She tilted her mouth up against mine, quite briefly, her lips soft and leaving an impression of coolness. 'I might be by for some someday.'
I watched her walk briskly toward her car, the red skirt swinging against good legs. She did not glance back.
Meyer surrendered the belt. I put the twenty-six thousand in my watery vault. Later, in the news stories, I found the information I wanted, the address of Powell Daniels' divorced wife and their twin fifteen-year-old sons. I wrapped up the money. I used a ruler to print the name and address. No handwriting expert in the world can make any identification of block letters, all caps, printed with a ruler. I sent it parcel post, special handling, from Miami's main post office.
And by then, of course, they had them all. Terry, Loyal, Berga, Macklin, the Barntree woman and the Strusslund woman, and they were searching the continent from Hudson Bay to Acapulco for Walter Griffin. Macklin said Griff shoved Vangie into the speeding path of the stolen car, and that she was so terrified she was only semiconscious. Macklin had been driving the car. Nogs had given the order. Drowners, Incorporated, was the name some reporter stuck on them. Despite all the frantic efforts of the tourist industry in the Broward Beach area to get it handled with the same emphasis as a parking ticket, the whole thing, as you will remember, was page one, prime-time shrillness for day after day, with much editorializing about greed, callousness and the decay of moral standards.
Before the grand jury returned the indictments in record time, I was summoned up to the women's wing of the Broward Beach jail for a confrontation with the Strussland woman. Though they'd had her only ten days, her discreet tan had faded to paste, and all the life had gone out of the hair of cream, so that it hung in dulled strands. She wore a baa gray cotton dress without a belt and paper shoes. There were deep violet smudges under her eyes.
The sweet little kiddy-ice was unchanged. 'Why did you do that to me! Why?'
'Do what? Buy you a drink in Nassau?'
We had a large interested audience. 'Honey, please! You tricked me into writing the confession. My God, tell them how it was, darling! You made promises! You were going to take me to Jersey.'
'Wish I could help out, girlie. But I don't know what your angle is. It doesn't make any sense. I don't have a twin brother, and the last time I ever saw you, until right now, was in the ship's dining room. I don't see how it can do you any good trying to bring me into this. Either you did what you wrote down or you didn't.'
'So it's going to be like that, you bastard?'
'It's going to be what happened, that's all.'
First she made a pretty fair attempt to get her thumbs into my eyes, but the matrons caught her and held her in restraint. As they took her out, that fatty little mouth opened into a round horror-hole. In a candy.sweet chant she said words and phrases that seemed to fume and smoke in the jail air, to give off a tangible aroma of rot. She ejected that last few over her shoulder as they dragged her out, and when the sound had faded, some very professional officers of the law took out handkerchiefs and mopped their faces.
On the Fourth of July I got Meyer to take ten thousand of what I had found in Vangie's kitchen ceiling. At first he would have no part of it, but then after frowning into space for half a minute, he suddenly agreed.
The next day he showed me a copy of something he had pecked out on his typewriter, titled Meyer Manifesto. It was a stately mass of whereas, wherefore, and be it resolved, nd after I had sifted out the meat of it, I discovered that he was putting the ten thousand into a four and a half percent interest account, and that each year he would draw out four hundred fifty dollars and use it to finance the Meyer Festival on July Fourth and such subsequent days as the Festival might continue unabated. Invitations would be issued to convivial and compatible persons, both of the permanent group and the transient group, and it would be held upon a beach area to be designated each year, the only stipulation being that it would be a deserted beach accessible only by boat. The theme of the Festival would be Booze, Broads, Beer, Bonhomie, Bach, Blues and Rhythm, Bombast, Blarney and Behavioral Psychology.
I guess he saw that I had to fake my pleasurable approval. Things were getting flat and wistfully sour.
The smart money had it all figured out about the Drowners. The best odds were that the State would hold a cook-in for Terry and Loyal, and that Jane Adele Strusslund and Delilah Delberta Barntree would get life, as would Macklin. And Emil 'Nogs' Berga would get twenty to life.
