The Empty Copper Sea

The Empty Copper Sea

John D. MacDonald

Travis McGee Book 17 The Empty Copper Sea

John D. MacDonald Dedicated to all the shining memories of those last two passenger ships which flew the United States Flag the Monterey and the Mariposa, and to the mariners who sailed aboard them.

A man needs only to be turned around once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost.

- Thoreau

One

VAN HARDER came aboard the Busted Flush on a hot bright May morning. My houseboat was at her home mooring, Slip F-18 at Bahia Mar, Fort Lauderdale. I was in the midst of one of my periodic spasms of energy born of guilt. You go along thinking you are properly maintaining your houseboat and your runabout, going by the book, keeping a watchful eye on the lines, the bilge, the brightwork, and all. But the book was written for more merciful climates than Florida, once described to the King of Spain by DeSoto, as “an uninhabitable sandspit,” even though at the time it was inhabited by quite a lot of Indians.

Suddenly everything starts to snap, rip, and fall out, to leak and squeal and give final gasps. Then you bend to it, or you go live ashore like a sane person.

Crabbing along, inch by inch, I was replacing the rail posts around the whole three sides of the sun deck, port, starboard, and stern, using a power drill and a power screwdriver to set the four big screws down through the stainless flange at the foot of each post. I had sore knees, a lame wrist, and a constant drip of sweat from nose and chin. I wore an old pair of tennis shorts, and the sun was eating into my tired brown back.

It had been six, maybe seven years since I’d seen Van Harder. He had owned the Queen Bee III in charter-boat row. He had been steady and he could find fish, and so had less trouble finding customers than a lot of the others. I knew he wasn’t going to overwhelm me with a lot of conversation. I knew he’d had some bad luck, but that was a long time ago. A frugal man, he had saved his money and finally sold the Queen Bee III to Rance Fazzo, had acquired a shrimp boat and a large debt, and had moved around to the other coast.

I finished the post, walked over, and mopped my face on the towel. We sat on the two pilot chairs, swiveled away from the instrument panel to face astern, toward all the shops and towers of Bahia Mar, both of us shaded by the folding navy top.

Van Harder was a lean, sallow man. Tall, silent, and expressionless. I had never seen him without a greasy khaki cap with a bill. Florida born for generations back, from that tough, tireless, malnourished, merciless stock which had scared the living hell out of the troops they had faced during the War Between the States. His eyes were a pale watery blue. He was about fifty, I guessed.

“They tell me Fazzo is fishing out of Marathon now,” he said.

“Doing okay, from what I hear.” Silence.

“Meyer still around?”

“Still around. He had some errands over in town today.”

Silence.

“Guess you heard I lost the Queen Bee Number Four. Shrimp boat. Sixty-five foot.”

“Yes, I remember now. Wasn’t that four years or so ago?”

“Two month shy of five year. Run down by a phosphate ship headed for Tampa. Forty mile west of Naples. Three in the morning. Lost two men. One of them had the helm. No way to tell what happened.”

“Insurance?”

He spat over the rail, downwind, with excellent accuracy and velocity. “Enough to pay off what I owed on her. Got a job hired captain on another shrimper. Bigger. New. Hula Marine Enterprises.”

“Hula?”

“That’s the h and u off the front of Hubbard and the l and a off the front of Lawless. Hubbard Lawless. Hula run six shrimp boats at the time, and seven by the time they sold out a couple of years ago. What happened was Hub seen the handwriting on the wall, and he sold out to Weldron, which is a part of Associated Foods, own markets and all. I could have stayed on with Weldron, like most of the others did, except the ones so old they would have been in retirement too quick, and Weldron wouldn’t take them. But Hub Lawless, he offered me a job skipper of the Julie. Real nice cruiser.”

“I’ve seen her over at Pier Sixty-six, way out at the end. Nice.”

“Dutch built. Big twin diesels. Fast. Good range. White with blue trim. How’d you know it was the same Julie?”

“I remember that name. Lawless. I asked who the owner was.”

“If it was a year ago, I was captaining her. Year ago April. Had some time to come over here and see who was around, how things were going. Didn’t happen to run into you then, McGee.”

“But this time you looked me up.” Not quite a question, but at least a leading remark. It sailed right by him. No response. I slumped in the chair, chin on my chest, ankles crossed, staring patiently at my big brown bare feet, at some paler cleat marks on the outside of the left ankle, and at the deep curving ugly scar down the outside of my right thigh.

“Funny thing about it all,” he said, “was that Hub took me on because he knowed I was steady. The captain he had before, I won’t mention no names, he got into the whiskey and he took a cut for himself when he ordered supplies, and he had brought women aboard when Hub was off on business trips.”

“Why do you say that’s funny?”

“Funny meaning strange how it came out, is all. I become a born-again Christian when I was twentyeight years old. Clawed my suffering way up out of the black depths of sin to walk in love and brotherhood with our good Lord Jesus. Now Hub knew that. And he respected that. Until that night he never had no women aboard except his wife and his daughter.”

“What night?”

He turned and gave me a long, watery blue stare. “The night Hub Lawless got drownded! What night you think I was talking about? There wasn’t a news paper in Florida didn’t have the whole thing in it.”

“When did it happen?”

“March twenty-two. Fell off the Julie somehow.”

“I’ve been gone since early March, Van. I got back a week ago. Duke Davis had a party down in the Grenadines on that big ketch of his, the Antsie, and he had a bad fall and tore up his back, and he cabled me to come down and help him bring the Antsie all the way home. I didn’t have any time to read the papers or listen to the news.”

“Thought you look darker than I remembered.”

“What’s this all about, Van?”

He gave it about thirty seconds of thought before answering. “I know maybe more than I should about the time you he’ped out Arthur Wilkinson when he was way down, and it was right after you he’ped him, he married Chookie McCall. What I heard that time was that if somebody lost something important to them, you’d try to get it back, and if you did, you’d keep half what it’s worth.”

“That’s close enough. So?”

He leaned toward me, just a little. I sensed that this was something he had thought about very carefully, turning it this way and that, not certain whether he was being a fool. His wisdom was the sea. So he took onto himself more dignity.

“They is stolen from me my good name, McGee.”

“I don’t see how or what ”

“Now you wait a minute. I got marked down as a drunken man, a fool who lost the owner overboard and nearly lost his vessel. They had an inquiry and held I was negligent. I haven’t got my papers and I can’t work at my trade. I have talked it over with Eleanor Ann, who has got a nursing job there in Timber Bay, and she says if it is what I want to do, she’ll help out. I would say that by and large, my good name is worth twenty thousand dollars anyway, so what I’ll do, I’ll give you a piece of paper. You can word it any way you want, and I’ll sign it. It will say that if you can find some way to show it wasn’t my fault at all, I will pay you ten thousand dollars, not all at once, but over whatever time it takes me to make it and pay it.”

Everything he had was wrapped up in that request: his pride, his dignity, his seafaring career, his worth as a man. And I sensed that this was the very last thing he had been able to think of. Travis McGee, the last chance he had.

“You better tell me exactly what happened.”

“You’ll make the deal?”

“After you tell me what happened, I will sit around and think about it, and I will probably talk to Meyer about it. And then I will tell you if I think I can help at all. If I can’t, I’m wasting your time and mine.”

He thought that over slowly, pursed his lips, and gave a little nod of acceptance. And told his story. At about four in the afternoon of March twentysecond, Hubbard Lawless had phoned the Julie from his country office out at the grove and asked if the cruiser was okay to take a night run on down to Clearwater. It was a pointless question because Van Harder always kept the Julie ready to go. Van reminded Mr. Lawless that the mate, DeeGee Walloway, had been given time off to go up to Waycross, Georgia, where his father was close to death with cancer of the throat. Lawless said there was no need for the mate. There would be four in the party, and one of them would be available to handle the lines, if necessary, and they could certainly serve their own booze and peanuts.

Harder thought it would be four businessmen; he had often made short trips up and down the Florida coast when Lawless wanted to meet with people without attracting too much attention. The boat made a good place to hold a conference. It couldn’t easily be bugged, a fact that politicians seemed to appreciate.

They came aboard at nine. They came down to the marina dock in John Tuckerman’s big blue Chrysler Imperial. John Tuckerman was a sort of unofficial assistant to Hub Lawless. He didn’t seem to hold any particular office in any of Hub’s many corporations and partnerships, but he always seemed to be around, laughing, making jokes, making sure of air reservations, hotel reservations, dockage space, hangar space, and so on. They brought two young women aboard. Half the ages of Hub and John Tuckerman. Tight pants and airline carry-ons. Perfume and giggles.

Van Harder didn’t like it one bit. The Julie was a family boat, named after Mr. Hub’s wife. Women like those two didn’t belong aboard. Harder knew from what people said that Hub Lawless was very probably a womanizer, but until that moment, when the two came aboard the Julie, it had been just talk as far as Harder was concerned. When he had been doing charter fishing, he had been known to turn back and come roaring to the dock and refund the unused part of the charter if people started messing around aboard the Queen Bee III. He couldn’t exactly refuse to make the run to Clearwater, but he did not want to stay on as captain of a floating whorehouse.

Still puzzling over what to do, Harder took the Julie on out of South Cedar Pass. It was an unseasonably chilly night; with a northwest wind and the sea foaming white across the bars that bracketed the tricky channel inshore of the sea buoy. Once he was in good water, he set the course for a point offshore of Clearwater, put the steering on automatic pilot, and watched the compass carefully to see if, in the following sea shoving against the stern starboard quarter, she would hold at that speed without too much yawing and swinging and searching.

As was their custom, when Hubbard Lawless felt the Julie settle into cruising speed, he built Harder’s single drink, a tall bourbon and water, and brought it up to him. Harder decided it was a poor time to speak to Mr. Lawless about the women. He did not feel that the single drink was in conflict with his religious convictions. It never led to another.

“Not long after I drank it down, I remember I had a buzzy feeling in my head, and then it was like the Julie climbed a big black wave that curled over at the top. I woke up sick and confused. I didn’t know where I was, even, but we were tied up back at the regular dock. Hack Ames, he’s the Sheriff, he was kicking me awake and yelling at me. He didn’t want to try to pick me up, I stank so from having throwed up on my clothes. I reached up and got hold of the rail and pulled myself up, but I was so dizzy I couldn’t dare let go. I couldn’t make out what all the yelling was about.”

“What had happened?”

“John Tuckerman testified at the inquest. He said one of the girls felt a little sick and went topside to get some air and went hurrying below again to tell them I was unconscious on the deck. Hub and Tuckerman came up and they checked me and thought I looked pretty bad. They thought maybe I had a stroke or some damn thing, so the best thing to do would be get me to shore. They had both run the boat, but neither one of them had come back in South Cedar Pass at night with a sea running. The way they worked it out, Hub Lawless went way up on the bow while Tuckerman eased it in. They steered at first by the city lights, and then by the sea buoy, and slowed way down to hunt the next marker. The girls stayed below, out of the cold wind. The boat was rocking and pitching in the chop. Hub was hanging on and trying to spot the sandbars. Tuckerman said that all of a sudden Hub pointed to the right. Tuckerman thought he meant turn hard right, and that’s what he did. The instant he hit the hard sandbar, he knew Hub Lawless had been pointing out the problem, not pointing out where to steer. The jolt tore Hub’s grip loose and he went overboard off the bow. The waves were picking the bow up and dropping it back onto the bar so hard Tuckerman knew he had to back off or start to break up. He put it in hard reverse and yanked it back off, and he couldn’t find the switch to turn on the overheard searchlight so he could hunt for Hub. He threw a life ring over, slinging it toward the bar, hoping Hub could find it. He didn’t know how to work the ship-to-shore, and even if he did, he didn’t dare leave go of the wheel and the throttles. He yelled for the women and they finally heard him and came up to help look for Hub. It was a wild dark night and the only thing he could think of to do was try to find the markers and find his way in and get help. I stayed passed out through all of it and didn’t come out of it even partway until, like I said, Hack Ames was aboard trying to kick me awake.”

“Funny thing for him to do if he thought you were sick.”

“He testified he thought I was drunk. He said I looked drunk, talked drunk, walked drunk, and smelled drunk. There was other testimony at the hearing, about how small boats had gone out hunting for Hub Lawless, and one of them found the life ring and nothing else. I testified I had that one drink that Mr. Lawless brought me like always. They asked me why I’d refused to go to a doctor, and I explained that once I started to come out of it, I felt groggy but I didn’t feel sick, not in any particular place or particular way. They decided that Hub Lawless was missing and believed to be dead by… I can’t recall the word.”

“Misadventure?”

“That’s the one. His body never has showed up.”

“What is it you think I could do anyway?”

“There’s a lot of talk around Timber Bay. People say Hubbard Lawless is alive. They say he’s in Yucatan, living like a king.”

“There’s always talk like that when the body isn’t recovered, and when the person had some money.”

“But what if he is alive? You see what I mean?”

“Then he and Tuckerman had to plan the whole thing, and they had to knock you out.”

“What I didn’t tell you, I was drunk a lot when I was a sinner. I was jailed for drunk, time and again. I gave it up all the way for twenty year. Took it up again, just the one drink when Lawless would fix me one, showing myself there was no holt on me any more. They asked about that at the hearing and I told them. I told them I’d been passed-out drunk and remembered it clear, and this wasn’t like it.”

“Why would the man fake his own death?”

“Money trouble. Woman trouble. Insurance. That’s what they’re saying. I got to have some help. I don’t know what to do with myself. I don’t know which way to turn any more. That was in March, and here it is May, and I haven’t had one real good night’s sleep since.”

“Van, I don’t want to say yes or no this minute.”

“I can understand that.”

“I want to walk it around a little.”

“Want I should come back about evening?”

“Where can I reach you?”

“I got one day of work, crewing for Billy Maxwell tomorrow, for walk-around money. I’ll bunk aboard his boat tonight. It’s that thirty-eight-foot Merritt with the-”

“Dawn at the far end. I know the boat.”

“Remember, I’ll sign a paper for the money, and. I’m good for it.”

“I know you are. I’ll be in touch tomorrow. Or why don’t you come here after you get through with the charter?”

After he left I sat there and watched him walk along the pier, a big sad sallow man, with a little bit more than his share of pride and rigidity. The world had tried to hammer him into the ground a few times, but he had endured and survived. Maybe this time he could not. Maybe it was too much.

Two

As I drove into town with Meyer that bright evening, we got onto a familiar complaint. Back not long ago when all the action in town was located in the rectangle bounded by the Beach, Sunrise Boulevard, Andrews Avenue, and New River, you could not go into the city without seeing a few dozen people you knew. Meyer had spent a whole day doing errands without running into a single person he knew. And it depressed him. He is the sort of man who manages to know people. He knows at least six people for every person I know. His little bright blue eyes sparkle with pleasure when he - meets anyone he has ever met before, and the splendid computer between his ears immediately furnishes a printout of everything they had ever confessed to him. Meyer can suffer bores without pain. He finds them interesting. He says the knack of being able to bore almost anybody is a great art. He says he studies it. So if my hairy amiable friend had been unable to find a familiar face in down town Lauderdale, the world was in deep trouble. He is seldom depressed.

At least the tourist influx had died down to about 15 percent of peak, and we did not have to hunt for one of those places where locals go to avoid the crush. We settled for Dorsey Brannigan’s pub atmosphere and Irish stew, and a couple of bottles of stout.

I knew that Van Harder’s story would get Meyer over his identity crisis, and so it did.

He had followed the news story of Hubbard Lawless’s untidy end in local papers and could fill me in a little on the man.

“About forty, as I remember. An achiever, Travis. One of those twenty-hours-a-day fellows. Wife and teenage daughters. A florid life-style, I believe. Lots of small corporations and partnerships. Housing, fishing, citrus, ranchland, and construction. The follow-up stories hinted that he was in very serious financial difficulties at the time of his death. And there was an enormous life insurance policy. Two million or more. I can’t remember the exact amount.”

“Anything about how maybe he took off, faked it all?”

“Nothing direct. Mystery surrounds the disappearance of Timber Bay tycoon. The body has not been recovered. I think it safe to assume that if the papers were hinting, then the public was talking more directly about that possibility. Then it died down, I’d guess about mid-April.”

“What do you think about Van Harder’s story?”

“He’s a reliable man. So let’s say it was a heart attack, a stroke, a savage bout of food poisoning, or somebody put something in the drink. In any event I think we can say that Lawless left the boat before it returned. He left on purpose or by accident. And in either case, he died or left town.”

“I don’t, know what I’d do without your help.”

“It’s simple mathematics, Travis. Permutations and combinations. You have three sequences-of four choices, two choices, and two choices. So there are sixteen possibilities.”

I stared blankly at him. “Such as?”

“It was a heart attack. Lawless fell overboard by accident. He- made shore and realized what a good chance it was for him to try to disappear forever. Or-Lawless put something in the drink, went overboard on purpose, miscalculated the risk, and drowned. Do you see why I say there are-”

“I see, I see. You don’t know what a help that is.”

“Break it down and you can’t find one of the sixteen where Harder is at fault.”

“Should I try to help him, dammit?”

“Would you like to know why I am saying yes, you should?”

“Yes, I would.”

“Because as you told me this heart-stirring tale, you kept loading all the dice in Van Harder’s favor, so that when you came to the point of asking me, I’d say yes. Okay. Yes.”

“I’ll be damned if I will. I am not in the business of salvaging the reputations of broken-down fishermen. I visited the city of Timber Bay once upon a time. It was closed. I am sick of red-hots, of overachievers, of jolly-boy Chamber of Commerce types. I’ve stashed enough money to last until Christmas week, and I’ve got work to do on the Flush, and when the work is done I want to ask about eight good friends and you to go on a nice little lazy cruise down to-”

“Will we need some sort of a cover story for Timber Bay?”

“We?

“You don’t think I’d let Harder down, do you?”

I stared at my friend with fond exasperation. I said, “You have a small piece of boiled onion on your underlip.”

“Sorry.” he said, and removed it. “How about a bottle of Harp?”

“Splendid!”

“No, we won’t need a cover story. People will want to talk about Hubbard Lawless. All we have to do is get them talking and then sort it all out.”

