Pale Gray for Guilt (25 page)

She began to eat well and spend some of the sun hours basting and broiling herself to the deep tan her skin took readily, and she began sleeping long and deeply, gaining the weight that softened her bone-sharp face, that filled out the long concave line of the insides of her thighs, that made her fanny look a great deal less as if it had been slapped flat with a one by six.

I called Meyer from shoreside phones. I wore the arm out of the sling for longer periods each day, reslingfng it when the knitting muscle structures began to ache.

She phoned Connie when the trip with the kids was over, and Connie accepted the notion that a little more time cruising would do her good. She talked to each of the boys. They were fine. They missed her. She missed them.

Meyer eased out of the last of her holdings in Fletcher on the Wednesday, the last day of January, at a good price, and when we talked again the following Monday evening-I had phoned him from Islamorada-he said with undisguised glee that Fletcher had gotten up to forty-six dollars a share at noon, and the Exchange had suspended trading in it fifteen minutes later, pending a full investigation of a tip that the earnings reports had been misstated, that a syndicate of speculators had been boosting the price, and that the company officers had been quietly unloading all their own holdings at these false and inflated values. The word on the Street was that it might be another Westec case, and it was rumored that a Florida-based speculator named Gary Santo was deeply involved in the artificial runup of the price.

"If they ever approve it for listing again," Meyer said, "it will open at about six dollars, and even that is more than a realistic book value per share."

The next morning the Flush was tied up at the marina dock at Islamorada, and after breakfast I had Jan peel the final dressing off the wound. The entrance wound was a pink dime-sized dimple, vivid in the middle of the surrounding tan. She made careful inspection of the exit area, held the back of her hand against it to check for any inner heat of infection and said, "This last little piece of scab is going to come off any day now. If we could have had it sewn up, there wouldn't be so much scarring, Trav. It looks as if… somebody stabbed you with one of those wood rasp things."

"I got through the whole day without the sling yesterday. And I can hold that smallest sledge out at arm's length for fifteen seconds. And so I keep a shirt on till the scars bleach white and match the old ones."

"You would make a very low-grade hide," she said. "They might find three or four sections that would make nice little lampshades, but they'd have to throw the rest away."

"Just accident-prone, I guess. And you pass inspection now, lady. Keep it combed that way and you're fine."

"You see, I was aboard this funny houseboat and it got rough and I lurched and took this great gouge out of my scalp on some kind of sharp thing sticking out."

'We can head back so Meyer can help you count your money."

Late that afternoon she went below and came up with two cold uncapped bottles of Tuborg and sat close beside me and said, "A sort of an announcement, Travis McGee. There won't be another chance to talk, probably. I wish to announce that you are a dear, strange, ceremonious kind of guy, and I didn't like you very much at all before Tush died and didn't know why he liked you, and now I do, maybe."

"Tell me. Maybe I can use it."

"It made me jumpy to be alone with you, because the way I had you all figured out, you were going to comfort the little widow woman. Life goes on and all that. Let me bring you back to life, darling. A woman always knows when a man finds her physically attractive, and I am flattered that you so do."

"I so do."

"I expected some of the gooey rationalizations of

the chronic stud, including how Tush would approve, and besides it's so healthy. But you have been very stuffy and proper and dear. Thank you."

"You're welcome."

"Maybe I would have gone along with it, out of some kind of self-destructive impulse. I don't know. I don't know if I was a one-man gal. I sort of think so. Maybe that part of me-the privacy part will come alive again. Anyway, I'm glad you didn't give me a chance to make any choice. Physically I'm a lot better than I was. Better nerves. But I'm still half a person. And so damned lonely, and the world is so… flattened out." She reached up and kissed me under the ear. "So thanks for not trying to be God's gift to the bereaved, dear."

"You're welcome aboard anytime. You wear well." She smiled a bitter little twisty smile and, eyes wet, took my hand and clenched it tightly. So we were a couple of kids in an abandoned barn and the big storm was hammering down, and we held hands for comfort. Tush was her storm, and perhaps Puss was mine.

On another Wednesday, the day of the Valentine, Meyer came over at high noon and interrupted my project of cutting and laying some Nautilex that was a clever imitation of bleached teak on a portion of the afterdeck.

"So I am here and I have brought you a Valentine," said he.

"Sometimes, Meyer, when you act like Porky, you make me feel like Pogo."

"Read the Card."

I put down the knife I was cutting the vinyl with and thumbed his card open. Homemade. He had drawn a heart pierced by an arrow, with a dollar sign dangling from the end of the arrow. His verse said, "Roses are red; violets are blue. Unadulterated, unselfish, unrewarded efforts in behalf of even the grieving widow of an old and true friend are not like you."

"It rhymes," he said.

Inside the folded card was his personal check made out to me for twenty-five thousand dollars.

"What the hell is this?"

"Such gratitude! It hurt me to see you lose your professional standing, McGee. Like you were going soft and sentimental. So, through my own account, I put us into Fletcher and rode it up nicely and took us out, and split the bonus right down the middle. It's short-term. It's a check. Pay your taxes. Live a little. It's a longer retirement this time. We can gather up a throng and go blundering around on this licentious craft and get the remorses for saying foolish things while in our cups. We had a salvage contract, idiot, and the fee is comparatively small but fair."

"And you are comparatively large but fair."

"I think of myself that way. Where did the check go? Into the pocket so fast? Good." He looked at his watch. "I am taking a lady to lunch. Make a nice neat deck there, Captain." And away he went, humming.

