Blackwater Sound

by James W. Hall

  Across the booth from them were a couple in their late twenties, early thirties, Charlie and Brandy. Good-looking young folks. Especially the girl. Charlie had a two-day beard, the shadow of dark bristles covering his cheeks.

  The four of them had been sitting there quietly since the food arrived. Waiting for somebody to break the ice.

  So Lawton said, “You know what Harry Houdini’s real name was?”

  The two young people stared at him.

  “It was Erik Weisz,” Lawton told them. “Houdini’s family came from Hungary. He did his first trick at six years of age. Made a dried pea appear in any one of three overturned cups.”

  The young man gave Lawton a careful look.

  “What’s wrong with this guy?” Charlie said.

  “Nothing’s wrong with him. He’s getting old. Same as me.”

  “What’s this shit about Houdini?”

  “I like Houdini,” Lawton said.

  “He likes Houdini,” Arnold said. “So there.”

  Lawton smiled at the young woman. Brandy was her name. She had a large smile and even larger breasts.

  “Me and Arnold go way back,” Lawton said. “In the old days I used to bust him about twice a year. Didn’t I, Arnold?”

  “Like clockwork,” Arnold said.

  “You’re kidding me. This guy’s a cop?”

  “Used to be,” said Arnold. “A good one, too.”

  “Yes, sir, I was a cop and now I’ve got a daughter in law enforcement. She’s a photographer for the City of Miami Police Department. Crime scenes, corpses, bullet wounds, blood spatters, gore. You name it, she snaps it.”

  Charlie frowned.

  “I don’t like this, Peretti. Some fruitcake listening in.”

  “Hey,” Lawton said. “I may be retired, but I still got full arrest powers.”

  “Yeah, right,” Charlie said. “Cardiac arrest.”

  Brandy giggled, then caught herself and tried to look serious.

  “Look, Charlie, not that it’s any of your business,” Arnold said, “but after we’re done here, me and Lawton are going fishing. I’m looking after him today.”

  Charlie closed his mouth and shook his head. The shit he had to endure.

  “I think he’s cute,” the girl said. “You hear, Lawton? I think you’re cute.”

  Lawton let go of the box and extended his left hand across the narrow table and cupped the girl’s right breast, lightly feeling its contour. Lawton knew how to touch a woman. He’d never been rough, even when he was young and full of fever. Her breast was round as a honeydew and just as solid.

  “Hey!” Charlie said. “Watch it, asshole!”

  Brandy drew back carefully, easing out of Lawton’s grasp. She flattened herself against the leather seat, trying to keep her smile together.

  Charlie Harrison leaned halfway across the table.

  “Touch her again, old man, you’re dead meat. You hear me?”

  “Relax,” Arnold said. “He’s confused, that’s all. He makes mistakes.”

  “I’m cracked,” Lawton said. “That’s what they say. Loopy doopy. There’s a name for it, but I forget.”

  “Jesus,” Charlie said. “You okay, Brandy?”

  “I’m fine, I’m fine. Leave him alone, Charlie. He’s okay.”

  “Cracked,” Lawton said. “But still full of beans.”

  Everyone was quiet for a minute, eyes wandering the room, trying to put the moment behind them.

  Truth was, even in his heyday, Lawton Collins’s brain had never been what you’d call razor sharp. For one thing, he’d always been lousy with time stuff. Most of his life, you could ask him the day of the week, he’d have to puzzle on it a while. Season of the year was the same thing. But that was partly Miami’s fault. Anywhere else in the world, somebody asked you what month it was, you looked out the window, you could tell. Leaves turning gold, snow on the ground, jonquils blooming. But in Miami, windows were useless. January looked exactly like June and August was the same as November.

  Back in his police days, faces were Lawton’s strength. Faces and the names attached to them. But that other stuff, time and dates, chronologies, what happened when, he was never good with that. Like he’d gotten a head start on old age. So when all the rest of the stuff started evaporating in his head, like the fizz going out of a soft drink, it took Lawton and everybody else, even his daughter Alexandra, a good while to notice anything strange was happening.

