Oh, my God. What is he going to do next? Part the Gulf? Throw down a tablet? She wanted to scream: Go home.
To Blanche’s horror, Langstrom had dropped the “m” word again. Avoiding “murder” altogether and hinting at the availability of “money” for financing businesses and schools and roads. And then, the audacity of it all, he’d managed to include St. Mark, who would surely roll over in his grave at being smacked with The Plan. Blanche wasn’t buying it, but she realized he knew how to move the crowd in the direction he wanted.
“What’s this got to do with us? Swiss chalets and such?” Sandy Burk was on his feet again.
“Well, I know you don’t want Swiss chalets.” The group tittered. “Now, you tell me, Mr. Burk. What will development bring to Santa Maria? Just think about it a minute.”
It was a friendly tone. They were humming, and the sound was far from music to Blanche’s ears. She held the emails and then jammed them further into her bag. The timing was not right for the reveal. She and Liza exchanged a frown. An explanation would be lengthy, and they couldn’t risk being shot down.
Liza nudged Blanche and shook her head. “We’ll talk. Maybe come at them from a different angle?”
“Uh-huh. Funny he didn’t mention the part of the plan that says they tear down the houses and the businesses.”
Langstrom lingered at the door. A few islanders chatted him up. More than a little fawning going on over there. Blanche’s stomach turned over.
All she could think about was the tearing down, the gouging, and the replacement that would create a fake, new Santa Maria. She had to keep fighting.
Twenty-Seven —
A Fern Called Blanche
One way to reach the islanders was through the pages of the Island Times. Blanche had been a full-time reporter but then went to part time. Clint, her editor, had tried to get her to stay on full time. A short, feisty dynamo, he’d hiked one foot up on her desk and said: “Hate to lose you. You’re one damn good little digger.” But she’d begun other writing projects, and she was enjoying her work at the historical preservation society. It kept her busy, and, fortunately, with Maeve’s support she had been able to stay afloat and keep the cabin.
But now she had to get back in the newspaper game.
Blanche eventually found her way back to her small, wood-paneled desk in a dusty corner of the newspaper office near the window. She needed light, a shot at the island traffic in the small shopping center, the sound of gulls calling not far off the beach. The keys beneath her fingertips.
Blanche was a good “digger” all right, and she stayed with the story until she’d given it all she could. All that ferocity for covering news fueled her, especially now. She needed connections: the implications surrounding Bob’s murder, the land development, and strange pieces of related information, some leading down blind alleys, others fitting nicely. She couldn’t let it go.
She stood in front of Clint’s desk, which had not been totally cleared in twenty years. She spied a Ronald Reagan headline or two. The newspapers—from all over the country—piled up, yellowing and curling with age, stacks of them in corners, like mushrooms in a forest of pages, books, pamphlets, old mail, and coffee cups. He was fond of using receipts and menus for bookmarks. She remembered if they wanted Chinese, they had to look inside a copy of Lolita in the “library.”
She’d asked, “Why there, Clint?”
“Because we should feel guilty eating that stuff from Lo Ho Fat.”
He did not take to suggestions for change. That was one of the many things she dearly loved about him on one hand, and on the other, it frustrated her. If Blanche mentioned the turnover to computers for desktop layout and publishing, the news of an increase in web-related reports and features, and the consequent, imminent demise of print newspapers around the world, she risked being thrown out the door.
“It’s the thing, Clint. Technology. Innovation.”
“It can come, and then, I wish it would go.” He’d sighed. “Guess that’s not going to happen.”
“Print is on the down slope.”
He didn’t want to hear it. He was old school but supported his writers and found news and features (he called them feeeeee-chures) in the most unlikely places, sometimes before the news exploded. He saw complexity in the facets of events and brought news into context. Made it real, with the development of people and places who made the news. She learned from him to never leave a story without getting a lead to another.
