IN THE morning I placed a station call to the number listed for George Brell in Harlingen. I got a lazy-toned switchboard operator who put me through to a sharp-voiced secretary who said that Mr. Brell was not in his office yet. As she had no way of knowing it was a long distance call, I side-stepped her request for my name and said I would phone later.
Then I phoned my barge boat. After three rings, I heard her voice, small, tense, cautious. “Hello?”
“This is your night nurse speaking.”
“Trav! Thank God.”
“What’s the matter? Is something wrong?”
“Nothing in particular. Just… I don’t know… tension, I guess. I got so used to you being nearby. I hear sounds. And I jump. And I had bad dreams.”
“Cook them out in the sun.”
“I’m going to. On the beach, maybe. When are you coming back?”
“I’m going to Texas today.”
“What?”
“There’s a man there I want to see. I might be back there by Friday, but I’m not certain. Take your pills, honey. Don’t agitate yourself. Eat; sleep and keep busy. You’re smack in the middle of hundreds of boats and thousands of people.”
“Trav, a woman phoned and she’s most anxious to get in touch with you. She said it’s an emergency. It sort of put her off stride to have a woman answer and say you’re away. I said you might phone and she said to tell you to phone her. Miss McCall. With a very strange first name. I don’t know if I have it right?”
“Chookie.”
“That’s it.”
I had her look in my book and give me the number. By the time I hung up, Lois sounded pretty good. I wondered if I had been a damn fool not to lock up the liquor supply or at least to arrange to have somebody stay with her. Hurry home, Mother McGee. People have their acquired armor, made up of gestures and expressions and defensive chatter. Lois’s had all been brutally stripped awy, and I knew her as well as anybody ever had or ever would. I knew her from filled teeth to the childhood apple tree, from appendix scar to wedding night, and it was time for her to start growing her new carapace, with me on the outside. I caught her raw, and did not care to be joined to her by scar tissue when healing began.
Chook’s phone went to nine rings before she answered in the gritty rancor of interrupted sleep. But her voice changed when she recognized mine. “Trav! I phoned you last night. Who is that Mrs. Atkinson?”
“One of your more successful rivals.”
“I mean really. Is she the one that whosis took on when he dropped Cathy?”
“Yes.”
“Trav, I phoned about Cathy. She worked the first show last night. She seemed fine. And then they found her unconscious out on the beach there at the hotel. She’d been terribly beaten. Her face is a mess. Two broken fingers. They don’t know yet if there’s any internal injuries. She regained consciousness before they got her to the hospital. The police questioned her. She told them she went out to walk on the beach and somebody jumped her and beat her up. She couldn’t give them a description. I talked to her next, after they’d given her a sedative. She acted very strange about it. I think it was him, Trav. She won’t be able to work for two weeks anyway, maybe longer. She’s really a mess.”
“Does she want to talk to me?”
“She doesn’t want to talk to amybody. It’s in the paper today. Show girl assaulted on private beach. Mysterious assailant and so on.”
“Are you going to see her today?”
“Of course!”
“I might not get back before Saturday. Look in on Lois Atkinson if you get a chance. Our friend left her in pretty sad shape. She’s a lady.”
“Oh, really?”
“With ragged edges. You’ll like her, I think. Make girl talk. Then I’ll try to phone you tonight at the hotel, for a report on both of them.”
“McGee’s clinic?”
“The Junior Allen discard club. Take care.”
A travel office at the hotel helped me find the best way to get to the Rio Grande Valley. A direct 707 out of Idlewild to Houston, a two hour layover and then a feeder flight down to Harlingen with one stop at Corpus Christi. I had barely missed a better deal, and so I could take my time getting out of Idlewild.
The flight took off with less than half the seats occupied. The whole country lay misty-bright, impersonal, under a summer high, and we went with the sun, making noon last a long time. The worst thing about having a hundred and eighty million people is looking down and seeing how much room there is for more.
A stewardess took a special and personal interest in me. She was a little bigger than they usually are and a little older than the norm. She was styled for abundant lactation, and her uniform blouse was not. She had a big white smile and she was mildly-bovine, and I had the curious feeling I had met her before, and then I remembered where-in that valuable book by Mark Harris, Bang the Drum Slowly, the stewardess that “Author” runs into when he is on his way out to Mayo’s. My stewardess perched on the edge of the seat beside me, back arched, smiling.
