John D MacDonald - Travis Mcgee 18 - The Green Ripper Read online

  "Where has she been lately? Geographically, that is."

  "Lately? Up until May she was living in Timber Bay over on the west coast. Then we came around to Lauderdale aboard my houseboat. We took our time. Got here in early August. She dived aboard and then moved to one of the model houses at Bonnie Brae to be closer to her work. A temporary arrangement."

  "Did she go out of the country at any time since last May?"

  "No."

  "Has she been in swamp country?"

  "No. Why?"

  'Jo you know if any of the people she has been associated with have been taken seriously ill, quite suddenly?"

  "I don't know if this is what you mean, but one of the owners of Bonnie Brae fell old his bicycle this morning and "

  "I know about that. I mean an illness like hers, characterized by extremely high temperatures, spo- radic delirium, cardiac arrhythmia, and fading blood pressure."

  'I can't think of anyone we know who's been sick lately. What's wrong with her?"

  "I've ordered every lab test I can think of. I don't approve of the shotgun approach to antibiotics, but I'm giving her a wide range of those. If we can't knock that fever down any other way, I'm going to try packing her in ice." He sighed heavily. "The big problem with treating something when you don't l~now what it is, you can male diagnosis all that more difficult."

  "Can I see her?"

  He thought it over, then nodded. 'They'll be busy in there. You can see her five minutes out of every hour. I'll approve that It won't be pleasant for you, and I doubt if she'll know you're there."

  A nurse came out and motioned to him, and he got up and plodded in, through the double doors. Man at work. A very tired man. But he was an empathetic man because, about ten minutes later, he beckoned to me and took me to her bedside. The rapid shallow breathing had eased. There was an LV. rigged, dripping into the vein in her arm. Her cheeks seemed hollower than they had looked an hour before, in her room, her eyes more sunken.

  He said in a low voice, '~e knocked the fever down almost one degree. First sign of progress."

  We walked out together and he said, "I'm making a full report of all our findings to Disease Control in Atlanta. Do you know anything about the red welt on the back of her neck?"

  The Green Ripper

  "She told me she was bitten by a bug this morning. She said it stung her."

  "Symptoms bear no relation to anaphylactic shock. We've taken some tissue from the area It's being packed in dry ice and flown to Atlanta along with blood samples and so forth. Got more sophisticated analysis systems available up there. Paper chromatography. Thin-layer chromatology techniques."

  The hours blurred. I went in as often as I could. Night and day inside hospitals are too much alike. Saturday night. Sunday. Sunday night. She kept changing, little by little, going further away from me. They did a tracheotomy, and from then on a machine was doing her breathing for her, pumping her chest up and down. When I bent close to her to touch my lips to her dank forehead, I could detect the faint sour smell of mortal illness. At one point, early in the vigil, I went out to the car and made the mistake of trying to eat one of the clammy hamburgers and was siclc on the asphalt.

  Meyer came out, bringing a change of clothes and my toilet kit. A nurse found me a towel and took me to a place where I could shower and scrape the pale stubble off my tired brown jaws.

  Somebody forgot to stop me and tell me. I went in a little after eleven on Monday night, and she was gone. The bed was empty. The equipment had been moved away.

  "Where is she?" I roared, and they came running toward me, hushing me, ushering me toward the door.

  A big black nurse, big as a tight end, had been answering questions for me during other visits during that shift. She took hold of my shoulders and gave me a shake. "Easy now! Easy now!" she said in a husky whisper. "It's better we lost her."

  "Better than what?"

  "Hush now. You hush down. A temperature like that, for so long, it cooked her brain. She would have been a vegetable. Ternble thing, a strong young woman like that." She had led me out into the corridor. "Who you got to come get you?"

  "I'll manage." I tried to smile. The tears were mnumg down my face. No sobs. No shudders. Just eyes naming. "Where is she now?"

  'They're doing an autopsy."

  "Who said they could!"

  "It's a law, Mr. McGee. When the cause of death is unknown, they have to. There's no way anybody can stop them, and that's a good law. Whatever is killing people, we have to find it out."

  "What finally happened? There was that machine..."

  She shrugged. "Total kidney failure, and then the heart gave out right about the same time." She shook her head. Her eyes were shining with unshed tears. "I don't know. We get so many old ones here.

  The Green Ripper

  Not young strong women like her. Whatever it was, it came and wore her right down to nothing. It took the life right out of her. It ate her up, like it was some hungry thing." She caught herself. "sorry. talk too much. Listen, if you're the only one she had, what you've got to do now, you've got to make the arrangements. She's got to have a burial"

  I wallced on out of their hospital, snuffling from time to time, marveling that I could walk with so little thought and effort. Long strides, heels thudding against the tile door, hand lifting without conscious command to flatten against the push plate on the big glass door, push and let me out into the chill night, spangled with stars that were faint above the security lights of the parking area. I walked to the tall dark shape of Miss Agnes, my ancient Rolls, and leaned against one of her high front fenders, my arms folded, ankles crossed, eyes running again.

