The Scarlet Ruse (21 page)

She might be impressed were I to cruise into Tallabea Bay and describe to her the one and a half billion tons of untreated wastes from Commonwealth-Union Carbide which put a two-foot coat on the bottom of the bay. Or we could take a tour up into the mountains to watch how the trade winds carry the bourbon-colored stink of petrochemical stacks through the passes all the way to Mayaguez, ninety miles from the refineries. While in the hills, we could check and see if Kennecott Copper and American Metal Climax have started to strip-mine the seven square green tropic miles of high land which they covet.

It might have made quite an impression.

"Can we start now? Can we?"

"It's full dark on an outgoing tide. The morning is good enough. In the morning I can take the Flush back out the way we came and leave her in storage at Regal Marine. Abandon her and it attracts too much attention. The Coast Guard would get in the act and Civil Air Patrol and guide boats and so on. Then we can go on from there."

"Okay. I feel so much better. I'm so glad we had this frank talk, darling.

"I guess we accomplished a lot."

"Oh, we did!" She lifted the train case back out of the way and hitched over to me and put a shy kiss near my mouth. I held her and looked past her hair at the manila envelope I still held in my right hand.

Poor helpless little critter. Sharing her wealth, but only on a temporary basis. Only until she could find the right time and place to slip an icepick into my brain through whatever orifice seemed handiest.

"Shouldn't we have a drink to celebrate?" she asked.

Of course, of course. She trotted to the galley to make the drinks. I changed into khakis and a white T-shirt and went to the lounge. As she came smiling in with the drinks, I said, "If Frank were to come here tonight…"

She jerked and lost some of my drink on the back of her hand and on the carpeting as she was handing it to me. "Jesus! Don't come on like that, will you?"

"Hypothetical question. Would he come alone?"

She sat opposite me and pondered it. "I don't know. It depends. He's the kind of guy who likes all the odds his way. I’d say this. If he didn't come here alone, he'd leave alone. There isn't any such thing as trusting people, not when it's worth money to them to put a knife in your back. What he'd probably do, he'd fake one of his slobs into thinking it was some other kind of deal, and when it was done, he'd drop the slob right beside us."

"Is he really as rough as you seem to think?"

"You've got me nervous. Is it okay to pull those curtains across? I don't like all that black looking in at us."

"Go ahead."

She pulled all the heavy curtaining and turned off two of the four lights. She sat beside me and said, "That's a lot better." She touched my glass with hers. "Happy days," she said.

"Happy days, Mrs. McDermit."

"Is it like a joke, the way you keep calling me that?"

"I guess it's like a joke."

"The best thing would be if Frank did come here and we were ready and waiting and we took him."

"Would he be hard to take?"

"You better believe it. He's a freak. He knows it all- judo, knives, guns, everything. Like a hobby. And he is fabulously strong. Not just ordinary strong, but special, the way some people are. He can hold his hand out like this, all his fingers spread, and put four bottle caps between his knuckles, here, here, and here, and the last one between his thumb and the side of this finger. Then he can slowly make a fist and bend every cap double. Don't look at me like that. It isn't a trick. He has to be careful to place them right, or they can cut into his flesh. There's another thing he does. You know the kid game, you put both hands out palm up and the other person puts their hands palm down on top of yours and tries to yank them out of the way before you can turn your hands over and slap the backs of their hands? I've never seen anybody fast enough to slap him or fast enough to get out of his way. And, wow, does he ever slap! He told me once that when he was fifteen years old, he was a bouncer. He never had to hit anybody, he said. He just took hold of them above the elbow and walked them out, and they always went. They couldn't use that arm for a few days either."

"Good with guns?"

"Not fast-draw stuff. Not like that. He has these custom guns, like he had one in the car he showed me once, like a rifle, with a place for his hand to fit perfectly, carved out to fit his hand. And a telescope fastened to it, with a lot of straps and gadgets. He said he makes his own loads. He belongs to clubs where they shoot at targets, and he wins cups and medals. Do you know what he told me? He said he could put a ten-penny nail into a tree, hammer it in and leave a half-inch sticking out, and he could stretch out on the ground a hundred yards away and drive it in with his first shot every time. I said I didn't believe it. He said he'd show me, but he never did."

"He may yet."

"Will you please stop that! It makes my skin crawl. And it's getting too cold in here. Can you do something about it before my teeth start chattering?"

