Bright Orange for the Shroud Read online

  Silence. She finished the drink. She clacked the empty glass down. She came up off the couch, moved close, stood tall, fixed me with a poisonous stare, upslanted, fists on hips. “Did I do you a favor coming here?” she said in almost a whisper. “Do you owe me for that, and for one or two other small things I could name? Do you want me to go after them myself? I will, you know. I’m calling you on this one, you big ugly lazy jerk. They smashed him. They gutted him. And there’s no other place he can turn.” Giving emphasis to each word by rapping my chest with a hard knuckle, she said, “You-are-going-to-help-that-man.”

  “Now listen …”

  “And I want a piece of the action, Travis.”

  “I have no intention of …”

  “The first thing we have to do is get him on his feet, and pry every living piece of information out of him.”

  “How about that weekly television thing you …”

  “I’m two tapes ahead, and I can go down there and do three more in one day. Trav, they didn’t leave him a dime! It was some kind of land development thing. Over near Naples.”

  “Maybe by fall …”

  “Travis!”

  By the following Saturday afternoon the Busted Flush was swinging on two hooks in Florida Bay, two miles off Candle Key, all larders stocked, five hundred gallons in the fresh water tanks. With alterations from time to time, I’ve tried to make the old barge-type houseboat ever more independent of shore-side services. Except when home at Bahia Mar, I like to avoid the boat basin togetherness. Under one hatch I have a whole area paved with husky batteries, enough of them so that I can stay at anchor and draw on them for four days before they begin to get a little feeble. When they’re down, I can use them to start up an electric trickle-feed generator which can bring them back up in six hours. If I ever get careless enough to run them all the way down, I can break out the big 10 kw gasoline generator and use it to get the electric one started. At anchor I switch everything over to 32 V. I can’t run the air-conditioning off the batteries, but I can run it off the gas generator. Then it is a decision as to which will be the most annoying, the heat or the noise.

  The sun was heading for Hawaii. Just enough breeze for a pattycake sound against the hull. I was stretched out on the sun deck. A line of pelicans creaked by, beating and coasting, heading home to the rookery. What I had learned so far from Arthur didn’t sound promising. But I comforted myself with thinking that while we were getting him in shape, I was doing myself some promised good. I was on cheese, meat and salad. No booze. No cigarettes. Just one big old pot pipe packed with Black Watch for the sunset hour. Due any time now.

  Every muscle felt stretched, bruised and sore. We’d anchored at mid-morning. I’d spent a couple of hours in mask and fins, knocking and gouging some of the grass beards and corruption off the hull. After lunch I’d lain on the sundeck with my toes hooked under the rail and done about ten sets of situps. Chook had caught me at it and talked me into some of the exercises she prescribed for her dance group. One exercise was a bitch. She could do it effortlessly. You lift your left leg, grab the ankle with your right hand, and play one-legged jump rope with it, over and back. Then switch hands and ankles and jump on the other leg. After that we swam. I could win the sprints. In our distance events, she had a nasty habit of slowly drawing even, and then slowly pulling away, and an even nastier habit of smiling placidly at me while I wheezed and gasped.

  I heard a sound and turned my head and saw her climb the ladderway to the sundeck. She looked concerned. She sat cross-legged beside me. In that old faded pink suit, dark hair in a salty tangle, no makeup, she looked magnificent.

  “He feels kind of weak and dizzy,” she said. “I think I let him get too much sun. It can sap your strength. I gave him a salt tablet, and it’s making him nauseated.”

  “Want me to go take a look at him?”

  “Not right now. He’s trying to doze off. Gee, he’s so damn grateful for every little thing. And it broke my heart, the way he looked in trunks, so scrawny and pathetic.”

  “He eats many lunches like today, it won’t last long.”

  She inspected a pink scratch on a ripe brown calf. “Trav? How are you going to go about it? What are you going to try to do?”

  “I wouldn’t have the slightest idea.”

  “How long are we going to stay here?”

  “Until he has the guts to want to go back, Chook.”

  “But why should he have to? I mean if he dreads it so.”

