"Some oriental blood. Complicates the problem. I'll say twenty-six, but give me two years either way."
"How about the long decorative fingernails, Mr. Holmes? Too long for useful work, no? And broken practically down to the quick on the third and fourth fingers of the right hand, possibly from a struggle."
"Very good, Doctor Watson, my dear fellow. Is there not one other thing worth consideration?"
"Uh... the scar on the right cheekbone?"
"Meaningless in itself. Come, man!" I looked blank. He said, "I shall give you a little help, Doctor. Imagine how some other young woman might react to the same set of circumstances."
I thought of Vidge. She wouldn't have endured so placidly the pain of removing the fish hooks. She would have been bleating and hooing and thrashing, and she would have been demanding doctors and policemen. When I said Jane Doe's acceptance of our help seemed significant, he beamed at me and said that her muscle tone, the rich trimness of her figure, her acceptance of the situation all seemed to point to some aspect of the entertainment world, probably one of the more sleazy segments of it, a so-called exotic dancer, a hinterland belly dancer, a bunny at one of the more permissive key clubs, a singer on one of the little cut-rate cruise ships. All her symptoms of near-death had been physical, but emotionally she seemed to have an acceptance of it so placid as to be a little eerie. As if she knew the world as a place where sooner or later they heaved you off a bridge.
We heard a door open, the gargling sound of the tub water running out, the sound of the stateroom door closing. In a few minutes we went as a committee of two, rapped on her door, and heard her call to us to come in. She lay in the middle of the giant bed under the coverings in the striped pajamas, her head, turbaned in a maroon towel, resting on two pillows. Her color had improved. We stood at the foot of the bed. "Much better, eh?" Meyer said.
"I got a little buzz from that big knock of brandy. On account of I guess nothing to eat since breakfast maybe."
"No trouble to fix you something, Jane Doe," I said. She frowned. "I don't know about solid food. I got a feeling maybe I wouldn't hang onto it so long. Maybe some warm milk and a coupla aspirin, Mr.... I forgot your name."
"Travis McGee. The hairy one is Meyer. How about a big warm eggnog with no stick, vanilla, nutmeg on top?"
She looked wistful. "Gee, when I was a little kid. sometimes... that would be nice, honest." She glanced toward the chair where the clothing was. "There's a girl on board?"
Sometimes when you think you can be casual, it doesn't work at all. You think something is healed, but then when you least expect it you learn all over again that some things never heal. My voice gave me away when I said, "The girl who owned those clothes is dead."
The normal automatic response would have been to say something about being sorry, but she said, "Then they ought to fit fine. In that big crazy blue tub I was wondering if I was dead, and if you dream things more real-like when you're dead. I guess when I wake up tomorrow I'll know for sure."
"In the morning," Meyer said, "when you feel better, you can tell the whole thing to the police."
Again I was aware of that utter emptiness behind those dark eyes, and of something else back there, a cold and bitter humor, the kind of humor which can make a joke when the hangman adjusts the noose.
"What's to tell?" she said. "I tried to kill myself and it didn't work."
I said, "You tucked that cement block under your arm and hopped over the bridge rail."
"It wasn't easy. You forgot all about the eggnog maybe?" In an absolutely casual and offhand way, Meyer said something that seemed to be all L's and vowel sounds.
She said, "No I... " She stopped, stared at him with narrow eyes and lips sucked bloodless. "Damn sneaky," she said.
Meyer smiled happily. "Jane Doe from Main Street, Honolulu. Forgive me. I heard just that faintest breath of Island accent in your voice. And you do have that very unique loveliness of the Hawaiian mix, my dear."
"Yah. I'm a dream walking." I have never heard a woman speak of herself with quite that much bitterness.
Meyer turned to me. "Macronesian strains, and add Irish and French and some Japanese and what all, stir for a few generations in a tropical climate and the results can refute the foes of mongrelization." He beamed at the girl. "I'm an economist, my dear. I did a survey of the Islands a few years before statehood, a tax-structure prediction."
