The Dreadful Lemon Sky (8 page)

"At eleven? Yes. The sister asked me."

"She seems nice, that Susan. Carrie was too old for me. Maybe she wasn't, but she thought she was, which is the same thing. We had some laughs. She was making it with Jack Omaha. I told her that was dead end, and she said, What the hell, everything is. And there's not much answer to that, I guess."

"Where did Omaha keep his boat?"

"Right here. There it is, tied up to that shoreline dock at the end there, past the office, over beyond the lights."

I stood up. It was hard to see. "Beriram?"

"Right. Forty-six-foot with all the high-speed diesel you can use. All the extras. One hell of a lot of boat."

"I can believe it. It's one hell of a lot of price too."

"You can get that one at a pretty good price right now. The bank wants off the hook on it. I understand they'll take ninety-five cash."

"They ought to get that with no trouble if it's been maintained."

"Two years old and clean."

"Do you mean Omaha couldn't run it himself?"

"No. He could run it. But you can't fish and run it at the same time. When he got an urge to go billfishing, he'd get Cal lined up. He liked the edge of the Stream up beyond Grand Baharna. That's a good run, so they'd take off way before daylight and come back in by midnight or later. It makes a long day. Sometimes Carrie would go along."

"When was the last time?" Meyer asked. "Do you remember?"

"Only on account of the cops being here asking us. It was on a Tuesday, the fourteenth of… this month? Is it still May? Yes, the thirty-first. May is one of the months I always think should have thirty days. Yes, Jack Omaha took off with Cal about three in the morning, and they didn't come back in until after midnight. They questioned Cal about it. Just the two of them alone? Where had they fished? How had Jack acted? What time did they get back? How was Jack dressed? What was he driving? And so on and so on."

He stood up, shrugged, moved toward the ladderway.

"What time is it?" he asked. "I've got to go help Oliver lock the place. Anything you want, just ask either one of us."

After he was gone I strolled over and looked at the Bertram. It was called Christina III. It looked very fit and very husky. When I went back, Meyer was in the lounge. He was tilted back in a chair, hands laced behind his thick neck, staring at the overhead and frowning.

"Now what?" I asked.

"Do you know how they locate invisible planets?"

"No. How do they do that, Professor?"

"Because the visible ones act in erratic and inexplicable fashion. Their orbits are… warped. So you apply gravitational theory and a little geometry of moving spheres and you say Aha, if there is a planetary body right there of such and such a mass and such and such an orbit, then all the random movements of the other planets become logical, even imperative."

I sat on the yellow couch. "So what kind of mass and orbit are we looking for?"

"Something large, important, illegal, and profitable."

"Involving a fast cruiser?"

"Possibly."

"Okay. Sunken treasure or Jamaican grass, routed via the Bahamas."

"Isn't there a lot of cannabis coming into Florida?"

"All the way from Jax around to Fort Walton Beach. Yes. Based on what they've intercepted and what they think they've probably missed, it would be at least ten tons a week. From Colombia, Mexico, Jamaica, and maybe some other BIWI islands."

"Big money?"

"Not as big as you read in the papers. Street value doesn't mean a hell of a lot. It passes through a lot of hands. The biggest bite is in getting it into the country and into the hands of a distributor. That's where you double your money, or a little better. Five thousand worth of goodquality, nicely cured Jamaican marijuana will go here for possibly twelve thousand. But if it is intercepted, they'll call it a quarter-million street value. It has to go from distributor to big dealer to little dealer to pusher-user to user. Everybody bites."

"How do you know all this?"

"What I don't know, I make up."

"Seriously, Travis."

"Boo Brodey wanted me to come in with him on a run last year. He laid it all out, including the comparison with Prohibition and so on. I said, Thanks but no thanks."

"Didn't he get picked up?"

"He's out again."

"Did you disapprove?"

"Can't you read me on that?"

Meyer chuckled. "I guess I can. You don't like partnership ventures and middleman status. You don't like large investments. You don't like coming to the notice and attention of the law. You wouldn't want anybody to have the kind of hold over you that Boo would have had. It's not your idea of high adventure. It's what the British would call a hole-and-corner affair. Tawdry. A gesture of defiance for the very young."

"So why ask questions you can answer?"

"I guess I meant, Do you disapprove of a person using the weed?"

"Me? I think people should do whatever they want to do, provided they go to the trouble of informing themselves first of any possible problems. Once they know, then they can solve their own risk-reward ratios. Suppose somebody proved it does some kind of permanent damage. Okay. So the user has to figure it out if there is any point in his remaining in optimum condition for a minimum kind of existence. For me, it was relaxing, in a way, the couple of times I've had enough to feel it. But it gave me the giggles, warped my time sense, and made things too bright and hard-edged. Also it bent dimensions somehow. Buildings leaned just a little bit the wrong way. Rooms were not perfectly oblong any more. It's a kind of sensual relaxation, but it gave me the uneasy feeling somebody could come up behind me and kill me and I would die distantly amused instead of scared witless."

