Джон Макдональд - Pale Gray for Guilt

His eyes bulged and his voice had hoarsened and the saliva shone on his chin. And finally he hitched up his pants and walked away. His walk was that of a man wearing new bifocals and not being very sure of how far away the ground might be. Meyer was able to stand up straight without much discomfort, and I dabbed iodine on the thumbnail gouge under his left eye. He seemed troubled, thoughtful, far away. I told him LaFrance wouldn’t make any trouble. I asked him what was bothering him.

Meyer, scowling, pinched the bridge of his nose. “Me! Did you hear me? On the sidewalk if there is a bug, I change my step and miss him. For me the business of the hooks almost spoils fishing. Me! I don’t understand it. Such a rotten anger I had, Travis! Thick in the throat like a sickness. Oh, he won’t kill himself. Not that one. He’ll live on and on so he can whine. But it was like changing your step to squash the bug, not flat, just a little squash so he can crawl a little bit, slow, leaking his juices. McGee, my friend, I am ashamed of that kind of anger. I am ashamed of being able to do something like that. I said to myself when I first got into your line of... endeavor, I said — forgive me for saying this to you — I said I will go only so far into it. There are things McGee does that somehow hurt McGee, hurt him in the way he thinks of himself. I talked to Muggsie. This business of the pretty little woman who just somehow happened to go off with Hero, that wasn’t pretty, and you were punishing something in yourself. Now I find myself a little bit less in my own eyes. Maybe this is a bad business you’re in, Travis. Is there this kind of ugly anger in a man that waits for some kind of virtuous excuse? Was it there in me, waiting for a reason only? Travis, my friend, is this the little demonstration of how half the evil in the world is done in the name of honor?”

He wanted help I couldn’t give him. One does not pat a Meyer on the head and give him a lollypop. He had overturned one of the personal stones in my garden too, and I could watch leggedy things scuttling away into comforting darkness.

I said, “You still didn’t figure out why I moved my bishop.”

He sat down and fixed a total concentration on the board. He gave a little nod at last and pushed a pawn one space forward, spoiling the sequence I was planning. He pinched at the bridge of his nose again, then smiled across at me, a hairy Meyer-smile, and said, “You know, I think I must have taken some sort of a dislike to that fellow.”

Two days later, Friday afternoon, Meyer came aboard the Flush at four thirty, just after I got back from the beach. A mass of that arctic air that Canada sends down free of charge had begun to change the day a little before noon. It had come down so swiftly I knew the grove people would be worried. There were frost bulletins on all the broadcasts. An edge in the crisp northeast breeze had cleaned the long beaches of everybody except diehard Yankees and one masochistic beach bum named Travis McGee. I had been taking out all the kinks, in the muscles in both body and brain, of too many sedentary days, swimming parallel to shore, in and out of the surf line, for all the distance, endurance and occasional speed sprints I could manage. It had been hard work to even stay warm, and I had ground away at it, breaststroke, backstroke, crawl, until on my chattering lope back to the Flush I felt as if I had pulled most of the long muscles loose from the joints and sockets and hinges they were supposed to control.

Any persistent idiot, like Hero, can strain away at the doorframe isometrics and build impressive wads of chunky fibrous muscle with which you can lift the front end of any sedan to make the girls say Oooo. But if you want the kind of muscle structure that will move you from here to there very very quickly, that will enable you to slip a punch, snatch a moving wrist, turn a fall into a shoulder roll that will put you back on the balls of your feet, balanced and ready, then you’d better be willing to endure total expenditure over long, active and dogged periods. I was going to be slowed down by time and attrition, and maybe it had begun, but not to a degree as yet for me to notice, nor to a degree to make me doubt myself — and doubt, of course, is more fatal than slowed reflexes.

I had the heat going aboard. Meyer drank coffee and worked on his investment figures while I hot-showered the salt away, dressed in ancient, soft, treasured, threadbare checked shirt, gray Daks, and a pair of Herter’s Two-Point woodsman’s shoes, of oiled, hand-treated bull hide, worn to a condition as flexible and pliable as an Eskimo wife. In the shower I had begun to raise tentative voice in song, but had remembered another day, another shower, when that same song had been interrupted by a lady named Puss handing me in a well-made sample of the drink known as a McGee. So that song clogged and died, and I dressed and made the drink myself and took it into the lounge.

Meyer looked up from his work and said, “You look grotesquely healthy, Travis.”

“And your eyes look grainy, and you look tired, and how long do you have to go five days a week and sit and watch the board like a great hairy eagle?”

“Not as long as I thought.”

“Indeed?”

“Sit and listen. Without a glaze in the eyes, please. Try to understand.”

“Proceed.”

“These Fletcher Industries earnings statements. Look, accounting is flexible. There are choices. Each one is legal. However, say there are fifteen ways to handle different things to make earnings look a little bit better. So this outfit uses all fifteen, right up to the hilt. The last published quarter, it looks like they made forty percent more money than the quarter before that. I rework the statement and I come out with earnings not even flat. But down a little, even.”

“So?”

“At fifteen dollars a share it looked as if Fletcher was a bargain for a growth stock, selling at maybe twelve times anticipated earnings for this year. So on top of that — which you call the fundamental picture, then there is the technical picture of the stock in the market. This buying pressure improves the technical picture. It becomes very desirable. Big volume attracts attention. Today I saw how it was going, how it was reacting, and so I took the risk, and I committed her all the way. Here is where her account stands. She’s got seventy-four hundred shares. Average cost per share is eighteen dollars. Today it closed at twenty-four and a quarter. So, right now, a short-term gain of forty-six thousand dollars.”

“Of what!”

“She holds shares worth right now a hundred and eighty thousand, less the margin account debit. The supply is shrinking and the demand is increasing. It is moving too fast. The Wall Street Journal yesterday had a statement from management saying they don’t know why all the big interest in their stock all of a sudden. It got out of hand too fast. I made this projection about where it is going to go next week. I have a used crystal ball an old gypsy gave me. I say a minimum eight points next week, so it will close between thirty-two and a half and thirty-seven. Traders will grab profits and get out. Usually I would wait, buy on the correction, and ride up with it again. But we get a trading suspension, maybe an investigation of corporate books. I think they used all the accounting gimmicks they could, and then they lied a little. It went up too fast and next week will be faster. So I start moving her over into that nice one I found for her to keep.”

“You’re telling me or asking me?”

“Telling you. What else? You are the expert on pigeon drops. I am the expert on the biggest crap game in the world.”

“But you have to talk to her and explain all this.”