A Flash of Green

Seven

Brian Haas muttered, stirred, opened his eyes at a few minutes before five. Jimmy Wing put his book aside. The small bedroom was hot.

Haas slowly fumbled the sheet down to his waist. His broad chest was shiny with sweat. His color was very bad. He looked at Jimmy.

“Still Friday?” he asked, his voice slow and toneless.

“Still Friday. Almost five o’clock.”

“One long son of a bitch of a day. How long have you been here?”

“Fifteen minutes or so.”

“Nan around?”

“She said she’ll be here a little after five.”

“Can you pour me some water?”

Wing poured a glass from the pitcher on the night stand. Haas hitched himself up in the bed and took the glass in both hands, shaking so badly he spilled perhaps a third of the water down his chin and chest. Wing took the glass, and Haas slid back down with a sigh.

“Been shooting me with something new,” he said. “It’s like the whole world was in slow motion. How about Borklund?”

“You’ve got a virus.”

“A two-quart virus.”

“Was it that much?”

“I don’t know. Probably. I bought four pints. I always buy pints. It cuts the losses if you drop one, I guess. I think I finished two before the car got stuck. I can remember waking up on the sand and killing another and feeling around for a full one and not finding it.”

“Couldn’t that much kill you? Taking it so fast?”

“I guess so.”

“Then what’s the point?”

Haas stared at him and Jimmy Wing thought he saw a flicker of amusement in the dark deep-set eyes. “Only the drunks know there’s no point in it, Jimmy. The civilians say it’s immaturity, or a need for love, or a physiological deficiency, or an escape from reality, or some such crap. I’m a drunk. So I drink. It’s that simple.”

“We civilians have to find reasons for things.”

“Happy hunting.”

“Is it over for this time?”

“It might be.”

“It’s rough on Nan.”

“It’s no picnic for me, fella. My life is full of places I can’t ever go again, and people I can’t ever see again. If it gets too rough, she can join that group. I can’t talk to you about it, Jimmy. You never joined the club. You haven’t been there. We’ll always be talking about two different things, so let’s skip it.”

“Okay.”

“You’re not sore?”

“No. I’ll even change the subject. The Save Our Bays people are back in action. Emergency session right about now. There’s a new move coming up to turn Grassy Bay into suburbia.”

Brian Haas closed his eyes. It was a full minute before he opened them again and turned his head toward Jimmy Wing. “That’s a good subject. Keep going.”

He told Brian no more than Brian would reasonably expect him to know. As he finished he heard Nan coming up the stairs. She came in and said, “Howdy, Jimmy. My God, you got the uglies, Haas!”

“A thing of beauty is a joy forever,” Brian said.

She sat on the foot of his bed, patted his leg and said, “How goes the remorses?”

“Same old ones. Familiar faces. Like abandoned children who finally tracked Daddy down.”

“How are these shots working?”

“They’re pretty good, Nan. Too good, maybe. I should be praying for death right now. I should be shaking the bed and gagging.”

“I know. Do you miss it?”

“In a funny way. It’s always been like paying my way. Maybe I’ve enjoyed the dramatics in some inverted way. It doesn’t seem right to feel no worse than a flu case.”

“He’ll be here at six to give you the last one. Could you eat?”

“They’re good, but they’re not that good.”

Jimmy stood up. “I’m off. You want to set up the board, I can give you one hour tomorrow, starting at high noon. Give me white, and I’ll give you another crack at the queen’s gambit.”

“If I can see the board. Right now there’s four of you. It’s a side effect, I guess. How do you think we’ll go on this Grassy Bay thing this time?”

“The paper? We’ll come out for progress. Ben listens to J.J., who is no idiot.”

“Can we bore from within, like last time?”

“We’ll have to wait and see, Bri.”

He went down to his car and drove to the newspaper offices. To the old yellow-tan Florida-Moorish building on Bayou Street, all courts and arches, dusty ivy and vivid, unkempt flower beds. He parked quite close to the circulation shed where, in another life, when he was nine years old, he had come in the first gray of morning to pick up the papers for his route. He went in through the side door of the main building, took some notes out of his box, and went back to his desk in a relatively quiet, windowless corner. One note asked him to call a number he recognized as the number for Bliss Construction. He called. A girl switched the call to Elmo.

“I’m going to be working late here, it looks like,” Elmo said. “So why don’t you stop on by when you get a chance?”

“It won’t be until about eight.”

“I’ll be right here.”

He went to work on his accumulated notes. “At a special luncheon meeting of the Chamber of Commerce, County Planning Director Edison Kroot announced that fallout shelter builders will get full cooperation from county zoning and building authorities...”

“Five science courses in Palm County high schools will become part of a Federally subsidized teacher-testing study this coming fall, according to Dr. Wilde Sumnor, Superintendent of Public Instruction...”

“The El-Ray Snack House was burglarized Thursday night...”

“... went through the stop sign at the intersection of North Street and Palm Way...”

“... remains in critical condition in...”

“... resigns post as...”

