The Empty Copper Sea

by John D. MacDonald

  He thought that over slowly, pursed his lips, and gave a little nod of acceptance. And told his story.

  At about four in the afternoon of March twenty-second, Hubbard Lawless had phoned the Julie from his country office out at the grove and asked if the cruiser was okay to take a night run on down to Clearwater. It was a pointless question because Van Harder always kept the Julie ready to go. Van reminded Mr. Lawless that the mate, DeeGee Walloway, had been given time off to go up to Waycross, Georgia, where his father was close to death with cancer of the throat. Lawless said there was no need for the mate. There would be four in the party, and one of them would be available to handle the lines, if necessary, and they could certainly serve their own booze and peanuts.

  Harder thought it would be four businessmen; he had often made short trips up and down the Florida coast when Lawless wanted to meet with people without attracting too much attention. The boat made a good place to hold a conference. It couldn’t easily be bugged, a fact that politicians seemed to appreciate.

  They came aboard at nine. They came down to the marina dock in John Tuckerman’s big blue Chrysler Imperial. John Tuckerman was a sort of unofficial assistant to Hub Lawless. He didn’t seem to hold any particular office in any of Hub’s many corporations and partnerships, but he always seemed to be around, laughing, making jokes, making sure of air reservations, hotel reservations, dockage space, hangar space, and so on. They brought two young women aboard. Half the ages of Hub and John Tuckerman. Tight pants and airline carry-ons. Perfume and giggles.

  Van Harder didn’t like it one bit. The Julie was a family boat, named after Mr. Hub’s wife. Women like those two didn’t belong aboard. Harder knew from what people said that Hub Lawless was very probably a womanizer, but until that moment, when the two came aboard the Julie, it had been just talk as far as Harder was concerned. When he had been doing charter fishing, he had been known to turn back and come roaring to the dock and refund the unused part of the charter if people started messing around aboard the Queen Bee III. He couldn’t exactly refuse to make the run to Clearwater, but he did not want to stay on as captain of a floating whorehouse.

  Still puzzling over what to do. Harder took the Julie on out of South Cedar Pass. It was an unseasonably chilly night, with a northwest wind and the sea foaming white across the bars that bracketed the tricky channel inshore of the sea buoy. Once he was in good water, he set the course for a point offshore of Clearwater, put the steering on automatic pilot, and watched the compass carefully to see if, in the following sea shoving against the stern starboard quarter, she would hold at that speed without too much yawing and swinging and searching.

  As was their custom, when Hubbard Lawless felt the Julie settle into cruising speed, he built Harder’s single drink, a tall bourbon and water, and brought it up to him. Harder decided it was a poor time to speak to Mr. Lawless about the women. He did not feel that the single drink was in conflict with his religious convictions. It never led to another.

  “Not long after I drank it down, I remember I had a buzzy feeling in my head, and then it was like the Julie climbed a big black wave that curled over at the top. I woke up sick and confused. I didn’t know where I was, even, but we were tied up back at the regular dock. Hack Ames, he’s the Sheriff, he was kicking me awake and yelling at me. He didn’t want to try to pick me up, I stank so from having throwed up on my clothes. I reached up and got hold of the rail and pulled myself up, but I was so dizzy I couldn’t dare let go. I couldn’t make out what all the yelling was about.”

  “What had happened?”

