The Turquoise Lament

And I have thought it over, many times, and it always makes the back of my neck feel chilly. I’ve vowed that someday I will go look at that block of solid stone in the hope that if I see it once, I will stop thinking about how to move it back to the quarry whenever I wake up in the middle of the night.

One thing was clear. The Professor had too much love and respect for knowledge ever to destroy any, even if it was only his own research and was planned for selfish gain, not for the good of mankind.

I remembered another pertinent fact. When we had discussed a possible future project before we all split up, after the pump burned out, the Professor had relied upon memory, apologizing for not being able to refer to the research notes and his backup material.

Inference: he did not-want to risk losing the whole package of projects for the future if he happened to drop the Trepid onto the sea floor somewhere. However, we live in the age of Xerox, IBM, MMM, Kodak, with microfiche and data retrieval, and certainly Ted was a gadgeteer. The equipment aboard the Trepid proved that.

Okay, then he did not want the project package aboard the Trepid in the original or any duplicate form because he did not want anyone taking it by force or guile or default.

In setting up Pidge’s comfortable future, he had to confer with Lawton Hisp and Tom Collier. He would state his desires, and they would make sug gestions based on professional knowledge. I did not see how he could possibly talk about a pretax estate of over a million dollars without some explanation of where it all came from. I suddenly remembered that after Meyer had researched the estate right after the Professor died, he mentioned there had been an IRS audit of Lewellen every year for the previous four years. Meyer had talked to Hisp. The bank handled all Lewellen’s personal financial affairs. So very possibly Hisp either prepared Lew ellen’s returns or arranged for the preparation and reviewed them.

Hypothetical question-McGee asking McGee. Is it not fair to assume, sir, that if a man is making a fine fat living in a field where one out of ten thousand makes anything at all, that man, Dr. PhD Lewellen, would give his banker, Mr. Hisp, some explanation of the reason for his success and also some indication of the continuance thereof? After all, one cannot tuck large money out of reach in a trust account without being confident there will be more money coming in.

Yes. It is a fair assumption. Boiled down to simplest form, one would have Professor Ted saying to Mr. Lawton Hisp, “I know where there’s more stuff and I know how to go get it.”

Hisp would believe him. The proof had been rolling in. How much would Tom Collier have been told?

A new question area for the witness on the stand.

- You and your friend searched the Trepid as soon as you heard Lewellen had been killed?

- Yes, sir.

- And found nothing?

- Nothing at all. We gave it a good try.

- Did anyone else conduct a search?

- Pidge. And Howie Brindle.

- Did you recall anyone else?

- Not exactly.

- That is not a responsive answer.

- I mean that I have secondhand knowledge that Mr. Hisp and somebody else from the bank came and inspected the Trepid and, I guess for estate purposes, inventoried everything aboard her that wasn’t fastened down. It took most of a day. I don’t know whether you could call that a search.

- The bank and Mr. Collier were, to the best of your knowledge, coexecutors of the estate?

- Meyer told me they were. So did Pidge.

- Now then, Mr. McGee, I wish to ask you a question which your life experience should qualify you to answer. I am asking for a subjective impression. Let us assume that there was some object, or box containing several objects, of great potential value to the sole legatee under the terms of Dr. Lewellen’s last will and testament. Let us assume that this object or objects were missing at the time of death and the whereabouts not yet known to the legatee. In previous testimony we have established that the legatee and her friends made inquiry as to the whereabouts of the object or objects, and that these queries were directed to Mr. Hisp, if not to both Mr. Hisp and Mr. Collier. Assuming that Mr. Hisp and Mr. Collier were aware of the existence of such object or objects, and assuming that both men had reason to believe in the high value placed on such object or objects, and knowing that such object or objects have not surfaced to be listed in the inventory of the estate for tax purposes, do you, sir, based upon your personal observations and experi ence, believe that Mr. Hisp and Mr. Collier acted in a fashion consistent with the assumptions and the facts I have related to you?

- That’s very interesting.

- The witness will answer the question, and then the Court will permit the witness to expand upon his answer.

- Thank you, your Honor. No. They haven’t reacted the way they should. As coexecutors, I would think they would be churning around really beating the shrubbery to find Professor Ted’s research diary and his support materials. But from first- and second- and third-hand information and impressions, I got the idea they just went through the motions. They took what was in trust and what was not in trust, and went through probate procedure for what was not in trust, and used the cash reserve for taxes, and… settled the estate. They both had to know Pidge was very concerned about her father’s dream book not turning up. No action was taken to dig up any hidden assets.

- Your Honor, may the prosecution ask the witness to speculate?

- Proceed, Counselor. If defense objects, I will make my ruling at that time.

- Mr. McGee, you have stated that the actions of Mr. Hisp and Mr. Collier were inconsistent with the assumptions and the facts in my previous question. Would you now address yourself to telling the Court what, in your observation and experience, would be a set of facts which would, as background, render the actions and attitudes of Mr. Hisp and Mr. Collier consistent?

- I object, your Honor! The witness is not qualified to

- Counselor, inasmuch as this is a pretrial hearing based upon a motion to dismiss, I am inclined to allow more latitude in examination than would be the case were a jury in the box. Overruled. Answer the question, Mr. McGee.

- Well, I would say that if they knew where the stuff was, if they had found it, or if Ted had given it to one of them before he slid under the truck, then they would act the way they acted. It would be consistent.

- The defense may cross-examine the witness.

- Thank you. Mr. McGee, I beg your indulgence in letting me pursue the same line of questioning a bit further.

- Go right ahead.

- Is it reasonable to assume that a man of unblemished reputation, a Vice-President and Trust Officer of a bank, would conspire with a prominent local attorney to defraud a young woman out of a part of her inheritance?

- I don’t know how reasona-

- Just answer the question.

- Yes.

- You think that is a reasonable assumption?

- It has happened before, all over the world, right? How many hundred times? So it can happen. And you are saying it happened again?

- No. I don’t know what happened. Maybe they had some kind of deal with Ted. Maybe they’re not supposed to tell Pidge about it. Maybe they don’t really buy this idea of treasure maps. All I know is they didn’t act like two men who know something valuable is missing. That’s all I ever said.

- During your previous testimony, you stated that it was your belief that there was more than one set of these documents.

- It just seems reasonable there had to be.

- Would you tell the Court, please, why there had to be?

- Because my friend, Ted Lewellen, was a finikin.

- A what?

- Counselor, the witness is using an obsolete word to describe a person who is almost unnecessarily and compulsively fussy about even the most trivial details.

- Oh. Thank you, your Honor. Would the witness care to speculate about how many copies of the valuable documents exist, and where they might be?

- No. I would not care to speculate.

Mansfield Hall’s office was in one of the older buildings in downtown Miami. There were a bank, brokerage house, airline offices and shopping mall on the ground floor. The eleven remaining floors seemed stacked with law firms.

He was in the middle, on the sixth floor, at the end of a corridor. It was a clever location. One could not help but associate him in more areas than geography with the suites one passed, with the handsome paneled doors and the bronze nameplates. The older buildings have the higher ceilings. They have windows which can be opened. The thick walls provide more privacy. The paneling is made out of boards, not out of woodgrain thin as a fingernail, epoxied to fiberboard.

I pushed the door open at five of four. The woman behind the secretarial desk was very close to being Mrs. Archie Bunker until she opened her mouth. A very British accent. I was expected. One moment, please. She slipped through a door, reopened it seconds later and stood aside, holding it.

I went in and she closed it. Her office was very bright. His was dark and large, draperies closed, lamps turned on. Leather books and leather chairs. Gleam of silver, of oiled rosewood and polished mahogany.

He was a small, round-headed man, with thick white hair and a thick white mustache, both carefully brushed and tended. He had a very ruddy face, a bulb nose, bulging blue eyes with sandy lashes. He came around the desk to meet me, all cordiality. He was about the size of the average twelve-year-old boy, and he wore splendid tweeds, immaculate linen, a small polka-dot tie, white dots on a blue that matched his eyes.

He waved me into a deep chair and went back behind his desk, and I noticed that his black leather judge’s chair was on a platform. Had he meant it to give him more presence, he would not have come around the desk. So it was for the sake of convenience.

The more common conversational hiatus breakers, while one selects the right word, are “eh.”

“ah.”

“er,” and “um.” His space filler was “haw.”

“Mr. McGee, I do… I do wish that after we talked on the phone I’d been able to… haw… intercept you before you took the trouble to come here to my office. We all seem to spend far too much of our lives dashing about on superfluous errands.”

“Mr. Hayes told me to tell you he is worried about the lack of control on the expense factor. He has substantial operating capital, but not unlimited.”

“It’s quite… haw… academic at this point, I fear. Directly after you telephoned me, I got in touch with my principals in this matter to determine the flexibility of their stipulations so that I could relay to you the acceptable bounds of negotiation. I had previously reported my conversation with Mr. Hayes, of course. It is their… haw… feeling at this time that they wish to leave the door open with Seven Seas, but that certain other affairs require such intensive supervision it would be best to… haw… postpone the negotiations until some future date more convenient to them. They regret any inconvenience they may have caused Mr. Hayes, or yourself.”

“Mr. Hayes will be very disappointed.”

“Really! He didn’t seem all that impressed with the proposition.”

“He’s a cautious man.”

“The world makes us all more cautious with every passing year.”

“Mr. Hall, could you tell me when they might be willing to reopen negotiations?”

“They did not say. I wouldn’t hazard a guess.”

“Maybe there was something in the selection of words or the tone of voice that might clue you as to whether it would be, for example, two months or two years.”

“I might have been able to draw some… haw… useful inference, Mr. McGee, had I been in direct communication. But this has all been through their representative.”

“Who would that be?”

“Someone they trust to remain discreet, I should imagine.”

His expression was one of impassive, everlasting amiability. You get to know the breed after you’ve met a few of them. The professional negotiators. There is absolutely no way to irritate them, entrapthem or confuse them. They cannot be bribed, bullied, frightened or cajoled. They are as unreadable as master poker players must be. They have no little nervous tics which could reveal mood. They do not smoke and they do not drink, and they seem almost independent of all plumbing facilities. They don’t sweat, wilt or yawn. They merely sit across a table from you for thirty-six or forty-eight hours, looking tidy and pleasant and inquisitive, until finally you say the hell with it, and give them what they asked for in the first place.

I should have thanked him and left. But there is no law against chunking pebbles against Stone Mountain.

“On second thought, maybe Mr. Hayes will feel relieved.” I waited for some response. He just sat there, amiably, waiting for me to say something he could respond to. “One aspect of this bothered him. He wondered why the person owning these documents would have to trade fifty percent of the net return for the chance of recovery. That made him wonder if there might be… some slight flaw in the title to the documents.”

He looked appreciative. “Most… haw… delicately said, sir. The question of ownership of notes copied from documents in the public domain raises interesting legal points. So does the question of the value one could assign to such research. A treasure map purporting to describe the location of one million dollars in doubloons has not the same status as a certified check for one million dollars. I believe that the reason for covert dealings is probably far more explicable on… haw… an emotional basis.”

“I don’t think I know what you mean.”

“One day a man of the cloth sneaked out the back door of his church on a very holy day, changed his clothing and went to a golf course and played one round all by himself. God focused his attention on the sinner, and a young ignorant angel watched over God’s shoulder. The ignorant angel watched and saw the sinner sink a three wood for an eagle two on the first hole, hit a long iron into the cup for an eagle three on the second hole, make a hole in one on the third. Following the same pattern, he finished the first nine holes in twenty strokes, and as he teed off on the tenth and hit his drive three hundred and seventy yards down the middle, the angel cried out, ‘God, he is a sinner! Why are you rewarding him?’ ‘Rewarding him?’ God rumbled. ‘Think about it. Who can he tell?’”

I saw what Mansfield Hall was driving at. I grinned and nodded.

He said, “In our society treasure-hunting is a sign of… haw… immaturity and unreliability. Captain Kidd. Yo-ho-ho. Walk the plank, et cetera, et cetera. Perhaps the fellow holds public office, or is in some fiduciary position, or is a bishop or a college president, or a market analyst.” He stood up, and the eight-inch platform made him look of average height as he leaned across the desk to extend his small hand. “Tell Mr. Hayes that should I ever be contacted again on this matter, I shall… haw… most probably get in touch with him.”

I made very good time from his office to the elevator, to the ground floor, and to a phone booth. I got Tom Collier’s office number from information. To avoid going through the coin-slot routine, I made the short-distance pay call to his office on my

John D. MacDonald

GT credit card. I got the switchboard and asked for Tom Collier. A girl said, “Mr. Collier’s office.”

I hoped I could do it without the usual practice session with the tape recorder. I said, “Forgive me, my dear, but I have… haw… recalled a matter I forgot to mention when I telephoned ` Mr. Collier earlier.”

“Oh, Mr. Hall, I’m sorry, but Mr. Collier left about ten minutes ago, and he won’t be back in the office until the second. That’s next Wednesday. Is it really important?”

“No, no. Just something… haw… incidental to what we discussed earlier. Perhaps not worth… haw… bothering him at all. Thank you, my dear.”

Feeling of triumph as I left the phone booth. I suppose it is childlike to give oneself a small round of applause. Especially since it was a victory within the area where I should reasonably expect to do pretty well, after spending years peeling back the layers of human guile and chicanery, an optimistic gourmet at work on the endless artichoke, ever searching for the good part underneath.

I could not have written down the reasons, one, two, three, why I grabbed at this possible way of linking Mansfield Hall to Tom Collier. A man wading the grass flats does not know why he drops the lure halfway between mangrove thicket and sandbar, but the snook comes wolfing out of the water, jaws agape to take it.

Lawyers have a little edge in personal negotiation, as they can always imply-or let the other fellow infer-they are acting in the interests of a client. When a new stipulation is presented, the at torney can gain time and psychological advantage 138

THE TURQUOISE LAMENT by saying he will have to refer it back to his nonex istent client.

In this particular instance, Tom Collier did himself a little harm, perhaps, by making Mansfield Hall believe that Collier was representing someone else. That diminished Mansfield Hall’s habit of caution, believing there was an intervening layer. One can assume that if Hall knew Collier was the principal, all contact would have been made much more carefully. These are the days of the bug, of the wire man, of circuitry smaller than a housefly.

I did not know where and how to reach into this funny little cup of worms, and so I decided to take it back to Meyer for consultation.

Ten

I DIDN’T get back to Meyer’s hospital room until eight thirty. He was sitting up in bed, glowering down at the chess set on the tray table.

“Aha! Frank Hayes won, I see.”

“Shut up, just as a special favor.”

I stood by the bed and studied the board. It was the beginning of the middle game. Sicilian defense. “I went wrong right here,” he said. “Eleventh move. Took the knight with the knight.”

“And so after the exchange he checked you with his queen on rook five?”

“Smart-ass!”

“Should have moved your queen to queen two before you took the knight.”

“I know that already. Look, do you want to play a game or stand around making redundant comments?”

“I want to play a slightly different game. I need to make some kind of move.”

I told him the whole thing. He asked questions. I told him my reasoning. And Meyer began to tug at the loose ends.

“I had an immediate liking and respect for Lawton Hisp,” he said. “He knows his job. He knows he knows his job. I have an idea that his trust department turns a pretty good dime for the bank. When I was up there, after Pidge told Hisp to give me any information I asked for, I was impressed by how crisp and businesslike that whole floor is, but with a flavor of people liking what they do.”

“You’d rather take aim at Tom Collier?”

“For a trivial reason. I’m ashamed of this brand of illogic.”

“Such as?”

“He’s a very agreeable man. He’s amusing. You’ve met him.”

“Get to it.”

“Remember when the Salamah was up for sale?” I remembered. She was a ketch, Abaco-built, one of the biggest I’ve ever seen built on Abaco, and the most graceful and lovely. A doctor had owned her. Meyer remembered. It is an accident that almost happens frequently. I don’t know why it doesn’t happen more often. They had anchored late one afternoon in the Berry Islands and gone swimming off the ketch after putting the boarding ladder over the side. The tide and wind shifted. The doctor dived without taking a look first. The dinghy had swung around. It was tied to a stern cleat on too long a line. He dived into it and broke his skull and his back and was dead before the float plane could get to them.

“Anyway” Meyer said, “Tom Collier was handling the estate, and after the Salamah had been brought back here, I was walking by one day and spoke to Tom and admired it, and he asked me to come aboard and see if I wanted to buy it. I told him it was way out of my reach, but I went aboard. Beautiful. He was waiting for the boat broker; who was, late for an appointment, so he was just killing time. You know those country-boy mannerisms of his, the thin crooked black cigars and the kitchen matches. He was saying he thought of buying her for himself at a fair market value, but decided he was too busy to use her as often as she ought to be used. He sighed and took out one of those cigars and looked around, then wiped his kitchen match along the varnished rail. A beautiful varnish job. The match made a scratch line and then a gray place as big as a quarter where it lit. He watched me as he lit the cigar, the match flame cupped in his hands. It was a challenge, the way he did it. He wanted me to say something. He was expressing some kind of contempt for people like you and me, Travis, who live on boats, who cherish boats. He had something to say, but I didn’t give him the opening to say it. It’s a damned small thing. I shouldn’t dislike the entire man for one observed act, but I do.”

“And now I do too.”

He smiled. “So we’re both strange. What’s a streak on varnish? Five minutes to fix it. I went back and made sure it was gone. That was about a week later. Howie had done a pretty good job on it.”

“Howie? By God, you’re right! He was living aboard her, caretaking her until she was sold. Was he working for the broker or for Tom Collier?”

“I have no idea.”

“Was that the first job he, had around the marina?”

“As far as I know.”

“Could he have been working as crew for the doctor?”

“I just don’t know. It’s possible.”

We were working away on our own special form of triangulation. In another context, for another purpose, it would be called gossip. We are all concerned with the strange activities of the human animal. We are all aware of how coincidence can lead to warped assumptions. And we all keep looking for the very worst from the couple next door to Watergate.

“He’s a damned likable brute,” Meyer said, echoing what I was thinking.

“Comfortable. Undemanding. A listener who never butts in to tell some epic hero story of his own, who laughs in the right places, and not too loudly or long.”

“Pidge wanted to know if he was trying to kill her.”

“So you told me.”

“I made her believe it was a little touch of paranoia.”

“So you told me.”

“But God damn it, Meyer-”

“Whoa. Settle down. If he wanted to, just how many chances do you think he’s had in over fourteen months of cruising?”

“That was part of my basis for believing she was wrong.”

“Well?”

“Who is Howard Brindle?”

“If that’s not a rhetorical question, and if that is your starting point, I agree. But you’re not going to find out tonight. The chess board is over there.”

By the time Nurse Ella Marie Morse came on duty to look after him during the hours of the night, I had the game won. He had slowly worked me back into a cramped position, pressing me back against my castled. king, smothering my queen side, but he had failed to see a sacrifice that gave me a very damaging knight fork and put me a piece ahead. I was trading him down to an end-game defeat, and he resigned when the nurse arrived, saying something about possibly the fever had damaged some brain cells after all.

Before she herded me out, Meyer told me he didn’t expect to see me again until I had some hard information on good ol‘ Howie.

A big raw Saturday wind killed what was left of the strange untimely heat wave. It was the first day of the extra-long year-end weekend, meaning that offices were closed and I could not use the logical starting place, the detailed forms which have to be placed on file with every little red-tape empire.