  Right then it was lunchtime, Wednesday. Easter coming up. Beyond the curtained windows the sky was full of juicy spring light, while the interior of Neon Leon’s Riverside Café was as murky as an underwater cave, most of the light coming from one big-screen TV that was tuned in to a pro wrestling match.

  Charlie had another tug on his beer, wiped his mouth, and fixed his glare on the box in Lawton’s lap like he was cranking up his X-ray vision.

  “So that’s it?” Charlie said. “You got it.”

  “Like I promised,” Arnold said. “My word’s my bond.”

  “So what do you want from me, Arnold? Credit report? Take a polygraph, what?”

  Arnold said nothing. Just eyed the young man in that leisurely way he had.

  The boy was wearing khaki slacks and a blue button-down. A long way from the scruffy crowd around the rest of the bar. Tattoos and pierced eyelids everywhere you looked. Ratty T-shirts and torn jeans.

  Brandy was silent, smiling nervously at Lawton. Brandy had on a shapeless shirt of pale green and baggy jeans. But the clothes didn’t conceal her. Already several of the guys at the bar had quit watching the wrestling match, swiveling their stools around to give Brandy their total attention.

  “Always in a hurry, this generation. Can’t wait to get to the end of the story, find out what happened. Lost the ability to savor. Isn’t that right, Lawton? Not like us old guys, sitting back, swishing the wine around in our mouths before we swallow it, enjoying every tick of the clock.”

  “True,” Lawton said. “But I gotta say, this young lady certainly has nice bosoms. Firm and round. They’ll come in very handy for suckling her young.”

  “All right, that’s it,” Harrison said. “Come on, Brandy, we’re out of here.”

  Arnold reached out and thumped his knuckles on the manila envelope.

  “Keep your ass planted right there, Charlie. You’ll get what you want, but first I got to get what I want. Quid pro quo. You know your Latin, right?”

  Charlie stared down at the baskets of fried food that sat in front of him and resettled himself in his seat.

  For thirty years Arnold and Lawton had been friends and in all that time Arnold hadn’t changed a bit. Still master of ceremonies wherever he went. For five decades he’d run a sports book out of his condo up in Hallandale. Anybody that was anybody in South Florida knew Peretti.

  Seventy-two and still commanded respect. Didn’t matter he was silver-haired with a short, stocky build. Didn’t matter he dressed like a dork. Like today in his lemon-yellow shirt, black shorts, and sandals with white knee-high socks. Big square glasses with gold frames. Behind the thick lenses his eyes were watery and dark. Everywhere he and Lawton went, people knew Arnold. The right people. They were always happy to see him, slapping him on the back, buying him drinks, lighting his cigars.

  “I think it’s me,” Brandy said. “I think I’m the problem, Charlie. Your friend doesn’t want to do business with a woman present.”

  Arnold glanced her way, then looked at Lawton, gave him a small, disappointed shake of the head.

  “What’re you going to do with this generation? Never had a decent war or a good Depression to give them any depth of character. Minute they were born, they thought they were entitled to the first-class seat without doing a damn thing to earn it.”

  Brandy scooted to the edge of the booth.

  “Would you gentlemen excuse me? This lady needs a potty break.”

  She stood up and ambled across the room, with Arnold and the gang at the bar following her mo
vements reverently. As she passed by the last stool and turned into the murky back room, a rack of pool balls exploded.

  “Nice girl,” Peretti said. “At least we know that much about you, Charlie. You got good taste in broads.”

  Someone cheered at the bar, and Lawton turned in time to see a big guy on the TV with long hair and a beard toss a guy who looked just like him over the ropes into the first row of the crowd. A murmur passed along the bar. A couple of guys talking on cell phones pulled them away from their ears to watch.

  “I can’t tell which ones are the bad guys,” Lawton said. “Used to be, you could tell.”

  “They’re all bad these days,” Arnold said. “That’s what sells.”

  “Bad against bad? Where’s the fun in that?”

  Out on the river a Haitian freighter piled high with mattresses and bicycles moved slowly downstream. Along the dock Arnold Peretti’s big Bertram bumped lightly against the pilings in the swell of the freighter’s wake.

