The Scarlet Ruse (24 page)

"I'm terrified. I'm not trying to be smart. I really am. You could make me tell you. I'm sure. But it would take as long as I could hold out, and I don't think you could do it without leaving a lot of visible damage, and when you got all done, Frank, you'd find out that the only way it can be canceled is by me, in person, not on the phone, not in writing. By a personal friendly visit to my insurance agent."

"And you want to use crap like that to make a deal?"

"Why not? Disprove it. I can get Fedderman to market the stuff. I want exactly half. I'm a practical man. I'll put myself in your pocket to save my skin and my partner's. I'll write you a confession of where, when, and how I killed Davis and how I killed Mrs. Ray McDermit. I know an island near here high enough so we can bury the bodies, and I’ll put that in the confession along with the chart coordinates. Then you own me."

"But you'll keep the insurance in force? We'll own each other, you mean. Can we get this foot fixed?"

"Is the negotiation all settled?"

"Half? Hell, I guess so. Let me see those damned postage stamps."

"Later. Last night I ran over to the village in the runabout and mailed them to myself. Three envelopes."

"Why didn't you start with that?"

"You wouldn't have bought it. But now you do, because if it wasn't true, I would have started with it."

He almost smiled. "Half. Harry Harris said he heard that was the way you go. It's a big piece. That dumb jackass, know what he was doing? Going home at night and telling his woman all about what he did all day. Like he was a bill collector or something. If you hadn't tipped me about the leak, I wouldn't be buying you now. Now will you please do something about my foot?"

That word was the one which unlatched half the springs which were holding my stomach up against the base of my throat. Please. A beautifully predictive word. Stomach moved halfway back to normal position.

"There's a first aid locker back…"

And Mary Alice thumped the door frame with her left hand as she staggered and caught her balance. She was running wet with sweat, head to toe, her face pallid, mouth open, eyes dazed with the near-fainting state the heat had brought on. She had her little automatic in her big right hand, but it was at her side, pointing at the floor.

Frank Sprenger swung the rifle toward her, and she tried to lift the little automatic to aim it at him. The rifle shot whacked, and her blue eyes bulged and broke, and she dropped straight down, very strangely, as if she were a bundle of clothing slipping off a hanger. But the little gun was coming my way, floating in the air with the momentum from swinging it up to fire it. But instead she had released it. It was moving so slowly in the air that I had time to change my instinctive reflex to pick it out of the air with my right hand and try instead with my left. My hand was still numb, and some feeling was coming back, with enough pain along with it to tell me it was broken in some way.

I could see it turning, floating, and as I reached and took it out of the air, taking it properly by the grip, beyond it I could see Frank Sprenger, out of focus, standing transfixed with the rifle still aimed down the companionway, at the empty air where her head had been.

I pointed at him and the little automatic snapped a little louder than a cap gun, and he spun and yanked the trigger of the rifle while some spectator in the back of my mind peered at him and told me that the fool had forgotten to work the bolt action. Keep firing, the spectator said. Hurry!

He came at me. Bounding. Stone-brown face under the orange cap. Huge brawny arms reaching for me. A caricature of a muscled chest, carved of hickory, moulding the black T-shirt. Bowed legs, massively thewed, bounding under the white shorts, springing him toward me, while his little nightmare blueberry eyes looked remote, impersonal, totally assured. No favoring of the smashed foot. I backed away, pointing my stupid left hand at him, the little automatic saying its futile bang, bang, bang, making no impression on him at all. He smashed me like a truck, bounced me against the bulkhead and off it to fall under him, and see that sledge fist rise high and come smashing down toward me. I rolled my head to the right, rolled it into blinding brilliance and over and over and off the edge of the world and down, the brilliance turning to a tiny white dot way above me and then winking out.

The bedroom door was opposite the foot of the old bed. It was always open. The closet was off to my left. There was a chest of drawers beside it. There was a huge conch shell on top of the chest of drawers. There was a framed lithograph of Venice on the wall over near the window. With a gondola in the foreground. The bathroom was out the door into the hall and to the left, just before the stairs going down.

I had been there a long time. I had heard heavy rain on the roof and roaring down through banyan leaves. At every dusk the tree screamed with its full passenger list of small birds. Sometimes I could hear surf, far away. I could hear traffic, closer than the surf, high-speed trucks droning by in the night. Something with a noisy old engine came in and out during the day, dying somewhere below my window. I could hear outboard motors sometimes, much closer than the surf. Once a great blue heron landed in the banyan, so close I could see his savage yellow eye.

I could hear young voices in the house, laughing. They played music, banged doors, roared away on motorcycles. I saw and heard these things and accepted them. They were there. I had no questions.

I could not open my mouth. My tongue tip traced the bits of wire and the new hole where it felt as if two teeth were gone in the upper row on the right, near the front but not right in front. And one tooth below them. That was where the glass straw went. It had a bend in it, to make it easier to suck while lying down.

For a time, vaguely remembered, there had been a broad starched woman in white, who had strong and gentle hands and clicked her tongue a lot. Bedpans, back rubs, changing dressings. And before that a different place, corridors, stretcher, shots.

