Bright Orange for the Shroud (23 page)

As she gathered up her gear, I picked the words that would, I hoped, pry open a closed mind. “Vivian, I wouldn’t ask your husband’s advice on a parking ticket, believe me.”

She straightened up, those very dark blue eyes becoming round with surprise and indignation. “Crane is a
very
good attorney!”

“Maybe he was. Once upon a time. Not now.”

“Who
are
you? What do you
want
?”

“I want to form a little mutual aid society with you, Vivian. You need help and I need help.”

“Is this … help I’m supposed to get, is it just for me or for Crane too?”

“Both of you.”

“Of course. I get him to do some nasty little piece of crooked work for you, and it will make us gloriously rich and happy.”

“No. He did his nasty little piece of crooked work last year, and it didn’t do either of you any good.”

She began to walk slowly, thoughtfully, off toward the distant entrance to the women’s locker room, and I walked beside her. She had been laboring in the sun for three hours. Under the faded cosmetic and deodorant scents of a fastidious woman was an animal pungency of work-sweat, a sharpness not unpleasant, the effluvium of ballet school and practice halls.

“What I can offer, if things can be worked out, is a long odds chance and a suggestion. I think he’s whipped himself here. I think you’re both whipped. If you had some cash, right now, you should settle up what you owe around here and get out. Try it again in a new place. What is he? Thirty-one? There’s time. But maybe he’s lost you along the way, and you’re not interested.”

Under the shade of big pines the path narrowed and I dropped behind her. Her back was straight and strong, and the round of her sturdy hips, in tempo with the smooth brown muscular flex of her calves, gave the tennis skirt a limber sway. She stopped suddenly and turned around to face me. Her mouth, free of the tautness of disapproval, was softened and younger. “He hasn’t lost me. But don’t play games. Don’t play cruel games, Travis. I don’t know what’s been going on. He says he got into something and he didn’t know it was a bad thing until too late.”

Sometimes you have to aim right between the eyes. “He knew from the start. He knew it was fraud, with a nice little sugar coating of legality. They paid him well, and he helped them screw a man named Arthur Wilkinson out of a quarter of a million dollars. It got around, Vivian. Who’d trust him now? He’s terrified that somebody is going to wipe off the pretty icing and expose the fraud. He consorted with con artists and trash like Boone Waxwell, went into it with his eyes
open for the sake of what he thought was going to be twelve thousand five. But he doesn’t have the nerve to be a good thief. He began to shake apart. They kissed him off with seven thousand five, knowing he didn’t have the nerve to get hard-nosed about it. And if he keeps dithering around spilling his guts to strangers like me, maybe they’ll get so tired of him they’ll send somebody around to put a gun in his hand when he’s passed out, and stick the barrel in his ear.”

She wobbled on those good legs, and her color went sick under the tan. She moved off the path and sat, quite heavily, on a cement and cypress bench, staring blindly through the shade toward the bright sea. Her mouth trembled. I sat beside her, watching that unhappy profile.

“I … I guess I knew that he knew. Sunday night, after Waxwell left, he swore on his word of honor Waxwell had been lying, trying to needle us by all those little hints that Crane had been in on something all along.”

She turned and looked at me in a pleading way, her color getting better, and said, “What makes him so
weak
?”

“Maybe what’s left of your good opinion of him is the only thing he has left, Vivian. Would you still want to try to save it?”

“His best friend at Stetson, his roommate, wanted Crane to quit here and go in with him in practice in Orlando. He might still … I don’t know. And I don’t know about me even. I think if I could get him straightened out again, then it would be time to decide about me.”

“If what I want to ask you to do works out, I want you and your husband to be ready to leave any moment, to get ready so you can leave. Arrange the big things later, like getting rid of the house and so on.”

“Right now our equity in that might buy one day’s groceries,” she said bitterly. “One way or another, I can make him do it.”

“How much would it take to clean up your bills here and give the two of you say a month or six weeks a good long way from here, in some hideout. Don’t look so skeptical. You wouldn’t be hiding from the law. It would be a chance to get him dried out. And then he might begin to make more sense to himself, and you.”

