He tilted his chair back and stuck his thumbs inside his belt. He squinted at the desk top and said, "Now if I wasn"t tied hand and foot by the restrictions of this office, I could churn around here and there, telling lies, making jokes, pushing b.u.t.tons, hustling and scrambling. Maybe some pieces would fall out of the box and I"d get to know more. No! Don"t tell me you understand a d.a.m.ned thing, because I don"t want to hear anything about your understanding. There isn"t any understanding. You might come back in here some day and have a chat, if you have some interesting conversation. I get bored a lot in here. I spent fourteen years in a car out on the roads. It gets tiresome in here."

"Before I go, it was kind of a shock to have Noyes trying very hard to kill me, or both of us."

"It knocked Nicky way off balance when Hub took off. He went away for a little while and came back with merchandise. We knew he was dealing, and we got a pretty good customer list. It"s easier to keep your finger on a network you know than to try to unravel the next one that starts up. He got to hitting his own goods. Dr. Sam Stuart knows more about it than I do. He"s worried all to h.e.l.l lately. Something the kids are taking. We had a thirteen-year-old girl sit on a gravel pile last month and swallow gravel, a chunk at a time, until she had four pounds of rock in her belly. Weird. G.o.d only knows who"ll take over where Nicky leaves off. Maybe the others we got will just start handling more."

"Meyer is waiting out there."

"Oh, sure. Send him in. It will only be a few minutes for him. I"ll expect to see you around?"

I nodded. Meaning clear. See me around or he would come and get me. I went out and sent Meyer in. I sat and waited. A st.u.r.dy woman typed slowly. I could just hear the dispatcher. A gigantic deputy came in slowly and said to the woman, "What"s it about?"

"You know what it"s about."

"Not the d.a.m.n charts again. Don"t tell me it"s the charts."

"You"re sixteen over again, Rudy."

"But, d.a.m.n it all, I"m not fat!"

"He says you got to be no more than two twenty-five. Weren"t you in high school with Nick Noyes?"

"Junior and senior. Four years of him."

"He"s dead."

"No s.h.i.t, Marie! OD"d?"

"Hit by a tourist Cadillac while crossing the street."

"You"ve got to be kidding."

Meyer came out, and the deputy went in to take his chewing for being overweight. We went out and suddenly realized we had no transportation. After we phoned a taxi and stood waiting, Meyer said, "What took you so long in there?"

"He thought I was being cute about something, so he went around and around, coming in at me from new angles. He finally decided I was some kind of out-of-town law, so I told him why we"re here."

"So he said go back to Lauderdale?"

"Almost. Not quite. Without saying so, he sort of appointed me official cat"s-paw."

"How nice for you!"

"I didn"t tell him what we"ve got so far."

"Which is next door to nothing at all. What we know changes nothing."

"It locates Lawless as of the next morning, ash.o.r.e and alive."

"Which he is conceding anyway, Travis," Meyer said, opening the cab door.

We stopped at the Galley to make certain that it was really too late to get anything to eat, but it wasn"t. Dave Bellamy said he was delighted to take care of old customers.

Good ol" Dave. He supervised the preparation of a pair of extra-dry Boodles gin martinis. Meyer looked beat. He beamed at the drink when it was placed in front of him. And, as on other occasions when the martini is badly needed, he quoted Bernard De Voto on that subject: "The rat stops gnawing in the wood, the dungeon walls withdraw, the weight is lifted. Your pulse steadies and the sun has found your heart. The day was not bad, the season has not been bad, and there is sense and even promise in going on. Prosit."

"Saved a life. Maybe," I said.

"And almost lost one or two. But didn"t," he said. "About that picnic tomorrow."

"Maybe that lithesome person hates picnics."

"She"s living a picnic out there. I saw a deli next to the supermarket at Baygate Plaza Mall. I can get one of those big wicker hamper things, and a big cooler. I"ll set up a picnic like she never saw before, from shrimp to champagne."

"What you"re talking about is a Care package."

"What do you mean?"

