The Dreadful Lemon Sky (20 page)

They are aggressive, these red ants, but they are certainly not the menace the farming fraternity and the petrochemical industry would have us believe. If you stand too near a nest, they will come out and climb up your shoes and sting your ankles. You know immediately, and you move away and knock them off. The bites make little white blisters which, if untended, are likely to fester. The easiest remedy is rubbing alcohol applied as soon as possible after being bitten. Vodka or gin will do.

Ninety-nine out of a hundred fire-ant horror stories are false. Freddy was the one in a hundred. I had never heard of anybody being so completely bitten. We had him free of the ants at last. He made said weak sounds as he rolled his head from side to side. He was gray and sweaty. I wedged him back into his pants and clinched the big brass buckle.

I now knew why he had been so anxious to do me in. But it seemed idiotic to have killed Jason Breen.

I leaned close to him and said, "Hey! Why did Jason come out here?"

"Money." he said in a dull voice. "Called me at four in the morning on the private line. I chained the dogs. Waited in the grove. Twenty thousand."

"Why?"

"He'd snooped. Figured it all out. Saw the Christina come in without Jack. Told me he had killed Cal with a wire and he had to run, and unless I gave him money he'd claim I paid him to kill Cal. I said okay. He was very jumpy. Then he said he was going to beat up on me anyway, on account of what happened with the Dobrovsky girl. He hit me and I hit him. I caught him in the throat. It broke something. He grabbed his throat. Tried to breathe. Fell onto his knees. Made choking noises. Fell over dead in less than two minutes. By dawn light his face was black and his eyes bulged out. I dragged him down to the stables. Wheeled his bike down. Oh; Christ, everything is getting so… so far away."

He was looking worse by the moment, face bloating, tongue thickening. His lips were fat. He was close to blacking out.

"He told me once a bee sting can make him real sick," Jane said. "What's keeping… them." A moment later we both heard the distant hooting as the cruiser blew its way through the highway traffic. When in another minute it drove into sight around the stand of trees, I stood up and waved my arms at it. It came bounding across the track and the infield, stopped near us, and two deputies piled out, very smart in pale blue shirts, dark blue pants, and trooper hats. They were big, young and ruddy, creaking with equipment.

"Hey, Miz Jane!" one of them said.

"Why, hello, Harvey!"

"Now just who is this here, Miz Jane?"

"You know him! This is Frederick Van Harn."

Harvey stared. "You've got to be kidding," he said in an awed voice. "What in hell happened to him?"

"He got into fire ants," I said, "and he's allergic. He's going into shock. Can you get a radio patch through to hospital emergency?"

"Yes, but-"

"You better get on it and tell them you're heading in there wide open. Tell them it's shock from insect bites. They'll know what to have ready. I think it's called anaphylactic shock."

"But-"

Jane stepped closer to him and said, "Maybe you want to explain to my uncle Jake why you let Frederick die?"

That is one of the interesting things about power. Everybody who really has it seems to know exactly how to use it. The ones who pretend to have it make the wrong moves.

While he was on the radio, the other deputy and I lifted Freddy and put him in the back of the cruiser, on his back on the seat. The deputy said, "There's supposed to be a body here?"

"There is."

"Harv, I'll stay here and look into what the call was about. You come back or have them send somebody, okay?"

Jane had gotten in the back and she was kneeling on the floor, holding Freddy's hand. Harvey made a tight circle and went bucketing out of there. We heard him hooting his way down the highway toward the city.

The one left behind said, "Those far ants are mean."

I inspected the bites on the backs of my hands and between the fingers. "They're very convincing."

He took out his notebook. "Who was it phoned in?"

"Me. Travis McGee."

"My name is Simmons. Frank Simmons." He almost started to shake hands and apparently decided it wasn't professional.

"Have you been a deputy long?"

"Just over three weeks. Address, Mr. McGee?"

He wrote the ID information down, slowly and carefully. "Now where'd this dead body be?"

"Over there in that hole."

"Is it a real old dead body? I mean dead long?"

"Only since last night."

