So maybe, I thought, Hero never came back to the Tiger’s, or maybe Mary Smith never drove up from Miami to try to find me, and if she did, maybe Meyer missed her. Or little Muggsie could have decided she deserved better.
Janine came walking slowly from the house, hands deep in the pockets of a borrowed gray cardigan worn over white ranch jeans. She hadn’t seen me, and when I called to her, she turned and came over.
“Have a good nap?”
“I slept a little.” She sat on an upended cement block and reached and picked up a piece of lath and started drawing lines in the dirt with the sharp end. She tilted her head and stared up at me, squinting against the brightness of the sky.
“Trav,” she said, “I keep wondering about one thing. It keeps bothering me. I keep trying to figure out what happened, but I can’t seem to think of anything logical. It’s sort of strange.”
“Like?”
“How did Tush get out there? I had the car. He was going to come into Sunnydale by bus and phone me to come get him. Did somebody give him a ride, or what?”
“I never thought about that.”
“Then, whoever gave him the ride could tell when he got there. They… found him at what time was it?”
“A sheriff’s deputy found him at nine o’clock approximately. The medical examiner estimated he had been dead from one to four hours at the time he was found.”
“From five thirty to eight thirty, then. In there somewhere, somebody… killed him. But he was so strong, Trav. You know how powerful he was. He wouldn’t just stretch out and let somebody… He was dead when they put him there. Maybe whoever drove him out there saw somebody hanging around.”
“We’re going to get to all that, Jan. Believe me, we’re going to do our best to find out. But first we’ve got to do some salvage work for you.”
She made a bitter mouth and looked down and drew a dollar sign. She reached a foot out and slowly scuffed it out. “Money. It got to mean so damned much, you know. Getting pinched worse and worse, and snapping at each other about it, and being so scared we were going to lose the whole thing we started with. And now it doesn’t mean anything. Nothing at all.”
“With those three kids to bring up? Shoes and dentists and school and presents?”
“Oh, I suppose it will be something I’ll have to think about. But right now I’m just… nowhere. You’re sure you can fix it so I’ll end up with thirty thousand clear, and you seem so sure you can make me a lot more out of that stock stuff I don’t understand at all. I ought to sound grateful and pleased and delighted and so on.”
“Not for my sake. Or Meyer’s.”
“Everybody is doing things for me. But I ran. Everybody knows that. I’m a lousy person. I don’t like myself. Trav, I used to like myself well enough.”
I slid off the dock and took her hand and pulled her up. “Let’s walk for a while.” We walked and I gave her some dreary little sermons about how never quite matching up to what you want of yourself is the basic of the human condition. She heard, but I don’t know if she believed. I was trying hard to believe my own hard sell, because I kept thinking of carpets and shoats and wide wide emerald eyes and a delicately provocative little pressure of teeth against the knuckles of my stupid right hand.
Twelve
I ARRIVED IN downtown Sunnydale at nine o’clock on Monday morning and parked in the bank lot, and walked toward the Shawana River Hotel, where I had arranged to meet LaFrance in the coffee shop.
When I went into the lobby, two men in green twill uniforms moved in from either side to position themselves with an unhurried, competence between me and the glass double doors. A cricket-sized man of about sixty planted himself spread-legged in front of me and said, “Nice and easy, now. You just lay both hands atop your head. You’re a big one, all right. Freddy?”
One of the others came in from behind and reached around me and patted all the appropriate pockets and places. I had recognized the sheriff’s voice from having heard it over the phone. He wore a businessman’s hat wadded onto the back of his head. Straight gray hair stuck out in Will Rogers style. He wore an unpressed dark suit with a small gold star in the lapel. The suit coat hung open, exposing a holstered belly gun small enough to be an Airweight. Small enough to look toylike, but in no sense a toy.
The legal papers, billfold and keys were handed to Sheriff Bunny Burgoon. From his voice I had thought he would be all belly, with porcine features. He opened the wallet, flipped through the pliofilm envelopes. He stopped at the driver’s license and studied it.
“Your name Travis McGee? You can put your hands down, boy.”
“That’s my name.”
“Now we’re going on over to my office and talk some.”
“Can I ask why?”
“It’s my duty to tell you that you got no obligation to answer any questions 1 or any of my officers may ask you without the presence of any attorney of your choice, and you are in your rights to request the Court appoint an attorney to represent your interests in this matter, and anything you say in response to interrogation, with or without the presence of your legal representative, may be held in evidence against you.”
He had run all the words together, like a court clerk swearing a witness.
“Is there a charge?”
“Not up to this minute, boy. You’re being taken in for interrogation in connection with a felony committed in the county jurisdiction.”
“If I’m being taken in, Sheriff, then it is an arrest, isn’t it?”
“Boy, aren’t you coming along willingly and voluntarily like is the duty of any citizen to assist law officers in the pursuit of their duty?”
“Why certainly, Sheriff! Willingly and voluntarily, and not in the cage in the back of a county sedan, and with my keys and papers and wallet in my pockets. Otherwise it’s an arrest, and if so, my personal attorney is Judge Rufus Wellington and you better get him on the horn and get him down here.”
“Read his name in the paper, boy?”
“Instead of bothering the judge, why don’t you just ask Whitt Sanders if the judge represents me?”
I was watching for a shift of uncertainty in his eyes and saw it. Apparently he had not anticipated any connection with the local power structure. He motioned one of the two deputies close, stood tall, and without taking his eyes off me, murmured into the younger man’s ear. The deputy walked out. Burgoon asked me to come over and sit on a couch in the lobby. The deputy was back in five minutes and the sheriff went over and talked quietly with him, then came over and gave me back my possessions. With one of the deputies ten paces behind us, we walked through the morning sunshine to the Shawana County Courthouse and around to the side and into the entrance labeled COUNTY SHERIFF.
I was aware of a particularly avid curiosity on the part of the desk personnel and the communication clerk as he led me back into his office. The slats of the blinds were almost closed. He turned on the ceiling fluorescence and his desk lamp. He had me sit in a straight chair facing his desk and six feet from it. The sheriff looked at the papers on his blotter, put them aside and sat in his big black chair. A portly man in deputy uniform came in and sighed and sat in a chair back against the wall. “Willie will be bringing it along, Sherf.”
Burgoon nodded. There was silence. I looked at the framed testimonials on the walls, and the framed pictures of Burgoon taken with various political notables, past and present., Some file drawers were partially open. The contents looked untidy, with documents sticking up out of the file folders.
“Make that deal with Harry?” Burgoon asked.