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

  "Oh," I said. "But I don't think Lois Harron is a very good liar. She said that she and Howie were below and heard the crunch when he dived into the dinghy."

  He opened his eyes. "Let's say they anchored off Little Harbor for a swim. All three of them swam. Fred Harron drank and swam and passed out on deck, loaded. And then Lois and Howie went below and took off their wet suits and had sex. Afterward, let's say that Lois drowsed off. Howie heard the dinghy swing in the tide and wind change and bump against the hull. He certainly knew the marriage situation. Maybe he wanted to do her a little favor. He could give such a great start it would wake her up and he could pretend to be agitated and say, 'What was that? What was that? Didn't you hear it? A big thumping noise. Maybe we pulled the hook.' He could yank his swim trunks on, hurry topside, take a quick look around at the empty sea, scoop the surgeon up and launch him headfirst into the dinghy, bawling to Lois to hurry up just as the doctor landed."

  I got up and looked out his window into the early darkness. "A little favor for a lady, eh? Like killing a hornet, or parking her car in a narrow space, or helping her over a fence. Meyer, you never used to be able to think so badly of people."

  "I used to lead a sheltered life. Does it fit, emotionally? Does the concept have internal logic?"

  "Enough to give me the crawls. No proof possible. Ever."

  "You take a turn. Try Susan from Texas."

  "Okay. Erratic, neurotic, alienated. And hostile. So she located her father's boat somehow. Maybe she was still in contact with a friend in her hometown who would know. She moves aboard, pleads with Howie not to tell her folks. They become intimate. He likes living aboard boats. She is an added convenience. He doesn't have to go out and find a girl if he wants one. Maybe he never wants one badly enough to go to any great lengths to find one. But if one is right there, within reach, he'll reach when he feels any mild urge. Okay, so she thinks she'd got the leverage on two counts, letting her stay aboard and laying her. Hostility is the clue, maybe. A little lady lib mixed in. Do just what I want you to do, or I'll blow the whistle on you, Howard. And maybe she would anyway, because she was erratic. End of a convenient way of life. Big problem of where to live and what to do. So he turned her head a little further around than it is supposed to go, wired her into a weighted tarp, put her and her stuff into the launch by the dark of the moon, and probably deep-sixed her up one of the canals. How many of those freaky, wandering, bombed little girls disappear every year without a trace? Thousands? I don't know. But I think it adds up to a lot of them."

  "Very nice," Meyer said. "It fits the same pattern. A casual response to a minor problem. Why do we like Howie Brindle?"

  "Rhetorical question?"

  "Not exactly. There is something childlike about him. A kind of placidity, a willingness to be moved about by events. You sense that he does not want to be an aggressor, to take anything you have from you by force. He is cheerful, without being at all witty. He loves to play games. He likes to be helpful. He watches a lot of daytime television. He has a short attention span. He won't dream up chores, but he'll do faithfully what you tell him to do, if you're explicit. His serious conversation, a rare phenomenon, seems to come from daytime televiion drama. He loves chocolate bars and beer. He doesn't want trouble of any kind, and he'll lie beaufully to get out of any kind of trouble. He has absolutely no interest in the world at large. Retarded? Hardly. I think he may have a better intelligence than he is willing to display. But something is wrong with him. For lack of a better word, call him a sociopath. They are very likable, plausible people. They make superb imposters, until they lose interest in the game of the moment. They form few lasting attachments. As a rule, they are liars, petty thieves, sometimes brawlers, but seldom are they killers. I can explain why they are so dangerous, the ones willing to kill. Because they are absolutely immune to polygraph tests. The polygraph measures fear, guilt, shame, anxiety. They don't experience these emotions. They can fake them by imitating the way the rest of us act under stress. But it's only an imitation. When the only thing in the world that concerns you is not getting caught, you would kill for very small reasons. In fact, murder that is the result of irritation plus casual impulse plus an elementary slyness is the most difficult to solve."

  I went to the foot of the bed. "We've seen some of those, Meyer. Remember?"

  "Not if I can help it."

  "We like him because he's just a mischievous little kid."

  "That's the ultimate simplification. Mommy gives all her time to new baby sister and won't make peanut butter sandwiches when you come home from school, so put the pillow over baby sister's little face and push down on it and listen to the clock going tick."

  "But what the hell good is all this doing Pidge?"

  "She doesn't fit the pattern of his other... solutions."

  "No. This seems more complicated. Seems! It is. It's as if... he hasn't been able to figure out the best way to go-to kill her or drive her crazy."

  "Remember his first and only rule. Don't get caught."

  "So?"

  "So if the ramifications of killing her made him cautious and indecisive a year ago, nothing has really changed so much. And you are in the equation now. He knows you talked to her about the things she couldn't comprehend and convinced her she had been hallucinating. I think that might be the best favor you could have done her."

  "I don't understand."

  "I'm thinking out loud. And not making much sense. Sorry. I think that if she were to confront him on this trip to American Samoa with his having tricked her into thinking she was losing her mind, she might not last the whole voyage."

  "But you think she will?"

