'So I'll keep my mouth shut.'
'Fine.'
I wanted to apologize, but couldn't find the right way to begin, and so the rest of the ride was silent. He sat beside me like a gloomy bear. I knew his feelings weren't hurt. He was sad because I had lost Gretel, and because we had lost Gretel.
'A picked out an urn,' he said, as we pulled into the parking place. 'Nothing ornate. Bronze, though. Seventy-two something, including talc. He wrapped it up in a box and brown paper, ready for mailing.'
'A might take it out there.'
'I told him you might do that,' he said. 'I've got the box at my place. 1,11 bring it over. Unless you'd like to have me go on out there with you.'
'All let you know, Meyer. Keep it for now. And thanks.'
He headed over to the newsstand to see if his copy of Barron's had come in, and I walked back to The Busted Flush, anxious to get out of the suit and get the necktie off. And anxious to see how much Boodles gin I could fit into a king-size old- fashioned glass.
Two men had boarded my houseboat. They were on my little back porch aft the lounge, one sitting on a folding stool, the other leaning against the rail. They were of a size and age, middle height, middle forties, a tailored three-piece gray suit, with white shirt, black shoes, blue necktie with a white figure; a tailored three-plece chocolate-brown suit, with white shirt, brown shoes, tan necktie with a small figure. Gray Suit wore a gray tweed snapbrim hat, and Brown Suit wore a dark brown hound's-tooth tweed hat. Soft jowls, pale faces, horn-rim glasses on one, metal-rim glasses on the other. One stood up and the other pushed off from the rail as I came aboard.
The Green Ripper
'Mr. McGee?' said Gray Suit.
The brain is a swift and subtle computer. I have perhaps become more sensitive the clues which exist in mannerisms, stance, expression, hand gestures, and dress than most people. If you are in a line of work where a bad guess can give you a pair of broken elbows, you tend to become a quick study.
They were not going to try to sell me anything. They did not have the twinkle, the up-front affability. They were not here to enforce one of the idiot rules of a bureaucracy that grows like high-speed cancer. They did not have that look of fatuous satisfacffon and autocratic, patronizing indifference of fellows who come to tell you that you forgot to file Form Z- 2324, as amended. Or to tell you that you can't cut down your pine tree without enlisting the services of an approved, accredited, licensed tree surgeon.
They looked important. As if they had come to buy the marina and put up a research institute.. Lawyers? Executives? They were not very fit. They moved heavily. They looked out of place aboard my houseboat, as if it was a little closer to the out- door life than they cared to be.
'I am not exactly cheered up by people coming aboard without being asked,' I said.
'Forgive the intrusion, please,' Gray Suit said. He had been Me one sitting. 'I am not familiar with marine protocol, Mr. McGee. We were told this is your houseboat, and we have been waiting for you. My name is Toomey. This is Mr. Kline.'
'I am not in the mood for visitors or transactions or conversation about anything.'
'~e are anxious to talc to you,' Kline said. He had picked up a dispatch case I had not noticed be- fore. It matched his suit color. Y think * would all go more smoothly if you did not put us in the posi- tion where we would have to insist.'
I studied him. 'You are telling me that if you have to insist, you have the leverage to make it stick?'
'We do indeed,' said Toomey. 'And we would rather not.'
So I unlocked and we went into the lounge. I have played respectable poker over the years. I won my houseboat on a broken Bush, four pink ones up and a stranger down. I can sense when a bluff is a bluff is a bluff. They had the leverage, and the clothes and manner to go with it.
Before I invited them to sit down while I changed, I asked to see credentials. They looked vaguely like passports, small with the dark blue cover and great seal of the U. S. of A. Inside were &e color ID pictures, the thumbprint, and the name of an agency I had never heard of before.
'We do not usually go out into the field,' Toomey said. 'We have access to another agency for investigative matters. But after a conference
The Green Ripper vith our superior, it was suggested that we take a firsthand look.'
