The Scarlet Ruse (12 page)

"If it weren't for the general?"

"He and his wife and the sister came in and talked to the girl. He wanted to bust her right out, right now, but the only way he could do it, it would turn into news. I want it to stay quiet. If the man who did it suddenly hears there is going to be every kind of heat and pressure he ever heard of, he could be long gone."

"The man?"

"She came home with him yesterday, say. She brought him to her place. They hassled. She started to try to run. He grabbed her by the hair to yank her back, not meaning to kill her, but he was too rough. Broke vertebrae. The spinal cord was pinched and lacerated. The time of death they say was maybe about two-thirty, but the injury could have happened then or earlier. There would be a lot of paralysis, but the heart and the breathing could have kept going an hour after the neck was snapped, maybe longer. She went down, and he probably started to get out of there, then decided to confuse everybody. I had a hell of a job convincing that old man to lay back. Judy's release can be arranged quietly tomorrow."

"Where are they staying?"

"Now it's your turn, McGee."

"I'm not pleading or begging. I'm just telling you that it would be a very nice gesture on your part, Sergeant, if you would accept what I want to tell you without going after what I really have to hold back."

"I'll decide after I hear the first part."

"There is a good chance that some person or persons unknown believed that Jane Lawson might have something very valuable hidden in her apartment."

"How valuable?"

"Four hundred thousand, maybe."

"Is there a chance they got it?"

"If there is a chance it was there, there is a chance they got it."

"Is it bigger than a breadbox?"

"That's as far as I want to go right now."

"The hell with that, McGee. Come in or get brought in. What are you trying to do to me, giving me such crap?"

"You are a good officer, I think. And if I get clumsy and walk in front of a city bus, I want you to have some kind of a starting place."

"Then give me one! The general is at the Doral."

"I did."

"Is it gold coins, McGee? Is it? Hey! McGee? Is it?"

Slowly, gently, I replaced the phone on the cradle, and its little night glow went on glowing.

I checked the time and wondered about the Doral. If one wanted to get anywhere at all with the general, it wouldn't be over the phone. Probably not in person either.

I wondered about breadboxes and gold. What were they getting for it lately? Sixty dollars an ounce? But not normal ounces. Troy weight. I scribbled some figures. A quarter ton of raw gold would be worth four hundred thousand maybe. Okay then. Smaller than your standard, everyday breadbox. But one hell of a lot more comprehensible than Fedderman's little squares and oblongs of paper.

He had showed me one in a catalog. British Guiana. Scott catalog number 13. One-cent magenta. Valued at $325,000. Unique, meaning there is only one in the world. Also, 1856. It is Stanley Gibbons catalog number 23, valued at Ј120,000. Crude printing in black on reddish purple paper and initialed in ink by a postmaster long dead.

So, to paraphrase Mary Alice, just what preoccupation of man is worth futzing with? Anything which relates to survival is acceptable on the basis that survival is both possible and laudable. Survival of self and species and environment.

Everything else then becomes a taste. Taste of the hummingbird tongues, taste of gold in the vault, taste of Barbara Barefoot, taste of uniqueness of oneself, because if there is only one British Guiana 13 in the world and you own it, you walk about with the knowledge of being the only man who owns it. You are unique. If you have the biggest pile of throwing-stones in the tribe… Whoa, that goes back to survival.

So what packrat preoccupation did I have? What special artifacts does McGee fondle?

As I was about to pronounce myself immune, I suddenly realized I am the worst possible kind. I collect moments of total subjective pleasure, box them up, and put them in a shed in the back of my head, never having to open them up again, but knowing they are there.

So what would be a gem in the collection?

A time when I am totally fit and I have just come wading through one of the fringes of hell, have been stressed right to my breaking point, have expected to be whisked out of life, but was not. I am out of it, and if there is any pain, it is too dwindled to notice. I am in some warm place where the air and sea are bright. There are chores to do when I feel like it, but nothing urgent. I am in some remote place where no one can find me and bother me. There is good music when and if I want it. There is a drink I have not yet tasted. There is a scent of some good thing a-cooking slowly. There is a lovely laughing lady, close enough to touch, and there are no tensions between us except the ones which come from need. There is no need to know the day, the month, or the year. We will stay until it is time to go, and we will not know when that time will come until we wake up one day and it is upon us.

