The Empty Copper Sea

by John D. MacDonald

  I put the notebook away and smiled reassuringly at him. “I know what is basically bothering you. Right? And I am really not authorized to tell you anything at all. But you’ve been so pleasant, such a good host, that I am going to level with you, and I hope you appreciate what a rare thing that is.”

  “I don’t know what—”

  “From what I guess, and from what I know of procedure, there is really very little chance of your being subpoenaed.”

  “Of being … for what … I don’t …”

  “And there is even less chance of the Resort here being either fined heavily or closed under the provisions of Chapter Twenty-one, Paragraph C-Six, Subparagraph a.”

  “But I don’t—”

  “So you don’t have to worry. Right? You can relax! It isn’t hanging over you any longer. At least, I am reasonably sure they won’t come at you in that manner. But nobody knows, of course, until they have an executive session.”

  His face had turned red. He grasped the edge of the table and leaned toward me. “Mr. McGee, I haven’t the faintest idea what the hell you are talking about!”

  My food came. It looked very good indeed. I smiled at Jack the Manager, and I winked at him and said, “None of that now.”

  “None of what?”

  “Shshsh. Please. You know I can’t go any further with this. I shouldn’t have mentioned it at all. I was only trying to do you a favor.”

  “But I want to know what this is all about!”

  “Please forget I said anything to you. I violated a confidence. And for God’s sake, don’t say anything to anyone else, because if it was leaked out and got back to the Supervisor, there’s no way in the world you could avoid a subpoena.”

  “I must insist—”

  “Do you want to ruin everything for yourself? Have you got some kind of economic death wish?”

  I chomped the good Canadian bacon. I beamed and winked and nodded at him. His choice was clear. Either I was certifiable as a maniac, or he and the Resort were in violation of the rules, somehow. In serious violation. I could guess his thoughts from his expression. It has all become regulation by blackmail, of course. Every small businessman lives with the knowledge that he is always in violation of some of the rules. Safety regulations, consumer protection laws, wage and hour laws, pure food and drug statutes, IRS regulations—and on top of all these are the interwoven, supplementary, conflicting regulations of the state, county, and city.

  He fills out the forms and sends them in because he knows that, if the forms do not come back in, the computer flags him. He fills the blanks with lies because it would take more hours than there are in the week to fill in the forms arriving each week. He knows all these lies go on record somewhere, and that at any time a field inspector can happen along and check out the old lies and apply pressure. So all he can do is contribute to both political parties, support local, state, and national candidates, and hope for the best.

  It was easier for him to believe he was in some kind of trouble than that I had lost my wits.

  He got up and said, “Uh … thank you, Mr. McGee.”

  “Believe me, I was glad to do it.”

  “Uh … enjoy your breakfast,” he said, and walked away. He turned in the archway, stopped, and stared back at me, his expression troubled, eyes clouded. He shrugged and walked on, out of sight.

  It was a small and childish pleasure. I ate with appetite. Great eggs. Days of misty rain are fine. Jack the Manager would leave us alone. He would do a lot of wondering, but he would keep his mouth shut and stay out of the way. And we would refrain from chousing anyone out into traffic. And we would duck away from all shotgun blasts to avoid messing up the parking area.

  Gretel was alive in this rain-mist day, in the same dimension, time sector, and hemisphere. She fitted in with any recitation of one of my lists of good words: pound sweet apples, song by Eydie, pine forests, spring water, old wool shirts, night silence, fresh Golden Bantam, first run of a hooked permit, Canadian geese, coral reefs, good leather, thunderstorms, wooden beams, beach walking, Gretel. We all have the lists. Different lists for different times of day and of life. Our little barometers of excellence, recording inner climate.

  The first chore after breakfast was another call to the hospital to get the word on the old party we had restored to momentary life. They said that Whittaker Davis was in serious condition, but no longer in critical condition. I asked if his condition could be considered grave. She said they didn’t use that word any more because people got it confused with being buried. She said if they did use it, Mr. Davis would be a little bit better than grave, that it sort of would come between critical and serious, but don’t count on it.