“What’s going on?” he said. He gave her that off-kilter smile. He held his breath. “Don’t run off. I like what you’ve done so far with these land development folks. You need to keep digging.”
“You know I will. The plan, and the murder. Possibly the worst stuff to hit us.”
“Stay on the development side. I’ve got Wade working on the murder. Still waiting on details, but it doesn’t sound good.”
Wade. Blanche hoped she could avoid Wade. He had sharp eyes and used them to pretend he was looking into your soul when what Wade should have been doing was looking up the facts, and then checking and double checking what he was writing about. But he didn’t. He was notorious for fudging the facts, and he seriously needed Clint’s journalistic skills and advice.
“Wade? Why Wade?”
“Do you want me to manufacture a Pulitzer-prize winner for this assignment? You know we’re short-staffed around here, unless, if I can believe my eyes, you are back full time. Now that would be real nice.” Clint, still smiling, easing her in. Back to her desk. He looked over in the corner, in the window, Blanche’s favorite spot that was being eaten up by a healthy fern with fuzzy tentacles. “I call the fern Blanche.” He shrugged.
“Aw, Clint.” She grinned, and then got down to business. “Listen, I’ve got something I want to run by you. Have you got time now?”
“For you. Of course.” Clint drank the rest of what was in his coffee cup. Blanche shuddered to think. The viscose brown liquid had probably been sitting there for a day, if not a couple of days. He got up and pulled a couple of chairs around in front of his desk. Blanche opened her bag and withdrew copies of emails Bob had written and received before his murder.
“Liza and I were busy while Wilma blew around. Look here.” She carefully laid the stack of emails in front of him.
“What am I looking at? Some more of that goldarn web writing.”
“Clint, it’s not from outer space.”
“Yes, it is.” He pushed his glasses down from out of his bushy head of hair and studied the papers. Blanche sipped at a cup of water from the cooler and watched his expression. First he looked blasé, then his complexion started to change and soon he was red as a tomato.
“What was he up to? Looks like cash was changing hands. What’s this Brecksall-Lam bunch? Aren’t they the rascals who are behind that north end deal? They’re into everything. Lawyers, trucking, development. They really have it covered, don’t they?”
“How did you know about them?”
“Been bandied about.” The island was a very small world, indeed.
“Langstrom. That hairball. He’s tied up with them. Something else. My cousin Jack bought into their trucking division. I have to tread lightly here until I can get Jack on board. I want information, but I don’t want to get him in trouble. As if he hasn’t done enough of that already. But, really, I think he’s an innocent party. He just signed the papers a while ago, and Bob had been dealing with them before that.”
“Whoa,” he said. “Maybe they wanted to get their foot in the door through the real estate angle. But it looks like Bob wasn’t on the take. He gave all the money away.”
“He was misled. Then when he told them he didn’t want anything to do with demolition of the north end, they killed him.” Just to say it made Blanche’s throat constrict.
Clint studied Blanche, thinking, his long face solemn and expressionless, although he looked happy as hell. She was back.
“Blanche,” he said softly. “Stay on i
t.”
Sitting with Clint brought Blanche a flood of memory. Her grip tightened on her notebook, and all of a sudden, she wanted to be at the computer working on deadline.
Blanche stood up.
“I’m glad to see you.”
She sat down.
“I want to stir it up, Clint. I really want to stir the hell out of it.” She angled an arm on the desk, eyes fierce. “If it gets out that Bob was murdered over this land grab, and Langstrom is a phony front for this Brecksall outfit in Chicago, then we have the bastards. Plus, we can get support to deny building permits. The police chief has some of the emails, and he says he’s following up.” She frowned. “But you know Duncan. He acts like he’s walking through Vaseline.”
Clint stood up, a gnarled fist on the desk. The brows came together and dipped over a bulbous nose. “I’m thinkin’. Don’t know why I’m thinkin’ it. But those stories on the drug drops you wrote? Funny how all this bad stuff is blowing through right now. Seems like a real shit storm. Pardon the expression.” Blanche had never heard him use an off-color word in the ten years she’d been at the paper. He was even something of a prude.
