Джон Макдональд - Pale Gray for Guilt

“Tush, if you need any help hanging on here until things pick up...”

“Forget it. Thanks, but forget it. It would just take that much longer to run down the drain.”

“Is it all going to go?”

“Probably.”

“Can you sell?”

“Sell what? Our equity? Go ask the bank what they think our equity is.” He yawned. “Hell, I can always get a pretty good job selling. I can sell pretty good. Trouble is, I hate the work. ’Night, McGee. And thanks again. It was a good evening. It helped. We needed it bad.”

I left the next morning. And that was in October, and I kept thinking about them and wondering about them, but I didn’t do anything about it. I didn’t run up there again. I wish I had. There are a lot of things in this life I wish I’d done, and a pretty gamey collection of things I wish I hadn’t done — but the things you don’t do leave the remorses around a little longer somehow.

The last time I saw Tush Bannon alive was the weekend before Christmas, late on a Saturday afternoon. It was by the kind of accident so unlikely, one has the temptation to call it fate. My friend Mick Coseen was awaiting a very important phone call from Madrid, and he had given my phone number aboard The Busted Flush . So when it was delayed, he asked me if I’d take his car and run down to the Miami International and pick up his date, Barni Baker, a Pan-Am stewardess due in from Rio for a Miami layover. As I was the only other one in the group who knew her by sight, it was more efficient for me to go down.

For company I toted Puss Killian along in Mick’s rental convertible. It was a cool, bright day, and the time of year when the gold coast is as empty as it ever gets. Nervous little men who own points in the big beach hotels brood about their fifth mortgages, and the retailers give fervent thanks that the Christmas pressure on the locals makes up for the lack of snowbird money. Puss is a big, stately, random redhead, a master of the put-on and the cop-out, who believes the world is mad, so she is the best of companions if you can keep up with the slants and shifts of her conversation, and merely irritating and confusing if you can’t. A little herd was assembling, and it was shaping up party time.

We put the car in the lot and went in and checked the board, and the man said that 955 was just touching down. After the passengers had been herded off and aimed in the right direction, Barni, with her peer group, came brisk-clicking along, button-big, button-bright, a little candy-package blonde with eyes of widest innocent blue, eyes casting right and left, searching for Mick, finding me as I moved to intercept her. Big smile, gracious and wary acknowledgement of the introduction to Puss. I told her about Mick and his call, about an independent wanting somebody to take over the camera crew because their chief cameraman had racked himself up on a bicycle in Madrid traffic, and Barni Baker said to give her fifteen minutes, and I said we would be up at the bar on top of the International, and she said just fine and went tap-tapping away, moving firm and well in her uniform.

In the big blue windowed room high in the air, the cocktail business was still thin, because of the hour, and a familiar face was working the quiet and elegant bar, and he remembered The Drink, and seemed so pleased with himself in remembering, that we each had one, sitting and watching the deftness with silent and respectful attention. Two ample old-fashioned glasses, side by side, filled to the two thirds line with cracked ice. A big, unmeasured slosh of dry sherry into each glass. Then swiftly, the strainer placed across the top of one and then the other, as with a delicate snap of the wrist he dumped the sherry down the drain. Then fill to the ice level with Plymouth gin, rub the lemon peel around the inside of the rim, pinch some little floating beads of citrus oil on the surface of the drink, throw away the peel, present with small tidy bow and flourish to the folk. “Two McGees,” said he.

“Thank you, Harold,” I said.

He had two new customers and when he moved away, Puss hoisted her glass, tinked it against mine. “The instant drink,” she said. “Instant stupidity, or instant rape, or instant permission. Me, what I get is this instant numbness around the chops. Here’s to flying quail.”

“To what?”

“To stewardesses! You’re slow today, lover. You’re not relating now and again.”

“It’s just that I was looking at you. Then I don’t hear so well.” And looking by chance beyond her, I saw Tush Bannon sitting at a deuce against the wall, the shoulder bulk hunched toward a still-faced girl who sat across from him. She had long, straight auburn-brown hair, a pouty, impassive little face. She seemed to be listening to him with a thoughtful intentness, and she bit at the heavy bulge of her underlip and closed her eyes and slowly shook her head in a prolonged No.

That is not the point where one goes ambling over to the old buddy and whacks him on the shoulder and asks how Janine is. It was a private conversation, so private and intense they seemed to be inside an overturned bowl of thinnest glass, almost visible.

“Know them?” Puss asked.

“Just him.”

“I’d say he’s going to get called out on strikes. He’s lost his cool. The hard sell makes a gal nervous these days.”

“Hey!” said Barni Baker, and put her overnight case down and climbed up onto the stool on my right. She wore a little pale green sleeveless blouse with a high collar, a darker green short skirt, and she had little gold ladybugs in her pierced ears, and she wanted a bourbon sour.

Puss leaned forward and spoke across me, saying, “Gad, it must be the most marvelous, exciting, romantic thing in the world, jetting around to marvelously romantic places! It’s really living, I bet. Those fascinating pilot types, and mysterious international travelers and all. I guess you realize how jealous of you all we earthbound females are, Barni.”

There was just the slightest narrowing of Barni’s eyes, gone in an instant. She leaned in from her side and said breathlessly, “Oh, yes! It’s all my dreams come true, Miss Killian. To fly to all the lovely places in the world.” She sighed and shook her pretty little head. “But it seems so... so artificial somehow to have to use an airplane, don’t you think? But with my little broom, I can just barely get above the treetops. Have you had better luck?”

“I think having to carry that damned cat makes the difference,” said Puss without hesitation. “And wear that stupid hat and the long skirts.”

“And it’s hard to enjoy the moonlight when you have to keep up that dreary cackling, don’t you think?” Barni asked.

Tush came up behind me and said, “Talk to you a minute, Trav?” He turned and walked away before I could introduce him. The gals did not notice. I excused myself and followed Tush. Barni Baker moved over onto my stool. As I went out into the corridor, before the glass door swung shut, I heard the contralto bark of one of Puss’s better laughs, in counterpoint with a silvery yet somehow earthy yelp from Barni. Knife-fighting among the females can spoil party time, and it was nice to know that this pair would get along.

I went with Tush past the elevators to the empty men’s room.

“I would have said hello, but you had a friend.”

“Friend! With friends like that, who needs, and so forth. She left. Look, I haven’t got much time. I’ve left Jan alone with the kids for three days and I want to get back. She said a year ago there was a pattern in this whole thing and we should get out, but I wouldn’t believe her. Okay. I believe her now. It’s a business deal. A land development deal. And we got in the way.”

He was as big as ever, but his face looked oddly shrunken. His big hands were shaky. His eyes had a starey look, somewhat like the eyes of people who wear glasses when they have their glasses off.