“My father left me a cabin on a couple of acres of ridge land near Brevard, North Carolina. On Slick Rock Mountain. It’s so lovely up there. You can look out across ridge after ridge, all gray-blue in the distance. Wood fires on summer nights.” Her mouth twisted. “We honeymooned there, several thousand lifetimes ago. How much to settle up here? I don’t know. He’s been so secretive. Maybe we owe more than I know. I’d think three or four thousand dollars. But there might be other debts.”

“And getting started in Orlando later on. Call it ten.”

“Ten thousand dollars! What could I do that would be worth ten thousand dollars to anyone? Who do I have to kill?”

“You have to be bait, Vivian. To lure Boone Waxwell out of his cave and keep him out for as long as you can, a full day minimum, more if we can manage it.”

Those good shoulders moved slowly up. She locked her hands, closed her eyes and shuddered. “That man. God, he makes my flesh crawl. The few times I’ve ever seen him, he’s never taken his eyes off me. And he acts as if he and I have some special secret we share. All those little smirks and chuckles and winks, and the way he struts around me, puffing his chest and rolling his shoulders, laughing with a little snorting
sound, like a stallion. And he puts double meanings in everything he says to me. Honestly, I freeze completely. He makes me feel naked and sick. That pelt of hair sticking out of the top of those ghastly shirts, and all that black hair on the backs of his hands and fingers, and that sort of … oily intimacy in his voice, it all makes my stomach turn over. Travis, if what you have in mind involves his … even touching me in any way, no. Not for ten thousand dollars, not for ten thousand dollars a minute.” She tilted her head, looking at me in a puzzled way. “It isn’t because I’m … prissy or anything. No other man has affected me that way. I am certainly not … unresponsive.” And the wryness around her mouth. “Of course I haven’t been able to check that in some time. When one becomes a very infrequent convenience for a drunk, an accommodation, the opportunity for any kind of response is very goddam rare.”

A dime of sunlight came through the pine branches overhead, glowed against the firm and graceful forearm, showing the pattern of fine golden hair against the dark skin. She shook her head. “It’s like nightmares when you’re a kid. I think that if Boone Waxwell ever … got me, I might walk around afterwards and look just the same, but my heart would be dead as a stone forever. Oh, I guess I’d make nifty bait all right. He did everything but paw the ground Sunday night.”

“The point is to make him think you have gone to a place where he can get at you. A far place, that’ll take him a long time to get to. And a long time to get back when he finds it was a trick, and when he gets back, both of you will be gone. But you can’t let your husband in on it. Because in his present condition, Waxwell can spread him open like a road map. We have to make Crane believe you
have
gone to a specific
place, and somehow give Waxwell the idea of prying it out of him.”

“Then you can get the money, while he’s gone off after me.”

“I had the idea you’d be just this quick and bright, Vivian.”

“The money … Crane helped steal?”

“A good part of it.”

“But then it’s still stolen money, isn’t it?”

“Not when, this time, you get it with the blessing of the man they took it from.”

“The man you’re working for?”

“In a sense. Arthur Wilkinson. And I think he should tell you in person that he approves the arrangement. You think of how we can best set it up, this decoy operation. Maybe Arthur and I can meet you tonight.”

“I could have some specific plan by then, I think, Travis. You could come to the house at eleven.”

“What about your husband?”

“The big suspense in my life every evening is whether he’ll pass out in his big leather chair or totter to bed first. I try to cut down the intake. I make his drinks, on demand. It is a delicate problem. If I make them too weak, he comes blundering out into the kitchen and snarls at me and puts another big slug in the glass. He stares at television and doesn’t see a thing or remember a thing. It’s no problem, really. Tonight I’ll make them strong, and frequent. And by eleven you could march a fife and drum corps through without him missing a snore. When he passes out, I’ll put the light on over the front door.” She took a very deep breath, let it out in a sigh. “Maybe it
can
work. Maybe people can go back and start the race a second time.”

Back aboard the
Flush
I was in time for lunch only because Chook had delayed it until there was an improved chance of Arthur keeping it down. He was wane and humble, reeking of guilt, his eyes sliding away from any direct glance.

