“I appreciate your cooperation. And when you see Mrs. Banks, you give her my best wishes.”
“I surely will. Dallas McGee? Is that right?”
“Not quite. Travis. Tell her it’s been ten or twelve years. I was at their house for supper. With them and those three pretty daughters.”
“My Debbie was the middle one. Here, I’ll drop you on back at your car. Seems like a quiet night around here, thank the good Lord. I better knock wood. Soon as I say quiet, those grove workers start sticking knives in each other. Or rolling their pickups over and over, dogs and shotguns flying every whichaway.”
He drove me back to the jail. We shook hands. He went off down the dark streets, a man alone in a county car on an overcast evening, waiting for somebody to do some damn fool thing to himself or to somebody else, wondering, as he made his patrol, if he was going to have to peddle the Suzuki to be able to help out with his mother-in-law’s new schedule of dialysis.
Five
I CHECKED out of the motel after breakfast and headed southwest in my little dark blue rental Dodge, a Mitsubishi, I think, with a VW engine and almost enough legroom. I took it over to Interstate 4 and made the mistake of staying on 4 all the way to the outskirts of Tampa before turning south on 301.
It had been a couple of years since I had driven that route, and I found all north-south highways clogged full of snorting, stinking, growling traffic, the trucks tailgating, the cowboys whipping around from lane to lane, and the Midwest geriatrics chugging slowly down the fast lanes, deaf to all honkings. Bradenton, Sarasota, Venice, Punta Gorda, Fort Myers-all the same. Smoggy vistas and chrome glitterings down the long alleyway between the fast food outlets, the sprawl of motels, car dealerships, shell factories, strip shopping centers, gas stations, and gigantic signboards. It is all that bustling steaming growth that turns the state tackier each year. Newcomers don’t mind at all, because they think it has always been like this. But in two years, they all want to slam the door, pull up the ladder, and close the state off. Once in a great while, like once every fifty miles, I even got a look at a tiny slice of the Gulf of Mexico, way off to the right. And remembered bringing the Flush down this coast with Gretel aboard. And wished I could cry as easily as a child does.
I had phoned ahead to the Eden Beach, and they had a second-floor single for me, with the windows facing inland. After I put the duffelbag in the room, I went over to the lobby to find Anne Renzetti.
I saw her coming diagonally across the lobby, walking very swiftly, her expression anxious and intent. Today she wore an elegant little dress: a cotton dress in an unusual shade of orange coral, which fitted her so beautifully it underlined the lovely fashioning of hips, sweep of waist, straightness of her back and shoulders. The color was good for her too. A small lady, luxuriantly alive.
“Hey, Anne,” I said.
She came to a quick stop and stared at me, an instant of puzzlement and then recognition. “Oh, hello there. Mr. McGraw.”
“McGee. Travis McGee.”
She was looking beyond me. “Yes, of course. I’m so sorry. Travis McGee. Is Meyer with you?”
“He had to get back.”
She started to sidle away. “You will have to excuse me. I really have to-”
“I was hoping you would introduce me to Dr. Mullen. I want to ask him about Ellis Esterland’s condition at the time he-”
Even the sound of his name made her glow. It seemed almost to take her breath away. Her smile was lovely. “That’s why I’m so busy at the moment. He didn’t get in yesterday. He’s due any minute. I just checked the room I set aside for him, and the damned shower keeps dripping and dripping. Excuse me just a moment, please.”
I followed her to the desk. She told Marie about the leak, and Marie picked up the phone to get the maintenance man on it. Anne turned back to me and looked beyond me toward the entrance. Her smile went wider, and she flushed under her tan and slipped past me, quick and cute as a safety blitz. She half ran toward the entrance, arms outstretched, and I heard her glad cry of welcome.
The man was in his middle thirties, with a russet mustache, blow-dried hair, tinted glasses with little gold rims. He had a likable look about him. Strong irregular features, a good grin. And he wasn’t very big. He was a dandy match for Anne Renzetti. Five foot two fits pretty well with five foot seven. He put his hands on Anne’s shoulders, kissed her on the cheek, and then with a gesture very much like a magician’s best trick, he reached behind him and pulled a large glowing blonde. She topped the good doctor by an inch or two. They both wore the same jack-o‘-lantern toothy grin, and over the lobby sounds I heard a portion of his introduction of her: “… my wife, Marcie Jean…”
Anne’s shoulders did not slump. I’ll give her that much. And I think her smile stayed pretty much in place, because she was still wearing it when she turned around and came back, leading them toward the desk. I sensed that this was no time to ask for an introduction to the doctor and his bride. Anne kept smiling while the doctor registered. She pointed out the location of his room on a chart. A bellhop went with them to cart their luggage through the gardens to their room.
The two girls behind the desk had arranged to disappear. They recognized the storm warnings. Anne leaned back against the counter, her arms crossed, staring at me and through me, a glare that pierced me through and through, at chest level.
“Honeymoon!” she said in a half whisper. “Big dumb blond dumpling comes out of nowhere and nails him. And I put two bottles of chilled champagne up there in the room. Shit! Hope the shower never stops dripping.”
“Pretty hard to stop a good drip in a shower.” She slowly came back to here-and-now and focused on me. She tilted her head a little bit to one side and looked me over with great care. She moistened her lips and swallowed. “What did you say your damn name is? McGee? You are a sizable son of a bitch, aren’t you?”
“Wouldn’t try to deny it.”
She looked at me. She was all a-hum with ready. She was up to the splash rails with electric ready. Everything was working: all the blood and juices from eyeballs to polished toenails.
“You better comfort me with apples, fella. Or is it roses? And stay me with flagons, whatever that means. Always wondered. And for God’s sake you better be discreet or it’ll undermine any authority I have left around here.”
“Appointing me an instrument of revenge?”
“Do you particularly mind?”
“I’m thinking it over.”
“Thanks a lot! Take your time. Take four more seconds, damn it.”
“Three. Two. One. Bingo.”
“My place,” she said. “Nineish.”
“Try to remember my name.”
She tried to smile but the smile turned upside down, the underlip poked out, the eyes filled, and she spun and darted away toward her office, the proud straight back finally curving in defeat.
I was on time, after wondering all the rest of the day whether to show up or not. It made me feel ridiculously girlish. Despite all the new freedoms everybody claims they have, I still feel strange when I am the aggressee. One wants to blush and simper. I was dubious about my own rationalization. She seemed a nice person, and her morale had taken one hell of a scruffing whem the Doc had walked in with his surprise bride. What would be the further damage if even the casual semi-stranger didn’t want her as a gift?
Anyway, it seemed to me that after a day of thinking about it, she would have cooled on the whole idea. It had been an abrupt self-destructive impulse that had made her proposition me so directly. She might not even be at her cabana on stilts. And if she was there, and if she said she had reconsidered and it was a dumb idea and all, then it would be time for both of us to disengage gracefully.