John D MacDonald - Travis McGee 20 - Cinnamon Skin Read online

I didn't have to phone Meyer. As I was unpacking toilet articles, he called me.

  "Travis? A reporter from the Miami Herald tracked me down: Is it true? They're dead?"

  "I didn't know a thing about it until about fifteen minutes ago. Johnny Dow told me. He thought you were aboard."

  "Would that I had been," he said. It was not dramatics. He meant it.

  "What can I do here?" I asked.

  "I don't know. I can't think. What is there to do anyway? Where have they taken the bodies?" "Meyer, from what I hear it was a very big explosion. Very violent. Out past the sea buoy. Out in the open ocean. Who handles your insurance?"

  "I can't think. You know him. Tall."

  "Sure. Walter. So he probably knows about it by now."

  "Before I phoned you, I checked with the travel desk here at the hotel, and I can't get out any earlier than the flight I'm already booked on tomorrow."

  "I'll pick you up. Ten after eight. Anybody I should let know about it?"

  "There's an address book in the... oh, dear God, that's gone too, of course. Anyway, under Amdex Petroleum Exploration in Houston I had the name of her immediate superior. Hatcher, Thatcher, Fletcher... one of those names. Travis, what I don't understand is this grotesque nonsense about Chile. I was in Santiago for one week, three years ago. It was a small conference. Yes, we were invited to make recommendations to the military government about controlling inflation. And they took the recommendations, and their inflation is under control, unlike the situation in Brazil, Argentina, and Peru. It was a small international conference; Britain, France, Canada, the U.S.-a dozen of us. I didn't write the final report or any part of it."

  "Meyer, listen. It's a crazy world. You were there. You got on somebody's hit list."

  "And so Norma and Evan and Hack die. Can you find whoever did it?"

  "There are going to be lots of very competent people trying to find whoever did it."

  "They never seem to find terrorists." His voice was lifeless, dulled by loss.

  At ten o'clock the next morning, local time, I got through to a brisk switchboard person at Amdex in Houston.

  "You had a woman working there, a geologist named Norma Lawrence."

  "Sorry. There's no one here by that name, sir."

  "Look, I know she worked for Amdex. She was on vacation."

  "Oh, you mean Norma Greene! Miss Greene."

  "Okay. Sure. I want to talk to her boss."

  "That would be Mr. Batcher. Sorry, but he's out of the country, sir. If you want to leave a message, we expect him Friday."

  I sighed with moderate exasperation. "Who on your team there, besides Mr. Batcher, would be interested in being informed that Norma Lawrence, your Miss Greene, is dead?"

  "Oh, God! No! To whom am I speaking?"

  "My name is McGee. Travis McGee. An acquaintance. Her uncle suggested I inform her employer. That's what I'm doing."

  "Mr. Dexter will want to know the details. He should be in any minute now. Where can he reach you, Mr. McGee?"

  I gave her the area code and the number. She said she was sorry about the whole thing, and I said I was too.

  "Automobile accident?" she asked.

  "Explosion on a boat."

  I heard her gasp. "Geez, you know I heard that on the news this morning and didn't make the connection. I mean I didn't listen to the name, you know? Her and her new husband and a fishing guide? The news said it was maybe some kind of Cuban terrorists. Why would they-oh, Mr. Dexter just came in. Shall I ring him now?"

  "Please."

  In a few moments he said, "Mr. McGee? What can I do for you."

  "Hardly anything. Mrs. Lawrence's uncle suggested that I call her employer and say that she was killed yesterday in an explosion aboard a boat off Fort Lauderdale, along with her husband and a local charterboat captain."

  "Lawrence? Norma Greene Lawrence?"

  "That's right." There was a silence that lasted so long I said, "Are you there? Hello?"

  "Excuse me. That's a terrible shock."

  "I was trying to get hold of Mr. Batcher. I didn't think you'd know her."

