I wadded it to walnut size and threw it some fifteen feet at a trash container. The swing lid of the trash container was open about an inch and a half. If it went in, I would live forever. It didn’t even touch the edges as it disappeared inside. I wished it was all a sound stage, that the orchestra was out of sight. I wished I was Gene Kelly. I wished I could dance.
I went into the marina office. It was shipshape, clean, efficient-looking. The man in white behind the desk looked like a Lufthansa pilot. “Sir?” he said with measured smile.
“My name is McGee. I phoned from Lauderdale earlier in the week, about dock space for a houseboat.”
He flipped through his cards. “Yes. The arrival date was indefinite. I have it here you will arrive between the twenty-fifth, next Wednesday, and the twenty-ninth. Let me see. Marjory took the call. I assume she told you it is no problem this time of year. Fifty-three feet. The Busted Flush?”
“As in poker, not as in plumbing.”
“Length of stay indefinite?”
“That’s correct. I’ll let you people know as soon as I know.” I hesitated, and decided to try it out. “Captain Van Harder is bringing her around for me.”
It did startle him. The eyes of eagles clouded for a moment. The muscles of the square jaw worked. “I probably should not say anything to you. Van is as good as there is around here. I don’t think he should have lost his license. Did you know he had?”
“Yes.”
“This is something a lot of people do not know—if you hire a man to operate your boat and he doesn’t have a license, if there is any trouble, you might have difficulty with your insurance company.”
“I knew him years ago when he fished charter out of Bahia Mar at Lauderdale, before he went into shrimp and had his bad luck. He’s bringing it around as a favor to me. No hiring involved and no passengers aboard. So I think it’s okay.”
He nodded. “I would think it’s okay too.”
“What is the status of the Julie?”
“The legal status? Clouded. The bank has put a lien on her. So she just sits, God knows how long. I know that nobody is going to move her until we get our dock rental. The mate is living aboard.”
“Is he there now?”
He started to say he didn’t know, but a smallish, dark, and pretty woman came in from the room behind the office. He introduced us. She remembered my call. He asked Marjory if she’d seen Walloway leave the marina and she said she thought he was still aboard.
I remembered the Julie from having seen her at Pier 66. She looked even better in the dying day. She sparkled from one end to the other. The bright-work was like mirrors. Varnish gleamed. Lines were smartly coiled, all the fenders perfectly placed. The boat basin had two main docks at right angles to the shoreline, with finger piers extending out on either side of the main docks. Small stuff was moored at the finger piers between the two docks, where there was less maneuvering room. The Julie was on the outside of the left-hand dock, moored to one of the middle finger piers, stern toward the dock, starboard against the finger pier.
A hinged section of rail was turned back amidships to make space for the little boarding ramp. Its wheels moved very slightly as the breeze moved the hull of the vessel.
DeeGee Walloway came toward the ramp, stuffing his keys into the pocket of his tight whipcord cowboy pants. He wore boots, a silver-gray shirt with lots of piping and pearl buttons, a blue neckerchief, and a Saturday-night cowboy hat. He looked like Billy Carter, except he was half again as tall and twice as broad.
I knew at once why that name had rung a small bell in the back of my head. He stopped and stared at me. He snapped his fingers, rubbed his mouth, shoved his hat back, and said, “McGee!”
“How you, Deej?”
“Son of a bitch! Hey, is Van bringing your houseboat around from the other side?”
“Word sure gets around.”
“What happened, he phoned Eleanor Ann the other day, and she said he sounded a little more up than he has lately, and he told her everything would be working out for him, but I don’t see how the hell it can. He told her he was bringing a houseboat around—and it would take maybe seven or eight days—for a fellow name of McGee he used to know in Lauderdale. So I figured it might just be the same one. I only knew you that one time, but I never forgot it.”