  “John Tuckerman testified at the inquest. He said one of the girls felt a little sick and went topside to get some air and went hurrying below again to tell them. I was unconscious on the deck. Hub and Tuckerman came up and they checked me and thought I looked pretty bad. They thought maybe I had a stroke or some damn thing, so the best thing to do would be get me to shore. They had both run the boat, but neither one of them had come back in South Cedar Pass at night with a sea running. The way they worked it out, Hub Lawless went way up on the bow while Tuckerman eased it in. They steered at first by the city lights, and then by the sea buoy, and slowed way down to hunt the next marker. The girls stayed below, out of the cold wind. The boat was rocking and pitching in the chop. Hub was hanging on and trying to spot the sandbars. Tuckerman said that all of a sudden Hub pointed to the right. Tuckerman thought he meant turn hard right, and that’s what he did. The instant he hit the hard sandbar, he knew Hub Lawless had been pointing out the problem, not pointing out where to steer. The jolt tore Hub’s grip loose and he went overboard off the bow. The waves were picking the bow up and dropping it back onto the bar so hard Tuckerman knew he had to back off or start to break up. He put it in hard reverse and yanked it back off, and he couldn’t find the switch to turn on the overheard searchlight so he could hunt for Hub. He threw a life ring over, slinging it toward the bar, hoping Hub could find it. He didn’t know how to work the ship-to-shore, and even if he did, he didn’t dare leave go of the wheel and the throttles. He yelled for the women and they finally heard him and came up to help look for Hub. It was a wild dark night and the only thing he could think of to do was try to find the markers and find his way in and get help. I stayed passed out through all of it and didn’t come out of it even partway until, like I said, Hack Ames was aboard trying to kick me awake.”

  “Funny thing for him to do if he thought you were sick.”

  “He testified he thought I was drunk. He said I looked drunk, talked drunk, walked drunk, and smelled drunk. There was other testimony at the hearing, about how small boats had gone out hunting for Hub Lawless, and one of them found the life ring and nothing else. I testified I had that one drink that Mr. Lawless brought me like always. They asked me why I’d refused to go to a doctor, and I explained that once I started to come out of it, I felt groggy but I didn’t feel sick, not in any particular place or particular way. They decided that Hub Lawless was missing and believed to be dead by … I can’t recall the word.”

  “Misadventure?”

  “That’s the one. His body never has showed up.”

  “What is it you think I could do anyway?”

  “There’s a lot of talk around Timber Bay. People say Hubbard Lawless is alive. They say he’s in Yucatan, living like a king.”

  “There’s always talk like that when the body isn’t recovered, and when the person had some money.”

  “But what if he is alive? You see what I mean?”

  “Then he and Tuckerman had to plan the whole thing, and they had to knock you out.”

  “What I didn’t tell you, I was drunk a lot when I was a sinner. I was jailed for drunk, time and again. I gave it up all the way for twenty years. Took it up again, just the one drink when Lawless would fix me one, showing myself there was no holt on me any more. They asked about that at the hearing and I told them. I told them I’d been passed-out drunk and remembered it clear, and this wasn’t like it.”

  “Why would the man fake his own death?”

  “Money trouble. Woman trouble. Insurance. That’s what they’re saying. I got to have some help. I don’t know what to do with myself. I don’t know which way to turn any more. That was in March, and here it is May, and I haven’t had one real good night’s sleep since.”

  “Van, I don’t want to say yes or no this minute.”

  “I can understand that.”

  “I want to walk it around a little.”

  “Want I should come back about evening?”

  “Where can I reach you?”

  “I got one day of work, crewing for Billy Maxwell tomorrow, for walk-around money. I’ll bunk aboard his boat tonight. It’s that thirty-eight-foot Merritt with the—”

  “Down at the far end. I know the boat.”

  “Remember, I’ll sign a paper for the money, and I’m good for it.”

  “I know you are. I’ll be in touch tomorrow. Or why don’t you come here after you get through with th
e charter?”

  After he left I sat there and watched him walk along the pier, a big sad sallow man, with a little bit more than his share of pride and rigidity. The world had tried to hammer him into the ground a few times, but he had endured and survived. Maybe this time he could not. Maybe it was too much.

  Two

  As I drove into town with Meyer that bright evening, we got onto a familiar complaint. Back not long ago when all the action in town was located in the rectangle bounded by the Beach, Sunrise Boulevard, Andrews Avenue, and New River, you could not go into the city without seeing a few dozen people you knew. Meyer had spent a whole day doing errands without running into a single person he knew. And it depressed him. He is the sort of man who manages to know people. He knows at least six people for every person I know. His little bright blue eyes sparkle with pleasure when he meets anyone he has ever met before, and the splendid computer between his ears immediately furnishes a printout of everything they had ever confessed to him. Meyer can suffer bores without pain. He finds them interesting. He says the knack of being able to bore almost anybody is a great art. He says he studies it. So if my hairy amiable friend had been unable to find a familiar face in downtown Lauderdale, the world was in deep trouble. He is seldom depressed.