I had written down what I knew about him. It was very skimpy. He didn’t talk about himself often and never said very much. Raised by grandparents, I think. Ohio, Indiana, Iowa. One of those states. His grandfather retired and they moved to Bradenton, Florida. Howie was about ten? Maybe older. Became a high-school jock. Fullback. Straight ahead for the tough yard and a half on third down. Partial scholarship to the University of Florida. Out of the athletic budget. How long ago? They shifted him to defensive tackle. Second string. Got to play in only three out of nine games his senior year. Disciplinary problems, he’d said. I’d inferred he broke train ing now and then, nothing worth spelling out. Wanted the pro scene, but nobody picked him in the draft. The Dolphins took a long hard look at him in training camp. Not enough hustle, apparently, according to what he said. They let him go. Three years ago? Longer? Then a blank until he showed up at Bahia Mar. Knows how to handle himself around boats and the sea. Drinks beer. Doesn’t smoke. Six four, two seventy, looks sloppy but is in good shape. Brown eyes, receding hairline, blond hair long. Voice pitched slightly high.

I took a packet of fresh fifties out of my stash. I studied my little collection of improvised business cards. Title Research Associates looked good enough, and there were six crisp clean ones left.

Her name, I learned at Bahia Mar, was Lois Harron. Evidently she’d been able to afford to keep the house. It was on one of those canals southwest of Pier 66, a long low white structure with Bahamian gray trim, behind a screen of shrubbery which would someday hide it entirely from the asphalt road in front. There were eight vehicles in the driveway, parked in random array on the white river pebbles. A couple of vans, a couple of VW’s, a camper body on a pickup, a couple of road-worn station wagons and a shiny ‘lbyota. The wheels of the young. The high-performance cars are dead. A young man in Dade County has to pay twelve hundred dollars a year in insurance’ premiums to buy the basic legal coverage for a high-performance car, and the law says he can’t get plates or inspection stickers without proof of insurance. The young used to be the meat of the market, and without their demand, Detroit can’t make toys for the middle-aged role players, which is perhaps a blessing to all concerned.

I punched the bell three times before a brutally loud vacuum cleaner was turned off. Then I could hear yelps and sloshing from a pool area out back somewhere. A slender, tall woman with dark hair came to the door. She wore faded old stretch pants and a tired old T-shirt on which appeared pink ghost-writing, almost entirely gone, saying HAWAII FIVE-O. She was barefoot and she had a streak of dirt across her forehead, and she looked irritated, and she also looked very familiar to me.

She frowned and smiled, and pushed the screen door open and said, “Where, where, where? Hmmm. Bahia Mar. A year ago. What was the name of that big cruiser? ‘Bama Lady?”

“ ‘Bama Gal. The Alabama Tiger’s lair.”

“Sho nuff. Jesus! A year ago, I guess, but the memories are vivid. And I think a bunch of us came aboard your houseboat. Belated apologies for that invasion, friend. We were not all the way tracking. Come in, come in. Total confusion. My maid died. Isn’t that hell? She didn’t quit. She didn’t get fired. She died. Which leaves me with mixed emotions, and I will be damned if I can find anybody who isn’t a total dumb-dumb. What is your name? I can’t come up with it.”

“Travis McGee.”

“Of course! I’m dreary about names. Excuse the racket. My only chick is home on Christmas vacation and I wish the dear girl wasn’t quite as popular. Look at them out there! Wall to wall energy. It makes me tired to watch them. Get you a drink? What can I do for you, Travis?”

“I’m doing an odd job for a friend. Odd meaning maybe strange. He’s doing research on the kinds of people who go around the world in small boats.”

“Believe me, I am not his kind of person.”

“Neither am I, Lois. But he was questioning me about the background of Howie Brindle, and I said I thought he worked for you and your husband, and he wondered if I’d ask you for your impressions of him.”

She was in a good strong north light. Her face tightened just a little bit, and there were some rapid eye movements, a small pursing of the lips. “Is Howie going on some brave adventure?”

“He’s somewhere in the Pacific, with wife.”

“Oh, yes. That girl who inherited the Trepid when her father was killed. Some idiot name. Pooch?”

“Pidge.”

“My dear man, the Trepid is hardly a small dangerous boat. It was built to cross oceans. And being with wife is not being alone, one would hope.”

“I’m sorry. This isn’t the epic-adventure kind of thing. It’s more sociological, about the kinds of people who seek solitude when everybody else is after togetherness. A think piece.”

“Can I get you that drink? No? Then sit patiently while I fix myself one.”

She was back in five minutes, hair brushed, mouth freshened, smudge gone from her forehead. She carried a colorless drink on ice. “Hatch,” she said and sipped before she sat down across from me. “Sure. Howie worked for us, crewing aboard the Salamah.”

“For how long?”

“Let me see. It was the longest vacation we ever took. It was just about the only vacation we ever took. Fred did umpty operations a day, getting the decks cleared. And he begged and bullied his best friends into taking the load while we were gone. Let me see. Howie came aboard at Spanish Wells. We’d been in the islands for two weeks, because I remember it took two weeks for me to realize Fred wasn’t getting much vacation trying to run the boat by himself. I’m an idiot about those things. So that means Howie was aboard for just about six weeks. And then he brought her back by himself, of course, after Fred-after the accident.”

“He was in Spanish Wells looking for work?”

“No. Not the way that sounds. There was a couple from Charleston in a cruiser, and Howie was working for them. Actually, the woman approached us about hiring him. She said he was an absolute jewel. There wasn’t anything he wouldn’t do, and he respected your privacy and all. But her husband was having angina too bad to keep on cruising, and they were going to fly back home as soon as he felt up to it, and that left Howie at loose ends. It was an answer to prayer. We interviewed Howie and we both liked him a lot. So he moved into the crew cabin forward that same day, and Fred started showing him all that he should know about the Salamah. He really worked out fine. We stopped having all those narrow escapes we were having when Fred was running it alone. And he scrubbed and helped with the cooking and all. If you mean competence, I think Howie could probably sail around the world in an old bathtub. He seems to know when the wind is going to change before the wind knows. He’s so huge you’re conscious of how his weight tilts the boat. But he’s so light on his feet he doesn’t seem… ponderous.”

“So he was there when your husband had his accident?”

She raised the glass to her lips so deliberately I wondered if she was trying to buy time, and why. She took a deep swallow and said, “Whatever would that have to do with anything at all, Travis?”

“I’m just guessing, but I’d say that there’d be some relationship between how these deepwater people react to emergencies and their desire to get away from the world.”

“He reacts beautifully.”

“What happened? I mean, where was he when it happened?”

“You have no idea how many times I told this, over two years ago, how many times a new official popped up and had to hear it all over again.”

“I’m sorry. Forget it.”

“It doesn’t matter as much now as it did then. It so happened that Howie and I were both below. The three of us had been swimming. We were anchored just outside Little Harbor. It was a very calm sea. It was about three thirty in the afternoon. Both Howie and I heard this strange thumping sound. He ran up and as soon as he saw what had happened, he yelled to me. Fred was on his face in the dinghy with his legs trailing in the water. The dinghy had shipped some water. Somehow we got him up onto the deck and got shade over him. Howie got on the emergency frequency right away and pretty soon there was a doctor on the way in a seaplane, but Fred stopped breathing before the plane landed even. There was an investigation and all that. And I flew back in the same chartered plane with Tom Collier and with the body. Tom has been an absolute doll about everything. I don’t know what I would have done without him.”

“So you think that Howie Brindle would be a good person to sail around the world?”

“I guess so.”

“Some reservations?”

“Not really. It’s just that I thought people like that were great readers, and kept journals and did a lot of heavy thinking. Howie is just sort of a physical person. I don’t think he really has much going on up here. You know? He’s terribly pleasant, and he figures out the little problems, the best way to do things, but if you said to him, ‘Howie, do you think there is a hereafter?’ he would look sort of startled. I can tell you almost exactly what he would say. He’d say, `Some people believe there is and some people believe there isn’t. I guess there’s no way to find out for sure.‘”

“Do you feel you really got to know him?”

“You know as well as I do that six weeks aboard anything the size of the Salamah is no way to remain strangers. After Howie brought her back to Lauderdale, Tom asked me if I had any objection to Howie living aboard her and caretaking. I said none at all. I went down and removed the personal stuff, and Howie helped me load it all in the station wagon. Funny. I was so positive I wanted to sell her until the day she was sold. And then I was sorry.”

The young were shrieking and yelping. She took her last sip of drink, looking at me across the rim of the empty glass. The ice chinked as she put the glass down. A handsome woman with the eyes of a gambler. I’ve got aces back to back, and I dare you to bet into them. Good smile lines.

She said, “I’d like to come see your houseboat some day when things aren’t so drunk. I remember an absolutely gigantic shower stall, or did I dream it? Much too big for a boat.”

“It’s there. It’s real.” She was waiting for the definite invitation. No thanks, widow lady. With that figure and mouth, you can get all the safe, healthy fellows you want. I stood up. “Thanks for letting me bother you with these weird questions.”

“It’s okay. I needed a break. I hate cleaning the place. If I can’t find somebody soon, I’m going to have to sell it before it works me to death.”

“It’s the right time of year to advertise in Boston or Chicago.”

“You just may have something there. After school opens, I could fly up and interview applicants and bring the best one back. See you around the marina, Travis.”

I went back to Bahia Mar to fill in a very troubling blank in Brindle’s history. Meyer had stimulated my memory to the point where I knew Howie had been aboard the Salamah until she was sold. But she was sold before Professor Ted was killed. So he would not have met Pidge until she came down from school when Ted died, and to meet her and to be available to give her a helping hand, he had to be living somewhere else in the marina complex.

The cold wet wind had swept the area fairly clean of both residents and tourists. The parking meters at the beach area stood like a small lonely forest of Martian flowers. Some young folk in wet suits were trying to find breakers to ride. They weren’t breaking often. They were sliding in round and gray and slow, as if quieted by oil. The black suits are the last step in unisex. Out there with their boards they looked as neuter as black seals.

I checked out several neighborhoods before I came up with anything. Any big marina has neighborhoods. The charterboats, the rag bums, the fat cruiser crowd, the horsepower freaks, the roundthe-worlders, the storekeepers, the staff.

Fat Jack Hoover was replacing a compressor aboard the Miss Kitty, the ornate top-heavy old single-crew mahogany yacht he captains for a crazy old lady from Duluth. She comes down once or twice a year for a week to ten days each time, bringing along a maid, a cook, three poodles and four friends. When she comes down, she wants to cruise up and down the Waterway, very slowly. She doesn’t want any rocking and lurching, or any more noise than necessary. Fat Jack sends all the billing to a bank in Duluth. They pay with hardly ever a question.

He wiped his greasy paws on a ball of waste and sat on the crate the new compressor had been shipped in. “Now who would know the most about it would be Rine Houk.”

“That sells yachts?”

“The very one. From the shape that Harron ketch was in while he was showing her, he come to believe Howie was reliable, which is a rare thing especially lately, especially anywhere. Like with a house, it is a good thing to have somebody living on it when you are selling it, so the air isn’t stale, the bugs stay hid, the bird shit gets wiped off the overhead. So what he does is make a deal, Howie moves onto that big son of a bitch of a thing out of Corpus Christi, that QM crash boat that was custom-made into a yacht, big old high-octane Packards in her, you couldn’t blow fuel out a fire hose as fast as she’d suck. Ninety foot? A friggin‘ fiasco, that thing, what was the name on it? Weird. Oh. Scroomall. Big sacrifice sale at forty thou, but the way I looked at it, Howie agreeing, you’d have to pull the Packards and put in diesels, change the tanks, gearing, trim. Nineteen and forty-four it was built, and all as solid as you could expect with the owner trying to hammer it into pieces on any little ripple whenever he run it, so you would end up with seventy-five to eighty in it, conservative guess, and what do you have? Another freak PT conversion is what you have, roll you sick on a wet lawn. The owner got it this far with a new wife on her, just a kid she was, and she said enough, she wouldn’t even go back onto the son of a bitch to get a toothbrush, so he put it up right then. Fahrhowser his name was, round bald fella with a voice to rattle the dish cupboards. There was work to do on it, so Howie got more pay, Rine Houk getting approval from Fahrhowser.

“I couldn’t see any rich man getting stupid enough or drunk enough to buy that Scroomall. One day there was a girl on deck, one of those spindly saggy kind, long blond hair hanging, a face that if she was dead it would have a livelier expression on it, sorry old clothes like a ragbag. Turns out, talking to Howie, she’s the daughter of this Fahrhowser, took off from school, she’s broke and wants to stay aboard only don’t tell the old man. He doesn’t know what he should do. She must have moved in, because it was anyway a week later I saw them on the beach and didn’t know it was the same girl for sure, because in a swim outfit you could see what was hid under those raggy clothes, and it was pretty nice. From how they were horsing around together it was clear to any fool she’d moved in all the way. What was her damn name? Susan. That’s it. Not so long after that my crazy old lady come down from Duluth and I had to run up and down that damn Waterway for a week and a half. I disremember seeing Howie for a time, and then I seen him one day on the Trepid, helping out Pidge Lewellen. I stopped and asked him if somebody bought that Scroomall crock and he said not yet, he was still living aboard, and it hadn’t even nearly been sold, as far as he could tell. I would guess that he stayed aboard that Texas boat until the wedding. Sometime later, one day that crock was gone, and you’d have to ask Rine Houk about what happened. And whyn’t you go below and drag us up a pair of beers, McGee? It’s a cold day for beer, but talking makes me sweaty.”

For about fifteen seconds I didn’t know I was talking to Rine Houk. It had been a year and more. The man I knew had a long head, bald on top, a cropped stubble of salt and pepper around the edges, glasses with big black frames.

When he called me by name I peered at him again. “Jesus Christ, Rine!” I said before I could stop myself.

He shook his head and sat down behind his desk at his big boatyard. “I know. I know. You should try wearing this goddamn thing in weather like we were having lately. Trav, it’s like wearing a fur hat with ear flappers. The sweat comes apouring out from under it and runs down the inside of these wire glasses like you wouldn’t believe. If I see myself far off in a store window and I squint up my eyes, I can almost believe that’s a young fellow I’m seeing. Selling is a young man’s game, Trav, and don’t you forget it.”

“Bullshit, Rine. How about Colonel Sanders and his greasy chicken?”

“I’m not exactly selling box lunches.”

“Don’t get huffy with me just because I don’t like your hairpiece. We’ve never been great friends, Rine. But I like you. You are an honest man in a business where they are rare. I want to know a couple of things. Why that red-brown color like a setter dog?”

“That’s the color my hair was when I had any.”

“Do you sell boats from fifty feet away, or talking up close?”

“I sell them right across this desk.”

“Have you got a young girl friend?”

“Me!”

“Are you looking for one?”

“Am I looking for a coronary?”

“Rine, somebody gave you a bad steer. Are you selling more yachts lately?”

“Business is generally rotten.”

“Listen. I did not think of you as being young or old. I thought of you as being Rine Houk, the boat broker. I never especially thought of your face. But now I see your face underneath and between all that shiny hair, and your face looks so damn withered and old, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. You look silly Rine. You look like you had bad judgment. You look desperate. I wouldn’t buy a leaky skiff from anybody who looks the way you do right now.”

“Get out of this office,” he said, but he wouldn’t look right at me.

“Rine,” I said gently.

He took a deep breath and let it out. He blinked rapidly, and I saw the tears squeeze out of his eyes. He jumped up and went around the corner of his desk, bumping into it, and went into the bathroom off his office and pulled the door shut. I felt rotten. People make such strange evaluations of self. Why upset them? It’s none of my business. I waited. And waited. And waited.

He came out, sans wig. He was back in the big glasses. He didn’t look at me. He sat on his heels in front of the executive icebox with the genuine cherrywood paneling. “Black Jack do you?” he asked.

“Fine. No mix. Just rocks.”

He made the two drinks the same and made them heavy. He brought them to the desk. The intercom said, “Mr. Houk?”

“Yes, Mark.”

“There’s a Mister Mertz here who’s interested in the Matthews fifty-two.”

“So sell it to him.”

“But you said-”

“Forget what I said. It’s a beautiful thing for that money. Sell it to him.”

He picked up his drink and gave it a little lift in my direction, then drank it down. He ran his hand over his bald head. “Had the old glasses in the cupboard in there.”

“Handy to have a spare.”

He hit the desk. “You don’t know how hard it was, dammit, to all of a sudden one day start wearing that hair.”

“I can imagine.”

“No. You can’t imagine. Jesus. All that wasted effort.”

“Are you giving it up?”

“You told me what I already knew. Now I’m just another bald old fart. Feels good already. Thanks, Trav. Can I sell you… some kind of a leaky skiff?” He grinned and then blew his nose.

I asked him about the Scroomall, shocking him for a moment with the misapprehension I might be interested in it. He remembered the boat, but he had to look at his files to remember what had happened to it. The owner had finally sent two men over from Corpus Christi to take the boat back to Texas to try to sell it there. The men had to turn back twice before they got it running properly.

“And Howie Brindle worked out well?”

“I wish I still had him. I wish I had one round dozen Howie Brindles. He didn’t break his back looking for things to do, but when you told him, they got done. And if he’d put his mind to it, he could have sold boats.”

“Was it Tom Collier who recommended him?”

“It could have been. Or Mrs. Harron, or both of them.”

“Never any problems with him?”

Rine tilted his head. “What are you being paid to do?”

“Funny question.”

“I guess so. Fahrhowser had to have money to back his bad judgment in buying that old crash boat. He could still be looking for his daughter.”

“Susan? The one who stayed on the Scroomall with Howie?”

“Not with Howie. Not that way. He actually loaned her some money to get home on. He told the guys who came looking for her, and he told me the same thing, he made a deal with her. He’d let her come aboard and get rested up provided she’d go home, no arguments. He said he was seriously thinking about calling her people anyway, but decided not to. I guess she never made it back to Texas. And if she hasn’t by now, she never will.”

“Maybe she’s home. I wouldn’t know.”

“Oh. Then why are you asking all about Howie?”

“I’m conducting a survey. Fahrhowser’s first name is?”

“Jefferson.”

I thanked him. As I got into my car I looked through the show window into his office and saw Rine Houk standing rubbing his head and looking at himself in a wall mirror. He brought himself to attention. He still looked damned old, either way.

I got back to the Flush at three thirty, and after I had made a big sandwich and eaten half of it, I looked at the map in the front of the phone book and dialed information for Area 512, and asked for Corpus Christi information, the home number of Jefferson Fahrhowser, F as in February, A as in April, H as in Hudson River, R as in Railroad-Fahrhowser.

I direct-dialed it and got a woman with a drunk voice. She had a lot of slurring range, most of it baritone. I wanted to talk to Jeff and she said I had to mean Jeff senior because Jeff junior was in Cuba or some other goddamn commie hideout, and if I just happened to mean Daddy Jeff, then I was shit out of luck because about six months ago, give or take a week, his heart blew up like a baked potato you forgot to stick a fork into before you put it in the oven, son of a bitch was dead before he hit the floor, and besides that, I was slowing up a great pool party and tequila contest, which I could come over and join if I needed some laughs. I said I was in Florida and it would take too long, and she said this had the look of one of those parties that would go right on through the end of this year and into the next one, and she said she was Bonnie Fahrhowser, the grieving widow lady.

I said that I was looking for a line on Susan, the wandering daughter, and where could I get in touch. She said she wished she could get back all the money Daddy Jeff had spent in that jackass search for that dreary girl. And you wanna know the worst, Florida boy, the very bitter goddamn end? There is one big slug of dough all locked up in an escrow account, and we’ve petitioned the probate court and so on, but she can’t be declared dead for years and years and years. Jesus! Any fool could tell you that dim little slut was an OD years ago, buried someplace by the taxpayers. I got to get back in the game. It’s Zen water polo. You play it with an imaginary ball. You can still make the party, friend. The best parts haven’t even started to get warmed up yet.“

As I walked around finishing my sandwich, I tried to guess what Meyer would tell me. Not to walk while you eat. It makes crumbs and you step on them.

