The Scarlet Ruse (16 page)

"Did you really bash two holdup-people with a toy baseball bat?"

She looked astonished. "What's that got to do with anything?

There were three. I didn't have to hit the third one. I told him that I would, and he believed me and left. Why do you ask?"

"I was curious. It seems to be just about the most stupid kind of behavior possible."

"You certainly say what you think."

"I'm trying to figure out how much weight I should give to anything you tell me."

"It was stupid behavior. The bat was a gift for my grand-nephew. Still wrapped. I snatched it up out of terror, certain the man was going to kill me. I hit him, and he fell down, and I became notorious. I was interviewed. My picture was in the paper. So I bought another bat for the little boy. When the second holdup attempt occurred, I felt I was in a dream. I had to retain my reputation as a character. I hit him in slow motion. His eyes rolled up out of sight, and he still stood there until I hit him again. More publicity. On the third attempt I told him I would hit him. He left. After he left, I looked for the bat. It was gone. Hirsh had disposed of it. I fainted dead away. Stupid, Mr. McGee? No. Not stupid. Silly. Very very silly."

"I had to know. Sorry."

"I understand. My mind is quite clear."

"Do you think Hirsh is right? Is the Sprenger stuff gone?"

"Yes."

"Have you wondered about how it could have been done?"

"Young man, we are all fascinated by larceny. Fortunately for civilization, most of us merely think about it. Obviously the entire album was taken and another substituted. It is equally obvious that Mr. Sprenger managed it by devising some diversion, some alternate focus of attention. Had I still been employed by Mr. Fedderman, he would never have taken on the Sprenger account."

"You made the decisions?"

"Of course not! I would have let Hirsh know I did not approve. Then he would know that if he went ahead with it, I would make his life totally miserable, and he would have decided it wasn't worth it. A man like Sprenger would find it amusing to steal his own property and then make Mr. Fedderman reimburse him for his investment."

"I see. Then there is no connection, you feel, between the theft and the death of Jane Lawson?"

"Did I say that? Did I even imply it? Then how do you infer I would believe that? Last Thursday morning those two young women learned what had happened. Jane Lawson had a lot of time to try to work out the puzzle. You were all trying, were you not? I imagine she devised a theory of how it was done and felt compelled to test it before reporting it. She had a very good mind, you know. Quite logical."

"Could she have been involved, on her own or as an accomplice?"

"Jane Lawson? The question is grotesque. It is… fifteen years ago he employed her. She seemed very pleasant and plausible. We had to teach her everything about the business. She learned quickly. A good memory. I am a very skeptical old woman. I set some traps which looked like the most innocent of accidents, where she could profit without any possibility of detection. She did not hesitate a moment. She is the sort of person who, if she were using a pay phone and found a quarter in the coin drop, would feel very uncomfortable about keeping it. With some people, with too many people, conscience is the still small voice that says maybe someone is looking."

"What if somebody put heavy pressure on her, like threatening her kids?"

"I think she'd pack them up and go to her in-laws and ask for help. And get it."

"She told you about the general?"

"Privately, in confidence. We worked together there for ten years, remember. I tend to pry a bit. Of course, I'm going to go back now and fill in until he can find someone. I let her know I did not think her decision was entirely rational, but I respected her for it. She should have married again, of course."

"Did you help train Mary Alice too?"

"Are you asking about her in the same way? Maybe not exactly in the same way? A personal relationship exists? I stayed on for two weeks after he hired her. She was, and is, a very troubled person, I think. She was quite depressed when she first came to work. She never discusses her background. I had thought her a fugitive in the legal sense. Now I think she is a fugitive from emotion. She has visited me here many many times. She brings little problems to me. Problems of identification. She hated to ask Jane or Mr. Fedderman to help her. She is not really highly intelligent. She has a high order of native animal shrewdness perhaps. In time she became fascinated by the high-value rarities. There is something touching and childish about her enthusiasms. I do not believe-in fact, I am quite positive-Mary Alice could not plan anything very complicated and carry it out."

