A big raw Sat.u.r.day wind killed what was left of the strange untimely heat wave. It was the first day of the extra-long year-end weekend, meaning that offices were closed and I could not use the logical starting place, the detailed forms which have to be placed on file with every little red-tape empire.

I had written down what I knew about him. It was very skimpy. He didn't talk about himself often and never said very much. Raised by grandparents, I think. Ohio, Indiana, Iowa. One of those states. His grandfather retired and they moved to Bradenton, Florida. Howie was about ten? Maybe older. Became a high-school jock. Fullback. Straight ahead for the tough yard and a half on third down. Partial scholarship to the University of Florida. Out of the athletic budget. How long ago? They shifted him to defensive tackle. Second string. Got to play in only three out of nine games his senior year. Disciplinary problems, he'd said. I'd inferred he broke train ing now and then, nothing worth spelling out. Wanted the pro scene, but n.o.body picked him in the draft. The Dolphins took a long hard look at him in training camp. Not enough hustle, apparently, according to what he said. They let him go. Three years ago? Longer? Then a blank until he showed up at Bahia Mar. Knows how to handle himself around boats and the sea. Drinks beer. Doesn't smoke. Six four, two seventy, looks sloppy but is in good shape. Brown eyes, receding hairline, blond hair long. Voice pitched slightly high.

I took a packet of fresh fifties out of my stash. I studied my little collection of improvised business cards. t.i.tle Research a.s.sociates looked good enough, and there were six crisp clean ones left.

Her name, I learned at Bahia Mar, was Lois Harron. Evidently she'd been able to afford to keep the house. It was on one of those ca.n.a.ls southwest of Pier 66, a long low white structure with Bahamian gray trim, behind a screen of shrubbery which would someday hide it entirely from the asphalt road in front. There were eight vehicles in the driveway, parked in random array on the white river pebbles. A couple of vans, a couple of VW's, a camper body on a pickup, a couple of road-worn station wagons and a shiny 'lbyota. The wheels of the young. The high-performance cars are dead. A young man in Dade County has to pay twelve hundred dollars a year in insurance' premiums to buy the basic legal coverage for a high-performance car, and the law says he can't get plates or inspection stickers without proof of insurance. The young used to be the meat of the market, and without their demand, Detroit can't make toys for the middle-aged role players, which is perhaps a blessing to all concerned.

I punched the bell three times before a brutally loud vacuum cleaner was turned off. Then I could hear yelps and sloshing from a pool area out back somewhere. A slender, tall woman with dark hair came to the door. She wore faded old stretch pants and a tired old T-shirt on which appeared pink ghost-writing, almost entirely gone, saying HAWAII FIVE-O. She was barefoot and she had a streak of dirt across her forehead, and she looked irritated, and she also looked very familiar to me.

She frowned and smiled, and pushed the screen door open and said, "Where, where, where? Hmmm. Bahia Mar. A year ago. What was the name of that big cruiser? 'Bama Lady?"

" 'Bama Gal. The Alabama Tiger's lair."

"Sho nuff. Jesus! A year ago, I guess, but the memories are vivid. And I think a bunch of us came aboard your houseboat. Belated apologies for that invasion, friend. We were not all the way tracking. Come in, come in. Total confusion. My maid died. Isn't that h.e.l.l? She didn't quit. She didn't get fired. She died. Which leaves me with mixed emotions, and I will be d.a.m.ned if I can find anybody who isn't a total dumb-dumb. What is your name? I can't come up with it."

"Travis McGee."

"Of course! I'm dreary about names. Excuse the racket. My only chick is home on Christmas vacation and I wish the dear girl wasn't quite as popular. Look at them out there! Wall to wall energy. It makes me tired to watch them. Get you a drink? What can I do for you, Travis?"

"I'm doing an odd job for a friend. Odd meaning maybe strange. He's doing research on the kinds of people who go around the world in small boats."

"Believe me, I am not his kind of person."

"Neither am I, Lois. But he was questioning me about the background of Howie Brindle, and I said I thought he worked for you and your husband, and he wondered if I'd ask you for your impressions of him."

She was in a good strong north light. Her face tightened just a little bit, and there were some rapid eye movements, a small pursing of the lips. "Is Howie going on some brave adventure?"

"He's somewhere in the Pacific, with wife."

"Oh, yes. That girl who inherited the Trepid when her father was killed. Some idiot name. Pooch?"

"Pidge."

"My dear man, the Trepid is hardly a small dangerous boat. It was built to cross oceans. And being with wife is not being alone, one would hope."

"I'm sorry. This isn't the epic-adventure kind of thing. It's more sociological, about the kinds of people who seek solitude when everybody else is after togetherness. A think piece."