"I am trying to imagine you giggling."

"I can still hear it."

"What about it being sunken treasure, Travis?"

"I am thinking back to the money. How it was packaged. Hundreds on the bottom, then fifties, twenties, tens. Some had fives on top. Tied with white cotton string, in both directions. With an adding-machine tape tucked under the string. Bricks of ten thousand. Somebody very neat. It smacks of retail business, my friend. Think of it this way. Suppose you are taking in a lot of cash from various sources, and you use that cash to buy from several other sources, after removing your own share. Assume you do not want to change little ones into big ones at your friendly bank. Okay, if you put all the hundreds together, you have some thin little bricks to buy with. But at the other end you've got some great big stacks of little bills to add up to the same kind of round number. So you mix them up, and you have fairly manageable sizes."

"Sounds less and less like doubloons," Meyer said.

"Yes, it does."

"When I get this pain right between my eyes it means I've done enough thinking for now-on a conscious level. Now the subconscious can go to work. Do you have the gut feeling Jack Omaha is dead?"

"Yes."

"Then that makes the Christina III a very unlucky vessel."

"Jack Omaha, Carrie Milligan, and Cal Birdsong."

"And," he said, "the invisible planetary body which warped the other orbits. Good night." After I had puttered around aimlessly and had at last gone to bed, I found myself reliving the memory of Boo Brodey when he tried to recruit me. He's big and red and abraded by life-by hard work and hard living, by small mercenary wars and thin predatory women. Yet there is something childlike about him. He paced up and down in front of me, his face knotted with anxiety and appeal, chunking his fist into his palm, saying, "Jesus, Trav, you know how I am. Somebody tells me what to do and when, it gets done. I work something out myself and it's a disaster. Trav, we're talking about the money tree. Honest to Christ, you wouldn't believe it, the kind of money. Kids, weird little kids, are bringing in bags of grass right and left. Anything that'll fly, that's the way to do it. You can lease an airplane to fly up to Atlanta and back. Okay, you put it down on the deck and go to Jamaica and buy ten thousand worth and come back, and you got thirty thousand before the day is over. It's coming in on boats and ships and everything, Trav. Come on! The narcs aren't all that hard-nose about grass. They know they can't keep it out, and a lot of them, they don't know for sure it hurts anybody anyway, right? Come on in with me and help set it up. You know, the contacts and all. Help me out, dammit!"

When I told him I didn't want in, he wanted me to set it all up for him. I could stay outside and get a piece of it in exchange for management skills. I said no, I didn't want to go down that particular road. If you make it with grass, you find out that hash and coke are more portable and profitable. You kid yourself into the next step, and by the time they pick you up, your picture in the paper looks like some kind of degenerate, fangs and all. And all you can say is, gee, the other guys were doing it too.

If I were really going to do it, I would refit the Munequita for long-range work. Tune her for lowest gas consumption and put in bigger tanks. She's already braced to bang through seas most runabouts can't handle. Then I would…

Whoa, McGee. There is larceny in every heart, and you have more than your share. So forget how far it is across the Yucatan Straits, leaving from Key West.

There was a narrow, scrabbly, oyster-shell beach beside the cottage at 28 Mangrove Lane where Carrie Milligan had once lived. A narrow wooden dock extended twenty feet into the bay. It was still solid, just beginning to lean. It was good, I guessed, for another couple of years. Two old skiffs were high on the beach, overturned, nosing into the sea grapes.

Jason sat on the end of one of the skiffs. He wore a white shirt and white trousers. He had a big plantation straw hat shadowing his face. He was playing chords quite softly on a big guitar with a lot of ornate fretwork against the dark wood. The chords were related but did not become any recognizable song. They were in slow cadence, major and minor.

Meyer and I joined the group, standing a bit north of most of them, in the shade of a small gnarled water oak. I saw Harry Hascomb and the young man who had been counting stock in the warehouse. I saw Mrs. Jack Omaha, Gil from Gil's Kitchen, Susan Dobrovsky, Frederick Van Harn, Oliver from the marina, Joanna from Superior Building Supplies, and a man it took me a few moments to place. He was Arthur, the younger of the two cops who had subdued Cal Birdsong.

There were seven young ladies in long pastel dresses. The dresses were not in any sense a matched set. They were all of different cut and style, but all long and all pastel. Susan wore a long white dress which was just enough too bigso that I suspected it was borrowed. Susan and the other girls all had armfuls of the lush Florida flowers of late springtime.

A young man stepped out of the group and turned and faced us. He had red hair to his shoulders and a curly red beard. He wore a sports jacket and plaid slacks.