“I’m glad you talked me into going,” Meyer said. “Life has been too restful lately. And here comes somebody I do know. Life is improving.” I looked where he was looking and saw Cindy Thorner and her husband, Bob, just leaving. They saw us at the same time and came over and sat with us for a while in one of Brannigan’s big oak booths. They are South Miami people, and we had met them during a couple of skin-diving fiestas down in the Keys. Cindy is a perky soul, looking far too young to have grown kids, a blue-eyed blonde with enough energy for three ladies.

They had been in Lauderdale for some sort of bridge thing, some determined pursuit of master points about which I know less than nothing, and were about to head back. Meyer got off into his diatribe about not meeting anyone he knew all day, and how depressing it was, and how everything is changing so fast.

Then he told us all his new insight into the problem. Florida can never really come to grips with saving the environment because a very large percentage of the population at any given time just got here. So why should they fight to turn the clock back? It looks great to them the way it is. Two years later, as they are beginning to feel uneasy, a few thousand more people are just discovering it all for the first time and wouldn’t change a thing. And meanwhile the people who knew what it was like twenty years ago are an ever-dwindling minority, a voice too faint to be heard.

They had to go. As Cindy got up she said, “Meyer, a Florida conservationist is a fellow who bought his waterfront property last week.”

“And wants us to make room for two or three of his friends, and then shut the door forever,” Meyer said.

Then she told me that the best reef for snorkeling she had ever seen was at Akumal in Yucatan, fifty miles down the coast from Cozumel. She said they were there at Easter and I should promise myself not to miss it.

After the Thorners left, Meyer said, “A person can go for months without hearing anybody say Yucatan, and now I have heard it twice in the same evening. A more primitive soul would take it as a sign.”

“A sign that Hub Lawless is down there snorkeling away, drinking booze out of green coconuts, and finessing the senoritas?”

“We could go look there first, maybe?” said Meyer.

I drove back through the thinning traffic a little past ten. My ancient electric-blue Rolls pickup whispered along, silent and smooth as one of the great cats a-hunting. We decided there was no need to keep Van Harder in suspense once the decision was made, so, once I had stowed Miss Agnes in her parking slot, we walked down charter-boat row, past Windsong and Dream Girl, Amigo and Eagle, Playtime and Uzelle, Pronto and Caliban, all the way down to where Billy Maxwell’s Honcho was moored and dark, the dockside lights slanting down into the dark cockpit.

I put one foot on the stern quarter of the Honcho and leaned my weight on it and let it rock back. Within seconds Van came up from below, silent and quick, a short gaff in his hand. Even though the Honcho was rocking a little in a fresh sea breeze that pushed against the tuna tower, that subtle change of motion was enough to bring Harder up out of sleep, instantly alert to repel boarders.

“Oh, it’s you fellows,” he said in a sleep-rusty voice. “Come aboard and set?”

“No thanks, Van. I stopped by to tell you we’ll go over to Timber Bay and see what we can turn up.”

After a long five seconds he said, “I do surely appreciate it. You fix up that paper to sign?”

“No hurry on that.”

“They aren’t going to care for people nosing around there.”

“Who isn’t?”

“Reporters came around, and all. Government people and law people and bank people. They asking questions, handing out legal papers, and so on. So the family and the people that worked for him and the people tied into it all, one way or another, they’re sick of it now, even though it slacked oft a lot by the middle of last month. How you, Meyer?”

“I’ve been fine, Van. Sorry to hear about your bad luck.”

“It do seem to come at me in bunches lately.”

“Forgive me for asking, Van, but did you see a doctor and get checked over?”

“Hoped he could find some reason I passed out. Doc Stuart. He said he couldn’t find any evidence I’d had some kind of heart spasm or something go wrong in my head, but then again he said he couldn’t find any reason to say something like that hadn’t happened. But if it had, it might probably happen again, and that would help pin it down. Aside from kid stuff, I never had a sick day in my life. Not ever. How soon are you going on over there?”

“We can talk about that tomorrow,” I told him. We ambled back and sat for a time on the transom of Meyer’s chunky little old cruiser, The John Maynard Keynes, looking at the overhead stars, faint through the particulate matter which jams the air of the gold coast night and day, never dropping below twenty thousand particles per cubic centimeter, except when a hurricane sweeps it away briefly, blowing it all into somebody else’s sky.

“A cover story will help. I was wrong,” I said.

“I’m working on it,” Meyer said. From his tone of voice I decided not to ask any more questions.

I went back alone to the Flush. My security system advised me I’d had no uninvited guests. I was still worn down by the weeks aboard the Antsie, working that ketch north into the teeth of a hard wind that never quite became a gale and never died out. Cold food and safety lines, chafing and salt rash, constant motion and noise, and the deep fa tigue, like a bone bruise all over. I wanted to drift the Busted Flush down through glassy bays, past mangroves and pelicans and the leaping of mullet. I wanted to take her down through Biscayne Bay and Florida Bay, and up by Flamingo through Whitewater, and out the mouth of the Shark River, and up past Naples, Fort Myers, Boca Grande, Venice, Sarasota, Bradenton, Tampa Bay, Clearwater, all the way on up to Timber Bay.

Once I was in the big bed in the master stateroom, I traced the route in the Waterway Guide all the way up to Cedar Key, which would be the last overnight before Timber Bay. I hadn’t run any part of the lonesome leg from Egmont Channel a hundred and fifty or so nautical miles up to Lighthouse Point beyond St. Marks in quite a few years, and so was pleased to learn they’d put in a new chain of sea buoys nine to sixteen miles off the shoreline; nineteen-foot-high dolphins with slow flashers I’d be able to see six miles away in clear weather. Timber Bay lies twenty-seven nautical miles north of Cedar Key, and that pinpointed the city halfwa’y between the marker number 16 for Pepperfish Key and marker 18 for Deadman Bay.

I reached for scratch paper and made a rough estimate of four hundred and seventy-five statute miles from Bahia Mar to Timber Bay. Running a ten-hour day at my cruising speed of a dazzling seven knots, I could just do it in six days, if absolutely nothing went wrong. As something always does go wrong, I always add a fudge factor of 50 percent. Nine days.

The Flush and I used to make nine knots. Then it was eight. Now we are down to seven, even when the bottom is clean and fresh. The problem seems to be in the efficiency of the two smallish Hercules diesels. They have many, many miles thereon. They are noisier than when I won the boat long ago. Some day they will have to be replaced. I have replaced almost everything else, a bit at a time.

I checked the accommodations at Timber Bay in the Guide and found a map of the waterfront and a description of the facilities. Cedar Pass Marina looked just fine. Ten feet on the approach and ten feet alongside. They could accommodate up to seventy-foot craft, so my fifty-two feet was no problem. Everything I needed was available at the marina, from electric to diesel fuel to repairs, showers, Laundromat, groceries, restaurant, and even a motel.

I had a distant memory of its being a small and sleepy place. Like Cedar Key, it had been one of the towns supplying the timber which was barged south down the coast to build hunting and fishing lodges for gentlemen from the Midwest before the southwest Florida area was available by road and railroad. Again like Cedar Key, it had supplied the wood for a few billion lead pencils, until the wood finally ran out. Both of them were well off the main north-south tourist routes, with Timber Bay being about fifteen miles west of Route 19, down State Road 359, a long straight two-lane road through a tangle of dankness, smelling of snake.

Now, apparently, as they had found Cedar Key, the tourist and the retired had finally found Timber Bay-just as, inevitably, every square foot of the state except the state parks is going to be found and asphalted and painted with yellow parking lines.

I woke up at two in the morning with the light still on and the Guide open and face down on my chest. I stayed awake just long enough to be sure I didn’t sink back into the same dream that awoke me. I had been underwater, swimming behind Van Harder, following the steady stroke of his swim fins and wondering why I had to be burdened with tanks, weights, and mask while he swam free. Then he turned and I saw small silver fish swimming in and out of his empty eye sockets.

As I faded down toward sleep I realized the dream had told me something. I should give up my rationalized cruise. When the cavalry went riding to rescue the wagon train, they never took the scenic route.

THE NEXT morning, Wednesday, the eighteenth day of May, after I finally gave up trying to find Meyer, he found me. He was beaming with pride and satisfaction. We went into the lounge of the Flush and he showed me the three identical envelopes, all addressed to him, hand delivered, not mailed.

The stationery was uncommonly crisp, and it was a ribbed creamy forty-pound bond, bearing at the top the corporate logo of one of America’s most successful conglomerates.

Up at the top left was printed in very small letters, “Office of the Chairman of the Board of Directors.”

My dear Meyer,

This letter confirms our conversations regarding our potential interest in various enterprises and holdings large and small, which are now available or may become available in the Timber Bay area.

Knowing our long-range plans for the area, you will be able to determine if there are properties or enterprises there which should require our further attention with a view to negotiation.

In the event we do acquire anything there, with such acquisition based upon your recommendation, we both understand that you will be due remuneration on a percentage basis, just as we have operated in the past.

You are, of course, authorized to use your best judgment in showing this letter on a confidential basis to those who might have a need to know, and you are authorized to instruct them to get in touch with me personally if they should have any doubts as to your credibility.

Cordially yours,

Emmett Allbritton

Chairman of the Board

“All three are alike,” Meyer said. “How the hell did you manage this?”

“I had breakfast with good old Emmett aboard his little hundred-and-twenty-foot play toy at Pier Sixty-six. Back when he was CEO of his corporation, I saved him from stepping in something nasty. They were acquiring a company which had a patent infringement suit filed against it. Emmett’s legal people didn’t think the suit had much chance. I was doing a Eurodollar survey for them at that time, and I came across something that indicated the suit would be large and nasty and successful. I went directly to him. He delayed the closing until the suit went to trial. And was very glad. So he owed me one. He had stationery aboard, and I took it to a public stenographer I know and composed the letter and took the three originals back to him for signature.”

“You do know what you’ve got here?” I said.

“Travis, what I have here is a con man’s dream. Emmett knows I won’t misuse it, and he knows I’ll destroy all three letters the instant there’s no more need to use them.”

“What about Van Harder? He can’t lie worth a damn.”

“Who says anything about lying? I am going to ask him if it meets with his approval if I kill two birds with one stone by checking into some property over there some friends might want to buy. Actually, if I do find something that looks very good, I think Emmett would be interested.”

“Have you figured out my role in all this, pal?”

“If you are my friend, you are going to be accepted. Avarice is the longest lever in the world. Everybody is going to be very anxious to help me. Nobody will want to risk offending me. If they offend me, I won’t make them independently wealthy. Of course, it would be easier if Van Harder wasn’t there, giving them cause to wonder if we are what we say we are.”

“Ha!” I said.

“Whyfor the Ha??”

“He could bring the Flush all the way around. As a favor. So we could come back home the slow way.”

“Some likely people around here could fly over and help us come back the slow way,” Meyer said, nodding and nodding, smiling and smiling. “How long will it take him?”

“Six to nine days.”

“Do you trust his luck?”

“He’s used up all the bad part.”

“I stopped at Zzest Travel and had Peggy look up the best place to stay in Timber Bay. It’s the North Bay Yacht and Tennis Resort. Suitable, apparently, for a man of my influence and knowhow. They should have some humble accommodations for you as well.”

When he came back from the charter, Van Harder said he’d be glad to take my houseboat on around to Timber Bay, but couldn’t he be more help to us in Timber Bay, telling us who everybody was?

While I fumbled the question Meyer said that maybe it was best if we went in cold; then we could tell Van our impressions by the time he arrived at the Cedar Pass Marina.

It took until noon the next day to teach Van the little eccentricities of the engines, bilge pumps, generators, two banks of batteries, automatic pilot, air conditioning, water tanks, fuel tanks, engine gauges, RDF, SSB-VHF, tape deck, marine head, freezer, bottled gas, and so on-and to lay aboard provisions enough for the trip, get the needed new charts, estimate the cash he would need, and recommend the places to hole up. He marveled most at the giant bed, the enormous shower stall, and the huge bathtub, shaking his head and saying, “My, my my!”

I showed him the security system-the concealed switches for the Radar Sentry and the Audio Alarm and the fail-safe bulbs he would find lighted if the devices had been activated when he was ashore.

Meyer kept Harder busy while I removed my working capital from the double-hull hidey-hole on the port side in the forward bilge area. After Harder left at noon-warping the Flush out with an offhand competence that would have erased any doubts if I’d harbored any. I put the better part of my funds into a safety-deposit box.

It was an odd feeling to be at Bahia Mar without the Flush-different from when I had to put her up for bottom work. This was more of a betrayal. She was burbling happily along, down toward Dania and Hollywood, and all I had left in the slip was the overpowered runabout, my T-Craft Munequtta, tarped and tied off, bobbing whenever the power squadron boys went by.

By six thirty that same Thursday we were settling into a two-bedroom suite on the second floor of the North Bay Yacht and Tennis Resort. We’d flown from Lauderdale to Gainesville and then caught a little feeder-line Bonanza from Gainesville to Timber Bay, with one stop at Cross City. At the trim new little Timber Bay airport I rented a light gray Dodge Dart. The girl at the rental desk gave us a map of Timber Bay. The basic layout was simple. Imagine a capital H with a backward capital C jammed up close to it.

The interior of the C is all water. Some small islands and unusual outcroppings of limestone block the open mouth of the C, leaving South Cedar Pass at one end and North Pass at the other. The crossbar of the H is the urban continuation of State Road 359, which comes from the east and dead-ends right at the bay shore. There it intersects the western vertical line of the H-inevitably called Bay Street where Bay follows the C curve of the bay shore for a time before straightening out. The south end of the bay is where the marinas, commercial docks, and fish houses are located. The north end of the bay is more elegant, and beyond the top of the C a lot of sand has been dredged up and imported and a lot of fill put down to make a beach development area north of North Pass. The other up-and-down line of the H is Dixie Boulevard, named after the county. When it gets out into the country, it changes to Road 351A, going north to Steinhatchee and south to Horseshoe Beach. The northern open end of the H is residential; getting more pleasant the farther you get north of the crossbar until you get too far north into an area of shacks and junk trailers, abandoned wrecks, bedsprings, and refrigerators. South of the crossbar is mostly commercial. The crossbar itself is called Main Street. Between Dixie Boulevard and Bay Street, on Main, are the banks, office buildings, and better stores. Urban sprawl reaches out to the east, north, and south, with franchise food service, small shopping plazas, automobile dealerships, drive-ins, and housing developments.

The North Bay Yacht and Tennis Resort was just north of the top of the C, with boat basin and dredged channel, with a private slice of the hand made beach, with tennis courts, pool, children’s playground, cocktail lounge (entertainment nightly-Billy Jean Bailey at the piano), Prime Western Beef, closed-circuit television movies, and a wealth of other irresistible advantages.

When I had stowed the few items of gear I had brought along, I went into our sitting room and found Meyer standing out on the shallow balcony, with the sliding doors open. I joined him and stood beside him, leaning on the concrete rail. Directly below us was a putting green, where a fat man labored mightily to improve his stroke. Off to the left was the big pool, with a few swimmers. Off to the right was a slice of the boat basin, where the brightwork winked in the last of the sunlight of the may evening. Directly ahead, beyond the putting surface, were the tennis courts. In the nearest one, two girls in pastel tennis dresses engaged in deadly combat. They looked to be about fifteen. The one on the right, a blonde in pale salmon, had a lovely style, drifting with dance steps to the right place, setting, stroking, following through. The one on the, right, in pale aqua, was shorter and stockier, with cropped dark curly hair. She was a scrambler. She was often out of position. She made improbable saves. She went to the net when she shouldn’t have, and managed to guess right a lot of times about where the passing shot should be. When she hit it on the wood, it tended to drop in. She tried for shots that were beyond her abilities-long-range drop shots, top-spin lobs-and made them pay off just often enough. She was sweaty and grim. She fell and bounded up. They had a gallery of about a dozen people. One point went on and on and on. Had it been a faster surface, the little dark-haired one couldn’t have beaten the blonde. Finally she went racing to the net after an angled return of second serve. The blonde whipped it right at her, apparently trying to drive it right through her. But in desperate reflex she got the racket in the way. The ball turned the racket and rebounded, touched the tape, and fell in for the point, and the people clapped and whistled. The winner held her hand out, and the blonde looked at it and turned and strolled away. The winner went and got her big towel and mopped her face, wobbled over to the grass, and spread the towel and fell on it, gulping for air but smiling all the while. The winners smile. The losers holler “Deal!”

We went out and explored the city in the fading light of evening, drifting the gray Dodge back and forth through the social and commercial strata, snuffling the flavors of change, the plastic aromas of the new Florida superimposed on the Spanish moss, the rain-sounds of the night peepers in the marsh, the sea smell of low tides, creak of bamboo in light winds, fright cry of the cruising night birds, tiny sirens of the mosquitoes, faraway flicker of lightning silhouetting the circus parade of thunderheads on the Gulf horizon-superimposed on all these old enduring things, known when only Caloosas made their shell mounds and slipped through the sawgrass in their dugouts. Here now was the faint petrochemical stinkings, a perpetual farting of the great god Progress. And a wang-dang thudding of bubblegum rock from the speakers on the poles in the shopping-plaza parking lot. And screech wheeling vans painted with western desert sunsets.

And the lighted banks and the savings-and-loan buildings, looking like Bauhaus wedding cakes. We found a place called the Captain’s Galley, with a parking lot full of local cars. There was no table for two, sir, not for fifteen or twenty minutes. The smell of fried grease was so heavy we hesitated, but I looked into the dark bar and saw captains’ chairs for the customers facing the pit where the barkeeps worked. And when I asked for the brand of gin we wanted the iced martinis made from, there was no confusion or hesitation. The young man in the sailor suit whipped the blue-labeled square bottle of Boodles out of the rack, poured generously, made us the driest of the dry, glacial and delicious.

I overtipped at the bar, a device useful in all such circumstances because it caused some secret signal to pass between the bartender and the fellow with the sheaf of menus. With more warmth than he had shown when we arrived, he led us to a corner booth set up for four, whipped away the extra setups, and said it would be his pleasure to go personally and come back with our second drinks if we were now ready, and we were. It is all a kind of bullshit, of course, to pry special treatment out of busy service people, but it improves taste and appetite. If you feel valued, it makes a better evening. And to busy service people everyone falls into a known category. It is enough merely to imitate the habits and mannerisms of that category which expects and gets the very best service. Hub Lawless would have expected it, gotten it, and probably tipped well, in the familiar style of the sun-belt businessman.

