And then came the fat argument with Puss Killian as we walked back to the city marina. At last she said, “Old buddy, you are leaving out one ingredient. You say she was a steady one. Great. She can cope. So maybe she is one of those who can cope with all the mechanics of a situation. A real administrator. But maybe she can’t hold people. Maybe it makes her feel itchy to try to hold somebody and hug somebody and rock somebody. I have this rusty nail for a tongue, and I kick where it is going to hurt the most, but I am a warm broad, like in the puppy sense of touching and being touched. Contact with flesh. That’s where the messages of the heart are, McGee.
Not in words, because words are just a kind of conventional code, and they get blurred, because any word doesn’t mean just the same to any two people. And I am very familiar with that old spook with the scythe and the graveyard breath. And I do not care to be sent back to Lauderdamndale to sit around in that sexpot houseboat and crack my knuckles. Think of me as a kind of tall poultice. Or a miracle drug. Part of your kit. And if the lady administrator can supply the same item, I will not enter a competition. I will stay the hell out of the way. But this is women’s work, and two are better than one, and it is going to be ten times worse for her because she ran for cover, and there will be guilt up to here.“
So I scribbled her a list of my overnight needs and sent her off to a shopping plaza winking and glittering in the distance. I checked the marina office and got the name and location of a place that could lift the Munequita out and tractor it over and put it on a shelf. He phoned for me and said they had space. I ran her over and took out all the stuff I did not want to leave aboard. A boat you can check as if it were a 4,300-pound suitcase is a vast convenience for people who never know what they’ll be doing tomorrow.
I watched them hose down the hull and put Little Doll tenderly on her shelf, and soon a rental sedan arrived for me, tow-barring the little three-wheeled bug that would get the delivery man back to the rental headquarters. I accomplished the red tape on car and boat, locked the gear in the trunk of the maroon two-door, and got back to the cavelike cocktail bar ten minutes before Puss came striding in with a new genuine imitation red alligator hatbox, a blue canvas zipper bag advertising an obscure airline, two suitboxes and a big shopping bag full of smaller parcels.
By five thirty we were making good time up State 710, aimed like a chalk line at the town of Okeechobee, and Puss was in the back seat, happily unwrapping packages, admiring her own good taste, and packing the items in the oversized hatbox. At last she came clambering over the back of her bucket seat, plumped herself down, latched her belt, lit her cigarette and said, “Now about a few little things aboard the Busted Flush, friend. Like the little ding-dong when anybody steps aboard. Like the way it is wired for sound, not the pretty music, but for tape pickup. And how about that cozy little headboard compartment with loaded weapon therein? Also, you have some very interesting areas that look as if you’d have a nice collection of purple hearts, if you got them in a war. And how about the way you go shambling mildly about, kind of sleepily relaxed, beaming at your friends and buddies, kind of slow, rawboned, awkward-like, and you were ten feet from Marilee Saturday night when she stepped on that ice cube on the sun deck and was going to pitch headfirst right off the top of that ladderway, and in some fantastic way you got there and hooked an arm around her waist and yanked her right out of the air? More? How about the lightning change of personality for the benefit of the phone man with the old-timey glasses, the way you turned into a touristy goof so completely I didn’t even feel as if I knew you? How about this con you almost worked on me about being retired. How about the way I tried to pump Meyer about you, and he showed speed and footwork like you couldn’t believe? How about that kind of grim professional bit with the camera and the hoist and the wire and all, so totally concentrated I could have been walking around on my hands with a rose in my teeth without getting a glance from you? How about my gnawing little suspicion that you aren’t going up to Frostproof to comfort this Janine, but to go pry information out of her? Enemy country, you said. Maybe for you the whole world is enemy country McGee. But somehow it would sort of fit one lousy guess, which would be a batch of official cars screaming up and the boys in blue jumping out, and a big loudspeaker yammering for you to come out quietly or they lob in the tear gas.”
“You are a warm broad. You are a warm nosey broad.”
“So I have this eccentricity, maybe. You know, a social flaw. Some kind of insecurity reaction or something. I started sleeping with somebody and I get this terrible curiosity about them.”
“So? I could have the same trouble too. But I haven’t asked questions. Or tried to find out things I could find out, without much trouble, probably”
She was quiet for a long time. I glanced at her. Her hands were folded in her lap and she was biting at sucked-in lips.
“Fair is fair,” she said. “When it’s time to tell you, I will tell you. Not in words, but in writing, so that I get it down exactly right. Not that it is so earthshattering or anything. But for now, for reasons I think are pretty good reasons, I want to keep it to myself. Fair being fair, if you have good reasons, okay, I ask no more.”
So I told her the retirement was accurate, except I am taking it in little hunks whenever I can afford it. “It’s a tricky, complex, indifferent society, Puss. It’s a loophole world. And there are a lot of clever animals who know how to reach through the loopholes and pick the pockets of the unsuspecting. Carefully done, the guy who has been plucked clean has no way of getting it back. There are a thousand perfectly legal acts that can be immoral, or amoral, acts. Then the law officers have no basis of action. Attorneys can’t help. The pigeon might just as well have dropped his wallet into a river full of crocodiles. He knows right where it is. And all he can do is stand on the muddy shore and wring his hands. So I’m the salvage expert. And I’ve ”own a lot of crocodiles. So I make a deal with him. I dive down, bring it up, and split it with him, fifty-fifty. When a man knows his expectation of recovery is zero, recovering half is very attractive. If I don’t make it, I’m out expenses:“
“Or you are a dainty dish for the crocs, man.”
“So far I’ve been indigestible. Now Janine Bannon is a client. She doesn’t know it yet. Tush would have been. A client in the classic sense of the legal squeeze. I don’t understand the killing. They didn’t need that. I know one thing. I have to watch myself on this one. Strangers make the best clients. Then -I can play the odds and stay cold. Here I’m too emotionally hung up. I’m too angry, too sick at heart. A dirty, senseless act. So I have to watch it.”
She pondered it for a time. “Just one thing that bothers me, darling. How do you find… enough new clients?”
I told her how I had found the last one, by combing very carefully through all the local items in the fat Sunday edition of a Miami paper. Of the items I marked that looked interesting, one was an apologetic announcement from a stamp collector’s club that Mr. So-and-So, a very long and complicated Greek name, the well-known restauranteur had, at the last minute, decided to withdraw from the exhibition and not show his complete and extremely valuable collection of Greek postage stamps, which had included the famous 1857 Dusty Rose, which had brought $21,000 at a New York auction house in 1954: