John D MacDonald - Travis McGee 17 - The Empty Copper Sea

by The Empty Copper Sea(lit)

  "I think you are."

  "You really listen, don't you?"

  "I'm interested."

  "You have been sitting there, looking right at me, and nodding and making little sounds in your throat. You are so damned earnest about listening to me, you made me rattle on and on and on."

  "You wanted to talk about it. That's all."

  "So I open up to you and I don't even know you."

  "That's the easiest way of all, when you don't know the other person."

  "Maybe."

  "What makes you so sure he's dead?"

  "We were always very close. Very close, until the last eight months of his life. We were in touch with each other on some kind of level most people don't have. Once I had a feeling of blackness, of terrible fear. He'd gone hunting with John Tuckerman. I wrote down the exact time it happened. I couldn't get in touch with him. I was beside myself with worry. Finally he phoned me from Waycross, Georgia, and said he'd been bitten on the wrist by a big cottonmouth, but he'd been treated and it was going to be okay and he would be home in two days. When we compared my note with the time he had been bitten, it was correct to the very minute. He knew the time because it had bitten him on the left wrist, near where his wristwatch was. Once when the girls were both in school, in the first and third grades, he came charging home in the middle of the afternoon, convinced something was wrong. I'd fallen from the shed roof and wrenched my back so badly I couldn't stand up. I couldn't even crawl to the phone or to the neighbors, it hurt so badly. I'd ruptured a disc. I knew that if I waited he'd come. I knew that he knew I was in trouble, and he came. There were lots of little things like that that happened between us. Those are just two of the biggest ones. When they told me that night that Hub was lost off the Julie and believed drowned, I didn't believe it. I kind of reached into that private world where he and I were always in contact, and I knew he was still there, so he couldn't be dead."

  "I don't understand."

  "It was a distasteful situation-with those two young girls going with two middle-aged men out on that lovely boat named for me-but not some kind of disaster, really. I didn't know what was going on. I got to sleep quite late. The girls were terribly upset, Tracy and Lynn, and I had to get them settled down. They loved their father so much. They couldn't understand what was happening to their world. I am very concerned about them, about Tracy particularly, she's getting so strange and secretive. Anyway, I took a sleeping pill and I didn't wake up until after ten the next morning, March twenty-third. Everything came rushing back into my mind and I reached out, or over, or down, in some direction I can't describe, to find the same reassurance I'd felt the night before, and there was nothing. Absolutely nothing. It was a cold, dead, abandoned place in my mind. I knew he was gone. There is no doubt at all in my mind. My husband is dead."

  "Forgive me, but that is not exactly the sort of evidence that will mean much to the insurance company."

  "I found that out. They want any excuse not to pay, because it is a very big policy. I wouldn't be at all surprised if they hadn't started all those rumors about Hub being in Mexico. He loved Mexico, granted. If he were alive, it would be a reasonable place for him to run to, if he wanted to hide."

  "Cleaning out those bank accounts makes it look as if he had running and hiding on his mind."

  "Maybe he did. I don't know. We weren't communicating. I suppose it would have eased his conscience about me and the girls if he could fake his own death and leave that insurance for me."

  "What if he tried to fake it, and something went wrong and he died?"

  "That would fit the way he acted before he disappeared, and it would fit the way I feel about his being so definitely dead."

  "Hypothetical question. Suppose somebody showed you a picture of Hubbard Lawless taken at a sidewalk cafe in Guadalajara on the eighth day of April, sitting and pouring dark beer into a glass?"

  "I would have to say the picture is a fake."

  "Who would bother to fake it?"

  "The insurance company, of course. To muddy the waters and hang onto their two million dollars. The insurance is mine. I am the owner of that policy. It's all in the records of the trust department at Coast National Bank and Trust. You can ask Rob Gaylor all about it. He's the Senior Trust Officer. He handles what my daddy left in trust for me. It isn't enough to maintain this house and raise two girls. Thus the garage sale, and also, I am going to list the house and look for something smaller and less expensive to maintain."

  "It's a beautiful house, Mrs. Lawless."

  "Julie, please. I know. But houses can go sour on you, all of a sudden. You remember too many birthdays and Christmases. What do people call you?"

  "Travis. Trav. I wonder if you could tell me who could give me the most information on Kristin Petersen, Julie."

  "She wasn't the sort of person who goes around making dozens of new friends. She subleased a condo apartment at North Pass Vista. That's just north of the North Bay Resort, where you saw Lynn beat Sandra Ellis-"

  "And where I'm staying with my associate, Meyer."

