John D MacDonald - Travis McGee 01 - The Deep Blue Good-By

by The Deep Blue Good-By(L

  "Just a moment. I have it written down here.

  His home, of course, is in Richmond, Virginia.

  Let me see. Thday is the... third, isn't it. He will be at the convention in New York City through Tuesday the ninth. At the Americana Hotel. I suppose you could reach him there, but he said there would be a great many meetings and he would be very busy."

  "Thank you so much, Mrs. Callowell. By the way, where was your son's overseas duty?"

  "in India. He has always wanted to go back and see the country again, He wrote such wonderful letters from there. I saved them all.

  Maybe one day he will have the chance."

  I hung up and finished my half cup of tepid coffee. I phoned an airline. They had one at the right time. Idlewild by 2:50 p.m. Lois seemed very disconcerted at the prospect of being left alone. She looked as if her teeth might chatter. Her eyes were enormous. I instructed her as I packed, and made her write down the briefing. Mail, laundry, phone, groceries, the manual switch to kick the air conditioner back on, garbage disposal, reliable local doctor, how to lock up, etc., television channels, cozy bookshelf, fire extinguishers, and a few small items of standard marine maintenance. She bit a pale lip and scribbled it all.

  She needed neither car nor bike. Everything, including the public beach, was walkable. Take the white pills every four hours. Take a pink one if you start to shake apart.

  At the gangplank I kissed her like any commutation ticket husband, told her to take care of herself, scuttled toward Miss Agnes, slapping my hip pocket where the money and the credit cards were. The unemployed merit no credit cards. But I had a guarantor, a man for whom I had done a sticky and dangerous favor, a man whose name makes bank presidents spring to attention and hold their shallow breaths. The cards are handy, but I hate to use them. I always feel like a Thoreau armored with a Leica and a bird book. They are the little fingers of reality, reaching for your throat. A man with a credit card is in hock to his own image of himself.

  But these are the last remaining years of choice. In the stainless nurseries of the future, the feds will work their way through all the squalling pinkness tattooing a combination tax number and credit number on one wrist, followed closely by the I.T. and T. team putting the permanent phone number, visaphone doubtless, on the other wrist. Die and your number goes back in the bank. it will be the first provable immortality the world has ever known.

  Manhattan in August is a replay of the Great Plague of London. The dwindled throng of the afflicted shuffle the furnace streets, mouths sagging, waiting to keel over. Those still healthy duck from one air-conditioned oasis to the next, spending a minimum time exposed to the rain of black death outside.

  By five minutes of four I was checked into the hotel. They had a lot of room. They had three conventions going and they still had a lot of room. Once inside the hotel, I was right back in Miami. Same scent to the chilled air, same skeptical servility, same glorious decor-as if a Brazilian architect had mated an air terminal with a manufacturer of cotton padding. Lighting, dramatic. At any moment the star of the show will step back from one of the eight (8) bars and break into song and the girlies will come prancing in. Keep those knees high, kids. Keep laughing.

  Will. M. Callowell, Jr., was not listed under his own name, but under the HopkinsCallowell, Inc. suite, 1012-1018. I asked the desk which convention that was. 'Construction," he said. "Like they make roads."

  A man in the suite answered the phone with a young, hushed and earnest voice, and said he would check Mr. Callowell's agenda. He came back in a moment and said in an even more hushed voice, "Sir, he just this moment returned from a meeting. He's having a drink here now, sir."

  "Will he be there long?"

  "I would imagine at least a half hour." I checked myself in a full-length mirror. I smiled at Mr. Travis McGee. A very deep tan is a tricky thing. If the clothing is the least bit too sharp, you look like an out-of-season ball player selling twenty pay life. If it is too continental, you look like a kept ski instructor. My summer city suit was Rotarian conservative, dark, nine-ounce orlon looking somewhat but not too much like silk. Conservative collar on the white shirt. Rep tie. A gloss on the shoes.

  Get out there and sell. Gleam those teeth. Look them square in the eye. You get out of it what you put into it. A smile will take you a long way. Shake hands as if you meant it. Remember names.

  There were a dozen men in the big room.

  They had big voices and big laughs and big cigars and big glasses of whiskey. Junior executives were tending bar for them, sidling in to laugh at the right time, not too loudly, at all evidences of wit. They wore no badges. That is the key to the small and important convention.

  No badges, no funny hats. Any speakers they get are nationally known. And they order their food off the full menu.

  One of the juniors told me that Mr. Callowell was the one over there by the big windows, with the glasses and mustache. William Callowell was in his middle forties. Average size.

  Somewhat portly. It was difficult to see what he like. He had a stand-up ruff of dense looked black hair, big glasses with black frames, a black mustache, and he smoked a big black. e. There didn't seem to be enough skin PIP showing. The only thing unchangeably his was a wide fleshy nose with a visible pattern of pores. He was talking with two other men.