The copy girl took the yellow sheets to the news desk. The evening tempo of work was increasing. Wire service material was being fitted into the makeup, along with the ads and syndicated materials already positioned. Except for late sports, the back pages were being locked up, one by one, working forward to page one, which would be held open until half past midnight. Borklund stopped by his desk, inquired about Brian Haas, and tried to load some phone work on Wing, but he avoided it by saying there were still a couple of things he had to go out and get. The teletypes chattered, phones rang, linotypes clucked steadily, and the Saturday edition began to take on form and pattern. It was a kind of work which, for many years, had given him satisfaction. But in this past year it had seemed to become smaller and less meaningful. The wire service reporting was leaden and clumsy. Each local story he wrote seemed to have been written before. Only the date had been changed. He could not know if his restlessness and sense of boredom was due to Gloria’s final escape into her nonworld, or to the limits of all the demands made upon him, or to his increasingly obsessional relationship with Kat. But he knew that now it was all changed, and would all be different.

He welcomed the new and not yet known things that would happen, but at the same time he was alarmed, uneasy. You walk into a new room, close the door and pull a lever. Then you begin to wish you hadn’t. But the lever has also locked the door.

When he had awakened, he had taken the two fifty-dollar bills from his wallet and turned them over and over in his hands. The money had looked theatrical, implausible. He had been offered all the usual things in the past, the junkets and free rides, the Christmas whiskey and the unofficial due bills, the lighters and cigarette cases and desk sets. And, sometimes, cash. He had used a flexible judgment based less on morality than on convenience. He took what it had seemed plausible to take, measuring himself against what he believed others would take and did take, seeking that comfortable level where he could be labeled neither prude nor rascal, and avoiding those gifts which implied too direct an obligation for future favors. But he had returned the rare gifts of currency. Gift certificates had been the nearest thing to cash he had accepted.

But this money was not, of course, a gift or bribe. Elmo had made that clear. It was specific pay for specific employment. He had become a moonlighter. And, should the job itself become distasteful, or should the fact of having two jobs become burdensome, he would tell Elmo his acceptance had been a little too hasty. Elmo, of course, would take it gracefully. There would be no instructive visit to one of the back-country sloughs, not for a mildly recalcitrant member of the press.

But Ulysses S. Grant looked out from the money with a brooding, dubious expression. Hadn’t he had some money trouble himself?

Now there was a summons from Elmo, and the money had given it a different flavor than had been apparent in the summonses of past years. His response to it had been altered also, in just as subtle a way. He wondered how many more there were who now played the same game, who had become a part of the expanding universe of Elmo Bliss, willingly or unwillingly — even knowingly or unknowingly. Frannie had said that he made her feel alive. Maybe that was the most effectively deadly subversion of all. All the children felt gloriously alive, marching away from Hamlin.

The offices of Bliss Construction were in a small one-story building in a commercial area on Bay Highway, south of the city, just over the city line, about a mile and a half north of the light where Mangrove Road turned toward Grassy Key. Behind the office structure, and enclosed by hurricane fence, were the storage buildings, a workshop and the vehicle park. His transit-mix cement plant and his hot-mix asphalt plant were in a heavy-industry zone north of Palm City. Though Elmo had expanded with startling speed throughout the fifties, he had the curious ability to give each new venture the flavor of having been his from the very beginning. His expansion no longer seemed as brash and reckless as it had been. He had adjusted so readily to being one of the city’s most influential businessmen that it was easy to believe he always had been. The tales of his early wildnesses were told with that same fond nostalgia usually reserved for incidents of a prior century. Jimmy Wing had wondered why this could be true, and had finally realized that Elmo would have been unable to achieve this quality of acceptance in a more static community. Palm County growth had been dramatic. Total county population had been a little over twenty-five thousand when Elmo had been swinging a brush hook on a county road gang. Now it was over seventy-five thousand, and most of the newcomers had arrived after Bliss Construction was an established firm. To them, the Elmo Bliss of the wild years had the quality of myth.

Elmo’s office headquarters was set back just far enough from the curbing of Bay Highway to provide room for a loop of asphalt drive in front of the entrance. The long dusk had ended when Jimmy Wing arrived. Tinted floodlights were buried among the broad shining leaves of the shrubs in the planting area that stretched the length of the front of the building. The right half of the structure was unlighted. The blinds were closed in the left half, but light escaped at the edges of them. He parked behind Elmo’s blue pickup truck. It was, he knew, a considered part of the image, a truck with the worn, battered, dusty look of the ranch lands, a more telling symbol than any Cadillac or Mercedes could be. Beyond the truck, in a more shadowy place, was a stubby, elderly Renault, sun-seared and rusty.

He tried the door and found it locked. Over the hum of traffic on Bay Highway he heard from inside the building a shrill yapping laugh of a woman. He pressed the bell beside the door. An inner door opened, and light streamed out into the reception desk area. A bright fluorescence flickered on, and a woman came toward the locked door, smiling, patting her hair, hitching her skirt. She was young, short, sturdy, her slender waist latched so tightly in a wide belt it accentuated hips and breasts far beyond their need for emphasis. Her face was broad, pale, pretty in a rather insipid way, roughened by acne scars. Her hair was dyed a dark red, and worn in a rather incongruous and inappropriate beehive style. She jounced toward the locked glass door on very high heels, coming down hard with each step. She looked cheap, trivial, empty and troublesome, but Wing had learned, during Elmo’s term on the commission, that she was shrewd, competent and trusted.

She opened the door and said, “Hey, Jimmy.”

“Evening, Miz Sandra.”