I thanked her for her time. I said I would probably see her in the store. She said Hirsh was going to open up again on Wednesday, the day after tomorrow. She went back to her class, and I phoned the hotel from the downstairs lobby. I had checked at two-thirty. Now it was quarter to four.

A Miss Dunn had phoned at five after three and left word she would phone again. She did not leave a number.

I phoned Meyer, caught him aboard his boat. It was too soon for Mary Alice to arrive. I told Meyer she was on the way, ETA unknown. Keep an eye out for her. Put her aboard the Flush. Lock her in. Then wait for me aboard his boat. I taxied back to the hotel, packed in fifteen seconds, and tried to pay my bill. But it was courtesy of Mr. Nucci, who isn't in the house at the moment.

I walked to the lot, repurchased my old pickup and took the fastest route through a light rain toward the Sunshine Turnpike, swallowing the little bits of acid that kept collecting in the back of my throat.

"She's aboard," he said. "With three suitcases, a hat box, and a train case. Your enchanted barge is all fueled, furbished, and provisioned, sir. May I offer my best wishes for a happy voya-"

"Knock it off!"

I do not talk to Meyer like that. It shocked and annoyed him. Then he got a closer look at my expression.

"She gave me the keys to her car," he said. "When she parked, she backed it in to hide the plate. She asked me to drive it away from here and leave it in an airport lot. Miami, if I want to be very obliging."

"Leave it right where it is for now."

"Okay."

"I want to ask you to do something without giving you any of the reasons or background. But there's a risk."

"A big risk?"

"I don't know how big. Maybe there's none at all. Tomorrow morning I want you to go to this address and see Frank Sprenger. Use my name to get to see him. Play it this way. You are very angry at me. I let you believe we were going to make a very nice score out of Fedderman's problems, share and share alike. In fact, I told you that we'd stay healthier if we got out of Sprenger's area until things quiet down, and at McGee's request you got The Busted Flush all ready for a long cruise, maybe over to the Islands, so bring your passport. So tonight McGee smuggled a woman aboard the Flush. You didn't see her. You don't know who she is. But from something I said while drunk, you think she came to the Contessa late last night and stayed with me in my room overnight. Tonight I told you your trip was off. I got ugly about it. I said I had better company. I said Frank Sprenger was almost as dumb as Hirsh Fedderman."

"Sprenger… and Mary Alice!"

"I don't know what he'll do. Maybe there'll be no reaction at all. Right now I'm… trying to work out a jigsaw puzzle where every piece is square, and when I get them in the right places, they make an abstract painting. But they also make an abstract painting any way I fit them together."

"If he's interested?"

"Remember No Name Island?"

"Of course."

"Find it by yourself?"

"No problem."

"You are going to tell him that my plan, when the two of us were going, was to take the Flush down into Florida Bay and lay behind No Name and wait for a good five-day forecast before running across to Nassau. You can take him to the place. For a fee. Just him. The two of you can drive down to the Keys and rent a skiff and go on out to No Name. Are you sure you can find it?"

"My God, Travis. It's-"

"All right. You can find it. It isn't on any chart, so he can't find it alone. Of all the ways I can read this puzzle, if I'm right at all, he'll be willing to come alone. If it's a mob scene, forget it. Be sure you aren't tailed by his people or anybody."

"How do I let you know if-"

"I'll listen to Miami Marine tomorrow afternoon from three-fifteen to three-thirty, four-fifteen to four-thirty, five-fifteen to five-thirty. If you don't come through with a call, I'll come in and come after you."

"But won't she be able to-"

"Once we're well out of here, I'll tell her I asked you to keep tabs on anybody who might come looking for me. If he doesn't bite, just tell me everything is quiet. If he reacts but the time isn't set yet, tell me you heard somebody was looking for me but you didn't get a chance to see them or talk to them. If you are set up with him and know about when he might come visiting, say a man with a beard came by and wouldn't give his name, but he's going to come by again at such and such a time."

