Bright Orange for the Shroud (21 page)

“McGee, do I do all the talking?”

“I think she must have been carrying her share in cash. And was killed a few days after she left the motel in Naples while Arthur was off on his bus trip. I’d guess the playmate who
killed her has spent at least twenty-five thousand. Cars, a boat, guns, toys. I’m helping my friend Arthur. If I could come up with a good way of making a recovery from you, I’d give it a try. I take expenses off the top and keep half the net salvage. So moving in on her playmate could be full of ugly surprises, and if I knew how much she was carrying on her, I’d know if there was a balance worth the risk.”

“And if I give you the figure?”

“Then I’d have to figure out whether to tell you who and where. And if you’re lying. Suppose she was carrying just twenty-five. So you tell me a hundred so I will go prodding and maybe get jammed up in a way that will keep me from ever coming back with some cute idea for you. Or maybe I eliminate the playmate, which would satisfy you up for the way he cooked your future plans for Wilma. Or suppose she was carrying a hundred and you tell me it was twenty-five. I say who and where and you send muscle after it.”

He pondered it. “Stalemate again. I see your point. There’s no way I can get you to take my word that the very last thing I would do these days is go after a hijacked take, or send anyone. Risks alarm me, Travis McGee. I have too much to lose. You could check something out. I own twenty percent of the West Harbour Development Corporation. And some other things here and there. Muscle is seldom combined with wits. You seem to be a striking exception. Someone gets killed and the muscle gets tricked into a state’s evidence revelation, and the middleman I would use implicates me. No thanks. Besides, Debra and I are negotiating a score as big as the one Arthur contributed. By falsifying records, bribing minor officials, making some careful changes in old group pictures—school and church—and with the help of some brown contact lenses,
some minor changes in hair and skin texture, we have given Debra an ironclad identity as a mulatto, as a pale-skinned girl who actually did disappear at fourteen. This curious revelation has come as a horrid shock to her young husband of four months, and an even worse shock to her wealthy father-in-law, the ex-governor of a southern state, a fevered segregationist, a man with political ambitions. The positive rabbit test—also faked—is bringing things to a climax. The fat settlement is for divorce, abortion and total silence. There was a real chance they might solve it by having her killed. But Debra is not squeamish. Actually, she takes too many chances. Very good family. She was risk-hunting when I found her. Jumping out of the airplanes, racing overpowered little boats and automobiles, skindiving alone and too deep, potting at cape buffalo with a handgun. She’s incredibly quick and strong. Now she has found something, finally, which satisfies her. The hunt. Along with the constant and very real danger of displeasing me.

“McGee, all I can ask you to do is accept my story of what happened. There was a hundred and thirty-five thousand left in that trustee account for the syndicate in the Naples bank. I arranged in advance for them to have cash available. It is not difficult in Florida where cash is used so often in real estate closings. The day Arthur came up to meet me, my man Harris drove me to Naples. I closed out the account at noon, kept five thousand for incidental expenses and took the balance to that grisly motel room and gave it to Wilma. She was almost packed. We had arranged she would return to Tampa in the car with me in time to catch a Nassau flight. I had her ticket. The money represented the final take for both of us. I gave her the prepared deposit slip for my share. Bahamian banks have a
pleasant policy of never divulging information on an account unless the depositor appears in person and signs a specific authorization. She said she’d made other arrangements, that someone was going to drive her to Miami and she would fly over from there. I made mild objections.”

“And you let her fly off with all that money?”

“She liked money. Without me, she’d have a lot less to spend. We were together fifteen years. Taking cash into the islands is easy. She was shrewd and tough. And far from retirement.”

“So, as I said at first, maybe you’re fattening the figure.”

He called Debra in. I gave them no chance for signals, made her face me with her slender back toward him. She verified the details and the amount, asked no questions, left without a word when he told her to go.

I could have gathered Chookie and left. I doubted he’d have tried anything. But there was an implied obligation. And if he did indeed come after what Boo might have left, it could turn into a diversion I might be able to use.

