Condominium

by John D. MacDonald

  “Wish I could. The hearing adjourned early, but I have to go back in and write it up. I’ll walk back across that pontoon bridge, and that same jackass will make me show my press pass again.”

  “Don’t you think he looks like a looter?” Sam asked Barbara.

  She tilted her head. “Sort of. It’s the mustache, I think. It’s a shifty mustache.”

  “I am shifty, but not looterwise. Today they took a little more testimony from me, even. The same old bullshit. They thrash around looking for somebody to blame a hurricane on. I didn’t handle it as well as you handled your appearance, Sam. You were great. Nobody budged you an inch. Ella did what you said she would do. And more. Now they are wondering why I didn’t give your story more early coverage and scare more people off the keys, which would have cut down the body count.”

  “Any additions?” Barbara asked.

  Mick made a face. “A few. One especially nasty one. Some kids were fooling around late yesterday in the new dunes south of Saturday Pass, using a metal detector. They located a big hunk and dug down to it and found themselves a whole Ford Fairlane with what turned out to be a family of five people in it. Male, female and three littles.”

  “God,” Barbara breathed. “How long can it go on?”

  “Quite a while,” Mick replied. “Aside from the four hundred and sixty-one bodies, about thirty not identified, we don’t know exactly how many are missing. When a vacationing family is wiped out, it doesn’t get reported for a while. But they keep crosschecking the power company customer lists and the phone company lists, tax rolls, bank records, vital statistics, vehicle regisistration, Social Security, Veterans Administration and so on. Move people from the probably missing lists to the known missing, and finally to known dead. The body count is maybe a little bit on the inflated side because they include people like Fred Hildebert who died of a heart attack at the height of the storm. If he hadn’t then, he would have later, once he found out what a whipping the Athens Bank and Trust is taking on their real estate loans on the keys. Then, of course, there was the trouble with the looters. Those two women who were raped and strangled were put on the list, and so were the three looters shot and killed.”

  “Why make the list even bigger?” Barbara asked.

  “Political,” Mick said. “At first the city and county fathers wanted to minimize the extent of damage and the death toll. You know, for the sake of the tourist industry and the retirement market and so on. Then, when they began to realize the dimensions of this whole disaster, they swung the other way. Now, the more they inflate the damage, the more help they can demand from the state and the federal government.”

  “This will fascinate Lee,” she said.

  “Also,” Mick said, “there is another way the figures get warped. I will venture to say that the known-missing-presumed-dead figure is screwed up by people who saw this one dandy chance to walk out on a lot of responsibilities they had gotten very tired of. People who were in big jams.”

  “Like you were saying about Commissioner Denniver and his wife?”

  “Okay, so I was wrong. Look, Sam, they were ripe for running. Justin was nailed to the wall. So they found them in the mangroves, wrapped around each other, drowned and dead. Funny. She was a strong swimmer. She was a jock, that lady was. Probably Justin started drowning and grabbed her and she couldn’t get loose. But I don’t think I’m wrong about Marty Liss.”

  “Even with his wife’s statement?”

  “Francie said Marty used his belt to fasten her to that ladder they were hanging onto. Then when that wall of the house tilted over toward the bay, he was washed away because he was lower on the ladder than she was. Washed away to where? Brazil? A lot of money has been washed away too. They can’t find it. You watch. She’ll hang around for six months and then go on a long trip. They cooked it up. I’ll tell you, Lew Traff and Benjie Wannover are happy men. With Denniver and Liss and Molly Denniver gone, and nobody able to find Sherman Grome, and a lot of the records missing in the storm, they’re home free, both of them. Tell you another one. Young lawyer named Greg McKay. He wasn’t getting along with his old lady, and he was having fun and games with a realtor name of Loretta Rosen. She sold out her business and got the money up front, and nobody is going to find those bodies either.”

  Barbara said, “I suppose it does give people a chance to go and try to become somebody else, somewhere else. But wherever you go, you take yourself along, and that self is the same old person who got you jammed up in the first place.”

  “Nobody ever thinks so, though,” Mick said. He had finished his beer. He began pawing out a deep hole to put the empty can in. He dug down and suddenly frowned and looked down into the hole and began digging with both hands.

  “What you got?” Sam asked.

  “Don’t know yet.”

  They watched as Mick enlarged the hole and plucked out an oblong object with wet sand clotted to it. He got up and took it down to the water and washed the sand off it and brought it back, swinging it by the short length of broken line cord. He smiled in an odd way and said, “Anyone want a perfectly good digital clock-radio?”

  “Heavens!” Barbara said.

  “I ought to be able to think of something very compelling and significant to say about finding a clock buried in the sands of time, and so forth. But all I can think of is that all this sand, these millions of tons we’ve got we didn’t have before, they are covering up the damnedest collection of plastic and trash and gadgets and kitsch and junk anybody could possibly imagine. Ella was one hell of a housekeeper. She swept everything under the rug.”

  After a thoughtful silence Sam asked, “Any closer to a decision today?”

