“Doctor, you are too damned smart.”
“Just be awfully awfully glad you and she had a good run at it. That’s all. And be glad for her if she’s getting what she wants. And for heaven’s sake, don’t try to punish her as she leaves, like a little kid who’s losing all his candy.”
“Am I like that?”
“You poor dummy, everybody is like that!”
So we kissed and I walked the doctor to her car, held the door open, and gave her a proprietary pat on the behind.
When l closed the door, she ran the window down and leaned to look up at me. “I don’t want to make you angry.”
“Then don’t.”
“Please, Travis. Don’t obstruct. What I want to say, which may make the whole situation easier for you to understand, is that maybe your hotel executive friend has more capacity for genuine maturity than you have.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“It need not be an insult, if you don’t take it as one. You have been living your life on your own terms. You need make only those concessions which please you. There are always funny friends, parties, beach girls, and the occasional dragon to go after. I don’t pretend to know any of the circumstances that shaped you. I would guess that at some time during your formative years there was an incident that gave you a distaste for most kinds of permanence. None of us decide arbitrarily to be what we are. We just are what we are, through environment, heredity, and the quality of our mind and our emotions. Are you ashamed of what you are?”
“No, but…”
“And that, dear heart, has to be everybody’s answer: No, but… And I can finish your sentence. No, but I wish I were a better person.”
“You too?”
She rested her hand on mine. “I’ve got your disease, Travis. That’s why I chickened out on marriage. I didn’t think I could handle the role. I know I couldn’t. But I do get so awful damn lonely sometimes.” Her hand tightened on mine.
“And they tell me it can get even lonelier.”
“I know.”
“So, Doctor Laura, after my bird has flown, maybe you could offer some physical comfort, and accept some.”
“I think I would like that very much. It doesn’t have to be a case of turning the clock back. Somebody to hang onto in the long long dark night, somebody warm, somebody breathing warmth against my flesh. Somebody giving a damn. Even just a little damn.”
I bent clumsily through the window and kissed her mouth. When I straightened I thumped my head on the top of the opening. She laughed. I told her doctors should have more sympathy, and she laughed again and backed out and drove away.
Meyer arrived at a quarter past one, as I was getting ready for bed. “Who stays open this late?” I asked him. “Barbers or clothing stores?”
“Was I supposed to report?”
“Don’t get stuffy. I just thought you might be here while I was out to dinner, to take any call that might come from Sigiera.”
“I came back and dropped off the clothes I bought. And then I went back to that Rawson again. The old lady had me stay and eat with her. And we’ve been talking. Her name is Margaret Howey, and she is really a hell of a woman.”
“Going to buy it?”
“What? The boat? Yes, of course. It’s a good buy, and it’s roomier than the Keynes was. The insurance will cover most of it.”
“What are you going to call it?”
“Times have changed. Perceptions change. Fashions change. Also, a boat has to fit its name. I thought first it might be the Adam Smith. But Margaret and I decided that the Tharstein Veblen would be nice.”
“The who?”
“Veblen died in 1929 at the age of seventy-two. He was an economist, and some of his theories became clouded by his sociological theories. His book The Theory of the Leisure Class, with its ideas about conspicuous consumption, had a vogue for a time. I have never been a Veblenian myself. But Margaret thinks it makes a neat name for a boat.”
“Whatever Margaret thinks.”
“It will be utterly meaningless to everyone who graduated from high school in the past twenty years. That’s the nice part of it.”
“What will you call it for short?”
“For short? The Thorstein Ueblen is quite short enough.”
When he is in that mood, there is nothing reasonable that you can say to him. He told me Margaret would move north in two weeks, and he could have possession on August sixteenth, and on that day he would move it to the berth where The John Maynard Keynes had always squatted, with its meager freeboard making it look underprivileged.
Twenty
TUESDAY, THE third of August, was one of those rare Atlantic coast days with no wind at all. Every scrap of cloth on every boat docked at Bahia Mar hung limp as rejection. The endless midday traffic droned past the marina and motel, under the pedestrian bridge over to the beach, leaving an oppressive chemical stink in the air.
There was a sheen of oil on the boat basin. Compressors chugged, cooling stale air belowdecks. Brown girls lay stunned on open decks, sweat rolling off them. A ship’s cat lay in the shade of a tarp aboard a nearby motor sailer, sleeping on its back with all four feet in the air.
Sigiera phoned at one fifteen.
“McGee? This here is your smart Texican law officer speaking.”
“Glad to hear from you.”
“Thought you might be. I didn’t go bulling into this thing. What I did, I tried to think of the angles. I tried to add up everything I’d ever heard about the Chappel family, and I didn’t move in on Mrs. Chappel until I had a real good angle to play. This is my angle. A bunch of good old boys are going to try to put Sid Chappel in the state legislature next chance. He’s willing. God knows he’s willing. He’s taken to shaking hands with people on the street he doesn’t hardly know.
“So I got out there this morning about ten, and Miz Clara was in the pool, and the maid took me out and left me. I can tell you, it’s hard to believe she’s got to be forty-seven if a day. Pretty little thing, built like a schoolgirl. I just come back from there.”
“And?”
“Don’t try to rush me along. In some cases it’s smart to kind of hem and haw and beat around until they finally ask. And she did. She said she would sure like to know what I had on my mind. That’s when you kind of blurt it out, like you just hated to say it. So I said I’d come to do her a favor. I said some political enemies of her husband had me checking out the old Cody Pittler file, because they had the idea of using it against him when he would up and run for office. She asked me what that could possibly mean to her. She said I should talk to Sid. And I told her I was talking to her because she was the one who kept in touch with Cody, as a favor to Helen June. I tell you, McGee, she came up out of that pool water like a porpoise. One minute she’s in the water, and the next minute she’s standing in front of me, sopping wet. She asked me where I’d heard a damn fool thing like that, and I said Helen June tended to talk when she had more than three, and she said some words about Helen June that I didn’t think a lady like that would know. She knew lots of them, and how to hang them together in chunks.”
“And so?”
“And so I asked her if she’d heard from Helen June lately, and she said she’d gotten a call yesterday in the afternoon, and she had written down what Helen June told her, and she had planned on driving the fifty-five miles up to Del Rio, like she usually did with messages for him, and mailing it from there. So I told her that what she could do would be give it to me quiet like, and if it ever came up, I would swear that she had been intercepting messages and turning them over to me, and it would turn back on whoever was after Sid’s hide. And if she didn’t want to-right here I slapped my pocket-I’d just have to hand her this here warrant that I didn’t have-and search the house. So she called me some of the names she called Helen June, and she was so darn cute, I was willing to forget the seventeen years she’s got to have on me and tote her right over onto one of those big sun cots they got. And she knew what I had in mind and liked stirring me up that way, and pretty soon we both started to laughing. She went and got the letter, and I got it right here. The note inside was typed. It didn’t say dear anything, and there was no name at the end. I’ll read it to you.”