Джон Макдональд - Pale Gray for Guilt

He spat again and started to move toward his truck. I walked slowly with him and said, “He seemed like a bright, pleasant guy. He didn’t seem like the kind who’d go broke. But you never can tell. Sometime it’s booze, or the dog track, or other women.”

He got into the truck and stared out at me. “Not this time. They run this boy off. He was in the way, and they run him off. But you didn’t hear me say that, mister.”

“I didn’t hear you, friend.”

He headed back over the lumpy road. I walked around to where Puss still sat on the sawhorse. She looked up at me. With a small frown she said, “My heart bled for you the way you went reeling around in shock, McGee. You really took it hard. Your dear old buddy has gone to the big marina in the sky. The hard way. Came to get your bilge pump! God’s sake, Travis!”

I sat on my heels and squinted up at her. Dark red hair and disapproval, outlined against a blue December sky. “Win a few, lose a few, honey,” I said.

“What are you?” she asked.

I stood up and put my hands on her upper arms, near the shoulders and plucked her up off the sawhorse and held her. Maybe I was smiling at her. I wouldn’t know. What I was saying seemed to come from a strange direction, as if I were standing several feet behind myself. I said some nonsense about smelling these things out, about sensing the quickest way to open people up, and so you do it, because if you don’t, then maybe you miss one little piece of something you should know, and then you go join the long long line of the dead ones, because you were careless.

“And,” I heard myself say, “Tush killed himself but not with that damned engine block. He killed himself with something he said, or something he did, and he didn’t know he was killing himself. Maybe he didn’t listen very good, or catch on soon enough. I listen very good. I catch on. And when I add up this tab and name the price, I’m going to look at some nice gray skin, honey. Gray and pale, oily and guilty as hell, and some eyes shifting around looking for some way out of it. But every damned door will be nailed shut.”

I came out of it and realized she was making little hiccupy sobs and looking down and to the side, and her cheeks were wet, and she was saying, “Please, please.”

I released her and turned on my heel and walked away from her. I went a little way up the road. I leaned against the trunk of an Australian pine and emptied my lungs a few times. A jay yammered at me. There were tree toads in a swamp somewhere nearby. Puss came walking very slowly up the road. She came over to me and with a quick, shy smile leaned her face into my neck and chest.

“Sorry,” she whispered.

“For nothing?”

She exhaled. “I don’t know. I asked you what you were. Maybe I found out, sort of.”

“Whatever it is, I don’t let it show, Puss. Ten more minutes and I would have been kindly Trav forevermore.”

She pushed herself a few inches away and looked up at me. “Just smile with your eyes like kindly ol’ McGee, dear, to kind of erase that other... that other look.”

“Was it that bad?”

“They could bottle it and use it to poison pit vipers.”

“Okay now?”

She nodded. “Sure.” Her eyes were a sherry brown, almost a tan, and in that good light under the tree I could see the area right around the pupil, a corona of green. “He was a special guy?”

“He was that.”

“But can’t even a special guy... give up?”

“Maybe, but if that one ever had, it wouldn’t have been like that.”

We walked back toward the dead marina, my arm around her strong waist. “Call it enemy country,” I explained. “He’s dead, and it solves some problems for some people. And they’ll want to forget all about it as fast as they can, and they won’t know anything about anything.”

I got the camera off the boat, a battered old Retina C–III, and put in a roll of Plus X. I hand-cranked the block as high as it would go before it wedged against the tripod poles. I got wire and pliers out of the toolbox aboard, fastened wire to the ratchet stop. I took pictures as I went along. When I yanked the wire, the great weight came down to thud against the hard dirt with a shock I could feel in the soles of my feet, while the drum clattered and the cable rasped through the rusty pulley. I craned it up and left it the way it had been.

She watched, and had the grace not to ask why.

I didn’t rinse my hands in the river. I waited until we were well out into the bay.

Then I put it at dead slow, right at 700 rpm, and told her to head down the channel. I climbed out onto the forward bow shell and leaned back against the port windshield.

One approach: Go storming into Sunnydale, promising stink and investigations and general turmoil.

Or: Find some kind of cover story that might open up some mouths. See who can be conned. See who can be turned against whom.

Or: Go in fast and quietly and come out with one Preston LaFrance and take him to a nice quiet place and open him up.

Or: What if some mysterious buyer picked up the Bannon property? Then the boys couldn’t put the whole two sections together. And that might bring them out of the woodwork.

The last had the right flavor, if it could be worked.

But first there had to be a first thing, and it had to be poor damned Janine. And if I couldn’t get to her before the Sherf told her the bad news, I could at least arrive shortly thereafter.

So I hopped down and took the wheel and ran at high cruise to Broward Beach and tied up at the city marina. I left Puss at the drugstore counter and shut myself into a booth and made a person-to-person credit card call to Sheriff Bunny Burgoon in Sunnydale. I yapped at him in the excited tones of a whiter-wash commercial and told him that CBS news had researched him and discovered he was a truly fine law officer, and had they located Mrs. Bannon yet, and her three kids, and it was a great human interest story and we might do a little feature.

“Sure,” he said. “Just before Christmas and all that. Yeh. Locate her? Well, not exactly yet, but we’re doing everything that any human person could expect or ask for, and that’s the truth. We got aholt of her folks in Milwaukee, and they’re all upset as any human person could imagine, but they haven’t heard a word from her, and they don’t know any friend of hers of the name of Connie. Now if it was to go on national television, she’d turn up right off, I imagine. The name is Sheriff Hadley — that’s an e-y, Burgoon, B-u-r-g-o-o-n. And I’ve been elected here three times as Sherf of Shawana County and—”

“Could you read me the note she left her husband?”

“Did you get the name wrote down with the right spelling?”

“I did, Sheriff.”

“It’s personal-like, but I see no harm in reading it to you, as any human person could tell it’s a public service to find that poor lady. Just a minute. Let me see now. Here it is. It goes like this. ‘Dear Tush, I’m sorry. This last thing was just the bitter end. Somehow it made me so ashamed. The boys are so upset and confused. I had to handle it alone because you weren’t there, and it took the very last bit of strength and courage I had. Don’t be angry with me. I’m worn out. I’m going to go stay with Connie for a while. I’m leaving this note and a suitcase with the things you’ll probably need with the Sheriff. When you get the details and all straightened out, please phone me. Don’t come charging up here, because I might not be ready to see you yet. I have some thinking to do, and then we have a lot of talking to do, about what’s going to happen to you and me. Don’t worry about me or the boys. We’ll be fine. It was all so ugly, the way it happened. I suppose those men tried to be nice, and it wasn’t their fault, but it was a terrible thing. Jan.”