"When you start hauling great quant.i.ties of food to a female person, it means you really care. It always has. I think it is some primal instinct. The hunter bringing spoils to the cave."

"Hmmm. Meyer, would it offend your sense of fitness if I called Gretel a girl?"

"Instead of a person or a woman or some such? You want to be patronizing and chauvinistic, eh? Look down upon her?"

"Cut it out, Meyer. I can go with all that approach right up to a point. When it doesn"t mean much one way or another. You know. But here we have one of the truly great, all-time, record-breaking, incomparable girls. And I want to call her a girl."

"And take her a ton of food. Ah, me. Ah, so. And so it goes. Let"s order before I faint from hunger. You are a child of your times, McGee. And so am I. Call her what you will, but call me a waiter."

Fourteen.

THERE ARE days you can"t ever forget. It doesn"t mean that anything really startling has to happen. It was a great glowing golden day in May. A Sunday numbered twenty-two. There you are in the midst of life, and one of those days comes rolling at you, and it is just like one of the magical days of childhood, like the first Monday after school is out.

We couldn"t warn John Tuckerman and Gretel Howard we were coming. We had to hope they"d be glad to see us when we showed up an hour before noon. And they were. Demonstrably glad. She knew how to accept gifts. None of this "Aw, you shouldn"t have." She went through the hamper and the cooler, giving little yelps of delight. "Hey! How about this? Wow! Look here, Johnny! Hey, you crazy guys. A jar of red caviar! Have you gone nuts, bonkers, utterly strange?"

I was glad that Meyer had realized it would be best not to bring any booze, or any beer. Tuckerman seemed slightly dazed. He wore a gentle smile. He rocked back and forth, heel to toe. You had to speak to him twice to get an answer.

"I said is the fishing any good?"

"Oh. Sure. I mean, I guess so. Haven"t done much good. But they"re out there, all right. They"re out there."

He looked much better. It took me a few moments to realize that not only had he shaved; his mustache and hair had been trimmed back a little. He seemed to want to be part of the festivities, but he could not quite keep track of the chatter. We were not trying to dazzle him with repartee or profundities. It was just your normal picnic conversation, but it was as if he were a foreigner among us, looking back and forth with a slightly baffled expression, able to speak the language, only not all that well.

One odd little incident happened. Gretel stopped in the middle of a sentence and stared at John. He sat with his eyes squeezed shut and his jaw knotted. She put her hand on his rigid arm.

"Are you going to be all right?" she asked.

He nodded. And in a little while the tensions went out of him. I asked her about that later, after we had swum down the beach and were walking back, and she said that it was hallucinations. They happened now and again. Some sort of a cousin of delirium tremens, the result of the booze with which he had almost killed himself. She told me that was the reason she did not want to leave him alone. She didn"t want to take him into town yet, or go in without him. Hence her magic washing machine. She thought that I had guessed the problem, and that was why I had brought enough food for fifteen people. By great exercise of character I made myself admit I hadn"t guessed it.

We sat on the side of a dune. We could have been the only two people in the world. I wanted to kiss her. My heart was in my throat. I felt fifteen again. I looked into her eyes and saw her amused acceptance of us, and knew I could. It was immediately intense, astonishing both of us, as was admitted later. We lay back against the slope of the dune, as closely enclasped as we could get, and it was all very delicious for a long time, and then it began to get a little bit too yeasty for the time and place. "Hey!" she said in a m.u.f.fled voice. "Hey you! McGee!" And then, with a muscular squirm, she kicked us over far enough so that we began rolling, and we rolled over and over down to the bottom of the dune and had to go into the Gulf again to rinse off the sand that had caked on our sweaty bodies.

It was a great day. Eating and swimming and napping, walking and talking. A simple day. I can remember the precise pattern of the white grains of sand on the round tan meat of her shoulder, and the patterns of the droplets of seawater on her long thigh. Gretel filled my eyes. I learned her by heart, wrists and ankles, mouth corners and hairline, the high arches and slender feet, downy hollow of her back, tidy ears, flat to the good skull.