I opened the shallow drawer under the phone desk and pawed through the junk in there. It is where I too often empty my pockets. I quickly found the envelope Pidge had forced upon me. “Take it away.” she said. “I don’t want to throw them away, and I don’t want them around where I can look at them and get strange again. Keep them, darling, and we can look at them again when we’re old and gray.”

Twelve square prints, twelve negatives in strips of three. I sat where the light was strong and good, and studied the first nine prints, one at a time. I knew that waterfront area of St. Croix. And it was a nice trimaran from Houston. Howie was in two of them. Smiling. Huge. Happy. And then the last three. The snapshots my Lou Ellen had taken of the imaginary stowaway, Miss Joy Harris. Empty forward deck of the Trepid. Empty hatch cover. No one standing at the rail.

I noticed that the color values weren’t quite as good in the last three. Probably due to the direction of the light. Automatic cameras were never meant for taking pictures in the light Overexposure bleaches the emulsion out, fades the color values.

Then I realized it wasn’t really overexposure. It was more of a kind of yellow-green cast over the whole print.

Suddenly I was aware of the bump, bump, bump of my heart, and of coldness in the pit of my belly. My hands shook as I tried to put the prints back into the envelope. I dropped half of them, and after I finally got things organized, I headed for the phone.

Eleven

I KNEW Gabe Marchman would be home, simply because he never goes anywhere. He had the sense to buy some so-called ranchland west of Lauderdale years ago and keep five acres of it, and put his house smack in the middle of the five acres. He was a combat photographer, one of the great ones, until a booby trap smashed his legs into a poor grade of hamburger and put him on crutches for life. He and his Chinese-Hawaiian wife, Doris, have seven kids, six horses, uncounted dogs, cats, geese, ducks, all living in a noisy and peaceable kingdom. He has a photolab almost as big as the main house. He does experimental work, and he does problem assignments for large fees. He is the most sour-acting happy man I know.

Doris came out of the house as I got out of the car. She said, “He’s very angry with you, and you really have to stay for barbecue, Travis. He loves to talk to you. Talk and talk and solve all the problems of the world.”

“I should stay because he’s angry?”

“Because like I heard him say to you on the telephone, you never come around unless you have a problem.”

“It’s strange, you know? I really relish coming here. I like to be with you two. What happens?” She has that lovely matte Chinese complexion, without flaw,, and looks more like a sister than a mother to her eldest daughter, age thirteen. “What happens? We all waste our days doing dreary things, Trav, instead of the things we want to do. You will stay and eat with us? Wonderful! Let’s see how Gabe is doing.”

We walked around the big house to the back garden. Gabe was chugging the length of the new pool, getting almost all the impetus from his powerful arms. He paused and held up three fingers.

“Three more laps only.” Doris said. “It’s best he finishes the whole forty at one time.”

“Is it helping?”

“Oh, yes. For the first time, this year, he’s been almost without pain. Poor lamb. He so hates exercise.”

Soon he clambered out, pulled himself up, shouldered himself into his terry robe, and leaned against the step railing to dry his face and hair. Then he came swinging nimbly over to us on his aluminum crutches.

He stared hard at me as he sat down at the glasstopped terrace table. “Well, what do you know!” he said.

“That’s a weird greeting.”

“There was an edge to your voice on the phone. I wondered if it showed in person. It does. So, whatever your problem, it’s more personal than professional.”

“Darling!” Doris said sharply.

“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s okay if Gabe Marchman reads me. He’s read a lot of faces in a lot of bad situations.”

“It happens in the eyes,” he said. “And something about the tilt of the head and the shape of the mouth. Mostly in the eyes, though.”

“Somebody very important to me could be in a very bad situation. I don’t know. It depends on what you tell me. I almost don’t want to ask you.”

“Do we go into the lab?”

“Maybe you won’t have to. Here. A roll of twelve exposures, Kodacolor, shot on an inexpensive Instamatic. Tell me anything you want to tell me about them.”

He slipped them out of the envelope and dealt them out on the plate glass like a game of solitaire. I watched him separate the three of the empty forward deck of the Trepid and put them in a row of their own.

Next he turned the nine prints face down. In a few moments I saw what he was doing. It irritated me that I had not figured out something so simple. The paper had a pattern on the back, the word “Kodak” over and over, imprinted in diagonal rows. He worked by trial and error until finally he had the nine prints all in a row, with the trademark matching at every edge. Next he tried to find even one of the three greenish ones which would fit at either end of the strip of nine. None would fit. He found that two of the greenish ones matched. But the third would not fit on either end of the short strip of two. Only then did he examine the negatives. He turned all the prints face up, in the same order. He matched them up with the negatives, which were in strips of three. He gave the most intensive examination to the strip which related to the three prints of the empty foredeck.

He leaned back in the white iron chair, shrugged and said, “All I can tell you is that the prints come from at least two separate rolls and possibly three. If I had to bet, I would say two rolls. This shift toward the greens and yellows indicates that the film, before exposure, either in the film package or in the camera, was subjected to too much heat. Probably when in the camera. That’s how it usually happens. The other nine are from a roll that didn’t get too hot prior to exposure. I am guessing two rolls because the degree of shift seems to be identical, on these two taken in sequence and on this one. This one is a stranger. At first glance it seems to be a print from this end negative on this strip of three, but if you look at the top of the negative and the top of the print, you see that the print covers one support of the rail that the negative doesn’t. I would say that whoever developed and printed these runs a small operation. He’s a little slow or a little stingy about changing his chemicals. And you can see that the prints were clipped apart by hand, probably on a small cutting board. Here is one where someone made a false start, backed off, and got it centered better between the two prints. That’s all they tell me. And I can see that it isn’t what you want to hear.”

“No. It isn’t what I want to hear.”

He looked at the front of the envelope, hand stamped with the name of the establishment. He read it aloud. “Pierre Joliecouer, Rue de la Trinite. Fort-de-France. Martinique. Photographic services and supplies. What haunts you, McGee?”

“You might as well be a hauntee too. A man and a woman are cruising the islands, alone on a motor sailer. At a port the man smuggles a transient girl aboard. I don’t know how he hoped to keep her a secret. Maybe he didn’t give a damn. The stowaway comes up through the forward hatch to sneak some sunshine. The wife sees her and makes a record of it. Three pictures. The stowaway sees her taking the third and last one. She ducks below. She tells the man. Meanwhile the wife takes the film out of the camera and hides it in a safe place aboard. When the wife is asleep the man filches her camera and drops a cartridge of film in it and takes a full roll, twelve shots, of the empty forward deck from several probable angles. At Fort-de-France he manages to follow her-or maybe there are not too many places where you can get color film developed-and takes his roll to the same place. I would guess he uses money to persuade the proprietor to rush the processing of the two rolls. Maybe he says he wants to play a harmless joke on his wife. He returns to the shop and sorts out the prints and negatives. He removes the pictures of the stowaway and substitutes pictures which show roughly the same area, but empty, of course. He makes one mistake, as you pointed out, in matching negatives to prints. He leaves the prints there for his wife to pick up.”

“I don’t feel haunted yet,” Gabe said.

“You see, he had already told his wife that she had imagined the girl. They had a scene about the stowaway. He said no girl had ever been aboard at all.”

“Oh, dear,” said Doris in a small voice.

“And he even dropped a raft into the sea and paddled away and let his wife search every inch of the boat, and there was no girl, and they had not been anywhere near land since she had taken the pictures of the girl.”

“Now I feel haunted,” Gabe said. “That is very nasty.”

“I am a very sound and logical and all-wise person,” I told them. “So when the wife called to me for help I flew out to Hawaii and looked at these pictures and convinced her that she had been hallucinating.”

“I would say that you should get back to her in a hurry,” Doris told me.

“That is a very sound idea. Except that right now she is somewhere south southwest of Hawaii in that very same motor sailer with that very same wonderful guy.”

Doris’s hand was on my arm at once. A good gesture of comfort. “Oh, my dear,” she said. “How really foul. He has to be quite mad.”

“Where are they headed?” Gabe asked.

“Pago Pago, with an ETA of Thursday January tenth. Twelve days from now. She’s going to break up with him. Or has broken up, whatever you want to call it. She’s helping him take the boat down there because he has a buyer for it.”

“And she is very important to you?” Doris asked. I tried a smile which probably looked like the best efforts of a skull. “She’s very rich and she can cook. She’s too young for me. She says we’re for keeps. I’ve been fighting the idea every way in the book.”

“Wait a minute,” Gabe said. “They took the boat all the way from Martinique to Hawaii? Just the two of them?”

“Yes.”

“Why is she in any more danger now than she was then?”

“She was in danger then,” I said. I told them about the two other incidents. “I’ve been trying to figure it out,” I said. “Let’s say, just for the hell of it, that Howie Brindle is a total flip, and he knew when he was marrying her that he might kill her. What if they took off from Lauderdale together and three days later he arrives in Nassau saying she fell overboard? It would be one big loud dirty news story. The authorities and the news people would start unraveling his background.”

“Howie Brindle!” Doris said. “What a marvelously ordinary name that is.”

“And he never met a man who didn’t like him. Dammit, he is a big cheerful likable guy.”

“What about his background?” Gabe asked.

“I haven’t really begun to dig, and I’ve come up with two possible kills, not counting the stowaway.”

“For money?” he asked.

“I don’t think there has to be very much reason. Mostly it would be a case of opportunity, plus some kind of minor annoyance. He’s quick and powerful and sly. I don’t think he’s clever. I’d say a clever man would have gotten this set of pictures back from his wife after they’d had the desired effect on her.”

“To make her think she was losing her mind?”

“To make her tell a few friends she thought she was losing her mind. The way she told me. And he can tell people how worried he is about her. Maybe this is the first time he ever tried to plan something out. By the time something fatal happens to her, he is going to be able to point back to all the months they had together, nearly a year and a half of cruising the oceans, before she did herself in. And there are friends to step forward and say that she has been getting very, very strange. Maybe always before, he killed strangers. And there wasn’t any real gain. But this time it is the best part of a million dollars. So he has to be careful. I have the feeling that he doesn’t really feel anything very much. He cries easily. He might be one of the most plausible liars in the world.”

Doris said, “Can’t you get them by radio or something? Won’t ships see them? Or airplanes?”

Gabe said, “You are a very nice girl, honey. Let me tell you how big that ocean is. Several wars ago a lot of airplanes, a lot of ships, a lot of people on islands and on radio watch tried for weeks to locate a whole fleet of warships. Oh, and a lot of submarines were hunting too. It was located finally by accident. An old tin goose was way off course, going from here to there, and happened to see it. And a fleet, honey, is a very distinctive-looking thing. It covers several square miles of ocean. One motor sailer is something else. There are hundreds of little inter-island craft out there, under sail. But you can fly across ten times without ever spotting one. If you can track down a radio contact, and if the vessel gave its location and you know where it is going, it is possible to find it, if you are standing by with a long-range search plane.”

“There’d be no reason for the Trepid to give a position unless they were in trouble,” I said.

Silence at the round glass table. Gabe squinted at the bright hazy sky. The old instincts of the newsman were at work. “Coming into port alone would be bad,” he said. “If a man says his wife fell or jumped overboard, my first guess is she was pushed, no matter how many years they’ve been sailing across the oceans. So you check and you find they’re married less than two years, that it’s all her money. And any idiot would realize he would have to have a body aboard, or it will be a long time and a lot of heavy legal expense in order to collect.”

I wondered if the lawyers’ union put the same big bite on an estate under those circumstances as they do in the case of a contested will. If the litigant wins a piece of the estate, the standard practice almost everywhere is for the lawyer to take 45 percent of the amount awarded, regardless of how strong or how flimsy the claim, regardless of how much or how little work is involved in pursuing it. And what agency regulates and enforces these legal fees? The Bar Association.

There is one thing they don’t do. They don’t publish their rate schedules in advance. They let it all come as a surprise. A big surprise.

When I recover something that the victim never expected to see again, I take half. That is made clear in advance. And who regulates my rate? The victim. He can try other methods.

Sometimes we can negotiate the percentage, especially when it is a very simple salvage job. It would be easier to sit behind a desk and shake my head solemnly and sadly and say, “Buddy, I surely wish I could cut the fee, but I have to abide by the rules and regulations of my association.”

And by the same rules they take 4 or 5 or 6 percent of a gross estate even when there are absolutely no problems at all. Absolutely no chance of paying an hourly rate. Know why? “It wouldn’t be fair to those, heirs of other estates where a lot more work is involved. Your dead daddy left you a gross of one hundred thousand, fella? My six percent comes off the top. Six grand. Local bar-association schedule. Hminni. Then there’s an estimated thirtytwo percent additional taxes and expenses, so you will stand to inherit… sixty-two thousand dollars! I know it will only take about two hours of my time and about a half a dozen forms for my secretary to complete and process. But you are paying to have it done right, fella.”

When there are things you don’t want to think about, your brain slips down the easiest back alley, whistling and kicking cans. It is a sickening wrench to bring it marching back out of the alley to stand at attention and pay heed. I suppose that when it stays in the alley and won’t come out, the world says you have gone mad. At Annapolis they have developed a brain-wave detection device to keep the cadets focused on the books. When the alpha wave gets the shape of daydreaming, you get beeped out of your reverie.

I forced myself back to the here and the now and bullied my reluctant imagination into guessing what Howie Brindle would probably do to my girl. His wife, yes. But my girl. I could name the day, hour, and minute when she stopped being a wife.

“Witnesses are always nice,” I said.

“I don’t understand,” Doris said.

“Somebody who really believes,” Gabe confirmed. “They really think they saw what somebody wants them to see, hear what somebody wants them to hear. Suggestibility. But they are alone. Mr. and Mrs. Brindle, in the middle of the sea.”

“Because I convinced myself and convinced her that Howie is a nice dumb guy and she was hallucinating. He now knows this is the last chance he gets. And the only thing in the world I can do is be at Pago Pago when he gets there.”

“She’ll be aboard,” Gabe said. “Too much stink, too much investigation if she isn’t.”

“But I don’t even know if he can think that clearly. I don’t even know if he’s that smart.”

“If he is, maybe you should be all geared up to have him picked up for something else. One of those possible kills you talked about. Or this girl.” He tapped the envelope of pictures.

I went digging back through memory. I had made some notes and, though I doubted I could find them, the making of notes is a good crutch. “Two girls traveling together, trying to hitch a ride from St. Croix to Plymouth on the island of Montserrat. Joy Harris and Cecile? Cecilie? Celia. Yes, Celia Animal. Wolf? Bear?”

“Katz?” Gabe asked.

“You’re a lot of help. Fox! Celia Fox, who has a sister married to a lawyer in Plymouth. Maybe I could do it by phone on the day after New Year’s, if Meyer can remember the name of the lawyer we met down there, and if Celia and her sister were both a Miss Fox, because I would think the guy would have to be English, probably colonial-born, and being married to an American girl would be unusual enough to be identification. But look, where does that leave us? Suppose I find the young Mrs. Barrister and get her on that weird island radiotelephone deal, and convince her she should give me Celia Fox’s address, if she had one, in the States, and assume I get hold of Celia and she says yes, Joy Harris left St. Croix on the Trepid and no one has seen or heard from her since. Suppose I get in touch with the grieving and worried parents of Joy Harris and they have not heard from the girl for a year. So what? The girls were bumming around the islands. What would be the jurisdiction? I would bet very large odds that very soon after Joy Harris told Howie about Pidge taking snapshots of her taking a sunbath on the bow, Howie worked out his freaky little deception, snapped Joy’s spine, and flipped her into the sea along with her backpack, hiking boots, spare jeans and guitar.”

Doris winced and made a gagging sound. “That’s a little too vivid,” she said.

“Sorry. There’s another thing I should have figured out. She said that when the generator was on, she imagined she could hear Howie and Joy talking and laughing. It would be no big problem to wire up a tape player with an endless loop, in sequence with the generator so that it played whenever the generator ran. Howie is a member of the tape generation. They all fool around with components and editing and splicing. Hearing voices and laughter mingled in with a sound-that of an engine or water roaring into a tub or a noisy compressor-is one of the most common hallucinations.”

A whole bright birdlike flock of little Marchman girls and friends came whirling and chirping into the garden area, asked permission to use the pool, and went darting off to change.

Doris asked me if I would stay for barbecue, and I said it was very nice to be asked, but my stomach felt as if somebody had slammed it shut. And I was not going to be very good company to have around. When she began to insist, Gabe interrupted and told me I had a rain check.

He walked me out to the car. He leaned against the high fender of Miss Agnes and said, “And what you want to do is take all the bits and pieces back and spread them out in front of Meyer and see what he says you should do.”

“And hope that it’s what I’ve already decided.”

“Bring him out here with you when this is all over.”

“Sure, Gabe, I’ll do that. Thanks.”

“And… bring that girl along too. Like to meet her.”

As I drove away I wondered if Gabe could be mellowing. Where was the sour, savage, bitter man I had learned to know and to like? Then I realized that never before had I gone to him with something that affected me personally, deeply. So Gabe had the warmth and the strength when you had need for it. Otherwise, keep your guard up.

His advice as to how to spend the waiting time was good. Get geared up to be ready to nail Howie for something else. And make some air reservations.

Twelve

MEYER was sitting up in a chair in his room having his evening meal when I arrived. I sat on the bed and told him that he looked a lot less like a reject from a wax museum.

“I took a shower,” he said. “I am eating a steak as you can plainly see. A very skimpy little sawdusty steak, but a steak nonetheless. This will be the last night I shall be attended by Ella Marie. You can pick me up and take me home Tuesday noon. That is New Year’s Day, I believe. If the prospect displeases, I can make other arrangements.”

“You are better. And up to your old standards of unpleasantness.”

“Let me know when I exceed them, please. Then I can back off a little. If you are wondering what this is, they started with green blotting paper, ran it through a shredder, soaked the pulp in bacon grease, and then pressed it into little molds so that it came out looking exactly like overcooked string beans. They have other esoteric-” He stopped and put his fork down. “I’m sorry. I was so busy showing off, I didn’t really take a good look at you. What’s happened, Travis?”

I got through the explanation about the pictures and my other discoveries. He took giant steps in logic which made detailed explanations of significance unnecessary.

He said, “Sorry to be so slow to see that something had you by the throat, my friend. Illness is an ego trip, especially after you begin to feel a little better. You turn inward. How do I feel right now compared to five minutes ago, an hour ago, yesterday? Is this pain in my hip connected with the infection? Is it something new? Why can’t they come when I ring? All intensely personal. Petulant. To each one of us, the self is the most enchanting object in all creation. Sickness intensifies the preoccupation with self. And, of course, the true bore, the classic bore, is the person who is as totally preoccupied with himself all the time as the rest of us are when we are unwell. The woman who spends twenty minutes telling you of her last four experiments with hair styling, for example.”

“I like that Spanish definition of yours better.”

“Gian Gravina? A bore is a person who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company.”

They came and got his tray. He got up cautiously, waved away the helping hand, and waddled slowly to the high bed. He operated the side buttons to give himself the perfect angle of repose, the right degree of support under the knees. And then he sighed. The sigh of tiredness and great accomplishment.

“Gabe said that-”

He stopped me with a hand slowly raised. His eyes were closed. “Let us think. Let us erase all past impressions and conceptions of Howard Brindle and then paint him back into our stage set without going too far, the other way, creating fangs, hair on the palms and the fetid odor of the great carnivore.”