But now, Blanche could see the bloodhound in his eyes. “You know. It’s funny how it all happens in threes, or multiples. I’ll keep an eye out.”
“You bet. There’s trouble there, and county hasn’t been able to nail the dealers.”
That meant wearing out the shoe leather, or, in this case, the sandals. The worst a reporter could do was sit at the desk and call it in. Or misspell a name in an obit. Both crimes were cause for firing.
At least he didn’t tell me to stay out of it.
“It’s a long shot—a relation between the drops and the murder,” he said. “But check it out. Tread carefully. And see if you can get more on Brecksall and Lam. For one, this’ll lock ‘em down real tight if they’re behind Bob’s murder. We need to get it right, from start to finish.”
“You have my back.” It wasn’t a question.
“I can hear Maeve now. She’d kill me if she knew I was encouraging you to get mixed up in all this.”
“Come on, Clint. Do you think I could possibly be at risk? Of murder? Again? Are they that stupid?”
“Yes. They are that stupid. Anyone who thinks they can get away with something like that is stupid. And desperate. Or worse. Just plain evil.” The yellowed polyester shirt—with long sleeves—strained across his shoulders as he leaned on the desk. “I don’t know, Blanche. Maybe I should get Wade to help you out.”
“Dammit, Clint.” All she could think of was Wade’s heavy breathing and slurping when he drank coffee. The crumbs in his pathetic beard. He had all the finesse and interviewing skills of a bowling pin, and he looked like a large one. He was on assignment in Tampa. She hoped he’d stay there.
“All right, all right,” he said. “Wouldn’t do to bring him in now anyway.”
“No, it wouldn’t. Leave him in Tampa.”
She grabbed her bag and the emails and rapped a good-bye on Clint’s desk. He was already back behind his desk, typing away on his computer, circa 1990, which he grudgingly used for checking facts and writing some news items. She smiled. The layout and printing were all done by computer now—but she knew he still missed the industrial, greasy smell of newspaper ink. The wall of trays, the blocks of letters for setting up the lines of copy and headlines. His old Smith Corona sat on a pull-out shelf at his desk for whacking away at a story or two. It was the new millennium, and he wouldn’t give up that typewriter.
She pushed through the bleary glass door of the Island Times, a tangle of loose ends clogging her brain, and ran smack into Sergi Langstrom.
Twenty-Eight —
Piercing Blue Eyes
“How’s your toe?” He didn’t miss a beat.
“My toe is fine. How’s the evil empire?”
“The what?” He feigned ignorance, and Blanche let it go. “Want to have coffee?”
The last thing in the world she’d planned to do today was have coffee with Sergi Langstrom. But, then, she always had it in the back of her head that they would meet up again. She needed to make the most of it.
What a stroke of luck.
“Sure. Why not. I could use a little jitters. There isn’t enough of that going around.”
Sergi laughed.
That’s good. Soften him up. Or is he softening me up?
They fell into step and walked toward Peaches without even discussing where to go. He looked back at the newspaper office. She caught the glance. Her news stories about the impending “devastation” hung in the air between them. It was best she didn’t bring them up.
“Haven’t seen you around lately,” she said. “Where you been?”
“Oh, you know. I’m around. Working on that ‘empire’.” He flashed her a blinding set of whites.
Blanche looked away quickly, inhaled the hefty wake-up call of Peaches Mulligan’s Guatemalan brew, the best coffee on the island. And with it, she regularly served up fresh bread, rolls, croissants, and cranberry muffins that were the rage of western Florida. Blue check curtains made the cafe homey. Oilcloth to match covered the square maple tables and seat cushions on the captain’s chairs.
They settled in the window. This is all business—I have to get down to business and dig.
“Blanche.” It sounded like he was starting a poem.