“ Houston is going to be wicked hot,” she said. “I am going to get me into that motel pool as fast as I can, and come out just long enough every once in a while to get a tall cold drink. Some of the kids just stay in the rooms, but I think they keep them too cold. It gives me the sinus. I layover there and go out at ten tomorrow, and somehow Houston is always a drag, you know?”
The mild misty blue eyes watched me and the mouth smiled and she waited for my move. You can run into the Tiger’s Perpetual Floating House Party almost anywhere. At 28,000 feet, and at the same 800 fps muzzle velocity of a.45 caliber service pistol. Nobody leaves marks on anybody. You meet indirectly, cling for a moment and glance off. Then she would be that hostess in Houston and I would be that tanned one from Florida, a small memory of chlorinated pool water, fruit juice and gin, steak raw in the middle, and hearty rhythms in the draperied twilight of the tomb-cool motel cubicle, riding the grounded flesh of the jet-stream Valkyrie. A harmless pleasure. For harmless plastic people, scruff-proof, who can create the delusion of romance.
But it is a common rudeness to refuse the appetizer without at least saying it looks delicious.
“I’d settle for Houston,” I said with a manufactured wistfulness. “But I’m ticketed through too Harlingen.”
The smile did not change and the eyes became slightly absent. She made some small talk and then swayed down the aisle, smiling, offering official services. Most of them find husbands, and some of them are burst or burned in lonely fields, and some of them become compulsively, forlornly promiscuous, sky sailors between the men in every port, victims of rapid transit, each night merely a long arc from bed to bed.
I saw her later in the Houston terminal, stilting along, laughing and chattering into the face of a big florid youngster in a nine-gallon hat.
I was in Harlingen at a little after five, the sun high and blazing, the heat as wet and thick as Florida ’s. I rented an air-conditioned Galaxie and found a tall glassy motel with green lawns, pool and fountains, and checked into a shadowed icy room facing the pool. I showered and changed to sport shirt and slacks. I drove around. it was a village trying to call itself a city. Pale tall buildings had been put up in unlikely places for obscure reasons. it was linked to Brownsville by the twenty-five mile umbilicus of Route 77.
The George Brell residence was at 18 Linden Way, Wentwood. Big plots, big sweeping curves of asphalt. Architectured houses, overhangs, patios, sprinklers, driveways wad turnarounds pebbled in brown, traveler palms, pepper trees, Mexican gardeners, housewives in shorts, antique wrought-iron name signs. Number eighteen was blond stone, glass, redwood, slate. Formal plantings. A black Lincoln and a white Triumph in the drive, a black poodle in a window of the house, glaring out at the world.
I went back among the common people and found a beer joint. Standard opening conversation gambit. “Sure hot.” Standard answer. “Sure is.”
The beer was so cold it had no taste. The juke played hill country laments. I found a talkative salesman. Local economy: Damned town had been too long at the mercy of the Air Force. Close the base, open the base, et cetera. Oranges and grapefruit were basic. Bad freeze year and everything goes to hell. Little winter tourist business building up pretty good. Padre Island and so forth. More transient traffic through into Mexico now the Mexicans fixed their damned road decent from Matamoros to Victoria. Quickest way from the States to Mexico City. He was talkative and cranky.
I got him onto local success stories, and when he got onto George Brell I kept him there. “Old George is into a lot of things. His wife had some groves, and now he’s got more. His first wife, dead now. God knows how many of these Beeg-Burger drive-ins he’s got now. A dozen. More. And the real estate business, and warehouse properties, and the little trucking business he’s started up.”
“He must be a smart man.”
“Well, let’s say George is a busy man. He keeps moving. They say he’s always in some kind of tax trouble, and he couldn’t raise a thousand dollars cash, but he lives big. And he talks big. He likes a lot of people around him all the time.”
“You said he married again?”
“Few years back. Hell of a good-looking girl, but I don’t think she’s more than maybe three years older than his oldest girl from his first wife. Built her a showplace house out in Wentwood Estates. Gerry, her name is.”