You can watch the Meyer Magic at work and not know how it's done. He has the size and pelt of the average Adirondack black bear. He can walk a beach, go into any bar, cross any playground, and acquire people the way blue serge picks up lint, and the new friends believe they have known him forever. Perhaps it is because he actually listens, and actually cares, and can make you feel as if his day would have been worthless, an absolute nothing, had he not had the miraculous good fortune of meeting you. He asks you the questions you want to be asked, so you can let go with the answers that take the tensions out of your inner gears and springs. It is not an artifice. He could have been one of the great con artists of all time. Or one of the great psychiatrists. Or the founder of a new religion. Meyerism.
Once upon a time when Lauderdale was the place where the college mob came in force, I came across Meyer sitting on the beach. He had a half circle of at least forty kids sitting, facing him. Their faces were alive with delight. Every few minutes there was a big yelp of their laughter. And they were the cold kids, the ones who look at and through all adults exactly the way adults stare at motel art without seeing it. And Meyer was, miraculously, part of that group. When I drifted closer, forty pairs of eyes froze me, and Meyer turned and winked, and I moved along. A kid was playing slow chords on a guitar. Between chords, Meyer would recite. Later I asked him what in the world he'd been doing. He said they were a wonderful bunch of kids. A lovely sense of the absurd. He had been inventing a parody of Ginsberg, entitled "Snarl," making it up as he went along, and he had also made up a monologue of a Barnyard girl trying to instill the concept of social significance into the mind of the white slaver who was flying her to Iraq, and he titled that one "The Two Dollar Misunderstanding." Then he had assigned parts to them and brought them into the act, setting the scene up as Richard Burton and Liz Taylor at a White House garden party in honor of culture.
And once I had seen a very reserved matron type, after talking earnestly in a corner with Meyer for three minutes, and without a drink in her, suddenly fall against his barrel chest and sob like a heartbroken child. He would not tell me just what it was that had broken her. His code forbids such revelations, and possibly that is one of his secrets too.
His comfortable little cabin cruiser, named the John Maynard Keynes, is tied up a seventy-foot walk from Slip F-18. In the sunset dusk he holds court, with wildly assorted people cluttering the cockpit deck, perching on the rails, sitting on the edge of the dock, legs swinging. And there are always the young popsies, sixteen to twenty, eyes soft with a special worship, content to be near him, the same way those of sterner breed clutter the hotel suites and the pits of the Grand Prix race drivers. Were he sensuously unscrupulous he could keep his bunk forever stocked with the exceptional tendernesses of the very young. But, instead, on an average of three times a year he takes unto himself one of that breed which he calls, with warmth rather than irony, the iron maidens. These are stern, mature, aggressive, handsome women who have made their mark in the world, and perhaps forfeited much in the process. Accomplished artists, concert musicians, heads of fashion houses and other competitive businesses, administrators, editors, women in government. He treats them fondly, but as though they are enchantingly foolish young girls, and goes off with his iron maiden of the moment for a few weeks, and when he brings them back, their mouths are soft, and their voices have lost that edge of command, and their eyes are filled with that unmistakable look of devotion. When I seemed curious, he suggested I read what Mark Twain had written about choosing a mistress. He said he had discovered just one other factor Twain had overlooked. He said that the woman who achieves a position of power and command is usually so intelligent that she catches on quite quickly when it is explained to her that she has a secret yearning to be hapless and foolish for a little while, to switch off the machinery of domination, to be cherished not only as a woman, but also in the same way she was once cherished when she was a little girl, before she became locked into those motivations that drove her upward so mercilessly. "They want a ribbon in their hair," he explained, "and someone who does not want to make any use of what they've achieved, and someone who would never go around waving their scalp on the end of a spear after they've gone back to the wars, or even look them up at the embassy or in the executive suite someday."