Джон Макдональд - Pale Gray for Guilt

“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.

I’d called an officer of the Philatelic Society who said the old gentleman was not mad at anybody, that he took a lot of pleasure in exhibiting his collection and having it admired, and that though he had sounded upset, he had not given any reason for withdrawing.

It had taken a little more research to find out what company insured the collection. An agent who said he had never met the old gentleman gave me his card. So I took his card and his name and presented myself to the old gentleman and said we wished to make a new appraisal of the collection. He stalled. The collection was in the vault at the bank. He was very busy. Some other time. So I said we had reason to believe he had disposed of some of the collection.

He broke down. He had been remounting the collection under glass for the exhibition. He had to leave his home for a doctor’s appointment. He returned. Twenty-two of the most valuable stamps, including the Dusty Rose, were missing.

“So he was the patriarch of a big family, all very close, all sensitive to scandal, and his wife had died, and he had been remarried for two years to something of the same coloring, general impact and impressive dimension of the late Jayne Mansfield, a lassy big enough to make two of the old boy, and he was so certain she had clouted his valuable toys he’d been afraid to make a report to the cops or claim insurance. So I followed the lady to an afternoon assignation with the hotel beachboy who’d blackmailed her into heisting the stamps, and after I got through shaking him up and convincing him that the old gentleman had arranged to have her last two male chums dropped into the Florida Straits wired to old truck parts, he produced eleven stamps, including the gem of the collection, and was so eager to explain where and how he had fenced the other eleven he was letting off a fine spray of spit. I helped him pack, and put him on a bus and waved good-bye and had a nice little talk with the big blonde about how I had just barely managed to talk two tough old Greek pals of her husband’s from hiring local talent to write a little warning with a hot wire across her two most obvious endowments. A cop friend shook the missing items out of the fence, and I told the old man it hadn’t been his wife at all, and he had every reason to trust her. So he hopped around and sang and chuckled and we went to the bank and he gave me thirty thousand cash, a generous estimate of half the value, and he gave me a note that gives me free meals for life in the best Greek restaurants in four states, and the whole thing took five days, and I went right back to my retirement, and maybe three weeks later one Puss Killian came along and enriched it considerable.”

“Pull over,” she ordered. I found a place where there was room to park on the grass between the two-lane road and the canal. She unsnapped the seat belt, lunged expansively over, a big hug, a big kiss from a big girl whose eyes danced and sparkled in the fading daylight.

“Drive on,” she said, snapping the belt.

I did. “Whatever it was for, it was nice.”

“Well, this is a very long day, and it was partly for way way back, having that coffee-with. And it was for getting so damned scarey furious — because maybe there isn’t much real anger around any more. It’s for appreciating mistletoe. It’s mostly for being what you are, doing the nutty things you do, and letting me for once be... Sancho Panza.”

“Please! Sanch a .”

“Of course.”

The entrance gate was very wide, very high, with a floodlight shining on the clean white paint and on the sign that hung from chains from the top of the arch. To-Co Groves, Inc.

It was nine fifteen. We had stopped in Okeechobee for a hasty meal of some fresh bass, fried in corn meal and bacon fat. I turned into the graveled drive and a figure stepped out of the shadows into the headlights, raising a casual hand to stop me. Ranch hat, faded blue denim work jacket and jeans. She came to my side of the car and said, “McGee? I’m Connie Alvarez.”

I got out, leaving the door open, shook hands, introduced Puss. Connie leaned in and shook her hand, then straightened again. In the glow of the courtesy light I had my first good look at her. A strong-looking woman, chunky, with good shoulders, a weathered face, no makeup, very lovely dark, long-lashed eyes.

“You would have helped them if they’d hollered, McGee?”

“All I could.”

“Me too. Pride. Their lousy, stiff-necked pride. How many good people has pride killed? She’s up there at the house thinking the roof has fallen in on her. She doesn’t know it’s the roof and the chimney and the whole damn sky, and it is a lousy time to have to tell her. What happened?”

“He was on his back on the ground and about five hundred pounds of scrap iron dropped on him from ten feet in the air. Head and chest, I’d imagine. I haven’t seen him, and probably wouldn’t know who I was seeing if I did.”

“Jesus Christ, man, you don’t tiptoe around things, do you?”

“Do you want me to?”

“I think already you know me better than that. Are they trying to call it an accident?”

“Suicide. He’s supposed to have run a wire to the ratchet stop, lay down and yanked it loose. They found it still fastened and wound around his hand. Yesterday morning.”

Suddenly her brown strong fingers locked onto my wrist. “Oh my dear God! Had he gotten the note she left him?”

“No.”

I heard the depth of her sigh. “That could have done it. That could have been the one thing that could have made him do it. I think I got to know him that well. I think I know how much Jan meant to that poor big sweet guy.”

“Not even that, Connie. At least not that way. He was murdered. But we’ve got to swallow the suicide story. All of us. We’ve got to act as if we believed it.”

“Why?”

“Why do you think?”

“I think why use amateur talent when you can hire professionals.”

“Rest your mind, Mrs. A.”

“We’ll talk after we get this sad thing done.” She leaned abruptly into the car again. “You, girl. Do you dither? Do you bleat and snuffle and carry on?”

“Go grow yourself an orange, lady.”

She threw her head back and gave a single bark of humorless laughter. “Maybe you’ll both do.” She pulled my seat back forward and scrambled into the back seat, rustling the discarded wrapping paper. “Let’s go, McGee. The gate light turns off up at the house.”

I wasn’t prepared for a full half mile of drive, nor for the house at the end of it, big and long and low, with upswept drama of roof lines, something by Frank Lloyd Wright out of Holiday Inns. She had me park around at the side. “I’ll have my people take care of the car and bring your gear in. You people use one bedroom or two.”