John MacDonald - The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper

Even without the knowledge of her death, Helena was a disturbing memory...

Five years ago? Yes. In a winter month, in a cold winter for Florida, Mick Pearson, with his wife, Helena, and his two daughters, aged twenty and seventeen, crewing for him, had brought his handsome Dutch motor sailer into Bahia Mar, all the way from Bordeaux. The Likely Lady . A wiry, seamed, sun-freckled, talkative man in his fifties, visibly older than his slender gray-blond wife.

He gave the impression of somebody who had made it early, had retired, and was having the sweet life. He circulated quickly and readily and got to know all the regulars. He gave the impression of talking a lot about himself, not in any bragging or self-important way, but by amusing incident. People found it easy to talk to him.

Finally I began to get the impression that he was focusing on me, as if he had been engaged in some process of selection and I was his best candidate. I realized how very little I knew about him, how little he had actually said. Once we began prying away at each other, showdown was inevitable. I remember how cold his eyes were when he stopped being friendly sociable harmless Mick Pearson.

He wanted a confidential errand done, for a fat fee. He said he had been involved in a little deal abroad. He said it involved options on some old oil tankers, and some surplus, obsolete Turkish military vehicles, and all I needed to know about it was that it was legal, and he wasn’t wanted, at least officially, by any government anywhere.

Some other sharpshooters had been trying to make the same deal, he said. They refused to make it a joint effort, as he had suggested, and tried to swing it alone. But Pearson beat them to it and they were very annoyed at his methods. “So they know I’ve got this bank draft payable to the bearer, for two hundred thirty thousand English pounds, payable only at the main branch of the Bank of Nova Scotia in the Bahamas, at Nassau, which is the way I wanted it because I’ve got a protected account there. I didn’t want them to find out how I was going to handle it, but they did. It’s enough money so they can put some very professional people to work to take it away from me. Long, long ago I might have taken a shot at slipping by them. But now I’ve got my three gals to think of, and how thin their future would be if I didn’t make it. So I have to have somebody they don’t know take it to the bank with my letter of instructions. Then they’ll give up.”

I asked him what made him so sure I wouldn’t just set up my own account and stuff the six hundred and forty thousand into it.

His was a very tough grin. “Because it would screw you all up, McGee. It would bitch your big romance with your own image of yourself. I couldn’t do that to anybody. Neither could you. That’s what makes us incurably small-time.”

“That kind of money isn’t exactly small-time.”

“Compared to what it could have been by now, it is small, believe me.” So he offered me five thousand to be errand boy, and I agreed. Payable in advance, he said. And after he had given me the documents, he would take off in the Likely Lady as a kind of decoy, and I was to start the day after he did. He said he would head for the Bahamas but then swing south and go down around the Keys and up the west coast of Florida to the home he and his gals hadn’t seen for over a year and missed so badly, a raunchy sun-weathered old cypress house on pilings on the north end of Casey Key.

That was on a Friday. He was going to give me the documents on Sunday and take the Likely Lady out to sea on Monday. At about noon on Saturday, while Helena and her daughters were over on the beach, they came aboard and cracked his skull and peeled the stateroom safe open. It would have been perfect had not Mick Pearson wired his air horns in relay with a contact on the safe door, activated by a concealed switch he could turn off when he wanted to open it himself. So too many people saw the pair leaving the Likely Lady too hastily. It took me almost two hours to get a line on them, to make certain they hadn’t left by air. They had left their rental car over at Pier 66 and had gone off at one o’clock on a charter boat for some Bahamas fishing. I knew the boat, the Betty Bee , a thirty-eight-foot Merritt, well-kept, Captain Roxy Howard and usually one or the other of his skinny nephews crewing for him.

I phoned Roxy’s wife and she said they were going to Bimini and work out from there, trolling the far side of the Stream, starting Sunday. At that time, as I later learned, the neurosurgeons were plucking bone splinters out of Mick Pearson’s brain.

I knew that the Betty Bee would take four hours to get across, so that would put her in Bimini at five o’clock or later. There was a feeder flight from there to Nassau leaving at seven fifteen. A boat is a very inconspicuous way to leave the country. Both Florida and the Bahamas have such a case of hots for the tourist dollar that petty officialdom must cry themselves to sleep thinking about all the missing red tape.

It was two thirty before, in consultation with Meyer, I figured out how to handle it. If I chartered a flight over, it was going to be a sticky problem coping with the pair on Bahama soil. Meyer remembered that Hollis Gandy’s muscular Bertram, the Baby Beef , was in racing trim, and that Hollis, as usual, had a bad case of the shorts, brought on by having too many ex-wives with good lawyers.

So it was three when we banged past the sea buoy outside Lauderdale, Bimini-bound. Meyer could not hold the glasses on anything of promising size we spotted, any more than a rodeo contestant could thread a needle while riding a steer. And if I altered course to take closer looks, I stood the risk of wasting too much time or alerting a couple of nervous people.

We got to the marker west of the Bimini bar at four thirty, and after a quick check inside to make certain the Betty Bee hadn’t made better than estimated time, we went out and lay in wait five miles offshore. I faked dead engines, got aboard, alerted Roxy Howard, and we took them very quickly. Roxy was easily alerted as he had become increasingly suspicious of the pair. An Englishman and a Greek. It was useful to do it quickly, as the Greek was snake-fast and armed. We trussed them up and I told Roxy what they’d been up to as I went through their luggage and searched their persons. The envelope with the bearer bank draft was in the Greek’s suitcase and with it was the signed letter to the bank identifying me, authorizing me to act for Mick Pearson, with a space for my signature, and another space for me to sign again, probably in the presence of a bank officer. The Greek had two thousand dollars in his wallet, and the Englishman about five hundred. The Englishman had an additional eleven thousand plus in a sweaty money belt. It seemed reasonable to assume that that money had come out of Mick’s stateroom safe. As far as I knew, Mick had taken a good thump on his hard skull and certainly had no interest in bringing in any kind of law. Roxy was not interested in tangling with the Bahamian police authorities. And I did not think the Englishman or the Greek would lodge any complaints. And it was obvious that trying to get word out of either of them would call for some very messy encouragement, something I have no stomach for. Theirs was a hard, competent, professional silence.

So I gave five hundred to Roxy. He said it was too much, but he didn’t argue the point. We off-loaded them into the Baby Beef , and Roxy turned the Betty Bee and headed for home port. I ran on down to Barnett Harbour, about halfway between South Bimini and Cat Cay, and put them aboard the old concrete ship that has been sitting awash there since 1926, the old Sapona that used to be a floating liquor warehouse during prohibition. I knew they’d have a rough night of it, but they would be picked off the next day by the inevitable fishermen or skin divers. They had their gear, their identification papers, and over twenty-five hundred dollars. And they would think of some explanation that wouldn’t draw attention to themselves. They had that look.