Pale Gray for Guilt (22 page)

Meyer looked up from his work and said, "You look grotesquely healthy Travis."

"And your eyes look grainy, and you look tired, and how long do you have to go five days a week and sit and watch the board like a great hairy eagle?"

"Not as long as I thought."

"Indeed?"

"Sit and listen. Without a glaze in the eyes, please."

"Proceed. I'll try to understand."

"These Fletcher Industries earnings statements. Look, accounting is flexible. There are choices. Each one is legal. However, say there are fifteen ways to handle different things to make earnings look a little bit better. So this outfit uses all fifteen, right up to the hilt. The last published quarter, it looks like they made forty percent more money than the quarter before that. I rework the statement and I come out with earnings not even flat. But down a little, even."

"So?"

"At fifteen dollars a share it looked as if Fletcher was a bargain for a growth stock, selling at maybe twelve times anticipated earnings for this year. So on top of that which you call the fundamental picture, then there is the technical picture of the stock in the market. This buying pressure improves the technical picture. It becomes very desirable. Big volume attracts attention. Today I saw how it was going, how it was reacting, and so I took the risk, and I committed her all the way. Here is where her account stands. She's got seventy-four hundred shares. Average cost per share is eighteen dollars. Today it closed at twenty-four and a quarter. So, right now, a short term gain of forty-six thousand dollars."

"Of what!"

"She holds shares worth right now a hundred and eighty thousand, less the margin account debit. The supply is shrinking and the demand is increasing. It is moving too fast. The Wall Street Journal yesterday had a statement from management saying they don't know why all the big interest in their stock all of a sudden. It got out of hand too fast. I made this projection about where it is going to go next week. I have a used crystal ball an old gypsy gave me. I say a minimum eight points next week, so it will close between thirty-two and a half and thirty-seven. Traders will grab profits and get out. Usually I would wait, buy on the correction, and ride up with it again. But we get a trading suspension, maybe an investigation of corporate books. I think they used all the accounting gimmicks they could, and then they lied a little. It went up too fast and next week will be faster. So I start moving her over into that nice one I found for her to keep."

"You're telling me or asking me?"

"Telling you. What else? You are the expert on pigeon drops. I am the expert on the biggest crap game in the world."

"But you have to talk to her and explain all this."

"I do? Why?"

"Because she ought to come down here."

He cocked his head. "Connie suggested?" I nodded. "I should discuss all this with her. It is only fair to her."

"And she should sign some papers, maybe?"

"Very important-looking documents." He scratched his chin, tugged at his potato nose. "One part of your thinking I don't understand. That lousy fellow, that LaFrance, it makes some sense he should go to Santo to see if he can get bailed out by maybe peddling him the option he's got on the Carbee land. So doesn't he mention you?"

"If he mentioned me, it's the same as telling Santo that he was a damned fool. If he admits he's smashed and trying to salvage something; the price from Santo will go way down."

"How can you be sure of how that idiot will react?"

"I can't be sure. I just make my guess and live with it."

The freeze hit low spots well to the west and north of the To-Co Groves, hit them hard enough so that all the smudge pots and airplane propeller fans and bonfires of old truck tires failed to save the dreams of a lot of the smaller growers. They expected the same on Saturday night, but the upper winds changed and a warm, moist breath began coming up from the lower Gulf and the Straits of Yucatan, moving across the peninsula from out of the southwest, and after some unseasonable thunderstorms, the afternoon was clear and warm and bright on Sunday when Janine Bannon arrived in the car Tush and I had fixed a quarter of a year ago.

I was watching for her, knowing when she had left the groves, and went and took her small suitcase from her and brought her aboard. She had been aboard before, when I had taken the Flush up the Shawana River, back when the Boatel was doing well, and they had told me their plans with an air of pleasure and excitement, so she knew the layout.

She looked trim and attractive in her green suit and yellow blouse, but thinner than she should have been. The difference in her was the way the vitality had gone out of her, deadening her narrow and delicate face, making her move like a convalescent, takIng the range and lilt and expression out of her voice. Even her dark hair had lost luster, and there were deep stainings under her eyes, fine lines around her mouth.