A pretty waitress with frosted hair told us the flounder was exceptional tonight, and yes, she would see that they picked two very nice ones to broil for us. And they were indeed splendid, as was the salad with herb dressing, hot fresh rolls with sweet butter, the carafe of house Chablis, and the espresso.

The throng had thinned out by the time we left. Meyer went out of his way to tell the manager how pleasant the evening had been. He asked if we were passing through, and Meyer said we were in town on business, looking at property, and staying at the North Bay Resort. I went on out to the car. Meyer came out in five minutes, humming happily to himself.

As I drove off he said, “That manager’s name is Bellamy. Moved down here from Atlanta three years ago. He owns a piece of that place, so he works lunch and dinner seven nights a week. If we want a quiet table any time, we can phone him. Just ask for Dave Bellamy.”

“And he is one of your dearest friends.”

“Is that supposed to be some form of humor? Dave is a nice man. He said the best real-estate broker for commercial properties is George Glenn. Glennmore Realty. First United Plaza. I wrote it down.”

He had been writing lots of things down. While I had been provisioning my houseboat and explaining her eccentricities to Van Harder, Meyer had been going through microfilm copies of the two-months-old newspapers at the library, writing down the facts he had related to me on our flight across the state.

We found a more detailed map of Timber Bay and all the rest of Dixie County in the newsstand area of a big drugstore in the Baygate Plaza Mall.

We found a phone book and wrote down addresses in Meyer’s pocket notebook

We went poking around, looking. We found

HULA MARINE ENTERPRISES

A DIVISION OF WELDRON/ASSOCIATED FOODS

(the sign read), down at the south end of the bay, with hurricane fencing closing off access to the big dock, warehouses, and processing plant. Bright lights shone down on the whole area from high poles, discouraging intrusion. We cruised slowly by the Hubbard Lawless residence at 215 South Oak Lane, a winding mile of asphalt in the northeast sector, off Dixie Boulevard, bordering the Timber Bay Country Club. It was a very long low white structure set well back behind a low concrete wall. There were dim lights on in the house. In the glow of a streetlight some distance away, the wide yard looked unkempt. The three overhead garage doors were all closed.

We found some of the other identities left behind by Mr. Lawless, like so many cocoons shed in some startling metamorphosis. Lawless Groves. Double L Ranches. Hula Construction. Hub-Law Development Corporation. At Hula Construction the hurricanewire gate was chained shut. A single guard light shone down on the empty area where equipment had once been parked. Grass was beginning to poke up through the thin skin of asphalt.

“How old was he in March?” I asked Meyer.

“Not quite forty-one.”

I aimed us back toward the North Bay Yacht and Tennis Resort. Those birthday years that end in a zero are loaded. A time of reevaluation. Where the hell have I been and what have I been doing and how much is left for me, and what will I do with the rest of my short turn around the track? I had one of those zero years coming up, not too many birthdays from now. Maybe Hub Lawless had felt trapped in his own treadmill, hemmed in by his juggling act, tied fast to success. The most probable catalyst was the random female who had come along at the wrong time in his life.

“Can you remember the names of those two girls?” I asked Meyer.

“Felicia Ambar and Michele Burns.”

“They still around this town?”

“They were both employed here in Timber Bay. Maybe they moved on. Probably you could find out about that better than me, Travis.”

So I began to find out about it as soon as we got back. Meyer went on up to bed at my suggestion, and not at all reluctantly. Billy Jean Bailey was having a slow night in the lounge. It was called the Western Sky Lounge because, I suppose, of the hunk of glass the size of a basketball court standing on end, facing west. She looked no bigger than a half a minute sitting at her little pink sequined piano at the foot of that giant window. One spot shone down on her from the ceiling fifty feet overhead. She had a platinum natural, a pink sleeveless blouse which matched the piano, and silver slacks which matched the sequins. I sat at the bar, turning to watch her and listen to her. There were a few couples whispering together and groping each other in the shadowed privacy of banquettes. There were some noisy salesmen at the bar, at the far end. Billy Jean had a deep expensive-looking tan, a round and pretty face, a button mouth, an amplified piano, and a baritone voice.

She played a medley of old standards. She did a lot of flowery, tinkly improvisations, moving far away from the melody and then sneaking up on it again. I like a firmer structure, a more emphatic rhythm. Then the improvisation is supported, as with Joe Pass on that incredible guitar of his. But she did well enough. And looked good while doing it. And seemed to sigh at one point, looking around, seeming to grimace.

I got up and walked over to her. It was a long walk. She watched me arriving, her smile polite. She kept the music going with a little bit of right hand and hardly any left at all.

“Maybe ‘Lush Life’?” I asked.

“My God, a thousand years ago I used to do that. I’ll have to fool around with it and work into it. Sure. And?”

“And a drink with me on your break?”

“If you can hum it, I can fake it.”

I went back to the bar. She found her way into “Lush Life” and, with but one stumble, got the words out of the music box of memory, did it very straight, and then moved into it with enough class to silence the salesmen for all of thirty seconds. She closed it off with her theme and came over, standing small at my elbow.

“As always, Mitch,” she said to the barman. “Over there,” she said to me and headed for a narrow booth for two. I paid the tab and carried her drink and mine to the booth.

“Thanks, friend,” she said, “for bringing that old one up. I don’t know how it fell out of the repertoire. It goes back in. I am Billy Jean Bailey and you are…?”

“McGee. Travis McGee. Been working this lounge long?”

“Practically forever. Hell, it’s all right. Good people own and operate this place. I used to do the resort-tour thing when I was first down here. I started in Youngstown. I used to do the Maine coast thing, and the Catskills and Poconos in the summer, and down the other coast here in the winter. Lauderdale, Hollywood, Miami, and so forth. But that can kill you off before your time. Then Danny died. He was my agent and kind of boyfriend. And they wanted me back here. That was three years ago. And here I am. Still. McGee, you drive one of those shrimpers for Hula? No? I thought you looked sort of the type. Like around boats and so forth. Jesus, this is one dead night here. Been in town long?”

“Checked in here this evening. I don’t know anything about the town.”

“There’s no action, if that’s what you mean. Oh, there’s a couple of discos like everywhere, mostly all kids.”

“No games?”

“You’ve got to be kidding. Oh, they probably play for lots of money over at the Elks or maybe the Legion. But you don’t mean that.”

“No, I don’t mean that.”

“So you can look at it this way, McGee. We’re right at the heart of all the Thursday-night action there is in Dixie County.”

“You’re all the action I need Billy Jean Bailey.”

Her mouth hardened. “If you mean what that sounds like, you are in for one hell of a sudden disappointment!

“Whoa. I meant it is nice to sit and talk and have a few drinks and listen to the piano lady.”

She studied me, head cocked. “Okay. Maybe I keep my guard up too high. But you know how things are. I don’t even sit with guys much. I don’t know why I did this time. You dint come on strong, and I liked what you requested, I guess.”

“Friends?” I asked.

“Sure.”

“I’ll be around for a while. I’m over here from Lauderdale with a man named Meyer. He’s my best friend. He’s gone to bed in the suite, but I didn’t feel like folding yet. What he’s here for, he’s looking into property that some bank might be liquidating that belonged to a man named Lawless.”

“Oh, Jesus, another one.”

“What do you mean?”

“McGee, dear, you have no idea the people who have come to town because of that Hub Lawless thing. My God, there is the IRS and people from the Department of Agriculture, and bank examiners, and investigators from the Justice Department, and FBI people, and insurance people. It is a real mess. You have no idea what a shock it was to this town. And still is. It has really sort of put this place into a depression.”

“Did you know him?”

“And the newspaper people and the television people. The town was full up already, it being March, the end of the tourist season, and some of them were even sleeping in their cars. Did I know him; did you say? Just casual, like he came in sometimes, always with a bunch of people. Hey, Mitch is making motions. I got to go earn my bread. Don’t go away.” She finished her drink, patted my hand, slid out, and ambled to her pink piano, swinging along in her silver pants, patting her silver hair, tapping her mike with a fingernail as she swung it close to her lips, saying in her oddly deep voice, “Well, here we are again, back into it, dears, don’t all of you go away, because… recognize this? Of course you do. Made famous by a lot of people including me, your own Billy Jean Bailey…”

Above her and beyond her I could see the night stars. Though the room was nearly empty, she didn’t dog it. She worked her stint, making music, including one very showy arrangement of “Flight of the Bumblebee” based on the old Red Norvo arrangement, but without as much drive as the way Narvo did it because she did not have the power in her left hand to roll the heavy bass. She moved from that into her theme, at which point I went over and got another pair of drinks and got back to the table with them just as she arrived, delicately winded from the session, saying, “And that is all for this here Thursday night because it is ten past Cinderella. Saturday we go until two. Friday until one. Monday not at all, thank God.”

“I enjoyed it.”

“Good. It was kind of for you. I’m glad you happened along tonight. I don’t know why, but I’ve been down. You know. All blah. What do you really do for a living anyway, McGee?”

“Free-lance salvage work.”

“Like sunken treasure?”

“Sort of like that.”

“But you’re not working on this trip? You’re just here with your friend whatzis.”

“Meyer. I can help him out on…”

She beckoned to someone beyond and behind me. He came over. He dragged a chair over from a table and plonked it down beside the shallow booth and sat down, saying, “Hi, B.J.”

“How you, Nicky? I want you should meet my friend Harris McGee. McGee, this is Nicky Noyes. Nicky used to work for Mr. Lawless.”

Noyes looked like an American Indian fullback who broke training five years ago. He had a lot of long black hair, a drooping pistolero mustache, rubbery brown jowls, flinty little eyes deep-set under thick black brows, buffalo shoulders, a lacy white guayabera stretched taut across chest and stomach, a lot of dangling gold trinkets on a thick gold chain nested in the black chest hair, and a sharp tang of some kind of insistent male perfume.

He looked me over with skeptical thoroughness. “So I used to work for Hub. Isn’t that damn fascinating?”

“It makes me tingle all over,” I said.

Chemistry was against us. We shared a simultaneous loathing for each other. No special reason. It was just there.

He turned toward the piano player, hunching his left shoulder forward to close me out. “You want to go over to Stel’s?” he asked her.

“I don’t know. I guess not tonight.”

“You rather sit around and let somebody pick your brains about what you know about Lawless?”

“Come on, Nicky! McGee isn’t in town about Lawless, honest.”

He stared at me. “And you don’t know the first thing about it, I bet.”

I shrugged. “I heard some hick businessman and one of his business buddies took a couple of hookers out on a cabin cruiser and everybody got slopped and the hired captain passed out and the local big shot fell overboard and drowned, and everybody got all worked up about it. But I guess there isn’t much to get worked up about around here anyway.”

It made his big neck bulge. It made his face darker. It turned big hands into fists and made his voice uneven. “Sure, you know a lot. All you know is that newspaper shit. I never see Hub Lawless liquored up in my life. Not once. And I happen to know the fellow ran the Julie for Hub, and old Van wouldn’t take more than just one drink ever. As for what you call hookers, Hub didn’t fool around. I wouldn’t say not ever, but anyways not around here, where he was a director in the bank and a deacon in the church, with a good marriage and those two daughters. Who are you calling hookers anyway? ‘Licia Ambar, she works in Top Forty Music over in the Baygate Plaza Mall, and she’s a good kid. Michele Burns, she works waitress over to the Cove. She’s no hooker.

“Nicky, she’s about as close as you can get and not be. Jack had to tell Mishy not to come cruising this bar, remember? Come on, you guys. What’s to get so edged up about?”

He gestured toward me. “People like McGoo here who know everything about everything, they gripe my ass, B.J.”

“McGee,” I said. “I think I know how you spell your last name.”

“Hey, guys!” she said sharply. “You’ll get me in trouble, dammit.”

“Lawless didn’t drown,” he said to me, almost inaudibly.

“Nicky!” she said nervously.

“Shut up, B.J.” He held up a big hand and ticked the items off on his fingers. “One. He sold off the trucks for cash, cheap. Two. He stopped paying all the accounts coming due, and at the very end he cleaned out the bank accounts. Three. That girl left town the next day.”

“Girl?” I asked.

He hesitated and then sighed. “What am I doing? It isn’t any business of yours anyway.”

“Tell me one more thing, Noyes.”

“What?”

“Do you believe in the tooth fairy, too?”

That did it. He got up very nimbly for a man that size, leaned his perfume close to me, gold trinkets a-dangle, and said, “Outside, McGoo. Now!” And he left.

“I shouldn’t have even noticed he was here,” she said dolefully.

“It’s okay,” I said.

“You’re not going out there!”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s childish, and because he’s really mad enough to really kill you. I’ve never seen Nicky so worked up.”

“Do you know if he was ever a fighter?”

“I don’t think so. He’s never said anything. He was Mr. Lawless’s superintendent, building those houses on that ranchland south of Baygate Plaza Mall. Please don’t go out there, McGee.”

“It’s been too long since I’ve been childish, I guess. Want to come watch?”

She responded with a certain unwholesome anticipatory delight that she tried to conceal. Stripped down to essentials, it was a primitive situation. The two bull males and the nervous skittery female. He was in the parking area near the entrance to the lounge, standing near a blue Chevy pickup. It was a balmy night. He had shed his expensive guayabera, exposing an impressive mat of black hair. I told Billy Jean Bailey to stay where she was, under the palm trees, and I went on out to him, and he tried to finish it with one big looping right-hand lead. I got my left arm and shoulder up in time and moved a little bit inside it, but the inside of his wrist and forearm thumped the side of my head over the ear, enough so I knew he could hit. A lot of big men can’t hit. A punch has to have snap in it, terminal whipping velocity; otherwise it is a big slow push.

I wanted him to be in a big hurry to finish it. I got my shoulders high and my arms high, and tucked my chin into my chest, bobbing under some of the roundhouse rights and lefts, taking others on my shoulders, elbows, forearms, moving in the direction of the punches to soften them as much I could. But they still hurt, laming my arms a little. He gave whistling grunts of effort with each swing. Canvas shoes squeaked and flapped on the asphalt. I wondered how the thumping and the thudding of the blows sounded to B.J. Bailey. When he began to tire, I encouraged him by backing away toward a pale car nearby. I encouraged him further by turning to my left and bending over so my back was toward him, my fists covering my ears, risking the chance he might know enough to take a really punishing shot at my right kidney..

“Had enough?” he gasped. “Had enough, you son of a bitch?”

It was not much of a risk-I had guessed from his style what he would probably do. He would put his left hand on my right shoulder, spin me around to face him, and pop me with that big right hand.

I felt the grasp of the left hand, resisted it for a moment, then spun with it, feet and heels braced just right, using all the momentum of the turn to drive my very best left hand deep into the sweaty meat just below the V of the floating ribs. I covered my jaw with my right arm as I swung, chin tucked into my elbow. To make a blow truly effective, you have to hit through the target. I tried to hit so far through it I would feel the knuckles of his spine against the knuckles of my left hand.

It burst the air out of him, drove him back and dropped him. His right hand had hit me just over the left eye, lightly, as my punch landed. I felt the warmth run into my eye and down my cheek. Nicky rolled, groaning, onto his hands and knees and fell onto his side, hugging his middle.

B.J. came running to me, gasped, and cried, “You’re all bleeding!”

Nicky rolled to his pickup and managed to climb up the side of it, hand over hand, until he was on his feet and could lean against it. I took the wad of tissue B.J. handed me, wiped my eye with one, and pressed the rest against my eyebrow. I walked over to the pickup.

Nicky had his right forearm pressed across his middle. “I think you bust something inside,” he said huskily.

“What’s my name?” I asked him. The ritual of the achoolyard, the necessary childishness.

“McGee,” he said, with no hesitation and no resistance. “I can’t hardly breathe at all.”

I opened the truck door, turned him, helped him hoist himself up to sit behind the wheel. He dug into his pocket slowly and found the keys, sighed, sorted the right one out and sighed again, and put it into the switch.

“I’m hurt real bad,” he said.

“Go home and get some rest,” I told him. He started the truck turned on the lights, and drove away.

“Do you have to call a doctor or anything?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Jack isn’t going to like it at all.”

“Who’s Jack?”

“The manager here. He doesn’t like for there to be any kind of trouble.”

“I don’t think it’s much. I think we could pull it together with some adhesive.”

She had some in her cabana beyond the pool. We kept to the shadows. She babbled nervously in a semi-whisper. I gathered that Jack wouldn’t care for this sort of thing, either. She said these cabanas had been designed to look out toward the beach, but then they had to put up the tennis courts and the locker rooms, and so her windows looked at the back of the locker rooms and you couldn’t see much of anything at all, but then again it went with the territory, and beggars couldn’t be choosers, and there you are.

She unlocked the door and let us in, and pulled the heavy draperies across the windows before turning on the lights. She was, as she had explained, clean but not neat. Her three-quarter bed had not been made back into a couch. There was a bright spill of lady-clothes on the available furniture, sliding stacks of Billboard and Variety and sheet music. She had a little Sony music center and a tumbled cupboard of records and tapes. She had show-biz glossies of a lot of people I’d never seen before Scotch-taped to the walls.

She broke out some ice, and I wrapped some in a hand towel and got the bleeding slowed to where I could get a good look at the gash. It was an inch and a half long, quite shallow; close to the eyebrow, and slanting toward my left ear. The impact had evidently broken a little bleeder close to the surface. I had her cut a dozen very narrow strips of adhesive tape with her nail scissors. I sat on the closed lid of the toilet and held a hand mirror so I could instruct her in just how to pull the wound shut, lacing it with the narrow strips of tape in a series of X’s. Then we placed a small gauze compress against it and taped that in place.

She said she knew how to get the dark dapplings of blood off the chest and shoulder of my pale blue shirt, and she took it into the tiny kitchen alcove and set it to soaking in something.

