The Deep Blue Good-By (9 page)

"I would think of that as a normal business risk, Lois."

The color she had regained drained out of her face. 'How can you say such a terrible thing?

You... you've been so good to me."

"What has that got to do with it?"

"But don't you see that..

"I see that you are a damned fool, Lois. You took me at face value. You decided what sort of a person I am. If I can't match that image, it isn't my fault."

After a long silence she said, 'Isn't it a waste?"

"Waste of what?"

"of you! It seems degrading. Forgive me for saying that. I've seen those African movies. The lion makes a kill and then clever animals come in and grab something and run. You're so bright, Trav, and so intuitive about people. And you have... the gift of tenderness. And sympathy. You could be almost anything."

"of course!" I said, springing to my feet and beginning to pace back and forth through the lounge. 'Why didn't I think of that! Here I am, wasting the golden years on this lousy barge, getting all mixed up with lame-duck women when I could be out there seeking and striving.

Who am I to keep from putting my shoulder to the wheel? Why am I not thinking about an estate and how to protect it? Gad, woman, I could be writing a million dollars a year in life insurance. I should be pulling a big oar in the flagship of live. Maybe it isn't too late yet! Find the little woman, and go for the whole bit. Kiwanis, P.T.A., fund drives, cookouts, a clean desk, and vote the straight ticket, yessiree bob.

Then when I become a senior citizen, I can look back upon I stopped when I heard the small sound she was making. She sat with her head bowed. I went over and put my fingertips under her chin. I tilted her head up and looked down into her streaming eyes.

"Please, don't,' she whispered.

"You're beginning to bring out the worst in me, woman."

"It was none of my business."

"I will not dispute you."

"But... who did this to you?"

"I'll never know you well enough to try to tell you, Lois."

She tried to smile. 'I guess it can't be any plainer than that."

"And I'm not a tragic figure, no matter how hard you try to make me into one. I'm delighted with myself, woman."

"And you wouldn't say it that way if you were."

"Spare me the cute insights." She shivered and pulled herself together.

"I'm grateful to you. I'll try to answer questions."

"What did he say about money?"

She tried. She sat as trim and obedient as a bright girl in class. He said he had all the money he would ever need. Yes, he had repeated that in different ways at different times.

And said he would never have to use any of it to buy a woman. There was some hiding place aboard where he kept cash.

"And maybe something else,' she said in an odd voice.

*What?"

"Let me think,' she said. Her face was very still. She had that listening look people wear when they dig into small vague memories. 'A crooked blue marble,' she said. 'It was such a hot day.

Sickeningly hot because there was no wind at all. And all that glare off the water. I'd drunk too much. I was trying not to be sick.

Their voices were a blur. They were always arguing about something, shouting at each other. He was showing her something, and it fell to the deck, a blue marble, and it rolled toward her across the teak. It rolled crooked.

She pounced on it and popped it into her mouth, like a child. I guess she wasn't over eighteen, but she was as old as all the evil in the world. He was murderously angry and he went at her and she ran, laughing at him. He chased her all over the boat and when he had her cornered, she dived over the side. She floated, laughing and squealing at him. She was naked. She looked very dark in the water, and I could see her shadow shimmering on the white sand bottom. He ran and got a gun.

It surprised me that it made such a small snapping noise, but the bullets spit the water up, close to her, and she came quickly to the boarding ladder and climbed aboard. He took her by the nape of the neck and she spat the blue marble into his hand. Then, still holding her, he beat her with his fist until she spent most of the rest of the day down in one of the bunks, whimpering.

The marble was a very deep blue. He kept thinking about it and getting mad all over again. He would yell down there, cursing her. He went down once or maybe twice and struck her again."

She stared at me with dead eyes and said, 'I think I remember it because that was the longest time that they left me alone. Afterwards I kept thinking of the gun. I tried to find it, but I couldn't.

When he caught me looking for it, he guessed, and he gave me to her and watched her beat me.