  "Mr. McGee, this is a small company. A little over two hundred people. The smartest thing we ever did was take on Norma Lawrence when she'd been out of Cal Tech a year. We hired her away from Conoco. She's... she was going to be one of the best geologists in the business."

  He said something else, but a sudden rumble of thunder drowned him out.

  "Didn't hear you. Sorry."

  "I was saying what a loss it is. What happened?"

  "It looks as if somebody put a bomb aboard, some nut trying to kill her uncle. But he was in Toronto. They were going to dive at the site this morning, but the weather is very bad: eight- to ten-foot waves out there, lots of white water. There was a marker buoy at the site dropped off by a pleasure boat, but it was washed loose during the night."

  "I don't know what to say. Maybe her uncle would know what her personal estate arrangements are. We have an insurance program, of course. And there would be other funds payable to her, or her estate."

  "I'll have him get in touch. What's your whole name?"

  "D. Amsbary Dexter," he said. Hence, I supposed, the Amdex. His company. I wrote down his addresses and phone numbers, and he thanked me for calling him. He said it was a terrible thing, and I said it certainly was. He had one of those thin fast Texas voices. Not a good-old-boy voice, a hustler voice. Hurrying to sell you.

  By nine o'clock Tuesday night, in the very last of the watery daylight, I was heading back toward Lauderdale from the airport in the Mercedes station wagon I'd borrowed from the Alabama Tiger's highest-ranking girlfriend, the one who has charge of his floating playpen while he is back in Guadalajara having his big old face lifted again. Wind gusts whacked the occasional rain against the right-hand windows. Meyer sat damp and dumpy beside me, radiating bleakness, speaking only when spoken to.

  "Were they annoyed you didn't give the final lecture?"

  "I was there. I'd taken their round-trip ticket, hotel room, and food. I gave the talk. Only because it was easier than not giving the talk."

  "The weather has been rotten."

  "Um."

  "The tropical storm has moved closer and picked up a little. But they don't think it will reach hurricane force."

  "Uh huh."

  Conversation wasn't working, so I tried silence. After fifteen minutes he said, "These last few months I've gotten into the habit of watching television."

  "Meyer!"

  "I know, I know. A laxative for the mind. Thinking makes lumps in the mind. Bad memories make lumps. Television flushes them away. At five o'clock, alone there aboard my boat, I've been able to get a rerun of M*A*S*H on one channel and then switch to another rerun on another. Old ones. Trapper, Hawkeye, Radar, Hot Lips. You know, the introduction has stayed almost exactly the same. The helicopters come around the side of the mountain. Then you get a shot from on high of the hospital complex. Then an ambulance, a closer shot of the choppers, and then people running up a hill toward the camera. In the left center of the screen a young woman runs toward you, slightly ahead of the others. You see her for four and a half running strides. Dark hair. Face showing the strain of running and her concern for the wounded. A pretty woman, maybe even beautiful, with a strong, lithe, handsome body. She is in uniform. A gleam of dog tags at the opening of her shirt. I've thought about her often, Travis. That shot of her was taken years ago. She's probably in her thirties now. Or even forty. I wonder about her. When they filmed that introduction she had no way of knowing that she would be frozen there in time, anxious and running. Does she ever think about how strange that is? Multiply viewers times original episodes and the countless reruns on hundreds of stations, and you can see she has been looked at a billion times. What do you pay a person to be looked at a billion times? How many thousand miles has she run? It's the fly-in-amber idea, plus a paradox of time and space. Maybe she never thinks of it these days. Or yawns when she sees, herself. Last night I saw
her again, late, in a Toronto hotel room. And she became Norma: dark hair and vitality. Now she is caught in some eternal time lock. Death is an unending rerun until the last person with any memory of you is also dead."

  I had not heard him say this much since that bloody June day when Desmin Grizzel had so totally terrified him that he had, in his fear, violated his own image of himself. I did not make any response because I wanted him to keep talking. I was afraid that anything I might say would make him clamp shut again, like an endangered clam.