She told me she had thought he was giving me a terrible beating and it had made her start to cry. She told me it had been a funny time for her lately, kind of bored and listless and lonesome, like waiting for something to happen. She said if I was to happen to her, it would be okay, no matter what she said earlier. She said she knew what she was doing. She wasn’t any kid. In the right light she could pass for twenty-five because she’d had a real good Mexican lift, “but don’t ask how old I really am because I always lie.” She hung on me, and I took her to bed, but after a while she got up and put a yellow towel on a small lamp on the other side of the room and turned the other lights out and said she always slept with a night light on. She said she had some really good grass, and did I want to share a joint? I said I didn’t, thanks, and she said she had some coke too, not very good because it was cut too far down, and maybe I’d like some. I said no thanks, and she said it really didn’t mean anything to her one way or the other, except she didn’t believe in the hard stuff, ever, but would I mind if she had just a little grass? because then she could be sure of getting it off. I said I didn’t mind, so she got a saved butt out of a little box in the nightstand drawer, good for five deep drags, well spaced, then pressed it out and came back down to me with that sad, sweet, oriental tang on her breath.

Four

I AWOKE a little after four in the morning. I could look across her to her improvised night light. It made yellow highlights on the sprawl of her small lean naked back and small mound of buttocks. She had her face pressed against my ribs, and I felt the long, slow heat of each exhalation from the depths of her sleep. She had one leg linked over mine, her right arm across my middle. A frizzle of that kinked platinum hair tickled me just under the armpit with each breath I took. The night bugs made small whirring sounds, and a wind made a sudden rainsound in the palm fronds.

I sighed in a kind of habitual dismay at my own involvements. This one had a locker-room drabness about it. Hey, guys, the first night I stayed there, I screwed the piano player.

How was it, fella?

Well, to tell the truth, not bad. A lot of little extra frills and trills and improvisations, just like her piano playing, but not much real intensity, you know.

The why and when of the inadvertent affair is never simply explained. I remembered a few years ago, Meyer pressing a book upon me by one L. Rust Hills, entitled How to Be Good. Mr. Hills was explaining to his peer group how one might retain a modicum of goodness in a sadly corrupt world. One chapter in particular seemed appropriate to the situation in which I now found myself. He described the awkward union which he terms “the charity fuck.” This is when a person finds himself in a situation where he suddenly realizes that the other party is ready, willing, and eager to make love, and because the place is available and private, and the time is available, and both parties are reasonably healthy, the only possible reason for saying no thanks is because you find the other party physically unappealing. Any excuse at that time-not in the mood, have this little headache, and so on and so on-will be so feeble as to lead the spurned party to the inevitable conclusion that she is indeed sexually unappetizing. This is such an unthinkable blow to give to another person’s ego and selfesteem, it is far more charitable to gird the old loins and hop to it.

So here she was in the sweet depths of her postcoital slumber, reassured once more of her sexuality and desirability. As I was wedged back against the wall, there was no hope of stealthy departure. I took hold of her shoulder and gave her a little shake.

“Whassawharra?” she said into my ribs.

“Got to leave, B.J.”

She groaned and hoisted herself up onto her elbows and lifted a bleared face to stare at me. “Whachawannago?”

“Daylight soon. Don’t want old Jack watching me creep out of here, do you?”

“Shidno, swee.”

I clambered over her and got into my clothes. “Shirdsonahanganashar.”

“What? What?”

“When I got up before, I hung your shirt on a hanger in the shower, but it probally isn’t dry.”

“Oh.”

It wasn’t. Not quite. I pulled a sheet up to cover her. I kissed her lazy mouth and patted her rump, and she told me to make sure the door locked behind me. It did. I felt a dampness in the cool touch of the predawn air. My brow felt fine, but my arms were leaden and dulled, by the deep ache of the bruises from Nicky Noyes’s big fists. Hell of a night, all told. Too much travel, too much to drink, a stupid brawl, and finally some romping with a small wiry tanned lady who was lonely enough to be potential trouble. By diligent effort I seemed to be prolonging my adolescence to total absurdity.

On impulse I turned away from the walk and found my way by starlight down to the beach, and out of my east-coast habit looked for that touch of light along the horizon which would warn of the new day. Then I realized it would come up behind me, over the land. I walked to a chaise and stretched out on the damp canvas.

Between love and sleep, she had given drowsy answers to my elaborately casual questions. What did Nicky mean about a girl leaving town the next day?

- Huh? Oh, her. She left town the next day. Who?

Who what?

- Who left town the next day?

Well, they said she and Hub Lawless had something going. Then there were other people said there was always talk about a woman like that, like Kristin Petersen, whoever she was working for, and they said Hub and Julie Lawless had too good a marriage. Then her leaving town the very next day while the Coast Guard and everybody was hunting Hub’s body…

Her voice had faded down into a muttering and then into slow, heavy breathing. A little bit more for Meyer’s notebook. One Kristin Petersen, who had worked for Hubbard Lawless in some capacity as yet unknown and who was a natural target for gossip. A veritable battalion of women were thronging the Timber Bay scene: B. J. Bailey Felicia Ambar, Michele Burns, Julia Lawless, and now Kristin, who had departed.

There was beginning to be such a subtle additive of light that I could make out the ghostly shape of a marker off to my left, where North Pass entered Timber Bay, and beyond it some shadowy tree shapes on the outcroppings that sheltered the bay. The Gulf was quiet, with a gentle lap and slap of small waves on the packed wet sand. I heard a deep-throated diesel chugging through the wet noises of the sea and soon saw the outline of a ahrimper heading out. There was a pale yellow rectangle in the amidships area, with a man standing against the glow, and I saw him lift his arm and realized that he was lifting a cup of coffee to his lips. It was so vivid I could smell the coffee.

And I had a sudden wrenching urge to shed my own identity and be somebody else. Somehow I had managed to lock myself into this unlikely and unsatisfying self, this Travis McGee, shabby knight errant, fighting for small, lost, unimportant causes, deluding himself with the belief that he is in some sense freer than your average fellow, and that it is a very good thing to have escaped the customary trap of regular hours, regular pay, home and kiddies, Christmas bonus, backyard bar-B-cue, hospitalization, and family burial plot.

All we have, I thought, is a trap of a slightly different size and shape. Just as the idea of an ancient hippie is gross and ludicrous, so is the idea of an elderly beach bum. I dreaded the shape of the gray years ahead and wished to hop out of myself, maybe into the skin of the coffee drinker now far out of sight in the just-brightening morning. And he, the poor deluded bastard, would probably have changed places willingly.

I stood up and stretched my sore arms again and decided, What the hell, when in doubt turn to the obligations of the moment. Van Harder was a tough, humorless, competent seaman, and I had given him my word, and he deserved my best effort. If I questioned my own value, then he was likely to get less than his money’s worth. He was the innocent bystander who’d been run down by somebody else’s fun machine, and all I had to do was repair his reputation somehow. And stop moaning about myself.

I went up to our second-floor suite, showered, changed, and looked out at the early slant of sunshine, and at two young men in warm-up suits volleying on the farthest tennis court, one strung so much tighter than the other that the sounds were in different keys-pink-punk-pink-punk. A shirt-sleeved, necktied man, thick around the middle, came hurrying out. The boys looked up at the windows of the hotel and shrugged and moved slowly and disconsolately off the court, picking up the yellow balls and putting them back in the cans. I guessed that the necktie was Manager Jack, doing his managing. Beyond the courts I could see the roof of the row of cabanas and estimated the exact place where B.J. lay deep in sleep in the yellow glow, surrounded by all the silent music, still and dead in the grooves of the records, frozen into the emulsion on the tapes, locked into the calligraphy of her sheet music and the stilled cleverness of her piano hands.

“You up?” Meyer said, astonished. He had come out of his bedroom into our shared sitting room. He plodded to the corridor door, looked out to see if there was a morning paper there, and gave a grunt of annoyance on finding that service not provided. He wore a robe in awning stripes of pink yellow, and black, and he looked and acted like a cross performing bear which had escaped a small circus.

“You want some morning news?” I asked. When he stopped and glowered at me I said, “Mystery woman Kristin Petersen, employed by Hubbard Lawless, disappears the day after alleged drowning. Nicholas Noyes, one-time superintendent of Hula Construction, states that Lawless sold equipment for cash before disappearing. And cleaned out bank accounts. One of the two young ladies aboard the Julie the night of the accident was one Michele Burns, known as Mishy, who is a waitress at the Cove and is reputed to be a part-time hooker. The other, Felicia Ambar, known as ‘Licia, works at Top Forty Music in the Baygate Plaza Mall.”

The glower was unchanged. “So?” he said.

“Don’t you want to write it down?”

“What happened to your face?.”

“Nicky Noyes took an instant dislike to it.”

Meyer nodded. “I can see his point.” He went into the bath, and soon I heard the shower. Meyer is not a morning person. Neither am I. But he is one of the non-morning persons who set the standards for all the rest of us.

After his breakfast and after the morning paper, Meyer was ready for communication.

“Officially,” I said, “I ran into that jungle-gym thing in the dark.”

“Why?”

“Both combatants were last seen with one Billy Jean Bailey, who is the piano player here and has been for three years, and Jack the Manager does not like to have piano ladies causing fusses between bar patrons. Or guests of the house.”

“Who fixed it?”

“Miss Bailey.”

His nod was approving. “Neatly done.”

“I’ve been wondering about the best way to use that great letter of yours.”

He found the right page in his notebook. “The top man at the Coast National Bank and Trust is Devlin J. Boggs. And it is not a chain bank, a situation that gets more rare every day.”

“Should I go along with you?”

He studied me, head tilted, and finally nodded. “I think so. We’re going to be linked anyway. You’d better be working for me.”

“As what?”

“Maybe… as knowledgeable in the area of groves and construction and marine holdings. And ranchland.”

“I can handle that. I’ll carry a pack of Marlboros and grunt a lot and look open-air sincere.”

The Coast National Bank and Trust Company occupied most of the ground floor of a ten-story office building at the corner of Bay and Main. All the window glass had an orange yellow tint, making a golden glow inside. The executive offices were glass cubicles along the left wall as you went in the main entrance on Bay. There were lines at the tellers, and people crisscrossing the broad expanse of carpeted floor. Friday is a busy banking day.

Boggs was talking to two men seated across his desk from him. Meyer gave the secretary his plainest and most impressive card after writing on the back of it, “Representing Emmett Allbritton.” She started to put the card down, read what he had written, looked at us again, got up and tapped on the door and took the card in and placed it by Boggs’s elbow, and came back out.

Within moments he was ushering the two men out. He came out with them and took us in and got us properly seated before he went around and sat in his judge’s chair. Devlin Boggs was about fifty, a tall and very erect fellow with a long and lugubrious face, an iron-gray military haircut, a lantern jaw, and a dark and elegant suit.

After introductions, Meyer handed him the letter. Boggs read it and said, “I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Allbritton about, I think, fifteen years ago. He spoke to the Association in Houston about future problems in energy supply. Prophetic indeed. It is quite… heartening to know that they have long-range plans for this area.” He looked inquiringly at Meyer.

Meyer said, “I wouldn’t, of course, be at liberty to discuss the little I know of those plans at this time.”

“Of course. What sort of-” he looked at the letter again-“holdings large and small would he be interested in?”

“Anything available.”

“Raw land, developed land, actual business operations?”

“He would expect me to make recommendations.”

“But I assume you are coming to me because of the possible availability of some of Hubbard Lawless’s holdings. We have all been terribly shocked by what has happened. We had great confidence in Hub’s energy and judgment. He was one of our directors, you know. Things were slow this year. Everybody complained, Hub included. He had borrowed up to the statutory maximum percentage from the bank. Three million dollars. These loans were to four corporations he controlled, and also to himself as an individual. The loans were secured by the assets of the corporations. After… it happened, we were able to inventory, or try to inventory, the assets. The books were in… very untidy condition. It would seem that for many weeks he had been systematically selling off the assets of his companies for cash, out of town.” He took out a snowy handkerchief and wiped his lips. “He had been ignoring his accounts payable, making a special effort on collections. During the week before he disappeared, he drained every single one of his corporate accounts down to minimum balance. He even took out the compensating balance against his personal loans, which he had agreed to leave untouched. Understand that the company accounts included tax reserves, FICA monies, retirement debits, money due for his upcoming payroll. He was down to about forty people from the hundred and twenty he employed at this same time last year.”

“How much did he get away with?” I asked.

“There are too many ways to compute it, Mr. McGee, for me to make a valid estimate. My horseback guess would be between six and seven hundred thousand dollars. I would say that those assets remaining behind which can be converted into cash would result in a recovery of maybe one and a quarter million dollars, and most of that value would be in the appraised value of the ranch and grove lands.”

“So the bank stands to take a bath of one and three quarters million dollars,” Meyer said.

Boggs wiped his mouth again and said dolefully, “if it were only that simple. There are a lot of other claims and liens against those assets. We may have the senior debt instruments, but we might have to prove it in court. It is such a terrible tangle that it might drag on for years. Legal fees and court costs will eat up a great deal of the remaining equity. In the meanwhile, such a huge write-off against our loan-loss reserves might mean that we would have to… give favorable consideration to an acquisition offer we have been rejecting. I have always felt that a locally owned, locally managed bank is far more responsive to the needs of any community, and… excuse me. Our banking problems are of no interest to you.”

Meyer gave a sympathetic sigh and said, “And I suppose that the state banking authorities and the examiners from the FDIC are stating that you didn’t exercise prudence and good judgment in so setting up the loans to Mr. Lawless that he was able to market the assets without your knowledge and able to withdraw his compensating balance.”

“I see you know banking, sir.”

“Everybody is always full of wisdom after the event.”

“Hub was in and out of the bank a couple of times every day. He was a director. He was on the Loan Committee of the board. He was a very hardworking man. And very… personable. Anyway, I wish we were in a position to be able to offer to sell some of the remaining real-estate assets to Mr. Allbritton’s corporation. But, with no legal decision as to whether Mr. Lawless is dead or alive, you can see the terrible legal tangle we are in here.”

“Do you believe he is dead?”

Boggs hesitated a long time, choosing the right words. He said, “I did at first. Now I am not so sure. Neither, of course, is the insurance company. Julia Lawless is the owner of that two-million-dollar policy. It was taken out seven or eight years ago, for half a million, and as his affairs kept getting more involved, he kept adding to it. She owns the house free and clear. The land it’s on was a gift from her father when they got married. I think she has some sort of very small income from her father’s estate. Not enough, I wouldn’t think, to run the house. I suppose… she is another of the victims of this disaster.”

Meyer said, “I don’t imagine you would have any objections if I set up a hypothetical situation. Suppose, just for instance, that Mr. Allbritton made a decision, based on our examination of the properties, to make an offer of one million dollars for Tract So-and-So. Could the various claimants be brought together to reach an understanding? Could title be passed somehow?”

For an instant a faint gleam of hope illuminated Devlin Boggs’s long sad face, but it faded away. “I wouldn’t think so. I don’t know. It’s a bureaucratic tangle as well as a legal tangle. Some kind of accommodation would have to be reached with the IRS… I suppose Harold Payne might be able to give you better answers than I can. He is the bank’s attorney, and he handled Hub’s affairs as well. Elfording, Payne and Morehouse. They’re in this building. Seventh floor.”

I awaited Meyer’s next move. He was doing very, very well. One door had been wedged open. Duplicity was hard on Meyer. It frayed his nerves and upset his digestion.

“Mr. Boggs,” he said, “it is quite evident from what we have heard so far that… people asking questions are not exactly welcome in Timber Bay lately. I can always show my letter of authority, but I would rather not do that except when dealing with a man of your position. Perhaps you might be able to give us… some sort of notes, possibly on the back of your business cards?”

Once he started, Meyer kept him going. Fifteen minutes later we were out on the broad sidewalk. Meyer leaned against the bank. I leafed through the little packet of cards. Devlin J. Boggs wrote in a very neat small black legible hand.

They were directed to Harold Payne, to Walter Olivera of the Timber Bay Journal, to Lou Latzov of Glennmore Realty, to Julia Lawless, and to Hack Ames, the Sheriff of Dixie County; and one read, “To Whom It May Concern.”

In his tight little script he said-that we had his confidence, and any help they could give us would be deeply and personally appreciated by Devlin J. Boggs.

Meyer was breathing deeply, eyes closed. “How was I?”

“You’ll never be better. We start now from the top. A new sensation for Meyer and McGee. Tools of the power structure. Servants of the establishment.” He smiled modestly. “No, I was never better.”

So we walked to where I’d parked, got into the car, and split up the cards. He took the lawyer and the real-estate broker. I took the Sheriff and the newspaperman. His were downtown, so I took the car.

Five

HAGGERMANN “HACK” Ames maintained his headquarters in the East Wing of the County Court House. Once it had been determined I was not an emergency, I was told to sit and wait in a cramped and dingy little room. The tattered magazines on the table were all hunting, fishing, and firearms oriented, looking as if some very sweaty-handed people had tried to escape into them.

Florida elects its sheriffs on a party basis, a shockingly bad system. Elections come around too often. Unqualified men can slip in. People with political clout are seldom harassed by the Sheriff. Good politicians do lots of favors. Every time when, by a change in state law or by local option, they try to set the office up on an appointive basis with specific qualifications, thousands’ of loud right-wing nuts rise up out of the shrubbery and start screaming about being deprived of their democratic rights and their voting franchise. Law enforcement has become so complex, technical, and demanding, so dependent on the expert use of expert equipment, one might as well say it would make as much sense to elect brain surgeons from the public at large as sheriffs.

A surprising number of them are very good in spite of having to be political animals in order to survive. An unsurprising number of them are ninety-nine-point-nine percent worthless. Having heard from Van Harder of the attempt to kick him awake, I expected the second kind.

But as time passed, I began to revise my judgment. The people who hurried by the waiting-room door were slender and young and in smart uniforms, male and female. No fat-guts, pearl-handled, hat-tilted-over-the-eyes, good-ol‘-boy deputies. I could almost make out the words of the woman handling communications, calling the codes for various types of alarms.

Finally I was sent in to the Sheriff’s small office. “Just a minute,” he said. “Sit.”

It was a tiny office with a steel desk, steel chairs, dark gray carpeting, off-white walls, and no window at all. A big steel floor lamp hurled so many watts against the white ceiling, it was bright enough in there to make a television series. Me and Hack. He was signing what appeared to be requisition forms. He was a medium man with dusty brown hair and an unhealthy pallor. He was carefully reviewing the list of items on each requisition.

When he had finished he pushed a button on the base of his fancy telephone, and a uniformed woman came briskly in and took the requisitions away.