  They stopped abruptly when I was six feet away and they all stared at me.

  I said. 'Mr. Callowell, when it's

  "Excuse me convenient I'd like a word with you."

  "You one of the new Bureau people?" one of his friends asked.

  "No. My name is McGee. It's a personal matter."

  "if it's that opening, this isn't the time or the place, McGee," Callowell said in a soft unfriendly voice.

  "Opening? I gave up working for other people when I was twenty years old. I'll wait in the hall, Mr. Callowell."

  I knew that would bring him out fast. They have to know where you fit. They have those shrewd managerial eyes, and they can look at a man and generally guess his salary within ten percent either way. It is a survival reaction. They're planted high on the side of the hill, and they want to know what's coming up at them, and how fast.

  He came lounging out, thumbing a new load into his pipe.

  "Personal matter?"

  "I came up from Florida this afternoon just to see you."

  "You could have phoned and I would have told you I have too heavy a load here."

  "This. won't take much time. Do you remember a crew chief named Sergeant David Berry?"

  It snapped him way back into the past. it changed his eyes and the set of his shoulders.

  "Berry! I remember him. How is he?"

  "He died in prison two years ago.)

  "I didn't know that. I didn't know anything about that. Why was he in prison?"

  "For killing an officer in San Francisco in nineteen forty-five."

  "Good Lord! But what's that got to do with me?"

  . I, m trying to help his daughters. They need help."

  "Are you an attorney, Mr. McGee?"

  "No."

  "Are you asking me to help Berry's daughters financially?"

  "No. I need more information about David Berry."

  "I didn't know him very well or very long."

  "Anything you can tell me will be helpful."

  He shook his head. 'it was a long time ago.

  I can't take the time right now." He looked at his watch. 'Can you come back at eleven?"

  "I'm registered here."

  "That's better. I'll come to your room as near eleven as I can make it."

  *Room seventeen-twenty, Mr. Callowell."

  He rapped on my door at eleven-twenty.

  He'd had a full measure of good bourbon and a fine dinner and probably some excellent brandy. It had dulled his mind slightly, and he was aware of that dullness and was consequently more careful and more suspicious than he would have been sober. He refused a drink. He lowered himself into a comfortable chair and took h
is time lighting his pipe.

  "I didn't catch what you do for a living, Mr. McGee."

  "I'm retired."

  He hoisted one black eyebrow. 'You're young for that."

  "I keep myself busy with little projects."

  "Like this one?"

  "Yes.

  I think I better know a little more about this project."

  "Let's lay down the shovels, Mr. Callowell.

  I'm not on the make for anything you have.

  Berry came home rich from his little war. I'd like to find out how. And if I can find out how, maybe I can get a little of it back for his girls.

  His wife is dead. All this will cost you is a little time. And a little remembering."

  For a little while I thought he had gone to sleep on me. He stirred and sighed. 'There were ways to get rich over there. They said it was even better earlier in the war. Berry had been there a long time before I came along. ATC. Flying C-46's out of Chabua in Assam. Passengers and cargo. Calcutta, New Delhi, and over the Hump to Kunming. Go sometimes to twenty-two thousand feet in those creaking laboring bastards, and then come down through the ice and get your one and only pass to lay it down at Kunming. I'd say I made twenty-five flights with Berry. No more. I didn't get to know him. Crews didn't stay together too long in that deal. The first one I had, my first airplane over there, quit.

  Structural failure, and the landing gear collapsed, and I slid it a long long way. Just three in a crew. They split us up. I got the ship Berry was on. Berry and George Brell, copilot. I was uneasy, wondering if Brell thought he should have been moved up. Their pilot wangled a transfer out."

  "Sugarman?"

  "That was the name! He was killed later.

  Brell didn't resent me. it worked out all right.

  Brell and Berry were competent. But they weren't friendly. Berry was pretty surly and silent, but he knew his job. I think he was sort of a loner. We had probably twenty-five flights together, probably ten of those round trips to China. Then one night we came up from Calcutta and I had let down to about a thousand feet when the starboard engine caught fire without any warning at all. It really went. Too much for the extinguisher system. I goosed it up to as much altitude as I dared, leveled it off and we went out one two three. Five seconds after my chute opened, the wing burned off and it went in like a rock, and five seconds after that I landed in a bed of flowers right in front of the station hospital and wrenched my ankle and knee. Very handy indeed. I hobbled in with my arm around a great big nurse.

  Berry and Brell visited me and thanked me and brought me a bottle, and I never saw them again."

  "Did you hear any rumors about Berry making money?"

  "I seem to remember hearing a few vague things. He was the type. Very tough and silent and cute."

  "How would he have done it?"