“Yes?” No blinking. No smiling. She waited. It was something she was taking a long time to learn, but she was learning. Like Gran said: Open your mouth and tell all ye know.
He stared at her, diddling with a muffin.
“You’d have liked my grandmother,” she said, and then wished she hadn’t said that. It seemed too personal to bring Gran into the conversation, but she would have been a big help. Blanche got most of her digging quality from Gran.
“Your grandmother?”
“Yes, she and her mother built and worked and lived in my cabin.”
“Oh, I know the place. Is it yours?”
“Yes, mine and my cousin Jack’s. I’d like to keep it that way.” At the mention of Jack, his eyes flickered. Slightly, but a flicker just the same. She took a sip of coffee and nibbled on a muffin. Blanche didn’t have an appetite, but she needed to do something with her hands, now that she had opened her mouth and put her foot into it. Along with a wad of crumbs.
“Well, I would hope so. It’s a charming place.”
He said “charming” like he was referring to toilet paper. He wanted to flush away all of the charming places on the island and replace them with McMansions. They’d make a fortune. At what cost? To whom? Blanche was getting angry thinking about it, and she was not good at covering it up.
“Really, Blanche, I hope you’re not getting the wrong idea. We want to work with you and everyone who lives here. We don’t want to ruin the island, which is the impression I think you are getting through some huge mistake on our part.” He lowered his eyes. He had surprisingly long eyelashes. “We really want to work together.” He leaned forward, elbows on the table. He’d pushed the coffee aside and looked directly at Blanche. “And those stories you wrote. Come on. Just not true.”
She did not look away. “Not true, huh? I think the only thing around here that is pure fantasy is you and those plans. What you have in mind, given the presentations you made at the last two meetings, doesn’t fit. Especially if the plan is to bulldoze the whole north end for those houses and that awful pink mall.”
He sat back, sipped. Smiled.
Why is that smile so infuriating?
She attacked: “Who do you work for?”
“I work for myself. Don’t we all?”
“Please don’t be coy. This Brecksall and Lam outfit is behind the development plans, aren’t they?”
“Well, yes, and I’m working with them, representing them, doing some of the leg work.”
“How long have you been with them?”
“Why is that important?” Now he was on the defensive. Sergi cocke
d his head. “I saw you talking to that guy in the newspaper office. Is he a friend of yours?”
“Why?”
He leaned forward, his eyes so deep blue she felt like she was falling into the sky. “We could sure use some good press. About now.”
“That is hardly my intention. I tell the truth. I work at the paper part time, and Clint is a good friend of mine.”
“Sure hope you’ll put in a good word for us.” He looked doubtful.
“Did you know that Bob Blankenship had some dealings with Brecksall and Lam?”
“Really? I’d heard something about that. Lam wanted a local realtor contact down here, and he’d contacted Bob. It’s terrible what happened.”
“And you don’t think your outfit had anything to do with it?”
“What? My God, I hope not.” He looked genuinely shocked at the thought. To her, he didn’t look like a murderer, but then often one didn’t. “Why are you asking these questions? Are you working for the police chief? As well as the newspaper?” He said the last with a smile, dissolving the tense air that had blown up like a cold front between them.
She settled back and concentrated on delivering a level tone. “At the moment, I am a concerned citizen, and property owner. You haven’t told me anything that is front-page. I want to know more about Brecksall and Lam, and you.” She hoped the last didn’t sound like a come-on, but she didn’t care. If she could get him to talk, so much the better. She reminded herself to slow down.
Langstrom put his hand on the table, and he moved it subtly toward her.
What an odd bird. A handsome one, but odd.
“Oh, there isn’t really much to tell. We’re all just a bunch of hard-working Chicago guys who really like it down here in Florida. You know what I mean?”
She crossed her arms tightly against her middle. “No, I don’t know what you mean. You’re working directly against us, and what we are. A quiet, natural, lovely place. Your plans will destroy it.”
Saving Tuna Street Page 14