Before I invited them to sit down while I changed, I asked to see credentials. They looked vaguely like passports, small with the dark blue cover and great seal of the U. S. of A. Inside were &e color ID pictures, the thumbprint, and the name of an agency I had never heard of before.
"We do not usually go out into the field," Toomey said. "We have access to another agency for investigative matters. But after a conference
The Green Ripper vith our superior, it was suggested that we take a firsthand look."
"At what?"
"Excuse me. I thought you'd guessed."
"Guessed what?"
"We want to ask you what you know about Gretel Tuckerman Howard."
"I just came back from her memorial service."
"We know that," Kline said.
"Sit down. 111 be back in a minute."
I took my time changing into old flannel slacks, Mexican sandals, and an old wool shirt. There was a small chill spot at the nape of my neck. A warniDg of some kind.
They had moved a couple of chairs close to the coffee table. Kline had a little Sony TC-150 opened up, and he was breaking the seal on a new cassette. "I hope you won't mind that I tape this."
"Go right ahead."
He put the tape in, put it on Record and counted to ten, rewound, played it back, rewound again, and said, "December fifteenth, one ten P.M., initial interview by Toomey and Kline with Travis McGee aboard his houseboat moored at Slip F-Eighteen, Bahia Mar Marina, Fort Lauderdale, Florida"
Toomey took over. "Please describe your relationship to the decedent. Wait. Excuse me. Where and when did you meet her?"
"Earlier this year. May. At a beach shack where her brother was living. John Tuckerman. South of
Timber Bay, over on the west coast of Florida. The northwest coast. Her brother died a little while later. I went with Gretel when she flew out to California to have his ashes buried in a little cemetery in Petaluma We flew back to Timber Bay and, sometime in June, we left Timber Bay in this houseboat and came down around the peninsula and back up here to Lauderdale. We made it a leisurely trip. We got here in August. She lived aboard until she located the job at Bonnie Brae in early November and moved out there, to one of the model houses."
With great delicacy Toomey asked, "Would you say that you and she had a... a significant relationship?"
'I didn't care what rules we went by, as long as we both agreed that it would be a permanent thing. Why do you have to know stuff like this?"
"We want to know whether the relationship was such that she would confide in you."
"Confide what?"
'met us just say details of her workday, her life out there. That sort of thing."
"Are you looking into something fishy at Bonnie Brae?"
"Did Mrs. Howard say something fishy is going on at Bonnie Brae?"
'No. No, she didn't. I mean, she called up last Saturday morning before she got sick, to tell me about one of the owners, Mr. Ladwigg, dying in an
The Green Ripper accidental fall his bicycle, if that's what you mean."
Kline took over. "Let me set up a hypothesis, Mr. McGee, and see if that helps. Suppose Mrs. Howard, in the course of her employment out there, learned that something curious was going on. Say that part of the operation was a cover for something else, like gambling or smuggling or something of that nature. Would she have confided in you?"
'`Of course."
'~Would she have confided something like that to anyone other than you? Or as well as you?"
'I can't see that happening."
"And she talked to you about her work?"
"Certainly. About her exercise classes of raffles, and the tennis lessons she was giving to children, and the forms she had to complete on each sale of land, houses, and so forth. She liked her work."
The two men looked at each other, and Kline reached over and punched the key to turn off the recorder. Toomey said, "We do appreciate your cooperation, Mr. McGee."
'wouldn't you say you owe me some kind of explanation... why you are interested in Gretel Howard?"
Toomey smiled sadly. 'I wish we could. I really wish we could. There was a possibility she could have acquired some information which would have been useful to us. Unfortunately she became ill before we had a chance to speak with her."
"If I happen to remember something later on, how do I get in touch with you?" I asked. 'Tm pretty upset right now and I'm not thinking too clearly."
Kline tore a sheet out of a small spiral notebook and wrote a number on it: (202) 661-7007. I thanked him. They put the recorder away in the dispatch case, smiled politely, put on their hats, and marched off, down my little gangplank and off toward the parking area, in step, arms swinging in unison.
Three minutes later Sue Sampson arrived, bearing a casserole of hot beef stew. She apologized for having to miss the service and tools off just as Meyer arrived.
I made the delayed drinks. Meyer put the stew over low heat while we sat and he listened to the saga of Toomey and Kline.
"All right," he said, "so you sidestepped. You left out Brother Titus and the blue airplane and the twenty-acre sale to a syndicate in Brussels. But you make them sound very authentic."
"While they were boring in, I was deciding several things. First, that I am not in very good emotional shape to spar with anybody about anything. Second, that I could get in touch with them later. Third, that they were almost too perfect Too cold and clean. They had no regional accent that I could detect. They said they did not usually go out into the field. That implied some importance to
The Green Ripper talking to me. But it never came off as important. They wanted some hearsay about what might be going on at Bonnie Brae. Colloquial American pronunciation, but a stilted kind of sentence structure. Almost like you when you are at your most professorial."
"Didactic is a better word. The tendency to lee" lure."
"Kline made those little continental crossbars on the sevens in the phone number. See?"
"But that came after you had decided to hold off."
"Before that, their pants were too long. Long enough almost to step on the back of the cuffs. Like Kissinger. The necktie knots were wrong. Frenchmen tie them that way. When Kline cleaned his glasses and held them up to the light, I looked through them too, and I saw no distortion."
"So the glasses were a very minor correction. So both of them have lived and worked abroad. So they spoke another language before they learned English."
'I know. I know. But, dammit, it seemed like such an invasion of my personal privacy to have strangers here asking me to talk about Gretel. I am not ready to talk about Gretel to anybody. I am not impressed by official credentials. Nor by Mr. Robert A. Toomey or Mr. Richard E. Kline, on the staff of the Select Committee on Special Resources in the Senate Office Building."