A Tan and Sandy Silence

by John D. MacDonald

  “Grab the three hundred thousand from Harry?”

  “Yes. But don’t burn the bridges. Not all the way. Kill Harry because he is the last useful witness left alive. Then take a leave of absence on an emergency basis, somewhere out of touch. Lay back and listen. If there is no letter at all, if it was a bluff, then come back after the deadline and pick up the project again.”

  I toasted him. “To you, Meyer. If he has left already, I get the letter back from Sibelius, and we wait for him to reappear. If he’s still here and working closer to the deadline of the tenth and if he hasn’t gotten around to Harry, we pluck Harry away from him and take Harry to a private place and have a long chat about Mary and Lisa.”

  “If he has left, or is preparing to leave, and wants a door ajar so that he can get back just in case, then he’ll have given Waterbury some sort of cover story, I imagine.”

  “Can we arrange a secret meeting with Waterbury?”

  “Travis?”

  “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “If we can’t find Harry Broll anywhere and if Paul Dissat is still around and if Harry never did buy that block in SeaGate, even if Mary’s body is dug up and identified, there’s no way you can get Paul indicted. You probably can’t even get him fired.”

  “He’s got pretty legs.”

  “I don’t want you to do some damned idiot thing.”

  “Long black eyelashes, Meyer. Red lips.”

  “Travis!”

  “Maybe I want to dance with him. Maybe I want to whisper in his ear. But I don’t want to have him come to me. You see, he’s a careful man. He knows I’ll come back if I didn’t drown. That’s why I told you to be careful about being seen going aboard the Flush. Am I overreacting?”

  “No. You are not overreacting.”

  “Don’t let him get to you, Meyer, when he starts looking for that letter.”

  “I’ve never seen you like this.”

  “He scrambled my brains. We should get away. I know a great cruise we could take.”

  “A cruise! A cruise?”

  “It’s different. I’ll tell you about it later.”

  “Do that. There’s been no report of Mary Broll’s death from Grenada. It’s taking a long time.”

  “A guest is charged for the cottage whether she uses it or not and charged for the food whether she uses it or not. And in the absence of a body it is the kind of island where, if a lady gets invited aboard a yacht for cocktails or up into the hills to an estate for cocktails, a lady could decide to spend a week being entertained. It is, shall we say, an impulsive place. A carefree isle.”

  “I phoned Mr. Willow last Wednesday. He got the cable from Mrs. Broll on Monday, and he talked with Harry Broll on Monday. On Tuesday morning he activated the loan papers and deposited the funds in Broll’s personal account. I thought you’d like to know. That’s when I started trying to get you on the phone. Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday. It was … pleasant to hear your voice.”

  “Paul sent the cable in her name. No problem. I should have realized how easily he could do that.” I looked at Meyer’s watch after first staring at my empty wrist for the thousandth time. “Five o’clock on Sunday afternoon. About the only thing we can do is try to find Harry.”

  “How?”

  “There is a name in the back of this scrambled skull. All the file cards are spilled on the floor. Let me crawl around back there for a minute.”

  I retrieved the red-brown hair, pale green eyes, the vital and expressive face, the lean, quick-moving body. I let her walk around and smile, and then I knew her. “Jeannie Dolan of 8553 Ocean Boulevard.” I hitched along the bed and got her number from information and called her.

  “Who?” she asked in a sleepy voice.

  “McGee. The guy with the blue Rolls pickup.”

  “Hey! It’s you! I’d about decided I hadn’t made any kind of dent on you at all. And that doesn’t help a girl’s pride. Where are you? Ask me out and then sweat out about three minutes of girlish reluctance and then come and get me, huh?”

  “I am going to do exactly that later on, but right now I can’t do any stirring around.”

  “Oh! Are you sick?”

  “Not too sick to take you out, Jeannie. But I am trying to give the impression of being out of town. For good reasons.”

  “Okay. I’m not even talking to you. I will go around saying, ‘Whatever happened to good old whosis?’ ”

  “You are one nice lady.”

  “Rrrrright!”

