Bright Orange for the Shroud by John D. MacDonald Read Free Book Online

memory.
    “Like I told you, Trav, I had the idea we were going to go farther away, maybe the southwest, but after we stayed overnight in Naples, she said maybe it would be nice to rent a beach house for a while. Because it was April we could probably findsomething nice. What she found was nice, all right. Isolated, and a big stretch of private beach, and a pool. It was seven hundred a month, plus utilities. That included the man who came twice a week to take care of the grounds, but then there was another two hundred and fifty for the woman who came in about noon every day but Sunday.”
    “Name?”
    “What? Oh … Mildred. Mildred Mooney. Fifty, I’d guess. Heavy. She had a car and did the marketing and cooking and housework. She’d serve dinner and then leave and do the dishes when she came the next day. So it came to maybe twelve hundred a month for operating expenses. And about that much again for Wilma. Hairdresser and dressmaker, cosmetics, mail orders to Saks, Bonwits, places like that. Masseuse, a special wine she likes. And shoes. God, the shoes! So say in round figures there’s twenty-five hundred a month going out, which would be thirty thousand a year, three times what was coming in. After wedding expenses, and trading for the convertible, I had five thousand cash aside from the securities, but it was melting away so fast it scared me. I estimated it would be gone before the end of June.”
    “You tried to make her understand?”
    “Of course. Wilma would stare at me as if I was talking Urdu. She couldn’t seem to comprehend. It made me feel cheap and small-minded. She said it wasn’t any great problem. In a little while I could start looking around and find something where I could make all the money we’d ever need. I was worried—but it was all kind of indistinct. The only thing that really seemed to count was just … having her. In the beginning, it was so damned … wonderful.”
    “But it changed?”
    “Yes. But I don’t want to talk about that.”
    “Later?”
    “Maybe. I don’t know. It all turned into something … quite different. I don’t want to try to explain it.”
    “If I left?” Chook said.
    “No. Thanks, but that wouldn’t make any difference.”
    “Get on with it then. When was the first contact with the land syndicate people?”
    “Late May. She’d gone walking down the beach in the late afternoon, and she came back with Calvin Stebber. Some kid had hooked a shark and as he was fighting it and beaching it with people watching him. That’s how she got in casual conversation with him, and it turned out they knew a lot of the same people, so she brought him back for a drink. Short and heavy and very tan. Always smiling. I’d say he wasn’t much over forty, but he looked older. And he seemed … important. They jabbered away about people I’ve read about. Onassis, Niarchos, people like that. He was very vague about what he was doing. He just said that he’d come down to work out a small project, but it was dragging on a lot longer than he’d estimated. He seemed … fond of Wilma. He wished us happiness.
    “After he left, Wilma got quite excited. She told me that Calvin Stebber was enormously rich and went around making very successful investments in all kinds of things. She said that if we played our cards right, maybe he would let us in on whatever he was doing, and certainly the very least we could expect would be four times our money back, because he was never interested in smaller returns. To tell the truth, it seemed to me like a good way out, if she could swing it. With four times the capital I’d have enough income to keep her the wayshe wanted to live. Stebber was staying aboard a yacht at the Cutlass Yacht Club, and when he left he asked us to stop by for drinks the next day.
    “The yacht was absolutely huge, maybe a hundred feet long, some kind of a converted naval vessel, I think.”
    “Name and registry?”
    “The
Buccaneer
, out of Tampa,