Somehow, I couldn't haul myself back up out of the sours. I kept slipping further in. When that happens to you, there is no continuity of self-awareness, no frequent appraisals... just a little flash of uncomfortable illumination from time to time, and you turn it off quickly because you don't like the bright light.
I would see my hand pouring a Cup of Plymouth over ice, and I'd take a sup of it, spilling a little, and in wiping my chin feel that it had been a little too long between shaves.
And then one morning I went beach walking at three o'clock and looked up just in time to see one hell of a shooting star. It really whipped across there, fast, hot and bright. I admired it. An old chunk of iron, after noodling around out there for half a billion years, had come in hot and fast at eight miles a second, and had gladdened the mind of a dreary pygmy on a starlit beach.
Suddenly I felt disgusted with myself. What the hell was the use of taking my retirement in segments whenever I could afford one if I was going to slop around and groan and finger the sad textures of my immortal soul? As opposed to the psychotic, the neurotic knows two and two make four, but he can't stand it. I admired the patience of my friends for putting up with me the last few weeks. Vidge had soured me a little, and Vangie had dropped off the bridge and accelerated the process, and then I had really put the lid on it by trapping that dumb empty punchboard into a life sentence.
Why be gloomy because the woman supply had run bad for a time? If there was any truth in averages, it had to start getting good. I thought it certainly wasn't going to improve if I kept spooking around like a wounded violinist. The world was good, and it had been one hell of a shooting star.
At ten o'clock that same morning, while entertaining myself with as many choruses as I could remember of the lass who had her head tucked underneath her arm, and putting n a little topside paint at the same time, I glanced down at the dock and saw Meyer staring up at me in vast astonishment.
'It isn't always exactly on key,' I said, 'but it's real loud.'
'It is that. Yes indeed.'
'Clamber aboard for a brew.'
We drank them under the topside awning. Meyer said, 'With a few more years of practice, boy, you could work up to real manic depression. I never know when you're going to come bounding out of the slump. Or hy.'
'Decided I was spoiling my retirement all to hell.'
'You weren't doing mine any good.'
'Meyer, let us round up a boatload of amiable clowns, jolly doxies, and old drinking friends and go bonk-chonkie bonk-cbonkie up the Inland Waterway in this lush tub, visit old haunts, scare the sea birds, invent parlor games and outrage the shoredwellers. And, above all, regain our health, our clean young American good looks.'
'McGee, the last time I came back I went to bed for a week.'
'Let's try for ten days.'
I heard the distant ringing of my phone and decided finally to answer it.
A small forlorn voice I did not recognize said, 'Travis?'
'Yes, dear.'
'About that luck. How's the supply?'
The voice had been so dispirited and uncharacteristic I had not identified it until then. 'Merrimay, unless I get rid of some, the supply is going to sink the boat. What's wrong?'
'Oh, I had to talk big. You know. And Uncle Jake got me a test. And I blew it. I came on like country ham. Old Rubber face herself. Actress! Ha! I don't want to face any of the gang I run with, and get patted on the head and told I'm still a great dancer. Travis, if maybe you could make up a sort of CARE package. Sonic of that luck, and a thick steak and red wine.... Maybe you're all sewed up?'
'And bring it to you at five-thirty?'
'Or five. I might not be any bundle of cheer, though.' She sighed. 'Got a pencil handy? Write down the address.'
When I climbed back to the sundeck Meyer said, 'I've made a tentative mental list of the passengers for this epic voyage. Let me check them out with you.'
'Sure, Meyer.'
After about six names he leaned and snapped his fingers in front of my face. 'I get the curious feeling you aren't listening.'
'They're great names. Great: Meyer. Who were they again?'
'Pierce, Fenner, Smitli, Kidder, Beane and Goodbody,' he said disgustedly and went home.
I think I sat right there for a long time. Just smiling.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John D. MacDonald was graduated from Syracuse University and received an MBA from the Harvard Business School. He and his wife, Dorothy, had one son and several grandchildren. Mr. MacDonald died in December 1986.
Other Books by John D. MacDonald