  “For reasons I may tell you some day, right now I want to know how goes the course of true love and romance and convenience. Betsy and Harry.”

  “It isn’t exactly a script Ali McGraw is going to want to star in. Right now Betsy is teed pretty good. He was real jumpy and mean last week, and Wednesday morning early, like five, he got a phone call. It woke her up, but she fell asleep, and then he’s shaking her awake. It’s just getting to be daylight, and he’s dressed, and he’s packed a suitcase. He tells her he’s going away on business. By the time the front door slams, she has asked him where he’s going and when he’ll be back about three times—no answer. I told her I think she has been handed the personally engraved, natural-bristle brush and maybe she should move back down here onto four with me. She’s been calling his office and getting brushed off there, too. She drove out there a couple of times, but there was no sign of his car. Maybe he is away on business. But it showed no consideration, the way he left.”

  “Sold any condominiums?”

  “Not to that friend of yours. She never showed up. If she really exists.”

  “You are very suspicious of people.”

  “If you’d ever met my husband, you’d know why. He could walk into a phone booth and leave by a side door.”

  “I’m a sneaky type too, Jeannie.”

  “That’s nice. It’s what I’m used to.”

  “I’ll be calling you soon.”

  “You do that, hon. Bye.”

  Meyer and I talked, establishing the new parameters. But it was like the game of guessing which fist contains the chess pawn. Harry had enough animal caution to know that if things went wrong for Paul Dissat, it was runaway time for Harry. So if it was Paul who phoned him, maybe Harry had started to run. Conversely, Paul would know Harry was shrewd enough to know when to run, and so if Paul gave Harry cause to run, he would make certain Harry wouldn’t be able to.

  “The money will be the clue,” Meyer said. “The first thing in the morning, as soon as the bank is open. I don’t think it was paid over to SeaGate. And I don’t think it’s still in the bank.”

  “How do you manage that?”

  Meyer smiled an unexpectedly unkindly smile. “By almost giving Woodrow Willow a coronary. He deserves a jolt. One should not be able to con a trust officer out of any assets held in trust.”

  “I’m coming along.”

  “Do you think you—”

  “In the disguise you’re going to go out and buy me at Happy Sam’s Giant Superstore Open Always Practically.”

  “And on the way back here I buy pizza and beer to go?”

  The lobby of the Southern National Bank and Trust Company takes up half of the ground floor of their new building on Biscayne. It is like three football fields. People at the far end are midgets, scurrying around in the cathedral lighting. The carpeting is soft and thick, dividing the lobby into function areas through the use of colors. Coral, lime, turquoise. The bank colors are pale blue and gold. The girls wear little blue and gold bank jackets with the initials SNB on the pocket, curled into a fanciful logo, the same logo that’s stitched into the carpet, mosaiced into the walls, embossed on the stationery, and watermarked into the checks. The male employees and officers up to ambassadorial rank wear pale blue and gold blazers. Everybody has been trained to smile at all times. The whole place looks like a huge, walk-in dental advertisement. There is probably also a bank song.

  Meyer dropped me a block away, and while he found a
parking space, I strolled back to the bank and went in. I wore a Hawaiian shirt, a straw ranch hat with a red band, a drugstore camera around my neck, sunglasses with big pale orange lenses.

  A guard moved in from the side and asked if he could help me. I said I was meeting the little woman here because she had to cash a traveler’s check, probably to buy some more of those damn silly hotpants, and where would she go to cash traveler’s checks. He aimed me across a hundred yards of carpeting, under a forty-foot ceiling. Nobody else looked at me. Tourists are invisible, except to the man trying to sell them something. Otherwise, they are as alike as all the trees in the park. Only a botanist knows there is any difference between trees. Or an applegrower.

  I kept moving, because if I stood still, one of the guards would come over and ask me if he could help me. I did not know how long it would take. Meyer said he would come in from the north side corridor after going up to the trust department and coming back down with Mr. Willow. Also, I kept moving because I wanted to make certain that by no ten-thousand-to-one-chance was Cousin Paul doing a little banking business this hot, windy Monday morning. Sometimes his face would be completely gone from memory, and that would frighten me. Then it would pop back like a slide coming into automatic focus.