  “Because, dear girl, he is my reference library. He doesn’t know what very small thing might turn out to be very important, so he doesn’t think of it or mention it. Then when it’s about to go off in my face, he can tell me where the fuse is, which is something he can’t do from a hundred miles away.”

  She looked at me speculatively. “He wants to give up the whole idea.”

  “Okay. Sure.”

  “Damn you!”

  “Sweetie, you can take a good and gentle horse, and you can start using a chain on it. Maybe you turn it into a killer. And maybe you break it right down to nothing, to a trembling hunk of meat. Then can you ever turn it back into a horse? Depends on the blood line. Sometimes you don’t want the victim along. Sometimes, like this time, you have the hunch you’ll need him. I won’t go into this without him. So he has to forget the chain. You’re along to turn him back into a horse, Chook. You’ve got to prop him up. I don’t want you in on any of the rest of it.”

  “Why not?”

  “It sounds just a little too dirty so far.”

  “And I have just walked out the convent gates in my little white pinafore. Come on, Trav!”

  “Miss McCall, the most dangerous animal in the world is not the professional killer. It’s the amateur. When they sense that somebody is taking back what they went to so much effort to acquire, that’s when they get violent. The essentially dishonest man is capable of truly murderous indignation. In this instance, the bitch will be looking on, heightening the performance, looking for blood. I don’t think she’ll relish losing.”

  I sensed mischief as she studied me. “I guess any man would find her pretty exciting.”

  “Hell, it’s exciting to be pushed out a window. Or run over.”

  “And you didn’t have the least little urge, darling? She did sort of have an eye on you.”

  “The scorpion is a very cute little brown bug, the way she plods along with that tail curled over her back. She’s a living fossil, you know, unchanged in millions of years. It’s imaginable that some bug-lover might want to pick one up and stroke her scaly little back.”

  Big brown girl in scanty pink, in Zen-pose on my splendid vinyl imitation of teak. It is real teak on the aft deck below, partially justifying such trickery. Staring dubiously at me. “Men aren’t that bright about those.”

  “Arthur wasn’t.”

  “And what have you got? Radar?”

  “Alarm systems. Bachelor devices to detect poisonous types. One good way is to watch how the other women react. You and the others, when Wilma Ferner was around, all your mouths got a little tight, and you were very very polite to her. And you made no girl talk at all with her. No clothes talk. No date talk. No guided trips to the biff. No girl secrets. Just the way, honey, a woman should be damned wary of a man other men have no use for.”

  That was a little careless, and too close to home. Frankie gives most men the warm sweet urge to hit him heavily in the mouth. Chook’s dark eyes became remote. “If the breeze dies it could get buggy here.”

  “The long-range forecast says we’ll get more wind instead of less.” I rose smartly to my feet. If I’d been alone, perhaps I would have crawled moaning to the sundeck rail and hauled myself up. Vanity is a miracle drug. I could count on three or four more days of torment before, I hoped, the limberness would come back, along with the hardened belly and lost pounds and unjangled nerves.

  As I stretched and yawned, Chookie said, “Hey!” and came to me and in a very gingerly way touched
, with one fingertip, the pink weal below my left armpit. “I didn’t notice that. It’s new, huh?”

  “Aw, it’s just a scratch.”

  “Knife?”

  “Yup.”

  She swallowed and looked ill. “The idea of knives, it makes my stomach turn over. And it makes me think of Mary Lo Ching.”

  While I’d been away on this last one, the one that gave me the funds for a slob summer, an animal had gotten to Mary Lo with a knife. The twins had been working in Miami Beach, in March. They got him in a few hours by rounding up known sex offenders. They’d thought this one harmless. He’d been tucked away a few times for short falls. Peeping, indecent exposure. His profession was fry cook. All the time he was working himself up to a big one, and Mary Lo had been in just the wrong place at the wrong time. He hadn’t been selective. Just the first one he could get to. They didn’t count the wounds. They just said “more than fifty.”

