Bright Orange for the Shroud Read online

  Bright Orange for the Shroud

  Travis McGee [6]

  John D. MacDonald

  Random House Digital, Inc. (1965)

  * * *

  Rating: ★★★★★

  Tags: Mystery & Detective, Hard-Boiled, General, Suspense, Thrillers, Fiction

  "McGee has become part of our national fabric."SEATTLE POST INTELLIGENCERUsually women came to take refuge aboard The Busted Flush. But this time a man stumbled on board, a walking zombie who fell into bed. Turned out poor Arthur Wilkinson was the latest victim of a fragile-looking blonde sexpot who used the blackest arts of love to lure unsuspecting suckers into a web of sordid schemes. Travis had thought he'd have a quiet summer. Instead he took on the most cunning, heartless, vicious con artists he'd ever met....

  Praise for

  John D. MacDonald

  “My favorite novelist of all time.”

  —DEAN KOONTZ

  “For my money, John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee is one of the great characters in contemporary American fiction—not crime fiction; fiction, period—and millions of readers surely agree.”

  —The Washington Post

  “MacDonald isn’t simply popular; he’s also good.”

  —ROGER EBERT

  “MacDonald’s books are narcotic and, once hooked, a reader can’t kick the habit until the supply runs out.”

  —Chicago Tribune Book World

  “Travis McGee is one of the most enduring and unusual heroes in detective fiction.”

  —The Baltimore Sun

  “John D. MacDonald remains one of my idols.”

  —DONALD WESTLAKE

  “A dominant influence on writers crafting the continuing series character.”

  —SUE GRAFTON

  “The Dickens of mid-century America—popular, prolific and … conscience-ridden about his environment.… A thoroughly American author.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “It will be for his crisply written, smoothly plotted mysteries that MacDonald will be remembered.”

  —USA Today

  “MacDonald had the marvelous ability to create attention-getting characters who doubled as social critics. In MacDonald novels, it is the rule rather than the exception to find, in the midst of violence and mayhem, a sentence, a paragraph, or several pages of rumination on love, morality, religion, architecture, politics, business, the general state of the world or of Florida.”

  —Sarasota Herald-Tribune

  Praise for the Travis McGee series

  “There’s only one thing as good as reading a John D. MacDonald novel: reading it again. A writer way ahead of his time, his Travis McGee books are as entertaining, insightful, and suspenseful today as the moment I first read them. He is the all-time master of the American mystery novel.”

  —JOHN SAUL

  “One of the great sagas in American fiction.”

  —ROBERT B. PARKER

  “In McGee mysteries and other novels as well, MacDonald’s voice was one of a social historian.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  Bright Orange for the Shroud is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  2013 Random House Trade Paperback Edition

  Copyright © 1965 by John D. MacDonald Publishing, Inc. Copyright renewed 1993 by Maynard MacDonald Introduction copyright © 2013 by Lee Child Excerpt from Darker Than Amber copyright © 1966 by John D. MacDonald Publishing, Inc. Copyright renewed 1994 by Maynard MacDonald

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Originally published in mass market in the United States by Fawcett, a division of Random House, Inc., New York in 1965.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-82667-1

  www.atrandom.com

  Cover design: Joe Montgomery

  Cover photograph: © Thomas Moore/Gallery Stock

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  Introduction

  Lee Child

  Suspense fiction trades on surprising and unexpected twists. Like this one: A boy named John Dann MacDonald was born in 1916 in Sharon, Pennsylvania, into the kind of quiet and comfortable middle-class prosperity that became common in America forty or fifty years later but which was still relatively rare early in the century. Sharon was a satellite town near Pittsburgh, dominated by precision metalworking, and John’s father was a mild-mannered and upstanding citizen with secure and prestigious salaried employment as a senior financial executive with a local manufacturer. Young John was called Jack as a child, and wore sailor suits, and grew up in a substantial suburban house on a tree-lined block. He read books, played with his dog, and teased his little sister and his cousin. When he was eighteen, his father funded a long European grand tour for him, advising him by letter “to make the best of it … to eat and function regularly … to be sure and attend a religious service at least once on each Sunday … to keep a record of your expenditures as a training for your college days.”

  Safely returned, young Jack went on to two decent East Coast schools, and married a fellow student, and went to Harvard for an MBA, and volunteered for the army in 1940, and finished World War II as a lieutenant colonel, after thoroughly satisfactory service as a serious, earnest, bespectacled, rear-echelon staff officer.

  So what does such a fellow do next? Does he join General Motors? IBM? Work for the Pentagon?

  In John D. MacDonald’s case, he becomes an impoverished writer of pulp fiction.

  During his first four postwar months, he lost twenty pounds by sitting at a table and hammering out 800,000 unsold words. Then in his fifth month he sold a story for twenty-five bucks. Then another for forty bucks, and eventually more than five hundred. Sometimes entire issues of pulp magazines were all his own work, disguised under dozens of different pen names. Then in 1950 he watched the contemporary boom in paperback novels and jumped in with his first full-length work, which was followed by sixty-six more, including some really seminal crime fiction and one of history’s greatest suspense series.

