John D MacDonald Travis McGee 14 The Scarlet Ruse

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damn childish thing or even ride in it if you insisted. Then you'd show me
your key that fits every Playboy Club in America and overseas, and then you'd
try to do the old magic trick."
"What old magic trick."
"You know. All of a sudden you turn into a motel."
"And you laughed because none of that is going to happen?"
"And because that Miss Agnes is a very dear automobile," she said, pushing
open the door to the shop.
Chapter Seven
On Friday morning I cleaned up after my breakfast, took a couple of overdue
loads to the laundromat and sat and peaceably watched some women get their
loads whiter than mine. I was not torn with jealousy. I wished them well. On
the way back a fat man on a rackety little trail bike nearly ran me down, then
yelled out his estimate of my ancestry and lineage. I smiled and nodded and
wished him well. I remembered vaguely that the city fathers had put the roust
on me. Move off your boat or leave town. I wished them well too. Nourish
yourself well at that public trough, boys. Gobble any goodies which happen to
float by.
Meyer was sitting on the dock, legs swinging, waiting for me. He came aboard.
He stood behind me as I stowed the laundry.
"How did you make out?" he asked.
"Beautiful"
"What?"
"This is the best time of year. Right?"
"I stayed and talked to Hirsh for a while. By the time I got around to calling
the shop, you were gone."
"We left early. Mary Alice and me."
Turn around, Travis."
"What?"
"Turn around a minute and look at me."
"Sure."
He stared and nodded. "I see."
"What do you see?"
"That you're going to try to help Hirsh Fedderman."
"What? Oh, sure. That's right. As right as & "
"Rain?"
"Whatever you say, old buddy."
When my chores were done, we had a talk. I pulled my wandering attention in
from somewhere out beyond left field and tried to settle down to the task at
hand. I remembered what Mary Alice had said about how long the switch would
take and how incredible it seemed to her, how she wondered if any switch had
really taken place at all. I tried her approach on Meyer.
"I have to believe Hirsh," Meyer said. "If he saw it, he saw it. His mind is
very quick and keen."
"She really knows all that stuff."
"What?"
"All that stamp stuff."
"I would think it would be more remarkable if, after five years, she didn't
know all about it."
"What?"
"Never mind. Good God!"
"I wanted to give her a ride in Miss Agnes. It was a slow afternoon. Jane told
us to take off. I followed Mary Alice to her place, in her old yellow Toyota.
We had a drink in Homestead and dinner in Naples."
"Naples?!"
"I know. We were just drifting along, talking about this and that, and Naples
seemed like the closest place. So we came back across Alligator Alley and came
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here, and I showed her the Flush. It knocked her out, like Agnes did. I like
the way she laughs."
"You like the way she laughs."
"That's what I said. So then I drove her home and by then it was too late to
even stop in for a nightcap."
"How late is too late?"
"Quarter past five."
"No wonder your face looks blurred."
"Meyer, the whole twelve hours seemed like twenty or thirty minutes. We just
hit the edges of all the things there are to talk about."
"Are you going to be able to think about Hirsh Fedderman's problem?"
"Whose what?"
He went away, shaking his head, making big arm gestures at the empty space
ahead of him. If he had come back, I would have told him that I had almost
decided that there was no problem at all, that Fedderman had been mistaken. If
there is no way at all for something to have happened, the best initial
assumption is that it didn't happen.
On that Friday I arrived at the store at closing time and drove Jane Lawson
back to her place, a so-called garden apartment in a huge development of
yesteryear, about a half-hour bus ride from Fedderman's store.
She sat erect on the edge of the seat and said, "Our gal was pretty punchy all
day, Trav."
"I haven't been exactly alert."
"Now turn left again and here we are. I hate that miserable bus, but it would
be a worse bus ride for Linda." She had already told me that Linda was the
elder of her two, a scholarship freshman at the University of Miami in Coral
Gables. Judy was a junior in high school. Sixteen and eighteen. I had noticed
she talked about Linda quite a lot and had very little to say about Judy.
She tried the door and then got out her keys and said, "Excuse the way the
place will probably look. Working mother and two teen gals. I've tried. But
they have a tendency to hang their clothes up in mid-air."
The living room was small and oven-hot. She hurried over to a great big window
unit and turned it on high-high, and then raised her voice to carry over the
thunder of compressor and fan. "The house rule is the last one out turns the
beast off. It eats electricity. But it will chill this place fast, and then I
can turn it down to where we can hear ourselves think. Isn't it terrible? Fix
you a drink?"
"If there's a beer?"
"There could be. Let me look."
She came smiling back with a cold bottle of beer and a tall glass and excused
herself to change out of her working clothes. There was too much furniture in
the room. The fireplace was fake. There was a double frame on the mantel, and
in one side of it was an incongruously young man with a nice grin, Air Force
uniform, lieutenant bars, pilot wings. In the other half was a picture of the
same lieutenant in civilian clothes, sports jacket and slacks. He was holding
a baby and looking down into its invisible face while a Jane Lawson, eighteen
years younger, stood by him, no higher than his shoulder, smiling up at him.
There was an alcove off the living room with some high-fidelity equipment,
with racks of tapes in bright dog-eared boxes, with tilted stacks of records.
The room was getting cool very quickly. I went over and checked the controls
on the beast and cut it from high cool to cool, from max fan to medium. It
shuddered and smoothed to about the sound of a good chain saw on idle. I was
back looking at the pictures when she came out in an overblouse and faded blue
shorts and sandals. She was a slight and pretty woman, with the residual marks
of old tensions in her face, with a firmness to her mouth and corners of her
jaw.
"That's Jerry," she said. "It seems incredible. He was stopped right there in
time, just thirteen months after this picture. In another year Linda will be
as old as I was when I met Jerry."
"Combat?"
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"No. He was trade school. He wore the ring. They used to have more flameouts
in fighter jets back then. He was on a night exercise, just two of them. That
particular model, the way it worked, there was an interlock so that if you
didn't jettison the canopy first, you couldn't eject, you couldn't make the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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