Pale Gray for Guilt (16 page)

I phoned Press LaFrance in the late afternoon and arranged to meet him in Sunnydale the next morning. He sounded cautious and nervous and he gave me the impression of a certain evasiveness. He assured me the forty was still waiting, and he was anxious to listen, but I had the uneasy feeling that something had changed.

I went out to the sheds and sat on the truck dock, feeling dispirited. I finally admitted to myself that I felt guilty about Mary Smith. I could rationalize it as an adroit defensive maneuver. Gary Santo had aimed her at me. Maybe the little code word had been "steak." He had evaluated me and decided there was enough chance of additional useful information to turn her loose. So I had sidestepped her and aimed her at Hero.

But, after all, she knew her way around. She was about as gullible, innocent and vulnerable as those limey lassies who had starred in the Profumo affair. It was a good chance that she would case Hero in about forty seconds and turn him off, because he could certainly never be a business assignment.

I wished, however, that one little comment about Hero had not lodged itself so firmly in my memory. He looked like the big, gentle, slow-moving, kindly star of a hundred Westerns, and he had the charm to make a woman feel admired, protected and cherished, until he could ease her back to his pad, or back to her place, or any nearby nest he could beg, borrow or rent.

And there he would tirelessly demonstrate that degree of satyriasis that stopped short of landing him in various kinds of corrective institutions. He cruised the festive areas and cut his quarry out of merry packs with easy skill and monomaniacal determination. The comment that lingered in my mind came from a weary man who came aboard Meyer's boat one hot Sunday afternoon and said, "Knowing Hero this long, I sure God should have had the good sense never to let him bring a woman aboard my ketch last evening, but with Myra and the kids off visiting her folks, and the forward cabin empty, and me a little smashed, I said okay and what he had was some young schoolteacher he'd found right over at the Yankee Clipper in a big batch of schoolteachers having a party before going on a five-day cruise to the islands out of Everglades. The ship left this morning and she sure God isn't going to make that cruise. Giggly woman, kind of mousy and trying to get along without her glasses, and built real good, especially up front. His angle was showing her a Bahama-built ketch on account of she was going to the Bahamas. I left them aboard and that was nine or ten o'clock and I came back at midnight or later thinking they'd be gone. Honest to God, I'm dead for sleep, men. It would get quieted down and I'd be drifting off and it would start up again. With all that whinnying and squeaking and thrashing around, the nearest thing it sounds like, and it's still going on from time to time, is like somebody beating carpets with a shoat. One day Hero is going to nail him one with heart trouble and she just isn't going to last it out. I should have had more sense last night Meyer, what would you say to me going below and getting a little nap?"

So maybe, I thought, Hero never came back to the Tiger's, or maybe Mary Smith never drove up from Miami to try to find me, and if she did, maybe Meyer missed her. Or little Muggsie could have decided she deserved better.

Janine came walking slowly from the house, hands deep in the pockets of a borrowed gray cardigan worn over white ranch jeans. She hadn't seen me, and when I called to her, she turned and came over.

"Have a good nap?"

"I slept a little." She sat on an upended cement block and reached and picked up a piece of lath and started drawing lines in the dirt with the sharp end. She tilted her head and stared up at me, squinting against the brightness of the sky.

"Trav," she said, "I keep wondering about one thing. It keeps bothering me. I keep trying to figure out what happened, but I can't seem to think of anything logical. It's sort of strange."

"Like?"

"How did Tush get out there? I had the car. He was going to come into Sunnydale by bus and phone me to come get him. Did somebody give him a ride, or what?"

"I never thought about that."

"Then, whoever gave him the ride could tell when he got there. They… found him at what time was it?"

"A sheriff's deputy found him at nine o'clock approximately. The medical examiner estimated he had been dead from one to four hours at the time he was found."

"From five thirty to eight thirty, then. In there somewhere, somebody… killed him. But he was so strong, Trav. You know how powerful he was. He wouldn't just stretch out and let somebody… He was dead when they put him there. Maybe whoever drove him out there saw somebody hanging around."

"We're going to get to all that, Jan. Believe me, we're going to do our best to find out. But first we've got to do some salvage work for you."

