“I would think so.”
“What I did, you see, I took two. It was an uggo little old boat and so I wouldn’t have taken any at all except that Sim and I, we collect weird boat names, and you need a picture to prove it. I guess our, or at least my, favorite this cruise was a Miami motor sailer we saw in Nassau called Estoy Perdido. Meaning, I Am Lost. Well, I took two because it looked to me, looking through the little finder, that a wave slopped up and maybe hid part of the name on the transom just as I clicked it. But it turned out they both came out with good shots of that fancy gold lettering. You mean that poor man would like a picture of his boat and his niece?”
“He would indeed.”
“I got them back in the mail day before yesterday, and I took them right down to the camera shop and ordered an eight-by-ten of the best one, the one that was nearest when I took it. That usually takes forever, but I do have the small prints the newspaper made up, or had made up. Maybe you think it’s a little creepy, me ordering the enlargement, but nothing like that ever happened to me before, never in my life. I have no need for these two prints, so I’d just as soon put them in the mail to you when I go to the drugstore, okay?”
“You’re very kind.” I waited while she got a pencil, then gave her the address.
“Aboard the Busted Flush?” she said. “Maybe I should come over and take a picture of that! What is it?”
“Kind of an old barge-type houseboat. Fifty-two foot, two diesels. It’ll go six knots if the wind isn’t against it.”
“It sounds quaint. The name is really odd. Does it mean… some kind of broken toilet?”
“No. A poker hand. That’s when-”
“I know poker. I know about a flush and a straight flush. And I know how, like in stud, a hand can get busted.”
“I had a black card face down and four hearts showing.”
“You mean you won the whole houseboat on-”
“No, I won a pretty fair pot on that bluff and kind of by accident let the hole card show after I’d pulled the pot in and everybody else had folded. From then on they kept staying in, to keep me honest. And I had a lot of good hands.”
Her voice dipped a half octave. “You sound really kind of adventurous, Mr. Travis McGee. Maybe you could sort of whip over here and pick up the prints in person? I’m getting a little stir crazy with Sim away at one of those weird conferences about setting up trusts in Liechtenstein.”
“It certainly sounds like an attractive idea, Mrs. Davis, and I would really take you up on it like a shot, but on Monday I’m being fitted for a new prosthesis.”
“Uh. Well, maybe some other time,” she said briskly.
“The other one never hurts at all,” I said.
“How nice for you. I’ll put these in the mail right away. Nice to talk to you. Good-by Mr. McGee.”
Meyer flew to Houston on Sunday and phoned me at four o’clock on Monday afternoon, the twelfth. His voice sounded tired.
“A progress report. Or a no-progress report. The traffic in this city is monstrous. They are maniacal. I’ve checked out of the hotel and moved into Norma’s apartment. Want to write this down?” After he gave me the address and phone number, he said, “It’s quite nice. It’s a rental, in what they call a garden complex, nothing over two stories, jammed in close but angled very cleverly to give the illusion of privacy. All her stuff is here, so I thought it would be easier to work if her lawyer set it up for me to move in. She left a will, leaving everything to me. It’s dated soon after Glenna died. She was probably going to change it again in favor of Evan. They were married on a Saturday, the seventeenth of April. He may have moved in here with her before then. Probably did. I’ve started going through her papers. Her lawyer is pleasant enough. It’s a small firm. He handled her tax matters and apparently advised her on investments. Windham, his name is. Roger Windham. Did I say he seems pleasant? I’m probably repeating myself. I find I seem to get tired easily. There’s a lot to do. Windham thinks she had some things in a storage warehouse somewhere. And a lockbox at the bank where she did her checking. He’ll have to arrange with the tax people about opening the safety deposit box with them present.”
“Want me over there yet?”
“Not yet. I’ll get the chores done, and if anything comes to light that might be a hint as to anybody wanting to kill her, then, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble…”
“Come off it! That Mrs: Davis is mailing me one print each of the two pictures she took. She took them because of the name. They collect boat names.”
“It still seems like a bad dream. There’s a picture of her parents standing with me somewhere in front of a lot of trees. It’s in a silver frame on her dressing table. I haven’t any memory of its ever being taken. I usually remember things like that.”
“Meyer. Get some sleep tonight.”
“Did I tell you about my mail?”
“I forged your name on the change of address card. It’s coming here. Today you got a fat publication from the Federation of Concerned Economists, a bill from American Express, a catalogue from the Vermont Country Store, and a bank statement. Also, I talked to Irv. There’s a thirty-one-foot Rawson made in Panama City, Florida, moored over at B-Eighty. Apple-pie shape. They went out of business a few years ago because they made them too good. GE diesels, air, recording fathometer. The old couple that lived aboard, he went into the hospital in March, and then into a nursing home, and he died last week, and she is looking to sell privately before she puts it in the hands of a broker. She wants thirty days to move out and go back to South Dakota. She’s talking fifty-eight five. Walter says you’ll get thirty-nine or forty out of the insurance.”
“I don’t want to think about it yet.”
“It’s a good price and a roomy hull.”
“When I do get another boat, I’ll have to think of a name. I couldn’t call it the same thing.”
“Well… stay in touch.”
So I walked over to B-80 and met the old lady from South Dakota. She showed me the boat. She was proud of it. She said she knew one of them would have to die, sooner or later, and they had each hoped it would be themself instead of the other one. “But George won, I guess,” she said. “Tell your friend how nice it is, how nice we kept it.”
Six
WHEN I got the mail on Wednesday, there was a buff envelope with Brandy Davis and her address embossed on the flap. It was heavy stock, with a bright yellow tissue lining, and the two prints were inside, with no note or comment.
I glanced at the two prints just long enough to see the transom and the name and the stubby vessel tilting under a lead-colored sky, white crests rolling on a dishwater sea.
When I was back aboard the Flush I looked at them more carefully in bright sunlight. The first print showed the Keynes at fifty or sixty feet, going away, and the second at about a hundred feet. Assuming an average six knots on each vessel, they were diverging at about fifteen miles an hour, or a little better than twenty feet per second. So about ten seconds after the second picture was taken, the three people were blown to bits: the tall slender woman with the brand-new tan and the vivid orange string bikini, standing at the starboard side near the rail, one hand braced against the bulkhead, waving arid smiling, teeth white, black hair snapping in the wind; the burly figure of Hacksaw Jenkins at the sheltered wheel, in silhouette against the sea beyond the windshield, Greek captain’s hat on the back of his head; and Evan Lawrence, bent over so far in the cockpit, working on a line, that in the first picture only his back and denimed rump showed, then caught in the second picture beginning to straighten up, beginning to turn.
I accepted it as Evan Lawrence, the man with whom I had broken bread, drunk wine, told the tales. And suddenly it was not Evan Lawrence. In the act of starting to straighten up, starting to turn, it became a different person, younger, not as broad, with skin that took a better tan, hair longer, tangled, sun-streaked. Once it became someone else, I could not by any exercise of imagination or will turn it back into Evan Lawrence. But it did turn into somebody I knew from somewhere. I looked at the line of the brow, and the slant of the jaw as seen from the back, from off to the left side. The print was sharp. There was a glint of something on the left wrist, a watch or a bracelet. I found the magnifying glass in the drawer, but I couldn’t make it out. I looked at the hand, then, and I could make out something very specific. The pinky and the ring finger of that left hand were stubs little better than a half finger long.