I could be serious in that particular area, but not on her terms. I’d had enough stitches to make a quilt, and had enjoyed not one of them at all, at all. And most floor nurses have a top sergeant syndrome. I went below and packed the promised pipe. Chook was in the stainless steel galley, banging pots. I went through to the guest stateroom where I had quartered myself. Chook had made that decision while we were provisioning the boat, when she brought her gear aboard. She had declared flatly that she wasn’t going to mouse around. All three of us knew she’d slept with Arthur before his marriage, and the huge bed in the master stateroom-the bed that had been there when I’d won the boat-gave her a better chance to keep watch over him, and if he wanted to make something of it, then she was willing to be compliant on the basis of therapy, affection, old time’s sake, morale-call it whatever the hell you feel like calling it, MeGee.
I had told her I avoided putting names on things whenever possible, and I transferred my personal gear and went back to the hot greasy chore of smoothing out the port engine which, after too much idleness; was running hesitantly, fading when I gave it more throttle, complaining that it wanted its jets cleaned.
By mid-evening, Arthur Wilkinson felt better. It was a soft night. We sat in three deck chairs on the afterdeck, facing the long path of silver moonlight on the black water.
I overpowered his reluctance and made him go over some of the stuff he had already told me, interrupting him with questions to see if I could unlock other parts of his memory.
“Like I told you, Trav, I had the idea we were going to go farther away, maybe the southwest, but after we stayed overnight in Naples, she said maybe it would be nice to rent a beach house for a while. Because it was April we could probably find something nice. What she found was nice, all right. Isolated, and a big stretch of private beach, and a pool. It was seven hundred a month, plus utilities. That included the man who came twice a week to take care of the grounds, but then there was another two hundred and fifty for the woman who came in about noon every day but Sunday.”
“Name?”
“What? Oh… Mildred. Mildred Mooney. Fifty, I’d guess. Heavy. She had a car and did the marketing and cooking and housework. She’d serve dinner and then leave and do the dishes when she came the next day. So it came to maybe twelve hundred a month for operating expenses. And about that much again for Wilma. Hairdresser and dressmaker, cosmetics, mail orders to Saks, Bonwits, places like that. Masseuse, a special wine she likes. And shoes. God, the shoes! So say in round figures there’s twenty-five hundred a month going out, which would be thirty thousand a year, three times what was coming in. After wedding expenses, and trading for the convertible, I had five thousand cash aside from the securities, but it was melting away so fast it scared me. I estimated it would be gone before the end of June.”
“You tried to make her understand?”
“Of course. Wilma would stare at me as if I was talking Urdu. She couldn’t seem to comprehend. It made me feel cheap and small-minded. She said it wasn’t any great problem. In a little while I could start looking around and find something where I could make all the money we’d ever need. I was worried-but it was all kind of indistinct. The only thing that really seemed to count was just… having her. In the beginning, it was so damned… wonderful.”
“But it changed?”
“Yes. But I don’t want to talk about that.”
“Later?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. It all turned into something… quite different. I don’t want to try to explain it.”
“If I left?” Chook said.
“No. Thanks, but that wouldn’t make any difference.”
“Get on with it then. When was the first contact with the land syndicate people?”
“Late May. She’d gone walking down the beach in the late afternoon, and she came back with Calvin Stebber. Some kid had hooked a shark and as he was fighting it and beaching it with people watching him. That’s how she got in casual conversation with him, and it turned out they knew a lot of the same people, so she brought him back for a drink. Short and heavy and very tan. Always smiling. I’d say he wasn’t much over forty, but he looked older. And he seemed… important. They jabbered away about people I’ve read about. Onassis, Niarchos; people like that. He was very vague about what he was cloing. He just said that he’d come down to work out a small project, but it was dragging on a lot longer than he’d estimated. He seemed… fond of Wilma. He wished us happiness.
“After he left, Wilma got quite excited. She told me that Calvin Stebber was enormously rich and went around making very successful investments in all kinds of things. She said that if we played our cards right, maybe he would let us in on whatever he was doing, and certainly the very least we could expect would be four times our money back, because he was never interested in smaller returns. To tell the truth, it seemed to me like a good way out, if she could swing it. With four times the capital I’d have enough income to keep her the way she wanted to live. Stebber was staying aboard a yacht at the Cutlass Yacht Club, and when he left he asked us to stop by for drinks the next day.
“The yacht was absolutely huge, maybe a hundred feet long, some kind of a converted naval vessel, I think.”
“Name and registry?”
“The Buccaneer, out of Tampa, Florida. He said friends had loaned it to him. That’s when I met the other three men in the syndicate.”
I had to slow Arthur down so that I could get the other three men nailed down, made into separate and distinct people in my mind.
G. Harrison Gisik. The old one. The sick one. Tall and frail and old and quiet. Bad color. Moved slowly and with apparent great effort. From Montreal.
Like Stebber, G. Harrison Gisik had no woman with him. The other two each had one. The other two were each local.
Crane Watts. Local attorney. Dark, good looking, friendly. And unremarkable. He came equipped with wife. Vivian. Called Viv. Dark, sturdy, pretty-scored by sun and wind-an athlete. Tennis, sailing, golf, riding. She was, Arthur thought, a lady.
Boone Waxwell. The other local. From a local swamp, possibly. Sizable. Rough and hard and loud. An accent from way back in the mangroves. Black curly hair. Pale pale blue eyes. Sallowy face. Boone Waxwell, known as Boo. And he came equipped with a non-wife, a redhead of exceptional mammary dimension. Dilly Starr. As loud as good ol‘ Boo, and, as soon as she got tight, slightly more obscene. And she got tight quickly.
“So okay,” I said. “The four members of the syndicate. Stebber, Gisik, Crane, Waxwell. And Stebber the only one living aboard. A party, with Boo and his broad making all you nicer folks a little edgy. So?”
“We sat around and had drinks. There was a man aboard who made drinks and passed things, a Cuban maybe. Mario, they called him. When Calvin Stebber had a chance, when Dilly was in the head and Boo had gone ashore to buy cigars, he explained to us that sometimes, in deals, you weren’t able to pick your associates on the basis of their social graces. `Waxwell is the key to this project,‘ he said.”
“How soon did they let you in on it?” I asked him.
“Not right away. It was about two weeks. Wilma kept after him, and she kept telling me that he said there wasn’t a chance, that there wasn’t really enough to go around as it was. But she didn’t give up hope. Finally one morning he phoned me from the yacht and asked me to stop by alone. He was alone too. He said I had a very persistent wife. Persistence alone wouldn’t have been enough. But this deal had dragged on so long that one of the principals had backed out. He said he felt obligated to offer it to other associates, but as long as I was on the scene and because he was so fond of Wilma, he had talked Mr. Gisik into agreeing to let me in, with certain stipulations.”