"Can I get you that drink? No? Then sit patiently while I fix myself one."

She was back in five minutes, hair brushed, mouth freshened, smudge gone from her forehead. She carried a colorless drink on ice. "Hatch," she said and sipped before she sat down across from me. "Sure. Howie worked for us, crewing aboard the Salamah."

"For how long?"

"Let me see. It was the longest vacation we ever took. It was just about the only vacation we ever took. Fred did umpty operations a day, getting the decks cleared. And he begged and bullied his best friends into taking the load while we were gone. Let me see. Howie came aboard at Spanish Wells. We'd been in the islands for two weeks, because I remember it took two weeks for me to realize Fred wasn't getting much vacation trying to run the boat by himself. I'm an idiot about those things. So that means Howie was aboard for just about six weeks. And then he brought her back by himself, of course, after Fred-after the accident."

"He was in Spanish Wells looking for work?"

"No. Not the way that sounds. There was a couple from Charleston in a cruiser, and Howie was working for them. Actually, the woman approached us about hiring him. She said he was an absolute jewel. There wasn't anything he wouldn't do, and he respected your privacy and all. But her husband was having angina too bad to keep on cruising, and they were going to fly back home as soon as he felt up to it, and that left Howie at loose ends. It was an answer to prayer. We interviewed Howie and we both liked him a lot. So he moved into the crew cabin forward that same day, and Fred started showing him all that he should know about the Salamah. He really worked out fine. We stopped having all those narrow escapes we were having when Fred was running it alone. And he scrubbed and helped with the cooking and all. If you mean competence, I think Howie could probably sail around the world in an old bathtub. He seems to know when the wind is going to change before the wind knows. He's so huge you're conscious of how his weight tilts the boat. But he's so light on his feet he doesn't seem... ponderous."

"So he was there when your husband had his accident?"

She raised the gla.s.s to her lips so deliberately I wondered if she was trying to buy time, and why. She took a deep swallow and said, "Whatever would that have to do with anything at all, Travis?"

"I'm just guessing, but I'd say that there'd be some relationship between how these deepwater people react to emergencies and their desire to get away from the world."

"He reacts beautifully."

"What happened? I mean, where was he when it happened?"

"You have no idea how many times I told this, over two years ago, how many times a new official popped up and had to hear it all over again."

"I'm sorry. Forget it."

"It doesn't matter as much now as it did then. It so happened that Howie and I were both below. The three of us had been swimming. We were anch.o.r.ed just outside Little Harbor. It was a very calm sea. It was about three thirty in the afternoon. Both Howie and I heard this strange thumping sound. He ran up and as soon as he saw what had happened, he yelled to me. Fred was on his face in the dinghy with his legs trailing in the water. The dinghy had shipped some water. Somehow we got him up onto the deck and got shade over him. Howie got on the emergency frequency right away and pretty soon there was a doctor on the way in a seaplane, but Fred stopped breathing before the plane landed even. There was an investigation and all that. And I flew back in the same chartered plane with Tom Collier and with the body. Tom has been an absolute doll about everything. I don't know what I would have done without him."

"So you think that Howie Brindle would be a good person to sail around the world?"

"I guess so."

"Some reservations?"

"Not really. It's just that I thought people like that were great readers, and kept journals and did a lot of heavy thinking. Howie is just sort of a physical person. I don't think he really has much going on up here. You know? He's terribly pleasant, and he figures out the little problems, the best way to do things, but if you said to him, 'Howie, do you think there is a hereafter?' he would look sort of startled. I can tell you almost exactly what he would say. He'd say, 'Some people believe there is and some people believe there isn't. I guess there's no way to find out for sure.'"

"Do you feel you really got to know him?"

"You know as well as I do that six weeks aboard anything the size of the Salamah is no way to remain strangers. After Howie brought her back to Lauderdale, Tom asked me if I had any objection to Howie living aboard her and caretaking. I said none at all. I went down and removed the personal stuff, and Howie helped me load it all in the station wagon. Funny. I was so positive I wanted to sell her until the day she was sold. And then I was sorry."

The young were shrieking and yelping. She took her last sip of drink, looking at me across the rim of the empty gla.s.s. The ice c.h.i.n.ked as she put the gla.s.s down. A handsome woman with the eyes of a gambler. I've got aces back to back, and I dare you to bet into them. Good smile lines.

She said, "I'd like to come see your houseboat some day when things aren't so drunk. I remember an absolutely gigantic shower stall, or did I dream it? Much too big for a boat."

"It's there. It's real." She was waiting for the definite invitation. No thanks, widow lady. With that figure and mouth, you can get all the safe, healthy fellows you want. I stood up. "Thanks for letting me bother you with these weird questions."