There would never be enough time in all the world for us to say to each other all the things that needed saying, time to tell all that had happened to each of us before the other had appeared-a sudden shining in the midst of life. In so many ways she was like a lady lost long ago, so astonishingly like her-not in appearance as much as in the climate of the heart that it was like being given another chance after the gaming table had already been closed for good. She had a great laugh. It was a husky, full-throated bray, an explosion of laughter, uncontrolled. And she laughed at the right places.

The second strange incident happened in late afternoon when the four of us were up on the roofed deck of the cottage, sitting in the ragged old deck chairs and the unraveling wicker ones, squinting into the sun glare off the broad Gulf.

Meyer had talked a little bit about the odds and ends we had unearthed, Mr. Wedley recovering his red Mazda, the items Kristin had left behind, DeeGee Walloway"s guess as to what had happened. Things like that. I realized that Meyer was sidestepping the big dramatic incident. When he ran down I said, "Leaving it to me?"

"Why not?" he said.

"Leaving what?" Gretel asked.

"Nothing at all. Really." I became Lawrence of Arabia. "Chap tried to blow some large ugly shotgun holes in us last night. Number twelve. Range of fifteen feet. Missed. Wounded our vehicle."

"He missed," Meyer said, "because that slothful-looking beach b.u.m sitting there with the rotten imitation accent has one of the most fantastic reaction times you would ever care to see. I heard a strange little clicking behind us and suddenly McGee slammed into me, and as I was tumbling along the asphalt I heard a deafening pair of explosions."

She had worn a half smile, antic.i.p.ating some sort of joke. But when she realized Meyer was quite serious, her jaw dropped and her eyes went wide in consternation. "How terrible!" she said.

"He jumped up and ran over to the fellow and yanked the gun away from him before he could reload and aim again, and the fellow ran right out into the Bay Street traffic and got hit by a car. We saw him get hit. We knew no one could survive that kind of impact, especially a man that heavy. He died on the operating table."

"Who was it?" Tuckerman asked.

"Nick Noyes."

Tuckerman boggled at me. "Nick" he said. "Nick. Nick." It was not a sound of anguish or dismay. It was a puzzled expression he wore, as if he were trying to remember something about Noyes.

"He worked for Hub too, didn"t he?" Gretel said. "In construction or something? Johnny, didn"t the two of you hang around together after Hub left? Isn"t that what you told me?"

I sat between Tuckerman and his sister. Tuckerman reached over and put his right hand on my forearm and clamped down. I would not have believed him that powerful. "Nicky is dead? Really?"

"Very dead, John."

The grip slowly softened and he took his hand away. His smile came slowly, and grew and grew. It was one of the contagious smiles of childhood; a big candy-apple, cotton-candy, roller-coaster smile.

"I won"t have to kill him!" John Tuckerman said joyously.

Gretel inhaled sharply. "Johnny!"

"Well, I won"t. You heard him, Gretel. Nicky is dead, and I won"t have to even think about killing him any more. That"s the best thing I"ve heard in a long time."

"Why would you think you had to kill him?"

"Oh, I"ve known I"d have to."

"But why?"

"Because he was after me."

"After you? How?"

"Just after me, dammit."

"But if he was after you, dear, wouldn"t he have come out here?"

"Oh, he"s been here. A lot. Sneaking around. You wouldn"t know about it. I didn"t tell you. I didn"t want to worry you, that"s all. Now he won"t be around here any more. Unless..." He stopped and stared at me and began to glower.

"What"s the matter, John?"

"You two could be helping him. You could be lying, to make it all easier for him."

We couldn"t ease his suspicions until Meyer remembered he had the Sunday edition of the Bay Journal down in the car. He got it, and Tuckerman was at last willing to admit Noyes was dead. He went down to ground level and climbed the dune and sat just over the crest of it with his back to us, silhouetted against the sea glare.