And that is a McGee catalog 13, unique, shameful, and totally hedonistic. Misfit. An ant with a grasshopper syndrome. Rationale: One turn around the track.

I decided I had better take the whole thing and drop it in front of Meyer, like a crock of snakes, and let him do the sorting and prodding. Meaning, he says, is what somebody finds meaningful.

The phone rang, and she said, "Just to be sure you're alone in your broom closet, luv."

"What else? You're downstairs? Go back through to the second batch of elevators."

"Just as soon as you take care of this man's problems."

"Bell captain here, sir."

"Mmm. Alfred?"

"Why, yes sir!"

"Any dear friend of mine is, by definition, a dear friend of Mr. Nucci's. Send Mrs. McDermit up, please. Cordially."

"Sir, I was only-"

"You were only trying to put a body block on any freelance hooker trying to work your house, Alfred. And no one can tell by looking at them any more, can they?"

"Sir, I-"

"Find out what she would like to drink and have it sent up, please. And have the waiter bring a dinner menu, please."

"Right away, sir!"

Her little glass jug of margueritas, sitting imbedded in a bowl of shaved ice, reached 1802 about fifty seconds after she did, and just as I was explaining to her that any pretty lady coming alone into a Collins Avenue hotel after dark, carrying a purse as big as a bird cage, would be under suspicion of entrepreneurism.

We tried to be jolly and gay, but it kept fading off into a minor key and into silence. The conductor raps the stick on the podium and starts the music again.

Even the absolutely superb steaks did not get us back into our own places. An ugly death had bent our realities, and we were each on our separate journey to Ixtlan because it meant different things to each of us. We ate by the light of candles in hurricane globes, guttering and flickering in front of the open balcony doors, in the moist warm night wind that came off the sea. I wheeled the dinner equipment out into the hall and chained the door before we moved the candles to bedside, and even the strokes and promises, the rituals and releases of love did not pierce that curious, deadening barrier between us. We did what seemed expected and what seemed the momentary imperative, each living inside the ivory round of skull, looking out of it with night eyes at the shifts and shadows of conjoining.

I got out on my side and went around the bed to the big doors. The first driving rain came just as I was closing the second one, spattering and bouncing as high as my belly. The doors closed out the rush of wind, the storm sounds, and muted the thunder. I found the pulls and slid both sets of draperies across the doors. The storm was no longer something alive. It was on tape on a television set next door.

I put a breath of air conditioning back on to keep the air in the room from turning stale, and when she called me, I went to her side of the bed. She found my hand and tugged at me. When I bent to her, she pushed and said, "We didn't talk."

She hitched over, and I sat on the bed, against a solid warmth of hip under percale. She said, "Over the phone you said you wanted to talk. We didn't talk that kind of talk, did we?"

"No. We talked bad lines from old movies, I think."

She was in a total blackness. When I closed my eyes, nothing changed. She said, "It's funny. You know? They've all said so many things so many ways, there's nothing left for people to really say to each other. I mean I can say things, but behind it I can hear Cher saying it to Sonny." She changed to a thin, squeaky little voice. "I am Gabby Gabriele, your very own talking doll. Pull my string and I'll say anything you want."

I said, "Sometimes Jack Lemmon is speaking, sometimes Jack Lord, sometimes George Peppard, sometimes Archie Bunker."

I heard and felt the depth of her sigh. "That's it," she said. "Nothing is really real, and then Jane Lawson is dead, and that is very very real. She'd talk about her kids and the house, and she'd sound like Erma Bombeck, and that wasn't real. You wanted to talk about Jane, and then you did, and I didn't ask you."

"Sooner or later, Mary Alice, we have to talk about her, so I guess now is okay. I've got some facts. You have to help me put them together."

"Me help?"

"The damage to the house was done after somebody cracked her neck."

