Pale Gray for Guilt (10 page)

I beckoned her aboard, and she came inside, stumbling and yawning. We shared a shower, and then we shared a lazy, easeful, gentled quarter hour of love, wherein she murmured she didn't think she could but don't go to any special trouble, darling, it doesn't matter that much, and then she murmured that if it wasn't too late for a lady to change her mind, sir, and it was just barely not too late to be able to wait just long enough, and so she rose, and caught, sighed long, and fell away purring. She called me back from my edge of sleep by gently thumbing my left eye open and saying, "Are you there? Listen, for making all these days and nights so full, the lady thanks you. Thanks for letting me come along for more than just the ride, McGee. Thanks for helping me cram three bushels of living into a one peck basket. Are you there?"

"You are O so welcome, lady."

He won with one of those pawn-pressure games, the massive and ponderous advance that irritates me into doing the usual stupid thing, like a sacrifice that favors him, just to get elbow room on the board.

As we finished, Puss came over, shoving her letter into her pocket and said, "Should we call Jan and say merry merry? Which is worse, I guess, to call her or not call her?"

"There's one of Meyer's laws that covers it. Tell her, Meyer."

He beamed up at her. "Of course. In all emotional conflicts, dear girl, the thing you find the hardest to do is the thing you should do. So I guess you call."

"Thanks a lot. Trav? Will you do it? Please? Then you can turn it over to me. Okay?"

So I placed the call. Connie sounded too hearty. I guess it wasn't such a great day at the groves. Janine imitated the requirements of friendship and holiday. But there was deadness under her tone of voice. I knew she would not break up, not with that weight of the deadness holding her down. After all the things to say I could think of, most of them so trite I felt like both Bob and Ray I gave the phone over to Puss. She sat at the desk and talked for a long time with Janine, in low tones. Then she said Connie wanted to talk to me again. She said Janine had gone to her room, so she could talk freely. She asked me when the body would be picked up. I said I'd made arrangements and they would come and get it tomorrow. The holidays had caused a delay.

"Any communication from sunny Sunnydale, Connie?"

"Nothing at all. Nothing yet."

As I hung up I turned and saw Puss leaving the lounge, almost at a gallop, and heard her give a big harsh sob.

I looked at Meyer and he shrugged and said, "The tears started to drip, and then she started to snuffle and then she took off."

I filled our mugs and brought him up to date on my financial affairs in Shawana County.

He pondered the situation and said, "It's pretty flexible. There's a lot of ways it could go."

"That's the general idea. To keep my skirts clean I have to have a legitimate sale of my legitimate ownership in that marina and motel. I think that's where I pick LaFrance clean. If he could offer thirty-two five, I'll settle for forty thousand, and he assumes the mortgage. He'll have to go for it because that's the only way he'll have a package he can provide Santo-his own fifty acres, my ten, and the option on old Carbee's two hundred. Now this LaFrance is a greedy and larcenous bastard. He was trying to make the deal as sweet as possible for himself by driving Tush into the ground and getting those ten acres cheap. I think he will continue to be a greedy and larcenous bastard, and I think that if I can offer him a little extra edge, for cash under the table, he'll get the cash somehow, and I hope it will be from that brother-in-law of his on the County Commission." I went and checked the name in my notebook. "P K. Hazzard. Known as Monk. He-meaning Preston LaFrance-is going to be very jumpy, so you and I are going to work a little variation on the old pigeon drop."

His big bushy brows climbed his Neanderthal forehead. "We are?"

"Meyer, I think you'd make a nice plant location expert, somebody with the authority to make firm recommendations to a nice big fat rich company."

"It is an exact science, my good fellow," he said. "We take all the factors-labor supply, area schools and recreation facilities, transportation costs, construction costs, distance from primary markets, and by adjusting these by formula before programming the computer, we can arrive at a valid conclusion as… Travis, what is a pigeon drop?"

"Unlike what might first come to mind, Meyer, this is something one drops onto a pigeon."

"You couldn't have made it more clear. One thing. Aren't you on a little dangerous ground on this bodysnatching thing?"

"Body-snatching! Me? Meyerl A perfectly legitimate funeral home in Miami is going to pick up that body in a licensed hearse and bring it back to Miami and air-ship it from there to Milwaukee."

"And the place is run by a man who owes you a big favor, and that hearse is going to make a stop at a very well equipped and staffed pathology lab during the off hours, where two more of your strange friends are going to determine if there was some cause of death besides dropping an engine block on him."

"Meyer, please! It's just normal curiosity. Jan gave her permission. Is there an ordinance against it?"

