Джон Макдональд - Pale Gray for Guilt

“Once she gave in,” said Meyer, “you noticed the relaxation. You noticed she ate better too? You noticed she laughed a little?”

“Conspiracy.”

“The best kind,” he said. “Today I unloaded a thousand shares of Fletcher at thirty-one and moved the funds into G.S.A. It’s the critical time right now. I don’t know how high the rocket goes. Ninety-two thousand shares traded today. Suppose in the morning I call her and tell her the men we have to see will be available Friday morning. No. Saturday morning. So you should move that hunk of ugly luxury before it congeals to the slip. A nice little cruise someplace.”

“I’ll try it. Don’t count on it.”

I went ambling back and went aboard and into the lounge. Janine was standing in the doorway at the forward end of the lounge, the companionway dark behind her.

“Trav?” she said, and her voice was all wrong. It was a sick sad scared voice, and the belt she was wearing was a sinewy, sun-reddened forearm. “Trav? I’m... sorry.”

A knuckly hand appeared at her left side, at waist-level, aiming a short barrel of respectable caliber at my middle. “I’m sorry about this, Mr. McGee,” he said. I could make out a tallness behind her, a relative pallor of the face against the gloom behind her.

“Freddy?” I asked.

“Yes sir.”

“I’m sorry about this too, Freddy.”

“Just you stand quiet,” he said. The arm left her waist. A set of regulation handcuffs arched toward me, gleaming in the light, and fell on the lounge carpeting with a jingling thud.

The arm quickly clasped her waist again. “Now you move all the time like slow-motion movies, Mr. McGee. You get down on your knees and take those cuffs there slow, and you edge over slow and reach both arms around that pipe thing and put them on and press them nice and tight.”

“Or?”

“I think you know the corner I’m in, Mr. McGee. It has piled up on me, and no way to stop it or change it. I couldn’t stand being locked up anyplace even for one month without being turned into some kind of animal. So I’ve got no choice. I’m sorry about everything, but sorry doesn’t help. So do it right now, start moving, or I’ll lay one slug right through your forehead, Mr. McGee.”

Freddy had been worn thin. He was on the edge, and the truth was in his voice. It made me very obedient. Very humble. I moved the way the specialists move when they are lifting the fuse out of a bomb. I snapped the cuffs snugly, taking a faint remote comfort in the knowledge that given ten seconds alone in the lounge I could brace myself, wrench the stanchion loose and get my hands on the revolver in the desk.

He walked Janine out of the doorway and into the lounge. As he put the handgun away, I heard him sigh with the release of tension. He released her and gave her a little push. She stumbled forward, her body slack, head bowed in her despair. “I’m sorry,” she said in a low voice.

His hand went to his hip pocket, then reached out toward her quite casually. There was a barely audible sound of impact, a hairsoftened, leathery little thopp. She took half a broken step, face emptying. She started to lift her arms to break the fall, then pitched onto her face, jelly-slack, with a tumble of cushioned bone against the lounge carpeting.

I had seen something odd in his face just as he had flicked the lead against her skull. It had been a moment of change and revelation, showing a pleasure of erotic dimensions, of sensual pleasure. It is not an unusual way for the mind of a man to turn rancid. Cops fall in love with the hickory nightstick. Prizefighters forget to pace themselves, going for the sweet knockout. It is a pull that takes some twisted ones into anesthesiology, or into preparing the dead for burial, or into scut-work in asylums. They are the dark brothers of the slackened flesh, turned on in some soiled way by a total vulnerability.

He looked down at her, stepped over her and sat in a chair just out of my reach. He yawned hugely. There was a faint family resemblance to LaFrance. He was a big, stringy, slope-shouldered boy, and he looked stone tired. He held the spring-handled tranquilizer in his right hand and gently bounced the leaden end off the open palm of his other hand. It was of black leather, intricately woven, greasy with much handling.

The only other time I had seen him was when he and another deputy had backed up Sheriff Burgoon when he had picked me up in the lobby of the old hotel.

I sat and hitched around to where I could lean my back against the bulkhead, the stanchion between my flexed knees, forearms resting on my knees.

“Why did you come here, Freddy?”

He was so exhausted his mind was moving slowly. “I remembered two days ago my Uncle Press telling me about this houseboat of yours. I was trying to sneak aboard one of the freighters heading out of Tampa. They watch them too close. I figure I can get out of the country somehow, I can get myself all sorted out and get some time to think what to do next.”

“What you ought to do next is pick up that phone over there and call Sheriff Burgoon and tell him where to come get you.”

“Too late for that.”

“You’ve got a lot of friends in Shawana County. They’ll work things out for you. They think you were defending yourself from Bannon and hit him too hard and got scared. They’ll make sure that old couple where you got the clothes and car won’t press charges.”

“I tell you, Mr. McGee, it’s too late . I had some more bad luck. That’s the only kind I’ve had lately. There’s a woman I killed not meaning to, over west of Dade City. I tunked her perfect, light and easy and just enough, and she took two steps more than she should have been able to and when she fell, it was right on a garden rake acrost her throat, and no way in the world to stop all that blood. God, there was a lot of blood! He run into the brush and I don’t know if I winged him at all. Anyway, I couldn’t find him and I had to get out of there. No sir, it’s too late for anything but running and hiding. Things start to go wrong, they just seem to keep right on.”

“How did they go wrong with Tush Bannon?”

“I was patrolling and seen him at just about first light walking the shoulder of the road, carrying a suitcase. I stopped and he said he’d come in on the bus and phoned out to his place and no answer at all. He was worried about Miz Bannon. It’s easy to know later on what you should have done. My daddy had said Mr. Bannon was sure a hard man to discourage. I should have taken him in where we were holding the stuff his wife left and the letter from his wife, and told him his place was all foreclosed and sealed up with the notices and all. Uncle Press had to have that ten acres, and he was sure going to get it. It had been a real quiet night, so I decided what I’d do was run him on out there so he could see with his own eyes, without me telling him, how he’d lost the whole works for good. I think I wanted to do that because he didn’t act whipped at all. He acted like he had some way out of the mess he was in. So I said maybe the phone wasn’t working and took him out. We got out there and he got ugly when he figured out I had to know that he’d been all foreclosed. Then I told him his wife had left him and left his stuff and a letter with the sheriff and he called me a liar. He walked at me, half yelling at me and I tunked him on the skull. It should have taken him down, but it just bent his knees some and he shook his head and kept coming. So I knew he had a hard skull, and he was big, and he felt ugly, so I made sure the next one would take him down. I put a lot of wrist in it and I figured to lay it right onto his forehead, but he was quick for a big man like that, and he tried to snap his head back.” He sighed. “It hit him right square on the bridge of the nose, Mr. McGee. That’s a real bad place because it drives two little thin bones right back into the brain. I squatted there beside him in the morning light, sweaty and cold, and held my fingers on his wrist, and felt his heart go slower and slower and softer and softer and then it stopped all the way and he shivered sort of, and after a while I figured out it would seem likely he had enough troubles to want to kill himself, and figured out how to make it look like he did and at the same time cover up the places I’d tunked him. You see, I knew if I had to tell what happened, I’d get run out of police work for good, maybe, and it’s the only way I feel good, with the uniform and people listening when you tell them something.”