“Between the damned state auditors and the god damn nitpicking Washington desk jockeys, a man can spend his life doing the paperwork,” he said. He stared at me carefully for the first time. His eyes were brown, and they looked as dry and dusty as his hair. “Didn’t you get picked up here in Dixie County five-six years back?”

“No, Sheriff.”

“I could have swore. Do me a favor. Stand up.” What can you do? I stood up. He came around his desk and stood in front of me and looked up at my face. He backed off and bent and took a good look at my shoes.

He sat down again and said, “No lifts. The one I mean, the one that looked like you, he was about six foot even. Once a man gets his height, he don’t grow any more than that. Sure looks like you in the face. What’s your name again? McGee. From Lauderdale? What’s that you got there?”

I reached across the desk and handed him Boggs’s card. He read it, looked at me, read it again, and put it down in neat alignment with the corner of his desk. He reached his hand across to me and we shook hands.

“Nice to know you, Mr, McGee. Now just what is it that I can help you on? You just tell me and we’ll give it a try.” It was as if I had suddenly turned into a Dixie County voter.

“What’s the current status of the investigation of the Hubbard Lawless disappearance?”

“My investigation isn’t the only one in town.”

“I didn’t think it would be.”

He shifted around in his chair. If he’d had a window, he’d have gotten up and stared out of it. “Our investigation so far tends to show that Hub Lawless is still alive.”

“Where is he?”

He picked up Devlin Boggs’s card again and asked me if I would mind stepping out of the office and closing the door. He said it wouldn’t be more than a couple of minutes, and it wasn’t. He called me back in and I sat down.

“You’ve got to keep this quiet, Mr. McGee.”

“I intend to.”

“I gave one of my deputies, a man name of Wright Fletcher, that speaks pretty good Mexican, leave of absence to go on down to Mexico with an investigator from the insurance company has the big- policy on Hub’s life. Both those men thinks there’s a pretty good chance of getting a line on him, and if they can locate him, there’s enough federal heat involved, we should be able to get him extradited.”

“So how did he get from the Gulf of Mexico to Mexico?”

“You know how he turned everything he could into cash, picked everything clean; that gave us the lead on premeditation.”

“But wasn’t there a hearing and a verdict that he was missing and presumed dead?”

“That was when the whole thing had just happened. Everybody liked Hub. What it looked like, he was just getting a bunch of cash together to put it into something good where he could turn it over fast and come out ahead. He’d done that kind of thing before. And nearly everybody knew he couldn’t swim a stroke. It’s like that with a lot of Florida native born. Me, I’ve lived all my life close enough to the Gulf to near spit in it, and I can’t swim no more than Hub could. And the Gulf water is right cold in March. Once we get a line on Hub, we can open the whole thing up again. That insurance company sure-God doesn’t want to presume him dead. And Julie Lawless wants to take them to court to get the money.”

“What do you have to go on?”

“First there is kind of negative reasoning. We can show how he was turning stuff into cash. Hundred dollar bills is all you can get hold of nowadays without attracting attention. You know how much space and weight is involved in six hundred thousand dollars? That is six thousand pieces of paper. It will weigh right around twenty pounds. If it was all mint, which it wasn’t, it would make a package six inches by seven and a half inches, and ten inches high. We’ve not found” it or any part of it. And we have looked. We’ve looked good.

“The next part is negative reasoning too. When they got around to inventorying the stuff on the books of those four corporations of his, there.was a jeep missing he used a lot. An old yellow jeep with dune-buggy tires that he could run cross-country at the ranch and the grove. It has never turned up. His other two cars were here, but the jeep is gone.”

“Do you have any positive reasoning, Sheriff?”

He looked at me, and in those dusty brown eyes I could read a very serious message. Though he looked like a mild man, I would not want to irritate him and not have a little card from Boggs to keep him in check. He exhaled and let his white knuckles relax.

“We got a lot of calls. After the whole thing went on the wire services, we got calls he was seen in Tacoma and on Maui and in Scranton, P A. People called up and said that if there was a reward they’d tell us where to come pick him up. Key West, Detroit, Montreal. Everybody knew right where Hub Lawless was hiding. When a man has money and you can’t find the body, these calls always come in.”

“But that-”

“Wait until I finish. We don’t. have the budget to check out all that nonsense. But we check out what looks possible. Just ten days ago in the Tuesday mail we got a letter from Orlando. There was a slide in it, in a cardboard mount. There was a typed note in with the slide. I’ve got a copy here of what the note said, and a print made from the slide.”

He read me the note. “The man in this picture I took looks like the man in the newspaper pictures. I took this picture on Friday April eighth in Guadalajara. I can’t give you my name or address because my boyfriend thinks I was in San Diego visiting my sister.‘”

The print was a four-by-five, sharp and clear. It showed a sidewalk cafe, a sunny street; traffic, buses, buildings in the distance, nearby shops with signs in Spanish. There were several tables occupied. A man sat alone at one of them, off to the left. He was almost facing the camera. He was carefully pouring what was evidently beer into his glass.

Hack Ames came around the desk, leaned over my shoulder, and tapped that beer-pouring fellow with his finger. “Hub. No doubt of it. We projected that slide as big as we could with the best projector we could locate. Hell, it even shows the detail of his ring, the little scar at the corner of his mouth. The experts say it was taken on Ektachrome X with a good-quality lens that was a medium-wide angle, like maybe thirty-five millimeters. It was developed at one of the Kodak regional labs, and the date stamp in the cardboard of the mount says April. You can see that she wasn’t trying to take a picture of Hub. I think she didn’t even know what she had until she got the slides and used a viewer or a projector.”

Hubbard Lawless was wearing an open khaki jacket with short sleeves over a yellow T-shirt. He had a blunt cheerful face, snub nose, bland brow, thinning blond hair combed and sprayed to hide the paucity of it. His hands were big, his forearms thick and muscular. He wore a small frown of concentration as he poured his beer.

“So it places him in Guadalajara a month and a half ago. That’s where your deputy and the insurance investigator went?”

“With copies of this picture. Wright Fletcher is a very hard worker. He’ll show that picture to ten thousand people if he has to. But they’re going to concentrate on the clinics.”

“Clinics?”

“That’s the world center for cosmetic surgery. l.ifts, nose jobs, hair plants. There are dozens of very qualified surgeons working down there.”

“Makes sense.”

“If he’s been and gone, there’ll be before-and-after pictures in the files. That and this picture and the date of the operation would prove he didn’t drown when he allegedly fell off the Julie.”

“What about Kristin Petersen?”

“You mean is she with Hub? It looks that way. Funny thing. A man gets to be forty and he gets itchy, and it’s usually a woman sets him off, trying for a different kind of life. It happens every day. But most men, when they go off the deep end, they don’t influence the lives of so many other people. They don’t raise such hell with a community. This has upset a lot of applecarts.”

“We’re staying at the North Bay Resort. Maybe you could let me know if your deputy finds out anything.”

“I don’t exactly see where you fit into this.”

“We fit where Mr. Boggs said we fit.”

“Sure,” said the Sheriff. “Great.”

“Can I keep the picture?”

“If you want it. We had a lot made.”

“Are the city police in on this in any way?”

“There aren’t any. There was a referendum and the county took over law enforcement for everything inside the county. They get more service for less money this way. We absorbed their staff and equipment and gave up their office space two years ago.”

“Where is the Julie, Sheriff?”

“Over to Cedar Pass Marina. The fellow that was mate, DeeGee Walloway, he’s living aboard and keeping an eye on it.”

“Can I tell him it’s okay with you if I take a look at it?”

“Now why would you want to do that?”

“It can’t hurt anything, can it?”

“I guess not. But there’s been enough people trying to be some kind of Shylock Holmes around here.”

“Was Harder really drunk?”

“He looked drunk, smelled drunk talked drunk walked drunk, and all-around acted drunk. So, like it said in the paper, I didn’t get him tested for drunk. So I can’t swear he was passed-out drunk. Besides, he’d done a lot of jail time for D and D.”

“Before he was born again.”

“Those born-again ones fall off too, McGee. And hate to admit it. One drink Van said. Like the ones we pick up wavering all over the road. Two little beers, they say. John Tuckerman and those girls swore Hub took Van up just that one drink. But he could have had a pint bottle in his coat, sucked it dry, and heaved it over the side. He comes from here, you know. And a lot of people remember the hell he raised when he was young. He finally left here and moved on down to Everglades City, did some guiding and gator poaching, got in trouble down there, found Jesus, moved to Lauderdale, and finally wound up back here again. The ones that swear- off, most of them they go back onto it sooner or later, get pig drunk and locked up.”

“Something special you’ve got against drunks, Sheriff?”

“Married to one for a long time. Too long. She finally drove into a tree one night.”

“Nice of you to give me so much time, Sheriff.”

“What happened there, over your eye?”

“I cut across the grounds last night, heading toward the beach, and ran into some of that playground stuff in the dark. Nothing important. Appreciate your help.”

When I stood up, he tilted his chair back and looked up at me. “There have been some people coming into Timber Bay, nosing around here and there, thinking to come up with the kind of leverage that might would get them a piece of the money Hub is supposed to taken.”

“I can well imagine.”

“It would hurt me to find out that you people had conned Devlin Boggs and you’re after the same thing as those other sharpshooters.”

“You mean they think the money is here?” I asked, trying to look as though I were stupid enough to ask such a question.

With patient exasperation he said, “They hope to get a line here on where he went from here. And then they hope to go to wherever they think he is and take the money away from him.”

“Oh.”

“Hub Lawless could be a real surprise to anybody who found him and had ideas.”

“How do you mean?”

“One time some red-hots up from Tampa tried to take the payroll money at Hula Marina-that was before he sold out to Associated Foods. There were three of them and Hub shot one in the stomach, threw one of them into a wall, and broke the wrist on the third. He moves fast. I’ve hunted with him. He’s got real good reflexes, and he stays in shape. Jogging and so on. Weights.”

I thanked him again and left. This was one complicated man, this Sheriff Ames. He had a mild look. But those dusty brown eyes kept asking more questions than were spoken. He made me wonder if I had actually come to Timber Bay to get a line on all that money. He made me feel guilty for things I’d never done. He made me conscious of that capacity for blackhearted evil which every one of us shares with everyone else-and never speaks about.

Six

I WAS THE first to arrive at the Captain’s Galley for lunch, having set up the date by phone with Walter Olivera, phoned Dave Bellamy for the reservation, and left word at the desk at the North Bay Resort for Meyer to join us. I had a one-drink wait at the bar, and then Bellamy brought Walter Olivera over.

At first glance I thought he was a high-school kid. Tall, skinny, with long dank blond hair, a goatee, embroidered jeans, two strands of heishi, and little Ben Franklin glasses. But each time I got a better look at him, I added five years, and I finally guessed him at thirty.

Meyer arrived right after him, and Bellamy gave us the same booth as on our first visit. Olivera sat on the inside, and I sat across from them. The place was full of locals from the marts of trade secretaries, brokers, salesmen, and city-hall types, along with lawyers, dentists, and contractors. It made a cheerful midday din of voices, ice, silverware, and laughter.

Olivera said, “Sure, my by-line was on almost all the Hub Lawless stories, and on almost everything else too. What it is, we don’t have the horses to put out the Bay Journal seven mornings a week, and we don’t have the budget. It is an ABC figure of fifteen thousand; and we were picked up two years ago by Southern Communications, Incorporated, which has maybe twenty smallish papers and a dozen FM rock radio stations. They sit up there in Atlanta with their computer printouts, looking at the gross and the net, and they write ugly letters to Harry Dister-he runs the paper and has ulcers on his ulcers-asking how come he paid fourteen cents more a ream for copy paper this year than last year. They don’t give a shit what our editorial position is or our politics. They make us buy the cheapest syndicated crud on the market, and they make poor Harry hustle his ass off for advertising linage.” He picked up his glass of white wine. “No point in telling you all my problems, gentlemen. Yes, I covered the Lawless mess, and I didn’t do any digging because I can’t spend or spare the time.”

Meyer said, “I hope you understand our position, Mr. Olivera. If Lawless is alive and well, we have to go after the available property in one way, and if he is indeed drowned, then we go after it another way.”

“I can see that, sure.”

“So I guess what we are looking for-with Devlin Boggs’s help-is an educated guess on what to expect,” I said.

Walter Olivera took his time. “I see it this way,” he said finally. “Mr. Lawless was a proud man. He was born right here in Timber Bay. When he was in his second year at the University of Florida at Gainesville, his mother, father, and older brother were killed in a light-plane accident. His brother had rented the plane. Hit power lines trying to set it down in a field when the motor quit. After everything was settled, there was just enough left to see Hub through school. He took business courses. He came back here and married Julia Herron. Her father was D. Jake Herron, who was a state legislator from this area for thirty years, right up to when he died.

“Hub borrowed some money from his father-in-law to get started in the construction and landdevelopment business, and paid it all back with interest. He worked hard. He worked all hours. Kvery time he got a little bit ahead, he’d branch out. He started Hula Marine Enterprises, Double L Ranches, and Lawless Groves and nursed them through the early years and turned them into profitable businesses. It was a process of constant expansion. I think he was a millionaire, on paper at least, by the time he was thirty-five. He liked making things work out. But luck always enters in. He had no way of knowing everything would start to go sour at about the same time.”

“Everything?” Meyer asked.

“Just about. He took the money he got from selling Hula Marine to Associated Foods, and he put it into two big tracts of land, one about two miles east of the city line on State- Road Three fifty-nine, and the other way out beyond the south end of Bay, down on a little road that winds on down toward Pepperfish Key. Good waterfront land, and a lot of it. The land on Three fifty-nine was to be a shopping center, a big one. You can drive out and take a look at it. He got the land prepared, roads paved, foundations set. The waterfront land was going to be a big condominium development. Six high-rise buildings, fifteen hundred units. He’d borrowed right up to the hilt, and he was counting on the cash flow he could generate from his other interests to keep the new ventures going.”

Meyer nodded and said, “Hard freeze?”

“You bet it was. A little freeze is okay. It even helps make the crop juicier. They say Hub was up all night long, roaring around in that yellow jeep. They burned smudge pots and tires and ran big fans off generators. They tried everything. But when there is absolutely no wind and the temperature stays below eighteen degrees for almost five hours, there isn’t anything anybody can do. It froze and split some of his older trees. He didn’t even end up with cattle feed. And you know what has happened to the price of beef and beef cattle in Florida. They say he could have squeaked through, by getting the shopping center up as fast as he could. The center was going to be anchored by a big store, one of the big chains. He had a good lease, all signed. And a lot of little people were beginning to flock around on account of the traffic that would be generated by the chain store. And all of a sudden they went the way of Grant’s. Bankrupt. Finished. And his lease was worthless. He wanted to make the condominium project first priority, but all of a sudden the state came into the act and said that the project was going to damage valuable wetlands. They wanted a setback from the beach that would have made it impossible for him to put the buildings up in the area left, and they asked for an environmental impact study, which would have delayed it at least eighteen months even if the answer had been favorable to him.

“He was a very up-front guy. He admitted everything wasn’t going too great. But he smiled a lot and he was confident, and everybody figured Hub Lawless would work his way out of it the same as other times when he had been caught in a narrow place. I heard rumors he was sleeping on a cot out at his ranch office, and that his marriage had gone bad and he had something going with a woman named Petersen. She was an architect, and she was supposed to be helping with the designs of the shopping center and condominium project. If he had something going, then maybe he wasn’t thinking too clearly. As I said, he was proud. If he hung around, he was certainly going to go steadily and inevitably down the tube. He was going to have to see those corporations go into bankruptcy, and he was going to have to go into personal bankruptcy, resign from the board of the bank, resign from a lot of civic activities and church things. It was certainly going to spoil his image with his daughters, Tracy and Lynn. Sixteen and fourteen are tough years to suddenly go broke. So he decided to milk every dime he could out of every account, every source of funds, fake his own death, and go on the run, realizing that nobody could step in and grab the proceeds of the big insurance coverage on his life away from Julia Lawless. I want the lentil soup, please, a big bowl, and an order of the whole wheat toast, no butter.”

After we had all ordered, Olivera made his little summary. “He had no really good choices. He had no way of knowing that it would look so suspicious that the insurance company would refuse to pay the claim. He did so many things so well, it’s funny he didn’t manage his own disappearance better.”

“Would you guess he’s in Mexico?” I asked. “That seems to be the current tumor. I wouldn’t fault it. He went down there quite a few times. He liked the country. He and John Tuckerman used to go down and hunt a lot. Hub spoke enough bad Spanish to get by. Apparently he started squirreling away cash about the first of the year. It would give him a lot of time, almost three months, to establish a new identity.”

“With the lady architect?”

“And lots and lots of pesos,” Olivera said cheerfully.

“Apparently Tuckerman was in on the deception,” Meyer said.

“Had to be. And I think it was very, very rough on John Tuckerman. He thought Hub Lawless was the finest man who ever walked. Hub had a way of generating a lot of loyalty. If Hub had asked John to set himself on fire, he’d have run after the gasoline and the matches. Unquestioning. Okay John helped him, and did exactly as he was told. And after it happened, John crawled into the bottle and he’s been there ever since.”

“What was his position anyway?”

“He was supposed to be a vice-president of each of the four corporations. What he did was make sure the cars were gassed and maintained, and he made reservations and carried luggage and told jokes. He has no family except a sister. Hub Lawless was his family, and the Lawless enterprises were his home.”

“What’s he doing now?”

“Drinking. He has a beach shack down there on the land Hub bought for the condominium project. The ownership of that land is in limbo. He’s a squatter, technically, but I don’t think he’ll be rousted out of there right soon. If I had to make a guess, I would say that Hub probably gave John enough cash to keep him going.”

“If you had to make a guess,” Meyer said. Olivera turned and stared at Meyer and then over at me. “Look you guys. This is a favor, okay? Boggs, the big man, asked me to cooperate.”

Meyer looked wounded. “Please don’t misunderstand, Walter. Did I sound disapproving? I wasn’t. We’re here to make guesses. Good newspaper people make guesses based on hunch and experience and then check them out to find the facts, right?”

Olivera relaxed again. “What I’m working on is not exactly the Washington Post.”

“Does the paper do any crusading?” I asked. “If it doesn’t cost anything.”

