then?”
“For myself. Pride, I guess. Harry thought if she was really in trouble, she would come running to me. And the more I think about it, the more logical it seems. That she would. Besides—” I stopped suddenly.
“What’s the matter?”
“When was Harry here, did you say?”
“Oh, two weeks ago.”
“Can you pin it down to a day?”
“Let me go take a look at my kitchen calendar and see.”
She came back and said, “Less than two weeks ago. It was a Monday morning. April fifth.”
“He told me someone had seen Mary with me on April second. He was wrong, of course. Why would he come after you instead of me if she was seen with me?”
“Maybe he hadn’t been told about it before he came to see me,” she said.
“And maybe he was trying to get you to admit she’d moved in with me or some damn thing. What difference does it make anyway? He didn’t act as if he was thinking very clearly.”
“Mary was thinking about getting in touch with you. She was sitti
ng in my kitchen wondering out loud if she should. That was after she’d decided to take off. Then she decided it would be better to have some breathing space in between, some time to herself first. I thought she would have written you long before now. It’s over three months.”
“She writes you?”
“Don’t get too cute, McGee.”
“Okay. Do you know where she is?”
“Yes.”
“And she is okay?”
“I have no reason to think she isn’t. If I was Mary, I would be relishing every damn moment. The farther from Harry, the better.”
“That’s all I wanted to know, Mrs. Dressner. That she is okay. I had to hear it from somebody I could believe.”
“Hey! You’re spoiling the fun. You’re supposed to worm the whole story out of me. Or try to.”
“It’s Harry who has to know where she is. Not me.”
“Friend McGee, I am not about to get you two men confused, one with the other.”
“So she is a long distance from here. And should be relishing every moment. Right?”
“I’ve gotten some comedy postcards.”
“I believe you. There are people you believe and people you don’t. I don’t need to know any more than I know right now.”
She looked rueful. “Everybody believes me. Everything I’m thinking shows. I’ve got one of those faces. I’d make a rotten spy. Hey, sit down again. I haven’t offered you anything. Coffee, tea, beer, booze? Even some lunch?”
“No thanks.”
“Believe me, I’m glad to have anybody show up here. This is one of the days when the house gets empty somehow. David—my husband—has been gone all week. He’ll be home tomorrow, probably about noon. He’s gone a week or more out of every month. Our two little gals are tennis freaks, so who sees them at all when the weather is like this? I miss the hell out of Mary, I really do. You could choke down some terrible coffee at least. Pretend it’s delicious, and I’ll tell you where Mary is. Even if you don’t have to know.”
She brought coffee from the kitchen to the glass-top table on the screened terrace. Moving around had loosened the hitch in the terry belt, and when she bent to pour my coffee, the robe suddenly spilled open. She spilled coffee, clutched frantically, put the pot down, and gathered herself together and tied the robe firmly, her face dark red under the freckles. It was obvious she had not contrived it.
“Some people are solitary drinkers. I’m a solitary skinny dipper.”
“It’s habit forming,” I said.
She got paper towels and mopped up the spilled coffee and filled my cup the rest of the way. She sat and stared at me, lips pursed. Finally she said, “Thank you.”
“For?”
“For not jumping to any conclusions, for which I could not exactly blame you. Good God, I tell you my husband is away, my kids are playing tennis, I’m lonesome. I beg you to stay for coffee and then damn near drop my robe on the floor.”
“Some days are like that.”
“I like the way you can smile without hardly changing your mouth at all. It’s kind of all in the eyes. Mary said you’re a doll. She said big and brown and sort of beat-up looking. But you’re bigger and browner than the idea I had of you. About Mary. That was a sordid scene at the Casa de Playa. It shook her. Friendship is friendship, but you don’t tell your friends what to do when it comes to big emotional decisions. Through Christmas and the rest of December she spent a lot of time over here. I let her bounce it all off me. She was thinking aloud, arguing it out. Taking one side and then the other, while all I did was say ‘um.’ But I could tell which side was winning. Finally she said that if she hadn’t already had one divorce, she would definitely decide to leave Harry. It was a lousy reason to stick around, just to avoid being divorced twice, which has a kind of ring of failure to it, failure as a person or as a woman. So she was going to leave him and go away and, to be real fair, think it all through. But the way she felt, she’d probably sue for divorce after the waiting period. I waited for her to really make her mind up, and then I questioned her to make certain she was sure, and finally I told her about a little problem I had once with her husband. There’d been a party down the street and the four of us, the Brolls and the Dressners, had walked back together, a little tight. They came over here for a nightcap. There were supposed to be falling stars. It was in the paper. I wanted to see them. We put out the lights on the terrace, and I stretched out on a sun mattress beside the pool, right over there, to watch up through the screening overhead. David went to the kitchen to fix drinks, and Mary changed her mind about what she wanted and went in the kitchen to tell him. Harry was on a sun mattress near mine. All of a sudden he rolled over and put his big old cigar mouth on mine and pressed me down with his big belly and ran his big paw up under my skirt and started groping me. I froze with shock for about one second, and then I gave a big snap of my back like a huge fishing shrimp and bucked him into the pool in all his clothes. It turned into a big joke. He said he’d gotten up and tripped and fallen in.