“Boo Waxwell picked her up at the motel. Arthur went to Waxwell’s place at Goodland and found her there. Boo beat him badly. I jounced Crane Watts around first. I used his name to open Waxwell up. I invented the yarn that Arthur had gone to Watts and told him he’d seen Wilma at Waxwell’s. I said I was trying to set up a similar kind of operation to the way you cleaned Arthur out, and needed the woman. He claimed, wide-eyed, it was a little ol’ waitress friend from Miami. But Arthur remembers Wilma wearing the watch he thought she’d sold in Miami. He wouldn’t invent that. And, of course, he has all his new toys.”

Stebber nodded slowly. “Her usual type. A little more
complex, probably. Whenever she tamed them, that finished it for her. I tried to keep him away from Arthur’s beach house while we were still building the con. Hard man to control. Yes. Of course. It fits. She wouldn’t have waved the money at him. He smelled it somehow.”

Debra knocked and appeared with a blue extension phone. “Crane Watts,” she said. “Do you want to take it in here, darling?”

“Or take it at all? Please.” She stooped lithely, plugged it into a baseboard jack receptacle, brought it to him and drifted out.

In full heat and radiance he said, “How
nice
to hear from you, Crane, my boy! … Start from the beginning. Slow down, boy.… Yes … I see … Please, no assumptions. Confine yourself to the facts.”

Watts talked for a long time without interruption. Stebber made a sad face at me. Finally he said, “That’s enough.
Do
pull yourself together. No person named McGee or named anything else has tried to contact me on that matter. Why should you think in terms of an official investigation? As a lawyer you must know it was a legal business matter. This McGee is probably some sharpshooter who found out Arthur had lost some money in an unwise investment and is trying to shake some of it loose. Tell Waxwell too that neither of you should be so agitated. Please don’t phone me again. I retained you for legal work. It’s finished. So is our association.”

He listened for a short time and said, “The status of your career could not mean less to me, Watts. Please don’t bother me again.”

As he returned the phone to the cradle I could hear the frantic tiny buzzing of Crane’s agitated voice. Frowning, Stebber
said, “Strange that Waxwell should be so eager to bully my phone number out of Watts. He says he gave him the number but not the code—as if he expected congratulations. I would think, if your guess is right, I’d be the last person he’d …”

Changing the pitch and resonance of my voice, I said, “Ol’ Boo make that lawyer boy itchy.”

It astounded and delighted him out of all proportion to the accomplishment. Patience and a good tape recorder can make a respectable mimic out of anyone.

“Maybe someday we could find a project to our mutual advantage,” he said.

“I can think of one right now. Decoy Waxwell up here and keep him here for one full day and I send you ten percent of all we recover.”

“No thanks. I don’t think the man is entirely sane. And he goes by hunch. I wouldn’t risk it. Decoy him with a woman, McGee. The McCall girl could keep him occupied long enough.”

“Let’s say she’s squeamish, Stebber. Loan me Debra for the same cut. Ten percent.”

“I wouldn’t consider it for one …” He stopped suddenly. His shy glance was more obscene than any wink or leer could have been. “If you could have her back in three days. And … if you could leave Miss McCall here with me. As a guarantee of good faith.”

“How bulky would the money be?”

“New hundreds in Federal Reserve wrappers. Thirteen packets, one hundred bills thick. Perhaps not quite enough to fill a fair-sized shoebox. You didn’t answer my question about Miss … Chookie.”

“Given a choice, given time to think, I imagine she’d pick Boo Waxwell.”

“Why give her a choice, dear boy? You’d find Debra charming company. And I can assure you few men make the impact on her you’ve already made. And when you get Miss Chookie McCall back, you’d find her quite anxious to be agreeable, and not at all contentious. Truly effective disciplines, McGee, leave the loveliness untouched and the soul just an interestingly bit queasy and apprehensive. It’s a superimposed useful anxiety.”

“Speaking for Miss McCall, no thanks.”

“Someday, perhaps,” he said and went and called the girls. They came walking slowly back into the big room, and I saw Chook wearing an odd expression, Debra looking secretively amused.

They both walked us out to the elevator, all charm and assurance, convincing us we were lovely people who had stopped in for a lovely drink. As the elevator door closed, my final look at them showed their gracious smiles, the smiles of an elegant couple, tastefully appointed, mannerly. And virulent as coral snakes.

Chook stayed lost in her silence and did not explode until we were a half mile away. “Girl talk!
Girl
talk! do you know what that skinny bitch was doing? She was trying to … to
recruit
me. Like a gawdam Marine poster. See the world. Learn a trade. Retire in your prime.”