We walked to the hole. In a higher voice he said, "That there is a dead horse! You funnin' me? What's that jeep doing down in there?"

"Frank, there's a small hole I want you to look in, there by the front of the jeep."

He went over and looked down into the smaller hole. There were some flies on the brown arm. He swayed slightly, then whirled and took two big steps and threw up. When he was finished he straightened up slowly and said, "That didn't give me a damn bit of warning. It just come on me all at once."

"It can happen that way."

"This is my first one on duty. Jesus! Look, don't tell Harv about my barfin', okay?"

"I'd have no reason to."

"He rides me. He thinks I won't make it. I'll make it. Now, who discovered the, body? You or Miz Schermer or Mr. Van Harn?"

"I discovered it."

"Who put it there?"

"Mr. Van Harn."

"The hell you say!" He bent and slapped at his ankles. "Far ants all over the place. Let's get out of this here hole. You think there's a water tap around here anyplace?"

"Over there at the stables."

"Let's us walk over there. Now, you got any idea who the deceased is?"

"I think it is a fellow named Jason Breen."

"From Westway Harbor? With the beard?"

"Right."

"I'll be a son of a bitch," he said softly and stopped long enough to write the name in his notebook.

It had taken Mr. Smith a long time to notice that something was wrong. He came trotting across the field as they were loading Jason. "What are all these damn cars coming in and out? Is that fellow dead? He looks dead. Where is Mister Fred? Who's in charge here anyways?"

Scorf settled Smith down with an admirable economy of word and gesture. Then he suggested that I drive him to the hospital in my rental car, which would give him a chance to go over my story with me once more.

We turned the vent windows so the hot air blew in. I drove slowly. I went through the play-by-play description of our battle again. He chuckled and I told him that it did not seem funny at the time, and it did not get any funnier with the passage of time. I told him that he could maybe think of a nice funny way to tell Uncle Jake that he was going to have to arrest Frederick Van Harn.

"While we're both being funny, McGee, you can tell me how you happened to know that Breen was buried under that dead horse."

"As I said, Captain, I was scrabbling in the dirt, trying to get a purchase, trying to crawl to the jeep so I could grab onto it and stand up. Which I finally did. But I uncovered part of Breen and the bike first."

"It's nothing you can prove, and I want to see just how Van Harn's story matches yours. I'll buy the story about how he killed Jason; because Jane Schermer heard that part of it too. And maybe the autopsy will verify. We know the autopsy verifies the way Birdsong died. But I would be a happier man if I could get a better way to tie Breen to that killing. He was on my list and looking better every day. But it isn't solid."

"I can make you happier. I think Cindy Birdsong will be willing to tell you without much urging that once upon a time after Cal beat her up, Breen went to her and said he could arrange to kill Birdsong very quietly for her. No one would suspect. She was horrified and told him to forget it. The same day I arrived; when Birdsong got ugly with me, he backhanded his wife in the office and knocked her cold. Jason Breen was the one who got to her and picked her off the floor."

He turned in the seat and I could feel him looking at me. "That means that I can't let you go back there alone. You could coach her. I want to come up on her cold with this."

"Captain, what difference does it make anyway? You don't have to build a case against Jason Breen. It doesn't have to stand up in court. It gets Birdsong off your books."

"I am a careful man, McGee. I like people, alive or dead, to get charged with what they did, not what somebody else did."

When we got to the hospital, we were told that Frederick Van Harn was in Intensive Care. I followed Scorf up to the fourth floor. A young doctor was sitting in the small waiting room outside the closed double doors, talking quietly to Jane Schermer. Tears were running down her prematurely middle-aged face. The doctor came and talked to us in the corridor. He said they had tried, but they just couldn't reverse the severe shock, not even with every radical treatment they could think of. He had responded slightly to massive injections of digitalis but had faded again until his heart had stopped and they had been unable to restart it. An intense allergic reaction, he said. Massive fluid imbalance. A pity, he said. Such a young man.

Harry Max Scorf looked indignant. One cannot ask questions of the dead. People were eluding him. He acted as if he thought it was unfair, a kind of trickery.