She made it look as if she was beating me harder than she was. She wasn't sorry for me. She just didn't want to hurt me so badly I'd be of no use to her. She was terribly hard and chunky and strong. Her legs and thighs were like thick polished mahogany, and she laughed at nothing and she sang all the time in a hard screeching voice, in very bad French. In my empty house, before you came to me, Trav, I kept hearing her singing, as loudly as if she was in the next room."

Some of the old mad light came back into her eyes. "Do you want to hear me sing like Fancha?"

"Take it easy, honey."

"Would you like me to laugh and dance like Fancha?"

She had begun to tremble violently. I hurried to get the pills and brought her one of the strong ones. She didn't try to fight it. she was in bed and asleep in fifteen minutes.

After I had chased the ghastliness of Fancha out of my mind, I settled down to some planning. A trip out to Leavenworth had a deceptive plausibility. it is bad practice to try to question prison people. They live by the book.

They need documentation and identification and proper authority. When you can't present it, they immediately wonder if you are there to try to help somebody slip out. I decided that was the last resort. I would chase down every other lead, and if they all dwindled to absolutely nothing, then I would go out there to Kansas and get the feel of it and try to con somebody.

Before I went to bed, I took a look at my ward. In the faint light she looked no more than nineteen, gentle, and unmarked by any ugliness. IN THE morning I tried the William Callowells of Troy, New York.

Such chances run small. If he lasted out that war, and stayed out of a police action, and avoided civil disaster, maybe he could be a roamer, that address gone stale in a transient world.

Troy had a pair of them. William B. William M. The efficient operator took the numbers of both from Troy information, and I tried it by the alphabet. William B."s home gave us an other number. A girl said it was Double A Plastics, and three minutes later I had the wary voice of William B. A pilot in World War Two?

Hell, no, he was twenty-six years old, and a chemical engineer and he had lived in Troy less than a year and knew there was another Will. in the book, but knew nothing about him.

Thanks so much. You are entirely welcome.

My LDO left the circuit open and I heard a woman answer the William M. number. She had a small unsteady voice. She responded in a very formal manner. 'I regret to say that Mr. Callowell passed away last March." I asked to speak to her. "Mrs. Callowell, I am sorry to hear about your husband."

"It was a blessing. I prayed for his release."

"I just wonder if he was the Mr. Callowell I'm trying to locate. Was he a pilot in World War Two?"

"My goodness no! You must mean my son.

MY husband was eighty-three years of age.

"Can I get in touch with your son, Mrs. Callowell?"

"Why, if you had called yesterday you could have talked to him. We had a wonderful visit."

"Where can I reach him?"

"The operator said you are calling from Florida. Is it terribly urgent?"

"I would like to reach him."

"Just a moment. I have it written down here.

His home, of course, is in Richmond, Virginia.

Let me see. Thday is the... third, isn't it. He will be at the convention in New York City through Tuesday the ninth. At the Americana Hotel. I suppose you could reach him there, but he said there would be a great many meetings and he would be very busy."

"Thank you so much, Mrs. Callowell. By the way, where was your son's overseas duty?"

"in India. He has always wanted to go back and see the country again, He wrote such wonderful letters from there. I saved them all.

Maybe one day he will have the chance."

I hung up and finished my half cup of tepid coffee. I phoned an airline. They had one at the right time. Idlewild by 2:50 p.m. Lois seemed very disconcerted at the prospect of being left alone.

She looked as if her teeth might chatter. Her eyes were enormous. I instructed her as I packed, and made her write down the briefing. Mail, laundry, phone, groceries, the manual switch to kick the air conditioner back on, garbage disposal, reliable local doctor, how to lock up, etc., television channels, cozy bookshelf, fire extinguishers, and a few small items of standard marine maintenance. She bit a pale lip and scribbled it all.

She needed neither car nor bike. Everything, including the public beach, was walkable. Take the white pills every four hours. Take a pink one if you start to shake apart.