  Meyer points out that fewer and fewer people in this country speak English any more, and that the trend is toward the guttural grunt. As a case in point, he quotes the earnest newscaster he heard one time over WTVT Channel 2 in Utica, New York, speaking of an emergency operation performed upon the wife of one of the nation’s most important citizens. With expression of concern he read from his script that she was being operated on because they had “found a noodle on her breast.” The song lyrics, Meyer says, presage the future shape of the language.

  I was glad the old party was hanging in there. At least we had provided time for the Davis clan to gather at the bedside, if there was a clan, and if the hospital permitted clans to gather.

  While at the phone I found the number for Ralph Stennenmacher, General Agent, in the Coast National building. The girl said he was in, and tried to get my name and make an appointment, but I said I would wander on up and take my chances.

  A neat little sign on the corner of her secretarial desk said, “Dora Danniker, Serf-Person.” She was as tiny as B.J. Bailey, but had a lean pale little face, big glasses, and mouse-blond hair pulled back into a knot. You half expected a toothy actor to pull her to her feet, take away her glasses, fluff her hair out, and say, “But you are beautiful, Dora darling!” Then they would dance.

  She looked me over with considerable speculative care, from my tan Eagle shirt to my green brushed-denim slacks and buff-colored After Hours shoes, and back up again.

  She said, “It would be nice if you could at least say you’d seen me someplace before, McGee.”

  I thumped my forehead with the heel of my hand. “Friday night?”

  She nodded and smiled an evil smile. “You called me your little pal for a while. You said I should fly away with you, and we would sail the seven seas, climb the highest mountains. And all that stuff.”

  “Have mercy.”

  “Even smashed as you were, friend, plotzed out of your wits, you were using your head. You were trying to sign me on to solve the big problem you were having with B.J. and Mishy. You weren’t exactly what I would call some kind of a prize. I think it was because those two hate each other and needed an excuse. Do you get like that often?”

  “Every night in the week, love.”

  She studied me, nodded to herself. “You couldn’t look the way you look and do that. You were pretty funny for a long time. Life of the party. And finally, of course, you passed out.”

  “You were still there?”

  “Because the guy I was with was still there and I was exhausted from trying to drag him away. You want to see my boss?”

  “When convenient.”

  “He’s got somebody in there with him now. Have a seat. Have a paper. I’ve got to get something done here or I’d spend a little more time working you over. How was your hangover?”

  “Didn’t your boyfriend object to this ‘sail the seas and climb the mountains’ routine?”

  “Sure. But you finally got tired of him yapping at you. We were walking, the whole bunch of us. You threw Timmy up into a tree.”

  “I what?”

  “You picked him up and threw him up into a tree. You threw him pretty high. He’s sort of a small guy. He grabbed a branch and you kept right on walking and talking. He really hates you.”

  “
Please tell him I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t worry. He hates everybody your size. It’s just a general attitude—”

  The office door opened and a man came out, speaking back over his shoulder, saying, “If they get any line on him, Ralph, like I said, I’ll go on back down. But this ought to be enough for our purposes.”

  He smiled and nodded at Dora Danniker, gave me one quick flat glance, and went on out, a lean man in a wrinkled pale blue suit, carrying a gray tweed dispatch case. After he was gone I tried to fasten his face firmly in my memory, but it faded before I could begin to identify any distinctive feature. Ralph Stennenmacher stood in his office doorway and looked at me with a genuine smile of welcome.

  Dora said, “This is Mr. Travis McGee. He hasn’t had a chance to tell me what he wants to see you about.”