“Recruit you as what?”

“She didn’t say right out. She inspected me like a side of meat and said I was prime. Too bad I was wasting myself in such hard work for so little money. Damn it, I make
good
money. Men, she said, the right kind of men, could get so expensively
intrigued with a big, dark, fierce-looking girl like me. And that man, Trav. He made me feel weak and silly and young, and he made me feel anxious to make him like me. At first. But at the end there, I was thinking how nice it would be to squash him like a bug. They scare me, Trav. In a way I don’t think I’ve been scared since I was a kid, when my grandmother got me so worked up about white slavers, if I saw two men standing on a street corner, I’d cross the street so they couldn’t jab me with a needle and sell me to the Arabs. Trav, if we have to have anything to do with those people, something really awful might happen. My God, Trav, you should see the clothes she’s got. Furs and originals and nine drawers of undies and a shoe rack, I swear to God, with a hundred pair of shoes at least. And all the time she was kind of laughing at me inside, as if I was a dumb oaf of a girl, a nudnik. What
happened
, Travis?”

“In short form, he confirms the hunch Waxwell killed her. She was carrying her share and his of Arthur’s money. She was to put his end in a Nassau bank account. A hundred and thirty thousand dollars. I think he already had taken a fat slice of the rest of it. Everybody else had been paid off. But he writes her off and the money off. He wants no part of it. He says. Maybe I believe him. I don’t know. He might send somebody down. We have to play it that way.”

“A hundred and thirty thousand!” she exclaimed.

“Less what old Boo has blown, rough guess, eighty-five or ninety left.”

“But that’s good, isn’t it? Isn’t that better than anything you expected?”

“Putting my hands on any part of it, Chook, is going to be better than I expected. And I haven’t done that yet.”

It was after nine at night when I parked at the marina and we went aboard the
Busted Flush
. No light showed. I had the irrational hunch that something had gone wrong. Maybe I had been exposed to too much calculated deviousness for one day. But as I flicked the lounge lights on, there was Arthur slouched on the big yellow couch. He had a tall glass in his hand, dark enough for iced coffee. He gave us a big crooked glassy grin, hoisted the glass in such an enthusiastic salute of welcome that a dollop of it leapt out and splashed his shirt. “Warra sharra numun!” he said.

Chook stood over him, fists on her hips. “Oh boy! You’ve done it real good, huh?”

“Shawara dummen huzzer,” he said, in pleased explanation.

She took the glass out of his hand, sniffed it, set it aside. She turned to me. “As you remember, it doesn’t take much. The
poor silly. It was such a strain to be shut up here all this time.” She took his wrist, braced herself. “Upsy-daisy, darling.”

She got him up but with a wide loving grin, he enfolded her in big arms and, utterly slack, bore her over and down with a mighty thud of their combined weights. Chook worked free and stood up, rubbing a bruised haunch. Arthur, still smiling, cheek resting on his forearm, emitted a low buzzing snore.

“At least,” she said. “It’s not what I’m used to. A happy drunk.”

Between us we stood him up, draped him soddenly over my shoulder. I dumped him into the big bed. “Thanks, Trav. I’ll manage from here,” she said, and began to unbutton his shirt, looking up from the task to give me a slightly rueful smile. “Rich warm memories of Frankie Durkin,” she said. “But there the trick was to keep from getting a split mouth or a fat eye before he folded.”

Up on the sundeck I heard the sound of the shower, and a little while later she came climbing up into the night warmth in her robe, bringing two beers.

“Rockaby baby,” she said. “Tomorrow he’ll be a disaster area.” She sat beside me. “And what now, Captain?”

“Confusion. I was thinking that, at the right distance, in the right garments, you might pass as Vivian Watts, tennis player. And if Viv left a message for old Boo to join her in assignation at some far place, it might intrigue him. But it won’t fit together. The odds are she despises Waxwell and he knows it. Then it struck me that she could properly blame Waxwell for her husband’s downhill slide. And she might leap at the chance to give him a bruise if there was a chance of
a piece of money to square all overdue accounts and have enough left over to move along to a place where Crane Watts could start all over again. That means sounding her out. Quietly and soon. But with something specific. That’s as far as I’ve gotten.”