"What about concealing evidence of a crime?"

"If you're nervous about evidence we don't even have yet, you don't have to help me play games with LaFrance."

"So who's nervous?"

"I am. A little."

We sat in silence. The tape had run out and turned off. I wondered if I should go in and give Puss a little comforting pat to cure the Noel blues. Too many pasts crowd in on you at mistletoe time. It's the good ones that hurt.

"Meyer?"

"At your service."

"On the sale of the marina thing to LaFrance, Jan will end up with thirty thousand, net. If we can work that pigeon drop, she'll get maybe fifty maybe a hundred on top of that. Money won't buy what she's lost, but it would be nice to get her a really good big chunk. If I could find out that Gary Santo knew about what was being done to the Bannons, knew about it and didn't give a damn because he was pressuring LaFrance into assembling the adjoining parcels so he could buy them for resale, then it would be nice to take a slice of his bread too."

"Now wait a minute! This is not somebody that goes for your pigeon drop. This man operates very big, my friend. He has lawyers and accountants double-checking every move."

"I was thinking of something legitimate. Something in your line. Like some kind of an investment where you would know it was going to go sour and he wouldn't. Then couldn't there be some way of… funneling money out of the same proposition into Janine's pocket? Hell, Santo is a plunger. With all the protection, he's still a plunger. Some kind of a listed stock, maybe, like those they were rigging on the American Exchange you were telling me about one time."

"So why should Gary Santo listen to Meyer?"

"Because first we build you a track record. You dig into those charts of yours and make some of those field trips and surveys and come up with some very very hot growth items. And I think I've got just the pipeline, once I develop it a little, to feed them to him. The pipeline is named Mary Smith. She has brown straight glossy hair. She is small, and stacked, and she looks sullen and hungry."

"So if the great Gary Santo knew nothing about your friend Bannon?"

"I know Ttiish tried to get to him and couldn't get past the girl-curtain. He didn't think Santo was the kind of man who'd want the little guy crushed under his wheels. Somehow Santo squeezed LaFrance and LaFrance squeezed various folk, which happened to include Tush. If Santo knew-and let the roof fall on Tush-for a lousy little crumb of the acreage he needs up there, then I would like to have him get it where it stings. And, if so, can you work up something?"

Meyer got up and plodded back and forth, all hair and simian concentration, and scowling little bright blue eyes. He stopped and sighed. "McGee, I don't know. I just don't know. The problem divides itself into two interdependent parts. First I would have to get a line on a dirty situation like Westec before it leaks out. Those people falsified their earnings statements to keep the stock at a high level so they could pick up smaller companies on favorable merger terms. Then one executive put in for eight million worth of the stock, traded on the American Exchange, and he couldn't come up with the money to pay for the stock and that's when trading was suspended. Now I could smell out something like that, heading for disaster, and then if I can pick a few legitimate winners to make him feel as if I-"

"Or as if you had picked some winners, Meyer." He looked startled for just a moment, and then came that broad Meyer smile that turns one of the ugliest faces of the Western World into what one of the articulate lassies among the Meyer irregulars one season called "a beautiful proof that someday, somehow, the human race is going to make it."

"Dated, official, machine-printed confirmations of stock purchases on official forms from a reputable brokerage house! Hindsight! Perfectl One day, maybe two, in New York and I can come back with proof I'm such a genius I bought-"

"You had me buy…"

"Yes. I see. I had you buy highfliers right at the point where they were taking off, and I don't have to go back far, less than a year in every case. Gulton, Xtra, Leasco Data, Texas Gulf Sulphur, Goldfield Mohawk Data. Fantastic performers! Listen, I won't make it too good. If every buy was at the bottom, there'd be suspicion. Like instead of Gulton at fifty dollars a share, you get on at sixty-five."

"Where is it now?"

"It went up to nearly a hundred and ten, split two for one, and the last time I looked it's maybe sixty dollars." He sat down and emptied the nog mug again. "Travis, how rich do you want to be? I can use an old and dear friend who will be delighted to help, so I can get you monthly margin account statements showing the security position, the debit and so on."

"Say I started a year ago with a hundred thousand."

"Congratulations! You are now worth a quarter of a million."

"Success hasn't spoiled me, Meyer. Have you noticed?"

"All I notice are your criminal instincts, my dear Travis, and how rash you are with your queen, which lets me whip you at chess, and how right now you are too tightened up over this Tush business. You are too close to this one. Be careful. I don't want to lose you. Some terrible people might take over Slip F-18. Nondrinkers, going around saying shush."