  At least the tourist influx had died down to about 15 percent of peak, and we did not have to hunt for one of those places where locals go to avoid the crush. We settled for Dorsey Brannigan’s pub atmosphere and Irish stew, and a couple of bottles of stout.

  I knew that Van Harder’s story would get Meyer over his identity crisis, and so it did.

  He had followed the news story of Hubbard Lawless’s untidy end in local papers and could fill me in a little on the man.

  “About forty, as I remember. An achiever, Travis. One of those twenty-hours-a-day fellows. Wife and teenage daughters. A florid life-style, I believe. Lots of small corporations and partnerships. Housing, fishing, citrus, ranchland, and construction. The follow-up stories hinted that he was in very serious financial difficulties at the time of his death. And there was an enormous life insurance policy. Two million or more. I can’t remember the exact amount.”

  “Anything about how maybe he took off, faked it all?”

  “Nothing direct. Mystery surrounds the disappearance of Timber Bay tycoon. The body has not been recovered. I think it safe to assume that if the papers were hinting, then the public was talking more directly about that possibility. Then it died down, I’d guess about mid-April.”

  “What do you think about Van Harder’s story?”

  “He’s a reliable man. So let’s say it was a heart attack, a stroke, a savage bout of food poisoning, or somebody put something in the drink. In any event I think we can say that Lawless left the boat before it returned. He left on purpose or by accident. And in either case, he died or left town.”

  “I don’t know what I’d do without your help.”

  “It’s simple mathematics, Travis. Permutations and combinations. You have three sequences—of four choices, two choices, and two choices. So there are sixteen possibilities.”

  I stared blankly at him. “Such as?”

  “It was a heart attack. Lawless fell overboard by accident. He made shore and realized what a good chance it was for him to try to disappear forever. Or—Lawless put something in the drink, went overboard on purpose, miscalculated the risk, and drowned. Do you see why I say there are—”

  “I see, I see. You don’t know what a help that is.”

  “Break it down and you can’t find one of the sixteen where Harder is at fault.”

  “Should I try to help him, dammit?”

  “Would you like to know why I am saying yes, you should?”

  “Yes, I would.”

  “Because as you told me this heart-stirring tale, you kept loading all the dice in Van Harder’s favor, so that when you came to the point of asking me, I’d say yes. Okay. Yes.”

  “I’ll be damned if I will. I am not in the business of salvaging the reputations of broken-down fishermen. I visited the city of Timber Bay once upon a time. It was closed. I am sick of red-hots, of overachievers, of jolly-boy Chamber of Commerce types. I’ve stashed enough money to last until Christmas week, and I’ve got work to do on the Flush, and when the work is done I want to ask about eight good friends and you to go on a nice little lazy cruise down to—”

  “Will we need some sort of a cover story for Timber Bay?”

  “We?”

  “You don’t think I’d let Harder down, do you?”

  I stared at my friend with fond exasperation. I said, “You have a small piece of boiled onion on your underlip.”

  “Sorry,” he said, and removed it.

  “How about a bottle of Harp?”

  “Splendid!”

  “No, we won’t need a cover story. People will want to talk about Hubbard Lawless. All we have to do is get them talking and then sort it all out.”

  “I’m glad you talked me into going,” Meyer said. “Life has been too restful lately. And here comes somebody I do know. Life is improving.” I looked where he was looking and saw Cindy Thorner and her husband, Bob, just leaving. They saw us at the same time and came over and sat with us for a while in one of Brannigan’s big oak booths. They are South Miami people, and we had met them during a couple of skin-diving fiestas down in the Keys. Cindy is a perky soul, looking far too young to have grown kids, a blue-eyed blonde with enough energy for three ladies.