My salesman had to get on home, and after he had gone I went back to a booth and phoned George Brell. It was ten to seven. I got him on the line. He sounded emphatic. I said I wanted to see him on a personal matter. He became wary. I said that Bill Callowell had suggested he might be able to help me.
“Callowell? My old pilot? Mr. McGee, you come right on out to the house right now. We’re just sitting around drinking, and we’ll have one ready for you.”
I drove out. There were a half-dozen cars there. A house man let me in. Brell came hurrying to me to pump my hand. He was a trim-bodied man in his late forties, dark and handsome in a slightly vulpine way, and I suspected he wore a very expensive and inconspicuous hair piece. He looked the type to go bald early. He had a resonant voice and a slightly theatrical presence. He wore tailored twill ranch pants and a crisp white shirt with blue piping.
Within ten seconds we were Trav and George, and then he took me out to a glassed back deck where the people were. A dozen of them, seven men and five women, casually dressed, friendly, slightly high. As he made the introductions he managed to give me the impression that all the men worked for him and he was making them rich, and all the women were in love with him. And he made it known to them that I was a dear friend of one of the most influential road builders in the country, a man who had flown desperate missions with George Brell, and had survived only because George was along. His wife, Gerry, was a truly stunning blonde in her middle twenties, tall and gracious, but with eyes just a little cold to match a smile so warm and welcoming.
We sat around on the sling chairs and leather stools, and talked the dusk into night. Two batches left, cutting the group down to five. They made it unthinkable not to stay to dinner. The Brell’s, a young couple named Hingdon and me. A little while before dinner, Brell took Hingdon off to discuss some business matter with him. Mrs. Hingdon went to the bathroom. Gerry Brell excused herself and went to see how the preparation of dinner was coming.
I went wandering. A harmless diversion. It was a big rambling house, obviously furnished by a decorator who had worked with the architect. And they had not been in it long enough to add those touches that would spoil the effect. There was a room off the living room, a small room with lights on inside. I saw a painting on the far wall of the small room that looked interesting. I listened and there was no sound of voices from the small room. I thought Hingdon and Brell might have gone in there. So I wandered in for a closer look at the painting. Just as I reached the middle of the room I heard a gasp and a scuffling noise. I turned and saw there were two people on a deep low couch to the right of the doorway. The couch had high sides, and I had not noticed them.
One was a pale-haired girl of about seventeen. She was slumped back in the couch against pillows. She had on short khaki shorts and a pale gray blouse unbuttoned to the waist. She had the long sprawled luxurious body of maturity, and she was breathing deeply, her face revealing that telltale slackness, the emptiness of prolonged sexual excitement. It was a child’s mouth and a child’s eyes set into a woman’s face. Her lips were wet and her nipples swollen, and she was very slow in coming back from the dreamy land of eros. The boy was older, twenty possibly, and he was a massive brute, all hair and muscles and jaw corners and narrow infuriated eyes.
Left to my own devices, I would have gone very quietly away from there. But her warrior gave me no chance. “Why don’t you knock, you silly son of a bitch?” he said in a gravelly voice.
“I didn’t know it was a bedroom, boy.”
He stood up, impressively tall and broad. “You insulted the lady.”
The lady was sitting erect, buttoning her blouse. The lady said, “Deck him, Lew!” Sick him, Rover. He swarmed at me, obedient as any dog.
I am tall, and I gangle. I look like a loose-jointed, clumsy hundred and eighty. The man who takes a better look at the size of my wrists can make a more accurate guess. When I get up to two twelve I get nervous and hack it back on down to two oh five. As far as clumsiness and reflexes go, I have never had to use a flyswatter in my life. My combat expression is one of apologetic anxiety. I like them confident. My stance is mostly composed of elbows.
Lew, faithful dog, wanted it over right now. He hooked with both hands, chin on his chest, snorting, starting the hooks way back, left right left right. He had fists like stones and they hurt. They hurt my elbows and forearms and shoulders, and one glanced off the top of my shoulder and hit me high on the head. When I had the rhythm gauged, I counter punched and knocked his mouth open with an overhand right. His arms stopped churning and began to float. I clacked his mouth shut with a very short left hook. He lowered his arms. I put the right hand in the same place as before and he fell with his mouth open and his eyes rolled up out of sight.
