John D MacDonald - Travis McGee 15 - The Turquoise Lament Read online

  "And now I do too."

  He smiled. "So we're both strange. What's a streak on varnish? Five minutes to fix it. I went back and made sure it was gone. That was about a week later. Howie had done a pretty good job on it."

  "Howie? By God, you're right! He was living aboard her, caretaking her until she was sold. Was he working for the broker or for Tom Collier?"

  "I have no idea."

  "Was that the first job he, had around the marina?"

  "As far as I know."

  "Could he have been working as crew for the doctor?"

  "I just don't know. It's possible."

  We were working away on our own special form of triangulation. In another context, for another purpose, it would be called gossip. We are all concerned with the strange activities of the human animal. We are all aware of how coincidence can lead to warped assumptions. And we all keep looking for the very worst from the couple next door to Watergate.

  "He's a damned likable brute," Meyer said, echoing what I was thinking.

  "Comfortable. Undemanding. A listener who never butts in to tell some epic hero story of his own, who laughs in the right places, and not too loudly or long."

  "Pidge wanted to know if he was trying to kill her."

  "So you told me."

  "I made her believe it was a little touch of paranoia."

  "So you told me."

  "But God damn it, Meyer-"

  "Whoa. Settle down. If he wanted to, just how many chances do you think he's had in over fourteen months of cruising?"

  "That was part of my basis for believing she was wrong."

  "Well?"

  "Who is Howard Brindle?"

  "If that's not a rhetorical question, and if that is your starting point, I agree. But you're not going to find out tonight. The chess board is over there."

  By the time Nurse Ella Marie Morse came on duty to look after him during the hours of the night, I had the game won. He had slowly worked me back into a cramped position, pressing me back against my castled. king, smothering my queen side, but he had failed to see a sacrifice that gave me a very damaging knight fork and put me a piece ahead. I was trading him down to an end-game defeat, and he resigned when the nurse arrived, saying something about possibly the fever had damaged some brain cells after all.

  Before she herded me out, Meyer told me he didn't expect to see me again until I had some hard information on good ol' Howie.

  A big raw Saturday wind killed what was left of the strange untimely heat wave. It was the first day of the extra-long year-end weekend, meaning that offices were closed and I could not use the logical starting place, the detailed forms which have to be placed on file with every little red-tape empire.

  I had written down what I knew about him. It was very skimpy. He didn't talk about himself often and never said very much. Raised by grandparents, I think. Ohio, Indiana, Iowa. One of those states. His grandfather retired and they moved to Bradenton, Florida. Howie was about ten? Maybe older. Became a high-school jock. Fullback. Straight ahead for the tough yard and a half on third down. Partial scholarship to the University of Florida. Out of the athletic budget. How long ago? They shifted him to defensive tackle. Second string. Got to play in only three out of nine games his senior year. Disciplinary problems, he'd said. I'd inferred he broke train ing now and then, nothing worth spelling out. Wanted the pro scene, but nobody picked him in the draft. The Dolphins took a long hard look at him in training camp. Not enough hustle, apparently, according to what he said. They let him go. Three years ago? Longer? Then a blank until he showed up at Bahia Mar. Knows how to handle himself around boats and the sea. Drinks beer. Doesn't smoke. Six four, two seventy, looks sloppy but is in good shape. Brown eyes, receding hairline, blond hair long. Voice pitched slightly high.

  I took a packet of fresh fifties out of my stash. I studied my little collection of improvised business cards. Title Research Associates looked good enough, and there were six crisp clean ones left.

  Her name, I learned at Bahia Mar, was Lois Harron. Evidently she'd been able to afford to keep the house. It was on one of those canals southwest of Pier 66, a long low white structure with Bahamian gray trim, behind a screen of shrubbery which would someday hide it entirely from the asphalt road in front. There were eight vehicles in the driveway, parked in random array on the white river pebbles. A couple of vans, a couple of VW's, a camper body on a pickup, a couple of road-worn station wagons and a shiny 'lbyota. The wheels of the young. The high-performance cars are dead. A young man in Dade County has to pay twelve hundred dollars a year in insurance' premiums to buy the basic legal coverage for a high-performance car, and the law says he can't get plates or inspection stickers without proof of insurance. The young used to be the meat of the market, and without their demand, Detroit can't make toys for the middle-aged role players, which is perhaps a blessing to all concerned.

  I punched the bell three times before a brutally loud vacuum cleaner was turned off. Then I could hear yelps and sloshing from a pool area out back somewhere. A slender, tall woman with dark hair came to the door. She wore faded old stretch pants and a tired old T-shirt on which appeared pink ghost-writing, almost entirely gone, saying HAWAII FIVE-O. She was barefoot and she had a streak of dirt across her forehead, and she looked irritated, and she also looked very familiar to me.

  She frowned and smiled, and pushed the screen door open and said, "Where, where, where? Hmmm. Bahia Mar. A year ago. What was the name of that big cruiser? 'Bama Lady?"

