Willow said, “Would you say Mr. Broll was drunk or drugged?”
She thought it over. “No. He kept his eyes sort of squinted up. He knew what he was doing. He just seemed … fragile. As if he was in terrible pain. As if he had the world’s worst bellyache and was wondering if he was going to pass out with it. And … he smelled sort of sour. He was wrinkled, and he had beard stubble. I wondered if he’d been traveling all night or he’d slept in his clothes. I suppose it could have been the world’s worst hangover.”
“Thank you, Miss Marcus,” Willow said. “Uh … Kathy.”
“That means take off, huh?”
“With our thanks, Kathy,” Meyer said. “You are a bright girl and a good observer. And if it ever becomes possible to tell you anything about this whole matter, we will.”
“Thank you,” Kathy said. She paused at the door and said, “McGee, do you still have that wild floating pad?”
“The Busted Flush. Slip F-18.”
“I’ll come visit. If you haven’t gotten married up.”
“Come visit, Kathy. Bring your swim pants.”
“I’ll bring a bowl of Greek salad. I make one hell of a Greek salad.”
When the door shut, Willow said, “Good help is so terribly hard to find and hard to keep that one has to … uh … put up with a degree of impertinence that … uh …”
“Like she said, Woodie,” I told him, “it’s a lot easier to get respect from the pretty ones if you don’t keep grabbing them by the ass in the elevator. Right, Meyer?”
“Absolutely right. An executive can’t have it both ways.”
“Keep the pretty ones at a distance,” I said. “Grab the dog-faced ones by the ass. Then you have a happy bank.”
“A contented bank,” Meyer said.
“Goddammit,” Willow yelled. “Tell me what this is all about!”
Meyer said, “I’ll ask you the same question I asked you before, Woodrow. Could you swear that you were absolutely, positively certain that Mary Broll was alive when you processed that loan?”
“The answer is still the same. But why are you asking the question?”
“I’ll ask you another. What was Harry Broll going to use the money for?”
“To buy the SeaGate stock, to pay the balance due of three hundred thousand. Don’t look at me like that. It’s legal, you know. It is illegal to borrow money to buy listed securities.”
“He’d lose a great opportunity if he didn’t buy the block of stock?”
“Oh, yes! Really great.”
“Would he have to have cash to buy that stock, Woodrow?”
“Of course not! A certified check would—”
“Do you think he bought it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Can you think of any way of finding out?”
“Don’t go away.”
We were left alone. Meyer sighed. I told him he was pushing Woodie around beautifully. All he did was sigh again. When Meyer gets the silents, he isn’t very good company.
Twenty-one
As Meyer drove conservatively back toward Lauderdale in fast traffic, he said, “We can summarize what we know, if you think it will help.”
“You do it, and I’ll tell you if it helps.”
“We do not care whether Harry Broll was running from Dissat or hurrying to meet him. Immaterial. Dissat had him from some unknown hour early Wednesday morning until they walked into the bank Thursday at ten after eleven. By three o’clock Wednesday afternoon Harry Broll was forced to make the phone call to Mr. Winkler about the large cash withdrawal. Dissat had to then sustain Broll on that depressed level where he could make his appearance at the bank without creating suspicion, yet would have no interest in appealing for help. Total emotional and physical defeat. A person reduced to Harry Broll’s condition is beyond feeling terror. Only despair. The only part left would be the details of disposal, or if he’d already planned how to do it, to go ahead with it. If it required darkness, he would have to have a place to take Broll to wait for night, or better yet, a place to immobilize him safely so Dissat could put in an appearance elsewhere. If we are building the structure of limitation, the parameters of time and space, we need to know if Dissat appeared at the West Palm office on Wednesday, and if he did, the time spent there.”
