A Deadly Shade of Gold Read online

  John D MacDonald - Travis McGee 05 - A Deadly Shade of Gold

  One

  A SMEAR of fresh blood has a metallic smell. It smells like freshly sheared copper. It is a clean and impersonal smell, quite astonishing the first time you smell it. It changes quickly, to a fetid, fudgier smell, as the cells die and thicken.

  When it is the blood of a stranger, there is an atavistic withdrawal, a toughening of response, a wary reluctance for any involvement. When it is your own, you want to know how bad it is. You turn into a big inward ear, listening to yourself, waiting for faintness, wondering if this is going to be the time when the faintness comes and turns into a hollow roaring, and sucks you down. Please not yet. Those are the three eternal words. Please not yet.

  When it is the blood of a friend....

  When maybe he said, Please not yet.... But it took him and he went on down....

  It was a superb season for girls on the Lauderdale beaches. There are good years and bad years. This, we all agreed, was a vintage year. They were blooming on all sides, like a garden out of control. It was a special type this year, particularly willowy ones, with sun-streaky hair, soft little sunbrown noses, lazed eyes in the cool pastel shades of green and blue, cat yawny ones, affecting a boredom belied by glints of interest and amusement, smilers rather than gigglers, with a tendency to run in little flocks of three and four and five. They sparkled on our beaches this year like grunions, a lithe and wayward crop that in too sad and too short a time would be striving for Whiter Washes, ScuffPruf Floors and Throw-Away Nursing Bottles.

  In a cool February wind, on a bright and cloudless afternoon, Meyer and I had something over a half dozen of them drowsing in pretty display, basted with sun oil, behind the protection of laced canvas on the sun deck atop my barge type houseboat, the Busted Flush, moored on a semipermanent basis at Slip F-18, Bahia Mar, Fort Lauderdale. Meyer and I were playing acey-deucy. He was enjoying it more than I was. He kept rolling doubles. He looks like the diorama of Early Man in the Museum of Natural History. He has almost as much pelt as an Adirondack black bear. But he can stroll grinning down a beach and acquire a tagalong flock of lovelies the way an ice cream cart ropes children. He calls them all Junior. It saves confusion. He is never never seen with one at a time. He lives alone aboard a squatty little cruiser and is, by trade, an Economist. He predicts trends. He acquired a little money the hard way, and he keeps moving it around from this to that, and it keeps growing nicely, and he does learned articles for incomprehensible journals.

  At reasonable intervals one of the Juniors would clamber down the ladderway, go below and return with a pair of cans of cold beer from my stainless steel galley. I always buy the brands with the pull tabs. You stare at the tab, think deep thoughts about progress, advertising, modern living, cultural advances, and then turn the can upside down and open with an opener. It is a ceremonial kind of freedom.

  Just as Meyer got all the way around, blocked me out, and began taking off with exquisite care, smirking away to himself, humming, rolling good numbers, I heard my phone ring. It surprised me. I thought I had the switch at the off position, the position where you can phone out, but anybody phoning you thinks it is ringing, but it isn't. And that is another kind of freedom. Like throwing away mail without looking to see who it's from, which is the ultimate test, of course. I have yet to meet a woman who has arrived at that stage. They always have to look.

  Perhaps if Meyer hadn't been making everything so disagreeable, I would have let it ring itself out. But I went on down to my lounge and answered it with one very cautious depersonalized grunt.

  "McGee?" the voice said. "Hey McGee? Is this Travis McGee?"

  I stuck a thumb in my cheek and said, "I'm lookin affa things while he's away."

  The voice was vaguely familiar. "McGee, buddy, are you stoned?"

  Then I knew the voice. From way back. Sam Taggart.

  "Where the hell are you," I said, "and how soon can you get here?"

  The voice faded and came back. "...too far to show up in the next nine minutes. Wait'll I see what it says on the front of this phone book. Waycross, Georgia. Look, I've been driving straight on through, and I'm dead on my feet. And I started thinking suppose he isn't there, then what the hell do you do?"

  "So I'm here. So hole up and get some sleep before you kill somebody."

  "Trav, I got to have some help."

  "Doesn't everybody?"

  "Listen. Seriously. You still... operating like you used to?"

  "Only when I need the money. Right now I'm taking a nice long piece of my retirement, Sam. Hurry on down. The little broads are beautiful this year."

  "There's a lot of money in this."

  "It will be a lot more pleasant to say no to you in person. And by the way Sam?"

  "Yes?"

  "Is there anybody in particular you would like me to get in touch with? Just to say you're on your way?"

  It was a loaded question, about as subtle as being cracked across the mouth with a dead mackerel. I expected a long pause and got one.

  "Don't make those real funny jokes," he said in a huskier voice.

  "What if maybe it isn't a joke, Sam?"

  "It has to be. If she had a gun, she should kill me. You know that. She knows that. I know that. For God's sake, you know no woman, especially a woman like Nora, can take that from anybody. I dealt myself out, forever. Look, I know what I lost there, Trav. Besides, a gal like that wouldn't still be around. Not after three years. Don't make jokes, boy."

  "She's still around. Sam, did you ever give her a chance to forgive you?"