  “Hell, they’ve reached a decision, all of them. They just won’t say it out loud. That terrible jackass, Tod Moran, he gets the floor and he talks about how with a little help from the state and the federal government, the good citizens of this area will put their shoulders to the wheel and demonstrate the spirit of pioneer America or something, and put everything back just the way it was before.

  “Then the Department of Transportation fellow gets up and points out that they have cooperated on an emergency basis with a crash program to put the Tamiami Trail back in passable condition from Venice to Fort Myers, so that people who want to come to this area, or leave it, won’t have to head over into the middle of the state first. Then he points out that replacing the bridges would be a minimal four-year program, with an estimated cost of twenty million dollars, allowing for anticipated inflation, and that amount is not in any present or projected budget.

  “Next the Corps of Engineers spokesman says that even if they had the technology to change the passes back to their old locations, they couldn’t start on it for two years even if they had the funds, which they don’t. Then the representative of all the condominium associations gets up, and in that big boomy voice of his he demands that electricity and sewage disposal and water supply be provided to the keys so that the people he represents can move back into their homes. The man from Florida Power and Light then gets the floor and says that in view of the heavy expenses they have undergone to begin to restore full power on the mainland, and in view of the fact that the entire power grid was destroyed on Fiddler Key and the southern half of Seagrape Key, and in view of the fact that no one is in residence out here and no businesses are functioning out here, they have no plans to supply power.

  “You’ve heard it all, Sam. The Fiddler Key Utilities Authority rep says their only option is to default on their bonds and get out of business. Their water mains are gone, their sewage treatment plant is gone, their water purification plant is gone, and they have no funds for replacement. It built up slowly out here. It started slowly. Little wooden bridges. Beach cottages. Sand and shell roads. Water wells and septic tanks. Old Florida. There were fishermen’s shacks before the bridges came over. It had to slowly pay its way. The power came when there were enough customers. Funny thing. It can’t ever start that way again.”
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  “Why not?” Barbara asked, puzzled.

  “My God, the property rights on this island are going to be tied in knots for a hundred years. If a man has a building lot on the bay and the house is still sort of standing, and he survived the storm, okay, it is his. But he can’t live in it because all certificates of occupancy have been rescinded on health grounds until there is sewage disposal and water supply and so forth. And there won’t be, because there won’t be any bridges. Once the Waterway is redredged to depth, they can open it again and the pontoon bridge will have to be dismantled. But take that condo there, behind us. Maybe a hundred units. Okay, a hundred different people own that five acres, right? Some of them died in the hurricane, so those rights are now in estate litigation. What do they do with those rights? What happens? No sale is possible. How about the property rights in Beach Village? They will have to resurvey to even find the property lines. And who is going to pay for a survey? Some will, some won’t, and some aren’t here anymore. Do the heirs of the people who died in Azure Breeze and the Surf Club own a proportionate share of the land on the bottom of—excuse the expression—Harrison Pass? No, we built the whole thing up to its ultimate, creaky, freaky complexity and it all fell down, and it would cost twice as much to build it up again, so there’s no chance.”

  “I see,” Barbara said. “But doesn’t something have to happen to it?”

  “Every problem has a resolution?” Mick said. He stood up again. “Got to get back, people. Thanks for the beer. On my little dead radio clock here it says half past afternoon. When you see your old buddy Gus, Sam, tell him a lot of people think he’s doing a great job.”

  He went off, dangling the little blue clock-radio by the end of the frayed cord, swinging it back and forth.

  “Is that true,” Barbara asked, “what he said about it being too far gone to ever build up again?”

  “He’s right. You can buy all the parts to a six-thousand-dollar Pontiac for thirty thousand dollars.”

  “What has that got to do with anything?”

  “If you damage one fifth of the parts in an accident, and four fifths are okay, you have still totaled your car. Look at all the high rises still standing. Millions and millions of dollars. But the millions Athens will get will go to fixing up all the essential services and roads on the mainland. This place is as dead as Corinth, and after a while all the rest of the survivors will accept that and move their stuff out of the units. Who is going to spend the fifty or so millions to fix the roads, bridges, water supply, phones, electricity, sewage disposal and so forth to put a hundred and fifty million dollars’ worth of condominium apartments and a few thousand people back in functioning order on this sandspit? Some of the units have no damage at all. But they are finished. Monuments to some kind of ultimate assininity.”

  “What did he mean about Gus?” Barbara asked.

  “Oh, maybe I didn’t tell you. They combined the city and county Public Works Department about two weeks ago and gave him the county too. They got pretty fond of him at the nursing home during the hurricane, so he knows Carolyn is getting a lot of care and attention. Now he’s putting in an incredible workday and he’s happy as a clam. Gus was always a make-do guy, a very practical engineer. He found some idle equipment in an old county barn last Monday and found a couple of old retired machinists who could turn out some parts for those trucks and loaders, and he’s got some of the units rolling already.”

  “I like him.”

  “He is one very solid type. What’s funny? Why the laughing?”

  “That’s exactly what Gus said to my husband about you.”

  “I probably am. I guess I am. It means I know what I am doing, and I get it done.”

