Cinnamon Skin (5 page)

"What do you mean, if only three?"

"The photo taken showed three. Maybe Evan Lawrence was below. But I have the queasy feeling he was on shore. I have the feeling that maybe he was where he could watch the Keynes and push a button on a transmitter. I have that feeling in spite of believing he was not the kind of person to do something like that. I really liked him. He had a good face, good laugh lines. You know?"

"I know what you mean. How would he arrange to stay ashore?"

"I don't know. Back out at the last minute. Plead an upset stomach. And Hack would have picked up Pogo to help with the fishing because he'd be busy at the wheel out there in that chop. The Lawrences had been living aboard for almost two weeks. Time enough for him to poke around in Meyer's files and pick up enough information so he could make a convincing phone call about the Chilean connection."

"But what are you going to do?"

"Annie, I can dig into his life and find out if he was what I believed him to be. If so, he blew up too. If the back trail is rancid, he didn't die, and we have a new kind of ball game."

"In either case, you'll have to start in Houston, and you'll have to tell Meyer what you are thinking, won't you? So no need to worry. Tell him the whole thing."

"He's had so much-"

"Look. Trust him to be able to accept that immortal truth, dear, that life is unfair. And unpleasantly abrupt at times."

"It would be a lot easier to talk this all over if you had your head on my shoulder; and my left arm around you, and-"

"Hush. Please hush, McGee. I'd be of no use to you at all."

"Let me be the judge of that."

"No way."

"And so I am separated from my own true love by fifty-three proctologists?"

"That's one way to put it. Say hi to Meyer for me. Extend my love and affection and sympathy and so on. And phone me from Houston or wherever you may be-but not before Monday night next, which will be… the nineteenth. Look, if things turn ugly, don't take any dumb chances, okay?"

"No dumb chances."

"I had sort of an idea. There's a place on the waterway where they are condominiumizing boat slips: in other words, selling the slip itself with the dock, pilings, and overhead roof, like for forty or fifty thousand for a slip big enough for the Busted Flush. I haven't worked out the arithmetic yet, but I suspect that I could talk management into letting me invest in that as an adjunct facility to the Eden Beach. Then we could work out a lease arrangement, a sort of contract with you, to have a kind of permanent party-boat setup whereby the guests at the hotel here could sign up ahead and there could be sightseeing cruises, or cocktail cruises, or maybe even dinner cruises if we could work out the service details. What I mean to say, it could be a very nice little living for you, dear. It wouldn't be a killing but it would be steady, and you would practically be your own boss. And we would… see each other oftener."

"And I wouldn't be charging around taking dumb chances?"

"Something like that."

"On the dinner cruises, could I wear one of those great huge tall white chef's hats?"

"Don't be such a bastard, McGee."

"Look into your heart of hearts and see if you can really see me doing that."

"Hmm… Oh, shucks. No."

"Thanks anyway for the concern."

"You're welcome indeed. Good night, McGee. I love you."

You have to wait the locals out. Nothing is done without a reason, and sooner or later they either get around to it or change their minds and leave. The quickest way to change their minds is to press them to find out what they want.

He looked around the lounge and said, "Changed it some."

"You haven't been aboard in a while."

"I guess I was about fourteen. You and Dad armrassled to a draw, maybe forty minutes, with the sweat popping out and one or the other of you groaning from time to time, your faces like beets. He was a little bit stronger, and you had a little bit better leverage, having a longer arm."

"I remember."

"Then it was Meyer stepped in and called it a draw, and you both fell off the chairs and lay on the floor there, panting like dogs in the summertime."

"I remember it well. Want a beer?"

"I won't ever forget it, not ever. I'd never seen anybody ever rassle my dad to a draw, arm-rassling or any other kind. Little early for me for a beer, I guess."

"Carta Blanca?"

"Well, not all that early."

He drifted out to the galley with me, and I took two cold ones out of the locker and uncapped them. We went back into the lounge, and he dropped into a chair and took long swallows, wiped his mouth on the back of his brown hand. "Real good. Thanks. You and my dad were friends."

"Pretty good friends."

"I come onto something, I don't know how I should handle it, and there's nobody I can rightly ask. I don't want to bring Bud in on it. He's back up at Duke in that summer program. Andy's too young. And I can't ask Mom."

"What's it all about?"

There was a long final hesitation, and then he shrugged and sighed. "Like this. I've been building up a fair trade down there below Marathon, but it's nothing like Dad had here. I've been over his list for the season coming up, and he's booked nearly solid. I know his kind of fishing. I can do it, but not as good as he did. He could smell fish. The HooBoy would be mine to use or sell, whatever. I went prowling around among the charterboat guys, trying to find out if I could make some kind of a deal for his boat plus the bookings. Everybody acted just a little funny. You know? There was something going on I couldn't figure out.