“Here’s one that might not cost much. If we assume Hub Lawless had the whole thing planned ahead, and if we assume John Tuckerman was in on it and helped out, then it follows that Van Harder, running the boat, was given a funny drink. So he lost his license to skipper a boat carrying passengers for hire. So he got labeled a drunk who passed out while the owner fell overboard.”

Olivera thought it over, frowning, turning it this way and that. “I suppose we could have an editorial. But to get his case reconsidered, there would have to be some hard facts.”

I decided to run a little test. “Hard facts. For example, a reliable eyewitness who’d swear to having seen Lawless in Mexico in April?”

“That might do it,” he said. “That would be great, sure.”

So either he was a great actor or he didn’t know about the photograph. I resisted the temptation to be a nine-cent hero and take the picture out and explain it to him.

“What’s all this about Harder anyway?” he asked. “He’s just a sample of all the people who get hurt when somebody pulls something off, when somebody sets up a conspiracy to defraud,” I said.

While we ate, quite a few people who passed our booth on their way out spoke to Walter Olivera. He kept grinning and nodding and flapping his hand at them. And it seemed obvious that every one of them was wondering who we were. Small cities have a very compact power structure, and it is always more evident when the tourist season is over.

“It was really a hell of a blow to this town,” Olivera said, when his lentil soup was gone. “High hopes. You know. Two big projects. More jobs. The best thing that could happen would be if some organization could come in and pick up right where Hub left off, iron out the bugs, and get those projects moving again. I would think most of the creditors would listen to reason.”

“If we knew who to buy the rights from,” Meyer said.

“I know. The official result was: Missing, presumed dead by misadventure. Now the general feeling is. Missing, presumed alive. If seven years pass with no trace of him, I think they can declare him dead. And that is too damned long to wait.”

He had to get back to the paper. He shook hands around, thanked us for the lunch, told us he would be glad to help in any way he could. And he said that everybody he could think of would be glad to help us too.

After he was gone we ordered more coffee. I told Meyer the Haggermann Ames story and gave him a stealthy look at the picture of Hub Lawless in Guadalajara. He was enchanted, but agreed with me that it was the kind of evidence that would not stand up in any court of law. It would have to be backed up by direct examination of the person who had taken the photograph.

He had spent all his time with Harold Payne and said, “One very cool and cautious fellow. Very reluctant to violate any client-attorney relationship, even after I hinted that, if Mr. Allbritton’s firm came in here, I would recommend they use his services for local legal matters. That didn’t thaw him. He said he had been Mr. Lawless’s personal attorney for many years and that he had set up the corporations Mr. Lawless had controlled and had advised him on tax and estate matters. He said he had blocked an attempt by the IRS to proceed with a computation of estate tax and had contested a writ to have his client’s personal safety-deposit box opened. He had not filed a copy of the will and would not do so until there was positive proof that Hubbard Lawless was deceased.”

“Did he have any opinions about what happened?”

“He didn’t express any direct opinion. He said it was entirely possible that, had his client not met with an accident on the night of March twenty-second last, he would have been able to explain his very good reasons for having enhanced his cash position!”

“‘Enhanced his cash position’?” I said.

“A direct quote,” Meyer said. “Payne is okay. The firm represents the bank, too. It puts him in a curious position, a sort of ex post facto conflict of interest. So he is doing the smart thing,. following the letter of the law, keeping his head down, keeping everything in stasis until more information comes to light.”

“Are we getting anywhere?” I asked. “Are we doing Van Harder any good? That’s what this is all about. Remember?”

“To replace the fledgling in the nest, one must first climb to the top of the tall tree.”

“Oh, boy.”

“About five or six o’clock back at the Resort-forgive the expression?”

“Have a nice afternoon.”

Seven

THE VAST expanses of the parking areas at Baygate Plaza were less than half filled, and I wondered at the wisdom of Hub Lawless’s decision to build another big shopping center in Timber Bay.

Once I found my way into the Mall, I located an orientation map, one of those YOU ARE HERE! things, and found where I was in relation to Top 40 Music. I plodded along the tile-finished concrete under the perpetual fluorescence, past all the jewelry stores, shoe stores, cut-rate blue-jeans stores, gift marts, caramel-corn outlets, and health-food hustles. I plodded along in the din of canned music, in the perpetual carnival atmosphere of everyday, past the custom T-shirts, the pregnant ladies eating ice cream cones, and the lines of children on school holiday waiting to get into another revival of Star Wars, shrieking and jabbing at one another and pretending to die of serious wounds.

When I came to Top Music, I turned out of the slow parade and went in, feeling as if I were leaning into the blare of somebody electronically amplified, yelling, “Babybabybabybaby…”

There was an extraordinarily beautiful young woman in there, in white slacks and a pink top, with flawless figure and flawless complexion. She had one disconcerting flaw, though-she had such a mouthful of big white projecting teeth that she couldn’t quite close her lips. She had a smoky drift of dark hair, dark eyes, and a fine way of holding herself, of walking. I could almost read her lips and knew she was asking me if she could do anything for me.

I leaned toward her and yelled into her ear, “Miss Ambar?”

“Yes?”

“Can we go somewhere and talk?”

“What about?”

“Hub Lawless.”

“No way!”

I handed her the To Whom It May Concern card signed by Devlin Boggs. She looked at it and shrugged, then handed it back.

“Please?” I shouted.

She looked me over more carefully. I tried to look responsible and respectable. I could almost hear her sigh. She hurried into the back and came out with a small white-haired lady with a smudge of dust on her cheek. Then Miss Ambar walked by me and out into the pedestrian traffic. She turned back and looked at me. “So come on!” her lips said, inaudible in all that babybabybaby din.

We sat at a counter fifty yards from the music store. I had coffee and she ordered a tall Red Zinger tea with honey. She had the ghost of an accent. We kept our voices down.

“What she did, what Mishy did, she call me up like I guess it was two o’clock that day, and she said, Hey, ‘Licia, you wan we go on a boat tonight down to Clearwater? I said I din wan to do nothing like that at all, I had a date and so on, but she begged and begged and said how it was such a nice boat and all, real fast, real lovely, and where she works, the Cove, she had heard Mister Tuckerman, he was saying they were going down in the boat, and she asked maybe a fren of hers and her could come along, and he said, Hell, why not? So she wouldn’t go without me and she said she had a girlfren there in Clearwater, we could stay in her place, and then her girlfren’s boyfren, he could drive us back up here next day. Chee, I tole this seven tousand times, I think. Over and over and over.”

“Are you originally from Mexico?”

“From Honduras. When I was a little kid. I got no accent now at all. How you can tell?”

“I just guessed.”

“Okay, so I got to the Cove about eight thirty all set to go, and pretty soon Mr. Tuckerman, he picks us up, and then he picks up Mr. Lawless from downtown, and we go down to the marine place and get on, and it was beautiful, it really was. I didn’t know they were so nice inside. Just like in some kind of high-price trailer, television and hi-fi and everything, and ice and booze. I thought that what it was, it was some kind of pass. You know, like we were going to put out on account of we were so grateful to be on that boat. What Mishy does is her business, but I wasn’t going to, no matter what. But it was no problem on account of they acted like maybe we weren’t there at all. They were in the other end of that living-room-type place, having a drink, talking in low voices, talking business. After we had been‘ gone from the dock about twenty minutes, maybe less, Mr. Lawless made a drink and took it up and gave it to that Captain Harder. I din know his name then. I found out his name later on. Okay, so they were talking again, Lawless and Tuckerman, and the boat was going up and down, kind of, and I began to feel kind of sick. I said I was feeling sick, and Mr. Tuckerman said I should go up topside and the cold air would make me feel better. I went on up there and it really was cold and the wind was blowing something scary. Then I saw that Captain Harder on the floor up there, like he was dead. I ran back down there screaming and the men went running up, and then Mr. Tuckerman came back down and said they had decided to go back to Timber Bay, which was just fine with me, because by then I was sorry I’d ever said I’d come along for the ride, and, Mishy was sorry too because she wasn’t feeling real great either. It was more bouncy on the way back and it seemed to take longer, which I found out later it did, on account of Mr. Lawless was driving it by hand. What Mishy and I were doing, we were running in and out of that funny little bathroom, throwing up, taking turns. Then finally the wind wasn’t so strong, but we were bouncing up and down terrible, and there was one awful jolt that threw me right on the floor-I mean deck. Then Mishy thought she heard somebody yelling for us and then I heard it too, and neither of us would go up alone, so we both went. We were inside the pass by then, I think. Mr. Tuckerman yelled to us that Mr. Lawless had fallen overboard and we were to help look. The Captain was still on the deck passed out. It was a real nightmare. You couldn’t see nothing. Nobody could run the radio they have on boats like that. So we had to go in. Mr. Tuckerman banged the boat something terrible against the dock and there was some man there who came running to help with the lines, and pretty soon the police and, everybody was there, and by then, I can tell you, I didn’t give a damn what anybody did with me, I was so glad to have my feet back on ground again. I was so glad I could hardly stand it. I thought it had to be about three in the morning, but you know what? It was only about an hour and a half, just a little more than an hour and a half from the time we’d left. It was a terrible experience, I can tell you. We had to make statements and wait and sign them after they were typed up for us, and later we had to testify at the hearing. I’d never done that before. It isn’t as bad as I thought it would be. It was the worst night of my life. I din wan to go in the first place. That damn Mishy. She gets me into bad things. I doan wan to do anything with her again. But you know how it is when somebody keeps calling up. What the hell. She’s some crazy person, that Mishy. She likes a lot of stuff happening, and it sure happens aroun her. I tole all this nine thousand times. It’s been in the papers, every word of it.”

“Weren’t you going to get into Clearwater pretty late?”

“Like four in the morning. Something like that. It was a crazy thing to do, but that’s how Mishy is.”

“Why were Mr. Tuckerman and Mr. Lawless going down there by water? Did you get any clue to that?”

“Some kind of business thing. Nobody really said.”

“And the Captain was really out?”

“Man, I thought he was dead!”

“Were they drinking?”

“Little bit. Not much.”

I smiled at her. “Somebody said last night over at the North Bay Resort lounge that you’re a nice person.”

She lighted up. “Hey! Who says that?”

“Nicky Noyes.”

She lost the sparkle. “Oh, that one. I see him around. I doan go out with him. He used to work for Mr. Lawless, you know? Some kind of good job, he says. I couldn’t say. Lunchtime some guy I know was in buying tapes and he said Nicky was in the hospital from being in some kind of fight someplace.”

“Does he get in fights a lot?”

“Not often on account of he’s so big. But he comes on evil-bigmout‘, you know. He was over to North Bay last night. Huh! What happened over your eye anyhow?”

“I ran into something in the dark.”

“Something like Nicky?”

Her very dark eyes were merry. So take a chance, McGee. “What if it was?”

“Good for you! That sumbitch likes hurting. He busted Mishy’s finger once. He walk into a room, she walks out, you bet.” She looked at me more carefully. “No more marks? Just one? Maybe you had a stick?”

“Footwork.”

“That bank card says help you out. From the president yet. And you go around hitting. That doesn’t sound like a bank.”

“Did the fellow say how Nicky is?”

“Oh, he is okay. He said they were letting him out. He was just in, you know, for overnight. He goes to Emergency a lot. Nicky is always worried about his bod. If he feels hot, right away he wants to find out his temperature, and he thinks maybe he’s dying. He was some kind of big person around here in high school, and then he went to play football in Tallahassee, but he got sent home for some kind of gambling. He had a good job with Mr. Lawless. I doan know what now. For a little bit, he drove beer. Now he seems to be okay for money, but they say he’s a dealer, nothing real real heavy, just grass and coke and hash. Mishy is into that sometimes when she feels real down, but not me. Never. It’s too scary. I got to know where I am and where I’m coming from.”

“Is Mishy a special friend of John Tuckerman?”

“Huh? Oh, you wanna know if it’s all that special? Maybe. It wouldn’t mean all that much to Michele. I mean he’s kinda nice and funny. But she never mentioned it especially.”

“Is it okay to tell her I talked to you?”

“Sure. But why bother anyway, with me or her?”

“I’m working for people who want to buy Mr. Lawless’s land. So we need to find out if he’s dead.”

“Chee, we can’t help. I’m telling you, there was a hell of a lot of black watertout there, all bouncing up and down, and me knocked on the fl-deck. They say he couldn’t swim at all. They say he’s in Mexico. What that means is he didn’t have to swim. Mishy and I talked about that. So if he comes ashore, he’s in Timber Bay, where all around the bay it’s built up. A wet man walking. around? They say the tide was going out strong. What was there? A boat? I doan know, mister. You said your name is what? McGee? I just doan know. I theenk that sumbitch is dead. Hey, I got to get back or Carol’ll kill me dead. Sure. Talk to Mishy. But for what?”

The Cove was about two hundred yards south of the North Bay Resort, a rambling frame sunbleached structure which extended out over the bay, supported by thick pilings. The dining area was the farthest from the shore, beyond a large bar area hung with nets, glass floats, mounted fish, and funny sayings. They were having their midafternoon lull. A salesman was playing pinball, hammering the corners of the machine with the heels of his hands. A chubby white-haired couple wearing identical horn-rimmed glasses sat at a corner table drinking draft beer and playing gin. A tall hollowchested bartender with a gay-nineties mustache and hairstyle was polishing stemware and inserting it upside down into the overhead racks.

I slid onto a padded bar stool and said, “Mishy Burns around?”

“She comes on at four,” he said.

“Draft beer, please.”

He served it with a nice head. He said, “When she does come on, she’s working. She has to set up the tables. When she comes on, she’s not on her own time.”

“Are you trying to be unpleasant?”

“I’m just telling you the way it is, friend. What she does on her own time is her business.”

“You own this place?”

“I’m one of the owners.”

I was getting very tired of contentious attitudes. I smiled at him. I said, “I’ve always wondered about places like this.”

“Wondered what?”

“Suppose, just for the hell of it, you took a list of all the regulatory agencies that have any kind of authority over the way you do business here. County, city, state, federal. You know, the food-handling ordinances, and the tax people and the liquor people. Then suppose you went through this place and made a list of every single violation of every law, ordinance, and regulation.”

“We run a good clean place here. We don’t violate anything!”

“Nonsense, good buddy. There is no way to avoid being in violation of something. The rules are con, tradictory. You know it and I know it. Right now you are subject to fines, suspension of licenses, civil suits. That’s the way the establishment keeps you in line. If you get feisty, they come and look you over and tell you you have to build a whole new kitchen, or replace all your wiring, or put in ten more parking spaces.”

“Who the hell are you?”

“I am the fellow who came in here a little while ago, very quietly, and sat right here and asked you if Mishy Burns was around, and got a big discussion of her working hours and who pays her. We can start over again. Okay? Mishy Burns around?”

“She comes on at four,” he said.

“Draft beer, please,” I said, and he took the empty and refilled it and moved down the bar and left me alone, which was exactly what I wanted.

Michele came in ten minutes later. I had been building a mental picture of her, and so I was totally unprepared for a twenty-two-year-old Doris Day. She came a-dancing and bubbling in, full of warmth and life and high spirits. She brightened the place up. The salesman knew her and the gin players knew her. The bartender motioned to me and she came over and put her hand out and said, beaming, “Hello! I’m Mishy Burns.”

“Travis McGee. The man says you’re on his time and you can’t talk to me.”

“About what, love?”

“I’ve been talking to ‘Licia about your cruise.”

She made a face. “Oh, God. That again!”

She was in constant motion, constant changes of expression, posture, tossing her hair back, rocking from heel to toe, so much so that one wanted to clamp firm hands on her shoulders and settle her down, position her, quiet her. I realized that all the animation gave the impression of prettiness, and that perhaps in repose her face would look quite plain.

“Harley gets itchy, don’t you, Harley? Look, love, let me go put on the house garments and brush up the dining room a little and then we can talk, because things will be dead as a snake until five past five and all the car doors start chunking shut out there in the lot.”

I saw her in a little while, trotting back and forth in the dining room, wearing a crotch-length tennis dress with a sailor collar and a little white yachtsman’s cap. Another waitress had joined her. A couple of construction workers-off at four-came in for beers. Somebody started the juke. I watched Michele. She had absolutely great legs. I felt guilty about the way I was going to try to booby-trap my question. Not very guilty. Anticipatory guilt, the kind that Meyer calls chessboard guilt, when you realize that the weaker player is making a frail response to a standard opening, and you are about to ram your bishops down his throat.

When she beckoned to me, I went into the dining room and followed her over to a service bar where she had coffee waiting. She said, “Coffee? Black? Okay. Look, I have talked myself out on that boat ride. Believe me, it was a long, long time ago. To nle, two months is long. Lots and lots of things happen in two months. I have told about it so much ttiat what I remember now is not the boat ride but all the times I talked about it.”

“It can happen. Felicia is just as tired of it, I guess.”

“You would never believe how sick we got. Maybe I would have been okay, but as soon as she lost it, I was gone too.”

“There was just one thing I wanted to get straight, Michele.”

“Such as?”

“Exactly how did John Tuckerman word it when he asked you to come along for the ride and bring a friend?”

“You got it wrong. I asked him if we could go along.”

“‘Licia says that’s what Tuckerman told you to say.”

“Why, God damn her! She agreed never to tell anybody-”

And suddenly she stopped all motion. She was a subdued, plain-faced blonde with deeply bitten fingernails, staring at me from way inside herself, like an animal, looking out of the brush.

“You rotten bastard,” she said in a low voice,. “You faked me out, didn’t you?”

“Look at it this way. If Lawless is still alive somewhere, the whole thing was a conspiracy to defraud. He needed bodies to dress up the conspiracy.”

“That shows how much you know, you bastard.”

“I know this. You lied under oath. Right? So far, that’s between the two of us. And Felicia: But you keep on with the garbage mouth, I see no reason to keep your little secret.”

We stood facing each other, each with an elbow on the service bar. For a few more moments the wary creature stared through her eyes at me, out of the thickets at the back of her mind, and then dropped out of sight, and she was Miss Cheerleader again, all bounce and joy, all twinkle and grin.

