Mermaid on the Rocks

chapter 9

Barbara perched on the edge of the low table facing him. Their knees didn’t quite touch.

“I hoped Kitty wouldn’t have to know about this,” she said. “She’s such an avaricious thing, not that I expect you to agree with me. You’re quite right-a million dollars for Gaspar as it stands is fantasy. That’s thirteen thousand an acre, and most of those acres you can’t get to unless you happen to be a mosquito or a bulldozer. We’re swindling poor gullible Mr. Hilary Quarrels, that farsighted, hard-headed businessman, and if you sip your brandy and let me put my hand on your knee from time to time to emphasize a point, I’ll tell you about it.”

To emphasize that point, she put her hand on his knee. “You were limping, Mike. What’s the matter with your leg?”

“It’s still cramped up from that damn Volkswagen.”

“Poor dear,” she said sympathetically. “When the Germans designed that car they were thinking of somebody else’s specifications.” She stepped up the pressure for an instant, then removed her hand. “You don’t want me to make advances. You want to hear about our million-dollar deal. Mike, Quarrels and his organization aren’t buying just a development site. They’re buying a development site plus buried treasure.”

Shayne made a scornful sound. She chortled happily.

“Wait. The Key’s named after one of the last of the Florida pirates, Jose Gaspar. His main base was up St. Petersburg-way but there’s an old tradition that he had a stockade here where he kept people he was holding for ransom. Please, wipe that skeptical look off your face. I have no intention of telling you that Gasparilla buried a chest of doubloons in our back yard, and we have a treasure map to prove it. Not that we don’t have a map. We have a marvelous map. But it isn’t to pirate’s gold, it’s to swindler’s gold.”

“Barbara, can you move it along a little faster? I’m thinking of my helicopter.”

She drank off half her martini at a gulp. “Patience. I told you gin makes me talkative. Mr. Quarrels didn’t believe it either at first. But he believes me now, and by the time I’m finished with you, my fine skeptical friend, you’ll believe it too.”

“If you think there’s treasure on the Key and you have a good map, why don’t you do your own digging? Why sell it to Quarrels?”

“Don’t think we didn’t try.” She held out both hands and examined the palms. “They don’t show now, but I had callouses! Me!”

Shayne stirred, and she said hastily, “I admit I’m stalling. I don’t want you to walk out of my life one minute after you walked into it. Here it is. It started in the great Florida land boom of 1925, and what a crazy time that was. I’m so full of the subject I could talk about it for hours. Don’t worry. I know how anxious you are to get back to your client.”

She came forward suddenly, took his face in both hands and kissed his mouth. She darted her tongue against his lips for one tantalizing instant, then pushed away.

“Don’t say it! Your helicopter’s waiting! Back to ’25!” She gave him a mock salute. “Mike, imagine yourself a real-estate promoter in the spring of ’25. You’ve taken an option on a promising patch of swamp, but nobody’s interested in buying your lots because they’re miles and miles from anywhere, with no access, no ocean frontage, too many insects. The other promoters have more money for advertising and more salesmen, and possibly better drainage. You need a gimmick. One night you wake up with an inspiration. A week or so later some local yokel is digging for bait in the middle of your swamp and his shovel hits a crock of buried treasure! It’s genuine treasure. You’re positive about that because you buried it yourself the day before. The news makes the papers all over the country. People crowd in with picks and spades. But naturally you don’t let them dig until they’ve made the down payment on one of your hypothetical lots. I know it sounds crude, but I guess people were stupider in those days. It worked. The first promoter who tried it made a mint. There were three or four finds that summer, each one bigger than the one before. One of the big ones was on Key Largo.”

“Now you’re getting to the point,” Shayne said.

“Our man’s name was Jethroe. If suckers could be persuaded that pirates came ashore to bury their gold on Key Largo, or in Miami Shores, or in some place in the ’Glades a long way from salt water, why not on a Key that was actually named after a pirate? Daddy sold him the key, the way they sold real estate in those days, on a ten-percent binder. Jethroe built the trestle and this one sample house. He was all ready for the first public announcements on a certain day in October. The ads never appeared. I have the proofs. With nothing but those ads to go on, you’d honestly think Gaspar was bigger than Miami, with a brighter future.”

“And then the boom fell apart.”

“Pow. There was no mention of treasure in the ads, but there was quite a spiel about fabled romance and the swashbuckling days of the buccaneers, to set up the atmosphere. First there had to be a flashy opening, with a free boat ride from Miami, free food and entertainment. Jethroe had William Jennings Bryan booked for the main oration. The treasure was due to be discovered two days later. One of the first homesteaders would be out digging a hole for a privy, and lo and behold! Gold doubloons. After the collapse the papers wouldn’t run the ads unless they were paid in cash, and nobody had cash, least of all Jethroe. He never had a chance to come down and dig up the treasure himself. He got in an argument with a man from Ashtabula, Ohio, who’d put his life savings in one of Jethroe’s promotions, and the man from Ashtabula shot him. Didn’t I tell you it was wild?”

