The Dreadful Lemon Sky Read online

  “If you are smashed, maybe you step out.”

  “If you are drunk, you would have opened the door on the driver’s side, wouldn’t you?”

  “I don’t know. But what the hell was she trying to do? Walk to one of those houses and phone? If so, Meyer, would she leave her purse and car keys?”

  “Nice point. Now what?”

  The wrecker stood beside the large gas station across from the entrance to the shopping center. It was a very muscular beast. It was painted bright red. It had warning lights, emergency lights, floodlights, and blinkers affixed to all available surfaces. The big tires stood chest high. The array of winches and cables and reels on the back end of it looked capable of hoisting a small tank up the side of an office building.

  “Something I can do for you?” the bald sunburned man said.

  “I didn’t know they were making them so big.”

  “Mister, when you get a tractor trailer rig totaled across three lanes of an Interstate, you need something big to get it out of the way fast.”

  “Did that go out Wednesday night when that woman got killed just down the road there?”

  His face twisted in pain. He spat and sighed. “Oh, Jesus, yes, it went out. Ray took it out. I had two guys out with flu. That goddamn Ray. You know what the payments run on this brute son of a bitch?” He kicked a high tire.

  “No idea.”

  “Four hundred a month. A month. And Ray, the dummy, has to diagnose. Is he some kind of mechanic already? Hey, he says, no gas. So he puts some in. So what does that cost me? Thirty bucks’ tow charge. Jesus!”

  “Is he around?”

  “Look, what’s your interest in this thing, mister?”

  “It’s a case study project for the Traffic Advisory Council for the State Department of Transportation.”

  “Oh. Well, that’s him at the far island there, checking the oil on the green Cadillac. Just don’t hold him up on working the island, okay? It’s money out of my pocket.”

  Ray was a stumpy nineteen with blue eyes empty of guile and with a face ravaged by acne.

  “Gassy smell? Well, yeah. The way it was, see, I leaned inside to check the gear it was in and the brake. I was glad to see the keys there because it was in park, you know, and I was moving it to N when on account of the gassy smell inside it I looked at the gauge and seen it was empty. I turned the lights on. It’s best at night, a short tow, keep the lights on, all the lights you got. I put gas in, figuring if it would run what’s the sense towing it. I didn’t know the boss would get his ass in such a big uproar about it, see. And I didn’t even think who is going to pay for the couple gallons I put in, or the service call. That made it worse. Jesus, he’s been all over me all the time since Wednesday. I’m about ready to tell him to shove his job.”

  I went to the boss and thanked him and said, “I have to interview the dead woman’s sister. I can give her the bill for the gas and service, if you want.”

  He brightened up. We went into the office. He made out the bill. I looked at it and shook my head and handed it back. “Not like that, friend. Two gallons, not five. Five dollars’ charge, not ten.”

  “So what are you, her brother? Look, the dead lady is in no shape to care what the bills are.”

  “Do you want to take a dead loss or fix the bill?”

  “Everybody is all of a sudden getting weird,” he muttered, and made out a new bill.

  At ten o’clock we were back aboard the Flush, up on the sun deck under hazy stars, in two unfolded deck chairs like old tourists on a cruise ship. The events of the long day had been more abrasive than I had realized while they were happening. I felt a leaden weariness of bone and spirit.

  I whapped a mosquito which tasted the side of my neck and rolled him into a tiny moist gobbet of meat and dropped him out of his life onto the deck. In many ways the Hindu is right. All life in all forms is so terribly transient there is an innocence about all acts and functions of life. Death, icy and irrevocable, is the genuine definition of reality. In my unthinking reflex I was doubtless improving the mosquito breed. If, over a millennium, man whapped every side-of-the-neck biter, maybe the mosquito race would bite only neck napes.

  “Mr. McGee?” the polite voice said from the dock. I got up and walked aft to look down. There was Jason with the Jesus face and wire glasses standing under the dock light in a T-shirt with the short sleeves torn off, ragged blue-jean shorts, and a pair of boat shoes so exquisitely and totally worn out it looked as though he had wrapped his feet neatly in rags.

  “Hi, Jason.”

  “Permission to come aboard?”

  “Come on.”