The little lady screamed. People came running. I massaged my right hand. “What’s going on!” Brell yelled. “What the hell is going on!”
I was too angry for polite usage, for the living room turn of phrase. “I walked in here to look at the painting. I thought the room was empty. This crotch jockey had his little girl all turned on and steaming and they resented the interruption, and she told him to deck me. But it didn’t work out.”
Brell turned on the girl, anguish in his voice. “Angie! Is this true?”
She looked at Lew. She looked at me. She looked at her father. Her eyes were like stones. “What do you really care who gets laid around here anyway!” She sobbed and brushed by him and fled. After a stunned hesitation, he ran after her, calling to her. A door slammed. He was still yelling. A sports car rumbled and snorted and took off. Rubber yelped. it faded, shifting up through the gears.
“God love us,” Gerry Brell said. She took a vase from the table and stood thoughtfully and dumped it on Lew’s head, flowers and all. The Hingdons and I were busy trying not to look squarely at one another.
Lew pushed the floor away and sat up. He looked like a fat sad baby. His eyes were not properly focused.
Gerry sat on her heels beside him and put her hand on that meaty shoulder and shook him gently. “Sweetie, you better haul your ass out of here right now, because if I know George Brell, he’s loading a gun right this minute.”
The eyes focused, comprehended, became round and wide with alarm. He jumped up and without a glance at anyone or another word went running heavily and unsteadily out.
Gerry smiled at us and said, “Excuse me, please.” She went off to find George.
Little Bess Hingdon stayed close to her big and rather solemn young husband as we went into the long living room. “Dear, I really think we should go.”
“Just leave?” Hingdon said uncertainly. There was a nice flavor about then, that scent of good marriage. Separated by a room of people, they were still paired, still aware of each other.
‘’I’ll find Gerry,“ she said and went off.
Sam Hingdon looked curiously at me and said, “That Lew Dagg is a rough boy. Linebacker. One more year to go, and the pros are watching him.”
“Like what did I hit him with?”
He grinned. “Something like that.”
“Maybe he’s out of condition. He should use the summer for a different kind of exercise. Is that Angie George’s eldest?”
“Youngest. She’s the onlly one left home. Gidge is the eldest. She’s married to a boy in med school in New Orleans. Tommy’s in the Air Force. They’re Martha’s children.”
Bess came hurrying in, carrying her purse. “It’s all right, honey. We can leave now. Good night, Mr. McGee. Hope we’ll see you again.”
I went out to the terrace and made myself a weak drink. I could hear Gerry and George yammering at each other. I could hear the music but not the lyrics. Fury and accusation. A pretty girl in dark braids and a uniform came onto the terrace and gathered up the debris of the cocktail snacks, gave me a shy glance and cat-footed away.
Finally George came out. He looked sour. He grunted at me, poured bourbon over one cube and downed it before the ice had a chance to chill it. He banged the glass down. “Trav, Gerry has a headache. She said to apologize. Jesus, what an evening!”
“Apologize to her for me. Tell her I didn’t stop to think that could be your daughter when I spoke so rough. I was still angry. And about hitting that kid, he gave me no choice.”
He stared at me with evident agony. “Just what were they doing, McGee?”
“I didn’t actually see them doing anything. He had her blouse unbuttoned and her bra unhooked, but she had her shorts on.”
“She doesn’t even start college until fall. Goddamn that ape! Let’s get out of here, Trav.” We went out and got into the Lincoln. He drove swiftly through a long maze of curving roads and then slowed as we passed a house as conspicuous as his. I caught a glimpse of the Triumph. He speeded up. “Gerry said that’s where she’d go. It’s her closest girlfriend.”
He didn’t speak again until we were on 77 heading south. “It’s a hell of a thing for something like that to happen, the first time you’re in my home.”
“Worse for you than for me.”