  He shook my hand and tugged me toward his office. He liked me. That is the secret. That’s what had made Ralph a success. He was interested in me and he wanted to know more about me. He wanted to sit me down across his big blond desk and listen to my life story. When that genuine and unmistakable warmth is combined with good sense and good products, then you have a great salesman—and a happy man. One wall was hung with certificates, awards, commendations, and group photographs, hung frame to frame. He had white hair, big black-framed glasses, and a comfortable belly. He had little broken veins in his nose and cheeks, big knuckles, a resonant voice, and laugh lines around his eyes. He aimed a big finger at me and said, “Hey, I saw you and another man at the Cove having lunch with Walter Olivera. Excuse me, dammit, at the Galley. Mmmm. Friday?”

  I said that was right. This Timber Bay had begun to give the impression of being a risky place for intrigue. Everybody seemed to keep an eye on everybody. I gave him the Devlin Boggs explanation of our presence in town, and he was glad to tell all.

  “I wrote the coverage on all Hub’s activities and on his personal life too. In the beginning we were thinking of having business insurance, of having insurance at his death go right into the company or corporation so that it could be used to buy out the widow’s interest in the partnership or her stock interest, whatever. But I wasn’t satisfied that it answered his problem, on account of the way he ran things. Understand, Hub was a good businessman, but he was a loner and a high roller. He wanted to run whatever show he was in, and he had an instinct about pushing his luck—right up until the end, of course. So it began to appear to me like there wouldn’t be much of anything left of Hub-Law, Double L, Lawless Groves, or Hula Construction if Hub died. For one thing, nobody would know what was going on. He kept terrible records and he kept a lot of information in his head. And second, because of the way he liked to keep moving money and debt around, it might be that the businesses, each one of them, might have to be liquidated to pay off what was owed. So we started quite a while back with three hundred thousand ordinary life, with Julia the beneficiary, and built it to a half million, million, million and a half, two million, two million two hundred thousand as of the alleged date of death. The girls were contingent beneficiaries. We set the policies up with Julia as the owner, and we put them in her trust downstairs at the bank, the one her daddy Jake Herron set up for her when she turned eighteen. Her daddy helped me get started, by the way. A finer man never lived.…

  “Where was I? Oh, the trust paid the premiums on the policies, and it left Julia in a pretty good condition. You could just about figure that after expenses and all, and knocking off the mortgage, she’d have anyway one point seven million, plus the little she gets from Jake’s estate, which goes to the daughters, share alike, when Julie dies. That money could bring her in about ninety thousand a year tax free, more than enough right now to be mighty comfortable on in Timber Bay, but who can say if it will be enough tomorrow? Tomorrow it might cost ninety thousand a year to hire a truck driver. But it’s all, like they say, academic. Hub Lawless is alive down there in Mexico somewhere, according to the report that freelance investigator that just left here gave me.”

  “I heard that a Mr. Frederic Tannoy was going down there with Deputy Fletcher to see if they could—”

  “Gone and got back late last night. Tannoy was the one in the blue suit leaving as you came in. He gave me a copy of this thing he wrote up, which he now turns in to Planters Mutual General Insurance in Topeka. A good solid old-line company. Conservative investments, and they treat their policyholders right. I’ve worked with them a number of years, and this is the first sour one we’ve ever had. I’d give an arm if this hadn’t have happened. Things like this hurt everybody. This says confidential, so I better not let you have it to look at, but I can read you off here what it says.”

  He frowned at the document, lips moving, and said, “What happened was that Tannoy and Wright Fletcher went down to Guadalajara with pictures of Hub, and they’ve got here a little list of five people swearing they saw Hub Lawless in Guadalajara after the twenty-second of March, the date Hub was supposed to have fallen off the boat. It also says here that they picked up Xerox copies of the office records from the Naderman-Santos Medical Clinic, where they had a set of pre-surgery pictures taken for the record and placed on file under the name Pickering. He made a firm date for Wednesday, March thirtieth, to sign himself in. He paid five hundred dollars down when he made the date in late February. He signed up for—these are hard words—rhinoplasty, rhytidectomy, and, uh, blepharoplasty. Nose job, face lift, and work on the eyes. He had used the name Steven Pickering, and he had a tourist card in that name and had signed as Pickering on the formal release for surgery. He didn’t show up for his appointment. It doesn’t matter, as far as the investigation is concerned. There’s enough in this report so they can back off from paying the face amount of the policies. They can assume he went somewhere else to get the work done. It would be foolish to sue them. No chance of a recovery, or even any compromise. He’s down there somewhere with that Petersen woman. I just wonder how he feels about what he’s done to everybody around here.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t care.”