And not over four minutes later a half-familiar voice said, "McGee?" I looked up from the tricky bit of fitting the vinyl at the hatch corner and saw the three of them lined up on the dock staring at me without much affability or enthusiasm. Gary Santo on the left. Mary Smith in a bright orange mini-tent and a little-girl hat standing in the middle. A stranger on the right, medium tall, of that hunched, thin pallor that looks like sickness, even to the little watermelon pot, with a face like a bleached mole, glasses with massive black frames, a briefcase in hand.

"Howdy do there, Gary boy," I said. "Miss Mary."

"And this is Mr. D.C. Spartan, one of my attorneys. May we come aboard?"

"Why, surely. Please do."

I took them into the lounge. There was no handshaking going on. I excused myself and went and washed the grime off my hands, pulled the sweaty T-shirt off, swabbed chest, neck and shoulders with a damp towel, put on a fresh white sports shirt and rejoined them, saying, "Coffee, folks? Booze?"

"No thanks," said Santo.

Spartan said, in a voice like a talking computer with a slight honk in the speaker system, "It might be advisable for you to have your attorney present, if you could reach him quickly."

"Now what would I need lawyers for? Somebody suing me?"

"Don't get so damned cute!" Santo said. His face looked slightly mottled and puffy, as if the facials' weren't working well lately.

"Please, Mr. Santo," Spartan said. "Mr. McGee, we are facing what might shape up into a very exhaustive investigation of Mr. Santo's role in the speculation in Fletcher Industries. And it may well become necessary to have you testify as to your part in bringing this… uh… investment opportunity to Mr. Santo's attention."

"There seems to be an unfounded opinion that Mr. Santo knew of the precarious condition of Fletcher Industries and conspired to run the stock up, and then short it, and that this scheme was interrupted by the suspension of trading in Fletcher common. To show Mr. Santo's good faith, we will have to subpoena your trading records and show that you had taken a position in Fletcher and then went to Mr. Santo to elicit his interest, and that Mr. Santo then made a cursory investigation of the company's condition before beginning a very active trading in the common stock."

I shook my head. "Mr. Spartan, you lost me there somewhere. I never bought a share of Fletcher. I don't own any stock at all. Never have."

"Come off it, friend," Santo said in an ugly way. "You better be able to show me you took a real good bath in Fletcher. You better be able to show me you got stung."

"I've never owned a share of stock in my life!"

Spartan looked sad. He dug into the briefcase. He took out the stapled Xerox copies of the fake margin account with Shutts, Gaylor, Stith and Company. "Come now, Mr.. McGee! Surely you know that your account records can be subpoenaed from the brokerage house."

I looked at them and handed them back. "I'd say that's going to be a very confused bunch of brokers, folks. If I had to guess, I'd say these were Xerox copies of some kind of forgery, or there's somebody else with my name. I just don't know what the hell you're talking about."

"But Miss Smith can testify to what you told her and to you giving her the originals to Xerox. Do you actually want to deny that you went to Mr. Santo's offices and talked about this whole matter to Miss Smith?"

"Oh, I went there all right. I didn't have any appointment, and I had a hard time getting to talk to anybody, even this pretty little quail. Now, I suppose whatever we said was taped, just as a matter of convenience, you know, for reference. But I don't think you can introduce that kind of a tape, and even if you can, it would have to be the whole tape, not just some edited parts of it."

"There is a tape, of course," Spartan said. "And we can prove it predates Mr. Santo's interest in Fletcher common."

"Spartan," said Gary Santo, "I think this son of a bitch is too cute. I think he was working for somebody. I think he was setting me up."

"Sometimes I work for people," I said. "But not for long. Mary, you remember the long talk we had about that Gary's parcel he holds up there in Shawana County under the name of Southway Lands, Inc.?"

"What?" she said. "There wasn't anything like that."

"But, honey, you confirmed the rumor that Southway was going to sell out to Calitron for a nice price, if a fellow up there by the name of LaFrance could assemble the rest of the acreage."

"But what are you trying to do to me?" she asked.

"Say! If I've spilled the beans and gotten you into some kind of trouble or anything… I guess we didn't talk about it up in the offices. That was later, honey."

"We never talked about that!"

I shook my head. "But you told me how Bannon got through to you, and you had a drink with him at the airport, and he told you how he was being squeezed and wanted Santo's help, and you decided you couldn't take a little thing like that to Mr. Santo and waste his time with a little guy who got caught in the middle."

She caught her little lip in her teeth the same way she had when talking to Tush.

I continued. "Remember, honey? You said that you thought Mr. Santo had mentioned how, up in the hotel penthouse in Atlanta, LaFrance had tried to get Santo to buy Bannon out and Santo told LaFrance that it was his problem and he should handle it? That was the same night you told me you'd give me a clean bill with Santo."

I moved just fast enough. Santo got up and got over to her and got his hand back for a slap that would have loosened her teeth. I caught his wrist. The position gave me very nice leverage. I swung the wrist back and over and down and ended up in about the same position as a pitcher after letting go of his best fast ball. Santo boomed into the yellow couch hard enough to snap his head back and then bounced forward onto his hands and knees on the rug.

"Now just a minute. Gentlemen! Just a minute?" Spartan said.

Santo shook his dazed head. I picked him up by the nape of the neck and sat him on the couch.

I stood in front of him and said, "Fun time is over, Gary baby. I didn't get a damned word of this from pretty-bit over there. She's devoted. She's energetic. She just never got a chance to get close to me. I made sure of that. Tush Bannon was a damned good friend. Your pressure, second-hand, drove him into the ground. And it went a little wrong up there and they went further than they had to and killed him." He stared up at me, very attentive.

"I squashed LaFrance. I would have squashed you too if I could have figured a way. But you're too big and too spread out. All I could do was sting you a little."