“And where he is right now,” I said. “When I wonder where he is right now, I wonder if he’s crouched on the floor behind us. That’s what he does to me, Meyer. Sorry. He was so pleased with himself, so damned delighted when he reached out with his bare toes and turned her head so she looked at me with those empty, crazy eyes. It was a funny kind of innocent pleasure, as if he had no idea there was anything really wrong about it. He was like a little kid who’d built a kite that would fly, and he wanted me to tell him how great it was. He tried to talk tough. Movie tough. But it was like something that had to be said. An obligatory part of the ceremony. After that we were going to share something, he and I. Some special personal important relationship. Dammit, I can’t say it so that you can understand how it was.”
“He fits the pattern of a certain kind of damaged personality I have read about, Travis. He could be called the activated sociopath sadist. Bright, healthy, energetic, competent. Excellent in areas requiring ritual. Mathematics, accounting, engineering. Quite cold inside. Tricky. Unable to concede the humanity of people around them because, having no basis of comparison, they think all of us have their same dry and barren soul. They are loners. They can charm when they choose. Sexually stunted, inhibited, often impotent. When Mary tried to escape from him and he caught her and they fell badly and injured her seriously, that activated him. Now he knows what he wants. He wants inventive episodes like the one with Lisa. The money will be meaningful only in how many such episodes it will buy. He isn’t aware of evil. Only of being caught. You have to think of him as a bored child who suddenly discovers that it is wonderful fun to go to the pet store and buy a mouse and bring it home and do things to it until it is dead. Life is no longer boring. It is full of rich and wonderful excitement. The mouse shares the experience, so he feels fond of the mouse for as long as it lasts. You could say that the child loves the mouse to the extent he can feel love.”
“Jesus!”
“I know. Stroking Lisa’s forehead, drying Harry’s sweaty face, are imitations of emotion. We can imagine he spoke tender words to Mary because she was pleasing him, giving him release. He’s not a madman in any traditional sense. He cannot feel guilt or shame. If caught, he would feel fury and indignation at the game ending too soon. He’ll go to great lengths to stay free, unsuspected. His career is a lot less important to him than it used to be. My guess is he’ll be gone by the deadline, the tenth, a week from today.”
We rode in silence for a time. “Meyer? How did you get that Woodie Woodchuck to snap to attention?”
“By reminding him that he had informed me of the approximate value of the assets in one of his trust accounts without any authorization from the trust customer or the senior trust officer. Banks take all confidential relationships very seriously. He soon said he would be very happy to help me find out all about the three hundred thousand.”
“How did he find out Harry had forfeited his option?”
“I don’t know. Probably phoned a contact at SeaGate and asked what value, as collateral, Harry’s hundred-thousand-share block would have. The stuff is too closely held to have an OTC quote.”
“Couldn’t he have borrowed against the stock he was going to get?”
“Not if he had already done so.”
“Sick condominiums and a sick construction business. How about the seven hundred thousand he’s supposed to get back from SeaGate?”
“If it went into land improvements at the site, then I guess he’d have to wait until the public issue money comes back to SeaGate.”
“So that goes to pay off other debts, and then Harry’s business quietly fades away and dies?”
“Reasonable guess.”
“He ha
d to take Harry somewhere and keep him there. Harry and Harry’s car. Transportation problems, Meyer. Logistics and tactics. If he took him to wherever he lives—”
“A cluster apartment complex at West Palm on the bay shore. Rental apartments. Not likely.”
“I suppose you have his phone number?”
“You asked me to check him out. Remember?”
“And your overall impression?”
“A very dull fellow, competent and humorless.”
“You know the name of the cluster apartments?”
“I’d rather not say it. Palm Vista Gardens. D-2.”
“The first phone booth after we get off the pike, please.”
• • •
He parked at a gas station by a shiny row of vending machines under a roof made of plastic thatch, incredibly green. I phoned from the hotbox provided by Gen Tel out on the cement wasteland. I hoped Palm Vista Gardens was big enough to have a rental and administration office on the premises. It was. The lady’s voice came right from the resonant bridge of her Indiana nose.
“Yes, maybe you can help me. Have you got any furnished one-bedroom vacancies?”
She was not a well-organized lady. She tended to ramble. She gave information and then with cries of dismay retracted it and called herself names, mostly “old fool.”