  At long last I saw Meyer coming toward me, striding right along, and I guessed that was Mr. Woodrow Willow a half step to the rear. I watched Meyer. He was going to rub his nose if he wanted me to join the act. He looked through me and did not see me at all. Woodrow Willow was not what I expected. This was a young man, tall, fresh-faced, snub-nosed, round-headed with the same mouth old Walt used to draw on his chipmunks. I sauntered after them, and caught up when they talked to a man who had his own big blond desk in a solitary, private thirty-by-thirty area of coral carpet right out in the midst of everything. The man used a phone. Soon a rangy woman came over walking like one of those heel-and-toe competitors, elbows pointed outward. She listened. She picked up the phone. A far younger girl came, carrying a ledger card. She jogged. Every part of her jogged.

  After she left, Meyer shook hands with the man at the desk, and Meyer, Willow, and the rangy woman walked all the way across to a line of teller’s stations on the far side of the bank. The rangy woman spoke to a slender girl with brown hair. Then she spoke to a man patrolling behind the cages. The slender girl closed her window and came around and out onto the bank floor. Meyer turned toward me and rubbed his nose. The rangy woman was leaving.

  I walked up, and Meyer said, “Mr. Willow, this is my associate, Mr. McGee. McGee, may I present Miss Kathy Marcus.”

  “Who is this person?” Willow said in a voice of despair. “Good God, I had no idea you were going to bring in—”

  “A place where we can talk?” Meyer said. “Just to have Kathy tell us in her own words before we get into anything else. Then we won’t be taking up so much of her time.”

  “Take a lot,” she said. “I’ve got a three-dollar short that’s driving me up the wall.”

  “We’d better use one of the small conference rooms upstairs,” Willow said.

  Upstairs was 1910 banking, as opposed to the 1984 version in the lobby. Oak paneling, green rugs, leather libraries. The computers were hidden offstage. Park your Mercer under the elm trees and come in and talk about buying a block of Postal Telegraph.

  There were six chairs around the table in the small conference room. There were two framed prints of clipper ships and a seventeen-pound glass ashtray on the polished walnut. As soon as the door was shut, I shed the ranch hat, shades, and camera.

  “Enjoying your stay?” Kathy asked me with a quick wink.

  “Little gal, when I come across those Everglades in that big old air-conditioned Greyhound bus, I said to the little woman, I said, Mother, we shoulda—”

  Kathy guffawed, stopping me. Willow rang the big glass ashtray with his pipe in authoritarian tempo, silencing everybody. “Please! This is a very serious matter. If I have your attention, Miss Marcus, we would like to find out to what extent you are involved—”

  “Whoa, friend,” she said sharply, no laughter in her voice or her level stare.

  “Now you will listen to me, Miss Marcus! I was saying—”

  She got up and went to the door and smiled and said, “When you go home to the wife and kiddies tonight, Woodie, tell her that nice Miss Marcus quit the bank and went right down the street to another bank. Some loyalty, huh?”

  “Come back and—”

  “Woodie dear, the banks are so hard up for anybody who is worth a damn, it’s pathetic. They’ve been hiring people here if they’re ambulatory and feel warm to the touch. And I am one very damned good teller, and I have been here four years, and I am not now, nor have I ever been, involved in anything hanky or panky.”

  “Please, come back and—”

  “Woodie dear, you just can’t have it both ways. You can’t call me Kathy and fun around with me when we’re alone in an elevator and give me a friendly little grab in the ass and a chummy little arm pressure on the tit and then expect me to sit meek and mild in front of these gentlemen and take some kind of accusatory shit from you. No thanks. I’ll tell them downstairs who ran me out of this bank.”

  “Kathy,” he said.

  With her hand on the knob she looked at him with narrowed eyes and said, “That’s a start at least. Say the rest of it.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to imply—”

  “Do you want me to come back and sit down, Woodie?”

  “Please. I would appreciate it very much.”

