The Turquoise Lament

by John D. MacDonald

  I wanted to ask if Howie got into any trouble while he was in high school, but I had the feeling Stan Shay would jump on any deviation from the pattern. So I moved at it sideways. “I guess you’re right. He could have made it big. But when there isn’t enough motivation, natural ability isn’t enough. From what I hear, he’s gotten pretty close to trouble a few times. Since he got out of college.”

  “Trouble?”

  “I don’t know any of the details. I just got the impression he might have a bad temper. And if a man that big loses his temper.…”

  “No. Not Howie. I can guaran-damn-tee you can’t make ol’ Howie mad. There was an old country boy named Meeker, moved over here from Arcadia, a good running guard, took it on himself to rile Howie. Called him Fats, asked him when he was going to buy a bra, snapped red marks on his ass with a wet towel, put his good shoes in the shower. That was third year. Howie just beamed and chuckled. Some of Meeker’s tricks were mean. There was no use asking Meeker to ease off because it just made him go after Howie more. But Howie never minded it one little bit.”

  “Where did Meeker go away to school?”

  “He would have had a lot of offers, but he never made it. First of June, that third year, we had a class party over on the beach at Anna Maria Island, bonfires and beer and all that. Meeker got pretty loud and pretty drunk, and so did a lot of other people. If he’d driven out there, probably he’d have been missed sooner. But he rode with somebody, so they thought he’d rode home with somebody else. There was so much noise and music, nobody could have heard anybody yelling out there in the dark. About everybody went swimming at least one time, but Meeker went ahead and drowned, and nobody knew it for sure until two days later a fisherman wading next to Tin Can Island spotted his body coming in on the tide, rolling over and over across the bar.”

  I tried it. A hearty laugh.

  He snapped his head up. “That’s some kind of joke to you?”

  “No offense. I was just thinking. After all that towel-snapping, maybe Brindle went swimming at the same time as Meeker.”

  I saw his eyes change. His eyes went back into uniform. He was accepting it as a possibility. The cop years had given him the cynical awareness of what people are willing and capable of doing to one another. The first time a young officer of the law finds a starving three-year-old in chains, curled up on a cement floor amid its own fecal matter and dotted with the festering burns made by cigarets wielded by its loving daddy, who only “wanted her to mind,” that cop becomes a better cop because he is more aware of the dimensions of his profession.

  “The whole squad was honorary pallbearers,” he said. “And Howie cried. I remember that. He cried quietly the whole way through.”

  “Didn’t that strike you as strange?”

  “I thought it was because he was just a nice guy.”

  Just as I saw a beginning suspicion of my motives, he got an emergency call to go help with traffic control. A gas truck had flipped over at the intersection of DeSoto Road and Route 41. He was under way as quickly as it can be done.

  I parked the car under the shade of ancient live oaks and walked back into the trailer park. The park had been there a long time. Shade trees and tropical plantings had grown up around them. The Sunday birds sang. So many “Florida” additions had been affixed to these old aluminum boxes that it was hard to visualize any of them as having once rolled along the open road. The de-wheeled village seemed to be trying to nestle itself further into the turf, forgetting the old bad dreams of tires, traffic and tolls. I saw a dedicated game of bocce, some chess boards, some people merely sitting, moving their chairs to follow the warm December sun. From radios and television sets, turned politely low, I heard the Sunday intonations as I walked past. “… and so I say unto you, brethren.…” “… the everlasting glory and the infinite mercy and the chance of everlasting life.…”

  They looked with curiosity at the new face going by, suspicious and unsmiling unless I smiled. Then the smile was answered. When I asked, they told me that T. K. Lumley knew the history of the park. He kept records. Go ask T.K. Straight ahead, turn right at the big banyan that the road goes around, a hundred feet on your right. An old square trailer painted gold color.

  T. K. Lumley was cricket-size, all of him except a W. C. Fields nose—a red potato with pores like moon craters. He was in a wheelchair painted in the same gold fleck as his trailer.

  “Set,” he said. “Can’t get up because I broke my goddamn hip last July. First the quacks said I’d die of it, then they said I’d never get out of bed, and now they say I’ll never walk again. Maybe what they do is try to make you so goddamn mad, you get better just to spite them. Greedy bastards charge a left tit to look at you, then figure they can put it in the bill to the estate. You wanted to know about the Brindles? Shit, I don’t even have to go look them up. They moved into number one-oh-eight way back about … fourteen years ago. Molly and Rick and that fat kid named Howie.”

  “One-oh-eight?”