The murder and the poetic justice of the macabre death made the event a twenty-four-hour sensation. The wire services picked it up. It had the right words. Prominent attorney. Political hopeful. Possible blackmail. Involvement in drug smuggling suspected. Murdered man believed intimate of ex-model recently slain by bomb aboard houseboat.

But a news story is a fragile thing. It is like a hot air balloon. It needs a constant additive of more hot air in the form of new revelations, new actions, new suspicions. Without this the air cools, the big bag wrinkles, sighs, settles to the ground, and disappears.

Judge Jacob Schermer put the clamp on any flow of additives. He and his minions spread the word. They apparently had leverage to use on the local radio stations and the Bayside television station and the monopoly newspaper. They also had the City and County Police Department, the banks, the Chamber of Commerce, the service clubs, and every phase of local government.

No one knew a thing about anything. A blank stare was better than no comment. The reporters who had come in from Jacksonville, Miami, and Orlando went hurrying right back out of town toward the next story. People could barely remember what,Van Harn looked like or what he did. The usual eruption of sick, sad, violent events continued throughout the nation and the world, like an unending, eternal string of those little Chinese firecrackers called ladyfingers.

By Saturday morning, when Harry Max Scorf came to see us aboard the Flush, the news story was so dead it might as well have happened in some other year.

He sat in the cool lounge, took his spotless white hat off and wiped the sweatband with a bandanna, and placed it back on his head carefully, at exactly the right angle.

"My feeling," he said to us, "is that I ought to waltz you people to and fro and bounce you up and down gentle-like until you let loose of something that makes sense out of where you fit in this picture. But it's one of those feelings I don't get to enjoy."

"Orders?" I asked.

"The official position is that there's no loose ends at all. Everything is solved and filed away. The Milligan woman was an accident. Jack Omaha lit out for places unknown. Jason kilt the Freeler girl with the bomb and kilt Birdsong with a wire. Then Freddy kilt Jason and the ants kilt him. And that's all she wrote, boys. You two fellas know, just like I know, that it adds up to a crock of shit."

"We really can't help you at all," Meyer said.

He sighed. "Anyway, one things looks better. There's pretty fair grass coming in at a reasonable price. Somebody has knocked all them amateur wholesalers into a tight line. Some professional outfit has moved in like overnight and took over the whole county. Speaking purely as a cop, it's a relief. It's the amateurs screw everything up. With these pros, I know which way they'll jump, and what will make them jump and what won't. If they keep it tidy, we'll lay back and let it roll. When customs picks up forty-two tons at a time on the Mexican border, it's a signal that it is too big a business to hope to stop entire. If these pros start to get into any heavier action around here, then what we'll do is make their operation so expensive it'll take the cream off, and they'll back off to what they've got right now. It's the amateurs who drive you crazy. That Walter J. Demos would drive anybody crazy, the damned fool. Every time I try to talk to the son of a bitch, he starts crying. He sits down, wraps his arms around his bald head, and starts bellering. What I come by for is to say you can make everybody happy by going back where you come from, as soon as you can untie your ropes and start your engines."

"This is a roust, Captain?" I asked.

"Not right at this minute, it isn't. It starts to be a roust when I tell somebody you won't move. Then that somebody goes to all the city and county departments that have got anything to do with boats and navigation. Then they come around here and check you and your boat for every little paragraph in city, county, state, and federal law going back to when Lincoln got shot. Like any boat operating in county waters has got to carry two brass kerosene lanterns at least fourteen inches high as spare equipment, one with green glass and one with red glass, and if you can't show them to the inspector, it's a hundred dollars a day and costs for every day of violation, whether you're tied up or running. That's when it gets to be a roust. Want any more?"

"When you want us to move out, Captain," I said, "you just give the word and we'll move. You've convinced us."

He looked puzzled. "I thought I'd just given you the word."

Meyer cleared his throat arid said, "I suppose you could change that official position you described if you could come up with something new?"

Scorf frowned. "It would have to be hard evidence. Very hard. I told you, people want this all forgot. Right now. If anything gets stirred up and it comes to nothing, I am retired with no pension."