I tried to think. Linear logic was beyond me. My mind kept bouncing off the stone barriers of anxiety and running in circles. He was breathing deeply and steadily, and I wondered if he had fallen asleep.

“Marianne Barkley backed me into a corner right after the doctor’s death and bent my ear into strange shapes with her dossier on Fred and Lois Harron,” he said.

Sometimes there’s no way of sidestepping her. She is a large lady who dresses in gypsy fashion and runs a small successful shop in the complex called Serendipitydoo. She sells yarn, needlepoint kits, creative pots, literature of the occult and Japanese prints. She works up detailed horoscopes, breeds Siamese cats, instructs in decoupage, gets around on a Honda and writes a weekly society gossip column for a throwaway called the Lauderdale Bystander. She knows everybody, has a certain fringe position in the old-settler social order and has outlived three husbands, all rumored to have been talked to death.

Meyer went on. “Twenty minutes of conversation boils down to pure soap opera. Dr. Harron had started to have some real trouble with the bottle. The doctor union was very close to closing the operating-room door. Booze had put the marriage in jeopardy for the usual reasons. His impotence making her wander afield, a few drunken beatings. Marianne suspected that a psychiatrist friend had recommended the long vacation aboard the Salamah. The whole point of her assault on me was to tell me how lucky Lois Harron was. Some mutual friends had tied up fairly near them in Spanish Wells and reported that Fred was getting so totally smashed all day every day, the Harrons had to hire a fellow to operate the ketch. Death by swimming accident left Lois pretty well fixed, she pointed out. The long slow death from booze would have meant professional disgrace and bad memories and no money left at all.”

“It sounds more likely than the account Mrs. Harron gave me. But where are you going with it?”

“I’m linking it up with a conversation I had about that time. I can’t remember who I was talking to. But they had an aura of reliability. Maybe somebody official. Something about a blood alcohol test in Nassau, and a mild astonishment that a man carrying that much load could stand up long enough to dive.”

“Oh,” I said. “But I don’t think Lois Harron is a very good liar. She said that she and Howie were below and heard the crunch when he dived into the dinghy.”

He opened his eyes. “Let’s say they anchored off Little Harbor for a swim. All three of them swam. Fred Harron drank and swam and passed out on deck, loaded. And then Lois and Howie went below and took off their wet suits and had sex. Afterward, let’s say that Lois drowsed off. Howie heard the dinghy swing in the tide and wind change and bump against the hull. He certainly knew the marriage situation. Maybe he wanted to do her a little favor. He could give such a great start it would wake her up and he could pretend to be agitated and say, ‘What was that? What was that? Didn’t you hear it? A big thumping noise. Maybe we pulled the hook.’ He could yank his swim trunks on, hurry topside, take a quick look around at the empty sea, scoop the surgeon up and launch him headfirst into the dinghy, bawling to Lois to hurry up just as the doctor landed.”

I got up and looked out his window into the early darkness. “A little favor for a lady, eh? Like killing a hornet, or parking her car in a narrow space, or helping her over a fence. Meyer, you never used to be able to think so badly of people.”

“I used to lead a sheltered life. Does it fit, emotionally? Does the concept have internal logic?”

“Enough to give me the crawls. No proof possible. Ever.”

“You take a turn. Try Susan from Texas.”

“Okay. Erratic, neurotic, alienated. And hostile. So she located her father’s boat somehow. Maybe she was still in contact with a friend in her hometown who would know. She moves aboard, pleads with Howie not to tell her folks. They become intimate. He likes living aboard boats. She is an added convenience. He doesn’t have to go out and find a girl if he wants one. Maybe he never wants one badly enough to go to any great lengths to find one. But if one is right there, within reach, he’ll reach when he feels any mild urge. Okay, so she thinks she’d got the leverage on two counts, letting her stay aboard and laying her. Hostility is the clue, maybe. A little lady lib mixed in. Do just what I want you to do, or I’ll blow the whistle on you, Howard. And maybe she would anyway, because she was erratic. End of a convenient way of life. Big problem of where to live and what to do. So he turned her head a little further around than it is supposed to go, wired her into a weighted tarp, put her and her stuff into the launch by the dark of the moon, and probably deep-sixed her up one of the canals. How many of those freaky, wandering, bombed little girls disappear every year without a trace? Thousands? I don’t know. But I think it adds up to a lot of them.”

“Very nice,” Meyer said. “It fits the same pattern. A casual response to a minor problem. Why do we like Howie Brindle?”

“Rhetorical question?”

“Not exactly. There is something childlike about him. A kind of placidity, a willingness to be moved about by events. You sense that he does not want to be an aggressor, to take anything you have from you by force. He is cheerful, without being at all witty. He loves to play games. He likes to be helpful. He watches a lot of daytime television. He has a short attention span. He won’t dream up chores, but he’ll do faithfully what you tell him to do, if you’re explicit. His serious conversation, a rare phenomenon, seems to come from daytime televьon drama. He loves chocolate bars and beer. He doesn’t want trouble of any kind, and he’ll lie beaufully to get out of any kind of trouble. He has absolutely no interest in the world at large. Retarded? Hardly. I think he may have a better intelligence than he is willing to display. But something is wrong with him. For lack of a better word, call him a sociopath. They are very likable, plausible people. They make superb imposters, until they lose interest in the game of the moment. They form few lasting attachments. As a rule, they are liars, petty thieves, sometimes brawlers, but seldom are they killers. I can explain why they are so dangerous, the ones willing to kill. Because they are absolutely immune to polygraph tests. The polygraph measures fear, guilt, shame, anxiety. They don’t experience these emotions. They can fake them by imitating the way the rest of us act under stress. But it’s only an imitation. When the only thing in the world that concerns you is not getting caught, you would kill for very small reasons. In fact, murder that is the result of irritation plus casual impulse plus an elementary slyness is the most difficult to solve.”

I went to the foot of the bed. “We’ve seen some of those, Meyer. Remember?”

“Not if I can help it.”

“We like him because he’s just a mischievous little kid.”

“That’s the ultimate simplification. Mommy gives all her time to new baby sister and won’t make peanut butter sandwiches when you come home from school, so put the pillow over baby sister’s little face and push down on it and listen to the clock going tick.”

“But what the hell good is all this doing Pidge?”

“She doesn’t fit the pattern of his other… solutions.”

“No. This seems more complicated. Seems! It is. It’s as if… he hasn’t been able to figure out the best way to go-to kill her or drive her crazy.”

“Remember his first and only rule. Don’t get caught.”

“So?”

“So if the ramifications of killing her made him cautious and indecisive a year ago, nothing has really changed so much. And you are in the equation now. He knows you talked to her about the things she couldn’t comprehend and convinced her she had been hallucinating. I think that might be the best favor you could have done her.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I’m thinking out loud. And not making much sense. Sorry. I think that if she were to confront him on this trip to American Samoa with his having tricked her into thinking she was losing her mind, she might not last the whole voyage.”

“But you think she will?”

“My God, don’t take my hunch for reality. She could be face down right now, off a lovely atoll, drifting down and down into that incredible turquoise blue, with Howie squatting and watching her sink, his only lament a vague disappointment at having to give up something of about the same pleasure quotient as a chocolate bar.”

“Why are you-”

“Whoa! The veins in your neck are standing out. I had to steer you away from childish optimism. Remember, there is a very cold and strange entity that hides inside Howie Brindle. It is the imposter. He is the stage effect. It has refined the role until good ol‘ Howie knows all the tricks of quick acceptance, of generating fondness, of making people glad to help him out. The thing inside pulls the strings and pushes the little levers, and Howie does all your chores for you. Cheerfully.”

“What the hell should I do?”

“First, stop yelling. Second, on your way out, tell them I am ready to go to sleep: Third, you could backtrack Howie a little bit further. Fourth. Hmmm. Fourth. Oh. Tom Collier comes into this thing too often to be shmmm… suggle…”

“Meyer?”

“Garf,” he said softly, the “f” lasting on and on. His eyes were closed. I stared up through the ceiling, hands spread wide, and spun and left him there.

Thirteen

SUNDAY MORNING was crisp and bright, but so windless the smog- was going to build up quickly. Coop flew me over to the Sarasota-Bradenton Airport in his little red-and-white BD-4. It is a very happy and responsive four-place, high-wing ship. It is comfortable, reasonably quiet, and cruises at a hundred and seventy miles an hour on its hundred and eighty horses.

Coop is always ecstatic at-the chance to fly me anywhere in the state. I buy the gas and pay the landing fees. He can’t charge for the flight or his services because he built his airplane from a kit. The FAA classifies it as an Experimental Amateur Built airplane. Coop paid $7200 for the kit. He is one of five or six hundred people who fly planes made from the same kit. He put in twenty hours a week for forty weeks, and the FAA, who had been looking over his shoulder as he built it, watched him climb into it and fly it, and gave it an airworthness certificate. There is nothing about it he doesn’t maintain perfectly, and nothing about it he can’t fix.

I always forget his square name until I see it behind the glassine on the instrument panel. Pelham Whittaker. He is known as Coop because he looks astonishingly like Gary Cooper until he either talks or stands up. He has a very fast high-pitched voice. And he is about five foot five. He teaches in the adult-education program in the high school at night, so he can fly his BD-4 in the daytime. His wife teaches in junior high in the daytime, so she won’t have to go flying with him.

He is a very careful, fussy pilot. They are the best kind. It was such a nice morning he took it right across the peninsula and emerged a little north of Fort Myers. Once over the Gulf, he took it down to a thousand feet and stayed a half mile off the beaches as we went up the coast. Even looking toward the morning brightness, I had a good view of the coast. I hadn’t seen it from that altitude for several years. Boca Grande looked much the same. And so did Manasota Key. But the small city of Venice, and Siesta Key, two keys north of Venice, were shocking. Pale and remarkably ugly high-rises were jammed against the small strip of sand beach, shoulder to shoulder. Blooms of effluent were murking the blue waters. Tiny churchgoing automobiles were stacked up at the lift bridges, winking in the sun, and making a whiskey haze that spoiled the quality of the light.

After he had his instructions from the tower and had turned inland to start his pattern, I could see, in the haze to the north, the tall stacks of the mighty Borden phosphate and fertilizer plant in Bradenton, spewing lethal fluorine and sulphuricacid components into the vacation sky. In the immediate area it is known bitterly as the place where Elsie the Cow coughed herself to death. I have read where it had been given yet another two years to correct its massive and dangerous pollution. Big Borden must have directors somewhere. Maybe, like the Penn Central directors, they are going to sit on their respective docile asses until the roof falls in. There are but two choices. Either they know they condone poisoning and don’t give a damn, or they don’t know they condone poisoning and don’t give a damn. Anybody can walk into any brokerage office and be told where to look to find a complete list of the names of the directors and where they live. Drop the fellows a line, huh?

Coop put it down and rolled it over to the apron in the private aircraft sector. I knew he would stay in the area, answering questions about his kit plane, and talking flying-with hand gestures-with all the other Sunday flyers. When I neared the terminal and looked back, I could see that he had already acquired an audience of two, and would tell all about Jim Bede and his magic airplane kits.

A lanky miss behind the Hertz counter leased me a pink Torino which stank of stale cigar, even with the windows down and the speed up. I hesitated, then found my way out to Route 41 and turned north to Bradenton. I had checked a phone book in the airport to be certain it wasn’t going to be too easy. No Brindle. I didn’t even know if it was his paternal grandfather who’d brought him to Florida. Fast traffic was zapping by me on the northbound side of traffic divided highway, whooshing through a tacky wilderness of franchised food, car dealerships, boat dealerships, trailer dealerships, motels, auction houses, real estate agencies, factory clothing outlets, furniture warehouses, rent-anything emporiums, used cars, used trailers, used campers, used boats. Had I not seen a boat for sale every few hundred yards, I would never have known I was within five hundred miles of salt water. That’s what’s going to flatten the old wallets, guys, that missing feeling of being near the sea. It has done gone.

A Sunday that is the next to the last day of the year is a poor time to run a trace back through ten years, even in an area that hasn’t grown an inch. But I was impatient, and I hadn’t been able to get in touch with Tom Collier. And Coop wasn’t doing anything.

I fumbled my way out of the fast traffic and down to the heart of town, and from there, with some directions, found the City Police. I parked the pink cigar a block away and went into the station. The two men on the front didn’t come panting over to see what I wanted. It is the way with cops to make you wait a little while because a great deal can be read from the way a person waits. And it is a nice opportunity to look the visitor over. They were looking while they talked. Okay, so I am large, leathery, bigboned, with some visible signs of violent impact in years past. The shirt, fellas, is L. L. Bean, lightweight wool. The pants are Sears best quality double-knit stretch. This here cardigan I am carrying over my shoulder is Guatemalan, knitted by durable little brown people up in the Chichicastenango clouds. The shoes are After Hours, pony hide I think. The watch is by Pulsar.

And I wait amiably, see? Sort of lounging here, with half smile. So I could be the guy who comes and climbs the pole and fixes the phone. Or the driver of a big rig looking for a safe place to leave it because he can’t deliver it today. Or I could be fuzz on vacation, stopping in to patronize the local brotherhood. Or I could be a dude from Palm Beach stopping by to report the theft of an original Dufy from the salon of his motor yacht. An eccentric dude without siyled hair, capped teeth or tinted contacts.

All I know as I wait so disarmingly is that I have done a lot of things wrong here and there, but with what there is left of this Howie Brindle fiasco, I am not going to make bad moves.

“Help you, sir?”

“I don’t know. If I could get a look at a back file of city directories.”

“Trying to find someone?”

I quickly suppressed the terrible compulsion to tell him that I wanted to see if I could still tear them in half. “He moved here when he was about twelve; I think. That would be thirteen or fourteen years ago. I guess he left when he went to the University of Florida, which would be about seven years back give or take. Howard Brindle.”

“You say he left? Then he’s not here.”

“That is right. That is absolutely right, Officer. I want to see if he has relatives still living in Bradenton.”

“What have you got in mind?” The questions are always automatic. The more you ask the more you know. And you might get an answer you don’t like. I gave him one of the six clean cards. “Title Research Associates,” he read aloud. “McGee. Fort Lauderdale.”

“It’s just a little research to clear a title,” I said. He pushed the card back across the counter and I picked it up, tucked it away. “You come around on a business day, you can find old city directories at the Tax Office, and maybe the Chamber, or even the library.”

“I had to come over here anyway, and I guess I was trying to save myself two trips. You know how it is.”

“Sure. I don’t know how I could help you.”

“It might be that somebody in the Department would know Brindle. He played football for the high school here. Offensive backfield. Big fellow. Light-colored hair. Went to Gainesville on a football scholarship.”

My man looked blank but the other one put a file folder down and ambled over, saying, “Sure. I remember him. A great big son of a bitch, more pro size than high school. Short yardage situations, they’d bring him in to get the distance or be a decoy. Quick as could be getting through that line, but once he got into the backfield, they could catch him pretty good. He couldn’t go for the long gainers. He never did much at Gainesville, and I expected him to show up in the pros, but he never did. What ever happened to him?”

“He married a little money, I understand.”

“That’s the way to go! Say, dint you play some pro? I heard Dave here say McGee. First name?”

“Travis.”

“Oh, sure. Tight end. Kind of way back. Like you were up there two years, and you got racked up bad. Give me a couple of minutes and I can come up with the Detroit guy that clobbered you.”

I stared at him. “Nobody can remember me, much less who messed up my legs. You’ve got some kind of hobby there. It was a rookie middle linebacker named DiCosola.”

He put his hand out. “Ben Durma. I memorize all that stuff. My wife thinks I’m nuts. But I win a lot of beers. Too bad you couldn’t stay in long enough to last into the good money like they get nowadays. You’re a good size for a tight end. Well, about Brindle’s folks, I wouldn’t know. But I got an idea. Let me check the duty roster.”

He came back and said, “I asked the dispatcher to bring Shay back in. He was playing for the high school the same time Brindle was. Stan Shay. He was too small for a scholarship.”

“I don’t want to upset anything. I could wait around.”

“No problem. It’s very, very slow out there. Tonight it will start building and tomorrow night will be a disaster area. We’re running light so we can beef up the shifts for the trouble time. In the last hour and a half, one stolen bike, one guy chasing his old lady naked around the yard with a ball bat.”

Shay was one of those elegant cops. Handsome and dark and trim, the kind who has blue jowls no matter how close the shave, wears tightly tailored uniforms, sports a very careful hair style, walks like a lazy tomcat, and looks as if the eyelashes are false. But they are real, and the toughness is real, and you do not want to say anything which could possibly be interpreted as a challenge to his virility or authority. The desk had business when he came in. They aimed him over at me where I sat on a bench, but Durma called him back to give him a better fill-in. I was standing when he arrived. We shook hands and he said he had to be next to his cruiser because he was on call. We went out to the parking area and he sat behind the wheel, door open, turned sideways so he could hook his heels on the step plate. I leaned against the side of the car.

“We were on the same squad. He was a good kid. He never crapped out on what had to be done, but he never exactly pulled more than his share either. He liked to get by. You know. I had to work my tail off to stay even, to make up for not having the beef, and I used to tell him that if he worked like I worked, he could own the world. He could have been big. I really mean it. You want to know about his folks, Ben says. I went there a couple times when there was something he wanted to pick up and we were on our way somewhere else, so it was a couple of minutes. It was an old trailer park called the Bayway Trailer Haven, and they were way back in toward the middle you could get lost in there-in a blue house trailer with a screen porch on one side and the built-on room which was Howie’s room on the other side. The only people he had, they were his grandfather and grandmother. Their name was Brindle. They seemed to be jawing at him all the time he was there, the two or three times I was along, but he didn’t seem to hear anything they were saying to him, or even be able to see them standing there. They could still be there, for all I know.”

I wanted to ask if Howie got into any trouble while he was in high school, but I had the feeling Stan Shay would jump on any deviation from the pattern. So I moved at it sideways. “I guess you’re right. He could have made it big. But when there isn’t enough motivation, natural ability isn’t enough. From what I hear, he’s gotten pretty close to trouble a few times. Since he got out of college.”

“Trouble?”

“I don’t know any of the details. I just got the impression he might have a bad temper. And if a man that big loses his temper…”

“No. Not Howie. I can guaran-damn-tee you can’t make ol‘ Howie mad. There was an old country boy named Meeker, moved over here from Arcadia, a good running guard, took it on himself to rile Howie. Called him Fats, asked him when he was going to buy a bra, snapped red marks on his ass with a wet towel, put his good shoes in the shower. That was third year. Howie just beamed and chuckled. Some of Meeker’s tricks were mean. There was no use asking Meeker to ease off because it just made him go after Howie more. But Howie never minded it one little bit.”

“Where did Meeker go away to school?”

“He would have had a lot of offers, but he never made it. First of June, that third year, we had a class party over on the beach at Anna Maria Island, bonfires and beer and all that. Meeker got pretty loud and pretty drunk and so did a lot of other people. If he’d driven out there, probably he’d have been missed sooner. But he rode with somebody, so they thought he’d rode home with somebody else. There was so much noise and music, nobody could have heard anybody yelling out there in the dark. About everybody went swimming at least one time, but Meeker went ahead and drowned, and nobody knew it for sure until two days later a fisherman wading next to Tin Can island spotted his body coming in on the tide, rolling over and over across the bar.”

I tried it. A hearty laugh.

He snapped his head up. “That’s some kind of joke to you?”

“No offense. I was just thinking. After all that towel-snapping, maybe Brindle went swimming at the same time as Meeker.”