  "By then the most obvious way was by smuggling gold. You could buy it in Calcutta, and sell it on the black market in Kunming for better than one and a half times what you paid for it. And get American dollars in return. Or, take Indian rupees and bring them back and convert them into dollars at Lloyd's Bank. Or buy the gold with the rupees. it could be pretty fle,-dble. But they were cracking down on it. It was a risk I didn't want to take. And I knew that if Berr or Brell was doing it, and got y caught, there would be a cloud on me. So I kept my eyes open. You could do a lot with gold in China then. They had that runaway inflation going, and damn few ways to get the gold in there. You could even make a profit by smuggling rupee notes in large denominations into China. They say the Chinese used the rupees to trade with the Japs. The Japs liked the rupees to finance their espionage in India.

  Hell, the Chinese were trading pack animals to the Japs in return for salt. it was a busy little war. I think Berry was a trader. He had that native shrewdness. And I think he had the knack of manipulating people. Once I think he actually sounded me out, but there was nothing I could put my finger on. I must have given him the wrong answers."

  "Was he close to George Brell?"

  "Let's say a little closer than a sergeant and a lieutenant usually get, even in an air crew.

  They were together quite a while."

  "Then Brell, if still living, is the next man to talk to."

  "I know where you can find him."

  VI, "Real He hesitated. It was the business syndrome.

  He had something somebody else wanted and he had to stop for a moment to consider what advantage might be gained. This reflex brought him all the way back from the jungly old war in the back alcove of memory, where he was Lieutenant Callowell, agile, quick and very concerned about the ways of hiding and controlling the fear he felt every day. He fell back into the portly disguise of William M.

  Callowell, cushioned with money and authority, shrewd builder and bidder, perhaps privately worried about impotence, audits and heart attacks. I could sense he did not often think of the war. There are middle-aged children who spend a part of every day thinking of their college or their war, but the ones who grow up to be men do not have this plaintive need for a flavor of past importance, and Callowell was one of these.

  He, relit his pipe, shifted his weight. 'Two years ago there was a short article in Newsweek about our operation, in connection with the interstate program. They used my picture.

  I got letters from people I hadn't heard from in years. Brell wrote me from Harlingen, Texas, sounding like a dear old flyboy buddy, which he wasn't. Letterhead stationery, thick parchment bond, tricky type-face. Brell Enterprises I think it was. One inch of congratulations to me, and a yard of crap about how well he was doing, closing with the hope we could get together and talk over old times. I answered it with a very short cool note, and I've heard nothing since."

  "You didn't like the man."

  "For no reason I can put my finger on, McGee. We had dull, dirty, dangerous duty over there, but, after all, it was Air Transport Command. Brell was the tailored uniform type, with the hundred mission cap, and when we were in Calcutta he'd put on the right hardware and turn himself into a Flying Tiger and cut one hell of a swath through the adoring lassies. And he totted a thirty-eight with pearl grips Instead of the regulation forty-five. And he didn't like to make landings. He would get very sweaty and overcontrol when he made landings."

  "He would have the information on David Berry, then."

  "if he's willing to talk. if he was in on it, on any cute money on the side, why should he talk to anybody about it?"

  "I've leveled with you, Mr. Callowell, but I might try something else with Brell."

  "And use my name in vain, McGee?"

  "it might occur to me."

  "I would advise against it We have lawyers without enough to do. They get restless."

  "I'll bear that in mind."

  "I don't often do this much talking for so little reason, McGee. You have a nice touch.

  You're an eager listener. You smile in the right places. it puts people on. And, of course, you haven't leveled with me."

  "How can you say such a thing?"

  He chuckled and pulled himself to his feet.

  "End of session, McGee. Good night and good luck." At the door he turned and said, 'I'll have you checked out, of course. Just for the hell of it. I'm a careful and inquisitive man."

  "Can I make it easier by giving you my address?

  He winked. 'Slip F-18. Bahia Mar. Lauderdale."

  "Mr. Callowell, I am impressed."

  "Mr. McGee, any reasonably honest man in the construction industry either sets up his own CIA or he goes broke." He chuckled again and trudged toward the elevators, trailing fragrant smoke.

  IN THE morning I placed a station call to t the number listed for George Brell in Harlin gen. I got a lazy-toned switchboard operator who put me through to a sharp-voiced secretary who said that Mr. Brell was not in his office yet. As she had no way of knowing it was a long distance call, I side-stepped her request for my name and said I would phone later.

  Then I phoned my barge boat. After three
rings, I heard her voice, small, tense, cautious.

  "Hello?"

  "This is your night nurse speaking."

  "Trav! Thank God."

  "What's the matter? Is something wrong?"

  "Nothing in particular. Just... I don't know

  ... tension, I guess. I got so used to you being nearby. I hear sounds. And I jump. And I had bad dreams."

  "Cook them out in the sun."

  "I'm going to. On the beach, maybe. When are you coming back?"

  "I'm going to Texas today."