“I just sat there. I couldn’t seem to think clearly. I took a bus back. I didn’t get to the motel until a little after midnight. My key wouldn’t work. I hammered on the door. Wilma didn’t answer. I went to the office and the owner came to the door after I’d rung the night bell a long time. He said the lock had been changed and he hadn’t been paid for two weeks, and he was holding my clothes and luggage until I paid up. I said there was some mistake, that my wife had paid him. He said she hadn’t.
“I asked where she was, and he said that in the middle of the afternoon he’d seen her and some man carrying suitcases out to a car and driving away, and it made him think we were going to beat him out of the rent, so he had put my stuff in storage and changed the lock. He hadn’t noticed the car particularly, just that it was a pale-colored car with Florida plates. She hadn’t left any message far me. I walked around the rest of the night. When the bank opened I found out she’d cleaned out the account the previous morning, when I thought she’d gone grocery shopping and came home with that headache.”
Toward the end of it his voice had grown dull and listless. Chook stirred and sighed. A gust of the freshening breeze swung the boat, and some predatory night bird went by honking with anguish.
“But you found her again, later on,” I said, to get him started.
“I’m pretty tired.”
Chook reached and patted him. “You go to bed, honey. Want me to fix you anything?”
“No thanks,” he murmured. He got up with an effort and went below, saying goodnight to us as the screened door hissed shut.
“Poor wounded bastard,” Chook said in a half whisper.
“It was a very thorough job. They got everything except the clothes he had on. They even milked old friendships.”
“He hasn’t much resistance yet. Or much spirit.”
“Both of those are up to you.”
“Sure, but try to make it a little easier on him, Trav, huh?”
“She took off in late September. It’s late May, Chook. The trail is eight months cold. Where are they, and how much do they have left? And just how smart are they? One thing seems obvious. Wilma was the bird dog. Rope a live one and bring him to Naples. Remember, she got booted off that cruiser out of Savannah. I think there was one on there a little too shrewd for her, so she took a long look at what we had around here. And picked Arthur. Marriage can lull suspicion, and she used sex as a whip, and when she had him completely tamed and sufficiently worried about money, she contacted Stebber to tell him the pigeon was ready for the pot. It was a professional job, honey. They made him ache to get in on it. They made him so eager he’d have signed his own death warrant without reading it.”
“Was it all legal?”
“I don’t know. At least legal enough so that you’d probably have a three-year court fight to prove it wasn’t, and then it would be only a civil action to recover the funds. He can’t finance that. He couldn’t finance two cups of coffee.”
“Can you do anything?”
“I could try. If you can prop him up a little, I can try.”
She stood up and came over and gave me a quick hug, a kiss beside the eye, and told me I was a treasure.
Long after she left, the treasure lifted a few score aches and sorenesses and went to bed.
Four
LATE SUNDAY afternoon, up on the sundeck I got the rest of the account from Arthur Wilkinson. Chook had him heavily oiled against additional burn. She was using the sundeck rail as a torture rack, and I was pleased to turn so that I could not see her. I had taken so much punishment all day, it hurt to watch her. But over Arthur’s recital I could sometimes hear her little gasps of effort, a creak of a joint strained to the maximum, and even that was mildly upsetting.
Arthur had gotten absolutely no satisfaction from the young lawyer. He had offered to sell Watts his syndicate shares for twenty-five thousand. Crane Watts said he wasn’t interested. Next, in a kind of bemused desperation, he had tried to find Boone Waxwell, had learned that Waxwell had a place at Goodland on Marco Island. With the last of the small amount of money he had taken on the Sarasota trip, he had taken a bus to the turnoff to Marco, had hitched a ride to the island bridge, and then had walked to Goodland. At a gas station they told him how to find Waxwell’s cottage.
He got there at sunset. It was an isolated place at the end of a dirt road, more shack than cottage. A pale gray sedan was parked in the yard. Country music was so loud over the radio they didn’t hear him on the porch, and when he looked through the screen he saw Wilma sprawled naked, tousled and asleep on a couch, and with a particular vividness he remembered her pale blonde head resting on a souvenir pillow from Rock City. Boo Waxwell, in underwear shorts, sat slumped by the little radio, bottle on the floor between his feet, trying to play guitar chords along with the radio music. He saw Arthur and grinned at him, and came grinning to the screen door, opened it and pushed Arthur back, asking him what the hell he wanted. Arthur said he wanted to speak to Wilma. Waxwell said there wasn’t much point in that on account of Wilma had gotten herself a temporary divorce, country-style.
Wilma had then appeared in the doorway beside Waxwell, light of the sunset against her face, a small and delicate face puffy with sleep and satiation, eyes drained empty by bed and bottle, nestling in soiled housecoat into the hard curve of Boo Waxwell’s arm, looking out at him with a placid and almost bovine indifference, outlined in that end-of-day glow against the room darkening behind her.
He said it was strange how vivid the little things were, the precise design in faded blue of an eagle clutching a bomb, wavering as the muscles of Waxwell’s upper arm shifted under the tattoed hide. The irregular deep rose shade of a suckmark on the side of Wilma’s delicate throat. And tiny rainbow glintings from the diamonds of the watch on her wrist-the watch she had claimed she sold in Miami.
Then he knew that it had all been lies, all of it, with nothing left to believe. Like an anguished, oversized child, he had rushed at Waxwell to destroy him, had landed no blow, had been pummeled back, wedged into a corner of porch post and railing, felt all the grinding blows into gut and groin and, over Waxwell’s diligent shoulder had seen the woman small in the doorway, hugging herself and watching, underlip sagging away from the small even teeth.
Then the railing gave way and he fell backward into the yard. He got up at once and slowly walked back the way he had come, hunched, both forearms clamped across his belly. He had the feeling that it was the only thing holding him together. His legs felt feathery, floating him along with no effort.