She finally discovered that one of their renters, “a nice young man” who had been on the special month-to-month basis with one month in advance (an arrangement they made with the “nice young people” from that new SeaGate company) had come in on the last day of April, just last Friday, and given his notice. He said he was vacating in a week. And that would make it … the eighth? No. The seventh. Yes. Next Friday. They could start showing it again the following Monday if there wasn’t too much to be done. That was number D-2, which meant apartment 2 in cluster D. Just stop at the office. But don’t wait too long. They go very quickly to nice young people, providing they don’t have any pets. Or any babies, of course. I wondered how they felt about noisy goldfish, the kind that do a lot of leaping and splashing and churning around.
I tried to blot out all rational thought with a lot of peripheral items. Goldfish. Lead-free gasoline. Diminishing aquifer. I walked to the car, realizing I had left the cheap camera on the backseat. An essential part of my tourist costume. Meyer stood beside the rental car, drinking a can of orange pop, and it suddenly seemed insane that Meyer wore no tourist disguise. Paul Dissat knew exactly who I was and where I lived. And if he had gone to Bahia Mar and poked around as such a thorough chap would, he would have learned that Meyer was associated with me in certain obscure but apparently profitable ventures. Though believing me safely drowned off Grenada’s lovely beaches, he might conclude that it was a very good chance my letter of self-insurance had been sent to Meyer to stow in a safe place. And so, as a percentage play …
It worked on me to the point that Meyer stared at me and said, “What the hell is wrong, Trav?”
My mouth wasn’t going to work. Alarm is contagious. He trotted around and got behind the wheel, whipped us out into the traffic flow with a good imitation of teenage technique. At last I managed two words. “No hurry.”
I saved the rest of it for my rackety motel unit. I tried to smile at Meyer. “Pure chicken. Sorry. I just don’t know what the hell is …” Then I felt the sudden and humiliating sting of tears in my eyes and turned quickly to blink them away before Meyer could see them.
I stood with my back to him, staring out between the slats of the battered tin blinds at the side wall of a restaurant and a row of trash cans haloed with bluebottled buzzing. I spoke too fast and chuckled where there was no need, saying, “It’s the old bit of the brave and noble hunter, gliding silently through the jungle, following the track of the big black panther, and slowly beginning to realize that the panther is also a-hunting and maybe he’s flattened out on top of that thick limb up ahead or behind that bush over there or in the shadow of that fallen tree, with just the tip of his thick glossy black tail moving and the shoulder muscles rippling and tightening under that black hide. I’m spooked because I kept telling myself the son of a bitch would be gone by now, but he isn’t going until Friday, and—”
“Travis. Come on. Slow down.”
Can’t ever really fool ol’ Meyer. I sat on the bed. We’re all children. We invent the adult facade and don it and try to keep the buttons and the medals polished. We’re all trying to give such a good imitation of being an adult that the real adults in the world won’t catch on. Each of us takes up those shticks that compose the adult image we seek. I’d gone the route of lazy, ironic bravado, of amiable, unaffiliated insouciance. Tinhorn knights of a stumbling Rosinante from Rent-A-Steed, maybe with one little area of the heart so pinched, so parched, I never dared let anything really lasting happen to me. Or dared admit the flaw. Maybe in some crazy way Paul Dissat was a fun-house mirror image of me, a warped McGee with backspin, reverse English.
The adult you pretend to be convinces himself that the risk is worth the game, the game worth the risk. Tells himself the choice of lifestyle could get him killed—on the Daytona track, in the bullring, falling from the raw steel framework forty stories up, catching a rodeo hoof in the side of the head.
Adult pretenses are never a perfect fit for the child underneath, and when there is the presentiment of death, like a hard black light making panther eyes glow in the back of the cave, the cry is, “Mommy, mommy, mommy, it’s so dark out there, so dark and so forever.”
Cojones are such a cultural imperative, the man who feels suddenly deballed feels shame at reentering the childhood condition. Papa Hemingway will never take him fishing. George Patton will slap his face.