  The psychiatrists call it a sickness. The cops call it a hell of a problem. The sociologists call it a product of our culture, our puritanical tendency to consider sex a delicious nastiness. Some of them escalate to the big violence. Others stay with a small kick, peering into bedrooms. You can’t give a man life for that, nor even constructive psychiatric help during a short sentence. He cuts brush on the county gang, tormented by the other prisoners, driven further into his private madness. Then he comes out and cuts up Mary Lo, and at once everybody is an expert on how he should have been handled by the authorities, up to and including gelding the very first time he committed a nuisance in a public park.

  “Anybody know anything about Mary Li?” I asked.

  “Just that she went back to Hawaii.” Chook stepped back a pace and looked at me from ears to heels as if examining one of the metal sculptures in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art. She shook her head sadly and said, “McGee, I swear, I never really noticed before how many times you’ve been torn up.”

  “This one here happened when I was three. My big brother threw a hammer up into a tree to knock some apples down. The hammer came down too.”

  “Do you like being in a crazy kind of business that gets you so close to being killed?”

  “I don’t like to hurt. Every little nick makes me that much more careful. Maybe I’ll get so careful I’ll have to find some other line of work.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously. Miners get silicosis. Doctors get coronaries. Bankers get ulcers. Politicians get strokes. Remember about the alligators? Honey, if nothing happened to people, we’d all be ass-deep in people.”

  “And I should see what happened to the other guys. Okay, you can’t be serious.” She marched off, and went down the ladderway like a … a dancer going down a ladderway.

  I could be serious in that particular area, but not on her terms. I’d had enough stitches to make a quilt, and had enjoyed not one of them at all, at all. And most floor nurses have a top sergeant syndrome. I went below and packed the promised pipe. Chook was in the stainless steel galley, banging pots. I went through to the guest stateroom where I had quartered myself. Chook had made that decision while we were provisioning the boat, when she brought her gear aboard. She had declared flatly that she wasn’t going to mouse around. All three of us knew she’d slept with Arthur before his marriage, and the huge bed in the master stateroom—the bed that had been there when I’d won the boat—gave her a better chance to keep watch over him, and if he wanted to make something of it, then she was willing to be compliant on the basis of therapy, affection, old time’s sake, morale—call it whatever the hell you feel like calling it, McGee.

  I had told her I avoided putting names on things whenever possible, and I transferred my personal gear and went back to the hot greasy chore of smoothing out the port engine which, after too much idleness, was running hesitantly, fading when I gave it more throttle, complaining that it wanted its jets cleaned.

  By mid-evening, Arthur Wilkinson felt better. It was a soft night. We sat in three deck chairs on the afterdeck, facing the long path of silver moonlight on the black water.

  I overpowered his reluctance and made him go over some of the stuff he had already told me, interrupting him with questions to see if I could unlock other parts of his memory.

  “Like I told you, Trav, I had the idea we were going to go farther away, maybe the southwest, but after we stayed overnight in Naples, she said maybe it would be nice to rent a beach house for a while. Because it was April we could probably find something nice. What she found was nice, all right. Isolated, and a big stretch of private beach, and a pool. It was seven hundred a month, plus utilities. That included the man who came twice a week to take care of the grounds, but then there was another two hundred and fifty for the woman who came in about noon every day but Sunday.”

  “Name?”

  “What? Oh … Mildred. Mildred Mooney. Fifty, I’d guess. Heavy. She had a car and did the marketing and cooking and housework. She’d serve dinner and then leave and do the dishes when she came the next day. So it came to maybe twelve hundred a month for operating expenses. And about that much again for Wilma. Hairdresser and dressmaker, cosmetics, mail orders to Saks, Bonwits, places like that. Masseuse, a special wine she likes. And shoes. God, the shoes! So say in round figures there’s twenty-five hundred a month going out, which would be thirty thousand a year, three times what was coming in. After wedding expenses, and trading for the convertible, I had five thousand cash aside from the securities, but it was melting away so fast it scared me. I estimated it would be gone before the end of June.”

  “You tried to make her understand?”

  “Of course. Wilma would stare at me as if I was talking Urdu. She couldn’t seem to comprehend. It made me feel cheap and small-minded. She said it wasn’t any great problem. In a little while I could start looking around and find something where I could make all the money we’d ever need. I was worried—but it was all kind of indistinct. The only thing that really seemed to count was just … having her. In the beginning, it was so damned … wonderful.”