"It's okay. I needed a break. I hate cleaning the place. If I can't find somebody soon, I'm going to have to sell it before it works me to death."

"It's the right time of year to advertise in Boston or Chicago."

"You just may have something there. After school opens, I could fly up and interview applicants and bring the best one back. See you around the marina, Travis."

I went back to Bahia Mar to fill in a very troubling blank in Brindle's history. Meyer had stimulated my memory to the point where I knew Howie had been aboard the Salamah until she was sold. But she was sold before Professor Ted was killed. So he would not have met Pidge until she came down from school when Ted died, and to meet her and to be available to give her a helping hand, he had to be living somewhere else in the marina complex.

The cold wet wind had swept the area fairly clean of both residents and tourists. The parking meters at the beach area stood like a small lonely forest of Martian flowers. Some young folk in wet suits were trying to find breakers to ride. They weren't breaking often. They were sliding in round and gray and slow, as if quieted by oil. The black suits are the last step in unis.e.x. Out there with their boards they looked as neuter as black seals.

I checked out several neighborhoods before I came up with anything. Any big marina has neighborhoods. The charterboats, the rag b.u.ms, the fat cruiser crowd, the horsepower freaks, the roundthe-worlders, the storekeepers, the staff.

Fat Jack Hoover was replacing a compressor aboard the Miss Kitty, the ornate top-heavy old single-crew mahogany yacht he captains for a crazy old lady from Duluth. She comes down once or twice a year for a week to ten days each time, bringing along a maid, a cook, three poodles and four friends. When she comes down, she wants to cruise up and down the Waterway, very slowly. She doesn't want any rocking and lurching, or any more noise than necessary. Fat Jack sends all the billing to a bank in Duluth. They pay with hardly ever a question.

He wiped his greasy paws on a ball of waste and sat on the crate the new compressor had been shipped in. "Now who would know the most about it would be Rine Houk."

"That sells yachts?"

"The very one. From the shape that Harron ketch was in while he was showing her, he come to believe Howie was reliable, which is a rare thing especially lately, especially anywhere. Like with a house, it is a good thing to have somebody living on it when you are selling it, so the air isn't stale, the bugs stay hid, the bird s.h.i.t gets wiped off the overhead. So what he does is make a deal, Howie moves onto that big son of a b.i.t.c.h of a thing out of Corpus Christi, that QM crash boat that was custom-made into a yacht, big old high-octane Packards in her, you couldn't blow fuel out a fire hose as fast as she'd suck. Ninety foot? A friggin' fiasco, that thing, what was the name on it? Weird. Oh. Scroomall. Big sacrifice sale at forty thou, but the way I looked at it, Howie agreeing, you'd have to pull the Packards and put in diesels, change the tanks, gearing, trim. Nineteen and forty-four it was built, and all as solid as you could expect with the owner trying to hammer it into pieces on any little ripple whenever he run it, so you would end up with seventy-five to eighty in it, conservative guess, and what do you have? Another freak PT conversion is what you have, roll you sick on a wet lawn. The owner got it this far with a new wife on her, just a kid she was, and she said enough, she wouldn't even go back onto the son of a b.i.t.c.h to get a toothbrush, so he put it up right then. Fahrhowser his name was, round bald fella with a voice to rattle the dish cupboards. There was work to do on it, so Howie got more pay, Rine Houk getting approval from Fahrhowser.

"I couldn't see any rich man getting stupid enough or drunk enough to buy that Scroomall. One day there was a girl on deck, one of those spindly saggy kind, long blond hair hanging, a face that if she was dead it would have a livelier expression on it, sorry old clothes like a ragbag. Turns out, talking to Howie, she's the daughter of this Fahrhowser, took off from school, she's broke and wants to stay aboard only don't tell the old man. He doesn't know what he should do. She must have moved in, because it was anyway a week later I saw them on the beach and didn't know it was the same girl for sure, because in a swim outfit you could see what was hid under those raggy clothes, and it was pretty nice. From how they were horsing around together it was clear to any fool she'd moved in all the way. What was her d.a.m.n name? Susan. That's it. Not so long after that my crazy old lady come down from Duluth and I had to run up and down that d.a.m.n Waterway for a week and a half. I disremember seeing Howie for a time, and then I seen him one day on the Trepid, helping out Pidge Lewellen. I stopped and asked him if somebody bought that Scroomall crock and he said not yet, he was still living aboard, and it hadn't even nearly been sold, as far as he could tell. I would guess that he stayed aboard that Texas boat until the wedding. Sometime later, one day that crock was gone, and you'd have to ask Rine Houk about what happened. And whyn't you go below and drag us up a pair of beers, McGee? It's a cold day for beer, but talking makes me sweaty."

