Jack and the Beanstalk (Matthew Hope) (7 page)

Which I hadn’t offered.

“Tell Joanna I’ll talk to her next week,” I said.

“I will. And, Matthew—” Her voice dropped almost seductively. “Thank you, Matthew. Really. Thank you.”

I visualized her replacing the receiver delicately on its cradle, even though the click sounded as abrupt as if she’d slammed it down. I sighed—I seemed always to sigh after a conversation with Susan—and then I dialed the number Bloom had given me for the McKinney ranch.

If you do not know US 41, then you do not live in the United States of America, and you are unfamiliar with any redline highway that crisscrosses the nation and spreads blight upon the countryside. The Tamiami
Trail
may once have been just that, a dirt road hacked out through the palmettos and palms, but them days is gone forever, Gertie. Today, US 41 is a four- (and sometimes six-) lane concrete thoroughfare lined for miles and miles with fast-food emporiums, gift shops, car washes, gasoline stations, pizzerias, furniture stores, nurseries, carpet salesrooms, automobile dealers, shopping malls, movie theater complexes, and a variety of one-story cinderblock shops selling plaster figurines, citrus fruit, discount clothing, rattan pool and garden furniture, cigarettes and beer (free ice if you buy a case), stereo equipment, lamps, vacuum cleaners, typewriters, burglar alarms, swimming pools, and (the only such shop in all Calusa) adult marital aids, games, and reading material. In short, US 41 is your typical American highway bazaar, ugly and blaring and tasteless. In the wintertime it is thronged with automobiles bearing out-of-state license plates; they only add to the sense of clutter and confusion and cause most native Floridians (a native is anyone who lives here year-round) to pray desperately for Easter. In August, US 41
is, by comparison, abandoned. I made the trip from downtown Calusa to Timucuan Point Road in ten minutes.

The landscape changes abruptly as you head eastward off 41. The road leading to Ananburg is a black-topped two-lane thoroughfare that runs past a scattering of housing developments with modest homes on small plots, and then past what used to be farmland but are now “country estates,” meaning that a developer has come in, dredged a big lake, sold land around it for $5,000 an acre, and put up luxury homes starting at $250,000. Beyond these—and this was only six miles east of 41—you run into real country, a reminder of what Calusa must have been like only thirty or forty years ago.

I drove past citrus groves only eight miles from the hustle and bustle of US 41. I drove past open farmland not fifteen miles from downtown Calusa. And suddenly there were cows grazing in pastures on either side of the road, and the grass beyond the palmettos seemed to stretch endlessly to blend with an eternal sky already turning gray in preparation for the rain that would come sometime later in the day. I almost passed the wooden posts and lintel from which hung a red sign lettered in black with the words
THE M.K. RANCH
. I braked sharply, glanced belatedly in the rearview mirror, and drove the Ghia in through the open gate and onto a single-lane dirt road. I had come about half a mile up the road when I saw a red pickup truck coming from the opposite direction. I stopped the Ghia. The pickup truck slowed and then stopped. The door behind the driver’s seat opened. The letters
M.K
. were painted in black on the side of the door. A man with a shotgun in his hands stepped down onto the dirt road. He looked like a cross between Charlie and Jeff. A bit over six feet tall, I guessed, wearing faded jeans and a red plaid shirt and dusty brown boots. Wide shoulders and a narrow waist. Big ornate brass buckle on his belt. String from a bag of cigarette tobacco hanging from his left-hand shirt pocket, little round tag on its
end. Straw hat tilted back on his head to show a forelock of dark hair that clung damply to his forehead. Black mustache under his nose. Dark eyes to match it. Black eyebrows. Skin burned by the sun to a leathery brown.

“Help you, mister?” he said, and turned the shotgun on me.

“My name’s Matthew Hope,” I said. “I have an appointment with Mrs. McKinney.”

He said nothing.

“I phoned her this morning, I’m supposed to see her at one o’clock.” I looked at my watch. “It’s almost that now.”

He still said nothing.

“So put up the shotgun, okay?” I said.

He did not put up the shotgun.

“I’m a lawyer,” I said. “I’m here to see her about her son.”

He still did not put up the shotgun.

