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  Girl In The Plain Brown Wrapper

  John D Macdonald

  John D MacDonald - Travis McGee 10 The Girl In The Plain Brown Wrapper

  1968

  1

  IT IS ONE of the sorry human habits to play the game of: What was I doing when it happened?

  After I heard that Helena Pearson had died on Thursday, the third day of October, I had no trouble recon-structing the immediate past.

  That Thursday had been the fourth and final day of a legitimate little job of marine salvage. Meyer made a lot of small jokes about Travis McGee, salvage expert, ac-tually doing some straight-arrow salvage. He kept saying it almost made my cover story believable. But he did not say such things for any ears but mine own.

  Actually it was not my ball game. Meyer gets himself involved in strange little projects. Somewhere, somehow he had gotten interested in the ideas of a refugee Cuban chemist named Joe Palacio. So he had talked a mutual friend of ours, Bobby Guthrie, a damned good man with pumps and pressures and hydraulics, into listening to Joe's ideas and going to Joe's rooming house in Miami where Joe had set up a miniaturized demonstration in an old bathtub he had scrounged somewhere.

  When Bobby got high enough on the idea to quit his regular job, Meyer put in the money and they formed a little partnership and named it Floatation Associates.

  Then Meyer, in one of his mother hen moods, sweet-talked me into donating my services, plus my houseboat, The Busted Flush, plus my swift little Mu¤equita boat to the first actual salvage operation. So I had to take the Flush down to a Miami yard where they winched aboard a big ugly diesel pump with special attachments rigged by Bobby Guthrie, some great lengths of what appeared to be reinforced fire hose, and several 55-gallon drums of special gunk mixed up by Joe Palacio, plus scuba tanks, air compressor, tools, torches, and so on. Once I had topped off the water and fuel tanks and laid aboard the provisions and booze, the old Flush was as low in the water as I cared to see her. Even with all her beam, and that big old barge-type hull, she had to react to what Bobby estimated as seven thousand pounds of extra cargo. She seemed a little discouraged about it.

  "If she founders," Meyer said pleasantly, "we'll see if we can raise her with Palacio's magic gunk."

  So we took off down Biscayne Bay with the Mu¤equita in tow, heading for the lower Keys. We got an early start and kept waddling along, and by last light we were far enough down Big Spanish Channel to edge cautiously over into the shallows off Annette Key, in the lee of a southwest breeze, and drop a couple of hooks.

  The immediate forecast was good, but there was an area of suspicion over near the Leeward Islands, and there was an official half month of the whirly-girl season left. Also the girls are known to come screaming up through hurricane alley after the season is over.

  Later I learned that Helena Pearson had written the letter to me that same Saturday, September 28th, the day after she guessed she wasn't going to make it, the letter the attorney mailed, still sealed, with his cover letter. And with the certified check.

  That evening at anchor aboard The Busted Flush the three Floatation associates were edgy. For Meyer it was simple empathy. He knew the risks they were taking. Joe Palacio had a chance to make a new career in his adopted land. Bobby Guthrie had a wife and five kids to worry about. The three of them had periods of contagious enthusiasm, and then they would get the doubts and the glooms and the hollow laughter. If it worked on a very small scale in the scavenged bathtub, that didn't mean it was going to work out in Hawk Channel, in the Straits of Florida, in seventy-five feet of ocean.

  In the morning we went south down Big Spanish, past No Name Key, and under the fixed bridge between Bahia Honda Key and Spanish Harbor Key. Then the overladen Flush was out in the deeps, and we had a nine-mile run at about 220 degrees to lonely little Looe Key, across a slow heave of greasy swell. Soon I was able to pick up the red marker on Looe with the glasses. On the way, while on automatic pilot, I had figured out the quickest and best way to run if things blew up too suddenly. I would pour on all the coal and run just a shade east of magnetic north, perhaps 8 degrees, and if I could manage to make eight knots, I could tuck the Flush into Newfound Harbor Channel in maybe forty minutes, and find a protected pocket depending on the wind, maybe in Coupon Bight or close offshore by Little Torch Key.