I saw his eyes change. His eyes went back into uniform. He was accepting it as a possibility. The cop years had given him the cynical awareness of what people are willing and capable of doing to one another. The first time a young officer of the law finds a starving three-year-old in chains, curled up on a cement floor amid its own fecal matter and dotted with the festering burns made by cigarets wielded by its loving daddy, who only “wanted her to mind,” that cop becomes a better cop because he is more aware of the dimensions of his profession.

“The whole squad was honorary pallbearers,” he said. “And Howie cried. I remember that. He cried quietly the whole way through.”

“Didn’t that strike you as strange?”

“I thought it was because he was just a nice guy.” Just as I saw a beginning suspicion of my motives, he got an emergency call to go help with traffic control. A gas truck had flipped over at the intersection of DeSoto Road and Route 41. He was under way as quickly as it can be done.

I parked the car under the shade of ancient live oaks and walked back into the trailer park. The park had been there a long time. Shade trees and tropical plantings had grown up around them. The Sunday birds sang. So many “Florida” additions had been affixed to these old aluminum boxes that it was hard to visualize any of them as having once rolled along the open road. The dewheeled village seemed to be trying to nestle itself further into the turf, forgetting the old bad dreams of tires, traffic and tolls. I saw a dedicated game of bocce, some chess boards, some people merely sitting, moving their chairs to follow the warm December sun. From radios and television sets, turned politely low, I heard the Sunday intonations as I walked past. “… and so I say unto you, brethren.:..”

“… the everlasting glory and the Infinite mercy and the chance of everlasting life…”

They looked with curiosity at the new face going by, suspicious and unsmiling unless I smiled. Then the smile was answered. When I asked, they told me that T. K. Lumley knew the history of the park. He kept records. Go ask T.K. Straight ahead, turn right at the big banyan that the road goes around, a hundred feet on your right. An old square trailer painted gold color.

T. K. Lumley was cricket-size, all of him except a W. C. Fields nose-a red potato with pores like moon craters. He was in a wheelchair painted in the same gold fleck as his trailer.

“Set,” he said. “Can’t get up because I broke my goddamn hip last July. First the quacks said I’d die of it, then they said I’d never get out of bed, and now they say I’ll never walk again. Maybe what they do is try to make you so goddamn mad, you get better just to spite them. Greedy bastards charge a left tit to look at you, then figure they can put it in the bill to the estate. You wanted to know about the Brindles? Shit, I don’t even have to go look them up. They moved into number one-oh-eight way back about… fourteen years ago. Molly and Rick and that fat kid named Howie.”

“One-oh-eight?”

“Number of the site. You buy the mobile home that’s on it and take over the land lease. Used to be people named Fitterbee had one-oh-eight, then he got so crazy their kids moved them into a nursing home, her too, so she could help care for him. Then she died there and he got over the crazy spell and got married again, but you don’t give a damn about that. We don’t get so many kids in the park. People here had their litters long back. That fat kid was okay. Obliging. Ask him to stop doing something, he wouldn’t give you a lot of mouth. And he didn’t have a bunch of kids coming in here racing around. He didn’t mind being alone. Rick and Molly didn’t have any extra change to spare, so the fat kid was handy to run errands for two bits or a dime. One thing he did got on my nerves a little bit. If he’d run an errand over to the grocery store, if he had enough money, he liked to buy himself one of those cans that squirt out whip cream or icing or chocolate for the top of a cake, and he’d go walking past, happy as a fat clam, squirting sweet goo straight into his mouth. It’s hard for grandparents to bring up a kid, but Howie was just about the only kin they had left in this half of the country. There was a married daughter in Oregon with family, but nobody left back in Ohio. Terrible thing happened. Rick and Molly couldn’t talk about it without choking all up over it. Howie was the middle one of three kids of Rick and Molly’s son and his wife, and they had a little cabin on a lake where they went summers. There was a roach problem, and apparently young Mrs. Brindle forgot over the winter what container she’d put the poison in, because she used it in cooking, and the only reason the fat kid didn’t die in the night too was because she’d fixed something he didn’t like much and he ate only a little. Maybe that was why the fat kid wasn’t like the other kids, the way he could fool around all alone and be perfectly happy. There were some here said they missed little odds and ends of things, change and postage stamps and candy, but the truth of it, the people around here are always missing things, with or without Howie Brindle around. They just forget where they put them last. I’m taking one hell of a time getting around to when Rick and Molly Brindle left. It was… four years and four days ago. I can remember because it was the day after Christmas: Night of the twenty-sixth, twelve minutes past two in the morning, there was the goddamnedest WHOOMP you ever heard, and then clang, bang, tankle, ding as big pieces and little pieces of that old trailer came falling back down into the park, landing on other trailers and cars and all. It nudged three trailers off their blocks close by. It killed old Bernie Woodruff. He hopped out of bed and started running up and down the road, whooping, and finally just fell on his face. Heart attack. And it sure killed Rick and Molly. They never knew what hit them. The way it was reconstructed, they got new bottle gas delivered the day after Christmas, and there was a cracked fitting in the copper tubing right where it come through the trailer wall. The pressure of the new tank opened that fitting a little, a slow leak. Propane is heavier than air. So in the night it filled the trailer up like a faucet turned on slow, filling a bathtub. When it was full up to this high, it got up to the little pilot light on the counter-top gas range, and that’s all she wrote. Wasn’t one piece of side wall standing. We had a big switch to electric around here. Real big. If you squint through the bushes, you can see a big white job with blue trim past those cabbage palms. That’s number one-oh-eight, and from coming to going, they lived there just about ten years, a little over.”

“Lucky for Howie he wasn’t home.”

“He was home up until noon on the twenty-sixth, and then the friends he was expecting came and

John D. MacDonald

picked him up and they all went off back up to Gainesville, because that year they had some kind of bowl game going on New Year’s Day, and there was final practice. Howie never got to play. Maybe he could have, but that boy was just too stunned. It took the heart right out of him. It was pitiful the way he walked around here like walking in his sleep. Everybody tried to do for him, but there wasn’t much of anything to do except bury what was left. Never have seen him since. He never came back here at all, and nobody would blame him for that. That boy is as alone in the world as anybody can get.“

T. K. Lumley backed his golden chair up and ran it forward again at an angle; chasing the sunshine. He grimaced and said, “We got all the kinds of dying around here anybody can ever hope to use. We got the cancer, coronaries, strokes, pneumonia, the emphysema. Gobbles us up, one by one, and the new ones move in getting ready for their turn. A good woman in this park could use up all her days cooking up a covered dish and toting to wherever somebody died. So when somebody goes violent, the way Rick and Molly went, it’s a strange feeling. Death in the midst of death. Like when C. Jason Barndollar fell off the pier and drownded. Or when Lucy McBee was setting at a window table in the Sears restaurant and some old tourist stepped on the gas pedal instead of the brake and leapt his Dodge through the window and killed her right there, eating shortcake. I keep a log of the coming and going. A history. But I don’t know who in hell will ever care one way or the other. Every day people give less of a damn about the day before. Nobody wants to even listen to anything. You are a real good listener, young fellow, and I want to tell you I appreciate it. And it’s keeping me from what I have to do and hate even thinking about, which is I got to roll around the side there, where my neighbor fixed me up a bar where I can hang on and stand up and take baby steps. It hurts like the fires of hell, but it’s the only way on God’s earth I’m going to get to stroll into the office of that doctor and tell him how goddamn little he knows vout how much it takes to kill T. K Lumley.”

I went back to the airport and turned in the pink car, found Coop, and took him upstairs in the terminal to buy him some lunch.

“I showed them the stuff on the BD-5 that just come out,” he said. “A lot of them are going to send out to Kansas for the poop. Forty-one hundred and fifty-five parts for twenty-six hundred bucks, including the forty-horse engine. Single-place, thirteen feet long, twenty-one-foot wingspan, cruise at a hundred and eighty-seven, weighs three hundred and twenty pounds, a thousand-mile range. Are you listening?”

“I guess not. Sorry.”

“Did you get some bad news?”

“We can skip Gainesville. All I would find out there would be more of the same. And I’ve hit my gag limit.”

“If I built me a BD-5, I wouldn’t have any room to take anybody anywhere.”

“What?”

“Oh, forget it. I didn’t say anything.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Once we get off the ground, you’ll start to feel better. Up in the air, everything looks better.”

Fourteen

LATE THAT afternoon, Meyer sat brooding in the chair placed at an angle to the window. I sat in the straight chair on the other side of the bed, waiting for Meyer to digest the lumps of information I had brought him.

“I would guess,” he said, finally, “that your Officer Stanley Shay was off at some other college or off in the service when Howard was orphaned for the second time.”

“Or he would have mentioned what happened to the grandparents. Right. I went through that equation.”

“Had we but the two disasters, the poisoning and the explosion, and knew nothing else about Howie Brindle except the impression he made upon us before they got married, we would label him a person luck frowned upon, and marvel at the adjustment he has made.”

“And wonder why he never mentioned the disasters?”

“Too painful to mention. Or maybe even a kind of traumatic semi-amnesia. We’d make excuses for him. Even right now, we have no proof of anything. Only a chain of incidents so long and so consistent that our life experience tells us he is an amiable maniac. Both of the incidents involving family fit what we discussed before, Travis. An almost casual Impulse. Irritation plus opportunity plus slyness, plus a total absence of human warmth and feeling. Maybe his parents had put him on a diet because he was too fat. Maybe his siblings had everything they wanted to eat. So put the powder from one container into the other container, and eat just a little bit. God knows how the grandparents managed to irritate him. I would guess that he didn’t know, or didn’t even really care very much whether the act of loosening or cracking a fitting on the gas line would be lethal. They could smell it and have to go to a lot of trouble and worry to get it fixed. It could start a fire which they might flee from. I would guess that he has often booby-trapped the environment and left, not knowing what the results, if any, would be. The act of laying the trap would give him the satisfaction he needed. A parallel would be writ!ng bad words with spray paint on the wall of a business which you believe overcharged you. Letting air out of tires.”

“This has to be going somewhere.”

“Of course. It just points up how different the current situation is. Let me put it in terms of an equation. H is for Howie. V is for victim. O is for opportunity. M is for motive, even though it is only a very casual and unimportant motive. D is for death. And so, time and again, we have H + O + M = V + D. Number the victims. V sub 1, V sub 2, V sub 3, up to God only knows what score. Maybe Linda Lewellen Brindle is V sub 20. Follow? Good. Now let us examine what is happening to the equation. It is stalled, short of completion. Is there any change in the values of our symbols? Howie remains the same, I would say. Opportunity has a far higher value than ever before with anyone. Certainly, as regards motive, she has given him cause to be very irritated with her, many times. As regards the D for death, we have two occasions where he acted it out but stopped short, causing her to fall overboard but then rescuing her, and shooting a rifle at her head but intentionally missing her. Can we say that were she to disappear at sea, the subsequent notoriety would unmask him as a killer? It might, of course, but I don’t think his mind would work that way. So we have to put a new factor on the left side of the equation, something or someone which has changed his pattern insofar as Pidge is concerned. Call that factor X. And I believe the right side of the equation has become less precise and less simple. There is a solution other than D, possibly. L for lunacy? Such an end result requires far more complex planning, making us even more sure of the X factor on the left.”

“Go shake up Tom Collier, which is what you started to tell me when you fell asleep last night.”

“Did -I?”

You could have said it again, instead of all this formula and equation stuff. Instead of giving your brain to science, I think I’ll have it dipped in ferrocement and use it for a doorstop.“

“If you underestimate Tom Collier, I’ll be the one trying to decide what to do with your head.”

“So give me an approach.”

“I don’t think you can trick him. I don’t know if you can scare him. He is a tough-minded man. I would assume that the trust officer, the man I liked, Lawton Hisp, might have some knowledge. You might do better going at Hisp first.”

On Sunday night I phoned the Hisp house and got a girl with a strong Scottish accent who said they were out for the evening and would not be back until late. There was a lot of child-noise in the background. On the morning of the last day of the year, I borrowed Arn Yates’s red Toyota wagon and went to take a look at 10 Tangelo Way, home of the Lawton Hisp family. I did not want to take anything as memorable and remarkable as Miss Agnes into the neighborhood.

The house was a little more than I had anticipated, a daringly architected structure, like seven or eight huge boxes of various dimensions, with redwood siding applied diagonally, stacked one box and two boxes tall, as by an indifferent giant child. There were slit windows, horizontal and vertical, and there were railings around terraces on top of the boxes, several outside stairways of heavy timber, planting areas of rough gray stone at ground level. The area at the sides of the house and beyond it were enclosed by a shadow fence of horizontal cypress boards with a vehicle gate at the end of the driveway. It was the sort of house which murmurs a base price of two hundred thousand, and once you get a look at the inside, you can start upping the estimate.

It was not take-home pay from the First Oceanside Bank and Trust Company.

I drifted slowly through the elegant neighborhood and made a selection of a round woman in a purple jump suit, yellow picture hat and red garden gloves, kneeling and digging in a flower bed beside the step and got out and went toward her with my best smile.

“Mrs. Dockerty?” I said, mostly because the little metal sign stuck into the lawn said “The Dockertys.” She sat back on her heels, expression dubious. “Yay-yuss?”

“My name is McGee. I’m not selling anything.”

“That’s a lovely coincidence, because I’m not buying anything.”

“I’m doing an informal survey in regard to a possible ordinance regarding approval of architectural plans for new residences in established neighborhoods.”

“Do you work for the City?”

“The reason I’m making inquiry in this neighborhood is to get honest reactions to the architecture of the Hisp residence. Were you living here when it was built?”

She sprang up, concealing the effort it cost her to be nimble. She looked startled and slightly disconcerted to find that I still towered over her. “Oh, yes, we were here. They moved here… five years ago. You want an honest reaction? I’ll give you an honest reaction. We all thought it was some sort of horrible joke. We tried to find some way to stop it. It looked like some kind of warehouse. It’s enormous. We thought it would hurt property values around here. But… I guess we’ve gotten used to it. And they are a very nice family. It really doesn’t look at all bad to me now. And I haven’t heard people complaining about it in a long time. It even won some awards in magazines.”

“Do you think neighborhoods should be protected against a new residence which is out of keeping with the others already there?”

“I don’t really know. It’s kind of a landmark now. Maybe we’re almost proud of it or something.”

“People who go in for strange architecture often have quite unusual life styles.”

She looked puzzled, and then said. “Oh, you mean like artists and writers and pot parties and so on. Not in this case. Mr. Hisp is a banker. They are… a little different, but I guess that’s because Mrs. Hisp, Charity, has money in her own right, and she has full-time help. And she is a great one for reading and concerts and so on, and going to New York to the galleries. They have four wonderful children. I’m sorry ours are too old for them. I guess the youngest is six and the oldest thirteen or fourteen. I would say that we see them socially… maybe twice a year.”

“Thank you very much for your cooperation, Mrs. Dockerty.”

“Do you want to talk to my husband too?”

“Does he feel the way you do?”

“Yes, but he wouldn’t admit it. He’d tell you he still hates the house and there should be a law against it. But he doesn’t believe that, really. He likes to object to things. I guess that if you have money you can afford to be different. Maybe that’s the best part of having it.”

“From the looks of the house, Mrs. Hisp has it.”

“Oh yes. Her maiden name was Fall. You know the law firm, of course. Fall, Collier, Haspline, and Butts. The senior partner was her grandfather, and I understand that once upon a time he owned four whole miles of ocean beach frontage. Imagine. Four miles!”

“Pretty nice little piece of land. Well, thank you.” As I backed out, she got back to her digging. I drove two miles to a shopping center and called the Hisp residence and got the Scots girl again. No, Mr. Hisp was out. Mrs. Hisp? Just a moment.

She had a young voice and she was panting audibly. “Hello?”

“Hi. I wanted to find out when Lawton would be home. Have you been running?”

“We’ve been trampolining. Who is this?”

“My name is McGee. Travis McGee.”

“Is this some sort of business thing? Today is a holiday, you know, and I just hate to have him use his holidays to…”

“It is a business matter; and it is a very serious business matter, and it is the kind that neither he nor I would care to discuss at the bank.”

“There isn’t anything he can’t discuss at the bank! What are you trying to say?”

“Mrs. Hisp, I can imagine that there were some matters which came up that old Jonathan Fall in years past preferred not to discuss in his office, and I do not imagine your grandmother knew much about those matters, do you?”

“Who are you? Do I know you?”

“I can’t recall ever meeting you.”

“You make it sound as if my husband was involved in… ”

“Is he due back soon?”

“He just went to buy… on an errand. He’ll be back any minute.”

“I’ll come right out. I think I owe Hisp the courtesy of listening to what he has to say before I go to the U.S. Attorney.”

I could have made it in five minutes. But forty minutes gave them more stewing time, more time for discussion. Lawton Hisp answered the door himself. He was an inch or so over six feet tall. Narrow head, a big beak of a nose, a thick and glossy and neatly tended squirrel-color mustache. I put him at about thirty-five years old, minimum. Hair darker than the mustache, but just as thick and glossy. Long chin and a long neck, prominent Adam’s apple, sloping shoulders. He wore big glasses with a faint amber tint. He wore shorts, sandals and a yellow sport shirt open at the neck. The shape of his head and the long neck gave him a look of frailty. But the bare legs were sturdy, brown and muscular. The chest was deep, and the arms looked sinewy and useful.

Even before I gave him my name I saw that he was right on the edge of losing control. He said, “You have ten seconds to tell me why I ought to let you come into my home.”

“Ten seconds? So I’ll do it with names. Professor Ted Lewellen. Tom Collier. Howie and Pidge Brindle. Take your time. I’ll come in and talk or I’ll go away. It’s your choice.”

“We manage a trust account for Mrs. Brindle.”

“Else I wouldn’t be here, Lawton baby.”

He looked pained. “Do you purport to represent Mrs. Brindle?”

“No.”

“Because I cannot discuss any aspect of any trust agreement without direct authori… you said no?”

“I said no.”

“I don’t understand. What do you want?”

“I want to talk to you about hanky-panky.”

“You have to be out of your mind, McGee. The estate and the trust were handled exactly as the decedent wished, and there are no problems, at all.”

“So maybe there is some hanky-panky you might not know about. And if you don’t know about it, somebody might want to find out if you were negligent not knowing about it. In other words, hanky-panky can rub off on the bystanders.”

He smoothed each side of the mustache with the ball of his thumb. He looked over my shoulder into remote distances. “Come in, Mr. McGee,” he said.

It was very nice inside those big boxes. They had balconies with doors opening off them. He led me into a tall box and down into an oval conversation pit entirely carpeted in gray shag. The cocktail table that filled the middle of the pit was the biggest oval hunk of slate I have ever seen. There was the sound of children at play, very muted, and some music coming from everywhere, softly.

She came quickly into the room and said, “I am going to sit in on this. You must have some reason for letting him into our home.”

She was a slender, sallow, pretty woman, dark hair pulled tightly back and locked in place. White slacks, black turtleneck, no makeup except pale lipstick. No jewels. A general air of neurotic sensitivity. “Mr. McGee, I would like to-”

“My God, Lawton, you don’t have to do an introduction. He knows who I am, and he told me his name is Travis McGee. This is not a social situation. It’s an intrusion.”

“How do you do, Mrs. Hisp,” I said.

“You’re too tolerant with boors, dear,” she told her husband. She sat on the other side of the pit, a dozen feet away. Hisp and I sat a few feet apart, half turned to face each other along the curve of the steep padded step.

“I have to know relationships,” Hisp said.

“I was friendly with Ted Lewellen. I went on one of his excursions with him. You remember Meyer, who came to see you with authority from Pidge to find out from you the status of her father’s affairs?”

“Yes. I do remember him. A most acute interrogator.”