“All these empty boats around us,” he said. “I don’t know. I kept hearing things. A little creak or a thump, after it got dark. Each time I
knew
he was sneaking aboard. And I knew what he has to do, Trav. He has to get rid of everybody who can link him with Wilma. And I
saw
her there. I went back and forth in the lounge in the dark, with the loaded gun, and I’d peer out the windows and see things, see some shadow duck across an open space over there, coming closer. I felt I could empty the gun right into him and he’d come right on at me, laughing. He certainly found out the name and description of this boat, and I just
knew
he’d hunted until he’d found it. Then I thought a drink would give me some confidence. And one didn’t. But the second one worked so good, I thought three would be even better. Hell, I can’t even remember what I
did
with the gun. We hunted all over. Chook found it. In a corner up against a locker. I must have dropped it and kicked it. I’m a lot of help to everybody.”

Chook stepped from the galley to the dining booth and glowered down at him. She wore pale blue stretch pants that rode low on her hips, and a red bikini top so narrow that only a perfect adjustment, which she attained but seldom, kept the umber nipple areas entirely covered. Half-leaning over the booth in that cramped area, in the glow of sun off the water shining through the ports, it seemed an almost overpowering amount of bare girl.

“Why don’t you go sit in the garden and eat worms, lover?” she demanded. “Your self-pity rends my girlish heart. You got
drunk, a condition so rare you can find it only in medical books. God’s
sake
, Arthur!”

“I got terrified.”

“That man beat you within an inch of your life, with Wilma watching it and enjoying it, and if that railing hadn’t broken, maybe he would have killed you. Do you think a thing like that shouldn’t leave a mark?” She hissed with exasperation. “Since when is it a sin to be scared? Am I going to move out of your bed because you can get frightened? Are people going to spit on you on the street? Drop this
boy scout
bit. Every day in every way, nine out of ten people in this big fat world are scared pissless. You have some obligation to be different? Even the mighty McGee isn’t immune, believe me. God’s
sake
, Arthur!”

She strode back into the galley area, made a vicious banging of copper pots.

“Wow,” Arthur said in a low tone of awe.

“She’s right,” I said. “And tonight you get another chance to get a little jumpy, Arthur. You and I are going calling.”

His throat slid up and down in a large dry swallow. He put his shoulders back. “Fine!” he said heartily. “Just fine! Looking forward to it.”

Chook appeared with a big scarred pewter plate for each of us, banged them down. “Huevos rancheros,” she said. “There’s enough chili in those eggs, love, and enough heat in that sausage to give your stomach something brand new to think about.” She brought her own plate and slid in beside him. “Ours are merely hot, my lamb. Yours is volcanic. And choke it down or you’ll wear it like a hat. It’s an old home remedy for the squeams.”

Arthur made it. It was a noble effort. It gave him tears, the
snuffles and the sweats, and frequent glares of astonished agony before snatching at the soothing blandness of buttered bread.

“You briefed him?” I asked her when we’d finished.

“On the whole thing, at least when he wasn’t clattering off to go whoops.”

“Cut it out, Chookie!” Arthur said firmly. “Enough is enough. Let’s drop it for good.” He stared her in the eye.

Suddenly she grinned, nodded, patted his arm. “Welcome back to the human race.”

“Glad to be aboard,” he said politely.

“Wilma’s background too?” I asked.

“It’s so strange,” Arthur said. “I never knew her at all, did I? I realized something odd today. I can see her very vividly, the way she stood and sat and walked. But in every memory, she’s turned away from me. I can’t bring her face back at all. I can remember the color of her eyes, but I can’t see them. So now somebody I never knew is dead. And … she was married to somebody I didn’t know very well. I see two strangers living in that beach house. Does that make any sense?”

“It does to me,” Chook said. “Trav, please, what happens tonight? Until you’re both back safe, I’ll be half out of my mind. Please tell me.”

It was very close to eleven when I turned the dark green sedan onto Clematis Drive. The other houses were dark. There were more vacant lots than houses. As I approached the Watts home I saw that the light over the front door was not on. And so I touched the gas pedal again and started by saying to Arthur, “I guess lawyer boy is still semiconscious.”