"Let me apologize," Gretel said. "We"ve been through this before. I thought he was over it. So I asked about Nick Noyes, trying to lead John into it in... a less squirrelly fashion. From what I gather, Nick looked John up to commiserate with him, to get drunk together and cuss Hub Lawless and talk about their bad luck. That was while John was still living at the Vista, and before he had smashed up his car. I think Nick suspected that Hub"s disappearance was planned and that my brother was in on it somehow. I think he was trying to pry information out of John. John is quite sure he did not reveal anything. He"s not really sure, of course, but he thinks Nick Noyes was so angry at the whole thing, and so sure Hub had left with Miss Petersen, that if he thought John had any part in it, he would have blown the whistle. It would be actionable, wouldn"t it?"

"Accessory to fraud, or conspiracy to defraud," Meyer said. "Something ominous at any rate."

"Also, that Wright Fletcher, the Sheriff"s deputy, was out here prodding away at Johnny. He came several times after I was here, and I finally told him to make an arrest or stay away. He didn"t seem to have anything to go on except the idea that, inasmuch as John was Hub"s best friend, John had to know about anything Hub planned and did."

"He believes Noyes was out here prowling around?"

"Practically every night. He was very very sure one night. He said he could hear him. We"d had a hard rain earlier in the evening. It dappled the sand and took out footprints and tire tracks. There was just that one hard rain. The next morning I made him walk the perimeter with me. There wasn"t a footprint or a tire track for a hundred yards in any direction. I almost convinced him Nick hadn"t been here. At noontime he told me that it was pretty obvious Nick had a special pair of shoes with soles which imitated the marks rain makes. He was serious. It breaks my heart. He was always so d.a.m.ned sane and practical and fun. At times-I don"t know-I get the feeling he"s putting me on, that it is all some kind of a weird game, and then I will realize he means it, he really means it all."

"Any idea why he thinks Noyes was after him?"

"No. None. It"s an obsession. Nick was after him, just after him. No reason. Look at him out theref G.o.d only knows what sick thoughts are crawling through his, head. He"s better than he was. He let me trim his hair. You noticed? He finally got over the idea that if it was trimmed the hair ends would bleed. Yeck. Every day a little bit better, I keep telling myself."

Aside from those two incidents, it was one of your great days. We stayed into the night and built a fire of driftwood on the beach. A sea breeze kept the bugs away from us. We had stars by the billion. Meyer was in his best form. He came up with a tale I had never heard before, about a time years ago when he had attended a monetary conference in Tokyo. He was slated to deliver a paper he had written on the effect of interest rates on gross national product in the emerging nations. It was over an hour long. The taxi driver took him that morning to the hotel where he was to deliver his paper. Eager underlings led him to a big hall. He was pleased and surprised at the size of the audience. He gave his talk, shook hands with what seemed to be dozens of j.a.panese men, and left, still savoring the applause.

That afternoon he was called before the executive committee. They wanted to know why he had failed to appear and deliver his paper. He said he had. They proved he hadn"t. He began to realize that he should have been made suspicious by the fact that the audience was entirely j.a.panese, quite a few of them were women, and, of the men who shook his hand afterward, not one of them thanked him in English. And he remembered a small elderly j.a.panese man who stood in the wings while he talked and kept looking at his watch in a troubled way.

Meyer then told us of the lengths he went to to find the hotel again. He never found it. So he would never know whom he had talked to, or what they had expected. He had always remembered how their applause had warmed his heart. A polite people indeed.

He did it well. He had Gretel chuckling and groaning a long time after he finished. When it was late, she made some chicken sandwiches for us to take along, so we could collapse into bed at the Resort.

On the way back along the nine miles of lumps and potholes, I realized how ready I was for sleep. "You and Gretel make an extraordinary couple," Meyer said, apropos of nothing at all.

"How?"

"Hard to describe, exactly. You give the impression of having been close for years. You are tuned to her in some fashion. The two of you look larger than life somehow. Of course, you are larger than couples one runs across every day. There is some sort of aura about you two. You had it in place when you came back down the beach that first day. I don"t know why it should, but it makes me feel drab."

"For a drab man, you tell a funny j.a.panese story."

"I felt compelled to do my best. She makes you want to dig deeply into your bag of tricks. With no insistence at all, she seems to demand some kind of excellence."

"I don"t happen to have any of that around."