'At what?'
'Excuse me. I thought you'd guessed.'
'Guessed what?'
'We want to ask you what you know about Gretel Tuckerman Howard.'
'I just came back from her memorial service.'
'We know that,' Kline said.
'Sit down. 111 be back in a minute.'
I took my time changing into old flannel slacks, Mexican sandals, and an old wool shirt. There was a small chill spot at the nape of my neck. A warniDg of some kind.
They had moved a couple of chairs close to the coffee table. Kline had a little Sony TC-150 opened up, and he was breaking the seal on a new cassette. 'I hope you won't mind that I tape this.'
'Go right ahead.'
He put the tape in, put it on Record and counted to ten, rewound, played it back, rewound again, and said, 'December fifteenth, one ten P.M., initial interview by Toomey and Kline with Travis McGee aboard his houseboat moored at Slip F-Eighteen, Bahia Mar Marina, Fort Lauderdale, Florida'
Toomey took over. 'Please describe your relationship to the decedent. Wait. Excuse me. Where and when did you meet her?'
'Earlier this year. May. At a beach shack where her brother was living. John Tuckerman. South of
Timber Bay, over on the west coast of Florida. The northwest coast. Her brother died a little while later. I went with Gretel when she flew out to California to have his ashes buried in a little cemetery in Petaluma We flew back to Timber Bay and, sometime in June, we left Timber Bay in this houseboat and came down around the peninsula and back up here to Lauderdale. We made it a leisurely trip. We got here in August. She lived aboard until she located the job at Bonnie Brae in early November and moved out there, to one of the model houses.'
With great delicacy Toomey asked, 'Would you say that you and she had a... a significant relationship?'
'I didn't care what rules we went by, as long as we both agreed that it would be a permanent thing. Why do you have to know stuff like this?'
'We want to know whether the relationship was such that she would confide in you.'
'Confide what?'
'met us just say details of her workday, her life out there. That sort of thing.'
'Are you looking into something fishy at Bonnie Brae?'
'Did Mrs. Howard say something fishy is going on at Bonnie Brae?'
'No. No, she didn't. I mean, she called up last Saturday morning before she got sick, to tell me about one of the owners, Mr. Ladwigg, dying in an
The Green Ripper accidental fall his bicycle, if that's what you mean.'
Kline took over. 'Let me set up a hypothesis, Mr. McGee, and see if that helps. Suppose Mrs. Howard, in the course of her employment out there, learned that something curious was going on. Say that part of the operation was a cover for something else, like gambling or smuggling or something of that nature. Would she have confided in you?'
'`Of course.'
'~Would she have confided something like that to anyone other than you? Or as well as you?'
'I can't see that happening.'
'And she talked to you about her work?'
'Certainly. About her exercise classes of raffles, and the tennis lessons she was giving to children, and the forms she had to complete on each sale of land, houses, and so forth. She liked her work.'
The two men looked at each other, and Kline reached over and punched the key to turn off the recorder. Toomey said, 'We do appreciate your cooperation, Mr. McGee.'
'wouldn't you say you owe me some kind of explanation... why you are interested in Gretel Howard?'
Toomey smiled sadly. 'I wish we could. I really wish we could. There was a possibility she could have acquired some information which would have been useful to us. Unfortunately she became ill before we had a chance to speak with her.'
'If I happen to remember something later on, how do I get in touch with you?' I asked. 'Tm pretty upset right now and I'm not thinking too clearly.'
Kline tore a sheet out of a small spiral notebook and wrote a number on it: (202) 661- 7007. I thanked him. They put the recorder away in the dispatch case, smiled politely, put on their hats, and marched off, down my little gangplank and off toward the parking area, in step, arms swinging in unison.
Three minutes later Sue Sampson arrived, bearing a casserole of hot beef stew. She apologized for having to miss the service and tools off just as Meyer arrived.
I made the delayed drinks. Meyer put the stew over low heat while we sat and he listened to
