Pale Gray for Guilt (4 page)

So I gave up and got up and showered and came back, and tried to quietly get into a white sports shirt and khaki slacks. But in the muted light as I shoved my arm through the short sleeve I knocked a nightcap glass off the shelf and it smashed on the deck. She rolled, rose up slowly, glowered indignantly at me and settled back down into her sleep, nestling onto her other side, a long, tangled tassle of red hair falling across her cheek and mouth, stirring with each breath.

I heard furtive galley sounds and found Barni Baker in a hip-length yellow robe, her hair in a kerchief, doing something to eggs. Her eyebrows went up when she saw me, and she whispered, "You fool. What's your excuse? Don't answer. It's rhetorical. It's criminal to have to talk in the morning. I found this here good-looking roe and these here good-looking eggs, and what smells like good Herkimer County cheese, and if you want me to double the portion, just nod."

I nodded. I poured us some juice. She had the water on. I dumped the Columbian fine grind into the Benz filter paper and slid into the booth. She stared at me as I tried the egg invention. The question was in the lift of a little blonde eyebrow. The response was the circle of thumb and forefinger. When she started to tidy up, I told her to leave it until later, and I carried our coffee seconds in the white porcelain pot topsides, and she brought along the mugs.

The morning was almost cold. I dug a blanket out of the forward locker for her to use as a lap robe over her bare legs, and I put on an old gray cardigan I've had for seven hundred years. It could now be classified as a missionary barrel reject.

"I think we could have practiced on the snare drum and tuba down there without bothering those two," I said.

"Mick needs all the sleep he can get. We'll have to leave by ten o'clock to make that flight. They're going to work him to death when he gets to Spain. The picture is behind schedule."

"When do you have to go back to work?"

"Tuesday noon."

"So come back."

"Thanks, but I don't think so. I think I'll turn the car in and hole up and try to do some thinking. You make damned good coffee, Trav How good is your advice? Like to the lovelorn?"

"The best. But nobody ever takes it."

"So here is a hypothetical case about two loners, about this little ball of fluff who is an airline stewardess who is twenty-seven all too soon, and likes to be where the action is, but lately she wonders if the action isn't getting to be all alike. And there is this very special and talented guy who is a cinematographer, and who is a tough and skeptical thirty-two, who is gun-shy from a sour marriage, and who gets so hooked on his work he can't remember the stewardess's name, practically. And they are together maybe five times a year, maybe five days a time, and it is always the rightest of the right. The workingest of ever, even though they keep telling themselves and each other that it is going to wear off any minute now. So last time the camera guy wanted to marry the airline girl and she said hell no, so she thought about it a lot, and this time she brought it up and said okay and he said hell no, because he was hurt because she said no the last time. Can these two darling kids find happiness, McGee?"

"You get married when there is no other conceivable course of action, Barni-baby. You get married because you are both compelled to marry each other."

"Indeed?"

"Don't get frosty. I'm not putting down your romance. It will either get inevitable or it won't. It won't hang where it is. It will get bigger, or it will start to dry up, and either way it goes will be the right answer at that time. Don't get pushy."

After a long silence she said, "Anyway, the coffee is good." She shrugged. "Change of subject. This Puss Killian of yours. I like her, Trav. I like her a lot. But there's a funny thing about her. You think she's telling you all about herself, and afterward you know she hasn't really told you a thing. What about her, anyway?"

"I wouldn't know. Don't look at me like that. I've known her for four months. She goes away for a couple of days every few weeks. I could do some digging. But it's up to her. When and if she wants to talk she can talk. I know that she's from Seattle, that she isn't hurting for money, that she's twenty-four or five, that she shed a husband not long before she showed up here, that I met her on the beach only because she stepped on a sea urchin and was cursing billy blue blazes and ordered me to come over and do something about it right now. I know she has enough energy for three stevedores, that she can eat three pounds of steak at a sitting, that she can hold her booze, and she would walk up and spit in a tiger's eye if she thought it would liven up the idle hour. And I know that once in a while she goes absolutely dead silent, and all she wants is for you to pretend she isn't there."

"She has a very soft look for you, Travis. When you're not looking at her."

"Troublemaker!"

I tried again and couldn't get an answer out of Tush. I had the long distance operator run a check on the phone up there, but it was reported in order. At a little after nine I thought I'd better see if Puss wanted to say her good-bye in person or let me relay it. I went in and sat gently on the bed. She was breathing faster. Her hand and arm were twitching as she dreamed, and she made a little whimpering sound. I gently thumbed the red hair back away from her face and saw a wetness of tears leaking out of the closed lids.

I put my hand on her bare shoulder and gave her a little shake. "Hey," I said. "It's not all that bad, is it?"