Now there was only the small woman with the ruff of blond hair turning gray. Gentle brown eyes. When the wheelchair was first gone, I was afraid to lean on her as hard as I had to, when we made the endless journey down the hall to the bathroom. But she was strong, much stronger than she looked. I remembered that I used to see her in the night, in the rocking chair over there, always awake when I woke up.

It was my face in the mirror, but not my face. When the leg began to hold better under me and when the dressing was gone from my face, I would lean on the sink and try to decide just what was wrong. There were two long, healed incisions, stitch dots still apparent, dark red against the yellow pallor of the lost tan. It was something else that was wrong, not the red wounds. Something subtly out of balance, the way the bedroom was not quite true, with no corner exactly ninety degrees and the doorframe and window frame not parallel to either ceiling or floor.

I accepted, but I began to superimpose a question atop the acceptance. I had another world somewhere else, but the shape of it was murky. I did not want to try to bring it into focus. But it seemed to be coming nearer of its own accord.

It was easier to stay in this world. I knew what the little wire cutters on the bed stand were for. I had asked the woman, and she had said that if I vomited, I could choke to death unless she was there to cut the wires that held my jaw together. It had been broken in three places. And the cheekbone had been crushed.

It was easier to stay in this world where I knew that in the middle of the morning and in the middle of the afternoon, I had to sit in the rocking chair and slowly lift and lower my right leg. From ten times at first, with no weights, to a hundred times with the gadget she had made, a sailcloth wrapping with strings to tie it on and with pouches for the lead fish weights. The leg grew stronger, but it did not feel right. It felt numbed and prickly, as a limb does when it has gone to sleep and has started to come awake. Sometimes there were needles of pain from my toes into my hip. Sometimes the area around the ankle and the top of the foot would feel very hot or very cold or even as if it had a soaking wet stocking on it when it was dry and bare.

The doctor came. He snipped the wire. He made me work my jaw while he watched. He told me the woman would get me gum to chew. It would condition the jaw muscles. He shone a bright little light into my eyes. He made me strip and walk away from him and toward him while he watched my right leg. He told me to put the pajamas and robe back on. He said the leg was doing fine. He asked me my name. I told him it was Travis. He asked if there was more, and I said I wasn't sure. I didn't know my address. He made me count backwards, add figures in my head, spell long words.

One day she came to my room a little before dusk, as the tree was beginning to fill with birds. I had been sitting in the rocking chair by the window, watching the birds come home, watching the sky change. She pulled a footstool close to the rocking chair and put a hand on my arm and looked up at me in a way that was half mischief and half sadness. "Who am I?" It was her familiar question, and I knew the familiar response.

"You are Cathy," I said.

In the last of daylight I took her hand and looked at it, at the weathered back of it, the little blue veins, the country knuckles. It seemed a very dear hand indeed. She knelt on the footstool and was closer and taller. I kissed her and felt the ridged area where the inside of my mouth had been stitched. Her brown eyes glinted in the last of the light. It was all strange and sweet and unemphatic, as though it were an inescapable extension of this unquestioned world, as natural and inevitable as all the rest of it.

I looked at her and said in a shaking voice, "You are Cathy! My God, I have been… What has… Oh, Cathy! Cathy!"

The whole back of my mind had been nailed shut. There was a creaking, straining, and the barrier tumbled, and it all came spilling out. The watery weakness ran out of my eyes and down my face, and I couldn't make words. But she knew what had happened. She hugged me, laughing, crying, snuffling.

Candle Key. Cathy Kerr. That sagging, weathered old bayfront house of hard pine and black cypress.

She said, "Your houseboat, it's tied on up to our old dock out there like before. And like before, there's handyman stuff that's piled up, when you're feeling up to it."

"We used to go out in your skiff and take Davie fishing."

"Remember that day he caught into that shark and got mad at you for cutting it loose? He wasn't even in school yet." She touched her hair. "Now he's near thirteen. I'm an old lady now, way over thirty, Trav."

"Where's your sister? Where's Christine?"

"Just down the road. She married that Max fellow, and she had four more, six in all. The kids are in and out of here all the time. I tried to keep them quiet, but you know how it is. Max got into the land business, and you wouldn't believe what he got us for the land that daddy left us the other side of the main road."

"How many times are you going to have to put me back together?"

"This is only twice. And it was both of us needing it the first time. It could be forty times and never make up to you for what you did for me and what you lost of your own, a-doing it. I've got to call Meyer right now! I shouldn't even have waited this long. He was closer to believing that fool doctor than he was me. I said it would be just a little time, and the doctor said maybe never."

She gave me a quick kiss as she stood up. "Because you had a terrible terrible concussion and they thought there could have been some bleeding inside of your skull that cut off what you knew before somehow. Meyer being here three times and you not knowing him was terrible for him."

She went swiftly to the door, and I saw the well-remembered way she moved, that quick light way of the professional dancer, quick of foot on those lithe, sinewy, lovely legs.