  "My God, don't take my hunch for reality. She could be face down right now, off a lovely atoll, drifting down and down into that incredible turquoise blue, with Howie squatting and watching her sink, his only lament a vague disappointment at having to give up something of about the same pleasure quotient as a chocolate bar."

  "Why are you-"

  "Whoa! The veins in your neck are standing out. I had to steer you away from childish optimism. Remember, there is a very cold and strange entity that hides inside Howie Brindle. It is the imposter. He is the stage effect. It has refined the role until good ol' Howie knows all the tricks of quick acceptance, of generating fondness, of making people glad to help him out. The thing inside pulls the strings and pushes the little levers, and Howie does all your chores for you. Cheerfully."

  "What the hell should I do?"

  "First, stop yelling. Second, on your way out, tell them I am ready to go to sleep: Third, you could backtrack Howie a little bit further. Fourth. Hmmm. Fourth. Oh. Tom Collier comes into this thing too often to be shmmm... suggle...."

  "Meyer?"

  "Garf," he said softly, the "f" lasting on and on. His eyes were closed. I stared up through the ceiling, hands spread wide, and spun and left him there.

  Thirteen

  SUNDAY MORNING was crisp and bright, but so windless the smog- was going to build up quickly. Coop flew me over to the Sarasota-Bradenton Airport in his little red-and-white BD-4. It is a very happy and responsive four-place, high-wing ship. It is comfortable, reasonably quiet, and cruises at a hundred and seventy miles an hour on its hundred and eighty horses.

  Coop is always ecstatic at-the chance to fly me anywhere in the state. I buy the gas and pay the landing fees. He can't charge for the flight or his services because he built his airplane from a kit. The FAA classifies it as an Experimental Amateur Built airplane. Coop paid $7200 for the kit. He is one of five or six hundred people who fly planes made from the same kit. He put in twenty hours a week for forty weeks, and the FAA, who had been looking over his shoulder as he built it, watched him climb into it and fly it, and gave it an airworthness certificate. There is nothing about it he doesn't maintain perfectly, and nothing about it he can't fix.

  I always forget his square name until I see it behind the glassine on the instrument panel. Pelham Whittaker. He is known as C
oop because he looks astonishingly like Gary Cooper until he either talks or stands up. He has a very fast high-pitched voice. And he is about five foot five. He teaches in the adult-education program in the high school at night, so he can fly his BD-4 in the daytime. His wife teaches in junior high in the daytime, so she won't have to go flying with him.

  He is a very careful, fussy pilot. They are the best kind. It was such a nice morning he took it right across the peninsula and emerged a little north of Fort Myers. Once over the Gulf, he took it down to a thousand feet and stayed a half mile off the beaches as we went up the coast. Even looking toward the morning brightness, I had a good view of the coast. I hadn't seen it from that altitude for several years. Boca Grande looked much the same. And so did Manasota Key. But the small city of Venice, and Siesta Key, two keys north of Venice, were shocking. Pale and remarkably ugly high-rises were jammed against the small strip of sand beach, shoulder to shoulder. Blooms of effluent were murking the blue waters. Tiny churchgoing automobiles were stacked up at the lift bridges, winking in the sun, and making a whiskey haze that spoiled the quality of the light.

  After he had his instructions from the tower and had turned inland to start his pattern, I could see, in the haze to the north, the tall stacks of the mighty Borden phosphate and fertilizer plant in Bradenton, spewing lethal fluorine and sulphuricacid components into the vacation sky. In the immediate area it is known bitterly as the place where Elsie the Cow coughed herself to death. I have read where it had been given yet another two years to correct its massive and dangerous pollution. Big Borden must have directors somewhere. Maybe, like the Penn Central directors, they are going to sit on their respective docile asses until the roof falls in. There are but two choices. Either they know they condone poisoning and don't give a damn, or they don't know they condone poisoning and don't give a damn. Anybody can walk into any brokerage office and be told where to look to find a complete list of the names of the directors and where they live. Drop the fellows a line, huh?

  Coop put it down and rolled it over to the apron in the private aircraft sector. I knew he would stay in the area, answering questions about his kit plane, and talking flying-with hand gestures-with all the other Sunday flyers. When I neared the terminal and looked back, I could see that he had already acquired an audience of two, and would tell all about Jim Bede and his magic airplane kits.

  A lanky miss behind the Hertz counter leased me a pink Torino which stank of stale cigar, even with the windows down and the speed up. I hesitated, then found my way out to Route 41 and turned north to Bradenton. I had checked a phone book in the airport to be certain it wasn't going to be too easy. No Brindle. I didn't even know if it was his paternal grandfather who'd brought him to Florida. Fast traffic was zapping by me on the northbound side of traffic divided highway, whooshing through a tacky wilderness of franchised food, car dealerships, boat dealerships, trailer dealerships, motels, auction houses, real estate agencies, factory clothing outlets, furniture warehouses, rent-anything emporiums, used cars, used trailers, used campers, used boats. Had I not seen a boat for sale every few hundred yards, I would never have known I was within five hundred miles of salt water. That's what's going to flatten the old wallets, guys, that missing feeling of being near the sea. It has done gone.