Somebody had brought him to Meyer’s annual birthday chili bash one year. After enough drinks he had decided to whip people. He told me later that it usually came out that way. Not ugly, not loud, not mean. Just an urge to whip people for the fun of it. If I had gotten him fresh, I don’t think I could have handled it. But he had whipped Jack Case and Howie Villetti before Chookie looked me up and told me some jerk named Walloway was spoiling the party. Jack and Howie had put quite a strain on Deej. He had a little sprain in his neck that made him hold his head funny, and he wasn’t going to be able to see out of his left eye much longer. We had the party that year on a sandspit called Instant Island. He was grinning and chuckling. He was a happy man, doing what he liked best. I spent a disheartening fifteen minutes before he finally stayed down. He came at me the next day and, because I had learned his tricks, it took about ten minutes. He came at me the third day, and that was the day I saw one coming at me so late that all I could do was duck my head into it. It broke his hand and left me with double vision for two weeks.
“I just know,” he said, “that I should have been able to whip you.”
“No, DeeGee. No. Get your mind off it.”
“It still bothers me. But what the hell. I’m not in no kind of shape like I was then. Look at the gut on me. And I hardly got any wind at all. You, you look like you’re in training for something. You get yourself lean and mean to come over to see old DeeGee Walloway?”
“Get your mind off it.”
“The only way I could take you now is sucker-punch you first. And that isn’t my style. There’s no fun in that.”
“Can you whip everybody in Timber Bay?”
“Pretty much most of them.”
“Nicky Noyes?”
“Oh, hell, yes! He hits like he was throwing rocks, but he don’t aim. What you doing right now? Want to walk around to a couple of places and check the action? We can find us some ass and bring it back here to the boat. It isn’t widespread like you got it in Lauderdale, but it’s around if you look. That’s what I was planning on, it being Saturday night.”
“Can I take a look at the Julie? Don’t mean to trouble you.”
“Hell, no trouble.”
He gave me the tour. I looked it all over. In spite of my protests, I had to look at the engines. He lifted the hatch and shone a light on the big GM diesels. The daylight was almost gone.
“A man could eat off that block there,” he said proudly. “That’s one thing ol’ Van always yapped about. And I ain’t slacked off an inch since he got busted.”
“What’s going to happen to her?”
“God only knows. The bank is giving me walk-around money for staying aboard her and keeping her up. I expect they’ll get the title cleared and sell her.”
“I understand you were out of town when the trouble happened.”
“That’s right. I was up to Waycross, where I come from. My daddy was bad off. It had been coming on a long time, but he was a stubborn old coot. He got hoarse and it hurt him to swaller. And his neck started getting bigger. My mom noticed that and she nagged him and nagged him until he went to the doctor. Soon as the doctor told him he wasn’t a-going to make it, my daddy started going fast. He was nearly gone when I got there, but he could smile and nod at me, and write words on a pad. You know, I never made that man happy with me. Not one time. I damn almost did when I got into the University of Georgia on a football scholarship, but then I got throwed out of the first two games I got into. I was a right tackle, and then I got throwed out of the school itself, signed on in the Navy, and got throwed out of that for discipline problems. He wanted so bad for me to be somebody. But, shit, I’m all I want to be
. I think my daddy lasted two days and a half or so after I heard Mr. Lawless got lost overboard. I was holding his hand there at the end. His hand gave this little quiver and then lay slack. Felt weird.”
I went forward to the spot where Lawless was supposed to have fallen overboard. There was a bow rail, braided cable threaded through stanchions, ending abruptly about eight feet from the bow, where the cable was angled down from the final stanchion and made fast to a fitting in the deck. So, if he was on the starboard side, say about seven feet back from the bow and pointed out to the right, bracing himself for the vessel to turn sharp right, and it had instead turned sharp left, then the angled cable would have hit him in the shins and he would have tripped over into the chop and into the night’s blackness. They had worked the story out nicely.
“Seen enough?” he asked. “Let’s go get a drink, McGee.”
As we walked by the lighted office, the little dark-haired lady waved. “Don’t futz with that one there,” DeeGee said. “Marjory is Coop’s old lady. He’s the one right there, in the white, runs the place. She acts like she’d fool around, but she doesn’t.”