  “Number of the site. You buy the mobile home that’s on it and take over the land lease. Used to be people named Fitterbee had one-oh-eight, then he got so crazy their kids moved them into a nursing home, her too, so she could help care for him. Then she died there and he got over the crazy spell and got married again, but you don’t give a damn about that. We don’t get so many kids in the park. People here had their litters long back. That fat kid was okay. Obliging. Ask him to stop doing something, he wouldn’t give you a lot of mouth. And he didn’t have a bunch of kids coming in here racing around. He didn’t mind being alone. Rick and Molly didn’t have any extra change to spare, so the fat kid was handy to run errands for two bits or a dime. One thing he did got on my nerves a little bit. If he’d run an errand over to the grocery store, if he had enough money, he liked to buy himself one of those cans that squirt out whip cream or icing or chocolate for the top of a cake, and he’d go walking past, happy as a fat clam, squirting sweet goo straight into his mouth. It’s hard for grandparents to bring up a kid, but Howie was just about the only kin they had left in this half of the country. There was a married daughter in Oregon with family, but nobody left back in Ohio. Terrible thing happened. Rick and Molly couldn’t talk about it without choking all up over it. Howie was the middle one of three kids of Rick and Molly’s son and his wife, and they had a little cabin on a lake where they went summers. There was a roach problem, and apparently young Mrs. Brindle forgot over the winter what container she’d put the poison in, because she used it in cooking, and the only reason the fat kid didn’t die in the night too was because she’d fixed something he didn’t like much and he ate only a little. Maybe that was why the fat kid wasn’t like the other kids, the way he could fool around all alone and be perfectly happy. There were some here said they missed little odds and ends of things, change and postage stamps and candy, but the truth of it, the people around here are always missing things, with or without Howie Brindle around. They just forget where they put them last. I’m taking one hell of a time getting around to when Rick and Molly Brindle left. It was … four years and four days ago. I can remember because it was the day after Christmas. Night of the twenty-sixth, twelve minutes past two in the morning, there was the goddamnedest WHOOMP you ever heard, and then clang, bang, tankle, ding as big pieces and little pieces of that old trailer came falling back down into the park, landing on other trailers and cars and all. It nudged three trailers off their blocks close by. It killed old Bernie Woodruff. He hopped out of bed and started running up and down the road, whooping, and finally just fell on his face. Heart attack. And it sure killed Rick and Molly. They never knew what hit them. The way it was reconstructed, they got new bottle gas delivered the day after Christmas, and there was a cracked fitting in the copper tubing right where it come through the trailer wall. The pressure of the new tank opened that fitting a little, a slow leak. Propane is heavier than air. So in the night it filled the trailer up like a faucet turned on slow, filling a bathtub. When it was f
ull up to this high, it got up to the little pilot light on the counter-top gas range, and that’s all she wrote. Wasn’t one piece of side wall standing. We had a big switch to electric around here. Real big. If you squint through the bushes, you can see a big white job with blue trim past those cabbage palms. That’s number one-oh-eight, and from coming to going, they lived there just about ten years, a little over.”

  “Lucky for Howie he wasn’t home.”

  “He was home up until noon on the twenty-sixth, and then the friends he was expecting came and picked him up and they all went off back up to Gainesville, because that year they had some kind of bowl game going on New Year’s Day, and there was final practice. Howie never got to play. Maybe he could have, but that boy was just too stunned. It took the heart right out of him. It was pitiful the way he walked around here like walking in his sleep. Everybody tried to do for him, but there wasn’t much of anything to do except bury what was left. Never have seen him since. He never came back here at all, and nobody would blame him for that. That boy is as alone in the world as anybody can get.”

  T. K. Lumley backed his golden chair up and ran it forward again at an angle, chasing the sunshine.

  He grimaced and said, “We got all the kinds of dying around here anybody can ever hope to use. We got the cancer, coronaries, strokes, pneumonia, the emphysema. Gobbles us up, one by one, and the new ones move in getting ready for their turn. A good woman in this park could use up all her days cooking up a covered dish and toting to wherever somebody died. So when somebody goes violent, the way Rick and Molly went, it’s a strange feeling. Death in the midst of death. Like when C. Jason Barndollar fell off the pier and drownded. Or when Lucy McBee was setting at a window table in the Sears restaurant and some old tourist stepped on the gas pedal instead of the brake and leaped his Dodge through the window and killed her right there, eating shortcake. I keep a log of the coming and going. A history. But I don’t know who in hell will ever care one way or the other. Every day people give less of a damn about the day before. Nobody wants to even listen to anything. You are a real good listener, young fellow, and I want to tell you I appreciate it. And it’s keeping me from what I have to do and hate even thinking about, which is I got to roll around the side there, where my neighbor fixed me up a bar where I can hang on and stand up and take baby steps. It hurts like the fires of hell, but it’s the only way on God’s earth I’m going to get to stroll into the office of that doctor and tell him how goddamn little he knows about how much it takes to kill T. K. Lumley.”

  I went back to the airport and turned in the pink car, found Coop, and took him upstairs in the terminal to buy him some lunch.