I took her back to the guest stateroom and she said, "I don't want to be a bother. I should have found a place."

"Which would be a very good trick right now. No bother. You know that. Get yourself settled in. Meyer will be over in a while for drinks and talk, and then we'll go out and find some beef, or Chinese, or whatever you feel like."

"Oh, anything is all right. Trav, it'll just be for overnight. I have to get back."

"That will depend on what Meyer has set up for you to take care of."

A little while later I heard some small clatterings in the galley and the chunk of the refrigerator door. I went forward and found her bending over and frowning into the little freezer. She turned and said, "I'd feel a lot better about all this if you'd let me earn my keep, Trav. Connie has all that help, and they have their own ways of doing things, and I feel like a parasite. You have lots of stuff here. Honestly I like to cook."

"Never volunteer, lady. Somebody will take you up on it. So you're hooked."

She smiled. "Thank you. You know things, don't you? Like you know what people really want to do. Now go away and let me just potter around and find out where everything is and how everything works, all by myself."

I went in and looked at the tape labels and picked out one of a lot of classical guitar with Julian Bream and started it rolling, adjusting it to that level that is not quite background and not quite for listening only. It wasn't until Meyer was aboard and I called Janine in from the galley that it occurred to me that they had never met.

She put her slim hand into his paw, and she had that speculative reserve that women seem to have for the first twelve seconds when confronted with the rather outrageous presence of Meyer.

He peered at her, shaking his head slowly in a disconcerting way and then said, "Tricked again! Janine, my dear, if I had been told you were beautiful, I wouldn't have been working so hard to make you rich."

"Beautiful! Now really."

He turned to me. "See? A fishing expedition even. She protests so she can hear it again. Okay Janine. You are a beautiful lady. I am very sensitive to beauty. A man who makes children run and hide behind mommy is very receptive to beauty."

"You should see the wolf pack of little kids," I said, "following this character up and down the beach, listening to his lies."

Suddenly her dark eyes looked lively. "Meyer, you too are beautiful. I do not know how you are doing It or why you are doing it even, but if you are making me rich, I will be very pleased and grateful."

"I am doing it because McGee nags me. That is a good guitar to drink by. And how long do we stand around with no drinks?"

She cooked up a great kettle of a delicious thing that she called "Sort of Stroganoff." I found some red wine that, for a change, Meyer approved of. After she had cleaned up, she and Meyer went into a huddle at the desk over the papers he had brought over. I eat on the yellow couch, reading and digesting, hearIng them with half an ear.

At last she came over and plumped down beside me, sighing. I put the book aside. "That fantastic man keeps telling me fantastic things, Trav."

"Meyer is like that."

"He says you are supposed to tell me where so much money came from to start with. I know you somehow tricked Mr. LaFrance into paying such a price for our place. But there's a lot more."

"He made a donation, Jan. Press LaFrance made a nice gesture."

"But… if you stole it from him, I don't-"

"Meyer, did he give you that money willingly?"

"Willingly!" said Meyer. "He could hardly wait to get rid of it. That is the truth, dear lady."

"Okay. I give up. But apparently I might end up… Tell him, Meyer."

"It's an estimate only. At the end of this year, after all taxes are paid, you should have, I think, about two thousand shares, free and clear, of G.S.A., General Service Associates, worth seventy dollars a share now, and more then. The dividend income will be six to seven thousand a year. All your eggs in one basket, but a very nice basket. Great ratios, great management, fantastic promise. Meyer will have his eye on the basket. With little kids, and you a young woman, you need growth and income. Tomorrow we see some people, start setting up some basic living trust structures."

"I have to stay over another night," she told me.

"Or more," said Meyer. "Depending. A three-year program and you will be on a five-figure income with a nice reserve, with insurance trusts maturing for the college expenses. The boys grows up, get married. You can go abroad, go to Spain, rich and foolish, marry a bullfighter, buy fake paintings. I'll be right here. A little trembly old man, feeling terrible because I ruined your life."

