Part 2 (2/2)
”We want to know whether the relations.h.i.+p was such that she would confide in you.”
”Confide what?”
”Let us just say details of her workday, her life out there. That sort of thing.”
”Are you looking into something fishy at Bonnie Brae?”
”Did Mrs. Howard say something fishy is going on at Bonnie Brae?”
”No. No, she didn't. I mean, she called up last Sat.u.r.day morning before she got sick to tell me about one of the owners, Mr. Ladwigg, dying in an accidental fall on his bicycle, if that's what you mean.”
Kline took over. ”Let me set up a hypothesis, Mr. MCGee, and see if that helps. Suppose Mrs. Howard, in the course of her employment out there, learned that something curious was going on. Say that part of the operation was a cover for something else, like gambling or smuggling or something of that nature. Would she have confided in you?”
”Of course.”
”Would she have confided something like that to anyone other than you? Or as well as you?”
”I can't see that happening.”
”And she talked to you about her work?”
”Certainly. About her exercise cla.s.ses of fatties, and the tennis lessons she was giving to children, and the forms she had to complete on each sale of land, houses, and so forth. She liked her work.” The two men looked at each other, and Kline reached over and punched the key to turn off the recorder. Toomey said, ”We do appreciate your cooperation, Mr. McGee.”
”Wouldn't you say you owe me some kind of explanation... why you are interested in Gretel Howard?”
Toomey smiled sadly. ”I wish we could. I really wish we could. There was a possibility she could have acquired some information which would have been useful to us. Unfortunately she became ill before we had a chance to speak with her.”
”If I happen to remember something later on, how do I get in touch with you?” I asked. ”I'm pretty upset right now and I'm not thinking too clearly.”
Kline tore a sheet out of a small spiral notebook and wrote a number on it: (202) 661-7007. I thanked him. They put the recorder away in the dispatch case, smiled politely, put on their hats, and marched off, down my little gangplank and off toward the parking area, in step, arms swinging in unison.
Three minutes later Sue Sampson arrived, bearing a ca.s.serole of hot beef stew. She apologized for having to miss the service and took off just as Meyer arrived.
I made the delayed drinks. Meyer set the stew over low heat while we sat and he listened to the saga of Toomey and Kline.
”All right,” he said, ”so you sidestepped. You left out Brother t.i.tus and the blue airplane and the twenty-acre sale to a syndicate in Brussels. But you make them sound very authentic.”
”While they were boring in, I was deciding several things. First, that I am not in very good emotional shape to spar with anybody about anything. Second, that I could get in touch with them later. Third, that they were almost too perfect. Too cold and clean. They had no regional accent that I could detect. They said they did not usually go out into the field. That implied some importance to talking to me. But it never came off as important. They wanted some hearsay about what might be going on at Bonnie Brae. Colloquial American p.r.o.nunciation, but a stilted kind of sentence structure. Almost like you when you are at your most professorial.”
”Didactic is a better word. The tendency to lecture others.”
”Kline made those little continental crossbars on the sevens in the phone number. See?”
”But that came after you had decided to hold off.”
”Before that, their pants were too long. Long enough almost to step on the back of the cuffs.
Like Kissinger. The necktie knots were wrong. Frenchmen tie them that way. When Kline cleaned his gla.s.ses and held them up to the light, I looked through them too, and I saw no distortion.”
”So the gla.s.ses were a very minor correction. So both of them have lived and worked abroad. So they spoke another language before they learned English.”
”I know. I know. But, dammit, it seemed like such an invasion of my personal privacy to have strangers here asking me to talk about Gretel. I am not ready to talk about Gretel to anybody. I am not impressed by official credentials. Nor by Mr. Robert A. Toomey or Mr. Richard E. Kline, on the staff of the Select Committee on Special Resources in the Senate Office Building.”
”Are you sure you remember that accurately?”
”I'm sure.”
Meyer wrote it down on Kline's piece of paper. ”No great problem to check it out on Monday, if you'd like.”
”I'd like.”
”Ready for stew?”
”Right after the next drink. If it all checks out, I'll forget my paranoia and phone them and tell all.”
”And what if it doesn't check out? What if your instincts were accurate?”