  A Sunday that is the next to the last day of the year is a poor time to run a trace back through ten years, even in an area that hasn't grown an inch. But I was impatient, and I hadn't been able to get in touch with Tom Collier. And Coop wasn't doing anything.

  I fumbled my way out of the fast traffic and down to the heart of town, and from there, with some directions, found the City Police. I parked the pink cigar a block away and went into the station. The two men on the front didn't come panting over to see what I wanted. It is the way with cops to make you wait a little while because a great deal can be read from the way a person waits. And it is a nice opportunity to look the visitor over. They were looking while they talked. Okay, so I am large, leathery, bigboned, with some visible signs of violent impact in years past. The shirt, fellas, is L. L. Bean, lightweight wool. The pants are Sears best quality double-knit stretch. This here cardigan I am carrying over my shoulder is Guatemalan, knitted by durable little brown people up in the Chichicastenango clouds. The shoes are After Hours, pony hide I think. The watch is by Pulsar.

  And I wait amiably, see? Sort of lounging here, with half smile. So I could be the guy who comes and climbs the pole and fixes the phone. Or the driver of a big rig looking for a safe place to leave it because he can't deliver it today. Or I could be fuzz on vacation, stopping in to patronize the local brotherhood. Or I could be a dude from Palm Beach stopping by to report the theft of an original Dufy from the salon of his motor yacht. An eccentric dude without siyled hair, capped teeth or tinted contacts.

  All I know as I wait so disarmingly is that I have done a lot of things wrong here and there, but with what there is left of this Howie Brindle fiasco, I am not going to make bad moves.

  "Help you, sir?"

  "I don't know. If I could get a look at a back file of city directories."

  "Trying to find someone?"

  I quickly suppressed the terrible compulsion to tell him that I wanted to see if I could still tear them in half. "He moved here when he was about twelve; I think. That would be thirteen or fourteen years ago. I guess he left when he went to the University of Florida, which would be about seven years back give or take. Howard Brindle."

  "You say he left? Then he's not here."

  "That is right. That is absolutely right, Officer. I want to see if he has relatives still living in Bradenton."

  "What have you got in mind?" The questions are always automatic. The more you ask the more you know. And you might get an answer you don't like. I gave him one of the six clean cards. "Title Research Associates," he read aloud. "McGee. Fort Lauderdale."

  "It's just a little research to clear a title," I said. He pushed the card back across the counter and I picked it up, tucked it away. "You come around on a business day, you can find old city directories at the Tax Office, and maybe the Chamber, or even the library."

  "I had to come over here anyway, and I guess I was trying to save myself two trips. You know how it is."

  "Sure. I don't know how I could help you."

  "It might be that somebody in the Department would know Brindle. He played football for the high school here. Offensive backfield. Big fellow. Light-colored hair. Went to Gainesville on a football scholarship."

  My man looked blank but the other one put a file folder down and ambled over, saying, "Sure. I remember him. A great big son of a bitch, more pro size than high school. Short yardage situations, they'd bring him in to get the distance or be a decoy. Quick as could be getting through that line, but once he got into the backfield, they could catch him pretty good. He couldn't go for the long gainers. He never did much at Gainesville, and I expected him to show up in the pros, but he never did. What ever happened to him?"

  "He married a little money, I understand."

  "That's the way to go! Say, dint you play some pro? I heard Dave here say McGee. First name?"

  "Travis."

  "Oh, sure. Tight end. Kind of way back. Like you were up there two years, and you got racked up bad. Give me a couple of minutes and I can come up with the Detroit guy that clobbered you."

  I stared at him. "Nobody can remember me, much less who messed up my legs. You've got some kind of hobby there. It was a rookie middle linebacker named DiCosola."

  He put his hand out. "Ben Durma. I memorize all that stuff. My wife thinks I'm nuts. But I win a lot of beers. Too bad you couldn't stay in long enough to last into the good money like they get nowadays. You're a good size for a tight end. Well, about Brindle's folks, I wouldn't know. But I got an idea. Let me check the duty roster."

  He came back and said, "I asked the dispatcher to bring Shay back in. He was playing for the high school the same time Brindle was. Stan Shay. He was too small for a sch
olarship."

  "I don't want to upset anything. I could wait around."

  "No problem. It's very, very slow out there. Tonight it will start building and tomorrow night will be a disaster area. We're running light so we can beef up the shifts for the trouble time. In the last hour and a half, one stolen bike, one guy chasing his old lady naked around the yard with a ball bat."

  Shay was one of those elegant cops. Handsome and dark and trim, the kind who has blue jowls no matter how close the shave, wears tightly tailored uniforms, sports a very careful hair style, walks like a lazy tomcat, and looks as if the eyelashes are false. But they are real, and the toughness is real, and you do not want to say anything which could possibly be interpreted as a challenge to his virility or authority. The desk had business when he came in. They aimed him over at me where I sat on a bench, but Durma called him back to give him a better fill-in. I was standing when he arrived. We shook hands and he said he had to be next to his cruiser because he was on call. We went out to the parking area and he sat behind the wheel, door open, turned sideways so he could hook his heels on the step plate. I leaned against the side of the car.