I went over and turned the thermostat down. The deeper voice of the compressor stopped. The generator chugged on. I heard a wind sound and a faint shift of the bulk of the Flush. I took Mary Alice out onto the deck to prove to her the bugs had been blown away. We went up onto the sun deck. There were ragged clouds obscuring and revealing a third of a moon. I could see a considerable distance by moonlight. The flats stretched out in every direction, mud flats, sand flats, grass flats, dotted with the mystery shapes of mangrove islands, from handkerchief size on up to fifty acres.

It was not a reassuring vista. It was not terrain I could protect easily. The obvious way to get at me would be to keep in direct line with the nearer islands, pick a close one, come up behind it, wade out the flats to the edge of the mangrove and then settle down and wait, with a clear field of fire through the shiny green leaves and the gnarled branches and roots.

I would be able to tell better by daylight, but the nearest one big enough to use as a screen for a long approach seemed to be at just about nail-driving distance.

"I don't like places like this," said the lady.

"You won't be here long."

"Hurray."

I went back down the ladderway and out to the aft deck. I stripped down to my boat shoes and went over on the shallow side and walked the bow anchor and stern anchor out to a better angle. I climbed aboard the Muсequita and unsnapped part of her cover, enough to get a small hook out and make it fast to a stern cleat before I walked it back to where she would ride quietly.

I got back aboard the Flush by getting up onto the diving shelf permanently affixed to the transom just above water level, then climbing up the two folding metal steps, and swinging over the rail. She watched me dry myself on my T-shirt and said, "How can you stand to go down into all that black guck? There could be stuff down in there that bites?"

I pulled the T-shirt back on and picked up the pants. They had lost some weight. I spun her and got her throat into the crook of my arm and felt around until I came upon the outline of the little automatic, pouched down into her groin. She stabbed back at my eyes, and I tightened up on her breathing until she was pulling at my arm with both hands. I slid my free hand down inside the jeans and found the gun and pulled it out. I spun her back away from me. She thumped into the bulkhead, coughed until she gagged, and said, "I'll feel better if I've got it. Please?"

"Sorry."

"You creaked my neck. You know that?"

"Sorry."

"I wouldn't shoot you with it. You know better than that."

I went in. She followed me, complaining. Now her throat felt sore. I didn't have to be so rough. Some kind of bug had bitten her on the forehead out there. See the lump it made? Why are you carrying your pants? Put them on. You look ridiculous. I went to the head to get away from her, picking up my manila envelope en route. It was the same heft, but I looked inside, just in case. All apparently in order. All yours, Hirsh, Deo volente.

Ever since one Boo Waxwell nearly brought me and friends to an untimely end aboard this same Flush, Meyer and I have improved many an idle hour trying to add surprises to the furnishings. They have to be unexpected and not complicated. Meyer is very good at it. I opened one of his. It is quick and easy. You open the medicine cabinet. It is set into a double bulkhead. The bottom shelf seems to be a part of the outer frame of the cabinet itself. But if you take the stuff off it and push it up against the pull of a friction catch, it opens like the lid of a box. I reached down in there and took out the oily Colt Diamondback, checked the load, put it back, and put its far smaller and weaker cousin beside it. The recess was deep enough to stand the envelope on end where it would not touch the weapons. I slapped the lid down, put toilet articles back on it, and shut the cabinet. Invisible hinges, a very sturdy catch, a nice deep dry hole. One of the better efforts.

I had to do some thinking before I got back out in range of Mary Alice's noisy petulance.

I knew she had no idea of where we had come from, what our direction had been coming in. So if I headed in the wrong direction, she would not object. I wanted more open space than I had. If I could go gently aground, or appear to be aground, with a half mile of open flats on every side, I might lure the marksman close enough to equalize our skills. Like within ten feet? Topsides, in the bin, on its brackets, was the old Springfield shark rifle with the four-power scope, but the barrel was slightly keyholed and the slugs had a tendency to tumble.

She made him sound like he kept popping out of a phone booth in a funny cape and zooming into the sky. I had seem him. All right, so he looked very impressive. Our very short acquaintanceship had been interesting so far. Especially the way I had kept taking his money. And his girl.

He could use an island for a screen, and he could use Meyer, just to see if he could verify Meyer's ill will toward me. He might bring Davis along, the one with the dark moustache. Expendable? Who knows? Murder and arson. Boats burn hot. Four can fry as cheaply as three. One good thrust with a gun butt or a solid smash with a piece of pipe and you can forget about using the family dentist to identify his work.