“How the hell am I supposed to keep an eye on her? That’s Gerry’s job and she’s goofing it. She says she can’t control her. She says Angie won’t listen to her. I’m a busy man, goddamn it. I’ve got to send the kid away, but where? Where can you send them in August, for God’s sake? There’s no relatives to park her with. Did you hear what she said to me?” He banged the steering wheel with the heel of his hand. “What do you think, McGee? Do you think that ape is actually screwing my little girl?”
“I think you’re driving too damned fast, George. And I don’t think he is. Yet.”
“Sorry. Why don’t you think he is?”
“Because if he was, he would have had her off someplace where he could, without interruption. And from the look of her, that was the next step, George.”
He slowed down a little more. “You know, that makes sense. Sure. He’s probably trying to talk her into it. He’s been hanging around for about a month. Trav, that’s the second good turn you’ve done me tonight.”
“And she doesn’t care too much for the boy.”
“How do you know?”
“When she ran out, he hadn’t moved a muscle. She couldn’t know but that I’d killed him.”
“That’s right! I’m feeling better by the minute. McGee, you must have a very nice punch.”
“He’s very easy to hit. And you’re going too fast again.”
We came into Brownsville. He took a confusing number of turns and put the car in a small Iot on a back street. We walked half a block through the sultry night to the shabby entrance of a small private club, a men’s club, with a comfortable bar and a good smell of broiled steak, and a cardroom with some intent poker players under the hooded green light.
We stood at the bar and he said, “A key for my friend, Clarence.”
The bartender opened a drawer and took out a brass key and put it in front of me. “This is Mr. Travis McGee, Clarence. Trav, that key is good for life. Life memberships one dollar. Give Clarence the dollar.” I handed it over. ‘’Cash on the line here for everything. No fees, no assessments, no committees. And a good steam room.“
We picked up our drinks and I followed George over to a corner table. “We can eat right here when we’re ready,” he said. He frowned. “I just don’t know what the hell to do about that girl.”
“Didn’t Gidge and Tommy work out fine?” It startled him.
“Yes. Sure.”
“Don’t worry about her. She’s a very lush looking kid, George. And probably as healthy as she looks. Probably if you knew everything about Gidge and Tommy at the same age, your hair would turn white.”
“By God, if you were twenty years older, McGee, I’d hire you to watchdog her for what’s left of the summer.”
“You wouldn’t be able to trust me.”
“Anyway, whatever you came to see me about, consider it done. I owe you that much.”
“I want information.”
“It’s yours.”
“How much did Dave Berry steal overseas, how did he steal it and how did he smuggle it back into the States?”
It twisted him into another dimension so suddenly it was like yanking him inside out. His face turned a pasty yellow. His eyes darted back and forth as though looking for a place to hide. He opened his mouth three times to speak and closed it each time. Then he said, spacing the words, “Are you a Treasury Department investigator?”
“No!”
“What are you?”
“I just try to get along, this way and that. You can understand that.”
“I knew a Sergeant David Berry once.”
“Is that the way you want it?”
“That’s the way it has to be.”
“What are you scared of, George?”
“Scared?‘’
“You can’t be scared of Berry. He’s been dead two years.”
It startled him, but not enough. “Dead? I didn’t know that. Did they let him loose before he died?”
“No.”
“There’s no secret of the fact I had to testify for him. I hadn’t gotten out yet. I had to go to the presidio where they tried him. I said I’d served with him for two years and that he was a good competent noncom. I said I’d seen him lose his temper a lot of times, but he’d never hurt anybody before. He’d been drinking. A jackass lieutenant with brand-new gold bars, never been out of the States, didn’t like the way Dave saluted him. He made Dave stand on a street corner and practice. After about five minutes of that, Dave just hit him. And then kept picking him up and hitting him again. And then he took off. If only he’d hit him once, or if he hadn’t run… But I guess you know all about it.”
“Why should I? I want to know how much, and how he got it and how he brought it back.”
“I wouldn’t know a thing about that, friend. Not a single stinking thing.”
“Because you made it the same way and brought it back the same way George?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, believe me.”
“Because you can’t be sure there isn’t something official about this. Is that it?”
“McGee, I have had a lot of people asking a lot of questions for a long time, and they all get told the same thing. It was a good try, McGee. Let’s eat.” His morale came back fast.