“What do you think about the Hub Lawless situation?”
“I wouldn’t tell you this if you weren’t my friend. Anybody whips me like you did, they’re my friend. I think they decided there was no way they could buy Van off. He’s straight. So they give him a mickey. Hell I know the routine. Whenever we got rolling, whenever we settled into cruising speed, Mr. Lawless would bring a couple of drinks topside, one for me and one for Van. He’d check the dials and the course and look around at the weather and either stay with us and have his drink up topside with us, or go on back below with whoever he had aboard.”
“Women passengers?”
“No way. Not even that Norway ass he got mixed up with. Jumpin’ B. Jesus, but I would have liked me a chop at that one. She was steamy, I’m telling you. She had a fire burned all the time. A tilty little swivel-ass like to break your heart, and she knew it and she waved it. And really great wheels. Mr. Lawless got into that and stopped giving a damn for much of anything else, and no man would blame him too much. But he never brought her aboard. I couldn’t hardly believe that he and John Tuckerman had Mishy and that Mexican friend of hers aboard. Mishy is okay. I’d guess offhand that Tuckerman chopped her once in a while. She isn’t exactly a pro, but she likes to work you, you know? She needs room rent, or some damn thing, or something to send her poor old mother for her birthday. The way I see it, it was easy to give Van a mickey because of the way Mr. Lawless always gave him a drink. The two girls were below, and I think they were just to dress up the act a little. I think there was somebody in a boat waiting for him to jump, and they took him to an airplane somewhere, maybe a seaplane. They say he took off with a million dollars. You can buy a lot of help for a small piece of that kind of money.”
“And he’s in Mexico?”
“Sure. He went there a lot. Him and John Tuckerman, hunting, fishing, horsing around. They were best friends of each other. John has been way into the sauce ever since. Bombed out of his mind. What did he ever have besides being Hub’s best friend?”
“You liked Lawless?”
“Hell, yes. Everybody that worked for him liked him. It really hurt him bad when he had to start laying people off from the businesses he ran. And I know for a fact he was trying to sell the Julie. Some people came aboard and looked her over. But it’s hard to move a boat like that. She won’t suit people with really big money, and she’s too much for the average boat fella. I guess if he’d sold her, he’d have had to disappear some other way that would look like he died, so the insurance would go to Mrs. Lawless and the girls.”
“Did they come out on the boat much?”
“His family? Oh, sure. But a lot oftener before than after things started to get tight for him. I mean you can run a lot of dollars through those diesels just to move that thing out for an afternoon picnic. She’s way overdue for bottom work right now, too. Like the man said, if you have to ask, you can’t afford it.”
He stopped and motioned me ahead of him, and we went into a place called Lucille’s. It was long and dark, with a mahogany bar, a brass rail, saw-dust, spittoons, Victorian nudes in gilt frames, bowls of salted peanuts, and a game show on the television perched over the far end of the bar. Lucille squeezed past one of her bartenders to come down toward the entrance and take care of us herself. She was roughly the same size as Walloway, and of only slightly different dimensions. She wore what looked at first glance like a blue bathrobe. She had curly shiny black hair, like a poodle. Her face was white and stiff as wallboard, and she wore lots of eye makeup and lots of burgundy lipstick. I guessed her at about sixty.
“No thumping anybody tonight, Deej!” she ordered in a whiskey contralto.
“Meet my friend name of McGee. He whipped me three times.”
She looked me over. “Looks as if he could do it again if he had a mind to. Welcome to my place. Deej, you start anything, you can bet your bucket I’m calling the law early.”
“I was only funnin’, honey.”
“What would you done to him was you serious?”
“I’ve never been serious in my whole life. Double Bellows and a Miller’s chaser.” I settled for the chaser. He was almost offended, but I explained I had other places to go and I didn’t want to start more than I could arrange to finish. I said the previous night was still too fresh in my memory, what I remembered of it.
He told Lucille we had been talking about Lawless and Tuckerman. “If I had a shiny dime for every time I’ve heard those names in the last two months, I could quit and live ladylike,” she said.