  "She never would. Believe me, she never would."

  "Are you sewed up with somebody else?"

  "Don't be a damn fool."

  "Why not, Sam?"

  "That's another funny joke too."

  "She's not sewed up. At least she wasn't two weeks ago. Why shouldn't her reasons be the same as yours?"

  "Cut it out. I can't think. I'm dead on my feet."

  "You don't have to think. All you have to do is feel, Sam. She'll want to see you."

  "How do you know?"

  "Because I was the shoulder she cried on, you silly bastard!"

  "God, how I want to see her!"

  "Sam, it will tear her up too much if you walk in cold. Let me get her set for it. Okay?"

  "Do you really know what the hell you're doing, McGee?"

  "Sam, sweetie, I've been trying to locate you for three years."

  He was silent again, and then I heard him sigh. "I got to sack out. Listen. I'll be there tomorrow late. What's tomorrow? Friday. What I'll do, I'll find a room someplace..."

  "Come right to the boat."

  "No. That won't be so smart, for reasons I'll tell you when I see you. And I've got to talk to you before I do anything about seeing Nora. What you better do, Trav, tell her I'm coming in Saturday. Don't ask questions now. Just set it up that way. I... I've got to have some help. Do it my way Trav. I'll phone you after I locate a place."

  After I hung up, I looked up the number of Nora Gardino's shop. Some girl with a Gabor accent answered, and turned me over to Miss Gardino.

  "The McGee!" she said with irony and pleasure. "Let me guess. Something in a size eight or ten, lacy, expensive and, of course, gift wrapped."

  "Nope. This time I want the boss lady. Gift wrapped. Instead of package delivery I'll pick it up in person. About seven? Gin, steak, wine, dancing and provocative conversation."

  "Oh God, I promised my accountant I would...."

  "Low lights."

  "But this stuff is way past due now and I really...."

  "Close harmony."

  "Seven o'clock then. But why? I'm pleased and so on, but why?"

 
"Because a McGee never never gives up."

  "Wow, you're after me every minute, huh? Tireless McGee. Once a year, with bewildering frequency, turning a poor girl's head, never giving her a chance to catch her breath. But make it seven-thirty. Okay?"

  I went back topside and lost my game, and the next, and the next, while the Juniors cheered their Leader on. I lost $14.40. I paid off. The air was colder, and the heat was going out of the slanting sunlight. The Juniors were getting restive.

  "Here," I said to Meyer. "Put it in something with a future. Jump the culture trend. Electric hairbrushes."

  Meyer smiled and surveyed his flock. "With your money McGee, I'd rather be trivial. What I'll do, I'll send Junior off, when the time is ripe, to invest it all in bean sprouts, water chestnuts, almonds, candied ginger and wonton, and we'll choke it all down aboard this fifty-four feet of decadent luxury afloat, and play your fool records and all tell lies."

  "Got a date."

  "Mmmm," he said. He counted them. "Darlings, I see you are seven. Those of you who can be trusted to go round up one amiable young man each, respectful, attentive, light-hearted young men, raise your right hand. Three of you? Ah, four. Splendid. All of you take your little roses and slippers and beach bags and buzz off now, and get dressed, warmly and informally, and gather up your young men and we shall all meet at Bill's Tahiti at seven promptly."

  They trooped off my boat, making their little bird noises together, smiling back at us, waving.

  Meyer leaned on the sun deck rail and said fondly, "Darlings all."

  "That's a pretty sloppy formation. Shouldn't you have them marching by now?"

  "They are products of an increasingly regimented culture, my boy. Group activities give them a sense of security, of purpose, of adjustment. I am their vacation substitute for a playground director. Left to their own devices on vacation, they would become restless, quarrelsome, bitter, aimless. They would have a dreadful time. Now when they return to one of those dreary states which begin with a vowel, they will treasure the memory of being kept busy every minute. The western world, my dear McGee, is being turned into one vast cruise ship, and there is a shortage of cruise directors." He turned and gave me a somber hairy look. "After that phone call, you played even worse, if that is possible."

  "An old friend."

  "With a problem, of course. McGee, that expression is rapidly becoming obsolete too. In our brave new world there will be nothing but new friends. Brand new ones every day, impossible to tell apart, all wearing the same adjusted smile, the same miracle fabric, the same perfect deodorant. And they will all say exactly the same things. It will take all the stress out of interpersonal relations. From what I have been able to observe of late, I suspect that all the females could be called Carol and all the males could be called Mark."

  He lumbered down my ladderway, refused an ultimate brew, and went trudging off toward his ugly little cruiser tied up to a neighboring dock. On its transom, in elaborate gold, was the name The John Maynard Keynes.

  At the appropriate time I drove over to the mainland, across the 17th Street Causeway, and from there north to the back street where Nora Gardino lives in what was once a gardener's cottage for a large estate. Only that small corner of the grounds is unchanged, framed on two sides by the original wall, with the fierce ornamental iron spikes on top of it, screened on the other two sides by tropical growth, rich, thick and fragrant. As I drove in, tires crunching the brown pebbles, I wondered if, back in a world no longer comprehensible to us, my vehicle had ever called at the main house, now long gone, replaced by a garden apartment project.