And I wondered if it was the first time she had laughed loudly and long since Tush had died.

"A piece of genius," he said, "that call from Connie."

I had arranged it earlier with Connie, while Meyer was taking Jan to mysterious appointments with lawyors and trust officers, and Connie had called back et six and asked Jan if it was all right if she took the boys with her for a few days. She would take Marguerita with her to look after the kids. There was an Association meeting in Tampa, and then she wanted to go up to Tallahassee for a few days, and stop and visit some other growers on her way back. She'd be gone a week, and why didn't Jan stay right wliere she was?

"Once she gave in," said Meyer, "you noticed the relaxation. You noticed she ate better too? You noticed she laughed a little?"

"Conspiracy."

"The best kind," he said. "Today I unloaded a thousand shares of Fletcher at thirty-one and moved the funds into G.S.A. It's the critical time right now. I don't know how high the rocket goes. Ninety-two thousand shares traded today. Suppose in the morning I call her and tell her the men we have to see will be available Friday morning. No. Saturday morning. So you should move that hunk of ugly luxury before it congeals to the slip. A nice little cruise someplace."

"I'll try it. Don't count on it."

I went ambling back and went aboard and into the lounge. Janine was standing in the doorway at the forward end of the lounge, the companionway dark behind her.

"Trav?" she said, and her voice was all wrong. It was a sick sad scared voice, and the belt she was wearing was a sinewy, sun-reddened forearm. "Trav? I'm… sorry."

A knuckly hand appeared at her left side, at waist level, aiming a short barrel of respectable caliber at my middle. "I'm sorry about this, Mr. McGee," he said. I could make out a tallness behind her, a relative pallor of the face against the gloom behind her.

"Freddy?" I asked.

"Yes sir."

"I'm sorry about this too, Freddy."

"Just you stand quiet," he said. The arm left her waist. A set of regulation handcuffs arched toward me, gleaming in the light, and fell on the lounge carpeting with a jingling thud.

The arm quickly clasped her waist again. "Now you move all the time like slow-motion movies, Mr. McGee. You get down on your knees and take those cuffs there slow, and you edge over slow and reach both arms around that pipe thing and put them on and press them nice and tight."

"Or?"

"I think you know the corner I'm in, Mr. McGee. It has piled up on me, and no way to stop it or change It. I couldn't stand being locked up anyplace even for une month without being turned into some kind of tuoimal. So I've got no choice. I'm sorry about everything, but sorry doesn't help. So do it right now, start II mving, or I'll lay one slug right through your forehead, Mr. McGee."

Freddy had been worn thin. He was on the edge, ami the truth was in his voice. It made me very obeciiwt. Very humble. I moved the way the specialists move when they are lifting the fuse out of a bomb. I snapped the cuffs snugly, taking a faint remote comfort in the knowledge that given ten seconds alone in the lounge I could brace myself, wrench the stanchion loose and get my hands on the revolver in the desk.

He walked Janine out of the doorway and into the lounge. As he put the handgun away, I heard him sigh with the release of tension. He released her and gave her a little push. She stumbled forward, her body slack, head bowed in her despair. "I'm sorry," she said in a low voice.

His hand went to his hip pocket, then reached out toward her quite casually. There was a barely audible sound of impact, a hairsoftened, leathery little thopp. She took half a broken step, face emptying. She started to lift her arms to break the fall, then pitched onto her face, jelly-slack, with a tumble of cushioned bone against the lounge carpeting.

I had seen something odd in his face just as he had flicked the lead against her skull. It had been a moment of change and revelation, showing a pleanure of erotic dimensions, of sensual pleasure. It is not an unusual way for the mind of a man to turn rancid. Cops fall in love with the hickory nightstick. Prizefighters forget to pace themselves, going for the sweet knockout. It is a pull that takes some twisted ones into anesthesiology, or into preparing the dead for burial, or into scut-work in asylums. They are the dark brothers of the slackened flesh, turned on in some soiled way by a total vulnerability.