“He is my best friend. I know Pidge well. I saw her in Hawaii in early December.”

“You did! I sent funds to her there. We’d been holding them in an interest-bearing account because she’d been out of touch. She didn’t want the entire accumulation. Just a few-”

“Who are these people you’re talking about?” Charity asked.

Lawton Hisp’s neck seemed to grow longer. “My dear, you are welcome to sit in on this discussion, but in the interest of saving time, I believe you can wait until Mr. McGee is gone. Then I will answer any questions you may have.”

He kept staring at her until she nodded agreement. He turned back to me. “So you are acting as a friend. You will have to explain to me exactly what you mean by hanky-panky.”

“Ted Lewellen conducted original research to unearth documents regarding the location of sunken ships. As a result of the several salvage projects he undertook he was able to leave a handsome motor sailer and almost a million dollars’ net estate to his daughter. His daughter knew, and I knew, and Meyer knew, and another mutual friend knew that Ted had eight or nine more projects. He was getting geared up to head out on one when he was killed in the rain in traffic.”

A lot of rigidity seemed to go out of Lawton Hisp. “Oh, that again. I can assure you that a most careful search was made by Mr. Collier and by me. We couldn’t find any trace of his research records.”

“Did you decide they didn’t exist?”

“How do you mean that?”

“You must have had long conferences with Dr. Lewellen when he was setting up the trust for his daughter.”

“Of course!”

“He would have had to tell you where the money came from and where future money would come from.”

“I knew what line of work he was in, of course.”

“Could he tap Pidge’s trust fund if he went broke?”

“No. There was no way he could touch it.”

“Wouldn’t a banker think that sunken treasure is an iffy way of life?”

“It seemed very intriguing.”

“Here is the question that the U.S. Attorney can ask the Federal Grand Jury Mr. Hisp. The reasoning seems clear to me. He will say, ‘You have heard testimony to the effect that Mr. Hisp was advised by three different people on three separate occasions that Lewellen’s research records were missing and that they were of great value, and very probably unique. Does it not seem odd to you that Mr. Hisp, aside from one routine search of the vessel Trepid, made no effort to find these records, nor did he report their loss to the authorities?’”

He frowned. “Almost anything can be made to look suspicious and ugly. It depends on how you phrase it.”

“Then you phrase it for me.”

“All I can say is that the estate has been and is being handled according to the specific instructions of the decedent.”

“So Professor Ted left instructions about the dream book?”

“If I am ever going to be questioned about this, which I doubt, it is going to be by proper authority, Mr. McGee.”

“You will be, friend. You will be.”

He stood up. Dismissal time. “I guess we will just have to wait until it happens, won’t we?”

“It’s going to be triggered by Tom Collier. He tried to peddle the dream book to the wrong person. For a half interest.”

He tilted toward me like an unsteady stork. Something happened to his face, and his mustache looked as if it had been borrowed and pasted on. “Wouldn’t!” he said in a gargly voice. “We agreed…”

“You two agreed to some hanky-panky.”

“No!”

“Then you better tell me, or I’m going to blow you out of the water.”

“You better tell both of us.” Charity said.

He sat down. “Shut up, dear,” he said.

“We’re both listening,” I said.

He took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his big nose. “I have to explain to you some elemental facts of life as regards tax regulations. Tom Collier, Lewellen and I had several conferences on how best to handle the research information for estate purposes. There were seven more projects. He said each one represented a very good chance of recovery. He said they would represent from ten to fourteen years of salvage work, and would probably yield between two and five million dollars on a conservative basis, or eight to fifteen if his luck was good. Now then, had all the material for those projects been included in the estate, it would have been necessary to value them for estate purposes. There are no precedents. He died at just the wrong moment. Collier and I were trying to work out some sort of contingency sale arrangement, so that we would have a specific value, and a cash flow in that same amount. Suppose the research project papers had been listed and suppose the IRS had valued them at four million dollars and we had negotiated them down to two million. Can you see what the estate taxes would have done? They would have cleaned out the cash we needed on hand in order to leave the daughter what he wanted to leave her. And there was always the chance that the last seven projects would have been seven failures. There was no guarantee that they would ever pay off.”

“Where was this stuff when Ted died?”

“Tom had the originals. He still has them. I have Xerox copies of all the pages and photocopies of all the charts and maps and overlays. As I said, we were trying to work it out when Ted was killed.”

“His will left everything to Pidge.”

“Yes.”

“So she is the rightful owner.”

“I certainly have never had any intention of depriving-”

“Then how come, if you knew of the existence of those records, you didn’t, as coexecutor, put them in the inventory, dammit!”

“I told you! It could have bled all the liquid assets out of the estate to pay taxes on something that might turn out to have no value at all.”

“And your concern for the daughter of your trust customer was so great that you decided to risk concealing specific assets from the IRS, that you signed false statements when you certified as to the completeness of your accounting?”

“Well, it seemed…” He recrossed his legs. “When you put it that way…” He stood up and looked around as if he had forgotten whose house he was in. “The way it seemed to us…”

“What in God’s name were you two clowns going to do with Ted’s future projects?”

“Well… Tom said that it would perhaps be best to wait and see how well the marriage thing worked out for Pidge. He said she had a certain amount of… instability. And maybe, if the marriage broke up, it would be good therapy for her to… to sort of reconstruct her father’s plans, and then maybe on that basis, Tom could get a little investment group together to back an expedition.”

“To reconstruct from memory?”

“There could be important things that might be left out of the research materials, Tom said. We’d have no way of knowing. We weren’t competent to judge.”

“And you were going to be asked aboard that little investment group, right?”

“There was… that implication.”

“You two are the perfect friends for a girl who has just lost her father. She needed friends like you.”

He stepped up out of the pit. “Damn you!” he yelled. “You just don’t know. You don’t know how… how a man can get boxed.”

“And how did you get boxed, Brother Hisp?”

“I was going to list those records. I insisted on it. It’s a felony to conceal assets on any pretext. He told me I shouldn’t make any hasty decisions. And… he is a director of the bank. He said we had to have a talk. We talked in his office, after the secretaries had gone home. He had a file of documents about six years old. Not a thick file. About fifteen transactions that originated in my department. It was back when new issues of convertible debentures were coming out and selling in the aftermarket at big premiums. At first the documents looked okay to me. Then I figured out what had happened. Gary Lindner had been ordering new issues from a brokerage house on a pay-on-delivery basis. Delivery was a month to six weeks after the issue came out. That way he was able to order a sale of debentures and get the money before they ever arrived and he had to pay for them. A floor man was in collusion with Gary. He was holding the payment in a special cash account, and when the debentures would arrive, Gary would grab them and deliver them to the brokerage house for proper transfer to the new buyer, and they would be paid for out of the cash account. Then Gary would apparently pull all copies out of bank records. Mr. Collier’s file was made up of photocopies of the brokerage-house records of each transaction, and my okay and initials were on the bottom right corner of every order.”

“How could you be so damned stupid?” Charity yelled.

“Stupid? We were ordering those same issues for our trust accounts based on our investment advisory services, taking as many as we could get. Gary Lindner was negotiating a lot of purchases. I had to initial the orders. Most of them were legitimate. I can’t be expected to remember all the TA numbers in the bank. These were fake.”

“How much was involved?” I asked.

“Not an awful lot. Maybe about a thousand dollars a transaction, or a little more. Fifteen to seventeen thousand over a period of a year.” He stopped pacing back and forth behind me and came and sat down once again, sighing and slumping.

“Where’s Lindner working now? Still with you?”

“No. He got out of banking. He works for GeriCare International. It’s something about hospitals, rest homes, insurance programs, and a line of special medications and diet foods.”

“Did you get in touch with him about all this?”

“There didn’t seem to be much point in it.”

“What point was Tom Collier making?”

“He explained that it was possible that the National Association of Security Dealers might get around to auditing the local brokerage-office records regarding that period when there were a lot of abuses of the new-issue situation, and if that happened there wasn’t much he could do for me. He said they would relay all findings to the FDIC, which in turn would notify the U.S. Attorney’s office that there was reason to believe that I had been involved in a violation of the criminal code, and they would ask the FBI to investigate and report, and very probably they would indict.”

“Do they indict people for stupidity?” Charity asked.

“Just tell me how I explain that I did not know anything was going on, that I didn’t realize Gary was using the bank’s buying clout to sweeten his own income?”

“How did Collier pressure you?” I asked.

“He said that he believed that there was a way, if he moved slowly and carefully, to get the original orders out of the dead files at the brokerage office and have someone who owed him a favor make photocopies of the originals with my initials masked, and put the copies into the file and destroy the originals. He said that for the good of the bank, and to save me and my family from the kind of publicity an indictment would bring, regardless of my decision on whether or not to let the Feds clean out all the liquid assets in the Lewellen girl’s inheritance, he would go ahead and try to erase all traces of my involvement in the debenture swindle.”

“Involvement?” Charity said.

“I should have checked every one.”

“Do they get that picky?” she asked.

I nodded at her. “Yes. They get very, very picky. Collier was giving your husband a good reading.”

Lawton Hisp said in a tired voice, “So I told him that he was asking me to perform a fraudulent act in leaving any tangible asset off the estate inventory. He said that as coexecutor and as the attorney of record, he would of course certify my inventory as being full and complete to the best of his knowledge. There were no threats, really. But in the end I left it off.”

“And now that bastard owns you!” Charity said.

“Please, dear.”

She jumped up. “Oh, boy. Mister Rectitude himself. The soul of honor and duty. I never could stand Tom Collier. Jesus, I don’t even mind you turning tricky as much as I mind you being so damn dumb! Don’t you see that Collier can cut you and that girl out of any part of this, and you can’t do a thing? Don’t you even see that this McGee person can say jump, and you’ll have to ask him how high? Wow. You talked the good game of piety until you got into your first jam, and then you ducked your head and scuttled into a hole. I-I-I thought you were r-real!”

“Shut your damned mouth!” he roared.

I got up and walked out. I did not go on tiptoe. I could have been leaving on fire, hammering a gong and shooting off cherry bombs without slowing the argument a bit.

I backed out onto the street and paused for a moment and looked at that house again. It looked exactly the same, but it had fallen down. Those big boxes were emptier than ever before. There was no good way he could mend it. She knew and he knew and I knew that he should have gone directly from his talk with Collier to the authorities and explained what he was being asked to do and why. He shouldn’t even have paused to pick up a personal lawyer to sit in. Integrity is not a conditional word. It doesn’t blow in the wind or change with the weather. It is your inner image of yourself, and if you look in there and see a man who won’t cheat, then you know he never will. Integrity is not a search for the rewards for integrity. Maybe all you ever get for it is the largest kick in the ass the world can provide. It is not supposed to be a productive asset. Crime pays a lot better. I can bend my own rules way, way over, but there is a place where I finally stop bending them. I can recognize the feeling. I’ve been there a lot of times.

From now on, Lawton Hisp was not going to have a very nice life. They might never come after him, but it just wasn’t going to be very joyous from now on.

Happy New Year, Mister Hisp.

Fifteen

I COULDN’T get a line on Tom Collier. His office did not answer. I finally found somebody who knew his unlisted home phone. I tried that and got a woman with a booze-blurred voice.

“Now what’n hell would he be doing here?”

“Mrs. Collier?”

“Uh-uh. Mizzzzz. We have got a legal separation, thank you so much. Say, you want a nice holiday drink?”

“I’ve got to find Tom.”

“Baby, if you are a client, forget it. He’s too busy with his new image. Forty-two years old and I guess what hit him was some kind of change of life. You know? Oh, we had these plans. We remembered names and smiled at everybody. Senator Collier? Governor Collier? Why not? Onward and upward, hand in hand. Why’m I telling you my troubles? Well, two reasons. I have a logical mind: I look for the reasons. One, you’ve got a nice sympathetic voice. Two, I am slightly smashed. Three, it’s the end of another goddamn year. Four, it is very empty around here. Did I say two reasons? Make it four. Or ten. I can keep going. Sure you don’t want a drink? I am known far and wide as a pretty goodlooking broad in my own right.”

“I know. From pictures in the newspapers. But first I have to talk to Tom.”

“Hah! There is an obligation duly stated in there somewhere. First. The implication is there will be secondly. The address is fifty-one Dolphin Lane. Are you a spindly little old man with a nice voice, McGraw?”

“McGee. I’m a precocious twelve-year-old, Nancy.”

“Y’even know my name! What you do to find Tom, you look for Mister Swinger. You look for a two-hundred-dollar hairpiece, and clothes for a twenty-five-year-old musician, and diet and exercise and vitamins and hormones and suntan, and his private little brownie pack of girls.”

“Okay. Where should I look first?”

“Let me see. He’d either be having a party at the dock aboard the Strawberry Tort…”

“That’s his? I’ve seen it. Somewhere up the line, isn’t it?”

“At the Atlantic Club in Pompano Beach, at the club marina. Or he’ll be at his so-called horse ranch-about halfway to Andytown on the right, there’s a bridge across the New River Canal, private, and the sign hasn’t any name on it. It’s two horseshoes sort of entwined. He’s got big plans out there, some kind of executive club with conference rooms, airstrip, apartments and, of course, girls. Where the hell do all the girls come from, McGraw? Somewhere they are stamping them out of plastic, some gigantic production line, programmed to roll over onto their little backs for all the Tom Colliers in the world. Look, give him a message for me. Tell him Nancy is doing just fine. Absolutely, totally fine.”

I phoned the Atlantic Club and got the dockmaster. I said I didn’t know if Mr. Collier wanted the Applicator delivered to the boat or the ranch. He told me it was probably the ranch, because the boat had been hauled to get some bottom work done.

I went out State Road 84 and started looking before I got to the estimated halfway point. It was another two miles to the horseshoe sigh, big golden shoes on a big black shield. The bridge was a new timber bridge, very narrow, and the road beyond was freshly graded gravel. Before it turned sharply past a screen of wetlands brush, there was a sign which no one could fail to see.

PRIVATE PRIVATE PRIVATE

No trespassing. No hiking. No hunting. No camping. No soliciting. No deliveries.

No visiting of any kind except by special amp; specific invitation.

VIOLATORS will be subject to immediate citizen’s arrest amp; prosecution.

It made you feel warm and welcome. I went rolling along, thinking of the various things I could tell the guard I expected to find. It was a long way back in. Birds burst up out of cover. I think I went at least a mile and a half, winding to stay on high ground where less gravel fill was needed to build the road. And then I emerged from the scrub-country brush and palmetto thickets and oak hammocks, and there was a white fence on my right. Four horses stared over the fence at me, snorted and wheeled, and went pounding down their side of the fence line. It was apparently a familiar game. Race the funny car and beat the funny man. In the distance I could see a confusing cluster of buildings.

I let the horses win by just enough to let them know they had to work at it. Beyond their fence corner was an asphalt landing strip with a wind sock, a small hangar, six brightly colored little airplanes tied down to the ring bolts, and another one coming in, teetering on the wind. Beyond the hangar the road curved and I saw thirty or so vehicles. About half of them were four-wheel drive. And half the remainder were sports cars.

It was half after four, and I could hear the sounds of party time. I parked Miss Agnes between a Toyota Land Cruiser and an ancient jeep with a big winch on the front, mud-caked up to its ears. I followed the sounds of party. The music was very loud, and it wasn’t anything anybody was ever going to be able to whistle. The party was taking place in and around an indoor-outdoor swimming pool. Bright canvas was laced to framework made of pipe to take the sting out of the December breezes. And there were some big electric heating units turned on, glowing toward the pool from atop poles ten feet tall. Eighty to a hundred guests, maybe. There were some earnest young men in ranch gear taking care of the two little bars, and the long table where hot food was apparently in continuous supply.

A six-foot lady, startlingly endowed, pushed a drink into my hands and said, “You better like it,. buster. I spend valuable time getting it made zactly the way he likes them, and I turn around and the son of a bitch has disappeared. Don’t just stand there! Drink it, you silly clutz!”

Before I could tell her it was a splendidly dry martini, she had prowled away, snapping her head from side to side, looking for the gin gourmet. I moved further into the fringes of party-land and looked around. It was happening in my side yard, so I could pick out some faces. Two or three of the hustlers with the highest going rate on the beach, in season. A baroness who sang here and there, badly. A couple of girls from the water-ski school. The others looked like college girls, beach bunnies, store clerks and secretaries. The men, outnumbered about two to one, were harder to identify. There was that certain burnished, heads-up arrogance which- spoke of gold credit cards, and the authority to move people around, and the pleasures of the predatory life. They were men who would keep their lawyers busy and their doctors concerned.

I finally spotted Tom Collier, Genial Host. He was in a lime yellow jump suit with two entwined horseshoes in black on the breast pocket. He was coming out of the house, guffawing at something a little blond gem was whispering to him as she clung to his arm with both hands. As he listened, he made a slow sweep of his party, and the appraisal swept past me and hesitated and swept back and came to close focus. I nodded and smiled. He smiled and waved.

It had not been easy to recognize him. He had taken on the coloration of the group. He could have been selling generators in Sao Paulo for Swiss francs he was going to fly to Hong Kong to buy a shipment of motorbikes made in Taiwan. Or he could have been putting together a syndication deal on a dozen old television serials. Or greasing a bill through the state legislature which would improve the profits for his clients. Or supplying the tail at his own party.

I am never quite certain exactly when I make a decision about how to open people up wide as a Baptist Bible. Different strokes for different folks, they used to say. It is a combination of hunch and instinct. Here was a very smart, tough, ballsy fellow right at the peak of his power and glory. He had shed the dull old ways, and he was living big and living rich. He was tasting it all, and so far he loved it.

I was going to have to run a bluff, and a very good one, because this man had seen them all. He had the ruddy, fleshy face of the sensualist, and the air of the search for gratification that has become the reason for living. In this sense, he had a lot to lose. No more low bows and special tables. No more big hello °from celebrities. No more invitations to come in on cute little deals and payoffs. And that, perhaps, is the vulnerability of the corrupt, the terrible fear of losing the fruits of corruption. To put it another way-to be asked to leave the party.

But I knew he was the X in Meyer’s strange formula, the added factor on the left which had changed the outcome on the right-or delayed it.

I flipped through a half-dozen ways of cutting him out of his happy holiday pack, made a choice, and moved on an interception course. When I caught his eye I made that useful Latin-American sign which asks for a few moments of your time, a thumb and first finger held a half inch apart. He unwound the little blond beauty from his arm, patted her on the rear, and sent her off toward the food. He moved aside, pulling me over with a head gesture.

“I’ve seen you, but where?” he said.

“Here and there: Not often. Not to talk to. The name is McGee.”

He did a good job at covering any impact. I could not be sure I had seen any. But it was obvious that Mansfield Hall would have used my name when he had… haw… phoned Collier about my pending visit. And because he had some association of the name McGee with Professor Ted and his daughter, he had immediately turned off any negotiation with Seven Seas. The genuinely sly man will not rationalize any coincidence. Instead, he’ll slam doors.

“McGee? McGee. Is it supposed to ring a bell?”

“Not really. I’ve got something out in the car. Frank Hayes told me to show it to you.”

“Frank Hayes?”

“I didn’t know you were having a party. I tried the Atlantic Club first. Some tall girl handed me this drink because she couldn’t find the man she made if for.”

“On the last day of the year I’ll buy anybody a drink, McGee. Go get whatever it is this man I don’t know thinks I ought to see.”

“You’ve got to be kidding!”

“Kidding? I don’t know any Frank Hayes.”

“I mean about bringing it in. I lifted it into the pickup by myself, but I couldn’t carry it more than ten feet without taking a rest. It was three hundred feet deep. I don’t see how they got it up into a boat without busting it. Look, all I want is that when Frank Hayes asks me, did Collier see it, I can say yes, he saw it. That’s my only part in this.”