  She looked at him, close range, with an expression he could not read and then got up and walked away, up the beach. He opened another beer, drank half of it and then followed her. She stood near where Harrison Pass had eaten into the sand at high tide, leaving a three-foot drop down to the water. The tide was almost on slack and would soon start coming in.

  “Penny,” he said.

  She turned and smiled. “I don’t know. Thinking of people owning land. Like the bottom of your pass. People don’t really own anything, ever.”

  “They like to think so.”

  “They borrow something for a little while. That’s all. What will happen to all this, really?”

  “I can make a guess. In time, after everybody gives up, maybe a slow process of condemnation, a lawyer’s permanent festival, and then turn it into a park. A wilderness park. A marine park. In time they will come around to Lee Messenger for a signature and he can sign away a chunk of the empty air … let me see, right about in that direction … seventy to eighty feet in the air, the exact size and shape of the apartment you once had. Along, of course, with one forty-seventh of the land at the bottom of the pass.”

  “I see. And there is a bird flying through it. See? Does it know it is trespassing? A wilderness park might be nice, you know. But they should have somebody here to keep people from leaving the beach looking grubby.”

  She looked down the length of the key, squinting in bright sun. “Will they have to tear down the buildings? There’s dozens and dozens of them still standing.”

  “I would imagine they’d fence them and put up warning signs so as not to be sued. Conspicuous nuisance problems.”

  “Look, there is a sort of green fuzz beginning to show above the high-water line, Sam. Things are beginning to grow again. It will be nice here, you know? I wish there would be huge lush vines growing up these condominium towers some day, like some giant kind of ivy, so that it would all be like those old Mexican ruins in Yucatán. A park can be a memorial to … I can’t say greed and stupidity, really. There was something else, wasn’t there? A kind of autohypnosis.”

  “And human optimism and strange tax advantages. And too much time between hurricanes.”

  They went back to their portable shade. She sat in grace, looking down, drawing patterns in the sand. He felt as if he dared not draw a deep breath for fear of alarming her in some way. She had a bewildering vitality about her. She was all his magic for all time, but there were no moves he could make. He could not conceive of ever being without her.

  She looked at him suddenly, a quick glance which slanted through his heart. He saw the tears in her eyes.

  “Barbara,” he said in the rustiest of voices.

  “No. Just something I want to say. Something I’m learning. I’m only a little way along. It’s hard for me to learn. I’m going to need some time.”

  She stabbed her spread fingers into the sand, picked up a handful, let it trickle out of her fist.

  Looking down she said, “What you do is either take no risks or you take them all. I took a risk with you without knowing it, sending you after that fool bull. I can knock on the tin roof of that Ford Fairlane and holler down to those people in there. I can ask them things. Are you sorry you had love? Are you sorry you birthed these three dead kids? My God, when does being a tragic figure turn into a pose? How much bleakness can I stand in my life?” She tried to smile at him then. “What I guess I am trying to say is keep in touch, Sam. Keep in touch. Now please, please, go for about a fifteen-minute hike down the beach.”

  He walked. His arm was beginning to tire again, so he put it in the sling. When he looked back she was sitting in Buddha fashion, back straight, a distant bright-haired woman looking out at the innocent and harmless sea.

  There was a great rush of baitfish a hundred feet offshore, as something predatory came up under them. Seven pelicans went by, with slow beat and then long glide, close to the water. A gray crab ran sidelong down the beach and popped into its hole. He stopped and looked at a place just above the high-tide mark where a tendril had poked its way out of the sand, unfurling three small pale-green leaves. From that point he could see the city and its tall white bank buildings. Thunder grumbled far away, and he turned and saw that it had become dark in the north, and the breeze was now
coming from that direction. He headed back to the woman, lengthening his stride as he saw, in the distance, that she had collapsed the umbrella and was stowing it on the catamaran.

  By John D. MacDonald

  The Brass Cupcake

  Murder for the Bride

  Judge Me Not

  Wine for the Dreamers

  Ballroom of the Skies

  The Damned

  Dead Low Tide

  The Neon Jungle

  Cancel All Our Vows

  All These Condemned

  Area of Suspicion

  Contrary Pleasure

  A Bullet for Cinderella

  Cry Hard, Cry Fast

  You Live Once

  April Evil

  Border Town Girl

  Murder in the Wind

  Death Trap

  The Price of Murder

  The Empty Trap

  A Man of Affairs

  The Deceivers

  Clemmie

  Cape Fear (The Executioners)

  Soft Touch

  Deadly Welcome

  Please Write for Details

  The Crossroads

  The Beach Girls

  Slam the Big Door

  The End of the Night

  The Only Girl in the Game

  Where Is Janice Gantry?

  One Monday We Killed Them All

  A Key to the Suite

  A Flash of Green

  The Girl, the Gold Watch & Everything

  On the Run

  The Drowner

  The House Guest

  End of the Tiger and Other Stories

  The Last One Left

  S*E*V*E*N

  Condominium

  Other Times, Other Worlds

  Nothing Can Go Wrong

  The Good Old Stuff

  One More Sunday

  More Good Old Stuff

  Barrier Island

  A Friendship: The Letters of Dan Rowan and John D. MacDonald, 1967–1974