She locked the door again and said, as they walked toward Elmo’s office, “How about with my little sister in the Sunday paper, hey?”

“All set. They were going to make it a one-column cut, but now they’ll use it three columns wide.”

“It’s only fair, her being the one in the family with looks, and marrying better than me or Ruthie. When I married Pat we didn’t have the money to have a picture took, even.”

Elmo was sorting papers on his desk. The desk and the room were like his study at his home. He looked up with an abused grin and said, “Rick Willis keeps telling me everything is running just fine, but whenever I spend two days away from this desk, I get all this here crud to sort out. Make yourself a drink, Jimmy.”

The doors of the bar cabinet in the corner were open. He heard Elmo and Sandra Straplin talking about the work she was to do. He opened the small built-in refrigerator and found some beer on the bottom shelf, dark frosty bottles of imported Tuborg. He opened one and took it over to the long deep couch under the windows.

“You want I should do any of it tonight, like maybe the airmail to Costex, Elmo?” she asked, standing beside Elmo, frowning down at him.

“No. You have it all for me to sign tomorrow, so you just tell me when to come on in here.”

She riffled the sheaf of papers in her hand. “About like two o’clock?”

He slapped her on the haunch and turned it into a little push, urging her toward the door. “Two o’clock will be just fine, Sandra. Goodnight, girl.” He turned to Jimmy. “You follow along and lock that outside door behind her, boy, so we can talk easy. I got to get this desk cleaned the hell off.”

Sandra put the papers in her desk drawer, took her purse from another drawer, turned out the reception room lights. They went to the door and she said, “What you do, you turn this hickey here to the right. Guess you’ll be coming around more often?”

“Are you telling me or asking me, Sandra?”

The nearest light standard on Bay Highway shone a pale white light through the glass door, slanting across her wide white face. Her perfume was a very sweet and heavy flower scent. She smiled up at him. “Neither one, Jimmy. Just making talk.”

“I wouldn’t want you making that kind of talk too many places.”

Her placid smile did not change. “Chrissake, honey, if I was to start now, I’d go down one hell of a long list before coming to you, so don’t fret yourself. Thanks about my sister. We’ll get along, you know. That’s what he’s good at, always knowing people will get along good together. Goodnight, Jimmy.”

She left. He locked the door. He watched her little car turn out into the flow of traffic, heading toward town.

He went back and picked up the beer bottle and stood by Elmo’s desk until Elmo looked up at him, and then he said, “Maybe what you should do, Commissioner, is take an ad in the paper. You know the usual form. We are pleased to announce that James Warren Wing has become associated with us.”

“Are you sore, boy?”

“A little, I guess. Last night Leroy was so damn cute.”

“You handled that real fine. Leroy likes the way you took it, and so do I.”

“Thanks a lot. Does Sandra get to pat me on the head too?”

“Steady down, Jim, for God’s sake. You know what Leroy proved? He proved something I already knew, but he had to check it himself so he’d feel easier in his mind about it. He had to make sure you weren’t one of those people have to jump on every chance to make a brag. Most people are like that. It makes them feel bigger to hint around how important they are. I’m clearing you right now to talk right out to Leroy about any part of all this.”

“Leroy and Sandra so far. Do you want to write out a list for me?”

“You got the ugly on you tonight, boy. One thing you keep in mind, will you? What good would you be to me if everybody knew our deal?”

“Not very much I guess, but...”

“Sandra has been with me eight years. She’d just turned eighteen when she came to work here. Anything I do, she knows. Like Leroy does too. And like you do from now on. Man, I’m not a damn fool.”

Jimmy went back to the couch. “I guess you’ve never given me that impression.”

Elmo went to the cabinet bar and chuckled as he started to fix himself a drink. “Just don’t worry about who knows what. Take a damn fool like Flake. He never gets to know more than I need him to know so I can get the use out of him I have to.”

“But you have an arrangement with him on his share of this Palmland Development, don’t you?”

“I got some ways of keeping him tame. Leroy and Sandra I don’t have to worry about. They know they do good when I do good. So they like to come up with all the he’p they can give me. Hell, after Sandra married Pat Straplin, I made him a lend of the money to get into the contract electric business on his own, and I keep him busy. I got a couple of her kin onto the county payroll a while back.” He pulled a chair toward the couch, sat down and put his drink on the coffee table. “What happens to a man, Jim, he gets a lot of other people fastened onto him in one way or another, so sometimes you have the feeling it’s turned into a whole army, all pushing in one direction, everybody anxious to do all they can, because this is the way they make things better’n they’ve ever been. It’s getting so it would be hard to find a public place around Palm County where a man could bad-mouth me and not get knocked flat and bloody.”

“I suppose the biggest danger in that is beginning to believe it yourself.”

Elmo looked at him narrowly, then laughed. “Hell, I believe some of it. Why shouldn’t I? My name doesn’t sound the same to me it used to. Elmo Bliss — it used to have a raggedy-pants sound. But I’ve pulled it higher than anybody thought I would already. It doesn’t sound the same to me any more. You want I should be humble? It surprises me ninety-nine per cent of the human race can feed themself. Anything wrong with a man knowing he’s in the one per cent on top?”

“As long as he stays on top, I guess.”