  " 'Bama Gal. The Alabama Tiger's lair."

  "Sho nuff. Jesus! A year ago, I guess, but the memories are vivid. And I think a bunch of us came aboard your houseboat. Belated apologies for that invasion, friend. We were not all the way tracking. Come in, come in. Total confusion. My maid died. Isn't that hell? She didn't quit. She didn't get fired. She died. Which leaves me with mixed emotions, and I will be damned if I can find anybody who isn't a total dumb-dumb. What is your name? I can't come up with it."

  "Travis McGee."

  "Of course! I'm dreary about names. Excuse the racket. My only chick is home on Christmas vacation and I wish the dear girl wasn't quite as popular. Look at them out there! Wall to wall energy. It makes me tired to watch them. Get you a drink? What can I do for you, Travis?"

  "I'm doing an odd job for a friend. Odd meaning maybe strange. He's doing research on the kinds of people who go around the world in small boats."

  "Believe me, I am not his kind of person."

  "Neither am I, Lois. But he was questioning me about the background of Howie Brindle, and I said I thought he worked for you and your husband, and he wondered if I'd ask you for your impressions of him."

  She was in a good strong north light. Her face tightened just a little bit, and there were some rapid eye movements, a small pursing of the lips. "Is Howie going on some brave adventure?"

  "He's somewhere in the Pacific, with wife."

  "Oh, yes. That girl who inherited the Trepid when her father was killed. Some idiot name. Pooch?"

  "Pidge."

  "My dear man, the Trepid is hardly a small dangerous boat. It was built to cross oceans. And being with wife is not being alone, one would hope."

  "I'm sorry. This isn't the epic-adventure kind of thing. It's more sociological, about the kinds of people who seek solitude when everybody else is after togetherness. A think piece."

  "Can I get you that drink? No? Then sit patiently while I fix myself one."

  She was back in five minutes, hair brushed, mouth freshened, smudge gone from her forehead. She carried a colorless drink on ice. "Hatch," she said and sipped before she sat down across from me. "Sure. Howie worked for us, crewing aboard the Salamah."

  "For how long?"

  "Let me see. It was the longest vacation we ever took. It was just about the only vacation we ever took. Fred did umpty operations a day, getting the decks cleared. And he begged and bullied his best friends into taking the load while we were gone. Let me see. Howie came aboard a
t Spanish Wells. We'd been in the islands for two weeks, because I remember it took two weeks for me to realize Fred wasn't getting much vacation trying to run the boat by himself. I'm an idiot about those things. So that means Howie was aboard for just about six weeks. And then he brought her back by himself, of course, after Fred-after the accident."

  "He was in Spanish Wells looking for work?"

  "No. Not the way that sounds. There was a couple from Charleston in a cruiser, and Howie was working for them. Actually, the woman approached us about hiring him. She said he was an absolute jewel. There wasn't anything he wouldn't do, and he respected your privacy and all. But her husband was having angina too bad to keep on cruising, and they were going to fly back home as soon as he felt up to it, and that left Howie at loose ends. It was an answer to prayer. We interviewed Howie and we both liked him a lot. So he moved into the crew cabin forward that same day, and Fred started showing him all that he should know about the Salamah. He really worked out fine. We stopped having all those narrow escapes we were having when Fred was running it alone. And he scrubbed and helped with the cooking and all. If you mean competence, I think Howie could probably sail around the world in an old bathtub. He seems to know when the wind is going to change before the wind knows. He's so huge you're conscious of how his weight tilts the boat. But he's so light on his feet he doesn't seem... ponderous."

  "So he was there when your husband had his accident?"

  She raised the glass to her lips so deliberately I wondered if she was trying to buy time, and why. She took a deep swallow and said, "Whatever would that have to do with anything at all, Travis?"

  "I'm just guessing, but I'd say that there'd be some relationship between how these deepwater people react to emergencies and their desire to get away from the world."

  "He reacts beautifully."

  "What happened? I mean, where was he when it happened?"

  "You have no idea how many times I told this, over two years ago, how many times a new official popped up and had to hear it all over again."

  "I'm sorry. Forget it."

  "It doesn't matter as much now as it did then. It so happened that Howie and I were both below. The three of us had been swimming. We were anchored just outside Little Harbor. It was a very calm sea. It was about three thirty in the afternoon. Both Howie and I heard this strange thumping sound. He ran up and as soon as he saw what had happened, he yelled to me. Fred was on his face in the dinghy with his legs trailing in the water. The dinghy had shipped some water. Somehow we got him up onto the deck and got shade over him. Howie got on the emergency frequency right away and pretty soon there was a doctor on the way in a seaplane, but Fred stopped breathing before the plane landed even. There was an investigation and all that. And I flew back in the same chartered plane with Tom Collier and with the body. Tom has been an absolute doll about everything. I don't know what I would have done without him."