  "I went through the long list of all the things I should have done and didn't do," he said. "Go to the wedding. Or at least pick out a present and send it instead of a check. She was my very last blood relative. It's like a superstitious fear, having no one left in the world directly related to you by blood. As if you had started somehow to disappear. She wasn't at all pretty, but being in love made her beautiful. I noticed that. And I haven't been noticing much lately, have I?"

  "No. No, you haven't."

  "In that sense, to that degree, Desmin Grizzel won after all. All my life, until this last year, I have always noticed everything. Noticed, analyzed, filed. I watched people, understood them, liked almost every one. If he killed that in me, then he killed me, because he killed that part of me that made me most alive. And I let it happen."

  "No, Meyer. There wasn't any way-"

  "Be still!" he said with a surprising vehemence. "I've been dwelling on my sorry image, how I sat on the floor like a dumb pudding, peeing in my trousers, while I watched a maniac start to kill the best friend I ever had. In some kind of inverted fashion I fell in love with that image of Meyer. Oh, the poor dear chap! Oh, what a pity!"

  "But-"

  "So today in that aircraft I took a longer steadier look at myself. I saw my face reflected in the window beside me. One can become weary of shame, self-revulsion, self-knowledge. I am an academic, damn it. I was not intended to become some sort of squatty superman, some soldier of misfortune. It was not intended that I should be unafraid of sudden death. Curiously, I am not afraid of the prospect of my own demise. Plainly I shall die, as will you and everyone we know, and I do not think that a fact worth my resentment. Life is unfair, clearly. One must hope that the final chapter will be without too much pain. It was his terrible eyes and those four barrels on that strange handgun he had. Something inside me broke into mush, into tears and pee and ineptitude. But it does not signify!"

  "I tried to tell-"

  "I did not listen. I was too enchanted with my humiliation, with how I had failed my adolescent dream of myself as hero. There was a child on the airplane, directly across the aisle. The seat beside me was empty. I smiled at her and did finger tricks, and she giggled and tried to stuff her head under her mother's arm in shyness. She finally came over and sat beside me, and I told her a story about a cowardly goblin who refused to go out on Halloween and scare people because he was too fat and too shy. Partway through the story I realized I was telling a story about Meyer the Economist. It made the ending easier. They had a meeting of the Goblin Council and called him in and told him not to worry. There had to be room in each pack of goblins for a cowardly goblin who stayed home in the cave. Otherwise, who would count all the others as they came back home after their adventures? So there is room for me: counting goblins, including my own."

  "There always has been-"

  "No, Travis. Not for the Meyer of the past year. No room for him at all. But for this Meyer? Why not? I am not the same as I was before the incident, I am less naive. Is that a good word?"

  "I think so."

  "You have always been less naive than most of us, Travis. You are a different sort of creature, in many ways. But you are my friend, and I don't want to lose you. I want you to help me. Somebody blew up my boat, and with it all the artifacts of my past and my last close relative. I want to find that person or those people. And kill them. Is that an unworthy goal?"

  "It's understandable."

  "You dodge the question."

  "You want a moral judgment, go to Jerry Falwell. Anything you really want to do, I will help you do. And it is nice to have you back, even in slightly altered condition. Okay?"

  I glanced over at him and saw in the angle of a streetlight that he was smiling. It was a fine thing to see. Utterly unanticipated. I had thought this would be the end of him. Instead, it shocked him out of it not all the way out, but far enough to lead one to hope.

  "I keep remembering that Sunday evening aboard the Flush," he said. "They were really in love, weren't they?"