“Women, liquor and gambling. That’s what throws men, Jimmy. I do my gambling in a business way, where I know the odds. I got my drinking done early in life. And the women I got are no more anxious for any scandal talk than I am, and anything new that comes along will be selected just as careful, boy.”

“So you’re safe, Elmo.”

“It’s something you should know, you betting your future on me. If I should go down, I’ll fall heavy. And you might be right in the way.”

“You better decide whether you’re going to keep me in line by threatening me, Elmo, or by sweet-talking me. This way, you keep confusing both of us.”

“It just goes to show how much I want to depend on you. It’s making me too anxious. I guess once you get to work, we’ll both feel better. I was awake in the night thinking about you, Jimmy. A good man should get paid what he’s worth. I decided old Buck is going to sell a little bigger piece than he thinks he is, when the time comes. He’ll sell you some, and take your note. You should clear ten thousand on it, which would be seven thousand, almost, keeping money, once you pay capital gain.”

“Thank you very much.”

“There’ll be little things like that coming along ever’ so often, boy. By the time you get out with a profit, I’ll have a good place you should put it and watch it make you fat. I figure a man like you should feel more like a partner than somebody hired.”

“I’ve been a hired man all my life.”

“Then it’s time you should stand on this side of the fence and see how it feels. I know what you’re thinking right now. You’re thinking I’m awful goddam anxious this land fill goes through. I am. But I’m not so anxious I’m losing track of anything.”

“I wouldn’t expect you to.”

“They had their first meeting this evening, and the first one you should go after is that son of a bitch Sinnat. Now we’re down to cases, boy.”

“As I understand this, Elmo, you want me to dig up some things about these people, things which can be used to get them off this Grassy Bay campaign.”

“That’s exactly right!”

“But what kind of things, damn it? How much proof? How are they going to be used?”

“Now you listen here, Jimmy Wing! What I want is that Dial Sinnat finding out it just isn’t worth while for him to mix into this thing. He put up a good piece of the money the last time, and they’ll be wanting to clip him for more. It’s like a dog, he sticks his nose in a hole and a big yella bee stings it, he don’t care what else is in that hole any more. Just how it gets used depends on what it is you can come up with. And I don’t think it has to be too much. You know why? It would take one hell of a lot to keep me or Leroy or Felix Aigan out of this deal, because we come out at the end of it with something you can hold in your hand, namely money. What’s the word for the opposite of something you can hold onto?”

“Abstraction?”

“That’s it. All the damn bird-watchers and do-gooders and nature boys, they got an abstraction they’ve fell in love with. But the average man, you tell him that bay is a mess of mud flats likely to make his kids sick, he won’t see anything pretty in it, and he won’t want to save it. When the average man goes to look at nature, he wants something going on, like a porpoise coming ten feet up out of the water to eat a fish, or like pretty girls underwater, sucking air from a hose and eating bananas. There’s nothing going on in that bay they can look at. But the goddam do-gooders got this abstraction they look at. They like the idea of nature being left the hell alone. Boy, it never is left alone. Never. Not when there’s a dollar you can make out of it. Now, what I’m saying is that money in hand is a lot more persuasive than the abstraction of leaving it like it was when the Indians first found it. So it’s easier to chase a man off an abstraction than it is to chase him away from meat and potatoes.”

“Wait a minute, Elmo. A lot more men have died for abstract considerations, for ideas, than for money.”

“Is Sinnat one of those, for God’s sake?”

“N-no. He isn’t one of those.”

“So what can we use?”

“I don’t know, Elmo.”

“Then you find out. On his fourth wife, isn’t he? Anything he’s doing, or his wife is doing, or any of their kids are doing that he wouldn’t want too many people knowing about, he could be cooled off real fast on this nature-lover business. You’re the one can find out easiest and fastest of anybody in town, Jim. And he’s the one I want discouraged first. Anything looks promising, you bring it right to me.”

“And if there’s nothing?”

“One thing I’ve learned. There’s always something. Maybe you got to turn it a little sideways before you can use it, but it’s always there if you look for it.”

“How much time is there?”

“The petition gets presented to the commissioners next Tuesday morning. As far as setting the date for the hearing, I just plain don’t know yet. The law sets two weeks’ minimum time to wait after the petition is presented. I got to move a little easy on it, so the other commissioners won’t get the idea I got a special ax to grind.”

“Last time around, I helped the do-gooders all I could.”

“That’s good, boy. They’ll want more help. Try to give it to them.”

Jimmy Wing stared at the commissioner. “Maybe I’m not getting through. I agree with what they’re trying to do.”

Elmo finished his drink. “So do I, in more ways than you might imagine, Jim boy. If this whole coast could be just as it was when I was a boy, I’d be happy. Right in the middle of all those hundreds of little houses Earl Ganson built in that Lakeview Village of his, I used to get me my quail with an old single-bar’l Ithaca sixteen-gauge when I wasn’t as high as it was long. Had a busted stock wrapped with wire, and every time you fired it you had to bang the butt on the ground to make the trigger spring back to where it belonged. Hell, you’re old enough to know how it was around here.”

“Remember that old dock on the north end of Cable Key, the long one on the bay side at the old Esterly place?”

“Sure do.”

“I must have been about eight years old. It was a Sunday in May. There was a school of mullet in there like nobody has ever seen since. I’d say they were schooled up six miles long, a mile wide and ten feet deep.”