There is something about a pickup truck which disavows guile, which gives a commonplace, workmanlike flavor to any transaction. Night had come quickly. He looked off toward the tops of pine trees, black against the last gray of the sky. The pool lights were on. His nostrils widened, as if he hoped to smell gold adrift on the night breeze.

“Okay. Let’s go take a look. What is it anyway?”

“Tell you the truth, I’ll be damned if I know. You’d have to ask Frank.”

“How do I ask him if I don’t know him?”

“I’d guess he’ll get hold of you.”

We went through the night to where all the cars were parked.

“Some pickup,” he said. I was a half step behind him as he reached it. He peered into the bed. In what light was left, all he could see was the big tool chest that was spot-welded against the front end of the bed. I moved to where the light was perfect for me, and I took my right fist back, right shoulder turned away from him, both heels rooted to the ground, the fist six inches from my ear, and aimed at the sky.

Yes, Virginia, there is a button. As in right on the button. If you have a dimple in your chin, the button is an inch and a half east or west of said dimple, along the jaw shelf, lower jaw. That particular area seems to give the maximum jolt to the brainpan. You can knock someone out by hitting him right between the eyes, but the blow requires much more force. The most effective stroke is slightly downward, tending to knock the jaw open at the instant of impact, thus saving the problem of a collapsed knuckle. When striking someone, strike at an imaginary target well beyond the point of probable impact. Then you will not draw the punch at the last microsecond, muffling the blow.

My hand was still sore from hitting Frank Hayes on the side of the head, but the swelling was gone. Collier was aware of where I was standing, and I knew he would turn his head and direct a question at me. As I saw the first movement of his head, I started the punch at grass level. It came up through the muscles of thigh and behind, up the back, and reached the hand last of all. It resembles the old game of snap-the-whip, played by the foolhardy young on roller skates or ice skates. The fist is the last person at the end of the whip. The fist exploded down onto the turning jaw, knuckles nicely aligned along the shelf of bone. It blew his mouth open. He said, “Uhhh!” and dropped facedown so close to me his forehead hit the toe of my left shoe, and it felt as if I had dropped a bowling ball on it.

Two cars were coming to the party. The headlights swept across me. They parked where they would not pass close to me on their way to the fun and games. They did some whooping and doorchunking. When they were gone I listened to party sounds. There was another sound much too close, and I had a moment of alarm before I identified it. It was coming from an all-white Continental not more than fifteen feet from me. It was angled away from me, which put me back off the stern port quarter, in its blind spot. It was a measured phlumph, of enough weight and purpose to rock the white success symbol on its mushy springing. Once identified, I realized that there were two blind spots operating to hide me. A woman made a cooing sound, which rose to a question at the end and was answered in rumbling, effortful grunting. The phlumph cycle accelerated, and I squatted and slid my arms all the way under Tom Collier, kept my back straight as I stood up, and used the momentum to hoist him up over the high side of the pickup bed, giving him a half roll as he fell onto the metal floor.

I had seen a side road where the horse fence started, so I drove down there and went a hundred feet along the road and stopped, with my lights off. I climbed into the back. Collier was still slack. I‘ fingered his jaw; nothing felt broken. I unlocked the tool chest and found a pencil flash in the top tray and used it to locate my roll of one-inch filament tape, on the handy dispenser. Better than a fivehundred-pound breaking strength. I shoved his short sleeves out of the way and took a turn around his left arm just below the elbow, then pulled his two arms together, the insides of the forearms pressing against each other. I took the tape around the two arms just below the elbows four times and nipped it off with the dispenser trigger. I took three turns around his ankles and nipped it off.

When you think back, you can remember how many melodramas you have watched where the captive worked his hands loose from the ropes, or went hippity-hop to where they keep the kitchen knives, or broke a bottle or a light bulb and sawed on the broken glass, or even found some way to burn himself free.

Too bad. All obsolete. Try the filament tape. Trust a friend. Or truss one. No way to get teeth or fingers anywhere near it, or get the hands anywhere near the ankles. No way to stand up, or keep your balance if you do. No knots to learn. And I had him secure thirty seconds after I found my tape. I threw a tarp over him and shoved him forward where the wind wouldn’t catch the tarp. Then I went looking for a place. I had the feeling I had seen a canalbank road heading left and right just as I Came off his bridge onto the ranch side.

It was there. I took it slow. We’d had a dry December. I headed east, parallel to the highway, over there on the other side of the canal. After I had begun to wonder if I would ever find a place to turn around, I came to a hurricane-wire fence with a padlocked vehicle gate in it and enough room to turn around. The ground was firm along the fence line. I walked it first, and then drove back away from the highway and the canal for two hundred yards or so.

I dropped the tailgate and reached in and pulled him out to where I could get hold of him and lift him. There were little resistances in his body that told me he was doing the shrewd thing and playing possum. I sat him up, put a shoulder into the middle of him, and hoisted him over the shoulder, my right arm around his meaty thighs, his head and arms dangling down my back.

Using the pencil flashlight, I walked into the edge of the brush and found a mounded area of coarse grass, sand, shell and limestone, probably a place where some small current in the sea had pushed up a window of sea bottom when mankind was only an unborn threat to the distant future.

I carried him with as much of an effect of effortlessness as I could manage. Standing straight, I unclasped my arm from around his thighs and rolled him off my shoulder. I felt him tense up as he went off. He hit without a sound other than the thick thud of impact. That is another way to tell. When a person is unconscious, a jolt like that will rasp the air through the slack throat with an easily audible noise.

I left him in the dark and went back to the toolbox and got the short-handled spade and also a couple of Coolite sticks. I like to keep them on board the Flush and in the car. You peel the wrappers off, and bend until they make a little snapping sound, and then shake them to mix the chemicals. They provide a good strong light for three hours, with no trace of heat. It is a white light with a slight greenish cast to it.

He was on his right side with his back toward palmettos. I activated the Coolite sticks and tossed them onto the ground about ten feet apart. I stood between them and stepped the spade down into the coarse stuff, levered a load loose, heaved it to the side. It was easier than I expected. Once I was through the top crust, the consistency was predictable, and I was able to get into a good digging rhythm. When I worked my way around to where I could look at him without appearing to, I could see little catchlights against the wetness of his eyes and knew he was watching me.

I made it six feet long and about three feet wide. My hands began to tingle in a few spots, warning of where the blisters would puff up if I kept going much longer. By then I was almost down to my hip pockets. I had begun to get a sucking sound when

I pried the bottom loose. I put the light on the bottom and saw the water beginning to seep in. I sat on the edge and stood the spade up in my dirt pile and rubbed my hands together and rested for a little while. Then I went over to him and rolled him far enough so I could check the pockets in that jump suit. I found a wallet. I took it over to a Coolite and squatted on my heels as I checked it. Nice wallet. Some kind of fine-grained lizard hide with a grey cast to it. Gold corners. Gold initials, lower case, t.j.c.

American Express Gold Card, Diners, Cat Cay membership, Bunnyworld, the Riviera in Vegas, Atlantic Club, Air Travel Card, Abercrombie amp; Fitch, Shell, Texaco, Exxon and BP Three fifties, four twenties, a pair of tens and a pair of ones. I prodded around in the money section and found another flap and pulled it up and found two five-hundreds and a one-hundred. Thirteen hundred and fifty-two dollars for digging a hole. I put his driver’s license and his cards back into the pretty wallet. They were his identity. They were Tom Collier.

So the symbol was inevitable. I shoved the money into my pocket and I half turned and flipped the wallet into the grave. It hit with a small splat.

“McGee,” he said. Nice tone control. Nice modulation. Good for a speech on the floor, or at the jury rail.

“Sah!” Hard and sharp, the enlisted man’s protective response.

“I am a very good lawyer. You’re going to need one.”

“Not if I think everything out.”

“You’re not thinking. Do you intend to drop me into that hole? If you do, you’re not thinking clearly. I’m worth one hell of a lot more to you than you took out of the wallet.”

I sat on the edge of the hole again, feet dangling inside.“You’re cool about it. I like that. Just take my word, Collier. You have to go into the hole. I won’t put you in live. I’m not some kind of kink. I’ll give you a good one across the nape of the neck with the edge of this spade before I put you into the hole.”

“Why do I have to go in?”

“They have to be looking for you. They’ll figure a man like you would be all set to run at any time. Tricky. If you’re around, they’ll look for somebody else. And they could get lucky and come up with me. Are you sure you have the right person? I’m the acting senior partner in a very reputable law firm. ‘Tricky’ is a strange word.”

“I’ll have to tip them off. It’s too much to put into one phone call. Maybe three calls will be best. Three different phone booths, miles apart. Tomorrow. I’ll be able to say I read it in the morning paper.”

“Read what? About me being missing?”

“They won’t know you’re missing until they come looking for you. Look, it went wrong. I screwed up the detail. It was a good chance and I worked hard on it, but I know when it’s time to cover the tracks and run. It has to be you because you’re the logical one.

“Logical one for what?”

“The one that killed Lawton and Charity Hisp this afternoon.”

“What!”

“We were having such a nice talk, me and Lawton. From time to time I had to encourage him. He’d get over hurting from the last time and get brave again. And, damn it, we were right down to the final item, just how and where he was going to give me his copy of Ted Lewellen’s seven projects, with the maps and overlays.”

“Lewellen?”

“Oh, come on! Do you think I’m that stupid? There’s no ‘tpoint in going on with this.” I reached and plucked the spade out of the dirt pile.

“No, nol That was just a reflex. I’m sorry. Okay. Professor Lewellen. I’m caexecutor of the estate. What about Mr. Hisp?”

I laid the spade across my thighs. “It was just one of those damn-fool things that happen. Bad luck. You know that long skinny neck of his. He took a chance and tried to duck around me and I swung to stop him and the edge of my wrist hit him right on the throat and crushed something in there. He started digging his fingernails into his neck. His face began to get red: He fell down and rolled around and his eyes bugged out. Then he hammered his heels on the rug and died. No doubt about how dead he was. She and I knew it the minute it happened. I nearly lost her. Ran like a deer. I caught her by the nape of the neck in one of those little garden places. Great day for necks. I held her head under the water in one of those reflecting pools. After she stopped buckling, when I let go of her, she stayed right there, facedown on the stones with her head under. She saw me hit Hisp. I knew that if I was going to have any chance at all, she had to be number two.”

“Were you driving that idiotic blue Rolls truck?”

“No. I borrowed a car.”

“Their children were out?”

“Every one.”

“Look. Having my arms like this is beginning to make my shoulders cramp so bad, I can’t think. How about cutting my arms loose?”

“Not one chance, lawyer. Forget it.”

“Well… what time did this happen?”

“Two o’clock. I know you’ve got the original. I know that stuff was in your hands because at the time Ted died, you were trying to work out some way it could be handled in his estate if he died. Okay. Frank Hayes and I were with Ted a few years ago in Mexico, looking for something in the Bay of La Paz. We crapped out. Our big pump quit and the weather began to turn, and before we could get back there, a hurricane changed the bottom so much we’d have to start all over again.”

“And this Frank Hayes is the Hayes of Seven Seas, based at Grand Cayman?”

“Right. We were both lined up to go with Ted on the one he was getting ready to leave on when he was killed. It was going to be rich and easy. He brought me the letter from Mansfield Hall and we agreed it sounded like whoever he represented had hold of Ted’s research. And I knew it belonged to the daughter and that she didn’t have it, and nobody had seen it since he died.”

A couple of tree toads tried their pitch pipes and the whole chorus gradually joined in. Some moths had been attracted to the Coolites. They could land on them without frying, and their wing shapes made big moving shadows.

I knew his mind was spinning, running back and forth and up and down the cage, looking for a way out.

“Mansfield Hall,” he said. The tone was not questioning. It was bitter.

“No,” I said. “He didn’t name you. I figured if somebody was trying to make a deal through Hall to set up a treasure hunt, it had to be Hisp. I got to you through Hisp. In my phone tip I tell the law that you and Hisp defrauded Ted Lewellen’s daughter. I tell them it was your idea. I tell them you owned Hisp on account of knowing how he and a man named Gary Lindner speculated in bonds in the bank’s name six or seven years ago. I tell them you are a director of the bank and you were trying to turn the estate assets into money by secretly making a deal with Seven Seas. I tell them that you and Hisp were fighting about who was going to get what. They’ll really look for you, Collier. They may look a lot of places, but they won’t look in this hole. Sorry, friend. It’s the only way I’m going to get home free. Find something wrong with it.”

“Just one thing wrong. Jesus, this hurts! It keeps me from thinking clearly. Can’t you…”

“No. What’s the one thing wrong?”

“Assume it works. You walk away empty.”

“I’ll be in the clear. I’ll settle for that.”

“Killing the Hisps is going to be very big, McGee. When they can’t find me, it’s going to be more and more important to pin down exactly where I was when last seen. And who I was with. I can make you a better offer. I’ll swear I asked you to the ranch early. You arrived about one o’clock. I’ll turn over all the Lewellen papers to you.”

“And then blow the whistle on me. Who would they believe? Thomas J. Collier, or me? No thanks.”

“But you don’t know how much ammunition you have, man! You know that I betrayed my trust as co-executor of the estate. You know I learned of illegal bond dealings and didn’t report it. You could completely ruin me. They’d pick me apart. Blow the whistle on you? You could even make a pretty good case that I was the one who sent you to beat some sense into Lawton Hisp.”

I thought it over. There is the precise point in the poker game when you have to give the impression of carefully computing the odds. Most people with a bust hand bet too quickly and smile too much. You hesitate a long time before you make your heavy bet into that strong hand across the table.

I got up and tossed the spade aside and went over and picked him up off the ground.

“What are you…”

I carried him to the hole. “Hey! Oh, my God!”

I bent over and swung him over the hole and let go. He landed on his back in three inches of seepage.

“McGee!” he roared, from the darkness.

I chunked the shovel into the dirt pile, picked up a full load, dropped it where I figured the middle of him had to be.

“Wait!” he roared. “Wait!” and then he began yelling. He was trying to make words, but he couldn’t get his mouth closed far enough to make them. He was breaking.

I went over and got one of the Coolites and dropped it into the hole next to his head. I sat on my heels and looked down at him. He stopped roaring.

“I don’t see why I should have to explain all this to you, Collier. You’re just too damned tricky. There’s no way I could trust you to do what you say. I’d worry all the time. I’d wonder if you don’t own somebody on the cops who’d come to pick me up for questioning and blow my brains out of the far side of my head for resisting arrest. You’re too important. You sell people this big successful image called Tom Collier. I almost forgot to give you the message from Nancy. She says to tell you she’s doing just fine without you.”

“Listen! Please listen! I’ll write everything down. Things they can prove. Please get me out of here! Oh; Jesus! You’ve got to be crazy. I can write down… terrible things I’ve done. You’re right. Nobody should ever trust me at all.”

“Ted Lewellen trusted you. Pidge trusted you. How did you expect to get away with making a deal on Lewellen’s research and maps? Big strikes get publicity. She’d remember the name of the sunken vessel, wouldn’t she? Publicity would smoke you out. Then she’d have some questions.”

“Get me out of here!”

“No way.”

“Wait! What did you want to know? About the daughter? She’ll be locked up. Nobody will be paying any attention.”

“Locked up for what?”

“Emotional problems. There’s a history of instability. The deal is I can get appointed guardian. Her husband gets the income from the trust.”

“You made a deal with Howie Brindle?”

“Help me. Please.”

“Want to see how many shovels it takes to cover your head?”

“What do you want?”

“Howie wouldn’t make a deal with you. Even in a hole in the ground, in the last five minutes of your life, you keep on lying. Howie is a wonderful guy. Ask anybody who knows him.”

“Brindle is a bug! Listen, he worked for me. Any lawyer with experience in criminal defense knows that kind of a bug. Five minutes after I started chatting with him about the death of Fred Harron, I knew he’d killed Fred. Maybe he did Lois a favor. That’s beside the point.”

“Howie wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

“Dammit, man, he admitted he killed Fred. He sat in my office and blubbered and moaned and howled and wrung his hands and swore that he hadn’t meant to hurt the doctor, that he was just horsing around, and he’d never hurt anybody before in his whole life. He was good. You could almost believe him. But if he’s true to form, there’s a whole full-strength platoon of bodies stretching back into Brindle’s past. He wasn’t going to admit a thing, not even after I’d trapped him three or four times. Then he began to realize I was going to push for an indictment if he kept lying, and might make a deal if he would admit it. So he admitted it, and it didn’t make him very happy when I played the tape back to him. Not right then, because I think he’d have taken the tape and left me on the office floor. Later, when I could tell him that he was listening to a copy of the original tape. Nobody had ever owned him before. It was very hard for him to get used to knowing that he had to do whatever I told him. I told him to stay in the area and keep in touch. I had a different project in mind for him, but then Ted Lewellen got killed in an accident and it shaped up into a better project. I told him to marry her.”

“You thought he could?”

“The water is getting deeper.”

“So drown a little.”

“My heart is beating too fast. It really is.”

“It’ll get a long long long rest.”

“You’re a bug like Brindle. You’re rotten! You know that? You’ve got a cold heart. Yes, I told him to marry her and he married her. He hung around. He ran her errands, did her chores. He was always there. She was alone. He seems like a nice boy. I told him the cruise was a good idea. Why not? They had the boat and the money. I told him to use any way in the world to make her think she was losing her mind. When people start to think that way, it can happen. They get irrational. They act funny. And once they’re on the inside, you can usually manage to keep them there.”

“You’d say he’s a murderer. Why didn’t you tell him to kill her?”

“She’s worth too much. So there’d be too much publicity, especially about where the money came from. And there might be too many pictures of Brindle in a wire-service pickup, and somebody might show up with some stories out of the past. I warned him that if he killed her, I was going to cook him good, with an apple in his mouth. McGee, I could write the whole thing out for you.”

“Do you think he’s killed her?”

“I don’t know. People like Brindle, they get impatient. They get bored. If he could figure out a way where nobody would question it was an accident, he’d do it. Or suicide while of unsound mind. They’ve conned people ever since they could walk. They think people are uniformly stupid. They think we’re all as empty on the inside as they are. It’s a risk. Either way, I thought she couldn’t raise any questions. Dead or crazy, she’s out of the picture. McGee, it’s worth taking risks for. It could be millions. You won’t get another chance like this. You’ll live small all your life.”

“I guess I will,” I said quietly. “I guess I expect to.”

There he was down in his hole, with water up to his ears. Ted had probably trusted and respected him. Please help me with my problems, Mr. Collier. Help me take care of my girl in case I happen to slide under a truck.

Collier took care of her. He had a jolly sociopath standing by, waiting for an odd job, and then this new opportunity came along. Take care of Ted’s girl. My girl. Give her to good old Howie Brindle.

The white cold light filled the hole, and the moths were down there, fluttering around Tom Collier. He made a strange sound and I looked closer and saw that he was crying. His underlip was protruding and vibrating. Poor Tom. Playtime is ending. All the sweet tastes are fading away. Someone else will have to chomp the good steaks, snuff the bouquet of the wines, count the crisp bills, spread the warm ivory thighs, buy the favors, laugh at the jokes, buy the trinkets.

I held the spade handle so tightly my hands ached with the strain. It was my impulse to start spading that dirt into the hole as fast as I could, working from the feet toward the head, fill it in and stamp it down and spread the shell over the raw place. The weeping noises were almost as small as the sounds of the tree toads.

