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

  "Aha!" he said. "Tragic jigger of a man."

  "Meyer, I know what you are trying to do, and I forgive you. But don't keep it up. Understand?"

  He stared and finally nodded. "All right. I was out of line. A transparent, clumsy attempt to cheer the troops. What I came over for, aside from dispensing hollow cheer, was to complain about the bureaucracy. And to give you a conundrum to occupy your mind."

  "A riddle?"

  "Somewhat. I was on the phone at a reasonable morning hour, calling old friends in Washington.

  The Green Ripper

  There are a lot of offices up there. And strange titles. Deputy Director to the Assistant Director in charge of the Policy Committee on Administration. The phone directory is gigantic. I gave them the in- formation and set them to scurrying about. I gave the same mission to three quite different people in three quite different departments, and then waited for the results. The last call came in fifteen minutes ago. That phone number they gave you is not an operating number. There is not now and never has been, at least in living memory, any Select Commit- tee on Special Resources. The central register of all civil servants has no Robert A. Toomey, but it does have two Richard E. Klines. One is twenty-five and works for the Department of the Interior in Alaska. The other is sixty-one and based in Guam. Interesting?"

  My head was too full of fragments, like a kaleidoscope, making its bright patterns of nonsense. I had decided that when they had visited me, my reaction had been paranoid.

  'I don't know what to think, Meyer. Don't they have departments sort of hidden away, without public records and so forth?"

  "So why give you a bad phone number?"

  "Maybe you would like to try to make sense out of it."

  "Too many parts missing," he said. He got up and roamed around the lounge, sighing audibly, pausing to look out the port, then resuming his circuit. "High-level inquiry," he said.

  "What?"

  "Excuse me. I'm talking to myself."

  He roamed and muttered and finally sat down. He gave me a bright false smile. "It's all too melodramatic. There is but one way I can make the parts fit together, and it offends me."

  "See if it offends me."

  "It will more than offend, Travis. All right. Postulate X. X is an unknown force, group, movement, with unknown objectives. X is powerful and has high-priority objectives. Secrecy is imperative. Brother Titus represents the syndicate in Brussels, and he came down here from another part of the country to take a look at the land and make contact with Mr. Ladwigg. The odds against anyone seeing him and recognizing him are astronomical. But that is one way in which life is consistently quirky. It keeps serving up unlikely coincidences. Gretel told us her story about Brother Titus on December seventh. And she said she had seen him last week,' if I remember correctly. Not 'this week,' last week.' The last week in November. Brother Titus went back to X and reported being recognized. For some reason, this created a great danger to the high-priority objective. They had a wee} in which to plan and move. Their representatives were in the area by mid-week, perhaps, or earlier. On Saturday morning Ladwigg fell off his bike and died. Gretel was

  68 ' - The Green Ripper taken ill on Saturday. They are the only two, we can assume, who saw Titus face to face. Toomey and Kline came here Saturday to find out if Gretel told you about him. From what you told me of the questioning, they would have gotten the information from anyone less wary than you."

  "What the hell are you trying to say?"

  "I told you the reconstruction is so melodramatic * offends me. If you had told them all about Brother Titus, as related by GreteL right now you might be in the hospital, fading fast."

  I thought it over. I could not make it seem real. "Okay, why the charade? If what is going on is so important, why not just wait until dark, thump my skull, and let me go out on the tide?"

  '`They do not want to create curiosity. A man falls off his bike and dies. One of the young women who work for him falls ill and dies. The authorities can accept that as routine. But what if the womants best friend should then die accidentally, or be taken ill in the same way?"

  "The authorities would assume the friend caught it from her, whatever it was."

  "But that would create a big flap. Gretel's illness and death were reported, you said, to the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta."

  "By Dr. Tower."

  "Having it turn out to be contagious would make headlines."

  "Mental games are your specialty, Meyer. But it does not amuse me one goddamn bit to have you making lot of assumptions based on Gretel being murdered, poisoned somehow. For God's sake, you saw her that one time there! She was sick. She was terribly, terribly ill. Know what her last words were? Em burning up. I feel terrible, Trav. Terrible.' Great last words to remember. Comforting. readmit, she could have mentioned Titus to those people out there at Bonnie Brae. She could have asked about him. She could have asked the other partner, or Slater. And she could have told them about the fellow just the way she told us."

  "The way she told us, remember, was to start by saying she thought there was something funny going on out there. And she would not be likely to bring that up with the people she was working for. Or with. And one good way to prove I am totally wrong is to find out if Broffski and Hater have been questioned, just as you were. I don't think that pair came here from out of town to talk to you alone."

  I looked at him. 'If I thought for one moment that somebody had... poisoned her..."

  "I am not sitting here, Travis, trying to dream up a cheap plot line for a grade Z movie. You asked me to try to make sense out of it. I can malce melodramatic sense out of it, if I make the assumption that both Gretel and Ladwigg were killed. If they weren't, the sense of it all eludes me."