“Say, I remember that! God damn! We gigged all day long until our arms like to fell off.”

“Everybody did. Half the town was out there.”

“And the fish house price fell off to two cents, finally, and then they wouldn’t buy at all because they had no room. I remember we run a truck of them down to Naples, but it was a hot day and we had no ice, and the man down there didn’t like the look in their eye by then. So we dumped ’em damn near in the center of town and took off fast.”

“The whole town here stank for a week. That was the last big school, the last one on this coast, Elmo.”

“It’s a sad thing to think about, surely. And so are a lot of other things, Jimmy. All those miles of dead empty beaches. I was at a party at a big motel on Cable Key the other night. A political thing. Out at that Blue Horizon. I bet you Gidge Tucker put a million bucks into that, all told. And it’s got places on either side of it damn near as big. I was standing out on the beach where they had a bar moved out there, and lanterns strung and all, and grass-skirt music going on, talking to a committeewoman from Tampa, and I looked at the way the shoreline curves right about there, and knew where I was at, and all of a sudden I had to laugh and I couldn’t tell her what I was really laughing at. I had to make something up. You see, right about where we were standing, I’d spread me a blanket maybe twenty years ago, with a bottle and a fire and a little darkhead waitress from Estero, and we stayed right on there through most of the next day, the only time putting our clothes on to go all the way to town to get something to eat and some more wine. We had a game we were shipwrecked on a desert island, and we didn’t see a soul all day, or expect to. Gidge paid three hundred a foot for that same shoreline we blanketed on, and it’s worth more now, but if it had been three dollars a foot back then, I couldn’t have bought enough for a grave, except maybe lengthwise from the water. It’ll all be a sad thing the way it changes, all the wild things and wild places going, one by one, but you and me, we can’t change it or keep it from happening. All we can do is get in there and get our piece of it. Hell, I know why you went along with those folks. Vance Hubble was a good friend, and I know for sure that the people who fought the fill the last time and will fight it this time make better people to be around, for a man like you, than the ones over on my side of the fence. But you did it to help your friends and be with them, not out of any great big complex about saving the world. You don’t give enough of a damn about things like that to make it any great jolt for you to work against them instead of for them.”

“I wouldn’t want them to know what I’m doing.”

“They won’t know unless you tell them. I won’t. Leroy won’t. Sandra won’t. And let me tell you something else. Once it’s filled, the ones who were against it won’t give a damn either. Maybe they’ll feel regretful they lost, and maybe they’ll scowl when they look out onto that fill and the houses going up on it, but after they’ve seen it fifty times they won’t notice it any more, and they won’t miss the bay unless they stop and remember how it used to be. The only thing left of that bay will be some old memories and some old photographs hanging around. And after it’s filled there’ll be thousands and thousands of folks coming down here who won’t even realize it was open bay water, and will be bored if you try to tell them it was. Because they won’t give a damn. Jimmy, what the common man wants is television, air conditioning, a backyard barbecue, healthy kids and a normal sex life. If it was the last bay left in the world, he might get agitated. But there’s always more bays. And when he goes fishing, he doesn’t compare how good or how bad he does to what he could have done ten years ago or fifty years ago. If he gets two runty little trash fish last week and three this week, he’s happy to do better. If he sees one pelican and one blue heron all week, he’s glad there’s wild water birds around for him to look at. If they don’t look at him, he’ll yell and wave his arms to make sure they do. He likes nature to notice him. And that bay doesn’t notice him worth a damn. It just sits there, and when it’s gone he won’t miss it. Neither will your do-gooder friends. But I would sure as hell miss the money I’m going to make out of it. I’d want to lay down and cry if it went bad on me. I got to have it, and it’s not an abstraction, fella. It’s the most actual thing there is in the world, and I mean to have it, because I got just the right use for it. And now listen close. Name me one son of a bitch in this world who can prove which is the best thing to have out on those grass flats, eight hundred houses, or eight million minnows. It’ll be a nice high-class development, and the people who’ll live there’ll be happy they found such a pretty place to call home.”

“I’ll take the fish, Elmo.”

“If I had any choice in the matter, I would too. But if I chose fish, boy, somebody else would choose to fill it, because it’s close in, it’s shallow enough to fill cheap, and the state is still in the business of peddling land belonging to the people.”

“Which is a violation of trust.”

“Maybe it’s morally wrong, but it’s as legal as marriage, boy. When there’s next to nothing left worth saving, they’ll put it all under the Conservation Department where it should have been put years ago. But so long as the door isn’t locked yet, I’m walking through it before somebody else does. And I don’t want any long-drawn-out law fights either. That’s where you come in. And the first one I want nailed is Dial Sinnat. We set to go now?”

Jimmy Wing waited the space of three slow exhalations. “It should be interesting work.”

“You’ll get to like it, as soon as you break the ice.”

“Elmo, I don’t want to like it or dislike it. I just want to do it and get it over.”

“Where will you start?”

“I don’t know.”

Elmo reached and thumped Jimmy Wing on the knee with his fist. “You’ll figure it out. Boy, we’ll find time to talk this way often. We’ll get to know each other. The better I know you, the better I like you, Jimmy. You got a cool streak, but maybe that’s a good thing. I got plenty of people can get too damn hot and excited. You lay back and keep account on how we’re doing, huh?”

“Won’t you know?”