Puss Killian came drifting back into the lounge, looking wan. Her face was puffed, her eyes red. She snuffled and then honked into a Kleenex, and said, "Give me that Meyer's Law again, please? The exact words."

"In all emotional conflicts the thing you find hardest to do is the thing you should do."

"I was afraid that was what you said, Meyer. What we all do is make excuses why we shouldn't do the hard things. Like apologize. Like visit the dying. Like spend a little time with bores."

"Stop short of masochism, dear girl," Meyer said. "I always have. Too far short, maybe. Gad! I feel as if I'd been pressed flat and dried out, like an old flower in a bad book. Do something, gentlemen!"

And so we did. Meyer and I went off in opposite directions, head-hunting. He had a quota of fivethree female and two male. I went after two couples.

It is an old contest. They can be friends, or acquaintances, or absolute strangers. After the festivities, we rate them on a scale of ten, the measurement being whether or not you'd be willing to spend a month on a small boat with them. We made a good Christmas bag, because there was a compulsion to have a good time. We unfastened all the umbilical devices affixing the Flush to her mooring space, and, with eighteen yuletide souls aboard, chugged down into the breadths of Biscayne Bay under clearing skies, edged the old girl as close as I could get her to good beach with good protection near Southwest Point, stayed the night in drink, argumentation, minimal sleep, beach walks, a touch of skinnydipping for those brave hearts who can stand the December waters, and came trundling back up to home base the next day.

Sometimes it doesn't work at all, but this time it had jelled. There had been some good minds, outrageous opinions, furious squabbles, laugh-till-you-cry incidents, games and contests, confessions and accusations, tears and broad smiles. But no sloppy drunks, no broken crockery, or teeth. We aimed homeward tired and content and, for the- most part, friends. Waterborne group therapy, Meyer calls it. It restored Puss Killian. Late on Tuesday afternoon as we were scoring our recent boatmates, with Puss as arbiter when we disagreed, she said, "Does anyone else have the feeling that little jaunt lasted at least a week?"

"When they don't seem to," said Meyer, "they haven't worked." Which could be another one of Meyer's Laws, but he says it is too close to aphorism to be significant.

Mike took me into a small office and closed the door, and took a folder out of the locked file. He is thin, intent, strung on taut wires, totally intent on finding out why people die: He is qualified in about all the kinds of pathology they have.

"Trav, the first impression was of too much damage. Way too much to go with the way it was supposed to happen, from what we found on your roll of film once we made prints. So much damage that actually trying to locate any specific tissue damage or bone damage not likely to have been caused by the impact of that weight dropping on him would have been pretty iffy. About all we can say for certain is that there is a good chance he wasn't shot in the head first, nor much of a chance that there was any blow that struck him from behind. Now you did want a cause of death to a reasonable medical certainty, but I gathered from your conversation over the phone with me that you want suicide ruled out if possible."

"But if you can't-"

"This is another approach. Take a look at these." He put three 8 x 10 glossies on the desk top. He pointed with the eraser end of a yellow pencil. "This is a blowup of the central portion of one of your pictures, Trav, where you had that block cranked high and you aimed up at it. See these rusty hexagonal nuts along here, toward what we will call the rear end of the block? Look at this one in particular. Somebody apparently tried to knock it off with a cold chisel, and knocked off a third of it before they gave up. Now this next print is full frame, of the chest area of the subject. Note these three marks circled with a grease pencil, and marked A, B and C. This third print is actually a triptych, an enlargement of A, B and C. The area marked A shows a clear imprint or incised impression of that damaged nut. The encircled B area shows the same imprint exactly, and it is about four inches from the point marked A, in a lateral direction across the crushed chest, from right to left. Imprint C is, as you can see from the print of the whole chest area, another inch and a quarter or inch and a half further, going from right to left, from imprint B. But here, as it struck, or would seem to have struck a previously damaged area, we do not have as obvious an identical match. However, if you want me to project the thirty-five millimeter color slides we took of points A, B and C, I think you will see that it is reasonable to suppose that impact area C represents the same deformed nut."

"In simply lousy English," I said, "you are certain that the engine block was dropped onto him twice, and you can make a case that it could have been dropped, cranked up, dropped again, cranked up, and dropped the third time."

"Yes," said Mike. "It wouldn't be consistent with suicide."

Long ago and far away I could see Tush Bannon under the needle spray in the long shower room that smelled of old socks, soap and disinfectant, rubbing up a suds on that barrel chest and bawling, off-key, "… and this is my storrrreeee, as you can plainly see. Never let a sailor put his hand above your kneeeeeeee."

"Spare me the slides, Mike: Can I have dupes of these?"