  '~You're serious['

  The Green Ripper

  "Enough to want to try to prove it out one way or the other."

  "Where would you start?"

  "By finding out if Broffski and Slaterwere questioned too."

  So once again I drove out to Bonnie Brae. I could not have guessed how difficult it would be. Memories of her were of a painful clarity, a vividness in the back of the mind.

  Slater, the manager, was out for lunch Stanley Broffski was in his office. What did we wish to speak to him about? the woman asked. I said it involved some negotiations with Herman Ladwigg. She trotted off and soon reappeared, beckoning us in.

  Broffski sat behind a big white desk covered with piles of correspondence and blueprints. He was plump to the point of bursting out of his sport shirt. He had black hair combed across his forehead and a Groucho mustache. He had an air of jolly impatience, amused exasperation.

  He waved us into chairs, saying, "Honest to Christ, I wish to hell Herm had the habit of writing things down. Nothing against him, you understand. Nobody ever had a better partner. But he earned around too much in his head alla time! It's driving me up the wall trying to find out who did what to who."

  'I suppose," Meyer said, 'Lou divided up all the responsibilities you have here."

  'I've got the fat farm and the tennis club, and we'll have a riding stable going pretty soon. They're working on the stalls down there now." He swiveled his chair half around and pointed through the wide window to an old barn a hundred yards away. Two pickup trucks and a van were parked there, near a pile of fresh lumber. Off to the left a clutch of fatties trotted heavily down a long gentle slope. They were mostly women in their middle years, with a few men and a few adolescents, boys and girls. Despite the age differences, the fat at that distance looked the same, bouncing and flapping under the sweaty shorts and shirts. A lean woman was gal- loping along beside them, clapping her hands, running back and forth.

  "We work the tract-house part together," he said. I mean, we did. Herm handled the land sales. He was a wizard at that. We're all going to miss him Of course, we both worked with the manager, Morse Slater. Morse keeps evening running smooth If he wasn't around at this time, Pd be whipped. We lost a hell of a good
girl right after we lost Herm. Some kind of legionnaire flu, they say. She wasn't here long, but Morse says she was the greatest. Everything from doing the billing to teaching tennis. Hell, it's a sound operation here. Everything will turn out roses. We've got a nice community coming along. We're keeping a lot of

  The Green Ripper open space, and nothing tacky gets built. What was it you had going with Herm,gentlemen? Was it something to do with the commercial area?"

  "Actually," Meyer said, "we're trying to find out who it was who flew in almost three weeks ago, maybe November twenty-eighth or -ninth, to talk to Mr. Ladwigg, and flew out the next morning."

  "In a little blue airplane," Broffski said. His voice was no longer amiable, his face no longer jolly. "I am getting damn sick and tired of that tucking blue airplane. I am going to close that strip. Who needs it?"

  He bounded up and went around us to his office door. "Morse! Get in here a minute."

  Morse Slater came in, recognized me at once, and came over to me. I stood up, and he shook my hand and said, 'Tm terribly sorry I had to miss the service, Mr. McGee. I thought until the last minute I would make it, but something came up."

  I said, "Sure. Understood. Meyer, this is Morse Slater. I told you about him."

  As they shook hands Broffski said, "What's going on? What service?"

  "Gretel Howard," I told him.

  There was a sudden look of comprehension. "McGee! Right. I heard about you from her. What has all this got to do with the tucking blue airplane?"

  Meyer said politely, "Has someone else been interested in it?"

  '~e had the FAA out here. You tell them what it was about, Morse."

  We all sat down and Morse said, "Apparently it was some sort of serious violation of the air safety rules, flying close to a commercial liner, something like that. It was a Mr. Ryan from Washington, a field investigator, and they had traced the plane here. He was a very stubborn mam He couldn't seem to accept the idea that no one except Mr. Ladwigg knew where the airplane came from or who was flying it. He insisted on talking to some of the other employees, and he even had me take him over to the Ladwigg home and let him interrogate Mrs. Ladwigg."

  "Catherine didn't know from nothing," Broffski said. "She never saw the guy. She said Herm put him up in the guest wing and talked business in there from the time he arrived until late at night. Herm told her not to bother about dinner, and when she checked the guest wing after the man had left, she found paper bags and cups from one of the fried chicken places down the Drive, so she thinks Herm went out and brought food back. The next morning early she heard Herm drive out in the Toyota. All Herm ever told her was that it was a big deal for a good-sized tract, and they were talk- ing construction and deadlines. Damned imposition for him to go bothering Catherine."

  Morse Slater said, "Ryan said to me that he wanted to find out if the aircraft had flown in from

  The Green Ripper the islands with a load of coke or grass. He said he wanted to get that pilot out of the air. He just couldn't understand why we didn't have some record of the identification on the plane. I showed him the strip, of course. A grassy strip, an old shed, a wind sock, and a padlocked gas pump. There's nobody there to check anything in or out."