It was midnight when we left the back-street club. He had a cocky, wary friendliness. As he unlocked the door of the Lincoln and swung it open, I chopped him under the ear with the edge of my hand, caught him and tumbled him in. And felt a gagging self-disgust. He was a semi-ridiculous banty rooster of a man, vain, cocky, running as hard as he could to stay in the same place, but he had a dignity of existence which I had violated.
A bird, a horse, a dog, a man, a girl, or a cat, you knock them about and diminish yourself because all you do is prove yourself equally vulnerable. All his anxieties lay there locked in his sleeping skull, his system adjusting itself to sudden shock, keeping him alive. He had pulled at the breast, done homework, dreamed of knighthood, written poems to a girl. One day they would tumble him in and cash his insurance. In the meanwhile it did all human dignity a disservice for him to be used as a puppet by a stranger.
He stirred once on the orderly trip back, and I found the right place on his neck for the thumb, and settled him back. Assured I was unobserved, I carried him into my chill nest, pulled the draperies, readied him for proof.
I stripped him, bound him, gagged him and settled him into the bottom ofthe shower stall. It was a hair piece. I peeled it away and tossed it onto the lavatory counter. It crouched there like a docile, glossy little animal.
A naked man who cannot move or talk, and does not know whether it is night or day, and is not told where he is or how he got there, will break very quickly.
The cold water brought him awake, and I let it run until I was certain he was thoroughly awake. I sat on a stool just outside the shower stall. I turned the water off. He was shivering. He stared at me with a total malevolence.
“George, do you think any government agency would permit this kind of interrogation? I’ve got several ways of getting rid of you completely. All perfectly safe. You’ve been asleep a long time, George. A lot of people are looking for you. But they’re looking in all the wrong places. Kidnapping is illegal, George. So we have to make a deal or I won’t be able to let you go.”
His eyes mirrored several new concerns, but he was telling himself he would never give in. “I’m after Berry ’s little package, and I need your help. When you’re ready to talk, just nod your head. Your only other choice is to get boiled like a knockwurst.”
I reached up and turned on the hot water. Good motels keep it at about a hundred and eighty degrees, and it doesn’t take long to get there. I gave him a short burst and a cloud of steam. He bucked himself off the floor and screamed into the towel, a small noise. His eyes were maddened and bulging and he forgot to nod. I gave him a second blast, and when the steam cleared I could see him nodding vigorously. I gave him the third blast for insurance and he jumped nicely and nodded so hard he was rapping his head against the wall of the stall.
I reached in and took the gag away.
He groaned. “Jesus God, you’ve scalded me. What are you doing to me? My God, McGee, what are you trying to do?”
I reached my hand up and put it on the hot water lever.
“Don’t!” he bawled.
“Keep your voice down, George. You’re turning nice and pink. Now just talk to me. Tell me all about how you and Dave Berry worked it. And if something doesn’t sound exactly right, I’ll boil you a little, just for luck.”
With a little coaching, he got through it pretty well. He and Berry had worked together from the beginning. At first it was Missionary Bonds purchased in China, shipped back to a friend in the States to cash and send them the money to buy more. Double money on each deal. Then when that was closed out, it was the gold. They worked together, but kept the take separate. They didn’t trust each other completely.
But Berry was always making more than George Brell because he didn’t spend an extra rupee on himself. He kept reinvesting it in gold. Berry found a goldsmith on Chowringhi Road in Calcutta who would cast facsimile structural parts of the aircraft out of pure gold. Berry would sand them a little, paint them with aluminum paint, screw them in place. A man in Kunming would melt them back into standard bars.
This was after spot inspection was tightened up. When they were finally due to be shipped back on rotation, Brell had over sixty thousand American dollars, and he was certain that Dave Berry had at least three times that much. They took an R and R leave and hitched a flight down to Ceylon. It was Berry ’s idea. He had thought it all out, and had learned all he could about gemstones. The cash made Brell nervous. He followed Berry ’s lead.