"After! But how-"

"Let me cover the ground first. It wasn't kids, because too many of the things kids take were still there. The trashing didn't have the usual pattern. It was imitation trashing, a diversion. The person involved wore gloves. There wasn't even a fresh oil-smudge on all the glass and pottery things that were broken. The trashing could have been a diversion for another reason too, to cover up evidence of careful search. Whoever did it came through the front door, I think, with Jane. Then later they blew more smoke by making it look as if some small person had wiggled through an awning window in the bedroom. Judy is in custody. She was a couple of hundred miles away."

She squeezed my hand in the darkness. "How could you get to know all these things, darling?"

"I took a deep breath and walked right into the middle of it, using the excuse I took her home Friday. If I'd found somebody too rigid and dumb running the show, I would have left it at that. There are only two kinds of people you can con. Greedy people and bright people. The greedy ones want to use you, and the bright ones want to see how far you'll take it."

"But what does it all mean?"

"Lots of guesses. Maybe it's as simple as it looks. Somebody came to the door. Pushed his way in. Killed her and took what she had in her purse and looked for more. Then take it through all the shades and gradations right up to the way way out, where she was the one who somehow got her hands on the rarities Hirsh bought for the Sprenger account, and maybe somebody in Sprenger's organization knew about it and went after her."

"But Mr. Sprenger doesn't even know anything is missing!"

I thought that over and decided not to go into it with her. Give Sprenger credit for a good intelligence system. When you put a lot of eggs into a lot of different baskets, you watch all the baskets. McGee starts hanging around Fedderman's shop. Let us say I do not look as if I collect stamps or coins. I am conspicuous. It is a handicap, professionally. So he gets a line on me through the plate on Miss Agnes. Or, an ugly concept to swallow, Jane Lawson tells him I am interested, having previously told him his expensive rarities have turned into junk. Or there is some kind of conspiracy involving Fedderman and Sprenger which I have not yet been able to figure out. I can start with the only point I am sure of-that Davis and Harris approached me with the idea that the man they represented had a hunch he had been taken but was not really sure.

Too many ifs and whereases to inflict upon the lady who lay close at hand, warm and invisible in the smaller hours of Monday, on one of the twenty-fifths of the many Septembers of my life. Should a man reach eighty, he has only had eighty Septembers. It does not seem like many, said that way. It seems as if there are so few each one should have been better used.

Meyer made one of his surveys of the elderly couples in the Fort Lauderdale area, the ones being squeezed between the cost of living and their Social Security. They were very bitter about it. They were very accusatory about it. Amurrica should give them the financial dignity they had earned. Meyer's survey was in depth, relating income over the working years to the pattern of spending. Meyer radiates compassion. He is easy to talk to. He ended his survey after forty couples chosen at random, because by then the pattern was all too clear.

He said, "I'll put it all into appropriate and acceptable jargon later, Travis, but the essence of it is that all too many of them were screwed by consumer advertising. Spend, spend, spend. Live for today. So they lived out their lives up to their glottis in time payments. They blew it all on boats and trailers and outboard motors, binoculars and hunting rifles and department store high fashion. They lived life to the hilt, like the ads suggest. Not to the hilt of pleasure, but to the hilt of spending. They had bureau drawers full of movie cameras, closets full of record players and slide projectors. Buy the wall-to-wall carpeting. Buy the great big screen. Visit all the national parks in America. Funny thing. They had all started to lay away some dollars for old-age income, but when the Social Security payments got bigger and the dollar started shrinking, they said the hell with it. Blow it all. Now their anger is directed outward, at society, because they don't dare look back and think of how pathetically vulnerable they were, how many thousands they blew on toys that broke before they were paid for, and how many thousands on the interest charges to buy those toys. They don't know who screwed them. They did what everybody else was doing. Look at the tabulation on my last question. 'If you had it to do over again, how much would you put aside each month, expressed as a percentage of income, and what would you give up?' Read the things they'd give up, my friend. It would break your heart."