  Why? Why did a middle-class Harvard MBA with extensive corporate connections and a gold-plated recommendation from the army turn his back on everything apparently predestined, to sit at a battered table and type, with an anxious wife at his side? No one knows. He never explained. It’s a mystery.

  But we can speculate. Perhaps he never wanted a quiet and comfortable middle-class life. Perhaps, after finding himself amid the chaos of war, he felt able to liberate himself from the crushing filial expectations he had previously followed so obediently. As an eighteen-year-old, it’s hard to say no to the father who just paid for a trip to Europe. Eleven years later, as a lieutenant colonel, it’s easier.

  And we know from what
he wrote that he felt he had something to say to the world. His early stuff was whatever put food on that battered table—detective stories, westerns, adventure stories, sports stories, and even some science fiction—but soon enough his long-form fiction began to develop some enduring and intertwined themes. From A Deadly Shade of Gold, a Travis McGee title: “The only thing in the world worth a damn is the strange, touching, pathetic, awesome nobility of the individual human spirit.” From the stand-alone thriller Where Is Janice Gantry?: “Somebody has to be tireless, or the fast-buck operators would asphalt the entire coast, fill every bay, and slay every living thing incapable of carrying a wallet.”

  These two angles show up everywhere in his novels: the need to—maybe reluctantly, possibly even grumpily—stand up and be counted on behalf of the weak, helpless, and downtrodden, which included people, animals, and what we now call the environment—which was in itself a very early and very prescient concern: Janice Gantry, for instance, predated Rachel Carson’s groundbreaking Silent Spring by a whole year.

  But the good knight’s armor was always tarnished and rusted. The fight was never easy and, one feels, never actually winnable. But it had to be waged. This strange, weary blend of nobility and cynicism is MacDonald’s signature emotion. Where did it come from? Not, presumably, the leafy block where he was raised in quiet and comfort. The war must have changed him, like it changed a generation and the world.

  Probably the best of his nonseries novels is The Executioners, which became Cape Fear as a movie (twice). It’s an acute psychological study of base instinct, terror, mistakes, and raw emotion. It’s about a man—possibly a man like MacDonald’s father, or like MacDonald himself—who moves out of his quiet and comfort into more primeval terrain. And those twin poles are the theme of the sensationally good Travis McGee series, which is a canon equaled for enduring quality and maturity by very little else. McGee is a quiet man, internally bewildered by and raging at what passes for modern progress, externally happy merely to be varnishing the decks of his houseboat and polishing its brass, but always ready to saddle up and ride off in the service of those who need and deserve his help. Again, not the product of the privileged youth enjoyed by the salaried executive’s son.

  So where did McGee and MacDonald’s other heroes come from? Why Florida? Why the jaundiced concerns? We will never know. But maybe we can work it out, by mining the millions of words written with such haste and urgency and passion between 1945 and 1986.

  LEE CHILD

  New York

  2012

  One

  Another season was ending. The mid-May sun had a tropic sting against my bare shoulders. Sweat ran into my eyes. I had discovered an ugly little pocket of dry rot in the windshield corner of the panel of the topside controls on my houseboat, and after trying not to think about it for a week, I had dug out the tools, picked up some pieces of prime mahogany, and excised the area of infection with a saber saw.

  Cutting and sanding the new pieces to fit was a finicky chore. Sawdust stuck to my sweaty chest and arms. I was sustained by an awareness of the cool dark bottles of Dos Equis beer in the stainless steel box below, and by the anticipation of trudging from Bahia Mar over to the public beach where a mild wind from the east was capping the deep blue swells with white.

  Also I was sustained by the determination that this would be a slob summer for McGee. It wouldn’t be a gaudy summer. There wasn’t enough bread for that. But a careful husbanding of funds would see me through, leaving the emergency fund untapped, ready to finance some kind of an operation in the fall.

  I needed a slob summer. The machine was abused. Softness at the waist. Tremor of the hands. Bad tastes in the morning. A heaviness of muscle and bone, a tendency to sigh. Each time you wonder, Can you get it back? The good toughness and bounce and tirelessness, the weight down to a rawhide two oh five, a nasty tendency to sing during the morning shower, the conviction each day will contain wondrous things?

  And I wanted it to be a loner summer. There’d been too much damned yat-a-ta-yak, fervid conversations, midnight plots and dirty little violences for which I had been all too unprepared. The pink weal six inches below my armpit was a reminder of luck. If my foot hadn’t slipped exactly when it did.…

  A knife blade grating along a rib bone is a sound so ugly and so personal it can come right into your sleep and wake you up ten nights running.

  I got a good fit on the biggest piece, drilled it, and was setting the long bronze screws home when I heard a tentative and hollow call from dockside.

  “Trav? Hey, Trav? Hey, McGee?”