They spent the full ten days buying the most perfect gem stones they could find. Deep blue sapphires, star sapphires, dark Burmese rubies, star rubies. Some were too big to fit through the mouth of a standard issue canteen. They cut the canteens open, put the gems inside and resoldered them. They poured melted wax over the stones to hold them in place. The wax hardened. They filled the canteens with water, hooked them on their belts and came home rich and nervous.
“I don’t think they ever suspected Dave of a thing. He kept his mouth shut. But I did some hinting when I’d had a few drinks. They got onto me somehow. I went back home and hid them. I didn’t dare touch them. I was on terminal leave, waiting to get out when I got called to the trial. After they sentenced him to life, I had a chance to be alone with him. I tried to make a deal with him. Tell me where his were. I’d take a reasonable cut for services rendered and see that his family got taken care of. Not a chance. He didn’t trust me. He didn’t trust anybody to be shrewd enough and smart enough. No, he was going to handle it himself without any hitches, and then he could make it all up to his wife and girls.
“I didn’t touch mine for three years. Then I had to have cash. There was some land I had to pick up. I could buy it right. I couldn’t run the risk of selling them in this country. Martha and I took a vacation. We went to Mexico. I made contacts there. I took a screwing, but at least I felt safe. I got just a little over forty thousand. I brought it back in U.S. dollars, and I led it into the businesses a little bit at a time. I was careful. But they came down on me, on a net worth basis, trying to make a fraud charge stick, saying there was unreported income. And it has cost me a hundred thousand dollars to keep from being convicted for that lousy forty thousand. I couldn’t talk to you. I couldn’t take the chance. There’s no statute of limitations on tax fraud, and they could still jail me for never declaring the money I made overseas. I’m marked lousy in the files, and they are after me every year. They’re never going to stop. Now for God’s sake, let me out of here.”
After I untied him, I had to help him to his feet and half carry him into the bedroom. He sat on the edge of the bed and put his bald head down on his bare hairy knees and began to cry.
“I’m sick,” he said. “I’m real sick, McGee.” He huddled and his teeth began to chatter. I tossed his clothes to him and he dressed quickly, his lips blue.
“Where are we?”
“About two miles from your house. We walked out of that club in Brownsville about three and a half hours ago. Nobody is looking for you.”
He stared at me. “Do you know how you looked? You looked like you’d enjoy killing me.”
“I didn’t want to take too long over this, George.”
“I couldn’t hold out against what you were going to do.”
“Nobody could, George.”
He felt his bald head. “Where is it?”
“In the bathroom.”
He tottered in. In a few moments he came out, hair piece in place. But the haggardness of his face made it look more spurious than before. He sat again on the edge of the bed. We were oppressor and oppressed. Traditionally this is supposed to create enmity. But, so often, it does not. It had opened up too many conflicting areas of emotions. The violence was a separate thing, like a wind that had blown through, and we were left with an experience shared. He was anxious to have me know that he had acquitted himself well. I was eager to have him believe he had left me no other choice.
“You are a friend of Callowell’s?”
“No.”
“I wrote the stuffy son of a bitch a nice letter and got a brush-off.”
“I traced you through him.”
He didn’t seem to hear me. “Callowell was so damn nervous about anything cute. He’d check that airplane. He’d check around, and right over his fat head some of the static line braces would be solid gold. I tried to kid with Dave about it. Dave didn’t see anything funny. He was dead serious about everything. God, it warted him to send money home when he knew he could keep it and keep on doubling it. I kept spending too much. I had a private car in a private garage in Calcutta. I had a wife and two kids home too. But the difference between Dave and me, he was sure he’d live forever.” He shivered violently. “Trav, you think you could get me home? I feel terrible.”
I drove him home in the Lincoln. My rental was in his drive, and the Triumph was there, in the triple carport, beside a compact station wagon. I rolled the Lincoln into the empty space. Lights were on in the back of the house. I went into the big kitchen with him. There was a center island of stone, and copper pots aligned on a fruitwood wall.
Gerry Brell came into the light wearing a pink quilted robe with big white lapels, her blonde hair tousled, eyes squinting in the light.
“Honey, I don’t feel so good,” George said.
“He’s having chills,” I told her.
She took him off. At the doorway she turned and said, “Wait for me, Trav.”