  I drive a Rolls, vintage 1936, one of the big ones. Some previous owner apparently crushed the rear end, and, seeking utility, turned her into a pickup truck. Another painted her that horrid blue that matches the hair of a grade school teacher I once had, and I have named her, with an attack of the quaints, after that teacher. Miss Agnes. She is ponderously slow to get up to cruising speed, but once she has attained it, she can float along all day long in the medium eighties in a rather ghastly silence-a faint whisper of wind, a slight rumble of rubber. Miss Agnes was born into a depression, and suffered therefrom.

  My lights made highlights on Nora's little black Sunbeam parked deep in the curve of driveway. I went up onto the shallow porch, and a girl answered the door. She was big and slender. She had a broad face, hair the color of wood ashes. She wore a pale grey corduroy jump suit, with a big red heart embroidered where a heart should be. I did not catch her name exactly, not with that Gaborish accent, but it sounded like Shaja Dobrak. She invited me in, after I had identified myself, and said that Nora would soon be ready. In her grey-blue eyes, above her polite and social smile, were little glints of appraisal and speculation. Two Siamese cats, yawning on a decorator couch, gave me much the same look, though slightly cross-eyed.

  The decor had been changed since that last time I was at the cottage. Now it was gold and grey, with accents of white and pale blue, a small, charming, intimate room. She made me a drink and brought it to me, and sat with her own in a chair facing me, long legs tucked under her, and told me she had worked far Nora seven months, and had been living at the cottage for four months. She was a grown-up, composed, watchful and gracious, and extraordinarily attractive in her own distinctive way.

  In a little while Nora came hurrying out, and I got up for the quick small old-friends hug, the kiss on the cheek. She is a lean, dark, vital woman, with vivid dark eyes, too much nose, not enough forehead. Her voice is almost, but not quite, baritone. Her figure is superb and her legs are extraordinary. In spite of the strength of her features, her rather brusk and impersonal mannerisms, she is an intensely provocative woman, full of the challenging promise of great feminine warmth.

  She was in a deep shade of wool, not exactly a wine shade, perhaps a cream sherry shade, a fur wrap, her blue-black hair glossy, her heels tall, purse in hand, mouth shaped red, her eyes sparkling with holiday. Her face looked thinner than I remembered, her cheeks more hollowed.

  We said goodnight to the smiling Shaja, and as we went out Nora said, "I haven't had a date in so long, I feel practically girlish."

  "Good: My car or yours?"

  "Trav, you should remember that I would never slight Miss Agnes that way. She'd sit here and sulk." After I closed her in and got in beside her she said, "I hate to be a bore, but I left a letter on my desk that has to go out tonight. Do you mind?"

  "Of course not." As I turned out of the drive I said, "I thought you were a loner."

  "Oh, Shaja? She is a jewel. I'm in the process of setting the shop up so that she can buy in, a little at a time. She's the only one I've ever found I can really depend on. Or live with. She has a very precise sense of privacy, of fairness, of sharing. And... she reacts to things the way I do. We're men's women, both of us. No sorority overtones. No girlish giggles and confidences. And we're both tidy as cats. No hair in the sink, no crud on the dishes. So it works. She's married to a man years older than she is. She gets two letters a year from him. He's in a Hungarian prison. Four years to go, I think, and then the problem of trying to get him out of the country somehow, and get him over here, but she has a wonderful confidence that it is all going to work out. She is absolutely marvelous in the shop. If a woman is torn between something terribly expensive, and something quite suitable, Shaja has a little trick of raising one eyebrow a fraction of an inch and changing the shape of her mouth, and sighing in an absolutely inaudible way. We're doing just fine, and how are you doing, Trav, darling?"

  "Medium well."

  "You were away for quite a long time, weren't you? I tried to get to you for some little things that came up. I thought they'd amuse you."

  "I've been back since Christmas. Emotionally convalescent, sort of. Ragged edges."

  "Something rough?"

  "I came out of it with a little money, and absolutely nothing else, except a case of the flying twitches."

  "What in the world is that?"

  "When
you try to drop off to sleep and all of a sudden you leap like a gaffed fish and start shaking. So you have a drink and try again. But now I'm having play time. Months of it, Nora."

  "Until the money gets low?"

  "Is this going to work into the lecture about ambition, security, reliability, the obligation to use all the talents God gives you and so on?"

  "No, darling. Not tonight. Not ever again. You are incorrigible."

  I parked in the vast emptiness in front of her shop. She is in a superior shopping center, multilevel, with walks, planting areas, piped music, a sprinkling of nationally known retail names. The two feminine dummies in the shallow window were silhouetted against her night lights. In a slant of gold script on the display window was written Gardino.

  I went with her while she unlocked the door, and stood inside the door while she went back to her office in the rear to get the letter. In the still air was the scent of perfumes and fabric. Out of some mild ironic impulse I reached into the shallow window and patted the hard plastic curve of the sterile rump of the nearest dummy, covered by $89 worth of cotton. I thought of what Meyer had said, and I murmured, "I dub thee Carol."