He looked down at her, stepped over her and sat in a chair just out of my reach. He yawned hugely. There was a faint family resemblance to LaFrance. He was a big, stringy, slope-shouldered boy, and he looked stone tired. He held the spring-handled tranquilizer in his right hand and gently bounced the leaden end off the open palm of his other hand. It was of black leather, intricately woven, greasy with much handling.

The only other time I had seen him was when he and another deputy had backed up Sheriff Burgoon when he had picked me up in the lobby of the old hotel.

I sat and hitched around to where I could lean my back against the bulkhead, the stanchion between my flexed knees, forearms resting on my knees.

"Why did you come here, Freddy?"

He was so exhausted his mind was moving slowly. "I remembered two days ago my Uncle Press telling me about this houseboat of yours. I was trying to sneak aboard one of the freighters heading out of Tampa. They watch them too close. I figure I can get out of the country somehow, I can get myself all sorted out and get some time to think what to do next."

"What you ought to do next is pick up that phone over there and call Sheriff Burgoon and tell him where to come get you."

"Too late for that."

"You've got a lot of friends in Shawana County. They'll work things out for you. They think you were defending yourself from Bannon and hit him too hard and got scared. They'll make sure that old couple where you got the clothes and car won't press charges."

"I tell you, Mr. McGee, it's too late. I had some more bad luck. That's the only kind I've had lately. There's a woman I killed, not meaning to, over west of Dade City. I tunked her perfect, light and easy and just enough, and she took two steps more than she should have been able to, and when she fell, it was right on a garden rake acrost her throat, and no way in the world to stop all that blood. God, there was a lot of blood! He run into the brush and I don't know If I winged him at all. Anyway, I couldn't find him and I had to get out of there. No sir, it's too late for anything but running and hiding. Things start to go wrong, they just seem to keep right on."

"How did they go wrong with Tush Bannon?"

"I was patrolling and seen him at just about first light walking the shoulder of the road, carrying a suitcase. I stopped and he said he'd come in on the bus and phoned out to his place and no answer at all. He was worried about Miz Bannon. It's easy to know later on what you should have done. My daddy had said Mr. Bannon was sure a hard man to discourage. I should have taken him in where we were holding the stuff his wife left and the letter from his wife, and told him his place was all foreclosed and Koaled up with the notices and all. Uncle Press had to have that ten acres, and he was sure going to get it. It had been a real quiet night, so I decided what I'd do was run him on out there so he could see with his own eyes, without me telling him, how he'd lost the whole works for good. I think I wanted to do that because he didn't act whipped at all. He acted like he had some way out of the mess he was in. So I said maybe the phone wasn't working and took him out. We got out there and he got ugly when he figured out I had to know that he'd been all foreclosed. Then I told him his wife had left him and left his stuff and a letter with the sheriff and he called me a liar. He walked at me, half yelling at me and I tunked him on the skull. It should have taken him down, but it just bent his knees some and he shook his head and kept coming. So I knew he had a hard skull, and he was big, and he felt ugly, so I made sure the next one would take him down. I put a lot of wrist in it and I figured to lay it right onto his forehead, but he was quick for a big man like that, and he tried to snap his head back." He sighed. "It hit him right square on the bridge of the nose, Mr. McGee. That's a real bad place because it drives two little thin bones right back into the brain. I squatted there beside him in the morning light, sweaty and cold, and held my fingers on his wrist, and felt his heart go slower and slower and softer and softer and then it stopped all the way and he shivered sort of, and after a while I figured out it would seem likely he had enough troubles to want to kill himself, and figured out how to make it look like he did and at the same time cover up the places I'd tunked him. You see, I knew if I had to tell what happened, I'd get run out of police work for good, maybe, and it's the only way I feel good, with the uniform and people listening when you tell them something."

"But Arlene Denn saw you."