  I turned and walked to the aft end of my sun deck and looked down at the dock. A tall, frail, sallow-looking fellow in a wrinkled tan suit too large for him stared up at me with an anxious little smile that came and went—a mendicant smile, like dogs wear in the countries where they kick dogs.

  “How are you, Trav?” he said.

  And just as I was about to ask him who he was, I realized, with considerable shock, that it was Arthur Wilkinson, dreadfully changed.

  “Hello, Arthur.”

  “Can I … may I come aboard?”

  “Certainly. Why ask?”

  The gangplank chain was down. He came across, stepped onto the afterdeck, tottered, tried to smile up at me, grabbed at emptiness and collapsed onto the teak deck with a knobbly thud. I got down there in two jumps, rolled him over. He’d abraded the unhealthy flesh under one eye in the fall. I felt the pulse in his throat. It was slow and steady. Two fat teenage girls came and stared from the dock, snickering. See the funny drunk, like on television.

  I opened the aft door to the lounge, gathered Arthur up and toted him in. It was like picking up a sack of featherdry two-by-fours. He smelled stale. I took him all the way through and put him down on the bed in the guest stateroom. The air-conditioning was chill against my bare sweat. I felt Arthur’s head. He didn’t seem to have a fever. I had never seen a man so changed by one year of life.

  His mouth worked, and he opened his eyes and tried to sit up. I pushed him back. “You sick, Arthur?”

  “Just weak, I guess. I guess I just fainted. I’m sorry. I don’t want to be …”

  “A burden? A nuisance? Skip the social graces, Arthur.”

  I guess you always look for a little spirit, a little glint of the fang on even the most humble dog in town.

  “I’m very polite,” he said listlessly. “You know that, Trav. A very polite man.” He looked away. “Even … even when he was killing me, I think I was probably very, very polite.”

  He faded away then, like a puff of steam, quickly gone, his eyes not quite closed. I put my fingertips against the side of his throat—the pulse was still there.

  As I was wondering just what the hell to do next, he came floating back up, frowned at me. “I can’t cope with people like that. She must have known that. Right from the start she must have known about me.”

  “Who tried to kill you?”

  “I guess it really doesn’t matter very much. If it hadn’t been him, it would have been the next one, or the one after that. Let me rest a little while and then I’ll go. There wasn’t any point in coming to you. I should have known that too.”

  Suddenly I recognized a part of that stale smell about him. It was a little bit like freshly baked bread, but not as pleasant. It’s the distinctive smell of starvation, the effluvium of the sweat ducts when the body has begun to feed on itself.

  “Shut up, Arthur. When did you eat last?”

  “I’m not real sure. I think … I don’t know.”

  “Stay where you are,” I told him. I went to my stainless steel galley, looked in a locker, picked out a tin of clear, rich British broth, poured it into a pan and turned the burner on high. As it heated I looked in on him again. He gave me that reappearing nervous smile. He had a facial tic. His eyes filled with tears, and I went back to the broth. I poured it into a mug, hesitated, then tapped the liquor locker and added a fair jolt of Irish whiskey.

  Af
ter I helped him get propped up, I saw he could hold it all right in both hands and sip it.

  “Good.”

  “Take it slow, Arthur. I’ll be right back.”

  I sluiced the sawdust and sweat off in a fast shower in the huge stall the original owner had built aboard the Busted Flush, put on denims and a T-shirt and checked him again. The mug was empty. He was slightly flushed. I opened the promised bottle of dark beer and went back in and sat on the foot of the bed.

  “What the hell have you done to yourself, Arthur?” His voice blurred. “Too much, maybe.”

  “Maybe I asked it the wrong way. What has Wilma done to you?”

  Again the tears of weakness. “Oh Christ, Trav, I …”

  “We’ll go into it later, boy. You get out of the clothes and into a hot shower. Then you eat some eggs. Then you sleep. Okay?”

  “I don’t want to be a …”

  “Arthur, you could begin to bore me. Shut up.”

  After he was asleep, I took a good look at his arms. Big H could pull a man down quickly. No needle marks. But it didn’t have to mean anything. Only the eyedropper group, the ones who pick the big vein open with a pin, acquire scars. Any tidy soul with a decent hypo and enough sense to use an alcohol swab afterward can go unmarked indefinitely, as any urban cop can tell you. He was still a little grimy. It was going to take more than one shower, or two. The beard stubble didn’t help either. I checked through his clothes. They had been cheap originally. The labels were from Naples, Florida. He had a flat cigarette package with three one-inch butts carefully stowed therein. He had a match folder from Red’s Diner in Homestead. He had two pennies and some lint. I rolled his shoes up in the clothing, carried the bundle out at arm’s length and dropped it into the trash bin on the dock. Then washed my hands.

  The sun was going down. I went topside. The cockpit cocktail hour, with music and girl-laughter from neighbor cruisers. As I drove the remaining screws home without working up a sweat, I kept thinking of Arthur Wilkinson as I had seen him last, over a year ago.