"And come back at you the next day when it's definite?"

"I'll monitor at the same times. This is a big tricky bastard, Meyer. Don't listen to any lullaby from him. I think he might make you sit while he goes and gets a description from the night man at the Contessa, the night bell captain."

"Isn't that a little too tricky, the part about the hotel?"

"Suggestion?"

"I didn't see her, but I saw her car and went and wrote down the plate number, and I know where it's parked."

I thought it over. "I like it better. What I don't like is the way I keep thinking of reasons why, if I'm right, Sprenger would like to leave all three of us in deep blue water."

"If it works out and we drive down there, the two of us, and get the skiff from… what's that place by the draw bridge?"

"Regal Marine."

"On the way out I can mention I gave somebody a letter to mail for me if I don't reclaim it by such and such a day. Who would I be writing to, Travis?"

"Two letters. Our friend Captain Matty Lamarr, who has never been bought or scared, and to General Samuel Horace Lawson at the Doral." I thought about my luck. Our imminent eviction from what I had begun to feel was safe sanctuary had torn a hole in the bottom of the luck feeling. I sensed emptiness and a cool feeling at the nape of the neck. "Have you got paper and envelopes?"

"When this noble vessel, The John Maynard Keynes, sinks, it will be because of an overburden of paper bound and unbound. Here you are. May I read over your shoulder?"

"Meyer, will you accept the premise that the less you know, the more plausible Sprenger will find you?"

"A subjective judgment. But okay. Who will I leave these with?"

"Jenny Thurston. Allow room for delays."

Two short letters. All I had to give was my guess as to who and why. The combination of Matty's professionalism and the general's massive leverage would open up all the rest of it. I put them in the envelopes and handed them, unsealed, to Meyer. "You were reluctant," I said. "Chance to overrule."

He sighed and licked the flaps and sealed them tightly. He said, "Interesting analogy, about the jigsaw with square pieces and nonobjective art. So you put them together in a way, I suppose, that pleases you, and so you call it the only logical arrangement."

"That's what I seem to be doing."

"It is also an analogy for a madman's view of reality. No rules restrict his assemblage, because they're all square pieces. So he makes a pattern that pleases him, and then he tries to impose it on the world, and they lock him up."

"Thanks, Meyer."

He put his hand lightly on my arm, his wise eyes very sober and quiet. "Quixote, my friend. It has been too long for you, too long since there was a woman who moved you, who made magic. It started to be very good, and some automatic relays in that skeptical skull broke the connection. A sense of what-might-have-been can make a man very vulnerable. Suspicion can become one hell of a big windmill. And some kinds of windmills can break your ass."

"Contents noted," I said.

There was a pale pink scrap of day left when I unlocked the Flush, noting with approval that Meyer had unhooked the shoreside umbilical cords for phone, water, and electric and had taken off the spring lines and the heavy weather fenders. I didn't want to use any interior lights unless I was on engines or on the alternate one hundred and ten system off my generator.

In the gloom Mary Alice rose up from behind the far end of the big yellow couch and said, "Where the hell have you been?"

"Taking care of this and that."

"Don't you know you've got to get me out of here!"

I moved closer to her and checked on the validity of her anxiety by saying, "Settle down, honey. We'll be on our way in the morning."

Her voice got very thin. "In the morning! I can be dead by morning! Now. Please. Can't we just go a little way? Please."

I saw the dark shape in her right fist, pointed down at the deck. I took her arm and pulled it out of her hand. She resisted and then let go of it. I took it over to the light of a port. A little Colt.25 automatic, about as small as you can get and stay reasonably lethal.

"Where'd you get this?"

"Can we talk about where I got things when we're moving?!"

I handed it back to her. Maybe it would make her feel a little bit better. Her anxiety was genuine, or she was a great loss to the theater.