"Got them right here for you. Smaller. Five by sevens. OW."

"Fine. And what about a grand jury? Will it make you nervous if we don't do a thing?"

"What could you do with it? Somebody got clumsy. They found him crushed under that thing and so they cranked it up and it slipped and fell on him again and they cranked it up again and locked it. He was obviously dead, so why make a big statement about the crank slipping? We can't prove the third drop, even though I feel certain it happened. You understand what I'm saying, Trav. In a court of law any neophyte defense attorney could set up an area of reasonable doubt you could take a truck convoy through."

"But if there ever comes a time for affidavits?" "Me and Harry Bayder, and the tape going as we worked, and a resident in pathology taking notes. Time and place, and an accurate identification of the body, and signed statements in the file from all three of us. Just in case. If and when you ever get something else to go with it."

"You are a good man, Guardina."

"Beyond compare, surely. Keep in touch, hombre."

All I could tell Janine, or wanted to tell Janine, was that any last faint possibility of suicide was long long gone. I told her on the way out to the airport. She didn't say a thing. I had my hands on the wheel at ten of and ten after. She reached up and put her long fingers on the ten after wrist. At the chapel in Milwaukee, when we bowed our heads in prayer, I looked down at the underside of my right wrist and saw the four dark-blue half moon marks where her nails had bitten deep. Her parents thought she should have brought her three young sons to the services. They thought Tush should have been shipped sooner and buried earlier. They thought she should come home with the boys and stay. They thought her tailored navy-blue suit was not proper attire for a widow. They thought it odd she had brought along this McGee person and this Killian woman when there were so many old friends who were-or should have been-so much closer in a time of need. They resented not knowing Connie Alvarez. They had remembered that she had been at Janine's wedding, but they let it be known she had struck them as a rather coarse and peculiar person, not at all the ladylike type their daughter should cultivate. They made it clear that it was an affront to them that poor Janine should go back immediately to Florida with these… these strangers.

On the flight back we had three side by side. Janine was in the middle. She said, turning her face from Puss to me and back, "I'm sorry. They just… they aren't…"

Puss hugged her and said, "Honey, if you put the knock on them you'll feel like a traitor. Everybody has people, and their people don't want to let them go or admit they're gone when they're gone. They love you. That's good enough. Right?"

"Should I have brought the boys? That's what I keep wondering."

"Ask each one of them when he gets to be twentyone, dear. Ask them if they felt as if they had been left out of anything," Puss said.

So they sat, holding hands, and Jan fell asleep. Puss gave me a sleepy wink and then she was gone too. I looked out of the jet at December gray, at cloud towers reaching up toward us. Tush was gone, and too many others were gone, and I sought chill comfort in an analogy of -death that has been with me for years. It doesn't explain or justify. It just seems to remind me how things are.

Picture a very swift torrent, a river rushing down between rocky walls. There is a long, shallow bar of sand and gravel that runs right down the middle of the river. It is under water. You are born and you have to stand on that narrow, submerged bar, where everyone stands. The ones born before you, the ones older than you, are upriver from you. The younger ones stand braced on the bar downriver. And the whole long bar is slowly moving down that river of time, washing away at the upstream end and building up downstream.

Your time, the time of all your contemporaries, schoolmates, your loves and your adversaries, is that part of the shifting bar on which you stand. And it is crowded at first. You can see the way it thins out, upstream from you. The old ones are washed away and their bodies go swifdy by, like logs in the current. Downstream where the younger ones stand thick, you can see them flounder, lose footing, wash away. Always there is more room where you stand, but always the swift water grows deeper, and you feel the shift of the sand and the gravel under your feet as the river wears it away. Someone looking for a safer place can nudge you off balance, and you are gone. Someone who has stood beside you for a long time gives a forlorn cry and you reach to catch their hand, but the fingertips slide away and they are gone. There are the sounds in the rocky gorge, the roar of the water, the shifting, gritty sound of sand and gravel underfoot, the forlorn cries of despair as the nearby ones, and the ones upstream, are taken by the current. Some old ones who stand on a good place, well braced, understanding currents and balance, last a long time. A Churchill, fat cigar atilt, sourly amused at his own endurance and, in the end, indifferent to rivers and the rage of waters. Far downstream from you are the thin, startled cries of the ones who never got planted, never got set, never quite understood the message of the torrent.

Tush was gone, and our part of the bar was emptier, and the jet raced from the sunset behind us to the night ahead, and beside me slept the two women, hand in hand, their lashes laying against the high flesh of their cheeks with a heartbreaking precision, a childish surrender, an inexpressible vulnerability.