Shayne shook his head. “That’s the story you sold Quarrels?”

“I didn’t tell it to him the way I’m telling it to you. I showed him the documentation. There’s absolutely no question that Jethroe buried treasure on Gaspar October 2, 1925. I can prove that. I can’t prove it’s still there, but so? Quarrels comes out ahead either way.”

“What kind of documentation?”

“Eda Lou-” she raised her voice slightly and turned toward the hall-“and if you’re listening out there, dear, correct me if I’m wrong about any of the details-Eda Lou found the map in an old suitcase of Daddy’s. One day last fall I came down from Miami without phoning first. Eda Lou was nowhere to be seen, in spite of the fact that her car was in the garage. Then what did she do but walk in with a shovel. She doesn’t broadcast her age, but I know she’s too old to be out digging holes on a hot day just for the exercise. I followed her tracks and found three holes. Big ones. She refused to explain. I did a little snooping. It’s my house, after all, never mind what it says in that kooky will. And I found the map under the lace runner on her bureau.”

She studied Shayne for a moment. “I was going to say it’s in a safe-deposit box in the city, but damn it, I think I’ll show it to you.”

Going to the sideboard with quick steps, she pulled open a drawer and took out a locked dispatch case. She unlocked it, removed an envelope and brought it over to Shayne. She took out the map very carefully. It was obviously old. It had been folded twice and the markings had worn away at the folds. Other lines were blotted out by a brownish stain.

“And what do you think that stain is?” she asked. “Blood! Or maybe coffee, who knows?”

She opened both arms in a dancer’s gesture. “Isn’t it magnificent! I was absolutely nuts about pirates as a girl. Let’s be honest-I still am. One of the tragedies of my life has been that I’ve met so few. Mike, if you ever run into a pirate who wants to capture a sex-starved lady and hold her for ransom, put in a word for me, will you? Well! I waved this map under Eda Lou’s nose and did a little screaming. Where did she get it, what made her think it was O.K. to dig holes on somebody else’s property, et cetera? I pulled out a handful of hair, I’m sorry to say, and don’t be fooled by that switch she wears-that came from the wig store. She doesn’t have any of her own to spare.” She raised her voice again. “Do you, angel? Mike, at first we thought this must date all the way back to Gasparilla’s day. But I knew that couldn’t be, or Daddy would have shown it to me when I was going through my pirate phase. Then I remembered reading about that Key Largo promotion. It was in a book of memoirs by Ben Hecht, and I’ll loan it to you if you want to read it, it’s around the house somewhere. Nothing this interesting had happened to me for a long time. I went up to the Miami Public Library and took out a file of 1925 newspapers. I’d heard Daddy tell stories about Jethroe. He was one of the big men of the day, and whenever he cleared his throat on the subject of Florida’s future it made the front page. There were little squibs here and there about his plans for Gaspar, but never anything about what he was like personally, where he came from, whether or not he had a family. I talked to some old-timers who knew him, but nobody had any ideas about what might have happened to his records or his personal papers. I came back and practically took the house apart. And way in the back of a storage space up under the eaves, Mike, I finally found an old beat-up manila envelope.”

She emptied her glass and started back to the sideboard.

“There was a lot of junk in it I couldn’t understand,” she said over her shoulder, “along with the proofs of those opening-day ads, and things like the bill of sale for that pipe organ-which still works, incidentally. And then there was a sheet of ruled paper torn from a notebook without any heading, and I got a real fluttery pulse when I saw what it was.”

She selected a paper from the open dispatch case and brought it back.

“It’s a list of purchases of old Spanish money. The first time this trick was pulled it didn’t have to amount to much or look particularly authentic. Then as the summer went on, people began to get suspicious, and by the time Jethroe was ready, his map had to be very good, the treasure had to be genuine and of the right period, and there had to be lots and lots of it. There weren’t many real doubloons on the market, though of course the same coins were used over and over. As soon as one promoter milked all the publicity out of them, he sold them to another, at a nice advance in price. Now look.”

She sat on the arm of Shayne’s chair, her breast against his shoulder, and with a pointed fingernail ticked off the abbreviations on the top line. “July 6, twenty-seven eight-escudo gold pieces, seven thousand dollars. Then that word ‘Ort.’ That’s not an exotic kind of coin, it’s a man’s name, Charles Ort, the man who ran the Key Largo promotion!”

The fingers of her free hand were in Shayne’s rough red hair. “Now August 17. More doubloons from another promoter. September 6, a chest, New Orleans, fifteen hundred. A gold chain, New York, seven thousand. Some chain! Next line. More doubloons, some bar silver, Havana, C. T.-who can that be but Cal Tuttle, Daddy was going back and forth all the time-eighteen thousand. Mike, eighteen thousand! ‘Objects, seven thousand.’ Admit it, you’re impressed, aren’t you?”