  “Oh, no. Hub cares. That’s how come people can’t understand it, really. He’s a good man. Everything just got to be too much for him. I’ve been thinking about it a lot. I think that if everything had worked out just fine for him in a business way—the new shopping plaza and that huge development nine miles south of the city—he would still have done something nobody would be able to understand. Maybe blown his own head off.”

  It surprised me. “Why?”

  “Things aren’t all that great. You play craps?”

  “Once in a while. I’m no big fan.”

  “Imagine a man like Hub Lawless at a great big crap table. He’s keeping a dozen bets going all the time. He’s on the come line and the field. He’s betting with fours and tens, against sixes and eights. He’s bending over that table, sweating, changing bets, doubling up, drawing down, watching the dice and the stick man and the other players. He keeps winning because he is working harder than anybody else, and he’s figuring the odds closer, and he’s keeping track every minute. For a long time it’s fun. And one day he finds out that they’ve chained him to the table. That’s it, his whole life, piling up counters. He can still keep going as hard as before, but it’s different. Choice is gone.”

  It was a striking analogy. “He used to get away a lot.”

  “No. Not a lot, and not for long. Everybody thought he was such a happy guy, such good spirits, so friendly. I knew him real well, Mr. McGee, and in the last few years he seemed to me to be kind of … wistful. He was getting heavy and out of condition, and he smoked too much. He didn’t have time to stay in shape. He didn’t have time for much social life or home life, either. Nice home. Lovely wife and daughters. But he had chained himself to the table without realizing it. He knew, or had started to realize, that the rest of his life was going to be pretty much the same.”

  “One of those evaluations that come along at forty?”

  “I suppose so. But he felt the weight of the people who depended on
him for jobs. I guess he even felt my weight. I wrote all his coverage, and I don’t mind saying I’ll miss the business. I guess a man gets to feel the need to experience more lives than the one they give him a chance to lead, no matter how well he does at it.”

  “And along comes the lady architect.”

  “Sure thing. Ever shoot a sandhill crane?”

  “No.”

  “I got talked into going over to Texas one time with some old buddies of mine and shooting crane. They put me in the tall grass downwind from this little sort of marshy pond. And after a time this big gawky old bird starts to soar in for a landing. They yelled to me to shoot it. So I stood up and shot it. It was about as tough a shot as standing on the end of a runway and shooting a seven-forty-seven. Blew most of his feathers off, and he landed thump dead about eight feet from me. Made me sick to my stomach. People will do some funny things in the name of sport. That’s the way Kristin Petersen shot old Hub down. She blew all the feathers off him and he landed thump. He was ready for her. He was ready for anything that was going to change things around for him. Nothing tasted good to him any more. He stopped giving a damn what anybody thought of him. When the dice came to him, he wanted to show off for Kristin, so he bet the whole pile and lost it, and there was nothing left for him to do, if he wanted to keep her, but steal and run. And that is just what he did.”

  “He didn’t do it very well.”

  “If he’d done it well, he’d have left Julia with her pride and with plenty of money. That was how he justified it, I guess.”

  “I certainly appreciate your being so open with me, Mr. Stennenmacher.”

  “Nobody in Timber Bay calls me that. It is too damned long a name. I’m Ralph to everybody. You come back any time you want to talk about Hub Lawless. I knew him about as well as anybody except John Tuckerman. Poor John.”

  “He’s off the sauce. His sister has it under control.”