No, stasis was not my style. The more I thought of ways and means, the less I liked it. Running is no good either, unless it is the kind of running where you circle back and come out on the trail right behind the hunter. So tomorrow I take the Muсequita, and I wait just as close to Regal Marine as I can get. Hello there, Frank. Looking for anybody in particular?

She rattled the latch on the door to the head. "What are you doing in there anyway?"

"Thinking."

I heard her mumble as she walked away. I came out and made another drink and fixed us something to eat. She had stopped complaining. She looked thoughtful. No thanks, she did not want to play any music. No, no gin rummy, thanks.

"Trav?"

"Yes, honey."

"You don't want to ask me anything else about anything?"

"I don't think so."

"It's all cleared up in your mind?"

"I think so."

"Well… okay."

She began yawning. She came over and wanted to be taken off to bed. I told her to take herself off. She went pouting away to her own bed. I stayed up a little while trying to tell myself that everything was going to work out just right, like everything always had, almost.

But I could not get into it. I am apart. Always I have seen around me all the games and parades of life and have always envied the players and the marchers. I watch the cards they play and feel in my belly the hollowness as the big drums go by, and I smile and shrug and say, Who needs games? Who wants parades. The world seems to be masses of smiling people who hug each other and sway back and forth in front of a fire and sing old songs and laugh into each others faces, all truth and trust. And I kneel at the edge of the woods, too far to feel the heat of the fire. Everything seems to come to me in some kind of secondhand way which I cannot describe. Am I not meat and tears, bone and fears, just as they? Yet when most deeply touched, I seem, too often, to respond with smirk or sneer, another page in my immense catalog of remorses. I seem forever on the edge of expressing the inexpressible, touching what has never been touched, but I cannot reach through the veil of apartness. I am living without being truly alive. I can love without loving. When I am in the midst of friends, when there is laughter, closeness, empathy, warmth, sometimes I can look at myself from a little way off and think that they do not really know who is with them there, what strangeness is there beside them, trying to be something else.

Once, just deep enough into the cup to be articulate about subjective things, I tried to tell Meyer all this. I shall never forget the strange expression on his face. "But we are all like that!" he said. "That's the way it is. For everyone in the world. Didn't you know?"

I tried to believe him. But belief is a very difficult feat when you crouch out here in the night, too far from the fire to feel its heat, too far from the people to hear the words of their songs.

I have learned to trust my undefined anxieties. They are sentinels standing guard. I must find out if they are being alerted by shadows or by reality. If they cry wolf nineteen times and on the twentieth time it is a real wolf, it is better to check every time than roll over and go back to sleep and lose your throat.

I moved naked through the familiar degrees of darkness of the known spaces of my home-place. The door to the other stateroom stood open. I moved two steps into the room and listened and heard a small snorting sound at the end of each inhalation and a long flaccid rattle of the soft palate during exhalation. She was in sleep. A man will sometimes imitate snoring to feign sleep, a woman never. My eyes were used to the darkness by then, and in the faint starlight of the port I could make out the dark blur of her hair on the pillow, then a suggestion of profile. She was sleeping on her back.

Before going to bed, I had checked all the locks, all the security devices. There was no way to deactivate them without starting up a klaxon that would whoop the birds awake three islands away. I wondered if someone had come aboard over a side rail and the shift of weight had turned on my silent, subjective alarm system.

In retrospect, Frank Sprenger seemed strangely more impressive. The blueberry eyes stared out from the sun-browned folds of skin. His neck seemed broader than his skull. I went back to my stateroom and pulled a pair of shorts on. It is strange how a man, totally naked, feels a little more vulnerable. It seems to be a distraction, an extra area to guard. Cloth is not armor, yet that symbolic protection makes one feel at once a little more logical and competent. Doubtless the hermit crab is filled with strange anxieties during those few moments when, having outgrown one borrowed shell, he locates another and, having sized it carefully with his claws, extracts himself from the old home and inserts himself into the new. The very first evidence of clothing in prehistory is the breechclout for the male.

When I had rolled from the bed, I had plucked the Air-weight from its handy bedside holster without conscious thought. I put it back where it belonged and got the M35 Browning out of the locker. It is a 9mm automatic pistol with a staggered box magazine, so that it has a fourteen-round capacity. It fits my hand, and I like it. It goes where I point. The way to get that instinctive relationship with a handgun is to tape a pencil flashlight with a very narrow beam to the barrel, exactly in line with it, and rig it so that you can comfortably turn the beam on for an instant with thumb or finger. Then stand in a room in the dusk, turn and fire, spin and fire, fall and fire, at the lamp, the corner of the picture, the book on the table, a magazine on the floor. Point naturally as if pointing the forefinger, arm in a comfortable position, never bringing it up to the eye to aim. An hour of practice can develop an astonishing accuracy. After that you practice in a secluded place with live rounds.

