The Scarlet Ruse by John D. MacDonald Read Free Book Online Page A

aren't famous rarities he bought for Sprenger, not things any dealer would recognize on sight, maybe there is some kind of way of identifying them. I don't know enough about it. But did you notice that Philatelic Foundation certificate he showed us? There was a photograph glued to it, and an embossing seal used. If just one of those things can be traced…"
    "There were numbers in the margin of those blocks of four and six he showed us."
    "We need to know more about it, Travis."
    "Do we?"
    He leaned forward and peered at me very intently. "Hmmm. A kind of disapproval? That's what's bothered me most. Why should Travis McGee give a faint damn what happens to an elderly party who isn't too careful whom he deals with and inevitably gets stung? The desirable quality of shining innocence isn't there this time. And is it a total disaster? He has a place to go, people to look after him. You could get involved, but it would be going through motions."
    "Sometimes it isn't any more than that."
    "Are you saying no?"
    "Not quite yet."
    "But you might?"
    "It is a distinct possibility."
    He looked tired. He sighed. He pushed a piece of gristle around his plate and finally hid it under his potato skin. I caught the eye of the redcoat who had served us. He had saved up all his cordiality for the critical moment of check and tip. The service had been indifferent, the orders not quite correct. What do you do? If you are cross, tired, and immature, you take it out on the waiter. The world is not enhanced to any measurable degree by one, or by one million, confrontations with venal, lazy waiters. And it impedes the processes of digestion. So you compute the tip and leave in good order and try to remember never to return.
    But it had been one more smear on an already dingy day. All day I had been trying not to think of the eviction notice. But it was in the back of my mind. Willy Nucci had depressed me more than I had been willing to admit. He wanted to get out, and he was not at all sure he could. So, out of accumulations of anxiety, he had talked and talked and talked. The old men in the old bar had depressed me. And children with icepicks are not amusing. And I wished I'd gone to eat at Grimaldis' when Vito and Rosa were in trouble. I might have been able to help. It was easy to see that I had a new remorse. It was one of the night thoughts of the future. If I had only… I have a long list of those.
    After Meyer had gone to his home afloat, I made myself a hefty nightcap and turned the lights off and went up to the sundeck in a ratty old blue robe and sat at the topside controls, bare feet braced on the dew-damp mahogany. It was a soft night. Car lights, boat lights, dock lights, star light. Sound of traffic and sound of the sea. Smell of salt and smell of hydrocarbons. The Flush wind-swayed under me and nudged against a fender.
    "Hey, McGee? McGee?" she called from the dock.
    I got up and went aft and looked down at Jenny Thurston under the dock lights, in basque shirt, baggy shorts, baseball cap, and ragged boat shoes.
    "Hey, is it really true?" she asked.
    "Come on aboard. Want a drink?"
    "I got most of this here can of beer, thanks."
    She came up topside and took the other pilot chair, beside me, and swiveled it around to face me in the night. "I got back around five, and they showed me in the paper, and all of them were bitching about it. I looked for you to check it out."
    "It's true enough, Jen."
    "Well, goddamn them! Nobody is going to move me ashore, McGee. I was born on a boat. We'll have to find a place where they're not trying to iron everybody out flat. Maybe down in the Keys?"
    "Maybe."
    "But it won't be the same as here. Never."
    Jenny lives aboard a roomy old Chris and paints aboard her. Jenny paints three paintings. One is of a beach with a long cresting wave, sandpipers, and overhanging palms. One is of gulls in the wind, teetering over the abandoned, stove-in hulk of an old dory on a rocky beach. The last is of six old