She made a bitter mouth and looked down and drew a dollar sign. She reached a foot out and slowly scuffed it out. "Money. It got to mean so damned much, you know. Getting pinched worse and worse, and snapping at each other about it, and being so scared we were going to lose the whole thing we started with. And now it doesn't mean anything. Nothing at all."

"With those three kids to bring up? Shoes and dentists and school and presents?"

"Oh, I suppose it will be something I'll have to think about. But right now I'm just… nowhere. You're sure you can fix it so I'll end up with thirty thousand clear, and you seem so sure you can make me a lot more out of that stock stuff I don't understand at all. I ought to sound grateful and pleased and delighted and so on."

"Not for my sake. Or Meyer's."

"Everybody is doing things for me. But I ran. Everybody knows that. I'm a lousy person. I don't like myself. Trav, I used to like myself well enough."

I slid off the dock and took her hand and pulled her up. "Let's walk for a while." We walked and I gave her some dreary little sermons about how never quite matching up to what you want of yourself is the basic of the human condition. She heard, but I don't know if she believed. I was trying hard to believe my own hard sell, because I kept thinking of carpets and shoats and wide wide emerald eyes and a delicately provocative little pressure of teeth against the knuckles of my stupid right hand.

When I went into the lobby, two men in green twill uniforms moved in from either side to position themselves with an unhurried, competence between me and the glass double doors. A cricket-sized man of about sixty planted himself spread-legged in front of me and said, "Nice and easy, now. You just lay both hands atop your head. You're a big one, all right. Freddy?"

One of the others came in from behind and reached around me and patted all the appropriate pockets and places. I had recognized the sheriff's voice from having heard it over the phone. He wore a businessman's hat wadded onto the back of his head. Straight gray hair stuck out in Will Rogers style. He wore an unpressed dark suit with a small gold star in the lapel. The suit coat hung open, exposing a holstered belly gun small enough to be an Airweight. Small enough to look toylike, but in no sense a toy.

The legal papers, billfold and keys were handed to Sheriff Bunny Burgoon. From his voice I had thought he would be all belly, with porcine features. He opened the wallet, flipped through the pliofilm envelopes. He stopped at the driver's license and studied it.

"Your name Travis McGee? You can put your hands down, boy."

"That's my name."

"Now we're going on over to my office and talk some."

"Can I ask why?"

"It's my duty to tell you that you got no obligation to answer any questions 1 or any of my officers may ask you without the presence of any attorney of your choice, and you are in your rights to request the Court appoint an attorney to represent your interests in this matter, and anything you say in response to interrogation, with or without the presence of your legal representative, may be held in evidence against you."

He had run all the words together, like a court clerk swearing a witness.

"Is there a charge?"

"Not up to this minute, boy. You're being taken in for interrogation in connection with a felony committed in the county jurisdiction."

"If I'm being taken in, Sheriff, then it is an arrest, isn't it?"

"Boy, aren't you coming along willingly and voluntarily like is the duty of any citizen to assist law officers in the pursuit of their duty?"

"Why certainly, Sheriff! Willingly and voluntarily, and not in the cage in the back of a county sedan, and with my keys and papers and wallet in my pockets. Otherwise it's an arrest, and if so, my personal attorney is Judge Rufus Wellington and you better get him on the horn and get him down here."

"Read his name in the paper, boy?"

"Instead of bothering the judge, why don't you just ask Whitt Sanders if the judge represents me?"

I was watching for a shift of uncertainty in his eyes and saw it. Apparently he had not anticipated any connection with the local power structure. He motioned one of the two deputies close, stood tall, and without taking his eyes off me, murmured into the younger man's ear. The deputy walked out. Burgoon asked me to come over and sit on a couch in the lobby. The deputy was back in five minutes and the sheriff went over and talked quietly with him, then came over and gave me back my possessions. With one of the deputies ten paces behind us, we walked through the morning sunshine to the Shawana County Courthouse and around to the side and into the entrance labeled COUNTY SHERIFF.