She opened wide blind eyes and snuffled and said in a little-girl voice, "But they keep saying…" She shook herself like a wet red setter. She focused on me, snuftled again, smiled and said, "Thanks, pal. They were about to cut me off at the pass. Whassa time?"

"Nine fifteen."

"Hmmm. If I'm reading you, McGee, I admire your thinking. It's very good. Stay right where you are while I go brush my teeth first."

"Mick and Barni are taking off in a half hour. I wondered if you wanted to wave bye-bye."

She gave a leonine stretching yawn. "Yes I do indeed. And if you had any sense at all, you big brown knuckly idiot, you'd have come smirking in here at quarter of, not quarter after. Haste makes waste, and what I have is not to be wasted, lad. So set your little clock for siesta time."

"At siesta time we're going to be up in Shawana County visiting some old friends of mine with a problem."

"Really?" She sat up, holding the sheet to her breasts. "Hmm. Then hustle the lady some coffee while she showers. And set your clock ahead."

And from the giant shower stall, above the sound of sloshing like unto that which a small walrus herd might make, the three of us could hear Puss in good voice:

"With 'er 'ead tooked oonderneath 'er arm, she 'awnts the bloody tow'r. With 'er 'ead tooked oonderneath 'er arm at the midnight hour.'

"So I turned around," said Barni Baker, "and there was that sweet little old man yanking away at the lever on the cabin door thinking it was how you get into the men's room, and we're at twenty-eight thousand feet over the Amazon basin. So I got to him at a dead run and steered him gently where he wanted to go. Then he came out and stared at the cabin door and the big lever and rolled his eyes up and fainted dead away. A passenger helped me get him back to his seat and I gave him smelling salts and then I explained to him how the doors are designed so the pressurization clamps them shut so tightly ten men couldn't open them. But he just kept shaking his head and saying O Dear God."

Puss appeared just in time, wearing her big white wooly robe and carrying the half cup of coffee left from what I had taken her as she was stepping into the shower. The ends of her red hair were damp. She gathered little Barni into the big white wooly arms, hugged her, smacked her on the cheek and told her she was all doll. We went out the aft door of the lounge and waved them off, and watched them get into the car and drive away.

"Nice ones," said Puss. "For such a raunchy old beach bum, you know a lot of nice ones. Like me, for example. I was nice enough to leave our coffee and my cigarettes right beside the bed." She went over to the phone and switched it off. She went frowning to the record bin, made a thoughtful selection of two and held up the sleeves so I could see what she had picked. George Vari Eps guitar, and the Modern Jazz Quartet on Blues at Carnegie Hall. I took them from her, put them on the changer, fixed the volume where she said she liked it.

"Coming, dear?" she said with an excessive primness, and just inside the door of the master stateroom I had to step over the wooly whiteness of the robe on the deck just beyond the sill.

"No answer at all on the phone?"

"Not a thing."

"Seems odd."

"Seems very damned odd, Puss. The thing is, he isn't a devious guy. And he's caught in the middle in a very devious situation, with large money hanging on it, and old Tush may try to bull his way through, and he could get hurt twice as bad."

When we went up the Shawana River, there was a faint, drifting acrid stink. Our eyes watered. When I came around the last bend, I was shocked at the deserted look of the place. The cheerful white houseboats were all gone. All but one storage rack on the in-and-out boat shelter were empty, and the remaining boat was, at a hundred feet, worth perhaps fifty dollars, outboard motor and all. The moored boats were gone, except for a skiff so full of water there were only inches of freeboard left, and an old cruiser hulk that had sunk in the shallows. The forklift truck was gone.

I tied up and we went ashore. Near the cities, all the old highways of America pass businesses that have gone broke. End of the dream. The spoor of a broken marriage can be kept in a couple of cartons on a shelf in the garage. Broken lives can be tucked neatly away in graves and jails and sanitariums. But the dead business in a sub-marginal commercial strip stays right there, ugly and- moldering away, the frantic advertising signs of the final convulsive effort fading and tattering over the weeds. For every one of them was the big dream, the gala opening, the last dusting and arranging before the doors opened. "We're going to make it big, honey. Real big." Then there is the slow slide into doubt, into confusion, and into the terminal despair. "So we were going to make it real big, were we? Ha!"

It was a silent place. The acrid river slid by. Dry fronds rattled in the breeze. A sign creaked.

Even the two marine gas pumps were gone. I went to the marina shed. The tools were gone. We asked each other questions in low, graveyard voices. There was a shiny new hasp and padlock on the marina building, along with a printed notification from the County Sheriff's Department. There was another on the motel office. I could find no note fastened to anything that told how to get in touch with the Bannons.