  He came up the side ladderway like a big swift cat. He accepted a can of beer from the cooler. He had something to say, but he seemed to be puzzling out how to say it. He sat on his heels, on those brown legs bulging with big muscles.

  I finally had to give him some help. “Something bothering you?”

  “Sort of. I mean maybe it isn’t any of my business. What I wouldn’t want is her having a worse time than she’s having already. Okay?”

  “Her being Mrs. Birdsong.”

  “She’s really a great person. If I could have got to the office quicker, maybe the two of us, you and me, we could have grabbed onto Cal and quieted him down. I know how he could get. Did you hit him with anything? Did you pick up anything and hit him on the head?”

  “I sort of hurried him into the wall once. Ralph or Arthur rapped him on the head with a hickory stick, a couple of good licks.”

  “Hey! That’s right. I forgot that part. Then maybe it was from them. Look, can you tell—not you but medical doctors—can they tell which knock on the head did the most damage?”

  Meyer answered. “I don’t think so. Provided, of course, there’s no depressed fracture or anything like that. The brain is a jelly suspended in a lot of protection, and oftentimes the greatest damage happens in the area directly opposite the point of impact. This could be in the form of a subdural hematoma, a bleeding which gradually creates enough pressure inside the brain to suppress the vital functions.”

  “Well, she visited him and then went out and got something to eat and went back and found a half dozen people working on him, but he was dead. There’s going to be an autopsy. She came back in terrible shape. They gave her some pills. She’s asleep now. A girl friend of Oliver’s is sitting with her. Bet you it was a heart attack, or maybe a stroke that didn’t have anything to do with getting hit on the head.”

  My neck was still sprained from being popped on the forehead. I hadn’t enjoyed meeting the fellow, but had not wished him dead.

  “Thanks for letting me know,” I said.

  “It’s okay. I’ve been here the whole two years, you know. He was a pretty great person until he got to boozing real bad. And until just a little while ago, even though he got too drunk when he got drunk, he wouldn’t drink when there was something he had to do that was best done sober. Like when Jack Omaha would hire him to captain.”

  “Jack Omaha!”

  He turned toward me. He was slowly and carefully folding his empty beer can the way somebody might fold a Dixie cup, turning it into a smaller and smaller wad. “You knew Jack?” he said.

  “No. But I heard he took off with a lot of money.”

  “That’s what they say.”

  “You don’t believe he did it?”

  “No. But that’s because somebody told me he didn’t.”

  “Who would that be?”

  “Somebody that knew him better than I did.”

  “Carrie?” I said.

  I heard the air whoosh out of him. He stood up. “Who the hell are you?”

  “Carrie’s friend. When she married Ben Milligan she honeymooned aboard this old barge.”

  “Hey! I remember something about that. Sure. Have you got a great big shower stall aboard, and a big tub? And … uh …”

  “A big bed? All three.”

  He leaned his rear against the rail and stood with an
kles crossed and arms folded.

  “Cheez. That Ben came by a year ago. She was still living at the cottage then. She and Betty Joller and Joanna Freeler and some bird name of Flossie. How come she ever married him, I wouldn’t know.”

  “Nor anybody else. It happens.”

  “Mister America. Mister Biceps. He was in some kind of movie deal they were making up in Jax, probably an X movie. He came down to con some money off of Carrie. He’d done it before. She didn’t have any. He said he would hang around until she got some. Betty came over and got me. It was a Sunday afternoon. Mangrove Lane is right down the shoreline to the south of us. I got there and he was sprawled out in the living room. I told him it was time for him to get on his Yamaha and into his helmet and head north. So we went out into the side yard and he began jumping back and forth and yelling ‘Hah! Hah!’ and making chopping motions. He came toward me and I kept moving back. I picked up the rhythm of the way he was hopping, and when he was up in the air, or starting up, I stepped into him and hit him in the mouth so hard it pushed this middle knuckle back in, and the first thing that hit the sod was the nape of his neck. He jumped up with both hands on his mouth, yelling, ‘Not in the mouth. My God, not my mouth. Oh, God, my career!’ So the girls babied him a little and I stood around until he got on his bike and roared away. I haven’t seen him since. I don’t think Carrie saw him either before she got killed. Are you coming to the service tomorrow morning?”

  “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. “Bertram?”

  “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 Bahama. 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 good-quality, 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!”