I am being turned off handguns. Meyer did it. He made three casual statements, apropos of gun legislation. He said, "The only two things you can kill with a handgun are tin cans and people." And he said, "Way over half the murders committed in this country are by close friends or relatives of the deceased. A gun makes a loud and satisfying noise in a moment of passion and requires no agility and very little strength. How many murders wouldn't happen, if they all had to use hammers or knives?" And he said, "Studies have shown that if a person is not a psychopath, not a soldier, not a cop, there is only a one in ten chance they can bring themselves to fire a gun directly at a robber."

So there has been a diminishing pleasure in the look and the feel of handguns and in the ability to use them. I am even beginning to dislike the shape and feel and smell of them. But as long as I pursue a career in my version of the salvage business, I am going to affront people who yearn to read my obituary. So the weapons are tools of a precarious trade. Just as, I suppose, a carnival fire-swallower might find it useful to keep some fire extinguishers handy. He might even hate fire extinguishers because they are reminders that something might go wrong, but unless he is an idiot, he will keep them within reach, fully charged, and know how to use each one.

Out on the deck I was in a brighter world. I kept to the heavier patches of shadow. I made two circuits, stopping, listening, waiting. The damp wind was out of the north, warm and steady. A nightbird went by, shouting of doom in a hoarse, hopeless voice, even laughing about it.

I eased back into the lounge and reset the master switch and listened again. It was almost four in the morning. I tucked the pistol into the belly band of the shorts, the metal slightly cooler than the night air. I knew I had taken on a load of adrenalin that would take an hour to be so totally absorbed I could sleep. As I neared my bed, I heard her speak in her sleep. "Marf? Shugunnawg. Whassa-whummer?"

I went in. She whined, rolled her head back and forth, whined again, and turned onto her side. So one of those words had probably alerted the sentinels and turned on the alarms. She was down inside her head, asking questions.

I sat on the bed, put my hand on her shoulder, and shook her. She came fumbling up the dark ladder. "Wha-shawanname, Frank? Crissake. Oh. Whassamarra?"

"You were having a nightmare."

"Come on, McGee. I never even dream."

"Everybody dreams, M.A. Some people remember more than others. You were talking. You woke me up."

"Talking? The hell you say. What about?"

"Asking questions. But not in any language the world has ever known."

"How do you know they were questions?"

"Rising inflection. Marf? Whassawhummer?"

"Oh boy. Marf. Where are you? Oh. Well, anyway, I asked questions. You certainly didn't ask many."

"What do you mean?"

"You're looking down at me from somewhere, and I can't see you. Come down here some." She pulled at me. I stretched out and put my feet up. She put her head on my shoulder and rested a fist on my chest "You know what I mean about questions," she said.

"Do I?"

"You're so tricky. You know? You left me waiting for the other shoe to drop. Like anybody would think you would ask about how come Jane got the other stockbook printed with Frank's name."

"I assumed you asked her, saying you'd run out soon."

"Sort of like that. I asked for spares for all the investment accounts, because Lighthouse stopped making that kind, and if they had names on, we wouldn't make a mistake and sell them out of stock. Well… what about me telling you she poisoned me?"

"Window dressing. You were sick one day. And remembered it later, when you needed more window dressing. And those numbers on the sheets to indicate arrangement were for your own benefit in making up the junk book. And you invented that bit about how upset she was long ago and about her talking about going away. You can't check anything out with a dead lady. She can't verify conversations. And people have smashed up a house to conceal a search."

"Okay. You're so smart about everything, aren't you? You didn't even have to ask me about how much more I knew about the whole thing, did you?"

I stopped breathing for about two seconds and hoped that it had not been noticed and interpreted. If I were to ever be certain, I had to make the whole thing seem casual, unremarkable. I had to make my indifference persuasive. So I yawned widely and noisily and turned toward her, stripping the coverlet down below her hips, the better to hold and stroke and caress her.

"Hey, no problems, huh?" she said.

I slipped the pistol under the pillow. I yawned again. "No more questions about old Jane, honey. I know you killed her."

She turned her mouth away from me, stiffened, caught my moving wrist, held me still. "You are so damned sure," she whispered.

"Forget it," I said. I worked on her, trying to bring her along, trying to soften her tensions.