I went to the topside controls and cranked her up. When she settled down from the indigestion and flatulence that afflict her whenever I rouse her from indolence, I went down and cast off the lines, moved her ahead a bit, and left her teetering against a piling. I brought the Muсequita close with a boat hook, jumped onto her bow, took her lines off the dock, and scrabbled back aboard with her bow line, snubbed her close and bent the line around a stern cleat. I cut the timing very close. By the time I got back to the controls the bow was swinging very very near the bow of an old and very well maintained Consolidated in the next door slip. The unfriendly old man who owned her stood by his railing with a big fender, ready to lower it to where I might crunch into him.

"Watch it!" he bawled, just as I gave it hard right rudder and gave my port diesel a hard quick jolt of reverse. It held me against the piling and stopped the swing of the bow and started it moving out.

"Sorry," I called to him as I eased out of the slip. No point in trying to reply in kind. He had enough trouble in the form of a wide wife with a voice like a bearing about to go. He worked on the boat all week long with her telling him how to do what he was already doing. On Sundays they took a picnic cruise of three hours, and you could hear that voice of hers all the way out to the channel, telling him to watch out for the things he was already watching out for.

After I was under the bridge and past Port Everglades, heading south inside, in the Waterway channel with the running lights on, a healthy arm snaked around my waist, and the big lady pulled us close together and said, "Wow."

"I'll put it in the log. One heart-felt wow."

"You better believe it."

I showed her a distant marker to aim at and gave her the wheel and went aft and gave the Muсequita a little more line until she towed steadily without wallowing. Mary Alice was very anxious to give the wheel back to me.

"Makes me too nervous," she said. "Where are we going?"

"I know a good place about an hour and half down the line. We can anchor out. It's good water and out of the traffic."

"You tell me how I can help, huh?"

"You might be able to find your way below and come back with a pair of drinks."

It took a while. She had to hunt for things. She apologized. It was full dark. I was using the hand spot to pick up the reflectors on the unlighted markers. I was aware of her near me in darkness, sitting in the starboard chair, aware of how quiet she was.

"And about that automatic?" I said.

"Oh, a friend gave it to me. He was worried about me. He thought it would be a good thing for me to have."

"Ever fire it?"

"I drove way out into the country one time, to sort of ranch land. I found a beer can in the ditch and put it on a rock. I had a box of fifty shells. It didn't make as much noise as I thought it would, but I kept flinching. I had a newspaper in the car, and I stuck it onto a stub sticking out of a big pine tree. Then I could see where the bullets were going, and I figured out how to work it. If I didn't know when it was going to go bang, I flinched after it happened. Then they went where I was aiming. Then I could hit the can pretty good. Every other time at about twenty feet."

"That's pretty good."

"If I had to shoot somebody, I'd imagine his head is a big beer can."

"The torso is a bigger target."

She was quiet for about thirty seconds and finally said, "I'd shoot somebody who wanted to hurt me, right? So I think it would be better to shoot him in the part that does the thinking."

"I can't fault you for logic."

"What?"

"Do you think Jane Lawson switched the stamps in any of the other investment accounts?"

"Darling, can I make a new rule for us?"

"Such as?"

"You come to a point when… you want one life to end and another life to begin. I don't want to talk about any of that. It's all over now. I'm somebody else. So are you. We're both new people."

"What are these new people going to live on, M.A.?"

"I haven't seen you hurting for money. Not the way you live. You certainly had the sense to bring along a bundle, didn't you?"

"Even what they call a goodly sum runs out."

"In cash?"

"How else? And safely aboard."

"And we can get to the islands, can't we?"

"Slowly, in the very best weather. Sure."

"We can make the money last a long long time in the islands, living on this boat, can't we?"

"What islands did you have in mind?"

"You practically have to go to the Bahamas first, don't you?"

"Correct."

"Well then?"

"Well what?"

"We can just sort of poke along down the Islands to the end of them and then wait for good weather, like you say we need, and go across to the next batch. If we kept doing that, where would we end up some day?"

"Trinidad. Venezuela."