I was aware of a particularly avid curiosity on the part of the desk personnel and the communication clerk as he led me back into his office. The slats of the blinds were almost closed. He turned on the ceiling fluorescence and his desk lamp. He had me sit in a straight chair facing his desk and six feet from it. The sheriff looked at the papers on his blotter, put them aside and sat in his big black chair. A portly man in deputy uniform came in and sighed and sat in a chair back against the wall. "Willie will be bringing it along, Sherf."

Burgoon nodded. There was silence. I looked at the framed testimonials on the walls, and the framed pictures of Burgoon taken with various political notables, past and present., Some file drawers were partially open. The contents looked untidy, with documents sticking up out of the file folders.

"Make that deal with Harry?" Burgoon asked.

The portly one said, "He give me an estimate of over seventeen hundred. And it was supposed to be a twenty-year roof I told Cathy we could buy a lot of buckets to set under the leaks for seventeen hundred."

"Harry does nice work."

"Wisht I'd used him when I was building." Burgoon looked at me. "You made up your mind about a lawyer yet, mister?" I had been promoted from boy.

"Sheriff, I think it would be easier for me to make that decision if I had more information about what you think I did. It could be something we might be able to straighten out without bothering anybody"

"Maybe. Maybe not."

"When and where did the alleged crime take place? That might give me something to go on."

"It took place, mister, on the morning of December seventeenth last, and it took place at a marina on the Shawana River just about eleven miles east of here."

"That was a Sunday morning?"

"Yes it was."

"Would you be trying to make a capital case, Sheriff?"

"Murder first."

I remembered that Sunday with no trouble. Puss, Barni Baker, Mick Coseen, Meyer, Marilee, in fact a lot more people than we had needed or wanted aboard, and a dozen ways to refresh their memories that it was that exact day.

"Just one more question and I can give you an answer. Am I supposed to be connected with it in some way, or are you trying to say I was there at that time?"

"There at that time and did commit an act of violence which resulted in the death of one Brantley B. Bannon.

"Then, I don't think I need a lawyer to straighten things out."

It seemed to startle Burgoon. He said irritably, "Tom, what the hell is holding up that damn Willie?"

"Right here, Sheriff. Right here," said a thin young man who came in carrying a tape recorder. He put it on the corner of the sheriff's desk, knelt on the rug and plugged it in. "Sheriff, you just push-"

"I know, I know! Get on back to work and close the door." When the door was closed, Burgoon said, "We took this with the court reporter and on tape at the same time, and there hasn't been time to transcribe it yet. You get to hear it on account of now we've got that damn new law on full disclosure, and the defense would get a certified copy of the transcript anyways, and the State's Attorney said it was all right I should do it this way. You listen, and then you answer questions and make a statement, and then we hold you and this goes to a special meeting of the Grand Jury for the indictment so you can be arraigned proper."

He punched it on and leaned back and closed his eyes and rested his fingertips together. The tape had a lot of hiss. Apparently nobody ever bothered to clean or demagnetize the heads. But the questions and answers were clear enough.

I recognized the flat, insipid, dreary little-girl voice before she even gave her name, saying that she was Mrs. Roger Denn, Arlene Denn, and that she had been living with her husband at the Bannan Cottages, Cottage number 12 ever since the tenth of December, that she was twenty-two years old and that she was self-employed, as was her husband, making and selling art objects to gift shops. Prior to that time they had lived aboard a houseboat the Bannons had rented them, tied up at the Bannon Boatel on the river, and had lived there eight months.

"What were the circumstances of your leaving?"

"Well, they had to come and take the houseboats back. They owed on them and some men came and towed them off, I don't know where. That was… early in December, I don't know exactly what day."

"What happened then?"

"We put all our things in the two end units of the motel just for a while, until we could find something, because Mr. Bannon said it looked like he might lose the place. We went looking and we found a place at the Banyan Cottages and moved in on the tenth, and we were making trips in the station wagon to bring our supplies and so on back to the cottages."

As she spoke on the tape, through the hiss, I could picture her clearly, pallid and sloppy and doughy, with dirty blonde hair and a mouth that hung open, and meaningless blue eyes.

"What was the occasion of your last visit to Bannon's motel."