"So I went over to the boatyard, to Dalton and Forbes, where the engine work is being done. And they acted funny over there too. It'll be ready in one more week. I climbed up the ladder and went aboard her. I looked at the work sheets. The work is all paid for. Thirty-eight thousand dollars' worth, and he paid in cash."

"To rebuild a couple of old diesels?"

"Rebuild, hell. A new pair of high-speed jobs, with every kind of booster you can think of. They reinforced and cross-braced the whole front end of the hull. High-speed props. New controls. Outside it isn't changed. It was always just a little bit underpowered. He could have gone bumbling around in it, looking the same as always, but when anybody jammed those throttles forward that thing would take off like a big-assed rabbit."

"Isn't that a displacement hull?"

"No. It's kind of a modified deep vee, and they've put a new kind of step thing on the hull that will pop it right up into planing position. I remember when it was new, if we were heading downwind and he gave it full throttle on both engines, and we had a lot of room ahead of us, it would get up onto the plane and scoot. But it took too much gas to get it there. Jerry Forbes told me they think it will do a little better than forty knots once they get the step adjusted just right. I don't even like to think about it. He told Mom he had to get five thousand together to get the engines rebuilt. I've been through his papers, and there's nothing there to show where any thirty-eight thousand came from or where it went to. What do you think was going on, Trav?"

"Did they enlarge fuel capacity?"

"Bigger tanks, and they set them so the center of balance is a little more forward of where it used to be. When he got that boat, I was six and Bud was four and Andy wasn't born yet. We were so proud of the HooBoy. It was so pretty!"

"Your father was a good man, Dave. He had lots of friends. He worked hard. You could trust him."

"So where did a good man get thirty-eight thousand cash money?"

"Have you looked around at the charterboat people along this coast and in the Keys lately? There's a lot of big new vans and pickups. Lots of gold jewelry. New televisions with big big screens. Brand new washer-dryers. And little trips over to Freeport for shopping and gambling, and maybe a visit to the branch of the Bank of Nova Scotia."

"Certainly I've looked around. And I've thought about it. Fellow I knew down in Marathon had him a fast little runabout, like a California boat. Cigarette hull and power assists so he could do up to eighty-five, he claimed. He was clearing ten thousand a week running coke from a mother ship. One time they waited for him and tried to corner him. They had three boats not as fast as his. But he tried to get away around the end of a reef, and he cut it a little bit short and turned himself and his pretty boat into a ball of flame rolling for fifty yards along the night water. Friend of mine saw it happen. We're not talking about people like that coke dealer. We're talking about my dad, Dennis Hackney Jenkins, Hack. We're talking about lying, and cash money, and why'd he have them turning the HooBoy into a bomb."

"Look. I don't want to be in the position of making excuses. He'd just turned fifty. Men do funny things when they come up against a birthday with a zero on the end of it. They wonder if their life is pointless. They wonder what other kinds of lives they could have led. Don't judge him. A man can be tempted. Few ever get caught, and the ones that do get out on bail, and cases don't come to trial for years. The U.S. Attorney's office in Miami has a nine-year backlog of dope cases."

He stood up abruptly. "Thanks for the beer. He wasn't like that. You know it and I know it. And I'm going to find out what the hell was going on." And out he went. Blind loyalty. It made me wish my life had been different and I'd had some sons. Sure, McGee. What you want are the full-grown variety, big and sturdy and loyal and true. But you never wanted what came in between: diapers and shots, PTA and homework, yard mowing, retirement programs, Christmas lists, mortgage interest, car payments, dental bills, and college tuition. You made your choices, fellow, and you live with the results. And if in the end there is nobody to give a single particular damn when you die, that too is part of the bargain you made with life. And maybe that was what Annie was trying to tell me a couple of weeks ago.

If Dave Jenkins was as shrewd as I judged him to be, he would take delivery on the HooBoy, put it back on Charterboat Row, and start filling Hack's commitments to his clients. Certainly Hack wasn't working in a vacuum. Sooner or later some information would turn up. Somebody would come around. Charter fishing was sick. Money was tight and getting tighter. A lot of them were out there after the square grouper, as the bales of marijuana were called. Hack or whoever would run the transformed HooBoy, could make $10,000 a trip, out and back to the mother ship, some rust-bucket freighter chugging around out there, sixty miles offshore.

I decided to look him up when I came back from Houston, find out if anything at all had happened. But I wouldn't look him up to do any arm-rassling.

He looked as strong as his father, and his arms were longer: After a match with him, I would have to brush my teeth with my left hand for a week.

On Friday the sixteenth, Eastern Airlines took me from Miami to Houston by way of Atlanta. I went first class, I told myself, for the sake of the leg room. At six-four I am not the right size for tourist. But I probably went first because I like first. If I did a lot of flying, I'd probably find a reasonably good way to wedge my knees into the tourist-size seats. But flying seldom, I tend to treat myself to the best. I had alerted Meyer, and he met me at the gate and led me with my underseat case out to the lot to his rental Datsun, which seemed even smaller than tourist class.