With breathy laugh and salacious wink, she said, “What it was, and I’ll trust you, I really will, John Tuckerman has this thing about Felicia. You wouldn’t believe how horny he is for her, right from the first look he got at her. He said he would give me a nice present if I could get ‘Licia to come along. What it was, it was a way of getting maybe a good chance to set her up. She didn’t know what was coming down. She’s a funny kid. She’s not much for sex. She lived with some cat for a while but she’ll never talk about it, and I think it was some kind of bad start for her, so now it’s all yeck to her. What happened was we got seasick, and then Harder passed out and we had to come back and you know what happened. Right in the beginning John Tuckerman had told me to say it was me asked him if we could come along. Later on he said it was even more important I should say that, because if it got out he asked us, it would look bad. Mr. Lawless wasn’t real turned on by having us come along. He hardly spoke to us at all. The way Felicia found out was, after the testimony and all, I got a little high and I started kidding Felicia about Tuckerman giving me a hundred dollars to talk her into that terrible boat ride. She was really pissed off at me. She wouldn’t talk to me for a week but then she began to see how funny it was and she forgave me. She said even if it had been the best boat ride the world ever saw, Tuckerman wasted a hundred dollars. I don’t see why she’s like that. He’s sort of old for her. He’s thirty-eight, he says, but probably forty. I told her he’s not kinky or anything like that, mid very sweet and generous, and he lives on that great beach, but she doesn’t want anything to do with him. It isn’t as if she thinks she’s the world’s best. She has this idea she’s ugly. Somebody told her once that with those teeth she could eat a Big Mac through a venetian blind. She doesn’t see why anybody would want her.”

“Which finger did Nicky Noyes break?”

Her face got red. “She’s got all those big white teeth and she’s got a great big mouth too.”

“Here come customers.”

“Oh, God, with four kids yet. We close the kitchen at ten and I’m off by ten thirty.”

“If I’m not at the bar there by ten thirty, give up an me.”

“But you’ll be around?”

“Sure. For a while.”

Eight

I WENT right from the Cove to 215 South Oak Lane, to the long white house with the three-car garage. I arrived at about quarter to five. There were two cars in the drive, a weatherbeaten old Cadillac convertible, rusting out under the white paint, and a new little gray Honda Accord. The front door was open. Through the screen I heard women laughing-not social laughter, but contagious yelps of delight.

I had to ring the bell a couple of times. A woman came hurrying to the door and looked out at me, brows raised in query. She was small and lean and sun-brown in yellow shorts and a T-shirt. The black-gray bangs of her Prince Valiant hairstyle came almost to her black brows. Her face was sunweathered, hollow-cheeked, with deep squint lines, deep brackets around her mouth. Her eyes were dark blue.

“Mrs. Lawless?” I said.

“Yes, but I don’t want a thing, thanks.”

“I represent a group trying to purchase Double L Ranches and Lawless Groves, and I would appreciate a little of your time.”

I sorted out the calling card which said on the back “Dear Julia” and was signed “Dev” She opened the door a whole quarter inch to receive the card and then latched it again.

After she read it slowly and carefully, she frowned at me and said, “I can’t sell that land. You certainly know that much.”

“If your husband is alive, the problem is more complicated.”

“Hub is dead.”

“Perhaps you could help us ascertain that fact.”

“I’m through talking to people about my husband.”

“Because they wouldn’t listen?”

“Something like that.”

“I listen pretty good. Not as good as D. Jake Herron used to. But pretty good.”

Her face softened slightly. “You knew my father?”

“Just slightly. A friend of mine and I helped D. Jake nail a game warden some years back who was in the alligator-hide business as a sideline. The warden took a couple of shots at us.”

“I remember hearing about that!”

“I remember him saying that night that nobody ever wasted their time listening.”

“Well… come on in. Maybe you’ll buy something.”

“I don’t understand.”

“We’re tagging stuff for the biggest garage sale ever presented on South Oak Lane. Maybe the only garage sale.”

I went through the house with her and out to the area in the rear. There was a big screened cage, a swimming pool, a flagstone terrace beyond the cage, and a barbecue area beyond the terrace. Two women were working with Julia Lawless. There was a beefy cheerful redhead named Doris Jennings and a sallow and mocking blonde named Freddy Ellis. One Lawless daughter was there, introduced as Lynn. She looked familiar, and I suddenly remembered where I had seen her.

“Nice going, tiger,” I said to her.

“For what?” she said, looking at me with that apathy they reserve for ancient male strangers. “For whipping Miss Languid in the salmon dress over at the North Bay Resort courts. She wouldn’t shake hands on it, I noticed.”

She gave me a quick, warning wink. “Thanks. That was Sandra Ellis. I never beat her before.”

Freddy Ellis said, “Hey. You mean my snitty little daughter lost ungraciously?”

“I didn’t mind, honest,” Lynn said.

“I mind,” Freddy said ominously.

Doris Jennings asked me if I would be willing to look at the prices they had put on Hub’s possessions and see if they were out of line. She said she had gotten advice from the sporting-goods stores which had sold him a lot of the things. They were arranged on display in the nearest stall of the garage.

I moved slowly and carefully past Hubbard Lawless’s golf clubs, golf cart, tennis equipment, bowling ball and bowling shoes, shotguns, rifles, target pistol, fly rods, spinning rods, surf rods, tuna rods, reels and reel cases, boxes of lures, boxes of flies, weights, punching bag, Nikon cameras, lenses, lens cases, strobe lights, tripods, slide boxes, slide projectors, movie cameras, movie projectors, light stands, ten-speed tour bike, binoculars, sheath knives…

The man liked nice things, and he kept them in good shape. He didn’t buy things and put them away. They showed signs of wear and signs of care.

A splendid custom shotgun caught my eye. It was in a fitted pigskin case, with an extra set of side-byside barrels. Spanish walnut stock. Initials inlaid in gold. H.R.L. Beavertail forearm. Single nonselective trigger. Ventilated rib. English scroll engraving on white steel. It was Orvis Custom, built to Hub Lawless’s physical dimensions, and I knew it had to represent a minimum three-thousand-dollar investment. A dandy toy for a grown-up boy. It was priced to move at five hundred. I assembled it and tried it. The drop at the comb and the heel was wrong, trigger distance wrong. And the initials were wrong. A man the same size as Hub Lawless could find a great bargain here.

I moved along and then went back to the billfish tackle, and fended off a lust to buy some of it. The man had good taste in equipment.

“Well?” Julia asked.

“You got good advice. The prices of the things I know about are in line. Fair for the buyer and the seller.”

“He never stinted himself,” she said flatly. “Good old Hub. The best was just barely good enough.”

“Mother!” Lynn said, defending the beloved daddy.

“Sorry, chick,” Julia said, reaching to ruffle the girl’s hair. “Thanks for easing my mind about the prices. They seemed kind of low. I know what he paid for some of those things.”

“I know nothing about golf equipment or bicycles.”

“Oh, those prices are okay. I didn’t know about the outdoor jock stuff.”

The next stall of the garage was filled with standard garage-sale household items, Julia’s and also items brought over by Doris Jennings and Freddy Ellis, for a joint effort. It was a predictable array: Cribs and high chairs. Ornate beer steins and souvenir plates. Bonus books from book clubs. Floor lamps and suitcases. Rotisseries and bulletin boards. Tricycles and feather headdresses. End tables and tablecloths. On being pressed, I said it looked as if they had a lot of good stuff there.

Finally, as a reward for my patience and help, and for having known her father, she took me back into the living room for the obligatory conversation.

She sat curled in a corner of a large couch. I sat across from her, with a glass coffee table between us.

“It’s so damned depressing,” she said. “I’ve still not tackled his dressing room. I’ve got to get rid of all that stuff. Goodwill, I guess. Or the Salvation Army or somebody.”

“A lot of people seem to think he’s in Mexico.”

“Say the rest of it too, Mr. McGee.”

“Such as?”

“He stole the money and ran. He took off with his Norwegian piece of ass to live happily ever after.”

“He was having an affair with her. An architect, wasn’t she?”

“Okay. So he was having an affair. His very first. Believe me, it was his first. It started last year. In the summer. She was recommended to him. She was supposed to be some kind of an expert in the design of shopping centers. She did a big one in Atlanta and one in Jacksonville. When everything went to hell with the one he was supposed to build here, she should have taken off, right? But she stayed on, drawing pay from the big shot who was going broke. Oh, I am so goddamn sick of these little Scandinavian broads with their little breathy accents and no makeup, maybe a trace of lipstick and their pale green eyes and their big boobs and no more morals than rabbits. I don’t mind telling you I was really really hurt. I couldn’t believe it at first. Then when we had a nose-to-nose battle, he wouldn’t deny it. Finally he confessed and promised he would break up with her, but he didn’t. He claimed he tried, but he didn’t try hard enough. I asked him if he gave a damn about Tracy and Lynn. It marks a child terribly when there is family trouble when they’re in their mid-teens, just sixteen and fourteen. We had more rotten fights and then he started sleeping out at the ranch, in a room back of the ranch office out there. That was in late January. I’ve had a chance to think lately. And I can… almost begin to understand this Kristin business. Hub had a dream. He admired my daddy so much. What he wanted to do was build a base. Money and power. And then one day he was going to run for governor and become somebody in Florida. But last year, when times were hard and things began to go bad, he could see his dream fading. He had been too confident. He’d made a bad judgment of the situation. It was going to spoil his track record to be brought down after forty. And there wouldn’t be enough time to build it all up again. He, was really seriously upset. He always had such great drive and spirit, and he couldn’t find a way out of the spot he was in. Some men would go a little crazy. Some would take to the bottle or go onto Valium. Hub took up with that architect person, proving his manhood, I guess. Maybe she kept telling him he was a great man. Maybe I should have done that so she wouldn’t have to. Maybe I nagged him some. And maybe it was Hub’s way of going a little bit crazy. Am I making any sense?”

“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 could 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.”

“McGee. And this is Meyer. Ron Shermerhorn.”

“Pleased to meet you. I don’t want to talk about Nicky too much, you know. He was always okay to me. I just didn’t want you to think he was just another one of your ordinary crazies, is all.”

“He jumped me last night,” I said. “In the parking lot outside the North Bay Resort lounge. I don’t really know why. I walked out with the piano player, Billy Jean Bailey, and there he was, ready and waiting, shirt off, spitting on his hands.”

Ron was looking me over for signs of damage. “Talk him out of it?”

“No, we went around a little, and then I helped him climb into his truck.”

“You’ve got to be pretty good.”

“I faked him out.”

He was still staring dubiously at me when a man on the other side of Meyer spun around so violently he knocked Meyer back against me. The man then went charging toward the men’s room, back of his hand pressed to his mouth, and disappeared.

“What’s all that?” Meyer demanded indignantly.

“Oh,” Ron said, “that’s just Fritz Plous. Works for the paper. He’s in here a lot. Throws up a lot. It takes him sudden. It’s what they call auto-auto-”

“Autointoxication?” Meyer suggested.

“That’s it! The doctor has told him not to think about throwing up. But he sort of gets it on his mind and he can’t get his mind off it and all of a sudden he has to make a run for it.”

“You have your share of unusual people here in Timber Bay,” I said.

“No more than anywhere,” Ron said with a trace of indignation. He drained his glass and put it down. “See you guys,” he said, and went on out into the evening.

Meyer and I stood silently side by side. The man named Plous came back to the bar, gray and sweaty. We stood in a blur of ambient noise, of Muzak and laughter, tinkle and clatter, rumble and chatter, and tink of ice.

Ever since Noyes had delivered his cryptic speech I had felt even more depressed than had been my usual quota lately. I was aware that Meyer was studying me thoughtfully, carefully.

“What’s with you?” I said in irritation.

“Where has gone all that lazy mocking charm of yesteryear?” he asked. “Where is the beach wanderer, the amiable oaf I used to know?”

“Knock it off. Okay?”

“What the hell is making you so edgy!”

I had to use a surprising amount of control to quell the impulse to yap at him again, like a cross dog. I forced the deep breath and said, “I don’t know. Maybe I’m coming down with something. I’d like a bowl of hot chicken soup and a feather bed. An empty feather bed. I can’t relate to this paragon, this splendid fellow who left with the money. I can’t get used to all the leverage we have, Meyer. Everybody wants to be nice to us because we might represent new money in town. The Sheriff makes me very nervous. I met a lovely girl who hates her own teeth. All the way up from the Grenadines to the Virgins I had no one to, talk to but Duke Davis, and you know how he is. Two words a day does it. Then one hell of a three-day party at St. Croix, and more weeks of silence. I think I got used to it, Meyer. I am getting edgy talking to these people. I hate the sound of my own voice. And not too far from here, not far enough, there is a hundred pound piano player fixing to fasten onto me the way a King’s Crown attaches itself to a clam, and I have to shake her off somehow.”

“I think you are coming down with something.”

“Julia Lawless is bitter and angry at the world. She’s selling Hub’s toyland. At a garage sale, for God’s sake. You should see the Orvis rods and shotguns. Is there a name for what I’m coming down with?”

“Some kind of culture shock. It manifests itself in an inability to see a reality untainted by temporary hangups.”

“And yesterday when I was waiting to cross the street near the bank, I could look into all the cars roaring by, and the people in them had kind of a dead look. As if they were hurrying so as not to be late for their own funerals. Is there any cure for my disease?”

“When Harder comes waddling into the marina with the Flush, you’ll perk up. Hermit crabs get very nervous when they have to scrounge around without their shell.”

“I can’t wait that long. I feel as if some absolutely unimaginable catastrophe was getting itself ready to happen. And I feel as if, far no reason in the world, I was going to suddenly-for God’s sake-start crying!”

He looked at me then with a startled compassion, intently, somberly. “Hey,” he said softly. “Hey, Travis.”

“Sorry.”

“I thought it was just a little everyday weltschmerz. We’re not here on some great big thing, you know.”

“It’s as big a thing as Harder can possibly think of.”

“Did you and Duke Davis stand watches all the way up?”

“Yes, why? We decided it was best because the automatic pilot wasn’t reliable in any kind of chop, and we were in shipping lanes most of the way. Besides, we didn’t get any really long reaches on the way up. We fought wind all the way.”

“What did you think about all that time?”

“Come on! I played all the games of What if. I counted the ladies I have known. I replayed the hard shots-given and taken. Remembered grief, remembered pleasure. I thought of all the choices made, the doors I’ve slammed shut, the seasons which have closed down on me, games called on account of pain. All that shit, Meyer. You know. A man’s head goes round and about. Filth and glory. The whole schmear.”

“But mostly… Who am I? Where am I going?”

“I guess.”

“And the answer?”

I shrugged. “Answer shmanser. In the immortal words of Popeye, I yam what I yam. I know my patterns and limitations, needs and hang-ups. So I go on. Right? I endure. I enjoy what I can. There aren’t any more forks in the road to take. Keep walking.”

“You have felt that horrid rotten exhalation, Travis, that breath from the grave, that terminal sigh. You’ve been singing laments for yourself. Laments, regrets, remorses.”

“Light the pyre. Float me out on my boat. Come on, Meyer. I’ve always been perfectly willing to accept the risks as they come along. If I make it, I make it. And if I don’t, I had one hell of a time trying.”

“And what you do, the services you render, are important.”

`Are they?“

“Aren’t they?” he asked.

“If you get somebody out of one bad screw-up, haul them out, brush them off, and send them on their way, they will head. right back into some other kind of screw-up.”

“Ah-hah!”

“What’s with this Ah-hah?”

“You question the validity of the mission. Thus you question the validity of the missionary. A loss of faith. That is corrosive. At that point you question existence itself, the meaning of it. A common human condition. Those with no imagination never really feel despair. Congratulations!”

“Good God, Meyer!”

“I’ll phone my new friend, and we shall have Boodles and beef at the Captain’s Galley.”

“Everybody has to be somewhere, I guess.” Meyer learned that there would be a table. We walked back to the lot and got the rental and drove on out to the Galley.

Meyer was turning something around and around in his mind. He had that look. One does not make conversation when Meyer has that look. At the table he finally sighed and smiled and gave it a try.

“Travis, I’ve mentioned to you the second law of thermodynamics.”

“Which is?”

“That all organized systems tend to slide slowly into chaos and disorder. Energy tends to run down. The universe itself heads inevitably toward darkness and stasis.”

“Cheering thought.”

“Prigogine altered this concept with his idea of dissipative structures.”

“Who?”

“Ilya Prigogine, the Belgian mathematician.”

“Oh.”

“He used the analogy of a walled city and an open city. The walled city, isolated from its surroundings, will run down, decay, and die. The open city will have an exchange of material and energy with its surroundings and will become larger and more complex, capable of dissipating energy even as it grows. I have been thinking that it would not warp the analogy too badly to extend it to a single individual.”

“The walled person versus the open person?”

“The walled person would decline, fade, decay.”

“Meyer, dammit, I have a lot more interchange of material and energy with my environment than most.”

“In a physical sense, but you are not decaying in any physical sense. Great Scott, look at you. You look as if you could get up and run right through that wall.”

“The decay is emotional?”

“And you are walled, in an emotional sense. There is no genuine give-and-take. There is no real involvement, lately. You are going through the motions. As with the piano player. As with Nick Noyes. You are vaguely predatory lately. And irritable. And listless. You are getting no emotional feedback.”

“Where do I go looking for some?”

“That’s the catch. You can’t. It isn’t that mechanical. You merely have to be receptive and hope it comes along.”

“Meanwhile, I am being ground down by the second law of thermodynamics?”

“In a sense, yes.”

“Thank you so much. I never would have known.”

“Like I said. Irritable.”

Nine

AT TEN o’clock on Saturday morning, I took a chance on some strong black coffee. My throat clenched and my stomach worked and leaped, but settled down slowly. I felt of my face carefully. “What’s the matter?” Meyer asked.

“My face feels as if it had been sliced off, Cuisinarted, chilled, and slapped back on. If I turn my head too fast, it will slide off. Is there a pile driver working nearby?”

“That’s tennis you hear.”

“How was I?”

“I would say you weren’t listless. And you were audible. Lord, yes! You were audible.”

“I thought I had long since outgrown that kind of thing.”

“You had enough screwdrivers to empty your average orange tree. I lost count.”

“What happened to me?”

“You had a large wish to stop thinking, to turn your head off. You were not happy with yourself, so you decided to dim your lights. And you did. You became someone else. Completely.”

