"MacDonald, John - Travis McGee 06 - Bright Orange for the Shroud" - читать интересную книгу автора (MacDonald John D)

Again the tears of weakness. "Oh Christ, Trav, I..."

"We'll go into it later, boy. You get out of the clothes and into a hot shower. Then you eat some eggs. Then you sleep. Okay?"

"I don't want to be a..."

"Arthur, you could begin to bore me. Shut up."

After he was asleep, I took a good look at his arms. Big H could pull a man down quickly. No needle marks. But it didn't have to mean anything. Only the eyedropper group, the ones who pick the big vein open with a pin, acquire scars. Any tidy soul with a decent hypo and enough sense to use an alcohol swab afterward can go unmarked indefinitely, as any urban cop can tell you. He was still a little grimy. It was going to take more than one shower, or two. The beard stubble didn't help either. I checked through his clothes. They had been cheap originally. The labels were from Naples, Florida. He had a flat cigarette package with three one-inch butts carefully stowed therein. He had a match folder from Red's Diner in Homestead.

He had two pennies and some lint. I rolled his shoes up in the clothing, carried the bundle out at arm's length and dropped it into the trash bin on the dock. Then washed my hands.

The sun was going down. I went topside. The cockpit cocktail hour, with music and girl-laughter from neighbor cruisers. As I drove the remaining screws home without working up a sweat, I kept thinking of Arthur Wilkinson as I had seen him last, over a year ago.

A big fellow, big as I am, but not the same physical type. Slow, awkward, uncoordinatedЧa mild and rather pedantic guy. I could remember coming across a few of the same breed way back in high school basketball days. Coaches would hustle them on the basis of size alone. They were very earnest, but they had no balance. You could catch them just right, with the hip, and they would go blundering and crashing off the court. For them, high school was the final experience in any body-contact sport.

Arthur Wilkinson had been a member of the group for a few months. I met him when he was trying to decide whether or not to invest some money in a marina enterprise. He was going around, talking earnestly to boat people. He surveyed me at drinking time, and stayed, and came back other timesЧcame back once too often, perhaps, that time somebody had brought Wilma around.

He had told me about himself. Upstate New York boy. Little Falls. Department store family. Got a degree from Hamilton College. Went to work in the store. Became engaged to a doctor's daughter. Didn't particularly like or dislike the department store trade. Future all lined out, nailed down. Then it all fell apart, one piece at a time, beginning with the death of his widower father, then his girl marrying another guy, until, restless, irritable, unhappy, he had sold out his controlling interest to a chain, liquidated other properties and headed for Florida.

He got along fine with the group. He was amiable and very decent. We felt protective about him. He had been schooled for survival in Little Falls, and might indeed have been formidably adapted to that environment, but away from it there was something displaced about him. He was perfectly frank about his problem. He had left, after taxes, almost a quarter of a million

dollars. It was in good solid securities, bringing in, after personal income taxes, nearly nine thousand a year. But he felt it shameful to squat on it. He wanted to move it around, put some work with it, make it produce. Some of the genes of his great granddaddy kept prodding him.

The group changes; the flavor remains the same. When he was in the pack, he was the gatherer of driftwood for the beach picnics, the one who drove drunks home, the one who didn't forget the beer, the understanding listener who gets girl-tears on his beach coat, the pigeon good for the small loan, the patsy who comes calling and ends up painting the fence. All groups seem to have one. He had a fair complexion, blushed readily. He always looked scrubbed. He laughed at all the jokes, nearly always at the right place, even though he had heard them before. In short, a very nice guy, that Arthur Wilkinson. Part of the group, but nobody got really close to him. He had that little streak of reserve, of keeping the ultimate secrets. Liquor might have unlocked him except for one thing. When he took one over his limit, he fell smilingly, placidly, irrevocably asleep. And smiled in his sleep.

I could remember that for a little while Arthur and Chookie McCall had something going. She had just finished a dancing engagement at the Bahama Room at the Mile O'Beach. She's big, beautifully proportioned, vastly healthy, a dynamo brunette with a stern and striking face. Chook had fought with Frank Durkin and he had taken off and she was rebounding, and certainly Arthur was a better deal" than Frank. Without a dime, Arthur would have been worth nine Frank Durkins. Why do so many great gals latch onto a Frank Durkin to mess up their lives? When she got a three-week gig up at Daytona Beach perhaps Arthur could have gone with her, but he didn't make the right moves. Then Wilma Ferner moved in when Chook was away....

There are a lot more Arthur Wilkinsons in the world than there are Wilma Ferners. And this .Wilma was a classic example of the type. Little, but with a bone structure so delicate she made a hundred and five pounds look like a lush abundance.

Fine white-blonde hair always in that initial state of disarray which creates the urge to mess it up completely. Husky theatrical voice which covered about two octaves in what was, for her, normal conversation. Lots of anecdotes, in which she played every part, face as mobile as a clown's, making lots of gestures, flinging herself around, the gestures seemingly awkward at times until one noticed that they kept that ripe little body in a constant state of animation and display, a project given a continuous assist by her wardrobe. There were little traces of accent in her normal speech, when she wasn't imitating someone, but it seemed to vary from day to day. Hold a small clear wineglass of Harvey's Bristol Milk up to the light and it is pretty close to the color of her eyes. And, once you got past all the crinkling and sparkling and winking, her eyes had just about as much expression as still wine.

She came in on a big Huckins out of Savannah, amid boat guests in various conditions of disrepair, much of the damage evidently being accomplished by people beating people in the face with their fists. She moved into a hotel room ashore, in the Yankee Clipper, and after the cruiser took off without her, she somehow managed to affix herself to our group, saying that the lovely people on the Huckins were going to pick her up on their way back from Nassau, and she had begged off because she could not endure Nassau one more stinking time.

In that venerable and useful show biz expression, she was always on. The gals seemed to have an instinctive wariness of her. The men were intrigued. She claimed to have been born in Calcutta, mentioned the tragic death of a father in the Australian diplomatic service, mentioned directly and obliquely her own careers as set designer in Italy, fashion coordinator in Brussels, photographer's model in Johannesburg, society and fashion editor on a newspaper in Cairo, private secretary to the wife of one of the presidents of Guatemala. As she cooed, twisted, bounced, exclaimed, imitated, chuckled, I must admit that I had a few moments of very steamy curiosity. But there were too many warning flags up. The pointed nails curved too extremely over the soft tips of the little fingers. The poses and pauses were too carefully timed. And there was just a bit too much effervescence and charm. Perhaps if she had come along

a few years earlierЧbefore I had seen and learned all kinds of con, before I had found some of the sicknesses no clinic can identify...

So we wondered who would nail it. Or vice versa. She was carrying a weapon at port arms, waiting for a target of opportunity.

I remember a very late night when I sat alone with my hairy economist friend named Meyer in the cockpit of his small cruiser which he christened The John Maynard Keynes, after a beach time when Wilma had been so totally on she had sparkled like the moonlit surf.

"Wonder how old she is?" I asked idly.

"My friend, I have kept meticulous track of all pertinent incidents. To have done what she claims to have done, she is somewhere between one hundred and five and one hundred and seven. I added five more years tonight."

"Psychopathic liar, Meyer?"

"An inexact science uses inexact terms. I spit on parlor expertise, Travis."