”Then I'm going to have to try to figure out what they were really after. The cover story was very elaborate. I wouldn't think they'd have gone to all that trouble just for me. I would be incidental to something more important to them, or to someone.”
I had one drink more than I needed. Meyer dished out the stew. I managed almost half of what he served me. He wanted to clean up, but I shooed him out, sent him home.
After I washed the dishes, I locked up and went over the pedestrian bridge to the beach. A high gray overcast had moved in, pushed by a cool fitful breeze off the sea. I had put on good shoes for walking, and I headed north on packed damp sand, lunging along, carrying with me my sorrow, my mild headache, my sour stomach, and the dull pain in my right thigh which cold and damp will cause. I plodded along the beach all the way up to Galt Ocean Mile, and from there on I alternated between the beach and A-1-A, depending on obstacles. The cold and the oncoming dusk had emptied the beaches. The gla.s.sy facades of the condominiums glittered down at me.
I pushed hard, but even so it had been dark a long time when I crossed back over to the mainland on the Atlantic Boulevard bridge at Pompano Beach. I walked the seven short blocks to North Federal Highway. They were promoting Christmas carols at the big shopping center, pumping them out into the night wind. Jangle bells. And the silent stars go by.
When I found a saloon, I had a small draft beer and phoned a cab. One Oscar Lopez arrived in a rattle-bang rig that smelled strongly of cigar and faintly of vomit. He was dubious about the length of the trip compared with the appearance of the pa.s.senger, and I had to show him that I had money. Though he played loud rock and drove badly, he did not have to be told to turn east at Sunrise. He let me off at the marina. I walked to my houseboat, let myself in. It was empty. I had gotten used to a certain amount of emptiness after she had moved way out there to Bonnie Brae. But it had been a conditional emptiness. She could and would return. But now it was a hollowness beyond belief. Even the promise of life and warmth had been drained out of that clumsy old hull. She was hollow, brittle, tacky and old, sighing in a night wind, smelling faintly of onion, unwilling to admit that Gretel had ever lived here with me. My legs were leaden with fatigue. The small beer was caught in the back of my throat. Gretel was turned to ash and confined in bronze. The green ripper sailed by on the night wind, looking for more customers. I suggested, politely, that I would give him no big argument this time. But there were others with a higher priority tonight.
Four.
I GOT through Sunday-with a little help from my friends. It was a day of cold December rain. I uncrated and hooked up my new speakers. They had been delivered ten days ago. Once they were positioned and adjusted, I tied them down. I had been going to give the old ones to Gretel to give to a friend, but I couldn't remember the friend's name.
The new ones had a great big full rich sound for such small enclosures. They worked all day long. Big music and b.l.o.o.d.y Marys. People came by and brought bottles and food and stayed for a time and left again. When it would begin to get too noisy, somebody would remember that too much merriment was probably in bad taste, and things would quiet down, but not for long. It was a party related to a wake.
At the bitter end of the day there was but one guest left aboard. I had heard about her but had never met her. She was the third or fourth wife of some old party from Long Island whose hundred-and-twenty-foot ocean-going yacht was moored at one of the big berths, with a permanent crew of five. The Madrina, meaning ”G.o.dmother,” a nice enough name for a s.h.i.+p. The Madrina had been at the marina for a month because her owner had a very bad stroke the day before they were to sail for Bermuda. I did not know who brought the wife aboard my vessel, or left her there with me. Smallish, dark-haired, and very nice to look upon, she was a creature of many subtle perfections. Named Anna. An accent I could not place. Some Portuguese, she said, and Chinese, and a lot of White Russian, born in Hong Kong, and with a degree in engineering from the University of Alabama.
Anna wore a woolly white jump suit with a turtleneck, a heavy-duty gold zipper all the way down the front of it, and some little marine flag signals embroidered over the pocket. At five of midnight, after the others had left, there we were. She was curled into a corner of my yellow sofa, brandy gla.s.s in hand, looking over at me out of dark eyes under dark brows under the wing of smooth jet hair across her forehead. She stared with a total focus of her attention, watchful as a cat. The white outfit fitted so closely no one with figure flaws could have managed it. I couldn't remember who had brought her into the group.
”We have very much the same kind of trouble, Travis,” she said.
”We do?”
”They told me the day before yesterday, at the hospital, that Harvey won't live.”
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