Elmo laughed. “Hell, I’ll know it when we go so slow on this thing I get nervous. Then I’d have to tell Leroy to get you some outside help on those folks. You’d still be in charge, sort of. But they’d be helping you dig. Leroy knows a damn good Tampa outfit with some smart ex-cops working for them.”

“But you said it won’t take much to scare those people off.”

“It won’t, Jimmy! It won’t! But we’ve got to have that little bit.”

Jimmy Wing wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “If you want something to start with, I can give you something on Morton Derm...”

“Dial Sinnat first, Jimmy boy! Before he can fatten the kitty for them. Hell, I got to get on home before Dellie skins me. Get those lights over there, will you? I’ll see that everything’s locked.”

Wing followed Elmo’s pickup as far as Bayou, then turned off toward the newspaper building. Seconds after he arrived, a state highway patrol tip came in on a bad one ten miles south of town on Bay Highway, just north of the town limits of Everset. Borklund shooed him onto it, along with Stu Kennicott for pictures. They hurried down to Jimmy’s car. Four blocks after they had turned onto Bay Highway an ambulance screeched by them. Jimmy tucked the old blue wagon in behind it, maintaining a minimum safe interval, and clicked on his illegal red flasher.

They had to yell at each other to be heard over the constant sustained scream of the siren and the hard roar of the old Plymouth engine.

“All you know is it’s a bad one?” Stu yelled. He was an aggressive little man with thick glasses.

“That’s all he said.”

“Goddam death trap from Palm City to Everset. Same as Venice to Sarasota. I won’t let Myrt drive it. You following too close?”

“I can see past him, Stu. If anything looks hairy ahead, I’ll fade back.”

“You do that. You know what I like?”

“What do you like?”

“I’m a beauty contest man. And animals. Long legs and cute kittens. I take a hell of a picture, man. These tore-up folks, they put my stomach off. Aren’t you too goddam close!”

“Flash Kennicott, the fearless photographer. I have to move up so I can pass when he does, or I get nipped off.”

“They’ll still be there and they’ll still be dead.”

“Cheer up, Stu. If it’s a bad enough schmear, maybe you’ll get a wire-service pickup.”

Stu kept both feet on imaginary brakes. Soon Wing saw the flashing lights ahead and he stayed close behind the ambulance as it slowed. Troopers with flashlights were moving the traffic through. He saw a state patrol car parked in a field, heading out, so he bounced through a shallow ditch and parked beside it. They got out and walked over to the mess. The sedan was on the near side of the road, upright, the front end accordioned. The old panel delivery was on the far side, on its side, damaged in the same way. Tow trucks were waiting to hook on, as soon as the state police gave the word. In the floodlights a heavy woman in orange slacks lay bonelessly spilling out of the open door on the passenger side of the sedan, facedown, legs tucked under the dash.

Kennicott’s power-pack bulb began to flash. Tires yelped far to the north and south as cars braked for the slow passage by the accident. They gawped as they went by, and pulled off when they were beyond the officers and came walking back through the confusion of lights and through the tall grass to stand and stare some more.

Jimmy Wing saw Cal Chadwicks, a patrolman he knew well, talking to another officer and a truck driver. He went over to them and said, “Evening, Cal.”

Chadwicks turned, smiled, grimaced. “Hey, Jimmy.”

“Head on, it looks like. We going to know how they did it?”

Cal gestured toward the truck driver. “This-here boy saw good. He lost forty dollars of burned-off rubber staying to hell out of it.”

“Heading north,” the driver said with that wooden tone indicative of shock. “The car there, the Nebraska car, passed me and come in between me and the truck ahead. Then he swang out to take a look, but the panel truck was too close, coming fast, so he cut back too far, tripped hisself on where the shoulder drops off and got flang back out right bang into that panel truck and got knocked right back again right across the front end of me to where it’s sitting now. It was a hell of a noise. Seemed like it went on a hell of a long time.”

When another officer came to speak to Chadwicks, Jimmy got the truck driver’s name, and other pertinent information.

Kennicott came over to him and said, “I’ll get back with this right now, Jimmy, they can get it in. You going to phone it in?”

“Yes.”

“Then how about the lend of your car? Can you get a ride?”

Jimmy gave him the keys. “Leave it in the lot there. Put the keys under the mat on the driver side. Get anything?”

“What there is, I got. Who needs it?”

Kennicott left. Wing located Chadwicks again, over by the panel truck. It had Palm County plates. It was being rocked up onto its wheels. One ambulance was gone. “Who was in this one?” Wing asked.

“Claude Barnsong, from Everset.”

“Which Barnsong is that, Cal?”

“The one runs a charter boat out of Everset Marina. His license here says he was... thirty-four. He was alone and he was in a hurry. Got a half ton of marine engine in that thing and it came frontwards when he hit.” Wing borrowed the license and wrote down the RFD address. Chadwicks was able to lend him the identification on the other two deceased, a Mr. and Mrs. George Kylor, aged fifty-eight and fifty-six, with a street address in Grand Island, Nebraska, driving a 1960 Buick. They had lost control of it. There was ample evidence of the point of impact being in the southbound lane, all the fine scale and dust which is hammered loose from the underparts of cars in a head-on smash, the white powder of glass, burst of oil and spray of water, all captured on highway patrol cameras before traffic was permitted to roll over the place of impact. The police report would fix the blame on the Kylor car — and the insurance people would eventually settle. But who was responsible for a road too narrow for the traffic, or for shoulders scoured down by summer rains?