By Saturday, the next to the last day of the year, I was beginning to feel surly and uneasy. I held a slack line. I felt that I had deftly pulled the barbed hook through the underlip of one Preston LaFrance, and that boating him was inevitable. He had to come aboard the Flush, flapping, gills working. The name McGee had suddenly cropped up at too many points in his life. McGee at the bank with the widow. McGee at Ingledine's, making the arrangements about the hoody. McGee out at the old shack, souring his deal with old D. J. Carbee. McGee, the new owner of the property he wanted.

But the line lay slack on the water, without the slightest twitch or tension. Puss and I drove up to Broward Beach early Saturday morning, turned the car in, and came back down the Waterway in the Muneguita. I made a fast run, thinking I might find LaFrance when I got back to the Busted Flush. Nothing. Puss was withdrawn, remote, and did not help my mood by telling me she was going away Monday morning for a little while. A few days. No clue as to where or why. And be damned if I'd ask. As she packed a bag it seemed a gratuitous affront that she should hum to herself. What was she so cheery about?

And why didn't Meyer phone from New York? Too busy having a fine time with old stockbroker buddies, probably.

At ten minutes after four the slack line twitched. I tested the tension cautiously. It was still through the underlip. I shooed Puss into the master stateroom and invited Preston LaFrance into the lounge. He came in, grinning, hesitant. A gaunt and ugly and sandy one. Maybe the young Sinclair Lewis, if the old photographs are accurate. Fifty percent hick. Fifty percent con artist. Cowlick. Long lumpy face. Lantern jaw. Nervous cough. Ploughboy hands. Brash sports jacket with the wrong button buttoned. A gangly diffidence overlaying a flavor of confidence. When he looked around the lounge, his expression vague, I had the feeling he saw everything that had any bearing on his own aims and motives, and could price the whole layout within plus or minus three percent.

His big hand was warm, dry and utterly slack. "Mr. McGee, we seem to be aiming in kind of the same di rection on a little matter, and what I thought, I thought it might be time to see if we can eat out of the same dish or spill the dinner."

"I guess that depends on how hungry we are, LaFrance. Sit down. Get you a drink?"

"Mostly I'm called Press. Short for Preston. Thank you kindly, and if you would have such a thing as a glass of milk, that would be fine. I had an ulcer and got over it, and they tell me sipping milk instead of kitchen whisky will keep me from having the next one. And I guess you've upped my milk bill by maybe half, Mr. McGee."

"Mostly I'm called Trav. Short for Travis. And we stock milk because there is very little damn else you can put on cornflakes."

"You are so right!"

I brought him his glass of milk, and a beer for me. He sat on the long yellow couch. I pulled a chair a little too close, turned the back toward him and straddled it, forearm along the back of the chair, chin on the forearm, expression politely expectant and benign. It put my face two feet from his, and six inches higher, with the brightest window right behind me. Closeness is a tactical weapon. We do not like our little envelope of anticipated separation and privacy penetrated. It is a variable distance, depending on the needs and necessities of the moment. We endure the inadvertent pressure of the flank of the office worker in the crowded down-elevator at five o'clock. If we are alone with the office worker, if it is male-without overtones of fag-then it is insolent challenge, demanding action. Being jostled in a crowded airport is acceptable; on a wide and empty sidewalk it is not. A fixed stare is a form of penetration -of the envelope, carrying different messages according to the sort-out of sex, station, race, ages and environment.

Always we want some separation, some tiny measure of distance regardless of how clumsily our culture mechanizes an inadvertent togetherness. The only exception time is when sex is good in all dimensions, so that even in the deepest joining there is the awareness of that final barrier, an aparmess measured by only the dimension of a membrane, and part of the surge of it is a struggle to overcome even that much apartness.

The lounge aboard the Flush is a sizeable enclosure, and I positioned myself well inside the area of logical separation. Once you learn the expectations of distances, small and great, you can use them in tactical ways, watching for reaction, for a pulling back, a pained stiffness of expression, an awkwardness. Or position yourself beyond the plausible distance and watch for the forward lean, the advance, the slight what-is-wrong-with-me agitation. It is a kind of language without words, a communication, and incites a reversion to the primitive compulsion of the pecking order, the barnyard messages-You get too close so I peck you back to where you belong.

Press LaFrance sipped his milk, looking down into the glass. He looked to the side and reached and put the half glass on the end table. He then hiked one limber Ichabod leg up, heel on the edge of the couch cushion, long fingers of both hands laced around his ankle, slouching just enough to interpose the knee between us so that he looked at me over the top of it. With that interposition he increased the subjective distance between us.