"Now what?" Puss asked.

"There's no neighbors, nobody here to ask. I suppose we could run upriver until we come to something."

She stared around. "Gives me the spooks," she said. We'd just reached the dock when I heard a car coming. We went back around in front and saw the phone company service truck lurching over the torn-up road. As I moved to wave him down, he turned in and stopped and got out and stared at us as we approached. He looked to be about fifty, a squatty, leathery man wearing silver-rimmed glasses.

"I'd like to find Mr. Bannon," I said.

"Why?" It was a very flat and very abrupt question, and there was something about the flavor of it that made me wary. So I reached into the old bag of tired tricks and pulled out the one labeled Real Cordial.

"Well, it's like this. Quite a while back, I can't remember how many weeks, I had a bilge pump acting up, and I stopped in here and Bannon pulled it and stuck in a loaner, the idea being he'd fix it if he could or sell me the loaner if he couldn't, but I didn't get back as soon as I thought. Now it looks like he's gone out of business or moved someplace else."

"You could say that. Yes. It surely does. Let me make the disconnect and check in first, then maybe I can tell you what happened."

He donned harness and spurs with practiced ease and walked up the pole. He made his service disconnect at the lead-in terminals, clipped his handset onto the wires and called in. We could hear his voice but not what he was saying. He came down fast, showing off a little. He took off his gear and tossed it into the truck.

"Well, sir," he said, "you got here yesterday morning, you'd had some excitement for sure. You'da found Bannon right here. Promised myself I'd take a look and see where it was they found him. Maybe you'd like to come take a look mister. Maybe the young lady should kind of wait on us."

But Puss tagged along. He went around in back and looked around, grunted and went over to a sturdy and rusty tripod made of heavy pipe, standing about fifteen feet tall. There was a manual winch with a crank, as rusty as the pipe, and a wire cable that went from the winch drum up through a pulley at the top of the tripod. A big, heavy old marine diesel, cannibalized down to little more than the ponderous block hung from the taut cable about five feet off the ground.

The phone man sat on his heels and shook his head and said, "Sure a terrible way for a man to do himself. Look there! There's still hair and mess on the bottom side a that engine."

I had thought the stain on the packed oily dirt was merely more oil. Puss went trotting busily away about fifty feet. She stopped and bent forward and coughed shallowly a few times, then straightened up and went over and sat on a sawhorse with her back to us.

"What Freddy said this Bannon done-Freddy is one of Sheriff Bunny Burgoon's deputies and Freddy is the one that found him Sunday morning-this Bannon must have cranked that block up as high as he could get it, and then he fastened a piece of stove wire to that ratchet there on the side of the drum and lay out on his back right under that thing and give the wire a yank. The wire was still wound around his hand. Mashed him something terrible they say." He stood up, spat. "Well, you got to say one thing. It was quick and it was for certain. And I guess the poor fella didn't have much to live for."

"Because he went broke?"

"Maybe I don't have the straight of it. You know how people get to talking and every time they tell something, it comes out different. What I hear, he went off to try to raise some money fast to save the business. So when they come out here Friday with all the eviction papers and bankrupt papers and so on, just his missus is here with the youngest. She wanted them to hold off until Bannon got back but till the legal steps had been took care of in proper order, and there was just no choice about it. They waited about an hour for her to pack up personal Stuff and they helped her load the car. They say she was crying but she wasn't carrying on. She was crying without making any noise about it. She picked up the other two kids from school, and she left off Bannon's suitcase and a note from her to him with the Sherf, and she just took off. She must have had some travel money saved out, because they say that yesterday after they toted Bannon's body back to Ingledine's Funeral Home, Sherf Burgoon opened that note to see where he could get in touch with her to tell her about her husband, but all it said was she was going to go stay with some girl's first name for a while, and Bannon would have known the whole name, but nobody else does."

He spat again and started to move toward his truck. I walked slowly with him and said, "He seemed like a bright, pleasant guy. He didn't seem like the kind who'd go broke. But you never can tell. Sometime it's booze, or the dog track, or other women."

He got into the truck and stared out at me. "Not this time. They run this boy off. He was in the way, and they run him off. But you didn't hear me say that, mister."

"I didn't hear you, friend."

He headed back over the lumpy road. I walked around to where Puss still sat on the sawhorse. She looked up at me.

With a small frown she said, "My heart bled for you the way you went reeling around in shock, McGee. You really took it hard. Your dear old buddy has gone to the big marina in the sky. The hard way. Came to get your bilge pump! God's sake, Travis!"

I sat on my heels and squinted up at her. Dark red hair and disapproval, outlined against a blue December sky.

"Win a few, lose a few, honey," I said.