At the gangplank I kissed her like any commutation ticket husband, told her to take care of
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herself, scuttled toward Miss Agnes, slapping my hip pocket where the money and the credit cards were. The unemployed merit no credit cards. But I had a guarantor, a man for whom I had done a sticky and dangerous favor, a man whose name makes bank presidents spring to attention and hold their shallow breaths. The cards are handy, but I hate to use them. I always feel like a Thoreau armored with a Leica and a bird book. They are the little fingers of reality, reaching for your throat. A man with a credit card is in hock to his own image of himself.

But these are the last remaining years of choice. In the stainless nurseries of the future, the feds will work their way through all the squalling pinkness tattooing a combination tax number and credit number on one wrist, followed closely by the I.T. and T. team putting the permanent phone number, visaphone doubtless, on the other wrist. Die and your number goes back in the bank. it will be the first provable immortality the world has ever known.

Manhattan in August is a replay of the Great Plague of London. The dwindled throng of the afflicted shuffle the furnace streets, mouths sagging, waiting to keel over. Those still healthy duck from one air-conditioned oasis to the next, spending a minimum time exposed to the rain of black death outside.

By five minutes of four I was checked into the hotel. They had a lot of room. They had three conventions going and they still had a lot of room. Once inside the hotel, I was right back in Miami. Same scent to the chilled air, same skeptical servility, same glorious decor-as if a Brazilian architect had mated an air terminal with a manufacturer of cotton padding. Lighting, dramatic. At any moment the star of the show will step back from one of the eight (8) bars and break into song and the girlies will come prancing in. Keep those knees high, kids. Keep laughing.

Will. M. Callowell, Jr., was not listed under his own name, but under the HopkinsCallowell, Inc.

suite, 1012-1018. I asked the desk which convention that was. 'Construction," he said. "Like they make roads."

A man in the suite answered the phone with a young, hushed and earnest voice, and said he would check Mr. Callowell's agenda. He came back in a moment and said in an even more hushed voice, "Sir, he just this moment returned from a meeting. He's having a drink here now, sir."

"Will he be there long?"

"I would imagine at least a half hour." I checked myself in a full-length mirror. I smiled at Mr.

Travis McGee. A very deep tan is a tricky thing. If the clothing is the least bit too sharp, you look like an out-of-season ball player selling twenty pay life. If it is too continental, you look like a kept ski instructor. My summer city suit was Rotarian conservative, dark, nine-ounce orlon looking somewhat but not too much like silk. Conservative collar on the white shirt. Rep tie. A gloss on the shoes.

Get out there and sell. Gleam those teeth. Look them square in the eye. You get out of it what you put into it. A smile will take you a long way. Shake hands as if you meant it. Remember names.

There were a dozen men in the big room.

They had big voices and big laughs and big cigars and big glasses of whiskey. Junior executives
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were tending bar for them, sidling in to laugh at the right time, not too loudly, at all evidences of wit. They wore no badges. That is the key to the small and important convention.

No badges, no funny hats. Any speakers they get are nationally known. And they order their food off the full menu.

One of the juniors told me that Mr. Callowell was the one over there by the big windows, with the glasses and mustache. William Callowell was in his middle forties. Average size.

Somewhat portly. It was difficult to see what he like. He had a stand-up ruff of dense looked black hair, big glasses with black frames, a black mustache, and he smoked a big black. e. There didn't seem to be enough skin PIP showing. The only thing unchangeably his was a wide fleshy nose with a visible pattern of pores. He was talking with two other men.

They stopped abruptly when I was six feet away and they all stared at me.

I said. 'Mr. Callowell, when it's

"Excuse me convenient I'd like a word with you."

"You one of the new Bureau people?" one of his friends asked.

"No. My name is McGee. It's a personal matter."

"if it's that opening, this isn't the time or the place, McGee," Callowell said in a soft unfriendly voice.

"Opening? I gave up working for other people when I was twenty years old. I'll wait in the hall, Mr. Callowell."

I knew that would bring him out fast. They have to know where you fit. They have those shrewd managerial eyes, and they can look at a man and generally guess his salary within ten percent either way. It is a survival reaction. They're planted high on the side of the hill, and they want to know what's coming up at them, and how fast.