  Cessation.. Ending. A stopping of her. I heard the night sounds of country and city. Yawk of a night bird nearby. Faraway eerie pulsing of siren. Whim poring drone of light traffic on University Drive, lights in moving patterns. Grinding whine of trucks moving fast, a mile or so away. Random night wind clattering palm fronds. This was the world, bustling its way on through its allotted four billion more years of ffme, carrying its four ~billicn souls gracelessly onward. A lot of them had stopped tonight, some in blood and terror. I tried to comprehend the enormity the obscenity of the fact that Gretel Howard had been one of them, just as dead as the teenagers who impacted a tree at a hundred and ten miles an hour near Tulsa, the llying dentist who didn't see the power lines, the Muslim children dead by fire in Bangladesh, the three hundred elderly in Florida who would not make it through the night in their nursing-home beds.

  I could not fit my mind around the realization of finality. There seemed to be more that would happen for the two of us, more of life to be consumed and completed. My body knew with a dreadful precision all the contours of her, the shapes and fittings, the sighs and turnings, gasps and pressures.

  I sought refuge in a child's dreaming. They had spirited her away, mended her, and would soon spring the great surprise upon me. She would come running, laughing, half crying, saying, "Darling, we were just fooling you a little. That's an. Mid we scare you too much? I'm sorry, Tray, dear. So sorry. Take me home."

  And on the way home she would explain to me how she had outwitted the green ripper. I had read once about a little kid who had overheard some adult conversation and afterward, in the night, had terrible nightmares. He kept telling his people he dreamed about the green ripper coming to get him. They finally figured out that he had heard talk

  The Green Ripper about the grim reaper. I had told Grets about it, and it had found its way into our personal lan- guage. It was not possible that the green ripper had gotten her.

  Not possible.

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  Meyer took care of practically everything. I couldn't have managed. I was too listless and too depressed. We both remembered that after her brother's death at Timber Bay, Gretel said she preferred cremation, just as he had. Cremation and maybe a small nondenominational memorial service for close friends. Not many people had attended John Tuckerman's memorial s
ervice in Timber Bay. He had been too closely associated with Hum bard Lawless, the man who had taken all the money and tried to run.

  I did not think there would be many people who would want to come to Gretel's memorial service. Meyer arranged it at a small chapel up beyond

  44

  Lee Green Ripper

  South Beach Park, at eleven in the morning on Saturday, ten days before Christmas.

  Ten or so people came in from Bonnie Brae. And a lot of people from the Bahia Mar area. Meyer calls it a subculture, the permanents. The great waves of tourists and boat people flood the area and recede, leaving the same old faces, most of them, year after year. I did not see all of them come in. When it was over and we walked out into December sunshine, they were there, moving toward me to touch, to shake hands, to kiss, to say some fumbly words: We're sorry. That's what it was about. Together we form a village. And share the trouble as much as we can. Take as much of it upon ourselves as is possible, and we knifer it is not very much. Okay?

  There was Skeeter, and there were Gabe and Doris Marchman Gabe's metal crutches glinting in the sun. From charter-boat row there were Billy Maxwell, Lew and Sandy, Barney and Babs, Roxy and his nephews. There was the Alabama Tiger, and Junebug was with him, looking strangely sub- dued. Raul and Nita Tenero were there, up from Miami, with Merrimay Lane. There were Irv Deibert and Johnny Dow, and Choolcie and Arthur Wilkinson, back together again. And there were others, from the hotel and the shops, the boatyards and the tethered fleet.

  My village and my people. They seemed to know what I needed most, a sense of place, the feeling of belonging to some kind of resilient society. A man can play the game of being the loner, moving unscathed through an indifferent world, toughened by the diminished expectations of his place and time. I spoke to them, thanked them, managing to keep myself together. As I did so, I thought of the ones who weren't there any more. Lois, of course. Puss Killian. Mike Gibson, of the world before I came to the marina. Nora Gardino. Barni Baker, who went down with her 727 into the swamp short of the airfield. Too damn many of them. I could just barely stand losing them, but I couldn't handle having Gretel gone too. She was destined to be a part of the life that would come after the marina. But she was gone and I was fixed there, embedded in time, embedded in a life I had in some curious way outgrown. I was an artifact, genus boat bum, a pale- eyed, shambling, gangling, knuckly man, without enough unscarred hide left to make a decent lampshade. Watchful appraiser of the sandy-rumped beach ladies. Creaking knight errant, yawning at the thought of the next dragon. They don't make grails the way they used to. She had deserted me here, left me in this now unbreakable mold, this half-farcical image, trapped me in my solitary, fussy, bachelor hang-ups from now until they turned me off too. I shook hands, I hugged and was hugged, and I tried to smile into reddened eyes, and they left, slowly, car doors chunking, driving away from the sunlit ceremony of farewell to my girl.

  The Green Ripper

  I had parked Miss Agnes two blocks away. An electric-blue Rolls hand-hewn into a pickup truck seemed too conspicuous and frivolous for a memorial service for my dead.

  After we got in and I waited for the chance to move out from the curb, Meyer said, '~id it go all right? Did he pick the right things to read?"