  "North Pass Vista is a kind of town-house arrangement. They have a rental office there where you could ask."

  "If I think of more questions I want to ask you, may I come back again?"

  "Of course. But you are not really interested in buying land, are you?"

  "My associate is."

  She looked at me steadily, with care. "I think he probably is, but not to the extent you'd have me believe. You're here for something entirely different. To find out something. To help someone."

  "You know, you could make me pretty uncomfortable with all that."

  "I don't want to. I'm not a witch. I just can read some people sometimes. Whatever you do, Travis, you are very damn good at it."

  "Thank you. I'm not sure you're correct."

  "I've got to get back out there to the old-tablelamp department and start pricing. Will you tell me some day why you're here?"

  "If you're interested."

  "I wouldn't ask if I weren't."

  I got back to the North Bay Yacht and Tennis Resort at quarter past six, feeling grainy, listless, and depressed. There was no Meyer and no note from Meyer. I peeled off the little compress and then, with great care, pulled off the thin strips of adhesive. The skin held together nicely, so I dabbed some disinfectant on it, purchased from a drugstore near the bank and covered it with a fleshcolored waterproof Band-Aid from the same source. I stared into my own pale and skeptical eyes. An unenamored lady had once termed them "spit-colored." Deep-water tan, a few little white scars here and there, a nose but slightly bent, a scuffle of sun-baked hair, responding to no known discipline and seldom subjected to any.

  Out on that ketch, the Antsie, beating our interminable way up from the Grenadines to the Virgins to Keasler's Peninsula, I had wanted the night lights and the gentle ladies and the best of booze, with enough music to make them mix properly. And here I was, up to my hocks in all such ingredients and wishing I was back aboard the Antsie, being yanked and hammered and pounded by the everinsisting sea. Life is a perverse art indeed.

  I left a note to Meyer that he could find me in the lounge. Feeling somewhat better after the shower and the change of clothes, I went on down and walked in on a very busy bar, plus Billy Jean Bailey tinkling away on background music as opposed to the performance numbers she did later at night. When she saw me, her smile lighted her up from inside, like candles in a pumpkin, and my heart sank. She had on a silver-blue cowboy shirt and tight white jeans. She switched the music to tell me that I had come along from out of nowhere, and then she had me walking out of a dream, and then the music said she was in love, in love, in love, with a wonderful guy.

  "No, no, no," I yelled, in the back of my brain, and beat on the cell bars. "No way. Please."

  When she took a break she came around to the far end of the bar and wormed her way in to stand close beside me, with maximum contact. She put her hand on my neck and pulled my ear down to where she c
ould talk into it. "I've had the most goddamn delicious day of my whole life, thinking about you, bun."

  "Uh."

  "I've never turned on like that before. Couldn't,you tell?"

  "Uh."

  "We're so fantastic, I can almost get it off just thinking about how it was. I can get right to the edge, bun."

  "Bun?"

  "Bun rabbit. My dear darling bun rabbit baby. Oh, God, time is going so slow, it will never be midnight."

  "Don't you go Friday until one?"

  "Oh, Christ! It is Friday."

  "Yes. It sure is."

  She kissed me on the ear and went switching back to her piano. I was conscious of considerable amusement among the bystanders. She had not exactly concealed the relationship. My ears felt hot. Visitor makes immediate dear friend of the piano player.

  I wrote her a very short note, paid for my drink, took the note over to the piano, and put it where she could read it. She did so and made a kiss shape with her small mouth and then a big happy smile, and I went lumbering out and met Meyer just as I got outside the door.

  "Where are you going?" he asked.

  "It's very close in there."

  "With that ceiling?"

  "Take my word. Close. Very close. Let's... uh... have a drink at the Cove. Very close by. Walking distance."

  "I know. I saw it. Are you all right? You act strange."

  "Tell me about your afternoon, Meyer."

  "Mr. Glenn and Mr. Latzov drove me all over this county and showed me fantastic bargains in ranchland, grove land, raw land, development opportunities, waterfront land, and swamplands. They told me this area is right on the threshold of fantastic, unbelievable growth, and every dollar put into land values here would be like investing in St. Petersburg Beach in nineteen fifty. Every time I tried to bring up the Lawless holdings, they would whip me out into the scrub country and show me something much better, available right now."

