“Forgive the intrusion, please,” Gray Suit said. He had been Me one sitting. ‘I am not familiar with marine protocol, Mr. McGee. We were told this is your houseboat, and we have been waiting for you. My name is Toomey. This is Mr. Kline.”
‘I am not in the mood for visitors or transactions or conversation about anything.”
‘~e are anxious to talc to you,” Kline said. He had picked up a dispatch case I had not noticed be- fore. It matched his suit color. Y think * would all go more smoothly if you did not put us in the posi- tion where we would have to insist.”
I studied him. “You are telling me that if you have to insist, you have the leverage to make it stick?”
“We do indeed,” said Toomey. “And we would rather not.”
So I unlocked and we went into the lounge. I have played respectable poker over the years. I won my houseboat on a broken Bush, four pink ones up and a stranger down. I can sense when a bluff is a bluff is a bluff. They had the leverage, and the clothes and manner to go with it.
Before I invited them to sit down while I changed, I asked to see credentials. They looked vaguely like passports, small with the dark blue cover and great seal of the U. S. of A. Inside were &e color ID pictures, the thumbprint, and the name of an agency I had never heard of before.
“We do not usually go out into the field,” Toomey said. “We have access to another agency for investigative matters. But after a conference
The Green Ripper vith our superior, it was suggested that we take a firsthand look.”
“At what?”
“Excuse me. I thought you’d guessed.”
“Guessed what?”
“We want to ask you what you know about Gretel Tuckerman Howard.”
“I just came back from her memorial service.”
“We know that,” Kline said.
“Sit down. 111 be back in a minute.”
I took my time changing into old flannel slacks, Mexican sandals, and an old wool shirt. There was a small chill spot at the nape of my neck. A warniDg of some kind.
They had moved a couple of chairs close to the coffee table. Kline had a little Sony TC-150 opened up, and he was breaking the seal on a new cassette. “I hope you won’t mind that I tape this.”
“Go right ahead.”
He put the tape in, put it on Record and counted to ten, rewound, played it back, rewound again, and said, “December fifteenth, one ten P.M., initial interview by Toomey and Kline with Travis McGee aboard his houseboat moored at Slip F-Eighteen, Bahia Mar Marina, Fort Lauderdale, Florida”
Toomey took over. “Please describe your relationship to the decedent. Wait. Excuse me. Where and when did you meet her?”
“Earlier this year. May. At a beach shack where her brother was living. John Tuckerman. South of
Timber Bay, over on the west coast of Florida. The northwest coast. Her brother died a little while later. I went with Gretel when she flew out to California to have his ashes buried in a little cemetery in Petaluma We flew back to Timber Bay and, sometime in June, we left Timber Bay in this houseboat and came down around the peninsula and back up here to Lauderdale. We made it a leisurely trip. We got here in August. She lived aboard until she located the job at Bonnie Brae in early November and moved out there, to one of the model houses.”
With great delicacy Toomey asked, “Would you say that you and she had a… a significant relationship?”
‘I didn’t care what rules we went by, as long as we both agreed that it would be a permanent thing. Why do you have to know stuff like this?”
“We want to know whether the relationship was such that she would confide in you.”
“Confide what?”
‘met us just say details of her workday, her life out there. That sort of thing.”
“Are you looking into something fishy at Bonnie Brae?”
“Did Mrs. Howard say something fishy is going on at Bonnie Brae?”
‘No. No, she didn’t. I mean, she called up last Saturday morning before she got sick, to tell me about one of the owners, Mr. Ladwigg, dying in an