“Seen John Tuckerman lately?” he asked her.
“No. He’s down to that shack on that land nine miles south Hub bought for his girlfriend to design apartments on, and they say his sister is there and she has got him dried out and she’s keeping him dry, but his brains are still mush. I don’t never want to see him back in here. He was flat-out pitiful. I don’t want to see people that make me sorry I sell the stuff. I don’t need that kind of guilts. I got more than enough other kinds to go around.”
“Did you know Hubbard Lawless?”
“Everybody knew Hub. The business people in this town, of which I am one, aren’t never going to find it easy to forgive him for what he done to the town. He left us in a depression here. Everything is tied into everything else, and when something quits, other things get hard up on account of it. They say we got fourteen percent unemployment here, and I can feel it in my gross, believe me. But at the same time, everybody knows Hub worked hard to make things work, and he did things for the good of the place too. He contributed to everything when he was doing well. Community Chest, Boys’ Club, Cedar Pass Park, bandstand, the Pirate Pageant. He didn’t keep regular hours. He was out at that ranch by dawn. He’d work at getting stuff shipped in the middle of the night. Nobody ever knew when that man slept. He always had a smile and a little joke. The way it looks to me, when he got the money for Hula Marine, he should have used it to shore up the other businesses instead of buying the wrong land at the wrong time for the shopping center and that condominium thing.”
“What you forget, Lucille,” DeeGee said, “he wasn’t thinking straight. He had a bad case of nooky disease.”
“I don’t allow dirty talk in here, and you know it.”
“I would have said it nice if I knowed how, Lucille, dammit. You know as well as I do that architect woman had him going in circles.”
“Well,” she said, “nobody is perfect, and I hope that wherever he is, Mexico or wherever, he’s found some kind of peace, because he sure got awful jumpy before he took off. The town will make out. People will keep coming down from the north. Things will keep going. They always have.”
“You have a kind heart, Lucille,” DeeGee said.
“Not kind enough to set you up a freebie.”
“Okay. Hit me again anyway. Same thing. You, McGee?”
I ex
cused myself and left. He seemed disappointed to have me go. I imagine he got over it in about forty seconds. It would take him about that long to get a good look at the two young women who were going in as I was leaving.
Twelve
I found Meyer in a booth in the lounge. Business was better than usual. Billy Jean Bailey was tinkling away at her compulsory background-music stint, with no one listening. She looked at me and through me, with no change of expression, and looked away, smiling and nodding at someone else.
After I brought a drink back to the booth, Meyer reported on the rental Mazda.
“I had to wait quite a while for Mr. Wedley. He was out with the tow truck on a pickup. Short-handed. The boy pumping gas did not know anything about anything. When Wedley came back he was busy on the phone for ten minutes. Finally he was able to tell me about the Mazda. Five days after Lawless disappeared, he got a collect call from airport administration at Orlando. The car had been left in rental car return with the keys behind the sun visor. No one knew when it had been left. Airport administration got into it when Hertz complained that it was their space and they needed it. Garner Wedley’s Texaco station address and phone was on the key tag, so they had phoned him and he had arranged to get it picked up. He said that Bonus Rental was a small operation and he had an area franchise, and it said on the rental contract that the car had to be returned to him, but it wasn’t. It made him angry to talk about. He said that Hub had rented it for that Scandihoovian female of his, and it worked out to ninety-five seventy-five Hub owed him that he would never see. He told the Sheriff about it, and after an investigation the Sheriff said that it was reasonable to assume that Miss Petersen had driven the car to Orlando, arriving during the morning of the twenty-fourth. He had obtained a picture of her, from the files of the Bay Journal, taken when Lawless had given a press party to announce the plans for the new shopping plaza, and had carried the picture over to Orlando and questioned the airline personnel, but found no one who remembered her. He questioned the rental-car people as well, because it has apparently become a popular device to abandon an automobile in an airport parking area and immediately rent another and drive away. Did you know that?”
The Empty Copper Sea Page 14
