Bright Orange for the Shroud (18 page)

And, my, it certainly was still coming down when we got to my estimated destination. It always seems a waste when all that nice useful rain whishes down into the salty sea. I pulled it back until we barely had seaway, and turned on the little whirling red bulb of the depth finder. The Gulf has such a
constant slope, the bottom is a good location guide. We had twenty-one feet under the hull, twenty-five total, and if other things were right, that would put us three and a half miles off Palm City, according to the depths on the chart. I looked up the frequency of a commercial radio station in Palm City, with a tower almost in line with the harbor. When I had picked it up on AM, a baseball play-by-play, I changed our heading to zero degrees and rotated the direction finder loop until I had a good null. I was about a sea mile short of my estimated point. I put it on the new course, again with a following sea, and we waddled and rocked on in until the sea buoy appeared out of the murk, giving me a course on the chart for the channel between the keys. Inside, we were in flat water, and it was no trick finding the private markers for the marina channel.

It was, as I had hoped, loaded with big cruisers. Two airhorn blasts brought a kid out of the dock house wearing a plastic raincoat with hood. He directed us with hand signals and ran around to the slip. I worked it around and backed it in, went forward in a hurry and got a loop on a piling and around a cleat and snubbed us down. In fifteen minutes we were all set, lines, fenders and spring lines in place, gangplank onto the dock, all identified and signed in. And the rain was slacking off.

I was damp, but not enough to change again. Chook distributed dividends from the shaker and said, “Okay. I bite. Why here?”

“Multiple reasons. If you want to hide a particular apple, the best thing you can do is wire it onto an apple tree. Lots of these big lunkers around us are in wet storage for the summer. We’re one face in the crowd. We’re not far from Fort Myers,
where they have air service to Tampa. We’re a half hour by car from Naples, a little better than an hour from Marco. If he finds out we anchored off by our lonesome once, he’d expect us to do it again. And if he does find us, and if he does have any violent ideas, it’s a damned poor place for him to get away with them. Also, it would reassure Stebber if it turns out I can fix up a meeting here.”

Arthur said, “I think it was across that causeway over there, over on the beach on that key where they found me stumbling around. Should … should I sort of stay out of sight?”

Chook said to me, black brows raised in query, “With your fishing hat and those fly-boy dark glasses?”

“See no reason why you should,” I said.

Chook leaned to pat Arthur on the knee. “You have a dear face and I love you, but darling, forgive me, you aren’t terribly memorable.”

“I guess one of us is enough,” he said, making one of his rare little jokes, waiting then with no confidence anyone would laugh.

I got the evening weather news. As I had expected, the wind was swinging around into the north, and by dawn they expected it to be out of the east at three to five knots, clear weather, occasional afternoon thunderstorms. It meant that by early morning, with the
Ratfink
bailed and fueled, I could make a good fast run close in shore down to the little marina in Naples, tie it up there at that handy and useful location, then take the rented car back to Palm City. The evening was laundered bright, the air fresh, and Chook declined a chance for a dinner ashore, saying she had a serious attack of the domestics, a rabid urge to cook. After dinner, while the two of them were policing the galley, I took the little battery-operated
Mirandette tape recorder into the stateroom I was using and closed the door. For some reason, I cannot perform the feat with people listening, and sometimes I cannot perform it at all. The little machine has astonishingly good fidelity, considering its size.

Try, playback, erase. Try, playback, erase. I learned that to get Waxwell’s tone quality I had to pitch my voice higher, and put a harder and more resonant edge on it. The slurs and elisions were easier to manage, along with that slight sing-song cadence of the swamplands. When I got a reasonably satisfying result, I left it on the tape.

I went up on the sundeck for the long slow evening pipe. When one is down to this mild reward for abstinence, there is only one way to cheat. I found an oversized pot in the pipe drawer, a massive Wilke Sisters product, and nearly sprained my thumb packing Black Watch into it. We all sat up there in the warm night, marina lights sparkling on the water, traffic moving across the distant causeway. They sat together, about ten feet from me, off to my right. They rustled a little now and then. And whispered. And several times she made a furry and almost inaudible chuckle, as sensuous as a slow light stroke of fingernails. It began to make me so edgy I was grateful when they said their early, husky goodnights. I think it was becoming a little more for her than she estimated. I hoped it would get big enough to pry her loose from Frankie Durkin. But any kind of future for Chook and Arthur would depend on my making a pretty solid recovery for him. If she had to support him, or share the job of supporting the two of them, it wouldn’t work out so well. It would make him restive. And this was her time to have kids. And it wouldn’t mix well with her strenuous brand of professional dancing. She had the
body for kids, the heart for them, the need for them, and love enough for a baker’s dozen.