"What's the date?"

"Hmm. The man on the television said this morning it was nine more shopping days til Christmas."

She was gone, leaving me to try to fit my mind around that huge hole in time, Sprenger had killed me on the twenty-eighth day of September. Over two and a half months ago.

When she came back upstairs, she said Meyer said he would leave in ten minutes to drive down. The day was gone. She turned the lights on. I felt emotionally exhausted. I got into bed, and she sat beside me on the bed and held my hand and told me how Meyer had arrived in a rental boat the afternoon of that day with me in the bottom of the boat, wrapped in blankets with the left side of my face so horribly bashed in that my eye seemed to be out of the socket. I seemed to be alive but barely. Not alive enough to go through the routine of phoning an ambulance. They put me in her old pickup, and she had driven like a madwoman while Meyer had stayed back in the truck bed with me to keep me from bouncing around too much. They took me to Doctor Ramirez. The one who looked like a Swede. I suddenly realized it had been Ramirez who had been coming to see me here in Cathy's house. He remembered me from before. Back when he and I started putting Lois Atkinson's head back on. He treated me for shock. The three of them watched over me that night. The next day I was moved by ambulance to the little hospital in Homestead, where there was a surgeon Ramirez believed in, who could rebuild the left side of my face. Cathy told me I was full of alloy pins and plates and special wire. When I was well enough to be moved, I was brought back to her house by ambulance. She had quit her job in the village to take care of me.

"What did Meyer tell you about what happened? What did he tell Ramirez?"

She licked her lips. She wore an odd expression. "What happened, you and Meyer had come down into Florida Bay to do some fishing. You went out from the Flush in your fast little boat, and you went up on the bow to make something fast and gave Meyer the wheel, and he was going between some little islands when the steering cable broke, and he veered right into the island, you got threw headlong into the mangroves."

"What's the matter with my leg?"

"Your back got wrenched up, and it tore a nerve some. The si-sciatic? That's it. But it's coming along real good."

"So where did Meyer get the rental boat?"

She straightened. "Any questions like that, you better ask him. I just wouldn't know a thing."

She fed me well, and I slept and was awakened at ten-thirty when she and Meyer came into the bedroom. He was beaming like a pumpkin with a big candle. I didn't want him to notice the damned water running out of my eyes again. He didn't notice because he kept turning his back to blow his nose.

Cathy left us alone and closed the door. He said, "The absolutely worst part of it, believe me, is to have nobody to tell."

Nothing could have stopped him telling me. Davis had come aboard the Keynes at one in the morning, roused Meyer, and driven him down to Miami, where they picked up Sprenger and drove on down to Regal Marine. Sprenger and Meyer had waited near the public boat ramp while Davis drove to Regal and eventually arrived with the rental boat. Sprenger carried an elegant leather case, the shape of a gigantic dispatch case. It was custom fitted for two rifles, two scopes, ammunition, slings, cleaning equipment. Meyer managed to delay their arrival at No Name by routing them across flats where they could not risk planing speed. Sprenger had left Davis with Meyer in the boat behind the nearby island. He waded to the south end of the island and waited there a long time. He had fired one shot and then, at varied intervals, three series of six shots each. He came back to the boat and had Davis tie Meyer's hand behind him, with one arm through the steering wheel. They left him alone.

"Distant firecrackers," Meyer said. "And then nothing. One hell of a lot of nothing. Except heat. And bugs. Finally I wormed around and stood up on the seat and got my fanny on the edge of the steering wheel. I bounced on it three times, and on the third time it broke off. I got out of the boat and found a mangrove stub covered with barnacles and backed into it and rubbed until I frayed the rope in two. And lost some skin. There was an old gaff in the boat. I took it along. Where do those bluebottle flies come from? How do they know? They were so thick on Davis's face, I couldn't tell who he was until I scared them off. And the lounge was full of them. I thought you were dead. He was lying across you. Then I wondered why you didn't have your share of flies. I put my ear next to your mouth and felt the exhalation. So I lifted him off you."

"Thanks."

"Don't mention it. I wasn't tracking well. I didn't know where to start. I should have got on the horn and called a Coast Guard chopper in. I never even thought of it. Everybody… everybody was so damned dead! You know? It makes it hard to think."

"What killed him?"

"Five little holes in his chest, right through his black shirt. Centered, but just a shade to the right, I think. You could have covered them all with a playing card. Fantastic."

"He shot her. Where did he hit her?"

"I don't know. There was a hole right at the base of her skull, big as half an English walnut."

That fitted the way she had gone down. Her mouth had been sagging open. So that was where the little slug had gone, into the back of her throat and on out.

"I got the boat and had a hell of a job getting the steering wheel back on. I never did. I had to push down on it to turn it. I got you into the boat. I couldn't go back to Regal Marine. I hadn't rented it. I'd taken time out to pull Davis inside and close everything I could and shove clothes into the broken ports and spray those damned hungry flies. I remembered Cathy and figured I could find this place from the Candle Key water tower. So I told her-"