  "It was fine."

  "I tried to ask you ahead of time, but I couldn't seem to get through."

  "It was fine."

  I thought of the fine running we had done, Gretel and I, on the beach near the shack where her brother was living. I thought of making love with her on the sun deck at dusk, in a hard warm summer rain. I had never really told her how much it all meant. There was going to be plenty of time for that. All the rest of her life. I could make a list of the things we were going to talk about someday. When we had the time.

  "Good turnout," Meyer said.

  "For God's sake!"

  "So I'll keep my mouth shut."

  "Fine."

  I wanted to apologize, but couldn't find the right way to begin, and so the rest of the ride was silent. He sat beside me like a gloomy bear. I knew his feelings weren't hurt. He was sad because I had lost Gretel, and because we had lost Gretel.

  'A picked out an urn," he said, as we pulled into the parking place. 'Nothing ornate. Bronze, though. Seventy-two something, including talc. He wrapped it up in a box and brown paper, ready for mailing."

  'A might take it out there."

  "I told him you might do that," he said. "I've got the box at my place. 1,11 bring it over. Unless you'd like to have me go on out there with you."

  'All let you know, Meyer. Keep it for now. And thanks."

  He headed over to the newsstand to see if his copy of Barron's had come in, and I walked back to The Busted Flush, anxious to get out of the suit and get the necktie off. And anxious to see how much Boodles gin I could fit into a king-size old- fashioned glass.

  Two men had boarded my houseboat. They were on my little back porch aft the lounge, one sitting on a folding stool, the other leaning against the rail. They were of a size and age, middle height, middle forties, a tailored three-piece gray suit, with white shirt, black shoes, blue necktie with a white figure; a tailored three-plece chocolate-brown suit, with white shirt, brown shoes, tan necktie with a small figure. Gray Suit wore a gray tweed snapbrim hat, and Brown Suit wore a dark brown hound's-tooth tweed hat. Soft jowls, pale faces, horn-rim glasses on one, metal-rim glasses on the other. One stood up and the other pushed off from the rail as I came aboard.

  The Green Ripper

  "Mr. McGee?" said Gray Suit.

  The brain is a swift and subtle computer. I have perhaps become more sensitive the clues which exist in mannerisms, stance, expression, hand gestures, and dress than most people. If you are in a line of work where a bad guess can give you a pair of broken elbows, you tend to become a quick study.

  They were not going to try to sell me anything. They did not have the twinkle, the up-front affability. They were not here to enforce one of the idiot rules of a bureaucracy that grows like high-speed cancer. They did not have that look of fatuous satisfacffon and autocratic, patronizing indifference of fellows who come to tell you that you forgot to file Form Z-2324, as amended. Or to tell you that you can't cut down your pine tree without enlisting the services of an approved, accredited, licensed tree surgeon.

  They looked important. As if they had come to buy the marina and put up a research institute.. Lawyers? Executives? They were not very fit. They moved heavily. They looked out of place aboard my houseboat, as if it was a little closer to the out- door life than they cared to be.

  "I am not exactly cheered up by people coming aboard without being asked," I said.

  "Forgive the intrusion, please," Gray Suit said. He had been Me one sitting. 'I am not familiar with marine protocol, Mr. McGee. We were told this is your houseboat, and we have been waiting for you. My name is Toomey. This is Mr. Kline."

  'I am not in the mood for visitors or transactions or conversation about anything."

  '~e are anxious to talc to you," Kline said. He had picked up a dispatch case I had not noticed be- fore. It matched his suit color. Y think * would all go more smoothly if you did not put us in the posi- tion where we would have to insist."

  I studied him. "You are telling me that if you have to insist, you have the leverage to make it stick?"

  "We do indeed," said Toomey. "And we would rather not."

  So I unlocked and we went into the lounge. I have played respectable poker over the years. I won my houseboat on a broken Bush, four pink ones up and a stranger down. I can sense when a bluff is a bluff is a bluff. They had the leverage, and the clothes and manner to go with it.

  Before I invited them to sit down while I changed, I asked to see credentials. They looked vaguely like passports, small with the dark blue cover and great seal of the U. S. of A. Inside were &e color ID pictures, the thumbprint, and the name of an agency I had never heard of before.

  "We do not usually go out into the field,"
Toomey said. "We have access to another agency for investigative matters. But after a conference

  The Green Ripper vith our superior, it was suggested that we take a firsthand look."

  "At what?"

  "Excuse me. I thought you'd guessed."

  "Guessed what?"

  "We want to ask you what you know about Gretel Tuckerman Howard."

  "I just came back from her memorial service."

  "We know that," Kline said.

  "Sit down. 111 be back in a minute."

  I took my time changing into old flannel slacks, Mexican sandals, and an old wool shirt. There was a small chill spot at the nape of my neck. A warniDg of some kind.

  They had moved a couple of chairs close to the coffee table. Kline had a little Sony TC-150 opened up, and he was breaking the seal on a new cassette. "I hope you won't mind that I tape this."