  They had been in Lauderdale for some sort of bridge thing, some determined pursuit of master points about which I know less than nothing, and were about to head back. Meyer got off into his diatribe about not meeting anyone he knew all day, and how depressing it was, and how everything is changing so fast.

  Then he told us all his new insight into the problem. Florida can never really come to grips with saving the environment because a very large percentage of the population at any given time just got here. So why should they fight to turn the clock back? It looks great to them the way it is. Two years later, as they are beginning to feel uneasy, a few thousand more people are just discovering it all for the first time and wouldn’t change a thing. And meanwhile the people who knew what it was like twenty years ago are an ever-dwindling minority, a voice too faint to be heard.

  They had to go. As Cindy got up she said, “Meyer, a Florida conservationist is a fellow who bought his waterfront property last week.”

  “And wants us to make room for two or three of his friends, and then shut the door forever,” Meyer said.

  Then she told me that the best reef for snorkeling she had ever seen was at Akumal in Yucatan, fifty miles down the coast from Cozumel. She said they were there at Easter and I should promise myself not to miss it.

  After the Thorners left, Meyer said, “A person can go for months without hearing anybody say Yucatan, and now I have heard it twice in the same evening. A more primitive soul would take it as a sign.”

  “A sign that Hub Lawless is down there snorkeling away, drinking booze out of green coconuts, and finessing the señoritas?”

  “We could go look there first, maybe?” said Meyer.

  I drove back through the thinning traffic a little past ten. My ancient electric-blue Rolls pickup whispered along, silent and smooth as one of the great cats a-hunting. We decided there was no need to keep Van Harder in suspense once the decision was made, so, once I had stowed Miss Agnes in her parking slot, we walked down charter-boat row, past Windsong and Dream Girl, Amigo and Eagle, Playtime and Uzelle, Pronto and Caliban, all the way down to where Billy Maxwell’s Honcho was moored and dark, the dockside lights slanting down into the dark cockpit.

  I put one foot on the stern quarter of the Honcho and leaned my weight on it and let it rock back. Within seconds Van came up from below, silent and quick, a short gaff in his hand. Even though the Honcho was rocking a little in a fresh sea breeze that pushed against the tuna tower, that subtle change of motion was enough to bring Harder up out of slee
p, instantly alert to repel boarders.

  “Oh, it’s you fellows,” he said in a sleep-rusty voice. “Come aboard and set?”

  “No thanks, Van. I stopped by to tell you we’ll go over to Timber Bay and see what we can turn up.”

  After a long five seconds he said, “I do surely appreciate it. You fix up that paper to sign?”

  “No hurry on that.”

  “They aren’t going to care for people nosing around there.”

  “Who isn’t?”

  “Reporters came around, and all. Government people and law people and bank people. They asking questions, handing out legal papers, and so on. So the family and the people that worked for him and the people tied into it all, one way or another, they’re sick of it now, even though it slacked off a lot by the middle of last month. How you, Meyer?”

  “I’ve been fine, Van. Sorry to hear about your bad luck.”

  “It do seem to come at me in bunches lately.”

  “Forgive me for asking, Van, but did you see a doctor and get checked over?”

  “Hoped he could find some reason I passed out. Doc Stuart. He said he couldn’t find any evidence I’d had some kind of heart spasm or something go wrong in my head, but then again he said he couldn’t find any reason to say something like that hadn’t happened. But if it had, it might probably happen again, and that would help pin it down. Aside from kid stuff, I never had a sick day in my life. Not ever. How soon are you going on over there?”

  “We can talk about that tomorrow,” I told him. We ambled back and sat for a time on the transom of Meyer’s chunky little old cruiser, The John Maynard Keynes, looking at the overhead stars, faint through the particulate matter which jams the air of the gold coast night and day, never dropping below twenty thousand particles per cubic centimeter, except when a hurricane sweeps it away briefly, blowing it all into somebody else’s sky.

  “A cover story will help. I was wrong,” I said.