  Once we were wedged into a corner of the long bar at the Cove, I asked him what Mr. Glenn and Mr. Latzov thought about the Lawless affair.

  "A terrible tragedy. A legal tangle. A sorry affair. You never know what a man will do when he's pushed too far. They said that considering how smart Hub Lawless is, the odds are very small that anybody will ever find him. And they estimated his getaway money at closer to a million."

  It was payday in Timber Bay. The noise level at the Cove was overwhelming. Waitresses worked at a dead run. Harley had two helpers behind the bar. Srrddenly I noticed Nicky Noyes over in a corner of tlu bar area, at a bare table beyond the row of pinbull machines. He sat behind a round table, and the two couples with him looked as if they had just calmbed down off their big road cycles. They looked quaint. They are fading into history, like Pancho Villa's irregulars. All the macho whiskers and the leather clothes and the dead eyes and their feral, abused little women. Hundreds of them roar up and down the highway in formation, making formal protest about the law forcing them to wear a helruet. It is a violation of their freedom and liberty, they say. Very macho. But when they don't wear helmets, they abuse the taxpayers, taking a couple of weeks to die in intensive care, their primitive hrains jellied by hard impact with the concrete highway. Somebody has to pick them up when they go down and deliver them to Emergency, regrettably.

  I saw Noyes gesture toward the bar, and moments later all five of them were looking directly at rne, a stare of speculation and obscure challenge.

  I said to Meyer, "Beyond the pinball machines at the round table, the fellow with his back to the wall, facing us directly, is Nicky Noyes."

  "With the headband and all the gold trinkets?"

  "Himself."

  "Wholesome company he keeps."

  "Isn't it, though? I keep getting the feeling that Nicky isn't very tightly wrapped. He could be working himself up to jump me."

  "Right here?"

  "Or wait outside for me."

  "For us."

  "Thank you, Meyer. Very nice instinct. Here he comes, incidentally."

  Nicky came plodding toward me. He walked oddly, putting his feet down with care. His strong cologne arrived three steps before he did. I shifted carefully, coiling all my springs without appearing to do so. Nicky came inside my normal space and stopped, broad belly almost touching me. His gaze moved rapidly side to side, up and down, back and forth.

  "You are part of the trial," he said, chanting it in such a way he sounded like a Sunday television preacher.

  "Trial?"

  "Certain things are going to happen, and you are part of them, and when it is all over, we'll all be back at the beginning, every one of us but you."

  "Have you been sampling your own merchandise, Noyes?"

  "Soon you'll see the shape of everything yet to come and the part you're going to play, but it will be too late by then. It is up to me to turn it on and turn it off. It mustn't go too fast. You understand? Everything is part of it now."

  And he turned away from me and walked to the door and on out, still walking with that strange care, as if he might step too heavily, break through the floor of the world, and fall forever. One wornout-looking woman at the table where Noyes had been sitting caught my eye, smiled wearily, and circled a forefinger near her temple.

  A big young man was standing near us at the bar. He turned his red whiskers toward me and said, "Don't you mind ol' Nicky, hear? He's okay. I drove a truck for Hula Construction for nearly three yvarw, and Nicky was the foreman part of the time, and superintendent the last year I was there."

  "I hope he used to make more sense."

  "He did. He didn't used to be at all like the way he is now. He's weird now. You know about Hub Lawless taking off with all the money?"

  "Yes. I've heard about it."

  ''Well, Nick thought Lawless was the finest man ever walked the earth. He worked all kind of hours for Hub. He sprained a gut for Hub. And the hell of it was, Hub took off owing Nicky two months' pay. I tell you, it soured Nicky. It turned him kind of mean. He used to laugh a lot, and he used to fight for fun, and not very often. Now it's like he's against the world. I don't even speak to him any more because I don't want to get into some kind of argument with him. He always treated me fine."

  "Could you hear what he was saying to me?"

  "Sure could. Didn't make any sense. I guess from what you said to him, you know he's a dealer now. It's a small-potatoes thing with him from what I hear. He lives okay on it, maybe even pretty good. A couple of times he give me and my wife Betty free samples, but we flushed them down. I don't make enough driving for the county to want to pick up any habit where I got to buy it from Nicky. They say he is using his own stuff, and they say he's messing up his head."

  "Sometimes he's better than other times?"

  "That's right, but I'd say that each time he gets weird he seems to get a little weirder than the time before, and I never heard him so far out over the edge as he was tonight." He put a big hand out. "My name is Ron Shermerhorn."