“Jack McKinney,” I said.

He kept watching me. He was chewing gum, I noticed. His jaws worked and his eyes worked, but the shotgun remained level and steady in his hands.

“I was handling a real-estate transaction for him,” I said.

Without answering me, he went into the pickup again, took a walkie-talkie from where it was lying on the dash, said something into it, listened, said something else, and listened again. I was suddenly aware of the flies everywhere around me. Cattle meant flies; it went without saying. He came down out of the truck again, the shotgun dangling loosely at his side now.

“Missus McKinney’s out on Crooked Tree just now,” he said, “but Sunny says it’s okay to send you up.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“Got to be careful these days,” he said, by way of apology for the shotgun greeting.

I simply nodded and put the car into gear again.

“She’s at the main house,” he said. “Sunny is. Big white building on your left, top of the road.”

I drove up the rutted dirt road to where a large white clapboard house dominated a compound that included a smaller house also painted white, a barn painted red, and a mobile trailer home that hadn’t been painted since the year of the great flood. The big house nestled in a copse of tall old oaks. The other structures sat on land running wild with palmettos and cabbage palms. There was no tropical bloom anywhere in sight, no stray African tulip tree to delight the eye with its creamy, fuzzy flowers, no pink or purple bougainvillea, no oleander or trailing lantana. Except for the scruffy cabbage palms and palmettos, this could have been a ranch in Texas or Colorado. I parked the car near a pair of rusting gas tanks, one marked
LEADED
, the other
UNLEADED
, and walked toward the largest of the houses. A short flight of steps led up to a porticoed entrance. I knocked on the frame of the screen door; the wooden door behind it was open. I knocked again.

“Come in,” a voice called.

I opened the screen door.

“I’m in here,” she said.

“In here” was a greenhouse tacked onto the back of the building. What the grounds outside lacked by way of indigenous growth, the greenhouse made up for. Everywhere I looked, there was a riotous bloom of color, pink orchids competing with African violets, red gloxinias crowding out yellow mums, yellow-and-white spinning-wheel daisies banked against the sunset hues of flame violets. A blonde girl wearing cutoff jeans and a purple tank top shirt was spraying one of the orchids, her back to me, as I entered. Without turning, she said, “Hi,” and went right on squeezing the red rubber bulb.

“Miss McKinney?” I said.

“Yeah,” she said, absorbed in her task.

“Your mother’s expecting me,” I said.

“Yeah, I know,” she said, and tossed her long blonde hair, and turned to look at me.

She was, I guessed, five feet ten or eleven inches tall, a rangy suntanned girl, braless in the purple tank top shirt, her long legs beginning where the short cutoffs ended raggedly on her thighs, and tapering eternally to narrow ankles and sockless feet encased in dusty jogging shoes. She had the kind of face any New York model would have pillaged and killed for, high cheekbones and a generous mouth, a haughty nose turned up slightly at the tip, eyes that looked gray in the bright sunshine that flooded through the sloping greenhouse roof.

“Who gave you the shiners?” she said.

“Some friends,” I said.

Her eyebrows rose only slightly; a faint smile touched her lips. “You’re a cop, right?” she said.

“No, I’m a lawyer.”

“Right, right,” she said. “Mom told me. We’ve had enough cops out here this past week,” she said, and rolled her eyes heavenward. She put down the bulb sprayer she’d been using, picked up the walkie-talkie that was resting on a counter near the wet sink, and said, “Would you like some iced tea or something?”

“Well...how long will your mother be, do you know?”

“I don’t suppose too long,” she said. “She’s been gone almost an hour now. I don’t suppose she’ll be much longer. Too damn
hot
out there, isn’t it?”

“Very,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said. “You want some tea, yes or no? Or would you like something stronger?”

“Tea will be fine,” I said.

“Tea it is,” she said, and nodded, and walked past me into the living room of the house. “The shade trees keep it cool,” she said. “I hate air conditioning, don’t you?” The question was rhetorical. Without waiting for an answer, she went into the kitchen, took two cans of iced tea from the refrigerator, pulled the tabs on each, and poured them into separate glasses. “We’re out of lemons,” she said, handing one of the glasses to me. “Anyway, there’s supposed to
be
lemon in this, it says so on the can.”