  Bobby Guthrie had the coordinates on the sunken pleasure boat. She lay a half mile southwest of Looe Key. She'd been down there for two months. She was the `Bama Gal, owned by a Tampa hotelman, about ninety thousand dollars' worth of cabin cruiser, only six months old. Forty-six feet, fiber glass hull, twin diesels. The ho-telman and his wife and another couple had been out fish-ing and the hotelman had keeled over with a heart attack while fighting a billfish. Nobody else aboard knew how to run the ship-to-shore radio. They barely knew how to run the boat. There was a tug with a tow of three barges about a half mile farther out, so they figured that the tug would have a radio they could use to call a Coast Guard helicopter and get the man to a hospital. The guest ran the boat over toward the tug and cut the engines and they all started waving their arms. Maybe they thought that tugs and barges have some kind of braking system. The tug captain tried evasive tactics, but mass and momentum were too much. The forward port corner of the lead barge put a big ugly hole in the cruiser, but the crew launched a skiff and got the people off in good order be-fore she went down. By the tune the Coast Guard ar-rived, the owner was as dead as the other fish they had caught, which had gone down with the cruiser.

  The insurance company had paid off on the cruiser, and Meyer had gotten a release from them, so any recovery was going to be profit-if we could bring it up, tow it in, and find something worth money.

  So on that Sunday I worked the Flush into the most protected water that Looe provides. It is shaped like a backward "J" that has fallen onto its back, and I put the hooks out in shoal water, as close as I could get without risking being hard aground at low tide. We took the Mu¤equita out and located the `Bama Gal after about forty minutes of skin diving and looking. We made a bright red buoy fast to her, and then I ran the Mu¤equita up-current, put the anchor down in about seventy feet, and let her come back to the buoy before snubbing her down, almost at the end of my four hundred feet of an-chor line. Not enough scope to be sure of holding.

  We had just the two sets of tanks aboard the Mu¤equita, so I went down with Joe Palacio to get a good look at what condition she was in. She lay on a little slope, bow higher than the stern, and she was on about a fifteen-degree list to port, making the hole in the star-board side, a little aft of amidships, easy to see. She was picking up new grass and weed and green slime, but it wasn't too bad yet. We had expected to find her picked clean of everything the skin-diver kids could lift, but by some freak of chance they hadn't found her. The big rods with their Finor reels were still in the rod holders. Binoc-ulars, booze, cameras, tackle boxes, rifle, sunglasses-all the toys and gear and gadgets that people take to sea were either stowed or lay on the cockpit, cabin, or fly-bridge decking. While Joe busied himself with studying the hatches and the interior layout, and measuring inte-rior spaces, I kept assembling bundles of goodies and, with a couple of pulls on the dangling line, sending them up into the sunlight.

  When we went up, I found that all the stuff had looked better down in the depths, green and shadowy, than up on the deck of my runabout, all sodden, leaking, and cor-roded.

  Monday we took the Flush out and anchored her over the wreck and worked all day, in shifts, beefing up those places where Palacio thought the floatation might come busting out, and also cutting through some interior bulkheads to make a free flow of water through all the belowdecks areas, and fastening some plywood against
the inside of the hull where the big hole was. Whenever we came across anything we could tie a line to and lift to the surface, we did so.

  The weather held on Tuesday and by noon Joe was satisfied that we were ready to try. We took the rein-forced hose down and clamped it securely in place, lead-ing it through the hole we'd cut into the damaged side above the waterline. We had made no attempt to make her watertight. That was the last thing Palacio wanted.