So if you don’t recover enough, do you need to clip a full fifty percent of it, McGee?

Next there will be a choir of a thousand violins playing “I Love You Truly.” Or perhaps, “Paddlin’ Madelin’ Home.”

Back in my empty lonely nest, I turned the recorder on, and with the larynx memory of how I did it before, became Boo Waxwell giving a sour little talk on the joys of love and marriage. Then I played the tape from the beginning. The part I had previously approved sounded just about the same as the new addition. That meant I had it nailed well enough to risk it.

It was a little after nine in the morning when I tied up the
Ratfink
as before in the little marina. I went over into town in the green sedan, ordered drugstore coffee, and, as it was cooling, shut myself in the phone booth and called Crane Watts’ office number.

He answered directly, sounding remarkably crisp and impressive and reliable. “Crane Watts speaking.”

“Watts, this Boo Waxwell. How about you give me that number for Cal Stebber in Tampa. Caint lay my han on it.”

“Now I don’t know as I’m authorized to …”

“Lawyer boy, I git it fast, or in five minutes I’m right there, whippin yo foolish ass down to the bone.”

“Well … hold the line a moment, Waxwell.”

I had a pencil ready. I took down the number he gave me, 613–1878.

“Address?” I asked.

“All I’ve ever had is a box number.”

“Nev mind. Lawyer boy, I plain don’t like the way you give that McGee the whole story.”

“Don’t you think you made that plain enough last night, Waxwell? I told you then and I’m telling you now, that I didn’t tell him half the things he claims I told him.”

“Too dog drunk to know what you told him.”

“I’m doing my level best to get a line on him, and as soon as I learn anything useful, I’ll get in touch with you. But I don’t know why you’re upset about it. It was a perfectly legal business arrangement. Another thing, Waxwell, I don’t want you ever coming to my house again, like last night. You upset my wife, the way you acted. See me here if you have to see me at all, but I’m telling you now, I’m no more anxious to have any future association with you than you are with me. Is that quite clear?”

“Think I’ll come by anyways and bounce you some.”

“Now
wait
a minute!”

“Talk sweet to ol’ Boo.”

“Well … maybe I did sound a little irritable. But you see, Viv knew nothing about … that business arrangement. You said too much in front of her. She cross-examined me half the night before I could get her quieted down. And she still isn’t satisfied. I’d just rather you wouldn’t come to the house again. Okay?”

“I swear, lawyer boy, I never will. Never again. Less something comes up all of a sudden.”

“Please, just listen to reas …”

I hung up, sweating lightly, and went back to my coffee.
Boone Waxwell had wasted very little time getting to the only man who might know anything about me. And had charged that man with digging up information. Watts could get my Bahia Mar box number from the club records. That wouldn’t be much help. But there was a new factor. Waxwell did not seem like a patient man. Perhaps no later than this afternoon he would be phoning Watts to find out what he’d learned. And he would be very intrigued to know it was his second call of the day, and interested to know that he had asked for Stebber’s unlisted number earlier. He would work that out in short order.

I aimed the Chev north up 41 through light traffic, keeping a watch front and rear for State Police, who object violently to any speed approaching three numbers. I pulled into a marina parking space at Palm City at ten o’clock. The
Flush
was locked. A note on the rug inside the rear door to the lounge said they’d gone grocery shopping. I went hunting and found them in a Food Fair two blocks away, Arthur trundling the basket, Chook mousing along, picking out things, wearing that glazed look of supermarket autohypnosis. Eleven minutes after I located them, I had a protesting Arthur locked aboard with instructions to stay put and out of sight, and I was backing out of the parking space with Chook beside me, hitching at her skirt and buttoning the top buttons of her blouse.

If the feeder flight out of Fort Myers hadn’t been ten minutes late coming in from Palm Beach, we would have just missed it. And I had been too busy driving to do more than fragmentary briefing. I bought two round-trip tickets to Tampa. With stops at Sarasota and St. Pete, the ETA was twenty past noon.