I am no living endorsement for prudence and thrift. My grasshopper excesses are worse than theirs. Yet mine are deliberate. I do not expect to have the chance to become very old. And though my chance is perhaps less than theirs, to think that way is romanticism, like that of the seventeen-year old who vows no wish to live past thirty. I hobble down the raw streets of some unimaginable future, cackling, soiling my garments, trying to stop the busy people striding by so I can show them the dead bird I am wearing around my withered old neck. Not an awesome and magnificent albatross. A simple chicken.

"Where did you go, darling?" she asked.

I came back to the reality of my hand taken to her unseen lips, each knuckle slowly kissed. A coolness moved across my naked back, coming in silence from the unseen vent on high, drying the last of the sleep-sweat.

"I went roaming in my head. It isn't very orderly in there. A lot of brush and jungle trails and no signposts. So I get lost in there sometimes."

"I came after you, huh?"

"Thanks."

"That makes me feel spooky, thinking of the insides of heads like that. I don't go back into mine. It's full of dull junk. Old cardboard boxes from supermarkets, packed with old clothes and school books. It's full of things that are all over."

"Are you tidy? Is everything labeled?"

"No. Why should it be? I'm never going to go poking around in there. It's all throw-away. I ought to have a truck come and get it. I don't think back. Neither should you, dear. And there isn't any point in thinking ahead, because nothing ever comes out the way you think it will. So what I do is think of right now, and I do what I want to with it."

"I'm thinking of right now."

"Good. We weren't real good before, were we? Like yesterday, all except the first time yesterday. Jane dying made things strange. For us."

"She has to be involved with Hirsh's problem somehow, but certainly not out of any need for the money."

"Why do you say that? Why not any need for the money?"

"If she really had to have money, if she was desperate enough to try to steal from Hirsh, long before she got to that point, she would have asked her father-in-law for it."

"What if she needed a lot?"

"How much is a lot, Mary Alice? I would imagine he could have moved a million dollars into her name in that First Atlantic Bank and Trust within an hour of her phoning him."

Her breath whistled. The bed shifted, and the hip warmth pressure went away. Her grasp tightened on my hand, and I sensed, without seeing her, that she had hitched herself up to face me. I felt against my throat and chest a subtle radiation of the heat of her body, and the humid scents of her came clearer to my nostrils.

Her voice spoke from blackness at my throat level and not far away. "Are you sure? She never said anything like that!"

"I'm very sure. I met the man. I've read about him. He's very impressive."

"But I don't understand."

"Why she didn't tell you about it?"

"Not so much that. Why she lived so small and so shabby. Once Linda started going to college, Jane took that rotten bus every school day. I can't remember her going to a hairdresser. She was always letting her skirts out or taking them in. What kind of a weird kick was she on anyway?"

"Living her own life, maybe."

"If you want to call it living. I never knew she was such a freak."

"Apparently you and she didn't exchange life stories. You didn't tell her things either."

"That's sort of different. I could have gone back to McDermit, maybe. I don't know. I never asked. If I did, I'd have lived rich. If I could have stood it, I'd have stayed. But what kind of grief would she have had to take? Nothing at all. Just a nice life."

"Maybe she thought this was a better way to raise her kids."

"Do you mean that? Judy sings in the choir, maybe? And gathers wildflowers for mama dear?"

"She did all right with Linda."

"And she thought a five hundred average was okay? It seems to me that…"

After a long silence I said, "Seems what to you?"

"Forget it, huh?"

"Sure."

"Oh God, Trav, I don't want to talk about Jane or think about her or Hirsh or Frank or anybody. I just want to make love. Okay?"

"I can't think of any good reason why not, girl."

"You seem to be thinking clearly, dear."

It was better between us. The curious feeling of apartness was gone. She was not a strenuous partner. We slowly and gently and with mutual consideration sorted ourselves out so that there was no strain of support or numbing weight for either of us. In that perfect ease, that sleepy, lasting luxury, I drifted in and out of those fantasies which are neighbors of sleep. In one of the fantasies I was holding a gigantic and disembodied heart, holding it in that precise posture, moving against it in that precise rhythm which was the only way in the world it could be made to keep on beating with that small, deep, and solid rhythm, and could be kept alive.