She pulled back again, "Why are you so sure?"

"I told you all the reasons it wasn't kids."

"But if it was a person trying to make it look as if kids had done it, why me?"

"Does it matter one way or the other? Forget it, honey."

She tried to forget it. I could feel her trying to let go, trying to let her body take over. She pushed me away. "Wait a second. Please. Look. Is there any proof?"

"When Fedderman finds out the good stuff is missing out of stock and finds out you are gone without saying goodbye, what do you think it's going to look like?"

She tried to shake me in her exasperation. "But proof, damn you!"

"Relax. Nobody saw you coming or going. You didn't leave anything behind. They are even buying your version of when it happened."

"My version?"

"You set the electric clock in the bedroom ahead to two-fifteen, then you yanked it out and heaved it at the wall." I wanted to hold my breath again. Instead, I gathered her close, kissed her throat. She sighed. "The thing about it, darling," she said. "I really liked her. I really did." She sighed. Her breath had a trace of the staleness of sleep. "What do people expect a person to do when they don't leave you any kind of option at all? Know what she was going to do?"

"No. Who cares?"

"Stop a minute. Put yourself in my place. I didn't go to her house on my own. She asked me to come there. To talk. Or else. The way she sounded, I parked a ways off. She got hold of me at Hirsh's. Okay, so I cut that sort of short and went to her place. She was waiting for me, very cold and unfriendly, all dressed to go out. Know where she was going? To tell Hirsh and make him phone the police. Oh, she'd figured it all out that it had to be me. She knew how. Not exactly, but too close. Stop a minute. I made some offers. I begged her. I pleaded. I turned on enough tears for a fountain. And then she saw what was going to come next, so she ran, and I caught her and grabbed her, and we both fell down in the doorway. I was very mad at her. She was underneath, on her face, and I got up and pushed her back down and kneeled on her back and got hold of her hair and yanked up and back. It made kind of a crunchy little sound, and she went soft as butter. Yeck. All loose, sort of. I thought she was dead then, but I guess she lived a while. I sat down and thought it all out, and then I found red rubber gloves under her sink. I took the money out of her purse and wrecked the whole house and left."

"How did you keep from getting all spattered with all the stuff you broke?"

"I didn't. What I did first was take everything off and put a shower cap on my hair. I just wore that and the gloves, and took them with me when I left. I got splattered. After I was through, I took a shower and got dressed. I tried not to look at her at all the times I went past her. I really was awfully fond of Jane. Do you forgive me?"

"Do I forgive you?"

"Oh, I knew you'd understand, my darling. You scared me, being so sure. I tried to think of everything, even that back window to make it look as if a small person had gotten in that way. There was so much to do and to think about, that's why I was late getting to your yacht club. I was late and very nervous and scared."

"Nobody would have known it."

"Remember when you kissed me for the first time and I went off down the little beach to think?"

"I remember."

"Right up until then I was going to keep on with Frank. Then I realized that I had really bitched him up, the way that trouble with Jane came out. What I should have done was tell Frank right away and let him handle her. Being so very cautious about things, the way Frank is, I knew just what he would do to keep from being linked up in any way with Jane's death. I knew the son of a bitch was going to try to make me switch back, put the good book back, and sneak the junk out of the bank. Then he would cancel the deal, take the good stuff and arrange to have it sold, and try to come out practically even. Where would that leave me? I decided it better be you from then on, not Frank. It was the only way I could keep the whole thing. Poor Frank. By now, from the way I ran, he's figured out that I killed Jane and I've got the goodies. He knows that Fedderman will probably yell swindle and report me missing. And there is no way in the world Frank can keep from being brought into it. Even if he keeps it quiet that he even knew me outside the bank, he is going to have to explain where all that cash came from. I guess he can, but he's going to look like a very dumb person. I don't think Hirsh is going to have to pay him back. I don't think Frank will live that long. I guess I love you, McGee. Do you love Mary Alice?"

"Immeasurably."

"Well… now you can prove it. With-Oh, goddamnit, you're gone again. What the hell is the matter with you?"

"I think I know what woke me up."

"I can tell you something that didn't."

"You can't set a trap to catch a trap."

"What is that supposed to mean?"

"I can't very well surprise your chum by getting to him a lot earlier than scheduled, because that is exactly what he is doing. This is important to him. Why should he give a stranger a schedule and stay with it? Besides, if he is a marksman, why should he come in at dusk, with night coming on? Dawn is better. And not far away. Welcome, Frank boy." I was thinking aloud.