The other ambulance was gone. The panel truck had been hauled away. The burst and scattered luggage had been collected and shoved back into the Kylor vehicle. Patrolmen halted traffic while the wrecker turned out onto the highway with it. As Wing walked over toward the patrol cars to beg a ride back to the city, he kicked something in the grass and it rolled into the light. It was a carved coconut, with a bright clown face and a mailing tag. He squatted and used his lighter and saw the tag was blank. He straightened up and kicked it into the shallow ditch where some child might find it the next day.

A county deputy gave him a ride back into town. He turned his copy in, for the page-one space which had been cleared for it. After he had retrieved the hidden keys and gotten behind the wheel of the station wagon, he sat there in the dark parking lot for a little while without turning on the lights or the motor. There was always a carnival flavor about roadside death in the hot months. Flashing lights, the distant melodies of car radios, the abrupt nervous laughter at macabre jokes, the hot gaseous stink of engines mingling with the trampled fragrance of the grass, recognitions, greetings and farewells in the night, sirens coming and going, the holiday awareness of knowing strangers were dead, not you.

It had drained him, yet made him wonder that it could not touch him more deeply. The coconut mask was a sickly bathos. The fat orange slacks were clownish. He could believe that in these past few years of his life a crust had formed across some middle portion of his mind. He could perceive the relationships of his existence, yet he seemed to be required to explain them to himself in a search for reaction which was so studied that the whole procedure became meaningless. Sometimes he felt as if he had forgotten the first language he had learned to speak, and his acquired tongue had no meaningful words in it. It was not a cynicism. It seemed more of a process of a progressive deadening, depriving him of the internal dialogue he had previously enjoyed, that interplay of query and response which made awareness more acute. He had lost some textural, essential appreciation of reality, and felt himself to be in a dream of boredom, unresponsive to all cheap solutions, jeering at himself in a halfhearted way. And ready for Elmo’s offer, ready for almost any change, just to see what it would do — thinking of himself as a small creature in a maze which it has learned too well, and now needs the stimuli of experimental complications.

A mosquito whined to a thirsty silence against his throat. He slapped it, started the car and drove slowly to Tamarinda Street. It was midnight. Number 27 was lighted. He parked several houses beyond it, and walked quietly back to it. He tried to remember the last time he had seen his sister, Laura, and could not recall. Eight months at least. She was his only blood relative left in the state, and she was seventeen years older than he. They had been close, a long time ago. But the relationship had not survived the loss of what she had wanted for herself and for him.

Laura lived with her invalid husband in a shabby little frame house. He went up onto the porch and looked through the living room window. She sat staring without expression at television turned so low he could barely hear the sound of it through the screen.

“Laura,” he said.

She gave a violent start and put her hand to her throat and stared round-eyed at the window.

“It’s Jimmy,” he said in the same tone.

She pushed herself up out of the chair, turned the set off, and let him in. She wore a green housecoat belted around her thick body. Her hair was sandy gray. She had his long narrow head, beaked fleshy nose, pale blue eyes. But her mouth was tiny, pinched, set in a mesh of lines radiating from it.

“What’s wrong?” she demanded in a low voice.

“Nothing. Nothing at all. I drove by to see if there was a light on. I just wondered how you are.”

She shrugged and went back to her chair. He sat on a lumpy daybed. The small room smelled of fly spray, boiled food and sickness.

“How do you think I am?” she asked. “I’m queen of the May. Tomorrow I’m going to the south of France in my private yacht.”

“How’s Sid?”

She shrugged again, gesturing toward the back of the house by tilting her head. “Sometimes bad and sometimes worse. But he had a pretty good day today. He ate good. But he gets terrible depressed. It’s eleven years now, and he was an active man. He’s getting so heavy lately, it’s almost more than I can do, getting him into the chair and back into bed.”

“You ought to have some help.”

“I don’t like to bother all the servants with little things like that. On the pension I keep so big a staff I can’t keep track.”

“Can’t Betty help out at all?”

She gave him a look of sad disgust. “Pregnant with her sixth? Three thousand miles away? A sixth grandchild I’ll never get to see. Except the pictures she sends. She looks so little and tired in the pictures, Jimmy. How can she help out? You knew what he was when she run off with him. We all did, and there wasn’t a damn thing we could do. He’s a factory hand out there. A big car and big cigars, six kids and time payments and broke by Wednesday every week. I’ll never see her again. They’ll never get far enough ahead to come this far, and I can’t leave Sid. What’s the matter with you? How do you expect her to help out?”

“Don’t get sore. I was just wondering.”

After a long silence she said, “Do you remember how everything used to be, Jimmy?”

“Yes.”

“I think a lot about how things went wrong for everybody, and I wonder why it had to be this way. I keep thinking of what Mom kept saying before she died. In those last weeks she got homesick for New York State, for the Cherry Valley, even though she hadn’t ever been back since the day she and Dad left, when she was a young girl. And she kept saying that things had gone wrong because they’d come down here. You know, nothing seemed wrong then. Nothing at all, except her having to die that way, hurting. How old were you when she died?”

“Thirteen.”

