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 pa
le 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."
John D MacDonald - Travis McGee 15 - The Turquoise Lament Page 18