He shook his head slowly. "All those weird kids. I thought I was in the clear on Bannon. Then she said she watched. I stood out there in the night trying to think of some way I could kill all of them. Like tunk them all on the head and an overdose or something. Or a fire. But I was on the dispatch book because they gave me the complaint. I had those pictures, and I had that stuff I took off them. She didn't want trouble. I could give her a lot. So when she was off her high and made sense, I asked about maybe if Mrs. Bannon was playing around, or if there was some friend she could say she saw instead of me. So… "

There was a stir beyond the yellow couch, a grunting sigh. Freddy got up quickly and went to Janine. When he bent down over her, he was out of sight. I heard the tone of his gentle voice but not the words. It sounded as if a lover were murmuring to his beloved, comforting her fears. I heard the tiny thud once more.

When he came back and sat as before, I said, "That isn't going to do her any good, Deputy."

"Or no harm, Mr. McGee. I know just where and how hard. It just kind of puts a jolt onto the brain, with hardly even a headache afterward. I'll be thinking on what I should do so I can get some sleep without worrying about either one of you. You know, if you'd only been right here on this boat when Shawana County made the request to have you picked up and held, everything would have been all smoothed over."

"Don't count on it. No matter how good you make it look, Freddy, the people I was with at the time you killed Tush would have come forward and cleared me and left you with a lot of explaining."

"By then there would have been no Arlie to change her story. It maybe would be a big mystery, but there'd be no way to get me mixed up in it."

"So Tush was an accident, and the woman with the rake in her neck was an accident, but Arlie Denn was going to be on purpose."

"You get pushed so far there's only maybe one little narrow way out of the corner. I better get you two…"

I awakened lame and sore, with no knowledge of time or place. Daylight came from overhead, around the edges of a hatch cover that did not fit as well as it should. I had what I thought was a hangover headache, and when I realized that I was in the forward bilge area of the Flush, curled close to the anchor line well, the old frame members of the hull biting into my side, I thought that only a sorry drunk would pick that as a place to sleep. But when I tried to bring my right hand up and rub my face, it stopped with a jolting clink of chain. I turned my head and saw that my right wrist was handcuffed to one of the forward braces made of two-inch galvanized pipe, braces I had installed long ago to give her more forward rigidity in rough water. And I wasn't going to yank one of those loose, not without a chain hoist and a power winch.

I fingered my skull with my left hand and found a tender area above the right ear and a little behind it. I could not remember being "tunked," or where the conversation had stopped. My thinking gear was sluggish. It took me a long time to realize that my houseboat could not be moored at Bahia Mar. The motion was wrong. She was at rest, bow into a gentle swell, lifting and falling. Sometimes she would get out of phase with the swell and I could feel the soft tug of the anchor line snubbing the soft of the bow.

I sat up and shifted and found a better place to stretch out, where no white oak ribs dug into me. I kept telling myself that Janine was perfectly all right. There wasn't a thing in my pockets of any earthly use to me. And there was nothing I could reach. I managed to doze off a few times. The motion was restful. At eleven fifteen by my watch I awoke and heard the latch on the small hatchway entrance to the forward bilge click.

Freddy Hazzard came crawling through, wearing a pair of my fresh khaki pants and a clean T-shirt. He nodded and reached back through the hatch and lifted a half bucket of water through and put it within reach. He reached again and brought in a brown paper bag and put it beside the bucket. "Mr. McGee, there's milk and bread and cheese in the sack and a roll of toilet paper. You'll have to make out best you can with a bucket, because I'm not about to let you loose until there's a good reason.

"Where's Mrs. Bannon?"

"She's just fine. I found some chain and a padlock, and I got her chained in the head by one ankle, and I took her some food first."

"Where are we?"

"Anchored in the flats just off Sands Key, way east of the channel, maybe twelve mile south of Miami. I had me a time working this thing out of that big marina. The wind takes it. I fished commercial about every summer I was a kid in school. Mr. McGee, I found your fuel tables in the drawer next to the chart rack. With the fuel aboard it figures out to maybe four hundred miles range. Does that sound about right to you?"