  “I showed them the stuff on the BD-5 that just come out,” he said. “A lot of them are going to send out to Kansas for the poop. Forty-one hundred and fifty-five parts for twenty-six hundred bucks, including the forty-horse engine. Single-place, thirteen feet long, twenty-one-foot wingspan, cruise at a hundred and eighty-seven, weighs three hundred and twenty pounds, a thousand-mile range. Are you listening?”

  “I guess not. Sorry.”

  “Did you get some bad news?”

  “We can skip Gainesville. All I would find out there would be more of the same. And I’ve hit my gag limit.”

  “If I built me a BD-5, I wouldn’t have any room to take anybody anywhere.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, forget it. I didn’t say anything.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Once we get off the ground, you’ll start to feel better. Up in the air, everything looks better.”

  Fourteen

  Late that afternoon, Meyer sat brooding in the chair placed at an angle to the window. I sat in the straight chair on the other side of the bed, waiting for Meyer to digest the lumps of information I had brought him.

  “I would guess,” he said, finally, “that your Officer Stanley Shay was off at some other college or off in the service when Howard was orphaned for the second time.”

  “Or he would have mentioned what happened to the grandparents. Right. I went through that equation.”

  “Had we but the two disasters, the poisoning and the explosion, and knew nothing else about Howie Brindle except the impression he made upon us before they got married, we would label him a person luck frowned upon, and marvel at the adjustment he has made.”

  “And wonder why he never mentioned the disasters?”

  “Too painful to mention. Or maybe even a kind of traumatic semiamnesia. We’d make excuses for him. Even right now, we have no proof of anything. Only a chain of incidents so long and so consistent that our life experience tells us he is an amiable maniac. Both of the incidents involving family fit what we discussed before, Travis. An almost casual impulse. Irritation plus opportunity plus slyness, plus a total absence of human warmth and feeling. Maybe his parents had put him on a diet because he was too fat. Maybe his siblings had everything they wanted to eat. So put the powder from one container into the other container, and eat just a little bit. God knows how the grandparents managed to irritate him. I would guess that he didn’t know, or didn’t even really care very much whether the act of loosening or cracking a fitting on the gas line would be lethal. They could smell it and have to go to a lot of trouble and worry to get it fixed. It could start a fire which they might flee from. I would guess that he has often booby-trapped the environment and left, not knowing what the results, if any, would be. The act of laying the trap would give him the satisfaction he needed. A parallel would be writing bad words with spray paint on the wall of a business which, you believe, overcharged you. Letting air out of tires.”

  “This has to be going somewhere.”

  “Of course. It just points out how different the current situation is. Let me put it in terms of an equation. H is for Howie. V is for victim. O is for opportunity. M is for motive, even though it is only a very casual and unimportant motive. D is for death. And so, time and again, we have H + O + M = V + D. Number the victims. V sub 1, V sub 2, V sub 3, up to God only knows what score. Maybe Linda Lewellen Brindle is V sub 20. Follow? Good. Now let us examine what is happening to the equation. It is stalled, short of completion. Is there any change in the values of our symbols? Howie remains the same, I would say. Opportunity has a far higher value than ever before with anyone. Certainly, as regards motive, she has given him cause to be very irritated with her, many times. As regards the D for death, we have two occasions where he acted it out but stopped short, causing her to fall overboard but then rescuing her, and shooting a rifle at her head but intentionally missing her. Can we say that were she to disappear at sea, the subsequent notoriety would unmask him as a killer? It might, of course, but I don’t think his mind would work that way. So we have to put a new factor on the left side of the equation, something or someone which has changed his pattern insofar as Pidge is concerned. Call that factor X. And I believe the right side of the equation has become less precise and less simple. There is a solution other than D, possibly. L for lunacy? Such an end result requires far more complex planning, making us even more sure of the X factor on the left.”

  “Go shake up Tom Collier, which is what you started to tell me when you fell asleep last night.”

  “Did I?”

  “You could have said it again, instead of all this formula and equation stuff. Instead of giving your brain to science, I think I’ll have it dipped in ferrocement and use it for a doorstop.”

  “If you underestimate Tom Collier, I’ll be the one trying to decide what to do with your head.”

  “So give me an approach.”

  “I don’t think you can trick him. I don’t know if you can scare him. He is a tough-minded man. I would assume that the trust officer, the man I liked, Lawton Hisp, might have some knowledge. You might do better going at Hisp first.”

  • • •

  On Sunday night I phoned the Hisp house and got a girl with a strong Scottish accent who said they were out for the evening and would not be back until late.
There was a lot of child-noise in the background. On the morning of the last day of the year, I borrowed Arn Yates’s red Toyota wagon and went to take a look at 10 Tangelo Way, home of the Lawton Hisp family. I did not want to take anything as memorable and remarkable as Miss Agnes into the neighborhood.

  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.”