I looked in the refrigerators and found cold Tuborg in the second one. I leaned against the center island and drank it, feeling unreal. I walked on a fabric of reality but it had an uncomfortable give to it. You could sink in a little way. If you walked too much and came to a weak spot, you could fall through. I think it would be pretty black down there.
After fifteen minutes she came back to the kitchen, saw what I was having and got herself one. She had brushed her hair and her eyes were accustomed to the light.
She leaned against a bank of stainless steel sinks, facing me, and drank from the bottle and said, “He threw up. I turned on his electric blanket and gave him a sleeping pill.”
“I think he’s just emotionally upset.”
“You’ve had a dandy introduction to the Brell family.”
“Why did you ask me to stay?”
“Couldn’t you just wait so we could work around to it instead of coming out with it like that?”
“I’m not at my best at four in the morning.”
“Did you give him some bad news?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“George operates on the thin edge, and the edge is getting thinner all the time. I wanted to cut down the way we live, but he won’t hear of it. Any little thing could tip the scales, and then the walls come tumbling down.”
“How do you know that isn’t exactly what I want?”
She looked rueful. “Then I made a bad guess about you. Did he say anything about me tonight?”
“No. But it’s nice to know why you had me stay.”
“What do you mean?”
“I hope you had a nice long talk with the girl when she got home.”
“I guess I had to, didn’t I? Not stepmother to child. That doesn’t work, does it? Woman to woman. Call it an armed truce.”
“The next time she makes a crack like that, Gerry, it might not go over his head.”
“I think I made her understand that, if she loves her father, it would be a poor way to show it to give him a big broad hint about my infidelity. It’s a hell of a confusing world, Mr. McGee. She’s trying to throw herself away because she trusted me and I cheated on her father.”
“Can she be sure of that?”
Her laugh was ugly. “Eyewitnesses are usually pretty positive. It happened back in June. Kids are so idealistic. How can I explain to her that it really didn’t mean very much, that it was an old friend, sort of sentimental, unplanned, old-times-sake sort of thing. I don’t make a habit of that sort of thing. But ever since I heard the door open and turned my head and saw her there, pale as death before she slammed the door and ran, I’ve felt cheap and sick about it. We were getting fond of each other up until then. Now she thinks I’m a monster. Tonight she was trying to hurt me by hurting herself. I just hope George has forgotten what she said. His judgment is bad enough lately without something like that to cloud it.”
“He didn’t make any mention of what she said.”
“Good. Could this thing with Angie have made him so sick?”
“I think it’s probable.”
She tilted her pretty head and studied me. “Trav, you seem so mild and sure of yourself, and maybe you know enough about people to tell me what I should do about Angie.”
“I’m not that sure of myself.”
“I just wish there was a starting place. I can’t reach her. She looks at me with hate. I just can’t ever explain it to her.”
“Are you a good human being, Gerry? I mean good in the sense that if you put everything in the scales, they’d tip that way?”
It startled her. “I don’t know. I haven’t thought of myself that way. I think I like the lush life a little too much. That’s why I married George. I’m vain. I like men to admire me. I’ve got a coarse streak that comes out at the wrong times. But I do try to live up to… some kind of a better image of myself. And I try to improve. I came from nothing, Trav, from a little raggedy-ass spread in the Panhandle with too many kids and too few rooms. Dusted out, flooded out, burned out we had it all.
“Until I got big enough to know that if I wore a tight skirt and red shoes, I could get the pretties I’d ached for, and then smart enough to know that the cheap approach gets the cheap pretties. This house and this life, they’re big pretties, but the same old equation holds. I just don’t know. Maybe I’m good, but that goddamn scale would hesitate a long time before tilting that way.”
“Then tell the kid the whole thing. Lew proved she’s old enough. Make her identify. Level with her. The saga of Gerry Srell, up to and including your little sentimental gesture, and how you feel about her. Don’t hold anything back. Don’t let George send her away. Keep her here until she knows it all and she can balance it out herself.”
“She’ll despise me.”
“She already does.”
She brooded for a few moments. “I’ll do no sleeping tonight. I got to walk this one around, boy.” She set the empty bottle aside and said, “I have the feeling I won’t be seeing you again.”
“I have to see George once more.”