Once aboard, I gave it to her in more detail. “But with just a phone number?” she asked.

“And a little jump. And a prayer for luck. And the name of a yacht.”

“Golly, suppose you worked all this hard at something legitimate, McGee. No telling how big you might be.”

“A state senator, even.”

“Wow!” She checked in her mirror and fixed her mouth. “What good am I going to be to you?”

“I’ll figure that out as we go along.”

At Tampa International, with Chook standing outside the booth looking serious, I tried the number. As I was just about to give up and try again, a cool, careful, precise female voice said, “Yes?”

“I would like to speak to Mr. Calvin Stebber.”

“What number were you calling, sir?”

“Six one three–one eight seven eight.”

“I am sorry. There is no Calvin Stebber here, sir.”

“Miss, I suppose that it’s one of the oldest code situations in the world. You always ask for the number to be repeated, and the party calling is supposed to change one digit. But I don’t happen to have the code.”

“I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about, sir.”

“No doubt. I am going to call you back at exactly quarter to one, twelve minutes from now and in the meantime you tell Mr. Stebber that somebody is going to call who knows something about Wilma Ferner, Wilma Wilkinson, take your choice.”

She hesitated a half breath too long before saying, “I am terribly sorry that all this means absolutely nothing to me, sir. You’ve made a mistake, really.”

She was very good. So good the hesitation seemed to lose significance.

I tried it again at the promised time.

“Yes?”

“Is Mr. Stebber interested in Wilma? This is me again.”

“Actually, you know, I shouldn’t be so childish as to let this nonsense fascinate me, whoever you are. I suppose it’s because I am having a dull and boring day. Do you think that could be it?”

“Nonsense fascinates lots of people.”

“You
do
have rather a nice voice. You know, if you aren’t too busy for nonsense, you could break up my afternoon with more of it. Why don’t you mystify me again, say, at three fifteen?”

“It will be my pleasure. I’ll be the one with the red rose in his teeth.”

“And I shall be wearing a girlish smirk. Goodbye, sir.”

I stepped out of the booth. “What are you grinning at?” Chook demanded.

“The good ones are always a pleasure. She couldn’t contact Stebber so quickly. But without giving away one damn thing, she lined me up to call back at three fifteen. Then if Stebber is interested, they open a door. If not, she gives me the girlish chitchat, and I hang up never really knowing for sure. Very nice.”

She pulled herself taller. “It means you’re outclassed, doesn’t it, sweetie? Stebber has this terribly keen girl, and you’re making do with a big dull dancer.”

“Oh for God’s sake, why should a little impersonal admiration raise your hackles?”

“Feed me,” she said. “All women are at war all the time, and when I’ve got hunger pains, it shows a little more.”

We went to the upper level where she ate like a timber wolf, but with more evidences of pleasure than any wolf would exhibit. There was so much of her, and it was so aesthetically assembled, so vivid, so a-churn with vitality that she faded the people for ten tables around to frail flickering monochromatic images, like a late late movie from a fringe station. She provided me, in certain measure, with a cloak of invisibility.——Okay, fella, but describe the guy she was
with
.——Just a guy. Big, I think. I mean, hell, I don’t think I really looked at him, Lieutenant.

She sipped coffee and smiled, sighed, smiled again.

“You look like a happy woman, Miss McCall.” I reached across the table and touched her with a fingertip right between and a little above those thick black brows. “There were two lines here.”

“Gone now? Son of a gun. Gee, Trav, I don’t know. I talk. I talk my fool head off. There in the dark with him holding me, mostly. Things I’ve never told anyone. He listens and he remembers. I skip around, back and forth through my dumb life. I guess I’m trying to understand. I’m talking to myself at the same time, about Frankie, about how my mother made me ashamed of growing too big to fit into her dream, about running off and getting married at fifteen and annulled at sixteen, knocking around, and then buckling down and
really
working hard and making it and saving money so I could go back in style and knock their eye out. I knew just how it would be, Trav. I would wear that mink cape into that house and my
mother and my grandmother would stare, and then I would let them know I hadn’t gotten it the way they were thinking, and show them the scrapbook. Nineteen years old. God!