  Three

  THE EVENING had not been awkward because Evan Lawrence was not the kind of man to let that happen. I guessed him at about forty, ten to twelve years older than his bride. He had a broad, blunt face, brown sun-streaked hair, snub nose, crooked grin, the baked look of an outdoor person, and large fan-shaped areas of laugh wrinkles beside his eyes. He was perhaps five-ten, hardly an inch taller than his wife, but broad and thick in chest and shoulders. In repose, Norma was almost homely. Narrow forehead, long nose, an overbite and a dwindled chin, long neck. But her eyes were lovely, her long hair a glossy blue-black, her figure elegant, her movements graceful. In animation, and when she looked at Evan, she was beautiful.

  Evan asked Meyer a dozen questions about how he had made the meat sauce. tie asked me fifty questions about my houseboat. We went through several bottles of Chianti (aassir.o while we ate the ceviche I'd made and then had the spaghetti al dente with the meat sauce Meyor had brought.

  In the warmth and relaxation after dinner, Evan told us how he had met Norma. "What I was doing, I was down there in Cancun, gone down to Yucatan to visit with my friend Willy, and I was putting in my time helping him sell off some time-sharing condos. He had some he couldn't move at what he needed to make out, which was one hundred big ones, so he'd taken to selling them off in one- and two-week pieces for three and six thousand, people buying those same weeks for life and Willy explaining how they had tied into the big vacation computer so the pigeons he was selling to could like exchange with some other patsies who'd bought the same two weeks on maybe the coast of Spain or Fort Myers, Florida. I had no work license, so when I sold stuff, Willy had to slip me the pesos in cash and keep it off the books. I can always sell. I'm a scuffler, and there are always things to sell and people to buy them, so I'm home anywhere. Good thing, the way they keep moving Norma around the shaggy places of the earth.

  "One day what I was doing, I was taking the pickup to Merida to get some things that had come in that Willy had ordered way back, and ten miles from anywhere I came onto this beat old Dodge pulled way over on the shoulder and this tall pretty girl trying to open the hood. So I pulled over and walked back and I said in my best Texican, her hair being so black, '¨Tiene una problema, Senorita?' She just spun around and give me the glare and said, 'Problema? Me? No, I just enjoy standing out here in the hot sun breaking my fingernails on this son of a bitching hood latch.' And right there it was love at first sight, on my part, not on hers.

  "Opened the hood for her and looked in and right there looking back at me is a granddaddy rat, biggest damn thing I ever saw, big as a full-growed possum. We both jumped back, and he ducked down and hid someplace under the engine. I looked around, real careful, and I see he had chewed on the insulation on the wiring to the starter motor. So I had Norma get in and start it while I jumped the contacts with a screwdriver. When it caught and roared, old mister rat he went charging off into the brush. What had happened, she'd stopped to walk over to a formation that looked interesting, and chunked at it with that hammer she's got at all times, and came back and the car wouldn't start. Just a click when she turned the key. I led her into town to a garage I'd been before, and we went down the street and sat at a sidewalk place and drank cold Carta Blanca for the half hour it took them to rewire where old rat had chewed. I didn't find out for a long time how important she was down there, being borrowed by the Mexican government."

  "Hey, it wasn't all that big and great
!" she said. "I had a Mexican friend at Cal Tech, Manny Mateo, and he became an engineer with Pemex, the government oil company. They thought they had a new discovery field just west of Maxcanu, way to the north of the Bay of Campeche, and from the initial geophysical survey work it looked as if it might be a particular kind of formation I've had a lot of luck with. So Pemex arranged with Am Dexter to borrow me, and I went down there and we ran two more sets of computer tests and I finally picked a site for the test well, crossed my fingers, and went back to Houston. It took about nine weeks."

  "Did they make a well?" Meyer asked.

  She shrugged. "Just barely. It's a long way from their big fields and their refineries. It's a discovery well and a new field, but the porosity is bad. It makes the MER pretty low when you are so far from... excuse me, MER is Maximum Efficiency Recovery rate, and they figure it at seventy barrels a day, which would be a two-thousand-dollar-a-day delight in Louisiana but isn't so great down there. They'll try again a thousand meters to the north where, according to the core samples, they should hit the formation higher."