  "So you think that Howie Brindle would be a good person to sail around the world?"

  "I guess so."

  "Some reservations?"

  "Not really. It's just that I thought people like that were great readers, and kept journals and did a lot of heavy thinking. Howie is just sort of a physical person. I don't think he really has much going on up here. You know? He's terribly pleasant, and he figures out the little problems, the best way to do things, but if you said to him, 'Howie, do you think there is a hereafter?' he would look sort of startled. I can tell you almost exactly what he would say. He'd say, `Some people believe there is and some people believe there isn't. I guess there's no way to find out for sure.'"

  "Do you feel you really got to know him?"

  "You know as well as I do that six weeks aboard anything the size of the Salamah is no way to remain strangers. After Howie brought her back to Lauderdale, Tom asked me if I had any objection to Howie living aboard her and caretaking. I said none at all. I went down and removed the personal stuff, and Howie helped me load it all in the station wagon. Funny. I was so positive I wanted to sell her until the day she was sold. And then I was sorry."

  The young were shrieking and yelping. She took her last sip of drink, looking at me across the rim of the empty glass. The ice chinked as she put the glass down. A handsome woman with the eyes of a gambler. I've got aces back to back, and I dare you to bet into them. Good smile lines.

  She said, "I'd like to come see your houseboat some day when things aren't so drunk. I remember an absolutely gigantic shower stall, or did I dream it? Much too big for a boat."

  "It's there. It's real." She was waiting for the definite invitation. No thanks, widow lady. With that figure and mouth, you can get all the safe, healthy fellows you want. I stood up. "Thanks for letting me bother you with these weird questions."

  "It's okay. I needed a break. I hate cleaning the place. If I can't find somebody soon, I'm going to have to sell it before it works me to death."

  "It's the right time of year to advertise in Boston or Chicago."

  "You just may have something there. After school opens, I could fly up and interview applicants and bring the best one back. See you around the marina, Travis."

  I went back to Bahia Mar to fill in a very troubling blank in Brindle's history. Meyer had stimulated my memory to the point where I knew Howie had been aboard the Salamah until she was sold. But she was sold before Professor Ted was killed. So he would not have met Pidge until she came down from school when Ted died, and to meet her and to be available to give her a helping hand, he had to be living somewhere else in the marina complex.

  The cold wet wind had swept the area fairly clean of both residents and tourists. The parking meters at the beach area stood like a small lonely forest of Martian flowers. Some young folk in wet suits were trying to find breakers to ride. They weren't breaking often. They were sliding in round and gray and slow, as if quieted by oil. The black suits are the last step in unisex. Out there with their boards they looked as neuter as black seals.

  I checked out several neighborhoods before I came up with anything. Any big marina has neighborhoods. The charterboats, the rag bums, the fat cruiser crowd, the horsepower freaks, the roundthe-worlders, the storekeepers, the staff.

  Fat Jack Hoover was replacing a compressor aboard the Miss Kitty, the ornate top-heavy old single-crew mahogany yacht he captains for a crazy old lady from Duluth. She comes down once or twice a year for a week to ten days each time, bringing along a maid, a cook, three poodles and four friends. When she comes down, she wants to cruise up and down the Waterway, very slowly. She doesn't want any rocking and lurching, or any more noise than necessary. Fat Jack sends all the billing to a bank in Duluth. They pay with hardly ever a question.

  He wiped his greasy paws on a ball of waste and sat on the crate the new compressor had been shipped in. "Now who would know the most about it would be Rine Houk."

  "That sells yachts?"

  "The very one. From the shape that Harron ketch was in while he was showing her, he come to believe Howie was reliable, which is a rare thing especially lately, especially anywhere. Like with a house, it is a good thing to have somebody living on it when you are selling it, so the air isn't stale, the bugs stay hid, the bird shit gets wiped off the overhead. So what he does is make a deal, Howie moves onto that big son of a bitch of a thing out of Corpus Christi, that QM crash boat that was custom-made into a yacht, big old high-octane Packards in her, you couldn't blow fuel out a fire hose as fast as she'd suck. Ninety foot? A friggin' fiasco, that thing, what was the name on it? Weird. Oh. Scroomall. Big sacrifice sale at forty thou, but the way I looked at it, Howie agreeing, you'd have to pull the Packards and put in diesels, change the tanks, gearing, trim. Nineteen and forty-four it was built, and all as solid as you could expect with the owner trying to hammer it into pieces on any little ripple whenever he run it, so you would end up with seventy-five to eighty in it, conservative guess, and what do you have? Another freak PT conversion is what you have, roll you sick on a wet lawn. The owner got i
t this far with a new wife on her, just a kid she was, and she said enough, she wouldn't even go back onto the son of a bitch to get a toothbrush, so he put it up right then. Fahrhowser his name was, round bald fella with a voice to rattle the dish cupboards. There was work to do on it, so Howie got more pay, Rine Houk getting approval from Fahrhowser.