In all my approximately seventy-six inches of torn and mended flesh and hide, in all approximately fifteen-stone weight of meat, bone, and dismay, I sat on that damned bed and felt degraded. I was unmasked as a grotesque imitation of what I had believed myself to be.
Frowning, I tried to explain it in halting fashion to Meyer. “You talked about … the reflexes slowing, the warning system not working, the instincts inaccurate when … the only reason Harry Broll didn’t kill me was because he lacked one more round in the clip. Then in Grenada I didn’t even think of being careful … didn’t sense his presence, got such a shot in the skull bone my head is still blurred. Meyer, people have been a few steps ahead of me other times. I’ve played pretty good catchup. This time I have this feeling that there’s no way. He’s going to stay out in front, and if I get too close, he’ll turn around and take care of the problem. Maybe I’ve gotten too close already, and I have ten more minutes or ten more hours.”
“Travis.”
“I know. I’m scared. It’s like being very very cold. I can’t move well, and I can’t think at all.”
“So I do the thinking?”
“I wish you would. Don’t go back to your boat. I have a very ugly hunch about your boat.”
“We have to talk to Dennis Waterbury in absolute privacy, and I have to make contact in such a way that he will trust us to the limited extent that rich and powerful people can trust anyone.”
“Can you do it?”
“I don’t know. I have to try to reach some people by phone. In Montreal and Toronto and Quebec.”
“Start trying.”
“If I can get through to someone he knows and trusts, who can tell him I am reputable, not a shakedown artist, then we are going to give him whatever lead time we can spare before I go to the law.”
“With what?”
“With enough. Woodrow Willow’s contact said Broll didn’t buy the stock. So there’s a missing three hundred thousand and a missing Harry Broll. If they dig around the seawall at Blue Heron Lane, they’ll find Mary’s body. Kathy Marcus and the other bank people could pick Paul Dissat out of a lineup. Maybe it will sink the SeaGate public issue without a trace. Even if Dissat never took a penny from the Waterbury enterprises, a breath of scandal can make the accounting firm and the underwriter
s back off.”
“So why don’t we go to the law? Why do we screw around with Waterbury if we’ve got all this?”
“Think about it, Travis. Think about it.”
I instinctively fingered the place on the back of my skull where I had been so soundly thumped. Meyer was right. SeaGate was a very large thing, and Dissat was an operating officer in the SeaGate power structure. The lower echelons of the law would never go cantering into battle on the say-so of an apparently unemployed beach bum and a semiretired and eccentric economist. It was a two-county operation with both state and federal implications. Lower echelons would take the eccentric pair into skeptical custody and sweat them both.
Suppose you go to the top level, such as approaching the United States attorney in the area and suggesting he refer the problem to the FBI for investigation because of possible violations of the criminal code insofar as banking regulations are concerned. Then the approach would be made so tentatively—due to the SeaGate clout and the dubious source of the tip—that Dissat would be alerted, and he would disappear into his large countryside or ours.
First, you sell Dennis Waterbury on the idea that his boy, Paul Dissat, has been a very very bad boy lately and any publicity given his activities can founder the SeaGate plans. You convince him and give him some facts he can quietly check. You speak to him in absolute privacy and secrecy. Then, when he picks up the phone and relays his unhappy suspicions to the highest level, Dissat will be pounced upon first and investigated later, giving Waterbury additional time to plug up the holes and protect the upcoming public issue from scandal.
I said, “Okay. Do you think I’ll ever be able to think things out for myself any more? Or will you have to be on permanent standby?”
“I think they start you on baskets and work up to needlepoint.”
“I am supposed to laugh. All right, Meyer. Ha ha ha. Make your phone calls. What if the bastard won’t listen even if we can get him alone?”
“Men who are rich have times when they don’t listen. Men who are quite bright have times when they don’t listen. Men who are both bright and rich always listen. That is how they got the money, and that is how they keep it.”
A Tan and Sandy Silence Page 22