For about fifteen seconds I didn't know I was talking to Rine Houk. It had been a year and more. The man I knew had a long head, bald on top, a cropped stubble of salt and pepper around the edges, gla.s.ses with big black frames.

When he called me by name I peered at him again. "Jesus Christ, Rine!" I said before I could stop myself.

He shook his head and sat down behind his desk at his big boatyard. "I know. I know. You should try wearing this G.o.dd.a.m.n thing in weather like we were having lately. Trav, it's like wearing a fur hat with ear flappers. The sweat comes apouring out from under it and runs down the inside of these wire gla.s.ses like you wouldn't believe. If I see myself far off in a store window and I squint up my eyes, I can almost believe that's a young fellow I'm seeing. Selling is a young man's game, Trav, and don't you forget it."

"Bulls.h.i.t, Rine. How about Colonel Sanders and his greasy chicken?"

"I'm not exactly selling box lunches."

"Don't get huffy with me just because I don't like your hairpiece. We've never been great friends, Rine. But I like you. You are an honest man in a business where they are rare. I want to know a couple of things. Why that red-brown color like a setter dog?"

"That's the color my hair was when I had any."

"Do you sell boats from fifty feet away, or talking up close?"

"I sell them right across this desk."

"Have you got a young girl friend?"

"Me!"

"Are you looking for one?"

"Am I looking for a coronary?"

"Rine, somebody gave you a bad steer. Are you selling more yachts lately?"

"Business is generally rotten."

"Listen. I did not think of you as being young or old. I thought of you as being Rine Houk, the boat broker. I never especially thought of your face. But now I see your face underneath and between all that shiny hair, and your face looks so d.a.m.n withered and old, I don't know whether to laugh or cry. You look silly Rine. You look like you had bad judgment. You look desperate. I wouldn't buy a leaky skiff from anybody who looks the way you do right now."

"Get out of this office," he said, but he wouldn't look right at me.

"Rine," I said gently.

He took a deep breath and let it out. He blinked rapidly, and I saw the tears squeeze out of his eyes. He jumped up and went around the corner of his desk, b.u.mping into it, and went into the bathroom off his office and pulled the door shut. I felt rotten. People make such strange evaluations of self. Why upset them? It's none of my business. I waited. And waited. And waited.

He came out, sans wig. He was back in the big gla.s.ses. He didn't look at me. He sat on his heels in front of the executive icebox with the genuine cherrywood paneling. "Black Jack do you?" he asked.

"Fine. No mix. Just rocks."

He made the two drinks the same and made them heavy. He brought them to the desk. The intercom said, "Mr. Houk?"

"Yes, Mark."

"There's a Mister Mertz here who's interested in the Matthews fifty-two."

"So sell it to him."

"But you said-"

"Forget what I said. It's a beautiful thing for that money. Sell it to him."

He picked up his drink and gave it a little lift in my direction, then drank it down. He ran his hand over his bald head. "Had the old gla.s.ses in the cupboard in there."

"Handy to have a spare."

He hit the desk. "You don't know how hard it was, dammit, to all of a sudden one day start wearing that hair."

"I can imagine."

"No. You can't imagine. Jesus. All that wasted effort."

"Are you giving it up?"

"You told me what I already knew. Now I'm just another bald old fart. Feels good already. Thanks, Trav. Can I sell you... some kind of a leaky skiff?" He grinned and then blew his nose.

I asked him about the Scroomall, shocking him for a moment with the misapprehension I might be interested in it. He remembered the boat, but he had to look at his files to remember what had happened to it. The owner had finally sent two men over from Corpus Christi to take the boat back to Texas to try to sell it there. The men had to turn back twice before they got it running properly.

"And Howie Brindle worked out well?"

"I wish I still had him. I wish I had one round dozen Howie Brindles. He didn't break his back looking for things to do, but when you told him, they got done. And if he'd put his mind to it, he could have sold boats."

"Was it Tom Collier who recommended him?"

"It could have been. Or Mrs. Harron, or both of them."

"Never any problems with him?"

Rine tilted his head. "What are you being paid to do?"

"Funny question."

"I guess so. Fahrhowser had to have money to back his bad judgment in buying that old crash boat. He could still be looking for his daughter."

"Susan? The one who stayed on the Scroomall with Howie?"

"Not with Howie. Not that way. He actually loaned her some money to get home on. He told the guys who came looking for her, and he told me the same thing, he made a deal with her. He'd let her come aboard and get rested up provided she'd go home, no arguments. He said he was seriously thinking about calling her people anyway, but decided not to. I guess she never made it back to Texas. And if she hasn't by now, she never will."

"Maybe she's home. I wouldn't know."

"Oh. Then why are you asking all about Howie?"