  “But it changed?”

  “Yes. But I don’t want to talk about that.”

  “Later?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. It all turned into something … quite different. I don’t want to try to explain it.”

  “If I left?” Chook said.

  “No. Thanks, but that wouldn’t make any difference.”

  “Get on with it then. When was the first contact with the land syndicate people?”

  “Late May. She’d gone walking down the beach in the late afternoon, and she came back with Calvin Stebber. Some kid had hooked a shark and as he was fighting it and beaching it with people watching him. That’s how she got in casual conversation with him, and it turned out they knew a lot of the same people, so she brought him back for a drink. Short and heavy and very tan. Always smiling. I’d say he wasn’t much over forty, but he looked older. And he seemed … important. They jabbered away about people I’ve read about. Onassis, Niarchos, people like that. He was very vague about what he was doing. He just said that he’d come down to work out a small project, but it was dragging on a lot longer than he’d estimated. He seemed … fond of Wilma. He wished us happiness.

  “After he left, Wilma got quite excited. She told me that Calvin Stebber was enormously rich and went around making very successful investments in all kinds of things. She said that if we played our cards right, maybe he would let us in on whatever he was doing, and certainly the very least we could expect would be four times our money back, because he was never interested in smaller returns. To tell the truth, it seemed to me like a good way out, if she could swing it. With four times the capital I’d have enough income to keep her the way she wanted to live. Stebber was staying aboard a yacht at the Cutlass Yacht Club, and when he left he asked us to stop by for drinks the next day.

  “The yacht was absolutely huge, maybe a hundred feet long, some kind of a converted naval vessel, I think.”

  “Name an
d registry?”

  “The Buccaneer, out of Tampa, Florida. He said friends had loaned it to him. That’s when I met the other three men in the syndicate.”

  I had to slow Arthur down so that I could get the other three men nailed down, made into separate and distinct people in my mind.

  G. Harrison Gisik. The old one. The sick one. Tall and frail and old and quiet. Bad color. Moved slowly and with apparent great effort. From Montreal.

  Like Stebber, G. Harrison Gisik had no woman with him. The other two each had one. The other two were each local.

  Crane Watts. Local attorney. Dark, goodlooking, friendly. And unremarkable. He came equipped with wife. Vivian. Called Viv. Dark, sturdy, pretty—scored by sun and wind—an athlete. Tennis, sailing, golf, riding. She was, Arthur thought, a lady.

  Boone Waxwell. The other local. From a local swamp, possibly. Sizable. Rough and hard and loud. An accent from way back in the mangroves. Black curly hair. Pale pale blue eyes. Sallowy face. Boone Waxwell, known as Boo. And he came equipped with a non-wife, a redhead of exceptional mammary dimension. Dilly Starr. As loud as good ol’ Boo, and, as soon as she got tight, slightly more obscene. And she got tight quickly.

  “So okay,” I said. “The four members of the syndicate. Stebber, Gisik, Crane, Waxwell. And Stebber the only one living aboard. A party, with Boo and his broad making all you nicer folks a little edgy. So?”

  “We sat around and had drinks. There was a man aboard who made drinks and passed things, a Cuban maybe. Mario, they called him. When Calvin Stebber had a chance, when Dilly was in the head and Boo had gone ashore to buy cigars, he explained to us that sometimes, in deals, you weren’t able to pick your associates on the basis of their social graces. ‘Waxwell is the key to this project,’ he said.”

  “How soon did they let you in on it?” I asked him.

  “Not right away. It was about two weeks. Wilma kept after him, and she kept telling me that he said there wasn’t a chance, that there wasn’t really enough to go around as it was. But she didn’t give up hope. Finally one morning he phoned me from the yacht and asked me to stop by alone. He was alone too. He said I had a very persistent wife. Persistence alone wouldn’t have been enough. But this deal had dragged on so long that one of the principals had backed out. He said he felt obligated to offer it to other associates, but as long as I was on the scene and because he was so fond of Wilma, he had talked Mr. Gisik into agreeing to let me in, with certain stipulations.”