  She came slowly back to the chair, sat, and smiled and said, “If these men had been strangers, Woodie, I would have let you go on being a jackass, and I would have cooked you later. But I’m among friends. Friends who rescued an eerie blonde from the oldest floating houseparty in the world.”

  “I remember already,” Meyer said.

  I looked at her more closely. “Delmonica Pennypacker?”

  “Just a little name I made up for my vacation. Anyway, as I understand it, Woodie, you want a play-by-play account of cashing the check for Mr. Harry Broll.”

  Woodrow Willow was coming out of shock. He cleared his throat and told how a Mr. Winkler, a vice president of the bank, had received a telephone request last Wednesday at closing time from Harry Broll, stating that he would be in at about eleven on Thursday to cash a check for three hundred thousand on his personal account. He wanted to make certain the bank would have cash available in hundred-dollar bills. This is not an unusual request in an area where large real estate deals are made.

  Kathy took over and said, “The way our system works, everything has to go through teller records, or we’re out of balance. The cashier is Herman Falck, and I suppose Mr. Winkler told Herm to have the cash on hand. Herm told me he would run it through my balance, and he said Mr. Broll would probably bring in a dispatch case for the money. That amount would fit with no trouble. We run a minimum cash balance in the drawer at all times to make the place less appealing to the knockover boys. We signal the vault for more cash or to come make a pickup when we get too fat. They come zipping in a little electric money cart.

  “So at ten after eleven Herm brings these two men over to me. I put out my closed sign so that a line won’t build behind them. He takes the dispatch case from the man with Mr. Broll and hands it around to me. Mr. Broll gives me the check, and Herm initials it. Then Herm goes back and brings the cash cart behind the cage. It’s just a matter of packing the sixty wrapped stacks of hundreds into the case. A black plastic case, imitation lizard. I counted them out as I packed them. Five, ten, fifteen, on up to three hundred. The case was below eye-level looking from the floor of the bank. I snapped the snaps and slid it up onto the counter, and the other man took it, and they walked away.”

  “Had you ever seen Mr. Broll before?” I asked.

  “I think so. He looked sort of familiar. Maybe I waited on him. The name seems familiar.”

  “How did he act?”

  “Well,
I guess he’s really a pretty sick man. I don’t think he could have managed without the other man helping him.”

  “In what way did he seem to you to be sick?”

  “Well, he was very sweaty. His complexion was gray, and his face was wet. He kind of wheezed. Like asthma sometimes. He didn’t have much to say. Usually, men joke about lots of money when they put it in or take it out. They joke with me because I’m all girl, I guess. His friend had to kind of support him walking to my window, I noticed. Mr. Broll walked slowly, a little bent over and taking small steps. His friend was very nice to him. Considerate.”

  “What did his friend look like?”

  “Younger. Dark curly hair. Tall. Middle thirties, I’d guess. A very nice voice. Some kind of accent. Marvelous clothes. Conservative mod. But he was too pretty for my taste. Husky pretty. Great eyelashes. He called Mr. Broll ‘Harry,’ but Mr. Broll didn’t call him anything. Let me help you, Harry. Here, let me take that, Harry. Come on, there’s no hurry, Harry. Take your time, old man. It took them a long time to walk to the main doors. The fellow helped Mr. Broll and carried the dispatch case. I watched them. They didn’t go right out. I guess Mr. Broll felt faint, because they stopped and sat down in that lounge area left of the main doors. It made me uneasy. You like to see three hundred thousand get to where it has to go and get locked up again. They sat side by side on the couch. I could see the fellow leaning toward Mr. Broll and talking quietly and confidentially. I saw Mr. Broll put his hand over his eyes. The other man pulled it away and took his handkerchief and wiped Mr. Broll’s face, wiping the sweat away, I guess.” She frowned. “Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but the whole scene had a funny flavor. It seemed faggoty to me, like a wife with a sick husband.… No. The other way around. A youngish husband with kind of a fat, sick old wife he doesn’t really love but feels sort of affection and gratitude and … a sense of duty to, if I don’t sound flippy.”

  “Not flippy at all.”

  “I was busy, and when I looked again, they were gone. I would guess it was about twenty minutes before noon when they left the bank together.”