Bloom had told me on the phone that she was twenty-three; she seemed younger. Perhaps it was the uncertain timbre of her voice, and the casual pattern of her speech. Or perhaps it was the way she moved, coltishly, almost awkwardly—but maybe the jogging shoes had something to do with that. Bloom had called her “a real beauty.” She was indeed, but I couldn’t help feeling that I was in the presence of one of my daughter’s teenybopper girlfriends.

“Who was the man with the shotgun?” I asked.

“Rafe, you mean? We can sit over here,” she said. “It’s always cooler in this part of the room, don’t ask me why. He’s our new manager. We run a thousand head here, don’t need more than two hands to work them. Used to be my brother and Sam—till my brother moved out, and Sam went west. Rafe’s the manager now.”

She settled in a white wicker chair with a bright yellow cushion, folding her long legs under her. I sat opposite her in a chair with a lime-green cushion. The corner where we sat was decorated with ferns in huge clay pots, and it
did
seem cooler than the rest of the house.

“Why the shotgun?” I asked.

She smiled. “Make sure you weren’t one of the bad guys,” she said.

“Bad guys?”

“Where you’ve got cows, you’ve got people wanting to steal them,” she said. She was still smiling. “Rustling,” she said. “You heard of it?”

Rustling, I thought. In Florida. I suddenly felt a long, long way from Chicago, Illinois.

“Actually,” she said, “we keep the main gate unlocked during the daytime, put the padlock on it only at night. Mom knew you were coming, sent Rafe down to look for you.” She sipped at her tea. “So who do you think killed my brother?” she asked.

“I have no idea.”

“Neither do the police.
Some
Mickey Mouse department we’ve got in Calusa. Straight out of Disney World.”

I made no comment.

“Been how long already?” she said. “Ten, eleven days? Not a
clue
, can you believe it? Somebody walks in, stabs Jack
how
many times? Gee, looka this, the cops say. Gee, whatta we do now? So meanwhile the killer’s out there maybe planning to knock off somebody else. If he hasn’t already.” She shook her head. “Strictly amateur night in Dixie.”

“Are you from someplace else originally?” I asked.

“No. Why? Oh. That’s just an expression, haven’t you ever heard that expression? Amateur night in Dixie? What it means, it means...well, Mickey Mouse.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Sure,” she said. “I was born right here,” she said. “Well, not right here on the
ranch
, but in a hospital in Ananburg. That’s the nearest hospital, Ananburg. For
people
, I mean. For the stock, Mom uses a vet about three miles down the road. What’d you want to see her about?”

“Well, I’d rather discuss that with her personally,” I said.

“Sure, no problem.”

“What’s the Sunny for?” I said.

“You won’t believe it,” she said, “Sylvia!” and wrinkled her nose. “Can you imagine me as a
Sylvia
?”

“Not very easily,” I said.

“No
way
! They started calling me Sunny when I was still a little kid. ’Cause I have blonde hair, of course, and also because I have a very sweet disposition, ha!” she said, and snorted.

“Don’t you?” I said. “Have a sweet disposition?”

“Mister, I’m as mean as a fucking tiger,” she said, and someone across the room said, “Nice language, Sunny.”

We both turned.

“Oops,” Sunny said, and immediately covered her mouth with her hand.

The woman standing just inside the screen door was an older, more elegant version of the girl who sat opposite me with her face now buried in both hands. She was not quite as tall as her daughter—assuming she
was
indeed the Mrs. McKinney I was expecting—but the tan high-heeled boots she wore added at least another two inches to her already substantial height. She was wearing white, form-fitting designer pants and a white T-shirt. In her right hand she held a cowboy hat like the ones Charlie and Jeff had worn on the night they’d tried to rearrange my features. In her left hand she held a pair of tan leather gloves. Her blonde hair was styled in a short shingle cut, and her cheeks, eyes, and mouth were Sunny’s, exactly. The haughty nose with the slightly upturned tip would have been an exact replica of Sunny’s, too, were it not for a faint dusting of freckles across the bridge. I supposed she was somewhere in her mid-forties. I got to my feet the instant she moved toward us.