  Bobby Guthrie got his funny-looking pump going. It throbbed, smoked, and stank, but it pulled water up through the intake hose dangling over the side and pumped it down and into the wreck and out through dozens of small openings here and there. Palacio was very nervous. His hands shook as he clamped the small hoses that led from three drums of separate kinds of gunk to the brass nipples on a fitting on the big hose that led down to the wreck. He had flow gauges and hand pumps on each drum. As Meyer had explained it to me, Gunk One reacted with the water, raising its temperature. Then Gunk Two and Gunk Three interacted with the heated water as they went swirling down, and when they were released inside the hull down below, they separated into big blobs and, in the cooler water, solidified into a very lightweight plastic full of millions of little bubbles full of the gases released through their interaction on each other and the heated water. Palacio had the three of us manning the hand pumps and he hopped back and forth from one flow gauge to the other, speeding one man up, slowing an-other down. There was, after about ten minutes, a sudden eruption about forty feet down-current, and a batch of ir-regular yellow-white chunks the size of cantaloupe ap-peared and, floating very high on the water, went moving swiftly away in the slight breeze.

  Palacio stopped us and cut the flow. Guthrie turned off the big pump. We went down and found that the ventila-tor on the forward deck had blown out. By the time it was secure, it was time to quit. All day Wednesday there was pump trouble of one kind or another. We thought Palacio would break down and start sobbing.

  By midday Thursday everything seemed to be working well for about forty minutes. My arm began to feel leaden. Palacio was gnawing his knuckles. Suddenly Guthrie gave a roar of surprise. The hose began to stand up out of the water like a snake and a moment later the big cruiser came porpoising up, so fast and so close that it threw a big wave aboard, drenching us and killing the pump. She rocked back and forth, streaming water, riding high and handsome. We stomped and yelled and laughed like idiots. She was packed full of those lightweight brittle blobs of foam, and I tried not to think of how damn fool-ish I had been to never even think of what could have happened if she had come up that fast and directly under the Flush.

  We wasted no time rigging for towing. We were getting more swell and I did not like the feel of the wind. Be-tween periods of dead calm there would come a hot, moist huff, like a gigantic exhalation. I set it up with short towlines, the Flush in the lead, of course, the sal-vaged `Bama Gal in the middle, and Bobby Guthrie aboard the Mu¤equita in the rear. I broke out the pair of walkie-talkies because the bulk of the `Bama Gal made hand signals to Bobby back there impossible. The system was for him to keep the Mu¤equita's pair of OMC 120's idling in neutral, and if our tow started to swing, he could give the engines a little touch of reverse and pull it back into line. I knew the inboard-outboards could idle all day without overheating. Also, when I had to stop the Flush down for traffic, Bobby could keep it from riding up on our stern.

  It was early Saturday afternoon before we got her to Merrill-Stevens at Dinner Key, and we had to work her in during a flat squall, in a hard gray driving rain, the wind gusting and whistling. I'd phoned a friend via the Miami marine operator earlier in the day, so they were waiting for us. We shoved the `Bama Gal into the slings and they picked her out of the water and put her on a cradle and ran her along the rails and into one of the big sheds. Pa-lacio wore a permanent, broad, dreaming grin.

  The dockmaster assigned me a slip for the Flush and space in the small boat area for the Mu¤equita. By the tune we were properly moored, hooked into shoreside power, and had showered and shaved and changed, heavy rain was drumming down, and it was very snug in the lounge aboard The Busted Flush, lights on, music on, ice in the glasses, Meyer threatening to make his famous beef stew with chili, beans, and eggs, never the same way twice running. Guthrie had phoned his wife and she was going to drive down from Lauderdale to pick him up Sunday morning. They were tapping the Wild Turkey bourbon we'd found aboard the Gal, and I was sticking to Plymouth on ice. Meyer kept everybody from going too far overboard in estimating profit. He kept demanding we come up with "the minimum expectation, gentlemen."

  So we kept going over what would probably have to be done and came up with a maximum fifteen thousand to put her in shape, and a minimum forty-five thousand re-turn after brokerage commission.