“That means Betty was six. Sid had a good job. Al was still alive. The family seemed to be doing pretty well. She made me and Al promise we’d help you get an education. We would have anyway. You know that. Already we knew you were the brightest of the three of us. We helped as much as we could.”

“I know.”

“It’s like she knew things were going to go bad for all of us. Funny, isn’t it? Sometimes I have a dream, and it’s always the same. I’m having a picnic with Betty, in a beautiful place. And she has a little baby in her arms. There’s sunshine and sort of music and we’re laughing about something. Then we see Sid walking toward us, as if nothing had ever happened to him. Then I realize we’re all at the Cherry Valley. I wake up smiling and crying. I’ve never seen the Cherry Valley.”

“I drove through there once.”

“Don’t tell me about it, Jimmy. You want anything? Ice tea? Beer?”

“No thanks.”

“How’s Gloria?”

“About the same.”

“When did you see her last?”

“Last month,” he lied.

“You should go up there more often, Jimmy.”

“What’s the point in it? She doesn’t know me. She hasn’t known anybody for two years.”

“But maybe she knows more than she seems to.”

“Laura, don’t for God’s sake try to turn it into a soap opera. There’s been a progressive deterioration of the brain cells, a physiological decay. Now they’re willing to admit that possibly all those series of shock treatments may have made the process a little faster. It’s something that destroys the actual brain cells. They talk about some kind of chemical imbalance or deficiency.”

“Big words,” she said. “Lots of big words.”

“Do you have to have it in little words? She wears diapers. They feed her with tubes into her nose. Her eyes don’t focus. They say it’s interesting. They think they may be learning something from her.”

“The big words help you, don’t they? You don’t have to think of her as being Gloria. And you don’t have to go see her.”

He stared across at her in vast burlesque surprise. “Where’d all this concern come from? Aren’t you my loving sister, the woman who celebrated my pending marriage by telling me I was throwing myself away by marrying a little Ybor City slut named Mendez? I was impairing my social standing, or something. And when we had that first trouble, you were plugging for a fast divorce, weren’t you?”

“We didn’t know she was sick then, Jimmy. And I got to like her. She’s still your wife.”

“She’s nothing, Laura. She’s breathing meat.”

“You’re cold as a stone.”

“I went through all the kinds of feeling there are. I used up all there was. What the hell do you expect of me?”

“Nobody expects much of you, Jimmy. Nobody.”

“That’s nice.”

“Maybe you got things just the way you want them. Kind of a litle frog in a little pond. I saw you two months ago. Downtown, just going into the Bay Restaurant. You looked a little tight. You were laughing and you were with the McClure woman. I guess that’s the kind of thing you like.”

“Mitchie is an old friend.”

“You don’t pick your friends very careful.”

“I’ve got a thousand friends, Sis.”

She shrugged. “It’s none of my damn business anyhow, I guess. You’re grown. But I raised you, Jimmy. You remember that. Nothing is the way I dreamed it would be. I saw you, and I was on my way back here. I hadn’t seen you in months, and then I saw you with that woman, and I was coming back here. The days go by so slow for me. They go slow for Sid too. I guess they’re worse for Sid. I should be glad you came by tonight, instead of nagging you like this every minute.”

She looked at him with a forced smile. On an impulse he took his wallet out and took Elmo’s hundred dollars out of it. He had folded the two bills small and tucked them behind his credit cards. He unfolded them and took them over and put them in her hand.

She stared up at him blankly. “What’s this?”

“Will it help?”

“My God, yes, it will help. But you act funny. Where’d you get it?”

“For a favor for a friend.”

“What kind of a favor? Can it get you in trouble?”

“Do you want it or don’t you?”

“I want it. Thanks a lot.” She put it in the pocket of her robe. “Did you come here to give this to me?”

“Yes,” he lied.

“One thing I’m going to do with it, I guess you should know, I’m going to talk to Betty on the phone. I talked to her at Christmas, just three minutes.”

“It’s yours. Don’t ask for permission. Do anything you want with it. Maybe there’ll be more. I don’t know. I can’t promise it.”

“You don’t owe me anything. You know that.”

“I’ll help if I can. Okay?”

“If you want to, I think it’s very nice. You look awful tired, Jimmy.”

“I’m sort of jittery. It was an automobile thing, down near Everset. A bad one.”

“Oh, I heard it on the midnight news. Three people dead?”

“Yes.”

“I heard it just before you got here: I guess that... just being alive is something to be thankful for.”

“Sure. I’ll be going, Laura.”

She went to the door with him. She pecked him on the cheek, patted his shoulder and said, “Come back sooner next time, dear. You’re the only brother I’ve got. You should take better care of yourself. Come back in the daytime. Sid would love company.”

As Jimmy Wing drove toward his cottage on Cable Key, he felt better than he had all day. The nagging guilt about not having seen Laura in so many months was partially expiated. He could see her again soon. And, by giving her the money, he had somehow lightened his sense of obligation to Elmo. It made Elmo’s assignment more of a game than a necessity. Tomorrow he would talk to Kat, and tomorrow he would find out something about Dial Sinnat which would please Elmo. If the money, or a reasonable percentage of it, could go to Laura and Sid, the whole venture seemed considerably more respectable. It was good to think about her talking to Betty in California. A nice long talk, courtesy of Elmo Bliss.