“Not much. They came aboard a few times. She was picking up a good tan. He had a tendency to burn. The obvious thing about them was they were in love. There was between them a… I don’t know the word for it…”
“An erotic tension?”
“Right. Tangible. You could almost see it. Like smoke.”
“I didn’t realize she would ever get to be so handsome,” Meyer said. “She was in fact a very homely young girl, all knees, elbows, and teeth. Glenna thought it would be useful for her to have a profession, and she told me Norma would probably end up in the world of academe, taking students on geology field trips. I’m talking around and around and around what I’m trying to say.”
“Take your time.” We were at a light. I looked over at him. He was scowling.
“Travis, suppose a drunk came across the center line and killed the two of them while I was in Toronto. It would be the same degree of loss. The obligation would be the same. To go to Houston and… tidy up. So, in that process, which I want to accomplish by myself, I may or may not come upon anything which might be related to what happened. If I do come upon anything, I’m not sure I’ll take the right steps. Do you understand?”
“Of course.”
“You’d come help out if I come upon anything like that?”
“Gee, I don’t really know. I have these tennis matches with the ambassador’s daughter, and I’ve been thinking of getting my teeth capped. You know how it is.”
“I’ll pay all expenses.”
“For Christ’s sweet sake, Meyer!”
“I’m sorry. It’s just that I’m not at home in the world the way I was. The same as it would be, I suppose, for a person who had been in a coma for a year.”
“You holler, I’ll come running.”
When the big swells flattened in a couple of days, they were able to anchor a work barge out beyond the sea buoy, and divers went down and located what was left of The John Maynard Keynes.
It wasn’t much. The heavy metal parts of the old cruiser were scattered over a half acre of sloping sand, mud, and weed, with a lot of the stuff already covered or partly covered by sand drift. All the lighter stuff was gone-wood, paper, flesh, plastic, and bone-pulled up and down the coast, in and out of the pass, by tides and currents. From the amount of damage done to the metal remainsengines, anchors and chain, refrigerator, galley stove, wheels and rudder, hatch frames, and transom rail-the borrowed expert estimated that the amount of explosive used was from four to six times the amount necessary to kill three people aboard and sink the vessel. He called it “interesting overkill.” Because of the submersion in seawater, his tests for the kind of explosive used were inconclusive. He found nothing which could have been any part of a detonating device.
All the Bahia Mar boats that could make it, and were interested enough to make it, went out in a twilight procession. Meyer and I dropped our separate wreath for Norma and Evan on an outgoing tide. The minister brayed words of destiny and consolation over the bull horn. We bowed heads for the final prayer and headed back, in convoy, with the running lights winking on in the gathering darkness, moving aside to let the Royal Viking Sea come easing out, a giant hotel, golden lights aglow, full of holiday people on their way to the islands and the tour buses.
After I was properly secure again at Slip F-18, with the phone and electric plugged back in, we went out and ate and came back to the Flush and went topside into the warm bright night, leaned back in the deck chairs up on the sun deck to look at stars too bright to be totally obscured by the city glare and the city smog. But we could smell the smog underneath the scents of the sea, a sad acid, mingling burned wine and spoiled mousse.
“I keep thinking I’ll look something up and suddenly realize that I can’t,” Meyer said. “I don’t even have a picture of her. There was a wedding picture, a Polaroid print she had duplicated.”
“I think they can make a print from a print. In fact, excuse me for stupidity. That’s what they would have to do. So somebody else will have a print and you can get another made.”
“Somebody in Houston,” he said. “Very probably. You know, all the pictures I had of the Keynes were on the Keynes.”
“I’ll look in the drawer where I throw pictures. There’s probably one there, if you want it.”
“I can’t get used to being a guest. I want to have a boat and live on it just where I’ve been living all these years.”
“We can go shopping, if you want.”
“Not yet. That is, if I’m not getting on your nerves.”
“So far you’re only a minor irritation.”
“Somebody around here must have taken pictures of Norma and Evan.”
“Sure. But who? They’d be in tourist shots, mostly by accident. Of course there was a very fuzzy picture taken by the woman from Venice, the one that was reproduced in the paper two days after the… the accident.”
“Maybe if we call it the murder, it will be more accurate.”
I went below and looked for the old newspaper, but it had been tossed out.
So on Saturday morning, I called a man I knew in the city room of the paper, Abe Palinka, and asked about the photograph. Abe checked and called me back.
“What it was, it was one of those little tiny negatives from one of those little Kodak cameras that take the cartridge. It was on Kodacolor, and maybe you know you get a pretty dim-looking black-andwhite off of that, worse in repro in the paper, but Clancy thought it was good enough to use because it was like, he said, dramatic: the scene before it went boom. What we did, we got a rush job on development, made a set of prints, picked the one we wanted, made a black-and-white, and sent the rest back to the lady-got a pencil?-Mrs. Simmons Davis of eight four eight Sunrise Road, Venice, three three five nine five. How come you haven’t given me any kind of a hot lead in a hell of a while, McGee?°‘
“Nothing has been going on.”
“I bet. Okay, if that’s what you want me to believe.”
“Thanks, Abe.”
I dialed information for that area and got the Davis number. After the fourth ring a low, warm, husky, slightly-out-of-breath voice said, “Hello?”
“Mrs. Davis?”
“This is Brandy Davis.”
“I’m calling from Fort Lauderdale. My name is McGee. Travis McGee.”
“Mr. McGee, when I hear the name of your city, why, my stomach just sort of rolls right over. It’s been five days now, but the whole thing is just as vivid in my mind as if it happened five minutes ago. Excuse me, I’m a little out of breath. I was just locking the door when I heard the phone, and I ran back.”
“I don’t want to hold you up.”
“I was just going to the drugstore is all.”
“What I’m calling about, a dear friend of mine owned that little cruiser.”
“I heard he was out of town when it happened.”
“That’s right. And the pictures he had of his boat and of his niece all were blown up with the boat. We saw the one you took they used in the paper…”
“That was a terrible job they did! My goodness. They paid me twenty-five dollars for the right to use it. I wish they hadn’t said who took it, even. I take much better pictures than that!”