"Sometimes you can't help thinking," I said.

"About what?"

Meyer said, "We did a lot of thinking and talking last night, Captain. We decided to check just a little bit further and then bring it to you. But you've rushed us. It's still all theory."

"Theory," he said, and seemed to be looking around for a place to spit.

I said, "Carrie Milligan's share of the ill-gotten gains was a little better than a hundred thousand dollars."

He snapped his head around and stared at me. "That sounds more like a fact than a theory, McGee."

"She gave it to me to hold for her, and to give to her sister if anything happened to her."

"We can come back to that," Scorf said. "Where does it lead you?"

"We had four people in business together. Carrie Milligan, Freddy Van Harn, Jack Omaha, and Cal Birdsong. Carrie had her own kind of twisted integrity. She'd take no more than what was hers. But she was afraid somebody might take her share away from her. With Freddy supplying the plane and Jack supplying the boat, and probably the two of them supplying the financing, would Carrie have been in for a full quarter of the pie? I'd say no. I would say a top of twenty percent. Jack was the banker. He was keeping it in the safe at the business. Carrie was the bookkeeper and courier. New buys were financed out of that money in the safe. When they eventually decided to call it quits, they would have divided it up according to the formula and gone their separate ways. If a hundred thousand equals twenty percent, then there was four hundred thousand left in the safe after she took hers."

"Four hundred thousand!" Scorf said slowly.

"Maybe more," Meyer said. "It is hard to read the motives of a dead man you never met, but it struck us last night that Jack Omaha was setting himself up for total departure, deserting hearth and home, cashing in everything, even cleaning out the partnership. Maybe he left that money in the safe with the group funds, or maybe he hid it somewhere where he could get to it quickly."

"So maybe he did take off," Scorf said, "and took Van Harn's money and Cal Birdsong's money with, him."

"Or, like I told you before, a bag of grass fell on his head and killed him, and that's why Freddy told me that Jason saw the Christina come in without Jack Omaha."

Scorf frowned. "So… Van Harn would want his money and he'd know where it was and who could give it to him."

I said, "There's a chance he would want to leave it right there for the time being. Jack and Carrie had the combination. Jack was dead and he could trust Carrie. It would be there when he needed it."

"You mean it could still be there?" Scorf asked, frowning in puzzlement.

"Suppose," Meyer said, "that Harry Hascomb walked in on Carrie when she was taking her share out of the pot that night of the day Jack Omaha died. He would know there was big money there, but no way to get to it. Harry was the outside man. Because Omaha and Carrie handled all the accounts and financial records, they would be the only ones who needed to know the combination of the safe. Insurance people like to ask that the number of people with access be kept to a minimum. Two is ideal. Because Harry saw her take the money, it would account for her being uneasy and leaving the money with Travis McGee in Lauderdale. Just in case."

Scorf displayed the quickness of the cop mind by saying, "And after he found out that Omaha was planning to clean him out, and maybe guessed from the Milligan woman's reactions that Omaha was already dead, the simplest way into the safe would be to have the Milligan woman die by accident so he could call the safe company and have them drill it open. It would be the reasonable thing for him to do."

I said, "We can assume Van Harn went there as soon as he heard of Carrie's accident. All Harry would have to do is act totally blank about there being any money in the safe. Van Harn wouldn't dare press it. Besides, Uncle Jake had already taken him out of his financial bind."

Scorf sighed. "All theory. Pretty theory."

"How about some fact?" Meyer asked him. "In the building supply and construction supply business, Hascomb either handled dynamite and caps and wire and batteries or knew how to get what he needed. He was the outside man, not the desk man, and apparently had some mechanical training or ability."

"And," I said, "Joanna Freeler told me she could retire, if she played it right."

"Are you trying to say she could have known that Hascomb killed Carrie, and she would blackm-"

"No! It really shook her when I told her I thought Carrie had been pushed in front of that truck. I think Carrie told Joanna there was a bundle of money in the office safe. They were the only two girls working in that office. And that would give her some leverage to use on Harry Hascomb. That could have been her retirement. If she played it right."