  Arnold selected a fried shrimp, dunked it in the cocktail sauce, sucked it down. He patted his lips with the napkin and smiled at Charlie.

  “Look, kid, I like to have a feel for the people I’m doing business with. Especially a thing like this, the likely repercussions.”

  “I’m an average guy. Let’s just leave it at that.”

  Arnold settled a sharp look on Charlie. He tapped the manila envelope.

  “When you write this exposé, you’re going to piss some people off. You ready for that, Mr. Average Guy? You ready to go into hiding for a while?”

  Charlie pushed his Heineken aside. His eyes settled on the envelope.

  “Don’t worry, kid. It’s all there. Everything I promised. Blueprints, schematics, the whole deal.”

  Charlie swallowed.

  “How’d you get hold of it, Arnold? Tell me that.”

  “Not to worry, kid. It came into my possession, now it’s about to pass into yours. And this thing, it’s a prototype. You know, a scale model. I don’t know if the goddamn thing even works, but there it is.”

  “It seems damn small for what it’s supposed to do,” Charlie said.

  “Like I told you, all I know is what I overheard. Sounds to me like it’s a contraband weapon. Somebody’s doing a little arms dealing on the side. I thought somebody with some investigative training should look into it, expose the bastards.”

  Arnold helped himself to another onion ring.

  “I need to know if you stole this stuff, Arnold.”

  “What? You think they said, Hey, Arnold, why don’t you take this thing out for a test drive? Damn right I stole it.”

  “So my article would be based on information acquired illegally.”

  Arnold waved the thought away with his big paw.

  “Tell me something, Charlie. All this time I been talking to you, not once have you asked me why I’m exposing this guy.”

  Charlie closed his eyes and opened them again, like Peretti was trying his patience.

  “All right, Arnold. So tell me. Why’re you exposing him?”

  Arnold smiled. Showed his big teeth.

  “Long and short of it, I want to save his ass, set him back on the right course.”

  “Save him?”

  “Yeah,” Arnold said. “I’ve known him a long time. There’s a loyalty factor at work. But I still got to expose him. For his own damn good.”

  Arnold swiveled his head and stared at his smoky reflection in the mirror.

  “Why not go to the cops, the FBI?”

  “Like I got such a good working relationship with the law enforcement community. They’re going to jump up and salute when I walk in the door.”

  Charlie picked up a limp onion ring, inspected it for a second, then let it drop back in the basket.

  Arnold said, “Next thing you should’ve asked me but didn’t is, how come I chose you. Why the hell didn’t I call up the New York Times, Washington Post? Shit, anybody would kill to get this story.” Arnold took off his glasses, wiped his eyes, put them back on.

  “You like how I write.”

  “Fuck, no. What do I know about writing?”

  “So why?”

  “ ’Cause of that Sugar Bowl, ten years ago. Way you played that night.”

  “Aw, Christ.”

  With a corner of his paper napkin Arnold blotted the catsup from his lips.

  “Yeah, I know,” Arnold said. “People bring it up all the time, you’re sick of hearing it. But that’s the truth. I remember that game fondly. Then like I say, one of my people showed me your byline in that piece-of-shit paper you write for, what’s it called?”

  “The Miami Weekly.”

  “Yeah, yeah. But it was basically the Sugar Bowl. Jesus, that was a classic. Smallest guy on the field, but every fucking play, there you were batting down a pass, squirting through the line with all those corn-fed linemen trying to crush your ass. Man, it hurts my ribs just thinking about it.”

  “So you called me up. And here we are.”

  Arnold selected another onion ring, held it in front of his lips and said, “So let’s hear what you know about him, kid. Tell me.”

  “Oh, come on. A pop quiz?”

  “I need to know if I’m talking to a schmuck or what.”

  Charlie Harrison shook his head, closed his eyes again. Lawton had to hold himself back from reaching over and smacking a little common courtesy into him. The young man leaned back in the booth, got a bored sound in his voice.

