John D MacDonald Travis McGee 09 Pale Gray for Guilt

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badly nourished. In spite of their placid, dazed, beatific smiles and
grimaces, they were a kind of curious sadness, in their weird, bright patterns
of love-paint on the scrawn of flesh, in their protest bangles and their
disaffiliated bells, crushing the flower blossoms in a dreamy imitation of
adult acts that for them had all been bleached of any significance or purpose.
The rites of the strobe, frozen in such a sharpness it caught forever a
wistful dirtiness of knuckles, the calico of bad bleach jobs, the moles and
the blemishes and the sharp, helpless angle of shoulder blade. This was not a
rebellion against mechanization, or emotional fraud. This was denying life
itself in all eras and all cultures, and instead of being evil or outrageous
was merely empty, bland and slightly saurian somehow, as though in a vain
attempt to warm the blood that had begun to turn cooler in some gigantic and
total regression that would take us all back through geological time, back
into the sea where life began.
Said Tom, "Ain't that Arlie the damnedest sight a man would ever want to
behold?"
"Unforgettable," I said, and put the envelope on the edge of the desk. "I've
been waiting around to ask permission to leave your area, Sheriff. Here's the
address where you can get me. I'll come back if you need me. But now I'd like
to drive up to Frostproof and see Jan Bannon."
"Get your business done with Press?"
"Yes, thanks."
"Well... I guess there's no call to keep you waiting around. Thank you for
your cooperation, Mr. McGee."
"Thank you for your courtesy and consideration, Sheriff."
When I phoned ahead, Connie said that Janine had heard the news and that she
was very upset and puzzled. I said it would be well after midnight before I
could make it, and she said that it had been too much of a long, hard day to
wait up. I told her my day had been on the same order, and told her that
everything had gone very smoothly so far.
It was ten after one when I got there and turned under the arch and through
the glare of the gate light and drove to the big house. The night was cool and
the stars looked high and small and indifferent.
Jan stood in the open doorway waiting for me. And she leaned up to rest her
cheek for a moment against mine, with a quick, soft touch of her lips. "You
must be exhausted, Trav!"
"And you shouldn't have waited up."
"I couldn't have slept."
I went in and sat down into the depth and softness of a big leather couch.
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There were two red embers among the silvery ashes of the hearth. She wore a
floor-length navy robe with a white collar. She said, "Connie left orders to
give you a great wallop of bourbon to unwind on." I said it sounded great. She
drifted out of sight and I heard the clink of cubes and the guggle of a
generous dose.
"Water?"
"Just the ice, thanks."
She brought it over and fixed the cushions at the end of the couch and told me
to lie back and put my feet up. She moved a footstool close. The light behind
her from the corner lamp, the only one on in the room, shone through the fine
ends of her cropped black hair. Her face was in shadow.
I sipped the strong drink and told her about Deputy Hazzard. "That's what I
couldn't believe," she said. "He and the older one, with the funny name. Not
the Sheriff."
"Windhorn?"
"Yes. They were the ones who... came out with the padlocks and the notices.
And he, the young one, seemed so very shy and nice and troubled about
everything. There was no point in taking it out on them. They had their
orders."
"Had he been out there before?"
"Several times, yes. To serve papers, and the time they checked to see about
the licenses we have to have for the houseboats. A lanky boy with a long face,
kind of a red, lumpy face, but sweet. But very official about what he had to
do. All leather and jingling and creaking."
"That reconstruction of it doesn't fit," I said. "It doesn't fit Tush."
"I know. He never got mad that way. Not like me. I fly off the handle and want
to hit everything I can reach. He'd just get very very quiet and sad-looking
and he'd walk slowly away. It's better for me to... to be absolutely positive
once and for all that he didn't kill himself, Trav. But it just seems to be
such... a stinking trivial way to die, to be killed by that harmless-looking
young man."
"Most of the ways people die are kind of dingy and trivial, Jan."
"It just shouldn't have been that way for Tush. But how in the world did that [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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