"It was because of missing some silver wire. We use it in the jewelry. On Saturday, that was the sixteenth, we looked all over for it and it was just gone. We knew then that the place was foreclosed out there, but we still had a key to the end units on account of Roger forgot to leave it off when we made the last trip. I kept thinking that maybe what could have happened to it, we had a lot of supplies piled on the beds and maybe the wire slipped down and caught somehow like at the headboard or the footboard, because I had crawled around looking to see if we'd left anything on the floor the last trip we took. Roger kept saying to forget it because it was real trouble going into a place sealed off by the court, and maybe they'd changed the locks. But it was twenty dollars' worth of wire and maybe seventeen left on the roll, and we don't do so good we can just throw away seventeen dollars. So we sort of had a fight about it, and I said I was going to go out there whether he was or not, so I went out when it was just getting to be daylight the next day, which was Sunday. I drove right on by, slow, to see if anybody was there and I didn't see anybody, so I went a ways up the road and put the station wagon in a little kind of overgrown place that used to be a cleared road once. I backed it in. You know, kind of hiding it, and I went back with the key and when I was pretty sure nobody was around, I tried the key and it worked and I let myself in and started hunting for that wire."

"What happened next?"

"I guess I was hunting for maybe ten minutes or fifteen minutes. I don't know just what time it was. Maybe sometime between seven and seven thirty and I heard a car coming, so I squatted down so nobody could look in and see me when they went by. One of the windows, those awning kind of window things, was open three or four inches. So I heard the car drive in and it stopped and then I heard a car door slam and then I heard another car door slam and I heard men's voices."

"Could you hear what was said?"

"No sir. They were loudest near the car and then kind of faded when they were walking toward the marina. I couldn't hear words but I had the feeling they were mad at each other, almost shouting. I think one word that was shouted was Jan. That was Mrs. Bannon's name. Janine. But I couldn't be sure."

"What happened next?"

"I didn't know what to do. I was afraid to leave. I tried to peek out the windows and see where they went to, to see if it was safe for me to sneak out."

"Could you see the car?"

"No sir. But I knew I would hear it if it started up."

"Then what happened?"

"Somebody shouted a lot louder, and further away, and I knew they were real mad. It sounded to me like Mr. Bannon. Then it was quiet. Then maybe five minutes later I looked out the back window that looks toward the river, and I saw a man dragging Mr. Bannon across the ground. He had his arms wrapped around Mr. Bannon's ankles and he was leaning forward and pulling hard and pulling Mr. Bannon along. I was kneeling and looking out a corner of the window, like with one eye. He dragged him right to that old hoist thing and then kind of rolled and shoved and pushed him under the motor. Mr. Bannon was real limp, like unconscious or dead. The man stood up and looked at him and then he looked all around. I ducked down and when I got up enough nerve to look again, he was walking toward the hoist thing again from the marina and he was carrying something small, some wire and something. I watched him and he kneeled down and did something to Mr. Bannon I couldn't see, and then he worked some more at the hoist thing. Then he turned the crank and the motor went up real slow. I could hear the clickety sound it made. Then he stood near the gear part and bent over and did something and… the motor fell down onto Mr. Bannon. There was a rackety sound when it came down and the wire ropes slapped around and hit those poles and made a ringing sound."

"And then?"

"He cranked it up halfway and looked at Mr. Bannon close, and cranked it up the rest of the way and let it fall on him again. When he cranked it up again, Mr. Bannon looked… kind of flattened out. He didn't put it all the way up again. He just let it fall from there and he left it there and picked up some thing off the ground and then kind of stopped and dropped it and then picked it up and wiped it on some kind of a rag and dropped it again. He was nearly running when he left. And then I heard one car door slam and after a little while the car started up. I stayed way down until it was gone."

"Which way did it go?"

"Back this way, toward Sunnydale."

"Did you get a good look at the man?"

"Yes Sir, I did."

"Had you ever seen him before?"

"Yes Sir."

"Would you recognize him if you saw him again?"

"Yes Sir."

"Do you know him by name?"

"Yes Sir."

"What is his name?"

"His name is Mr. McGee."