“When I told Mary about it, she was furious with me for not telling her sooner. I told her I hadn’t told David, because he would have tried to beat Harry to death. I said that now she’d made her mind up, I could tell her about what Harry pulled that time. Frankly, what I was doing was trying to lock her into her decision to drop that jerk forever. Having her own money made it easy for her to get away. She got it from her trust officer at the Southern National Bank and Trust in Miami. Cash. A lot, I think. She didn’t want Harry tracing her through credit cards or personal checks. She told me she didn’t want to hear his voice or see his face once she left. Not for a long time anyway. We sat right out here one afternoon, a warm day for early January, and we looked at the travel folders she’d picked up from some little travel agency where she wasn’t known. She wanted to go to the islands. Between the two of us we decided that Grenada looked the best, and it was certainly far enough, way down there at the bottom of the West Indies, almost as far as Trinidad. So the travel agency sent wires and cables and got her set up at what looked like a very plush place, the Spice Island Inn. She’s sent me those joke greetings. Four or five, I guess. Airmail takes eight days! That place is a real hideaway.”
“Harry told me she left on January fifth. He said he came home from work and she was gone.”
“I think it was an impulse. She wasn’t going to leave until Thursday or Friday. I was out most of that afternoon. Maybe she tried to say good-by. I guess she probably drove down to Miami and stayed in a hotel or motel until her flight left.”
“I wonder what she did with her car?”
“I think she was going to leave it at Miami International.”
“Which is two fifty a day, no matter how many days, so she is up to a two-hundred-dollar parking charge.”
“McGee, the lady had decided to go first class all the way. That is what ladies do when they get mad enough.”
“What would Harry be wanting her to sign?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea.”
“Good coffee.”
“Come on! It tastes like stewed tire patches.”
She walked me to the door. She got ahead of me and leaned back against the door and looked up quizzically. She stood a little taller than my elbow. “McGee, I just wondered. It seems like a hell of a lot of trouble you went to. The business cards and the funny check and the sales talk.”
“No big thing, Holly. The cards and the checks were in the cupboard. I have to hunt for people sometimes. You learn to use something that works.”
“Why do you hunt for people?”
“I do favors for friends.”
“Is that a line of work with you?”
“I really wouldn’t know how to answer that question.”
She sighed. “Heck, I thought I could solve a problem for Mary. She never was able to figure out what it is that you do for a living.”
“Salvage consultant.”
“Sure. Sure.”
Whe
n I glanced back, she was standing on her shallow front steps, arms crossed. Her hair was beginning to dry and to curl a little. She smiled and waved. She was a sturdy, healthy woman with a very friendly smile.
Seven
I was on the beach by three o’clock that Friday afternoon and that was where Meyer found me at a few minutes to four. He dropped his towel, sat upon it, and sighed more loudly than the surf in front of us or the traffic behind us.
There were nine lithe maidens, miraculously unaccompanied by a flock of boys, playing some game of their own devising on the hard sand in the foamy wash of the waves. It involved an improvised club of driftwood, a small, yellow, inflated beach ball, one team out in the water, and one on the beach. Either you had to whack the ball out over the heads of the swimmers before they … or you had to hit it past a beach player who then … Anyway, it involved a lot of running, yelping, and team spirit.
“A gaggle of giggles?” Meyer said, trying that one on me.
My turn. “How about a prance of pussycats?”
“Not bad at all. Hmmm. A scramble of scrumptious?”
“Okay. You win. You always win.”
He slowly scratched his pelted chest and smiled his brown bear smile. “We both win. By being right here at this time. All the strain of a long, difficult, and futile day is evaporating quickly. Meyer is at peace. Play on, young ladies, because from here on out life will be a lot less fun for most of you.”
“Grow up and be earnest and troubled?” I asked. “Why does it have to be that way?”
“It doesn’t. It shouldn’t be. Funny, though. They take all those high spirits, all that sense of fun and play into one of the new communes, and within a year they are doleful wenches indeed. Somber young versions of American Gothic, like young wagon train mothers waiting for the Indians to ride over the ridge. And their men look like the pictures of the young ones slain at Shiloh. Idealism in our society is pretty damned funereal.”
One of the players looked up the beach and gave a quick wave and then went churning into the water to capture the yellow ball.
“One of my constituents,” Meyer said comfortably.
A Tan and Sandy Silence Page 7
