“Then I’ll put it another way, Boo. If you try something, and it doesn’t work, I’ll make sure you never get well enough to even get in and out of a boat.”
I watched him, saw the flicker of appraisal in his blue eyes, half hooded by those long lashes. He hooked his thumbs over his belt. Then, with that flashing speed which can come only from long and intensive practice, he snapped his brass belt buckle loose, yanked it free, exposing the bright limber blade holstered within the belt leather. The wrist snap came before I could hope to reach him. The blade chunked into the damp earth an inch from the outside of my left shoe, driving so deeply that only the brass buckle showed, as if balanced on end. He leaned against the boat with a lazy grin. I bent, put a finger in the buckle, pulled the blade free, wiped the earth from it between thumb and finger. The hilt was weighted to give it a midway balance point. I handed it to him. He fed it back into the scabbard, clinched the belt.
“What’s the message that get through to you, friend?” he asked.
“That I can stop watching you, because you’d just as soon talk about money.”
“Let’s get on in the house. I’m dry as a sandy beach for sure.”
He had more toys in the house. A big rack of new sporting arms, small rust spots beginning to fleck the bluing. Color television. Expensive camping and fishing gear stacked carelessly in corners. In the kitchen he had a hotel size refrigerator, its new enamel dappled with dark fingermarks, its innards stacked full of premium beer. I saw cases of very good liquor in a kitchen corner.
Everything not new was battered and squalid. I looked in the door of the tiny bedroom. The double bed was a rumpled tangle of soiled sheets marked in a leopard pattern. They looked like silk. The pattern seemed apt. The bedroom had the pungent odors of a predator’s cage, a cell for the cat carnivore.
We drank beer in silence and then he said in grotesque host-like apology, “I was fixin to keep fat stuff out here to hoe this place out today, but it slipped clean right out of my mind. I guess it’ll be until after exam week fore she can get to it. I don’t want to mess up her schooling.”
I sat on a chair with a broken arm. “Haven’t they ever heard of statutory rape around here?”
“First somebody has to complain, friend. What the hell is your name?” I told him. He repeated it aloud. “You in some line of work?”
“Whatever happens to come along.”
“That’s the best kind they is, McGee. But sometimes you work with somebody who like to mess things up because they get jumpy for no reason at all. Then you don’t want to work with them again. And maybe they do damn fool things like sending somebody around who could maybe be the law.”
“Crane Watts,” I said. “Great guy. If the law asked him for a match, he’d fink out. It makes us wonder about you, Boo baby. But maybe you went along because it was close enough to legal. Watts filled me in. I can use some of his ideas, but not him. Not to help me with my pigeon. A livlier one than Wilkinson. And it is not going to be split so many ways. From what Watts said, the take from Wilkinson had to be split between him, you, Stebber, Gisik, Wilma and the executor of the Kippler estate. I was hunting up a hungry Iawyer, and found him. But I need a smart hungry one.”
He wiped his mouth, and he looked very uneasy. “That dumb bassard talks awful quick, don’t he?”
“You and me, Boo. We know the ways to make them talk quick. I got interested. He got pretty jumpy.”
“Like to watch ‘em jump,” he said dreamily.
“When he got scared sober, he tried to deny the whole thing. Maybe I like that assessment bit, to keep it legal. But maybe hit and run would be easier all around. Either way I need the woman. The way I understand it, the woman works with Stebber. But do you think she’d come in on something without bringing him in?”
“How in hell should I know about that, buster boy?”
“How in hell should I know until I ask, Waxwell?”
“What did Watts say?”
“Before I got around to that he’d started to do so much lying I couldn’t sort it out.”
“I say it wouldn’t hurt to have Cal Stebber. That fat happy little son of a bitch could sell snowflakes in hell. He makes it go smooth. But you get Watts, and you don’t get Stebber or the woman. Or Boo Waxwell. He was a one-time thing. I got only one more little piece of business with lawyer boy, and that’s all. You see that Viv? She look at old Boo like he’s a spitty place on the sidewalk. I got it in my mind to take care of that. I had other things going then, and no time to line her up. She’s got next to no man atall, and it’s sure a waste. She’s all solid woman, and when ol Boo gets her steadied into it one of these days, she’ll come on like an ol walkin beam pump machine with no place to turn her off. I got that one marked in my mind, because any fool can see she sure ain’t gettin what she come after so far.” He winked. “And she was just a little too snotty to ol‘ Boo, which is always a good sign ever time. They get like that when they get little ideas in their pretty little heads, making them skitty.”
I sensed it was a diversion, but could not imagine why.
“But to get back to it, Waxwell. Is the woman as good as Watts seems to think?”
He shrugged, went out after more beer, came back and, as he handed me mine, said, “She has Arthur clamped down like one of those little hairy dogs rich women tote around. She married him legal. Always does, Cal Stebber said. Gets herself Alabama divorces. Makes no money claim and it goes through quick and easy. Married up with maybe eleven of them, and her and Stebber and Gisik, one way or another, picked every one clean. Averages out maybe one a year. Maybe she doesn’t hit it off so good with your man. She’s no kid anymore.”
“Where can I find her?”
He stared blankly at me that. “Why ask me?”
“Why not? Watts told me that after you cleaned Wilkinson, you and Wilma shacked up right here.”
He looked around at the room as though seeing it for the first time. “Here? Why would he say a thing like that?”
“Because Wilkinson told him how it was, months later, when he showed up demanding money. Wilkinson was sent on a wild goose chase up to Sarasota. When he came back to the motel, Wilma had cleared out. Wilkinson told Watts he found you and Wilma here, and you beat him up.”
Waxwell threw his head back and guffawed, slapped his knee. “Oh, that! Goddam! He sure did come around here. Drunk or sick. God knows. I had me a little friend here, waitress that come over from Miami to see me. Little bit of a woman no bigger than Wilma, silvery color hair like Wilma. About sundown and the light not too good. That fool Arthur got it in his head she was Wilma for sure. Maybe out of his head from losing the money and her taking off. Hard to say. I had to bust him up a little and run him off the place.”
He shook his head, stopped smiling, looked earnestly at me. “Mind you I’m not saying I wouldn’t want to a had Wilma here a while. I did give it a little try. But I struck out swinging on three pitches, man. Hurt my pride some, but it wasn’t the first time I missed and won’t be the last, and a man has to face it there’s some you can’t get to. With her, it was all business. She didn’t see no point in just for the fun of it. Cold, maybe. I don’t know. Or maybe no money, no kicks. Way I figure it, while Arthur was riding that bus up to Sarasota, she was long gone on her way to Miami with her end of the loot, and from there God knows where, someplace where she could live good until the money got small enough so she had to start on suckering the next one for them to squeeze dry.”