  That is the best kind of argument, trying to figure out how much you've made. It is good to hear the thunder of tropic rain, to feel the muscle soreness of hard manual labor when you move, to have a chill glass in your hand, know the beginnings of ravenous hunger, realize that in a few hours even a bunk made of cobblestones would feel deep and soft and inviting.

  They wanted me to come into the fledgling partnership, with twenty-five percent of the action. But struggling ven-tures should not be cut too many ways. Nor did I want the responsibility, that ever-present awareness of people depending on me permanently to make something work. They were too proud-Guthrie and Palacio-to accept my efforts as a straight donation, so after some inverted haggling we agreed that I would take two thousand in the form of a note at six percent, payable in six months. They wanted to put their take back into unproved equipment and go after a steel barge sunk in about fifty feet of water just outside Boca Grande Pass.

  I was sprawled and daydreaming, no longer hearing their words as they talked excitedly of plans and projects, hearing only the blur of their voices through the music.

  "Didn't we make it that tune in an hour and a half? Hey! Trav!"

  Meyer was snapping his fingers at me. "Make what?" I asked.

  "That run from Lauderdale to Bimini."

  They had stopped talking business. I could remember that ride all too well. "Just under an hour and a half from the sea buoy at Lauderdale to the first channel marker at Bimini."

  "In what?" Guthrie asked.

  I told him what it had been, a Bertram 25 rigged for ocean racing with a pair of big hairy three hundreds in it, and enough chop in the Stream so that I had to work the throttles and the wheel every moment, so that when she went off a crest and was airborne, she would come down flat. Time it wrong and hit wrong, and you can trip them over.

  "What was the rush?" Bobby asked.

  "We were meeting a plane," Meyer said.

  And I knew at that moment he too was thinking of Helena Pearson and a very quick and duty salvage job of several years aback. We were both thinking of her, with no way of knowing she had been dead two days, no way of knowing her letter was at Bahia Mar waiting for me.

  Even without the knowledge of her death, Helena was a disturbing memory...

  2

  FIVE YEARS ago? Yes. In a winter month, in a cold winter for Florida, Mick Pearson, with his wife Helena and his two daughters, aged twenty and seventeen, crewing for him, had brought his handsome Dutch motor sailer into Bahia Mar, all the way from Bordeaux. The Likely Lady. A wiry, seamed, sun-freckled talkative man in his fifties, visibly older than his slender gray-blond wife.

  He gave the impression of somebody who had made it early, had retired, and was having the sweet life. He cir-culated quickly and readily and got to know all the regu-lars. He gave the impression of talking a lot about himself, not in any bragging or self-important way, but by amusing incident. People found it easy to talk to him.

  Finally I began to get the impression that he was focusing on me, as if he had been engaged in some process of selection and I was his best candidate. I realized how very little I knew about him, how little he had actually said. Once we began prying away at each other, show-dow
n was inevitable. I remember how cold his eyes were when he stopped being friendly sociable harmless Mick Pearson.

  He wanted a confidential errand done, for a fat fee. He said he had been involved in a little deal abroad. He said it involved options on some old oil tankers, and some sur-plus, obsolete Turkish military vehicles, and all I needed to know about it was that it was legal, and he wasn't wanted, at least officially, by any government anywhere.

  Some other sharpshooters had been trying to make the same deal, he said. They refused to make it a joint effort, as he had suggested, and tried to swing it alone. But Pearson beat them to it and they were very annoyed at his methods. "So they know I've got this bank draft pay-able to the bearer, for two hundred thirty thousand Eng-lish pounds, payable only at the main branch of the Bank of Nova Scotia in the Bahamas, at Nassau, which is the way I wanted it because I've got a protected account there. I didn't want them to find out how I was going to handle it, but they did. It's enough money so they can put some very professional people to work to take it away from me. Long, long ago I might have taken a shot at slipping by them. But now I've got my three gals to think of, and how thin their future would be if I didn't make it. So I have to have somebody they don't know take it to the bank with my letter of instructions. Then they'll give up."