“What did they ask you about him?” I asked.
He shrugged. “If we had any conversation beyond his ordering his drink, and I said we didn’t. I had a dozen customers at the bar, and I was quite busy. I had no chance to notice him, really, to guess at his state of mind. That’s what they asked. Was he nervous? Was he elated? I just couldn’t help them at all. From his manner I judged him to be a businessman of some importance, used to good service. He spoke to no one else, and no one joined him. They questioned his waitress and the people at the desk and the girl at the newsstand. I don’t think they learned anything useful. At least they’ve never arrested anyone.”
“It’s puzzling,” I said. “Why would a man pull into a rest stop on the turnpike after he had been driving only six miles?”
“Car trouble?” the bartender said.
“He had a new Lincoln Continental with just over two thousand miles on it,” Meyer said.
“Perhaps he felt unwell,” the bartender said. “He didn’t look like a really healthy person. His color was bad.”
Three new customers arrived, laughing and hearty, dressed like Dallas businessmen, ranch hats and stitched boots. Juice moguls, maybe. They called the bartender Harry, and he greeted them by name. Two bourbons and a scotch.
We had a second drink and then went to the dining room for better than adequate steaks, green salad, and baked potatoes, served efficiently by a glum heavy woman who knew nothing about anybody who’d been a customer over a year ago, because she had not been there a year.
Back at the motel, Meyer went to bed with a book called Contrary Investment Strategy. I told him to be sure to let me know how it came out. I tried to think about Esterland’s misfortune, but my mind kept veering into trivia, to a memory of the fine matte finish on the slender Renzetti legs, and the tiny beads of sweat along her forehead at the dark hairline as she sat in silhouette against the white glare of beach. Meyer, in bright yellow pajamas, frowned into his strategy book.
I slipped away into nightmare. I was running after a comedy airplane. Gretel was the pilot, very dashing in her Red Baron helmet, goggles, white silk scarf, white smile as she turned to look back at me. The little biplane bounded over the lumps in the, broad pasture. I was trying to warn her. If she took off, she would fly into the trees. She couldn’t hear me because of the noise of the engine. She thought I was making jokes, chasing her. I could not catch her. The engine sound grew louder and the tail skid lifted and she took off toward the pines.
As I ran, still yelling, I saw her tilt the plane to try to slide through a gap in the trees, saw the wings come off, heard the long grinding, sliding, clattering crash into the stones. I climbed down the slope. The whole, gully was cluttered with large pieces of airplane, but strangely old, stained by time and weather, grass growing up through rents in the aluminum. I couldn’t understand. I kept hunting for her. I flipped over what seemed to be a small piece of wing, big as the top of a card table, and there was a skull in the skull-sized stones; helmet in place, the goggle lenses starred by old fractures, a bundle of soiled gray silk bunched under the bones of the jaw.
Meyer shook me out of it, and I came up gasping, sweat-soaked.
“Okay?” he asked.
“Thanks.”
“A lot of moaning and twitching going on.”
I wiped my face on a corner of the sheet. “Gretel again. She doesn’t seem to want to stay dead.” He went back over to his bed and covered himself and picked up his book. He looked over at me, thoughtful and concerned.
“How is the book coming?” I asked.
“The bad guys are winning, I think.”
“Sometimes they do. Sometimes you can’t tell the bad guys unless you buy a program at the door.” And when my heart slowed back to normal, I was able to go back to sleep.
At breakfast Meyer said, “I’d hoped to be back by early evening. In fact I would very much like to be back.”
It took me a few moments to understand the urgency. Then I remembered that Aggie Sloane was due in on her big Trumpy again, called the Byline. Aggie, an ex-news hen who had married a publisher and assumed the management of the chain of papers when he died, had first come to Meyer as the friend of a friend, with a delicate international money problem. Their friendship had blossomed during and after Meyer’s deft solution to her problem.
Though Meyer loves to look upon the lively young beach girls and is often surrounded by little chittering platoons of them, running errands for him and laughing at his wise jokes, when it comes to any kind of personal involvement, Meyer feels most at ease with-and is usually attracted to-mature capable independent women, the sort who run magazines, newspapers, art galleries, travel agencies, and branch banks: For them, Meyer is a sometime interlude, reassuring, undemanding, supportive, and gentle. They return, refreshed, to their spheres of combat. They are women who take great good care of themselves and are not inclined toward any permanent attachment. Meyer smiles lot.
Aggie Sloane makes an annual pilgrimage. She flies down and boards her big Trumpy in Miami, cruises up to Lauderdale to pick up Meyer, and takes him along on the one-week vacation she allows herself every spring.
“Aggie arrives today?”
“I suppose there’d be pretty good air service back.”
“Would you mind driving Miss Agnes?”
“Not at all. Of course, when I drive that thing, I always feel as if I’m hurrying to catch up with the antique classic car parade. But why?”
“I think a nice inconspicuous rental would be more useful somehow. And-I might go back to Naples and have a chat with that doctor.”
“Just for the hell of it?”
“I’ll give your regards to Anne.”
“I think she might be too involved with that doctor to hear much of what you say. She had that look when she brought him up.”
“I didn’t notice.”
“I think you’d better get back in the habit of noticing everything, Travis. That trait has kept you alive up until now.”
“I’ve noticed one thing I should mention. Whenever you feel a bit guilty about anything, you give these little stern warnings to people, usually me.”
His bright blue eyes looked quite fierce for a few moments. Then he smiled. “All right. The guilt isn’t about Aggie, of course. It’s about leaving you alone with this Esterland thing.”
“I managed everything alone for quite a few years, professor.”
“Always happy to leave you to your own resources. The things you get into make me highly nervous.”
“I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. Give my love and admiration to the lady Sloane. I might be back late tomorrow or the day after. But you won’t be there, will you?”
His smile spread wide under the potato nose, wide and fatuous and tenderly reminiscent. “With any luck, I won’t.”
Four
RICK TATE was a lean, dusty, bitter-looking man with eyes deep set under shaggy brows, narrow nose, heavy jaw-a slow, lazy-moving man who looked competent in his pale blue cotton, black leather, and departmental hardware. I guessed his age at forty.
He took the card and held it by one corner, looking at it with suspicion and distaste as he read it. “Says men,” he said.
“My boss had to get back.”
“Why you got to know this stuff?”
“My boss explained it to Barney Odum. It’s a legal and tax thing.”
He slammed the door of his gray steel locker and twirled the combination dial. We went out the back door into the lot and stood in the shade of the building waiting for the cars to come back in from their shifts. There were only three out, he told me.