"What are you?" she asked.

I stood up and put my hands on her upper arms, near the shoulders and plucked her up off the saw horse and held her. Maybe I was smiling at her. I wouldn't know. What I was saying seemed to come from a strange direction, as if I were standing several feet behind myself. I said some nonsense about smelling these things out, about sensing the quickest way to open people up, and so you do it, because if you don't, then maybe you miss one little piece of something you should know, and then you go join the long long line of the dead ones, because you were careless.

"And," I heard myself say, "Tush killed himself but not with that damned engine block. He killed himself with something he said, or something he did, and he didn't know he was killing himself. Maybe he didn't listen very good, or catch on soon enough. I listen very good. I catch on. And when I add up this tab and name the price, I'm going to look at some nice gray skin, honey. Gray and pale, oily and guilty as hell, and some eyes shifting around looking for some way out of it. But every damned door will be nailed shut."

I came out of it and realized she was making little hiccupy sobs and looking down and to the side, and her cheeks were wet, and she was saying, "Please, please."

I released her and turned on my heel and walked away from her. I went a little way up the road. I leaned against the trunk of an Australian pine and emptied my lungs a few times. A jay yammered at me. There were tree toads in a swamp somewhere nearby. Puss came walking very slowly up the road. She came over to me and with a quick, shy smile leaned her face into my neck and chest.

"Sorry" she whispered.

"For nothing?"

She exhaled. "I don't know. I asked you what you were. Maybe I found out, sort of."

"Whatever it is, I don't let it show, Puss. Ten more minutes and I would have been kindly Trav forevermore."

She pushed herself a few inches away and looked up at me. "Just smile with your eyes like kindly ol' McGee, dear, to kind of erase that other… that other look."

"Was it that bad?"

"They could bottle it and use it to poison pit vipers."

"Okay now?"

She nodded. "Sure." Her eyes were a sherry brown, almost a tan, and in that good light under the tree I could see the area right around the pupil, a corona of green. "He was a special guy?"

"He was that."

"But can't even a special guy… give up?"

"Maybe, but if that one ever had, it wouldn't have been like that."

We walked back toward the dead marina, my arm around her strong waist. "Call it enemy country," I explained. "He's dead, and it solves some problems for some people. And they'll want to forget all about it as fast as they can, and they won't know anything about anything."

I got the camera off the boat, a battered old Retina C-III, and put in a roll of Plus X. I hand-cranked the block as high as it would go before it wedged against the tripod poles. I got wire and pliers out of the toolbox aboard, fastened wire to the ratchet stop. I took pictures as I went along. When I yanked the wire, the great weight came down to thud against the hard dirt with a shock I could feel in the soles of my feet, while the drum clattered and the cable rasped through the rusty pulley. I craned it up and left it the way it had been.

She watched, and had the grace not to ask why. I didn't rinse my hands in the river. I waited until we were well out into the bay.

Then I put it at dead slow, right at 700 rpm, and told her to head down the channel. I climbed out onto the forward bow shell and leaned back against the port windshield.

One approach: Go storming into Sunnydale, promising stink and investigations and general turmoil.

Or: Find some kind of cover story that might open up some mouths. See who can be conned. See who can be turned against whom.

Or: Go in fast and quietly and come out with one Preston LaFrance and take him to a nice quiet place and open him up.

Or: What if some mysterious buyer picked up the Bannon property? Then the boys couldn't put the whole two sections together. And that might bring them out of the woodwork.

The last had the right flavor, if it could be worked. But first there had to be a first thing, and it had to be poor damned Janine. And if I couldn't get to her before the Sherf told her the bad news, I could at (east arrive shortly thereafter.

So I hopped down and took the wheel and ran at lrlgh cruise to Broward Beach and tied up at the city rnarina. I left Puss at the drugstore counter and shut myself into a booth and made a person-to-person credit card call to Sheriff Bunny Burgoon in Sunnydale. I yapped at him in the excited tones of a writer-wash commercial and told him that CBS news had researched him and discovered he was a truly fine law officer, and had they located Mrs. Bannon yet, and her three kids, and it was a great human interest story and we might do a little feature.

"Sure," he said. "Just before Christmas and all that. Yeh. Locate her? Well, not exactly yet, but we're doing everything that any human person could expect or ask for, and that's the truth. We got aholt of her folks in Milwaukee, and they're all upset as any human person could imagine, but they haven't heard a word from her, and they don't know any friend of hers of the name of Connie. Now if it was to go on national television, she'd turn up right off, I imagine. The name is Sheriff Hadley-that's an e -y, Burgoon, B-u-r-g-o-o-n. And I've been elected here three times as Sherf of Shawana County and-"