  “He lives in Palm Beach, runs MicroDyne Corporation. Used to manufacture computer hardware, silicon chips, all that shit. But six, seven years ago they were losing their asses to the California heavyweights, profits slipping, so his sexy daughter drops out of M.I.T., swoops in and saves the day.”

  “Sexy?” Arnold said.

  The kid rolled his eyes.

  “Yeah, Arnold. How you think she got on the cover of Forbes, Fortune?”

  “By being smart.”

  “There’s lots of smart girls. Except most of them have thick ankles and thicker glasses. Morgan Braswell’s a babe. Photogenic as hell. Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed.”

  “She didn’t save the company with her looks.”

  “She comes swishing into a room full of five-star generals, I bet she makes an impression.”

  “She’s a smart girl. It’s not about her appearance.”

  “Hey, Arnold. You want to know if I’ve done my homework. Well, okay. The fact is, yeah, I’ve invested some time in this already. One thing I found out, MicroDyne doesn’t actually manufacture anything. What they do is coat stuff with some hot-shit enamel or metallic powder or something. It’s all classified. Some kind of glaze that goes onto the chips and microcircuitry modules that run the telemetry systems and onboard computers for military weapons and fighter jets. All that hardware comes in the front door, they zap it with their coating and send it back to McDonnell Douglas or whoever, and those other guys build the planes and missiles.”

  “And that’s what you know. The sum total.”

  Charlie frowned. He reached into his shirt pocket, came out with a little notebook, and flipped through the pages until he found the one he wanted.

  “F-22 Raptor, the Bell V-22 Osprey helicopter, AIM-120 C missile guidance systems. The ALQ-99 jammer carried by the F/A-18F Super Hornet, and the Sanders situation awareness integrated system that regulates all deception countermeasures for the Hornet, the expendable decoys and signal and frequency emission systems. Those are a few of the systems coated with this shit.”

  He flipped the notebook closed and put it back in his shirt pocket.

  “Satisfied, Arnold? Do I get an A?”

  Arnold was staring down at his thick hands spread out on the tabletop.

  “That’s good, Charlie. That’s good stuff. Very specific.”

  “I’m pleased you’re pleased.”

  “But you still got some more digging to do.”

  “I’m aware of that. I just got started.”
/>   “You study up on the rest of the family?”

  Charlie sighed.

  “Braswell’s wife was a suicide, ten, eleven years ago. That what you mean? Went into a funk after her son died and jumped off a chair with a rope around her neck. Not very creative.”

  Arnold swallowed and looked across at the television.

  “So you know the story about the son, Andy Braswell, how he died.”

  “A fucking marlin ate him, that’s what I read.”

  Arnold turned his head and looked at the kid.

  “It didn’t eat him,” he said. “It drowned him.”

  “Okay, okay. So, what’s your point, Arnold? You think all this personal bullshit goes into the piece? What? Like Braswell’s son dies, that’s supposed to excuse the bad shit he’s gotten into?”

  Arnold popped the onion ring into his mouth, then reached out and thumped a solid finger on Charlie’s forearm, munching while he spoke.

  “Braswell’s a decent guy. He got derailed from all the suffering he’s been through. I think that’s the slant you take.”

  “I’ll figure out my own goddamn slant.”

  Charlie put his elbows on the table and leaned forward.

  “What is it, Arnold? You change your mind? Decide you don’t want to do business with me? All right, fine. So just take your goddamn envelope and your prototype and slither back under your rock. I got other stories. But don’t jerk me around.”

  Arnold topped up his beer mug from the pitcher, then leaned forward quickly to suck away the overflowing foam.

  Eyes on the wrestling match, Arnold said, “That was some kind of fucking night, that Sugar Bowl. Unassisted tackle record still on the books. You were golden, kid. You were ten feet tall and you fucking glowed.”

  “We lost the game, that’s what I remember.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Arnold said, “But you gotta keep in mind, kid, like they say, it’s not whether you win or lose, it’s whether you cover the spread. And you did, Charlie. You covered it just fine.”

  “I made you some money.”

  “You made me a shitload, Charlie. But that’s not why I’m here. Reason I’m here is ’cause I like guys with grit, tenacious little pricks like you.”