He said I had best not talk to him in the noontime traffic. I soon saw what he meant. We came whining down the Eastex Parkway at sixty-four miles an hour, because that was the average speed of the dense stampede in which we were enclosed. It is a fact of highway life that each heavily traveled road establishes its own cadence. The great pack of candy-colored compacts, pickups, vans, delivery trucks, taxicabs, and miscellaneous wheeled junk flowed in formation, inches apart, through the gleam, stink grinding roar, and squinty glitter of a July noontime, through a golden sunshine muted to brass by smog. What the traffic consultants seem unable to comprehend is that heavy traffic makes its own rules because nobody can nip in and pull anybody over to the side without setting up a shock wave that would scream tires and crumple fenders for a mile back down the road. California discovered this first. It is probably a more important discovery than est or redwood hot tubs.

In such traffic there are two kinds of maniacs. The first is the one who goes a legal 55 and becomes like a boulder in a swift stream. The stream has to part and go around, finding the spaces in the lanes on either side, getting impatient when they can't find the spaces, finally cutting out somebody else and making them so cross that a few miles down the road they actually nudge another car. Hence the plague of car wars. At times I have had a fleeting sympathy for the fellow in Dallas who ran such a station wagon off onto the median strip, hopped out, dragged the offending driver out of his vehicle, and flipped him into the fast traffic. Murder by impulse. Rage unconfined.

The second maniac is the one who tries to go nine miles faster than the flow instead of nine miles slower. This type is often bombed out of his mind on booze, cannabis, crazy candy, or marital disagreements.

Once you have the concept of the pack making the law, driving the urban interstates is simplified. You maintain just that distance from the vehicle ahead which will give you braking room yet will not invite a car from a neighbor lane to cut in. You pick the center lanes because some of the clowns leaving the big road on the right will start to slow down far too soon. You avoid the left lane when practical because when they have big trouble over there on the other side of the median strip, the jackass who comes bounding over across the strip usually totals somebody in the left lane. When you come up the access strip onto the big road, you make certain that you have reached the average speed of all the traffic before you edge into it. Keep looking way way ahead for trouble, and when you see it put on your flashing emergency lights immediately so that the clown behind you will realize you are soon going to have to start slowing down.

Meyer did well, hunched forward, hands gripping the wheel at ten o'clock and two o'clock. We traversed the interchange onto the loop Interstate 610, heading west. The average speed moved up to a little above seventy. He took the first exit past the junction of Interstate 10, headed west again, turned south at a light, and after a couple of miles turned into the main entrance of Piney Village, a misnamed development of clusters of town houses and duplexes in stained wood with some stone facing, set at odd angles on curving asphalt to manufacture illusions of privacy. Berms added variety to flatness, and new trees struggled. The architect had been crazy about step roof pitches, a manifest insanity in the Houston climate. Meyer meandered left and right and left, pulled into a driveway barely longer than the orange Datsun, and parked with the front bumper inches from the closed overhead garage door, killed the motor, and exhaled audibly. "Very nervous traffic," I said. "You did good."

"Thank you. Lately I seem to get along better by focusing on just one thing at a time, pushing everything else out of my mind. Driving a car, shaving, cooking eggs. The other day I was adding figures on a pocket calculator and I suddenly lost track of what I was doing." He frowned at me. "I was adrift all of a sudden, and I had to reinvent myself, find out who I was and where I was and what I was doing. Like waking from very deep sleep. Strange."

He got out and I followed as he went to the door of D-3 and unlocked it. In the hallway, he pushed a sequence of numbers on a small panel, and a voice came out of the grill and said, "Identify please."

"Meyer here. Two eight two seven five."

"Thank you," the grill said, after a short pause.

"Security," Meyer explained. "All these places are hooked up to a central control. When we sign out, they'll be listening for sounds of break-in or fire or whatever."

It was a two-level town-house apartment, with two bedrooms and bath off a balcony, with kitchen, bath, and a studio-workroom under the bedroom portion. The two-story-high living room had a glass wall at one end, with sliding doors that opened onto a small garden surrounded on three sides by a seven-foot concrete wall, and a fireplace at the other end. The furniture was modern and looked comfortable without being bulky. The colors were mostly neutral, but with bright prints on the wall, bright jackets on the bookshelves. It had the look of being well-built, solid, efficient, and impersonal.

"Norma lived here alone before she got married, and Evan moved in with her. She was the first occupant after this unit was finished. She rented it on some complicated lease-purchase arrangement whereby she paid six hundred and twenty-five a month, and two hundred of that went into an escrow account against her decision to purchase for sixty-five thousand when her two-year lease was up. It will be up in October. These places are now going for ninety to a hundred, so I guess she made a good decision. There's a big shopping mall about a mile away, and it's close to a very direct route into the middle of the city."