The Turquoise Lament

by John D. MacDonald

  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 suggestions 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 Lewellen’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 experience, 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 fi
ngernail, 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, entrap them 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 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 attorney can gain time and psychological advantage by saying he will ha
ve to refer it back to his nonexistent 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.”