  "We let Ryan look through Herm's desk notes and appointment calendar," Stanley Broffski said. "He said he'd come back with a subpoena if we didn't. There wasn't a clue."

  '~hen was Ryan here?" Meyer asked.

  Slater stared at the ceiling for a moment. "Last Thursday, the thirteenth. He disrupted the day, most of it."

  "Remember his whole name?" Meyer asked.

  "Ryan, Howard C. In his forties. Pale, broad, soft. Very autocratic. An irritating fellow."

  'A still don't understand why you two men are here," Broffski said. "Why should you give a shit who flew in and out in that airplane? What should it have to do with you?"

  I reached into the deepest pocket in one of the old bags of tricks and came up with a useful inspiration. I leaned forward, adjusting my face to maximum leaden sincerity, and I secretly apologized to Gretel. "Mr. Broffski, I was able to be with Gretel for a little time every hour, while she was dying. Toward the end there, she came sort of half-awake, and she said, 'Blue airplane. Blue airplane.' I thought she was out of her head from the fever. If she wasn't, then she was trying to tell me something, I don't know what it was, and then when I heard from somebody at the funeral that a blue airplane had landed here the week before she died, I thought... well, it wouldn't be any harm in asking, because you were her friends."

  "No harm! No harm at all!" Broffski said. "She was one terrific personality. She had star quality around here. Now I know why you're asking, but I still don't see what it has to do with anything. Herm knew who came in, and it seems as if whoever it was wanted to keep a real low profile."

  "I wonder why," Morse Slater said, frowning.

  'who knows?" Broffski said. "Maybe some kind of deal he wasn't ready to tell us about. So if somebody is still interested, they'll contact us. If they do, I hope it's better than that Brussels deal of his."

  "Brussels?" Meyer asked politely.

  "Twenty acres, undeveloped, on the west side of the property," Slater said. "We're holding a ten per cent deposit in an escrow account. The purchaser is something called the Morgen Group. Morgen with an 'e.' "

  'fascinating name," Meyer said.

  "What's so fascinating about it?" Broffski asked.

  'It's an obsolete land-measurement term which used to be used in Holland and in South Africa A morgen is approximately two acres, and the translation, of course, is 'morning.' It derived from ap

  The Green Ripper proximately how much land one man could plow with horses in a single morning."

  Broffsti stared at him. "You got a lot of stuff like that in your head? What line of work are you in?"

  'Em economist. Semiretired."

  "The address is a bank in Brussels. I tried to pick it up where Herm left off, and I made four phone calls to that bank. They deny any knowledge of the Morgen Group. All they would say is I should write to that name care of the bank, and if there was a Morgen Group, it would probably be delivered to them. I sent a cable, and the call-back on it said it was undeliverable. I wrote, and we're waiting."

  Meyer nodded and said, '`The Morgen Group is probably equivalent in law to what we call a blind trust here. And Brussels is quietly taking the place of Switzerland. Their secrecy is guaranteed by Belgian law. They have number accounts and investment services and they have no reverse interest, as the Swiss do. Thus, with a blind trust, there is a double layer of legal confidentiality. Impenetrable."

  'Cathy so secret?" Broffski said. "Harm told me that a bunch of Belgians wanted to build their own hotel-club on the twenty acres, so the members could come here on vacation."

  "Maybe it was going to be a front for something," Slater said.

  Broffski looked across the desk at Slater, a look of annoyance and derision. "Sure. Right here in our back yard they are going to build a warehouse for the drug business. Or a studio to make porn movies.'9

  "Sorry," Slatersaid. But he didn't look sorry.

  Broffski sighed. "Well, there isn't anything I can do about it. The land sits there. Eleven months from now we can take the money out of escrow and put the land on the market again. Or develop it. Whatever." He stood up and reached across the desk. "Sorry we can't give you any more help." He shook hands, and we went out with Morse Slater.

  "Can we look around the property?" Meyer asked.

  "Certainly," he said, and gave us a brochure with a map of Bonnie Brae, showing the existing roads and the ones to come later. He pointed to the area on the map where the Belgians had planned to buy and maybe still would. We thanked him and went out into the silver daylight, squinting against the high hard dazzle of the sky.

  78

  6

  We walked across a field to the airstrip. We walked through a healthy growth of sand spurs and stopped and picked them off socks and pants cuffs whe
n we got to a cleared space. Meyer thumped the surface of the landing strip: with his heel.

  "Probably some kind of soil cement," I said. '~You plow it up, mix the cement with the dirt, grade it, water it, roll it down. Quick and easy."

  We could hear the unrhythmic whacking of a lot of hammers as workmen were framing a house a hundred yards away.

  Meyer said, "If Ladwigg was coming over here to the strip from those houses there, cross-country, he would have to pass that patch of bushes and palmetto over there."

  We went over to look for tire tracks. They would be about three weeks old. There was a faint pattern in the heavy grass, a mark of rugged tread in dried mud, and some grease stains on the tallest grass.