I stretched out and leaned into the hole and sliced the few layers of filament tape that held his arms snugged together. I picked the Coolite stick out of the water, retrieved the other one, and used their light as I walked back to the car. So intense had been the desire to kill him and so narrow the escape, I walked like a gawky marionette with an amateur working the strings. I could not remember which arm was supposed to swing out first when walking. It was like those supreme attacks of insomnia that are so bad you cannot remember where you put your hands and arms when you sleep. I couldn’t even find the lights on Miss Agnes. As I backed out, my coordination came back, and then I began to shiver with reaction. I turned around by the locked wire gate and hurried back along the canal bank, turned over his bridge and hit the highway toward home.

When the shivering went away I began to take some relish in thinking of the jolly host returning to his party. I’m back, girls! Here I am in my sodden jump suit. My hairpiece is full of mud. My wallet is empty and I’ve got these shoulder cramps and this sore jaw. And I’ve been crying a lot.

I knew what he would probably do, after he found his way home and got cleaned up. He would shut himself in a room and phone Hisp’s home. And when Lawton Hisp answered, Tom Collier would wish him, after a long pause, a very happy New Year. And then Tom would hang up and sit there and think about it. He would think of all the things he would like to do to me. In the end he would realize why there was not one damned thing he could do.

There were two hours left in the old year. I did not want to spend them with anybody. Not even Meyer.

At Bahia Mar, I threaded my way past some parties I wanted to escape, and when I was aboard the Busted Flush, I was chary about turning on too many lights. There were some residual shivers from time to time. I quelled them with a chill flagon of Plymouth gin. It cheered me enough to warrant my digging out a personal steak and preparing it for broiling when I was ready. I leafed through the cassette stacks and put Mr. Julian Bream on, wanting something expert, mannered and complicated.

I showered and changed to an old blue robe, rebuilt my drink and sat and picked tenderly at the new blister on the heel of my left hand. Meyer says that somewhere between aphorisms and sophistry there is, or should be, a form of expression called sophorisms. These express the mood of emotional sophomorism. If the wish is the deed, then I killed him. If I hadn’t killed him, somebody else would have. If Howie hasn’t killed her yet, he isn’t really trying.

I got up and got the big atlas and opened it on my lap and pulled the lamp closer. I found the big double-page spread of the Pacific and slowly ran the edge of my thumbnail down the shades of blue which showed the great depths, the rare shallows.

They were out there, a microspeck moving down the flat blue, as invisible to the naked eye as a microbe on an agar dish. Now they would be coming up on the Line Islands. A five- or six-hour difference. The sun had wheezed its hot, tired way westward, and the girl to be known henceforth as Lou Ellen was under its late-afternoon glare, lifting and falling to those big bland rollers, with six or seven hours before her New Year’s Eve.

I studied the good names out there printed on the blue dye, Christmas Island Ridge, Tokelau Trough, Pacific Basin, and tried to think about those names, tried to wonder how they had measured the shocking depths out there. The mind is a child that keeps turning back, reaching for the WET PAINT sign. I kept seeing, superimposed upon the blue, Meyer’s image of her, with the slightly negative buoyance of the newly drowned, going down and down, through the lambent layers of undersea light, through the blues, greens, turquoise.

Tom Collier was right. Bugs like Howie have this terrible, incurable optimism. If nobody sees you do it, nobody can prove you did it. And people have always believed you. Howie is a nice little boy. He’s so helpful and willing and happy. Fat people are jolly people.

Next step, McGee. If, through some miracle of timing and coincidence, you should achieve radio contact, what would you say? Hello, there! By what law of the high seas can you send Captain Hornblower aboard his frigate to wrest the legal wife from her legal husband? How do you get yourself air-dropped onto the deck, assuming the Trepid could be located at all?

The next step is wait. Wait here, or fly out and wait there. But wait, no matter what. It would be ironic indeed if the one Howie flipped out of the tree would be McGee. I sweetened the drink, changed the music, put the steak in. I had a slight and somber buzz from the astringent gin. Whee. Whoopee. Happy New Something.

Sixteen

MY JET flight from Honolulu arrived at Pago Pago International Airport at three in the afternoon on Saturday the fifth of January. The airport is at Tafuna, about seven miles from town. The airstrips are on crushed coral rock, extended out into the sea. It is the only way one is going to find any flat land on those islands.

We were supposed to come in a little earlier, but it was the rainy season and a black, heavy tropical storm was moving across the big island, covering most of its fifty or so square miles. There are tricky winds in those storms, so we strolled around in a big circle on high, waiting for it to move away from the field.

We came down into a scrubbed, shiny, dripping world, full of a smell of flowers, rain freshness and jet fuel. I had learned that there is an n in the name when it is pronounced, that the first vowel sound had about the same value as the o in mom, and the g was halfway between hard and soft. Hence Pahng-o Pahng-o. When you say things correctly, you become an instant world traveler. Because of the rains, it was off season, and about eight of us got off. I had only carry-on, an unusual event at Tafuna, apparently, when the visitor is not reserved back out.

It is known as American Samoa. The U. S. dollar is accepted. The taxi driver accepted an impressive number of them to drive me into town to the Intercontinental Hotel. I had heard that the place was hot. It had seemed very hot to me when I came off the bird. But that had been the coolness after the rain. The driver said he would take me everywhere during my wonderful stay on the incredibly beautiful island of Tutuila. In his shiny elderly Plymouth with its square wheels and its ineffectual little fan buzzing directly into his sweat-shiny face, he would take me up and down all these perpendicular green mountains for a very nice price.

As we came around a corner of the coast road, I saw Pago Pago Harbor. I had seen it from the air, but height flattens things out. I’d been told it was the most beautiful harbor in the world. It is the most beautiful harbor in the world. Once, uncounted centuries ago, it was the fiery, bubbling pit of a volcano. The crater ate at its own walls, consuming itself, growing larger, until finally a whole side of it fell into the sea, and the sea came smashing into the red, boiling crater. That must have been a day. That must have been something to see and hear. We don’t know how long it took the sea to win. Now, inside the steep green hills, it is tranquil in victory.

He turned into the hotel drive. The first half ounce of raindrops from the next cloud began to splat as I paid him. It was a very handsome hotellow buildings, rounded thatched roofs, in the turtle fale island, style. But the thatch, of course, was covered ferroconcrete, and there were a hundred and one rooms, all air-conditioned, and a lower level with free-form pool, umbrellas over the tables, an outside bar and a view across the harbor of Mount Pioa, the Rainmaker. The Rainmaker was on the job. The day deepened from bright sunlight to deep dusk as the rain thundered down.

It does not take very long to make your appraisal as you walk across a lobby. A gift shop on the left full of bright overpriced instant artifacts. Little scraps of this and that on the floor. Bleared windows. A man in a uniform yawning and scratching his behind. Some overflowing ashtrays.

Three girls were in busy conversation behind the counter, with giggles that made them bend double and stagger around. One of them kept glancing at me. I waited placidly until she came over to the desk. The girls were three shades of brown. She was the shade in the middle, chocolate fudgicle.

“You want something, ah?” No inflection. No expression.

“A room.”

“You got a reservation?”

“No.”

“You haven’t got a reservation.”

“No, I haven’t got a reservation.”

“And you want a room.”

“I want a room. A nice room. Big. With a view. I want a nice big bed in the room. I want somebody to come on the run with ice and booze once I am in my nice room. I want it for maybe five days, six days, maybe more. I will eat my meals here. If you have no serious objection, give me something to sign. You have lots of empty rooms. Here is a five-hundred-dollar bill which I happened to come across the other day. Give me a receipt for it, please. It is an advance on the room and the service.”

“You’re pretty funny. You knock me out,” she said unsmiling.

“I can see that.” I filled out the registration card, while she scowled at the key rack. I knew the first one she gave me would be the worst in the house. I expected to come back for another key, and did. I didn’t expect another bad room, but I got one, and finally on the third try, she decided she’d gotten even. The room was very nice. It was even reasonably clean.

The whole hotel has a disease called The Only Game in Town. If you don’t like it, too bad. It has a secondary infection called No Ownership. In other words, management has a contract without a piece of the action.

But hotels, no matter how slovenly, are staffed by humans, and with a little care and some useful observation, you can usually manage to find a bartender who will not slop half your drink on the back of your hand, a waiter who will tell you what the kitchen does best, a maid who will change both sheets. We are all at the mercy of the hostility of the service industry. And I had begun to sense that most of these gentle, brown, warm, charming, simple children of nature, as it said in the brochures, would in fact enjoy splitting, cleaning, and deep frying every Yankee they could reach. They tell me that in free Samoa, this feeling is even more apparent.

In the relative cool of the evening, I walked slowly from the hotel past the docks to the village green and found some stores beyond it, up a dirt road. I found something called the Pacific Trading Company. Samoans selling clothes from Japan, India and Taiwan to Samoans. I found two thin white shirts of Indian cotton which fitted well enough, two pairs of walking shorts in a cool weave, a pair of madras swim pants, a pair of crude leather sandals and a straw hat from Uruguay with a big brim and a high crown, nicely woven. Every price ended in 99ў. No tax. I put the hat on. A small boy wanted to carry my bundle. I had to give him a dime to let me carry it. He understood the logic behind our arrangement and said that every day I bought anything, he would be glad to make the same deal again.

I got back to the hotel in the last of the beautiful golden light. I ordered a rum drink in the airconditioned bar on the upper level and finally picked out a useful type. The bartender did not have to ask him what he wanted and seemed very quick to serve it The customer was a tall, hunched man with dusty black hair, a nicely tailored bush jacket of bleached lightweight denim, an air of weary authority.

After an initial hesitancy he was glad to chat. His name was Revere. Wendell Revere, some sort of under-secretary of the Department of the Interior, who had been sent over to do a survey on education which was supposed to last a month and had lasted three. I found out that the Department of Interior administers American Samoa, and the Secretary appoints the Governor.

I explained that I had flown down to meet friends who were coming down by small boat from Hawaii. This astonished him. He said it was one hell of a long trek. He said that, no offense meant, it seemed that of late more and more damned fools were roaming the oceans in small boats, apparently to get their names in the papers and their faces on television.

I said that my friends, the Brindles, were actually delivering the boat to a man who had seen it in Hawaii and said he would buy it if they could deliver it. A man named Dawson. A recent arrival. He was in the land-development business.

Revere scowled at me. “A recent arrival? How can that be? No one can come in here, not to work and compete. In our infinite paternalistic wisdom, we decided that it should be Samoa-for-Samoans. Of course, there have been some exceptions made, like the Japanese fishermen.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You saw the cannery across the harbor, didn’t you? That warehouse-looking thing on the waterfront with those damned rust-bucket fishing vessels rusting and rotting away at the docks in front of it. Tuna fish. Management decided that Samoans were too lazy and undependable to use as a work force, so they pulled the strings to permit the importation of fishermen from Japan, a great horde of squat, dim little subhuman robots who are managing to kill all the porpoise in the Pacific along with their damned tuna fish.”

“Mr. Revere,” the barman said in a warning tone.

“I know, Henry. I talk too much. Talking too much is what gets me assignments like this one. I was a marine on Guadalcanal a long time ago, many wars ago, Mr. McGee, and I am afraid I have not yet learned to love and treasure my little yellow neighbors. Two more please, Henry. I’ll try to behave, after I tell Mr. McGee about one of the sights. Tomorrow, sir, take that cable car and keep a careful eye on the harbor in front of the canneries. You will see clouds of nauseous guck flowing directly into the harbor. Here they are permitted eighty times the pollution permissible stateside. The harbor is the sewer of the tuna business here. But if you can get inside them, which is unlikely, then you can really test the strength of your gag reflex as you-”

“Mr. Revere!”

“You’re right, Henry. I must behave. I should not become exercised at one of the facts of life, that industry resists controls which cost money, and a setup like this, an unincorporated territory with a toothless constitution, makes for very low operating costs. And that is the obligation to the shareholders, right? Management’s prime responsibility. How did this start? Oh, a man named…”

“Dawson. In land development.”

“He would be Samoan, sir,” Henry said. “One of the ASDC scholarships. They go to the University of Hawaii usually.”

Revere saw my look of puzzlement. “ASDC,” he said, “means American Samoan Development Corporation. All Samoan. They own this hotel and they have some big tourist plans. You can come here and stay, provided you can prove a continuing in come, post bond, and so on. I think the ASDC wants to get some of the red tape cut so they can open up some beach land for well-to-do retired people. There are some here now, of course.”

“How would I find this Mr. Dawson?” I asked.

“Please, Henry?” Revere asked. Henry nodded and went off backstage somewhere.

Revere had talked himself out. After Henry came back and told me that Luther Dawson would be along in about ten minutes, Revere excused himself and left. Henry polished a glass and said shyly, “Everything is not as bad as he says.”

“I know.”

“He is a good man. He thinks it should be better here. It should be. I guess it should be better everywhere than it is.”

“That is a very wise observation.”

“And sometimes it is a little better than it is other times.”

I looked around the area bar. “This seems to be a very quiet Saturday night, Henry.”

“Oh yes, sir. Very very restful. Many people go away this time of year.”

“Where is the action?”

“It is very nice to ride the tramway across the harbor, sir. It goes from Solo Hill every seven minutes all the way up to the top of Mount Alava, which is sixteen hundred and ten feet high.”

“Thank you, Henry.”

“On top of Mount Alava, sir, you will find the educational television station KVZK, which is famed for broadcasting into every schoolroom in American Samoa. You can walk through and see all the programs which are going out to the school children.”

“You are very kind, Henry.”

“Also, many people buy laufala mats to take home. They are the very best in the world because they are dried in the sun in a secret way which retains the natural oils. Also…”

“You are telling me that if I get restless, I should go out and buy a mat.”

“Or perhaps some tortoise-shell jewelry. Very nice here.”

Luther Dawson arrived before Henry could further inflame me with his inventory of mad delights. He was a sturdy, handsome and agreeable young man. The Samoans are attractive people. I offered a drink and he said that he would appreciate a CocaCola, please. He and Henry exchanged some brief phrases in an incomprehensible island lilt, and I took Luther over to a table. Luther wore one of those shirts which, about five thousand years ago, looked very jazzy on Harry Truman in Key West. On Luther it looked apt, even conservative.

He was baffled, in a humble way, that anyone would want to seek him out. And there was some concealed suspicion there too. The four years at the University of Hawaii had given him speech patterns which were strangely at odds with the sternness and impassivity of his expression.

“Oh, sure. Of course. Howie and Pidge. Right! That is some kind of boat there, believe it.”

“I know the Trepid. I lived on her for a while when Pidge’s father was alive.”

“It has absolutely everything. You could hack it anywhere in the world on that.”

“You’re really making one hell of a buy. At a hundred and thirty thousand, you’re stealing that boat, Mr. Dawson.”

I looked, but there was nothing to read. Dark eyes looked out of a beautifully carved head. “It seemed fair, Mr. McGee.”

“I flew here from Honolulu to ask you what you’ll take for your option to buy the Trepid. I represent a very interested party.”

“Then they are on their way?”

“Why not? It was a firm deal, I heard. They’ll be here by the tenth, according to their estimate. Is there any chance you might change your mind about buying her?” I raised my voice. “Can you come up with the hundred and thirty thousand?”

He glanced over toward the bar. “Maybe they won’t want to sell when they get here.”

“I don’t understand.”

He explained his situation. If they moved the decimal point two places to the left, he still couldn’t buy the Trepid. He had met Howie on the docks. They’d had some long talks. Howie was really a beautiful person. He told Luther his problems. Howie felt that one more long sea voyage together would mend the marriage, and then they could go on around the world as they planned. But she wanted to fold up the trip and the marriage, sell the Trepid right there in Hawaii, and fly home. If Luther would just agree to buy it if they’d deliver it to Pago Pago, that would be a big help. Luther had told Howie that Pidge wouldn’t believe he could buy that much boat, and Howie said that if he just told Pidge he was in land development in Samoa, she’d believe it. Howie said it was a little white lie. Howie said he would be doing Pidge a fantastic favor because she was a very nervous and neurotic person and her behavior was very erratic and frightening lately, and she was at her best after long days at sea. Howie said he was very worried about her.

Luther said, “Maybe it didn’t work and you can buy the vessel. I got the idea that if she still wanted to split, she’d fly home from here and he’d take it on alone to Suva, Auckland, Sydney and so on, picking up crew for short hops. He said maybe he’d write a book. But if he changed his mind about that, the Trepid could be for sale here. This might be the best place in this part of the Pacific, because there’d be import duties other places, maybe. I was just doing the guy a favor. You know how it is. I mean a person should get a last chance to fix up the marriage. Right?”

“Absolutely. Thanks for leveling with me.”

“No stress, Mr. McGee.”

“So I’ll hang around and see them when they get in.”

“If they made up and they want to go on, they might head for someplace else. Apia. Suva maybe, if they’ve got the range and supplies. I mean it might be easier for Howie to do that than explain to her that he talked me into a setup.”

“Possible,” I said, with a smile that hurt my teeth. “What would be the situation for setting up radio contact with them?”

“Go toward the malae from here and you’ll come to the Communications Office. It’s open every morning, eight to eleven thirty. We’ve got direct teletype to Honolulu and San Francisco. Did you know that? They’ve got a big radio setup, broadcast the weather and all that. They’d know.”

After my solitary dinner, where the only entertainment was a retired admiral and his lady on the other side of the dining room, on tour, I went yawning to bed. They were both deaf. He kept roaring at her that the hotel was right on the site of the good old Goat Island Club, and she kept shrieking at him that she didn’t have to be told the same damned thing fifty times running.

Heavy rain awakened me in the night, and for a half a breath I did not know where I was. Where is a product of who. And identity seems raveled by jet lag. To the tune of “Who Is Sylvia?” we sing “Who is McGeevia?” I was on the wrong side of the world, and my heart was a stone.

Seventeen

ALL CREATURES seem to seek comfort in routine. The cows bawl at first light for the milker. In Ireland the cows are milked at ten, a more reasonable hour, and begin their bawling then, if the ceremony is delayed. The cat comes to the kitchen at five, sits to wash, knowing it is time for supper. (Take a note: Check with Chookie and see how fares the cat name of Raoul I turned over to her after somebody strangled the lady who owned him.)

We put on the same shoe first every time and take off the same one first every time, and feel obscurely uneasy when we vary our dumb little pattern. We start the shave at the same place every time, put on a hat at the angle that feels right because it feels like all the other times.

Patterns hold us in place, give us identity. And patterns are a kind of freedom, because if all the little motions of life vary each time, they require thought. When the memories are imprinted in the fibers of the nerves and muscles, the shoes are on, the face shaved, the belt latched, with no conscious awareness of how it happened.

There was so little to do, my days became the same very quickly. An early breakfast of tropical fruit and bad coffee. A slow uphill stroll in the relative cool of morning to the station, from which the cable car took off for the summit. This was far up the slope of Solo Hill, because when you want to go from here to there by cable car, you have to get high enough to allow for the deep sag of the cables.

Service started at eight in the morning. Two dollars and a half for the round trip. The Samoan fare taker bore a slight resemblance to Satchmo, was exceedingly jolly, and, if you didn’t give him the exact fare, never failed to go through his little act. Great flustered consternation. He could not make change. Oh, dear. Then his face would light up. Ah! I will have it for you when you return! I saw him work it on the tourists. When the cable car would return, he would hop about and point and cry, “The taxis are leaving!”

It was a harmless little larceny. He tried it on me every time. Every time I said I would wait right there for change, because I was walking down the hill. Each time he told me I shouldn’t walk in the heat. I should take a taxi. Each time I said I enjoyed walking. Then he would slap his pockets, show sudden pleased astonishment and produce my fifty cents, and say, “I had it all the time!”