I made good time and got to the Groves an hour after nightfall. We had drinks by the fire of fat pine, and a good dinner, and good talk. Janine got up and came over to me, hesitated, then leaned and touched her lips to the side of my face, and went off to bed. Connie asked me what I thought of how Jan looked and acted.
“Listless. Thinner. More bones in her face.”
“She’s not eating well or sleeping well. She’ll start to read or sew and end up staring into space. I hear her wandering around the house in the middle of the night. She’s not coming out of it the way she should. I don’t know what to do to snap her out of it. She’s a damned fine girl, Trav. She’s turning into a ghost.”
“It’s good of you to have her and the kids here.”
“Don’t be a jackass! I told her she can stay forever and I mean it. Those are three good kids. Five kids make a good kind of noise to have in the house. It’s been quiet around here too damned long.”
She asked about my redhead, and why I hadn’t brought her along. When I said we’d called it off, she was suddenly furious, saying she thought I had more sense than that. I had to explain that it wasn’t my idea and I’d been given no chance to make her change her mind. Then she was merely puzzled, saying it didn’t make any sense at all.
On Sunday the three of us went fifty miles in Connie’s Pontiac at her customary Indianapolis pace up to Rufus Wellington’s law office. He had had his elderly secretary come in, and she was just finishing the typing of the deed and other documents pertinent to my sale of the Bannon property to Preston LaFrance. I had the power of attorney with me that Meyer had given me, which, when signed by Janine and witnessed, would authorize him to buy and sell securities in her name in the margin account he was establishing for her at the brokerage firm he used in Lauderdale.
Rufus eyed me and said, “You sure LaFrance will pay forty for an equity that isn’t even there? Young man, do me the favor of not telling me what kind of persuasion you’re fixing to use on him. I don’t think I would like to know. I don’t even want to know who this Meyer is, thank you. Any member of the bar is an officer of the court.”
“If I have any trouble with the bank approving of the transfer of the mortgage to LaFrance, can you help?”
“I can phone Whitt Sanders and remind him of something that would make him approve transferring it to a little red hen. But I don’t want to use it less I have to, just like I didn’t have to when Connie went on the note with you. I have the feeling LaFrance is going to have trouble making those payments on the mortgage.”
“If you don’t want me to tell you anything, Judge, why do you make leading statements and then wait for me to explain?”
“Because I guess I figure you’re not likely to tell me, son. But I do have a couple of clients here. You, Connie, and you, Miz Janine, and it would rest my mind to feel sure that nothing would come back on these ladies from anything too cute you are figuring on working on some of those folks down there in Sunnydale.”
“Rest your mind, Judge,” I said.
He leaned back, looked beyond us into the misty places of memory and said, “When I was a rough, wild young man, which seems like it was all in a different world than this one, I ended up down in Mexico one time, near Victoria, on a horse ranch. You had to prove you were all man. There was a thing they did, called the paseo de muerte. Maybe I don’t have the lingo just right, but it’s close. It was just riding full out, a full hard run over rocky land on halfbroke horses, and the one who wants to test you, he comes up on you on one side, and he grins and you grin back and kick your feet free of the stirrups and you change horses right there, risking the way the footing is, and spooking one of the horses, or losing ahold. Once you’d show them you were ready to do it anytime, then they’d leave you be, because they weren’t any more anxious deep inside to keep doing it than you were. Any fool could see that every time a man did it, his odds got shorter.” He shook his head and smiled. “Long hours and short money, and one day out of noplace I could imagine came the idea I could start reading for the law. Why dad I start all this? There was some point I was going to make. Oh. You keep in mind, Travis McGee, that the money game is one wild horse, and the vengeance for murder is another wild horse, and you try riding them both, you can fall between and get your skull stamped with an iron shoe. Bannon was your friend, and Connie’s friend, and he was your husband, Miz Janine, daddy of your boys. Murder can come in when the money game goes bad. But don’t think of it as being black dirty evil, but more of it being sick and sad, of some stumbling jackass that didn’t mean it to come out that way, and he wakes up in the night and thinks on it and he gets sweaty and he hears his heart going like mad. Well, you folks have refused my kind offer to come on home with me for kitchen whisky and side meat and fancy conversation, so you will forgive me if I tell you all to be careful, and speed you on your way.”
I phoned Press LaFrance in the late afternoon and arranged to meet him in Sunnydale the next morning. He sounded cautious and nervous and he gave me the impression of a certain evasiveness. He assured me the forty was still waiting, and he was anxious to listen, but I had the uneasy feeling that something had changed.
I went out to the sheds and sat on the truck dock, feeling dispirited. I finally admitted to myself that I felt guilty about Mary Smith. I could rationalize it as an adroit defensive maneuver. Gary Santo had aimed her at me. Maybe the little code word had been “steak.” He had evaluated me and decided there was enough chance of additional useful information to turn her loose. So I had sidestepped her and aimed her at Hero.
But, after all, she knew her way around. She was about as gullible, innocent and vulnerable as those limey lassies who had starred in the Profumo affair. It was a good chance that she would case Hero in about forty seconds and turn him off, because he could certainly never be a business assignment.
I wished, however, that one little comment about Hero had not lodged itself so firmly in my memory. He looked like the big, gentle, slow-moving, kindly star of a hundred Westerns, and he had the charm to make a woman feel admired, protected and cherished, until he could ease her back to his pad, or back to her place, or any nearby nest he could beg, borrow or rent.
And there he would tirelessly demonstrate that degree of satyriasis that stopped short of landing him in various kinds of corrective institutions. He cruised the festive areas and cut his quarry out of merry packs with easy skill and monomaniacal determination. The comment that lingered in my mind came from a weary man who came aboard Meyer’s boat one hot Sunday afternoon and said, “Knowing Hero this long, I sure God should have had the good sense never to let him bring a woman aboard my ketch last evening, but with Myra and the kids off visiting her folks, and the forward cabin empty, and me a little smashed, I said okay and what he had was some young schoolteacher he’d found right over at the Yankee Clipper in a big batch of schoolteachers having a party before going on a five-day cruise to the islands out of Everglades. The ship left this morning and she sure God isn’t going to make that cruise. Giggly woman, kind of mousy and trying to get along without her glasses, and built real good, especially up front. His angle was showing her a Bahama-built ketch on account of she was going to the Bahamas. I left them aboard and that was nine or ten o’clock and I came back at midnight or later thinking they’d be gone. Honest to God, I’m dead for sleep, men. It would get quieted down and I’d be drifting off and it would start up again. With all that whinnying and squeaking and thrashing around, the nearest thing it sounds like, and it’s still going on from time to time, is like somebody beating carpets with a shoat. One day Hero is going to nail him one with heart trouble and she just isn’t going to last it out. I should have had more sense last night Meyer, what would you say to me going below and getting a little nap?”