“I’m impressed,” Shayne said. “How much does it total, around seventy-five?”

“Over. That’s a lot of money for a gimmick, but he only expected to tie it up for a few weeks, with the value going up all the time. Naturally I’ve tried to find out how much it would be worth today. A Philip V doubloon in good condition, costing say two hundred in 1925, will set you back a thousand now. A silver piece-of-eight brings about a hundred, and Jethroe paid twenty-five. And how about that gold chain? Those ‘objects’? There’s no way of knowing. Quarrels of Florida-American had an expert go over the list. He thinks four hundred thousand would be a pretty close guess.”

“It’s a long way from a million,” Shayne said.

“No, it isn’t really. Companies like Florida-American never put much of their own money into one of these things. Four hundred thousand would more than cover their cash outlay. And here’s the part they couldn’t resist. They’ll come out ahead whether or not they dig up the treasure. We aren’t giving them any guarantees, after all. We’ve had some bad storms since 1925, and maybe the chest has been swept out to sea. They’ll still get their money’s worth in publicity. Don’t tell me this story won’t sell real estate. Back in 1925 you could show people a map like this and they’d believe a pirate named Gasparilla rowed ashore with a band of cutthroats one dark night in the early 1800’s and buried a chest of gold. We’re more sophisticated today. But tell us that a crooked real-estate promoter rowed ashore one dark night in 1925 and buried a chest of gold to swindle the suckers of his day-”

“It’s an up-to-date version of the original swindle.”

“Isn’t it! Mike Shayne, you deserve another drink. And we have so much more than just the map. We have this cost sheet. The newspaper ads that never ran. A photostat of the story about Jethroe’s death. And one other thing I haven’t shown you yet.”

She left him for another quick visit to the dispatch case, and brought back a faded yellow sheet of copy paper. “This is the first draft of the press release on the finding of the treasure.” She gave it to Shayne. “Now be careful with it. Not that I don’t have a Xerox copy in the safe-deposit box, but it’s the color, the feel of the paper-”

She waited till he had read the story. The name of the finder had been left blank, probably because he hadn’t been hired at the time the story was written.

“The interesting thing is the release date,” Barbara said. “That’s a Thursday. The formal opening was scheduled for Tuesday. Jethroe was killed late Monday night. There just aren’t any holes in it!”

Shayne scraped his jaw. “You don’t think it’s almost too good?”

Her mouth tightened. “You bastard, what do you mean by that?”

“It has a certain smell,” Shayne said slowly. “I’m just wondering who’s being swindled. You couldn’t get anything definite out of the map?”

“That’s the whole point-it couldn’t be too precise. The treasure was going to be found first. Then the map would turn up. There’s no north-south orientation, and the coast line is just a squiggle. And those folds. Jethroe had to convince the customers that the map and the treasure weren’t necessarily connected. If this was a pirate hideout, doesn’t it stand to reason that they buried more than one chest of doubloons? Not only that. Things have changed shape since 1925. One whole neck was washed away in the ’35 hurricane. And look at this.” Her finger touched a spot partially concealed by the brown stain. “You’re supposed to take a sighting here from a point thirty paces southeast of a big buttonwood tree. There aren’t any buttonwood trees left on the Key. Eda Lou found some old photographs that showed a big tree about there, and she figured out what she thought was the best place to dig. I told you I dug a hole myself. And that crazy Brad paid no attention to the map at all and bought an army-surplus mine detector. He detected a lot of miscellaneous junk before he quit.”

“Kitty wasn’t in on the digging?”

“I should say not. I wanted to keep it between me and Eda Lou, but the dear old soul didn’t think she could trust me, for some reason. We called a meeting of the real heirs, everybody but Kitty. We decided to cut Eda Lou in for a twentieth because she found the map. Which was generous of us,” she added, raising her voice. “After Brad got nowhere with the mine detector we made a priority list of likely spots and brought a man in with a backhoe. He must have thought we were insane. Then I happened to meet Mr. Quarrels at an art auction, and he saw possibilities right away. If you were Jethroe, how deep would you put the chest? No deeper than three feet, or a man digging a privy wouldn’t hit it. Florida-American will come in with their bulldozers. They’ll rip out the mangroves, and those roots go down further than three feet. By the time they’re finished grading and filling, the chances are they’ll find it. If not, they’ll bring in an article writer and let him write the story and sell it to a national magazine. People will figure that maybe Jethroe buried the chest three and a half feet deep, and if they buy a piece of attractive ocean frontage, it could be on their land. This is going to be a fast-growing community, Mike.”

She clenched her fists, her face suddenly ugly. “And the whole thing depends on Kitty!”