In a resonant and penetrating voice he said, "We are here today to say good-by to our sister, Carrie." The guitar music softened but continued. "She lived among us for a time. She touched our lives. She was an open person. She was not afraid of life or of herself. She was at home being Carrie, our sister. And we were at home with her, in love and trust and understanding. In her memory, each one of us here now most solemnly vows to be more sensitive to the needs of those who share our lives, to be more compassionate, to give that kind of understanding which does not concern itself with blame and guilt and retribution. In token of this pledge, and in symbol of our loss, we consign these flowers to the sea."

He moved to the side. The guitar became louder. One by one the pastel girls walked out to the end of the dock and flung the armloads of blooms onto the gray and glassy bay. There were tear marks on their cheeks. The flowers spread and began, very slowly, to move outward and in a southerly direction with the current. It was a very simple and moving thing. I had the feeling of a greater loss for having so undervalued Carrie. I excused myself by saying I had really not known her very well. But that was what Red-beard had said, that we should be more sensitive to the needs of others-and more sensitive, I added, to their identities as well. If she had meant this much to these people, then I had slighted her value as a person.

The music trailed off and stopped. Jason stood up and bobbed his head to indicate that was all. The murmur of voices began. Susan went a little way down the beach and stood, watching the floating flowers.

I looked at the twenty or so people I did not know, and I realized anew that there is a new subculture in the world. These were mostly young working people. Their work was their concession to the necessities. Their off-work identities were contra-establishment. Perhaps this was the only effective answer to all the malaise and the restlessness and the disbelief in institutionalized life, to conform for the sake of earning the bread and then to step from the job into almost as much personal freedom as the commune person.

I realized Meyer was no longer at my elbow. I looked around and did not see him. Jason nodded to me and said, "Was it okay?"

"It was beautiful."

"I figured if I just noodled around it would be better. If you play something, people start making the lyrics in their heads and they miss the other words. Robby did fine, I thought. He's an architect. Cindy wanted to make it to the service here, but she's still too shook."

"She shouldn't have even thought about it."

"Well, she thought a lot of Carrie. When Cindy was sick last year, Carrie came over and straightened out the books. It took her a whole weekend to do it, the way Cal had screwed things up. Look, I think I ought to talk to Susan. You think it would be okay?"

"I think it would be fine."

He moved off down the beach. Meyer came up to me and said, "There's a hex nut on the bottom of the gas tank. The undercoat is off it on one of the surfaces, and the metal is shiny where the undercoat flaked off."

I stared at him in disbelief. "With all these people around, you were damn fool enough to-"

"I was flipping my lucky silver dollar and catching it, like this. I dropped it and it hit the toe of my shoe and rolled under the Datsun. I didn't get a good look or a long look."

"Don't try to be cute about these things."

"Don't try to be McGee, you mean?"

"Don't get huffy. If you want to travel with the team, learn the ground rules. I've told you before. Don't ever take a risk you don't have to take, just to save time or inflate your ego."

"Now wait a minute-"

"There are a lot of things you can tell me that I would never know or guess unless you told me. You have a lot of special information in your head. So have I in mine. My information can make you live longer. And better."

"Better than what?" a girl asked. I turned. Joanna. Miss Freeler, recently of Superior Building Supplies. Dear friend of Harry Hascomb. Ex-friend. Slender girl with a delicate and lovely face, long fall of ginger-colored hair. Green eyes, slightly protruding and very challenging. The girl challenge, old as time.

"Live better than Harry is going to live for a while."

"That wouldn't be hard," she said. "Bet your ass. Harry is going to have to give up a lot of goodies. I know you from the office yesterday, when I quit. I remember you because you've got weird eyes. And for other reasons too, I might add. I bet you hear that from all the girls. You know, you got eyes the color of gin. What's your name?"

"McGee. And this is Meyer. Joanna Freeler."

"Hello, Meyer," she said. "Hello, McGee. What are you two dudes doing here at the memorial?"

"Friends of the deceased," I said. "From Lauderdale."

"Sure. That's where she married that muscle bum. Why didn't she marry you? Weren't you available, McGee?"

"Weren't. Aren't. Won't be."

"Now you're singing my song," she said.

She was wearing a long orange dress. The color was not good with her coloring. She had thrown her flowers farther and spread them wider than any of the others.

"You seem to be in good spirits," I said.

She clenched her jaw and glared up at me. "That's a shitty thing to say, friend. I miss her like hell. And in one way or another, I'll always miss her. Okay?"

"I didn't mean anything by what I said."

"Then apologize for letting your mouth run with your head turned off, McGee."

"I do so hereby apologize."

She hugged my arm and smiled and said to Meyer, "You run along, dearie. I have to ask this man something."

Meyer said, "I'll walk back to the boat."

"You've got a boat here? At Westway? Hmm. A fast boat?"