“Anybody we know?”

“McGee, you were loud, amiable, patriotic, and on key. You let me drive. We seemed to accumulate quite a group of new friends. We stopped at the Cove and picked up one blond Mishy Burns and we brought the whole pack here to the Resort. B.J. Bailey did not approve of you at all. Jack the Manager did not approve of the group. We were deprived of the chance of a midnight swim in the pool, but there was no way he could close the beach. You passed out on one of those canvas chaises. The piano player came after you at about quarter past one. There was some serious contention between the piano player and Miss Burns over your recumbent body, though I must say you seemed of very little value to anyone. There were some brisk face-slappings, some pungent dialogue, and then some yanking of hair, at which point they fell to the sand and went rolling over and over down the slope of the beach, yelping and biting. I chose that opportunity to yank you to your feet and walk you away. You began singing again, but not loudly. It was another rendition of ‘Ragged but Right.’ You had favored us with an estimated twenty renditions.”

“What did I do to deserve all this? No, don’t tell me. The question was rhetorical. God, Meyer, my hair aches and my skin doesn’t fit and all my teeth feel loose.”

“Last night we agreed the next thing we should do is go see John Tuckerman. I know how to find his place. It’s about nine miles down the coast. Feel well enough to leave?”

“I am going to feel absolutely rotten wherever I happen to be, so I might as well be in the car as out of it. You drive.”

I sat lumpily beside him, feeling squalid and faintly nauseated as he headed south, making the big half circle around the bay front, past the marinas and commercial docks and fish houses. Two blocks before we came to the end of Bay Street, Meyer turned right. We went through a couple of blocks of waterfront enterprise, ship’s chandlers, old rooming houses, saloons, and sundries stores, and soon the street had turned into two-lane rough country asphalt, past trailer parks and junkyards, running between shallow ditches where coarse weeds and grasses grew high. By the time we were in empty country, the road was much worse. The potholes were deep. In places the wind had drifted sand across the road. The occasional hawk sat atop a phone pole, watching the clumps of marsh grass.

An armadillo trundled across the road, delicate little head upraised, full of false security, trusting too much in its body armor.

To keep my attention off wondering how soon I was going to be sick, I said, briskly conversational, “In Texas they scoop those out and make baskets out of them and sell them in roadside stands.”

After a few moments of silence, Meyer said, “It is to be hoped that on some planet far beyond our galaxy a race of sentient armadillos is busy scooping out Texans and selling them at roadside stands, possibly as Lister bags.”

That did it. “Whoa,” I said in a small chastened voice. He whoaed and I sprang out and made it to the ditch, there paying one of the more ordinary penalties of abuse. I went back to the car and looked in at him. “How much farther?”

“I’d say three miles.”

“Please drive straight ahead two miles, park, and wait for me.”

The road curved. Two miles took him out of sight. The May sun was hot on my shoulders. I swung along, taking big strides but feeling clammy. And unwell. With a monstrous effort I kicked myself into a trot. For a little while I thought I would pass out, but suddenly I began to sweat properly. I stopped gasping and began to breathe properly. I stopped landing on my heels, jarring myself, and got up onto the balls of my feet. At the end of an estimated mile I began to get that good feeling of having all the parts of the machine working, thighs lifting properly, lungs filling deeply, arms swinging in cadence, lots of muscles flexing and relaxing.

“You’ll live,” Meyer said when I got to the car.

“I’m beginning to feel as if I might want to.”

“We have to look for a sand road that turns off to the right at a shallow angle. With a yellow mailbox at the corner.”

The yellow mailbox had an aluminum sign on top of it, the kind of sign where you buy the letters and slide them into a groove. The letters said TUCKERM.

The sand road wound between big bushes, angling toward the beach. We came upon a large faded sign which announced to nobody in particular, “Future Site of Pepperfish Village. A Planned Condominium Community. 1500 Units. Complete Recreation Facilities. Private Beach. Yacht Club. Golf Course. Shopping Plaza. A Hub-Law Development. Planning and Design by Kristin Petersen, AIA. Construction by Hula Construction, Inc. Occupation of first phase by-” Somebody had obliterated the rest of it with a big broad slap of red paint.

“So ends the dream,” Meyer said.

“They could have built a better mousetrap.”

“The world is beating a path down to this improbable peninsula, mousetraps or no. But it does seem to be a strange location.”

Soon we came upon Tuckerman’s place, off to the right of the road. It was atop spindly pilings ten feet high. The house was about thirty feet square. A veranda deck extended ten feet beyond it all the way around. The peaked roof was of galvanized sheet metal, weathered to a powdery white. The house and deck were of native pine, slapped up green and now weathered to gray, warped and twisted, with long-ago paint scoured off by the wind-driven sand. There was an old Fiat parked under the deck, square and green, sagging in the off right haunch with some kind of sprained underpinning.

Out behind the house, between the house and the long row of sand dunes, a woman stopped poking into a 55-gallon drum with a long stick and turned to look at us through the thicket of pilings supporting the house. She’d spent a lot of weeks in hot sun. She wore the bottom half of a string bikini, in red-orange Day Glo. Without haste or emphasis, she turned and located the bikini top, slipped it on, hammocked herself into it, and tied it in back. She then peered into the drum and began prodding again with the stick.

We walked around to where she was. There were two clotheslines hung with damp clothing. The drum was up on concrete blocks. There was a driftwood fire under it, flames almost too pale to see in the bright sunlight. Steam came off the soapy water in the drum. Bright clothing came into view and sank again as she prodded away.

“If you are the guys from Maytag,” she said, “it is about time. This thing don’t-cycle worth a hoot.”

“How is it on spin dry?” Meyer asked.

“Beyond belief.” As she spoke, water began to spill over the top of a second drum a dozen feet away. She sprinted to a small plywood shack and turned something off. A pump gasped and died. She came back and took the hose out of the newly filled drum. She was sweaty from working so near the fire. She was a big woman, middle twenties, tall, with solid bone structure, slender waist, great shoulders. Muscle rolled in her back as she dug into the drum with her thick piece of driftwood. She levered a sopping wad of clothing up and looked at it.

“I can say,” she said, “without fear or favor, that all this stuff is cleaner than it was. Beyond that I will not go.”

With a grunt of effort she levered the mass out of the drum and carried it to the other drum and dropped it in, and the displaced water sloshed out. “Have you come to take him away?” she asked.

“No,” I said.

“Which leaves me with mixed emotions.”

The next wad of wet clothing was too heavy for her. I stepped in and carried it over to the rinsewater drum. She had brown hair, coarse with sun and salt, looking as if she had cropped it herself. She had a solid jaw, a broad mouth, dark brown eyes, and a jutting, high-bridged, no-nonsense nose. “But you’re looking for him?”

“For a talk,” Meyer said.

She fished the final garment out of the hot water and put it in the other drum, turned and stared at us, seemed to see something that reassured her, smiled, and put her hand out. “I’m Gretel Howard.”

After introductions, Meyer explained that we were trying to get the title cleared up somehow on some of Hubbard Lawless’s holdings so that an offer could be made.

She looked at him and then at me. “Real-estate people? Not really.”

“Not really,” I said. “He’s doing a favor for a friend. I’m with him.”

“You look like the sort of man who can fix an antique Kohler five-thousand-watt generator, McGee.”

“I can look at it and make reassuring noises.”

“Follow me.”

We went to the plywood shed. It was a big brute. The gas was in a drum on a scaffolding arrangement behind the shed. Plenty of gas. I couldn’t check the condition of the batteries. It was rigged to start up at power demand. Turn on a hundred watts anywhere in the circuit and it would or should begin. A thin little metal leaf, like a spring, was supposed to be activated by the demand and bend over and touch a terminal. I pushed it over against the terminal, and with a great popping stuttering roar, the generator came to life.

Gretel sprang backward and hit the back of her head against the frame of the low doorway into the shed. Meyer backed into the little gasoline water pump and burned the back of his ankle on the stillhot housing. They each made appropriately fevered statements in the silence after I had released the little contact leaf. I examined it carefully. The vibration of the generator had caused the setscrew to work loose. I tightened it with the edge of a dime until the leaf was a sixteenth of an inch from the contact. There was a light in the shed, a hanging bulb. I turned it on, and the generator roared into life. I turned it off, smiling, smug and happy.

“My undying gratitude,” she said. “We’ll go find John. But first I have to churn my rinse a little.”

As she churned, Meyer said, “You have heard of Laundromats?”

“I know. You’re being ironic. Yes, love, and I could have bundled all this scrungy stuff into Brenda-that is little green Brenda over there, my dear lopsided auto-and gone Laundromating with a lot of gratitude for the benefits of civilization and so on. But I have this pioneer hang-up. I love doing things the hard way.”

Making it evident we weren’t going to be given the reason.

“I didn’t mean to pry,” Meyer said.

“Of course you didn’t. I can wring this stuff out and hang it later, gentlemen. Let’s go up on the deck and see if we can spot John pursuing lunch.”

We climbed the warped and weathered stairway to the deck climbed from one world into another. From the deck one could see across the top of the dunes, out to the blue Gulf dotted with infrequent whitecaps in the morning breeze. To the south was a curve of beach and the continuing line of dunes. To the north, far away, were a few white towers of Timber Bay rising up out of the city smudge. To the east was the north-south wavery line of the old asphalt road, heat shimmering from it.

She went into the house and came out with binoculars, and located him far up the beach. They were big old Navy ten-power, hard to hand-hold. She gave them to me, stood beside me. I was very conscious of her there, of a radiation of her body heat as we stood in the shade of the overhang, of the way the top of her brown head came higher than my eyes. Few women stand that tall in bare brown feet. I guessed her at a fraction of an inch over six feet.

I focused on John Tuckerman. He was a mile away, standing to mid-thigh in the waves, casting out beyond where they were beginning to lift and break.

“You can walk up there and talk to him,” she said. “But don’t… expect too much. He’s quite confused.”

“How so?”

“I thought when I got every last trace of alcohol out of his system, he would be like he used to be. Poor John. It’s a wonder I haven’t killed him, running him up and down that beach. I asked Dr. Sam Stuart about it and he said it was due to alcoholic spasm destroying brain tissue. He changed during the month after Hub disappeared. He was drinking so very heavily, I understand. He was… the way he is by the time I got here, by the time I could get here.”

“Should we both go?” I asked her.

“It might make him anxious to see two of you coming. Just you alone would be better, I think.”

He noticed me when I was a hundred yards from him. He saw me when he had drawn back his arm to cast. He stayed frozen in that position for a few moments and then lowered the rod and stood waiting. He looked like a Clark Gable gone seriously to seed. His dark hair was tangled and long. His black mustache had grown down over his lip. He had a four-day stubble of beard. But the cheekbones were high and hard, the brow jutting, the eyes dark, deepset, and merry. He was bigger than I had expected, almost as tall as I am, and wider, but soft. Tan helped hide the softness, the sagging belly, the varicosities on the husky legs. He wore ragged shorts. There was a tackle box on the sand and a stringer staked close by with the line leading into the wave wash.

“Any luck?” I asked.

“Not good today. Just some of those little suckers that taste like iodine. And a little shark I let go.”

“What are you using, John?”

“I got these tired pieces of cut bait. They’re beginning to smell. Say, how’d you know my name?”

“Gretel pointed you out up the beach here and told me you’re fishing for lunch. She seems like a nice person.”

“Oh, she’s a wonderful girl. Just wonderful. She’s taking real good care of me. I can’t remember the last time I had a drink. What’s your name?”

“McGee. Travis McGee. I came out here with a friend of mine. His name is Meyer. He’s back at the house with Gretel. We came to Timber Bay a few days ago to find out about buying Hub’s ranch and grove land. We wondered if you could help us.”

“No, I couldn’t help you with anything like that. I was just a friend. That’s all. We grew up together and went to school together and stayed friends. Hub was the smart one.”

“I thought you were a vice-president of those companies he had.”

“Oh, I was, sure. I guess I still am, come to think of it. But it didn’t mean anything, not anything at all. He said it was so I could be expensed. I don’t know why what I got paid couldn’t have come out of just one of the businesses. I wasn’t getting a free ride, though. I did a lot of things for Hub. And for Julie and the kids too. Pretty important things, sometimes. Like making sure something would get delivered on time to the right person.”

Finally I was able to put a name to what was so strange about him: it was his childlike quality. The amiable open manner, the pleasant eagerness were those of a manly child, eager for approval. “Deliveries can be very important,” I said. You just bet they can!“

I saw some action out beyond the waves and wondered if I could find him some better bait. I took off shoes and socks, rolled my pant legs up, went down to the edge of the water, and began digging in the soft wet sand. After a little while I dug up a sand flea, oyster-white, multilegged, and snatched him before he could burrow back into the wet sand. He was as big around as my thumb and half as long. I took him and impaled him on John Tuckerman’s hook.

“That’s an ugly thing!” he said. “Where did you find it?”

“There should be a lot of them along this beach. Cast out over in that direction and reel in fast.”

“Fast? Okay.”

In the first ten feet of retrieve he got a hard strike. He yelled with excitement and pleasure. He worked the fish expertly, but when we got a look at it, his shoulders sagged. “Oh, nuts. Another kind of trash fish. A darn jackfish.”

He had a fish knife in his tackle box. I pulled the four-pound jack farther up the beach, slit its throat, and pulled it back into the water, holding it captive by the leader. It pumped strings and strands of dark blood into the water until it weakened and died. The sea had washed away all the pink blush of blood.

“What did you do that for?” he demanded. He looked upset and disapproving.

“Because it is second cousin to a pompano, and now the meat won’t be dark and heavy, and it makes a good panfish.”

As the knife was sharp enough, I filleted the fish on the spot, washed the two slabs of meat in the sea, and threw the rest out beyond the surf, where the crabs would clean it up quickly.

“You sure did that fast,” John Tuckerman said.

“Lots of practice.”

“Say, were you ever a guide? Did you do guiding out of Marathon, ever? You look like a fellow me and Hub hired down there a long time ago. No, you couldn’t be. That was maybe fifteen years ago. He’d be a lot older by now than you are.”

“I’ve found fish for a lot of people, but not for hire.”

“What did you say your name is?”

“Travis McGee.”

“Trav?”

“Sure.”

“I used to remember names real good. It is sort of a trick. You know. You find some way to match up the name to the way the people look. Like if there is a woman named Fowler with a big mouth and a real loud voice, you say to yourself, She is Fowler the Howler, and then you never forget. But I have stopped remembering somehow. I used to be able to tell ten thousand jokes. I was known for telling jokes. The other day I was fishing and I tried to remember one. Just one. And I couldn’t.”

“If this fish is lunch, we ought to get it back to the house.”

“Hey, you’re right!”

We picked up our stuff and walked back along the beach toward the cottage. The roof gleamed white in the sunlight on the far side of the dune. I could see the dark shade on the veranda and a sudden glint, and knew she was taking a look at us through the binoculars.

Trite and repetitive thoughts march endlessly through every mind. I cannot use or even think of binoculars without my memory banks making a printout of the overly familiar fact that in World War II the Israeli hero Dayan, serving with the British, lost his eye when a sniper slug hit the binoculars he was using. I do not need to know this all my life. I do not need my memory dredging it up. We have no way of turning these things off. Every brain, including those of Kissinger breadth and force, is cluttered with these bits and snippets, these everlasting echoes.

“House been there long?” I asked him.

“A long time. I don’t know how long. It was there when Hub bought the whole tract. That damn Kristin talked him into buying it. It was unique, she said. It sure is unique. It is too far from anything. Hub said I could use it as a beach house. I fixed it up a little. Got a new well dug. Put the generator in and did some wiring. But the generator won’t work now.”

“I fixed it.”

“You did? So quick!”

“A setscrew had worked loose. It wasn’t much.”

“Gee, Gretel and I are sure glad it’s fixed.”

“And now you live out here?”

“With no money coming in at all, I couldn’t keep the nice apartment I had at North Pass Vista. It was more like a whole house than an apartment.”

“Kristin lived there too?”

“She lived in Melody unit. I was over in Symphony, nearer the beach. They’re named after music things. Concerto, Harmony, Opera, and so on. The wife of the guy that put them up was a harp player. There are four town houses in each unit. Like Symphony One, Symphony Two, and so on. Mine was Symphony Four. I put my stuff in storage. I didn’t want to bring it down here to the beach to this place. I don’t think I can keep up the payments on the storage. I’ll probably lose that too.”

“Too?”

“Like I lost the car. They say I ran it into a tree, but I don’t remember. I shouldn’t have been driving anyway because my license was suspended. The car was totaled and the insurance company wouldn’t pay a dime because I wasn’t a licensed driver any more. How do you like that? I was with them sixteen years! It was right about then that Gretel got here, thank God. Now that she’s here, everything will be okay.”

“When we got here she was doing the laundry in those big drums. Are you two so hard up you can’t spare quarters for a coin laundry? We passed one back at the edge of town.”

“Oh, we could afford that, but Gretel is stubborn. And she gets these ideas about things. She wants to see just how independent of everything we can be. No telephones or power companies. She’s trying to grow stuff in a garden she planted way the other side of the hard road, on the edge of the marsh, but the birds and rabbits are giving her a hard time. And the mosquitoes eat her when she goes over to work on it. But she won’t give up. Not on anything. Ever.”

We came to the path that wound up to the crest of the dune and down the other side. Gretel and Meyer were on the deck. John Tuckerman held up the fillets of jack and Gretel applauded him.

She came down and got the fish. Once she had hefted it, she asked us to stay to lunch. Meyer sidestepped the question and left it up to me. I said we’d be delighted, and thanks very much for asking us.

We tipped the soapy-water drum downslope, and she grilled the fish over the embers from the driftwood fire. While I had been with John Tuckerman, Gretel and Meyer had wrung out and hung up the clothes. We had lunch off chipped blue willowware plates at a table by the windows in the small bare living room of the beach cottage. We had the grilled fish, canned peas, and black coffee. The biggest object in the room was the fireplace. There was seashells on the windowsills and the mantel. Gretel put on a blue work shirt over her bikini before coming to the table. She glowed with strength and health and vitality. I envied John Tuckerman. There were golden flecks in the deep brown pigment of, her eyes, near the pupils. The whites of her eyes were the blue-white of peak physical condition.