"If you really press her, she'll do seven or eight knots."

"You a pilot? Like in an airplane?"

"No."

"Come along. I just don't like to say some kinds of things in front of two people. All right?"

She led me well away from the others, over to the far edge of the lot. One water oak had sent out a huge limb, parallel to the ground, the top of it almost as high as my shirt pocket. Joanna gave a little bounce and put her palms on the limb and floated up, turning in air to sit lightly. She patted the limb beside her. "Come into my tree, friend."

I sat beside her. She took my hand and inspected it carefully, back and front.

"Hmm. You've had an active past."

"You could have said that in front of Meyer."

"It's hard to say what I want to say in front of just one person. I mean it's so easy for you to get the wrong idea. I'll miss Carrie. But she is dead, right? And the world goes on. One thing I know from all this, maybe the same thing Carrie figured out, there's got to be more to living than sitting on your butt forty hours a week in an office and getting laid once in a while by the joker who signs your paycheck. I could retire, maybe. If I play it right. But what I want is more interesting work. Like what Carrie was doing."

"What was she doing?"

"Don't try to get cute, McGee. Listen, I knew that girl. There's four of us in the cottage now. Me and Betty Joller and Nat Weiss and Flossie Speck. So before she moved out and since, Carrie was supplying the cottage with free grass for her friends, like a paper bag this big half full. We must have two pounds left. Do I have to spell it out? What I wasn't told, I can guess. So it all fell apart for you people. She went to Lauderdale. Now you are here to put it back together again, right? So this is a job application. I'm very smart and I know how to keep my mouth shut."

"I wouldn't say you know how to keep your mouth shut."

"This one time I have to take the chance, or where am I? Outside, as usual."

"Who do you think I represent?"

"You are sitting in my tree playing stupid. You look smart and rough. You're in distribution after the crazy people bring it in. I want to be a crazy people because I need something weird to do, and the money is nice. I told Carrie she shouldn't be involved, and here am I asking to get involved. What did happen to Jack?"

"Didn't Carrie tell you that?"

"She said he got scared and probably grabbed his share and ran. But that doesn't…"

"Doesn't what?"

"Never mind. Skip it."

"Did Harry know what was going on?"

"Cowboy Harry? He's a jerk. How could he know what was going on? It takes him both hands to find his ass. Why did you come to see him anyway?"

"To talk to him about Carrie."

"Why would you want to talk to him about Carrie?"

"You can keep your mouth shut?"

"You know it!"

"Just trying to get a line on who pushed Carrie in front of that truck."

The color drained out of her face. She wiped her mouth and shuddered. "Come on, now!"

"She was killed. I guess you could call it an occupational hazard, right? If you want to accept that kind of risk, maybe we can find something for you."

"But who… who…"

"The competition, probably."

She looked down and plucked the orange dress away from her body. "I'm getting all hot and sticky. I better change. Don't go away, huh? I want to think this over, okay?"

Joanna dropped lightly from the limb and went to the cottage, striding long, and disappeared inside. A lot of people had left. Some had gone into the cottage. Others were talking, by twos and threes. I saw Susan walking toward the Datsun, so I dropped down and got to the car just as she did. Her eyes were red, but she managed a smile.

"I think Carrie would have liked it," she said.

"I'm sure she would. Yesterday I walked off with her rings. I forgot to give them to you. And I left them on the boat. We could go get them now."

She frowned and shook her head. "There's no hurry. I have to be here a few days anyway, Fred… Mr. Van Harn says."

"Do you want me to go and pick up that package from Mr. Rucker?"

"Oh, no, thanks. I already talked to Betty about it, and she's coming with me now and we'll go over there before two o'clock. It's perfectly all right, really. But thank you."

A sturdy girl in a yellow dress came hurrying to the car, saying, "Sorry, Sue. I got to talking to somebody."

"Betty, this is Travis McGee. Betty Joller."

She had one of those plump pretty faces which go with wooden shoes and beer festivals. Her eyes were Dutch blue, and her smile was totally friendly and not the least bit provocative. "When I saw you standing with Meyer, I figured it had to be you," she said. "Carrie told me once that the only really happy time she could remember was when you loaned her and Ben your houseboat for their honeymoon. We're all going to miss her so much around here."

They got in, and Susan hitched her white dress up above her knees and then backed smartly around and they left. At my elbow Joanna said, "Now that Susan is some kind of great package."

"And Jason has his eyes on it."

"I noticed that. She's too young for you, chief."

"So are you."

She laughed so hard it bent her over. The laugh was silver bright under the shade trees, unfitting for the occasion. "Me? Me?" she gasped. "I'm the oldest person around anywhere." She wore little salmon shorts and a soft gray top. She had wound her ginger hair into a pile atop her head and pinned it in place casually. Ends were escaping. It made her throat look very slender and vulnerable.