The Empty Copper Sea

by John D. MacDonald

  We went poking around, looking. We found HULA MARINE ENTERPRISES A DIVISION OF WELDRON/ASSOCIATED FOODS (the sign read), down at the south end of the bay, with hurricane fencing closing off access to the big dock, warehouses, and processing plant. Bright lights shone down on the whole area from high poles, discouraging intrusion. We cruised slowly by the Hubbard Lawless residence at 215 South Oak Lane, a winding mile of asphalt in the northeast sector, off Dixie Boulevard, bordering the Timber Bay Country Club. It was a very long low white structure set well back behind a low concrete wall. There were dim lights on in the house. In the glow of a streetlight some distance away, the wide yard looked unkempt. The three overhead garage doors were all closed.

  We found some of the other identities left behind by Mr. Lawless, like so many cocoons shed in some startling metamorphosis. Lawless Groves. Double L Ranches. Hula Construction. Hub-Law Development Corporation. At Hula Construction the hurricane-wire gate was chained shut. A single guard light shone down on the empty area where equipment had once been parked. Grass was beginning to poke up through the thin skin of asphalt.

  “How old was he in March?” I asked Meyer.

  “Not quite forty-one.”

  I aimed us back toward the North Bay Yacht and Tennis Resort. Those birthday years that end in a zero are loaded. A time of reevaluation. Where the hell have I been and what have I been doing and how much is left for me, and what will I do with the rest of my short turn around the track? I had one of those zero years coming up, not too many birthdays from now. Maybe Hub Lawless had felt trapped in his own treadmill, hemmed in by his juggling act, tied fast to success. The most probable catalyst was the random female who had come along at the wrong time in his life.

  “Can you remember the names of those two girls?” I asked Meyer.

  “Felicia Ambar and Michele Burns.”

  “They still around this town?”

  “They were both employed here in Timber Bay. Maybe they moved on. Probably you could find out about that better than me, Travis.”

  So I began to find out about it as soon as we got back. Meyer went on up to bed at my suggestion, and not at all reluctantly. Billy Jean Bailey was having a slow night in the lounge. It was called the Western Sky Lounge because, I suppose, of the hunk of glass the size of a basketball court standing on end, facing west. She looked no bigger than a half a minute sitting at her little pink sequined piano at the foot of that giant window. One spot shone down on her from the ceiling fifty feet overhead. She had a platinum natural, a pink sleeveless blouse which matched the piano, and silver slacks which matched the sequins. I sat at the bar, turning to watch her and listen to her. There were a few couples whispering together and groping each other in the shadowed privacy of banquettes. There were some noisy salesmen at the bar, at the far end. Billy Jean had a deep expensive-looking tan, a round and pretty face, a button mouth, an amplified piano, and a baritone voice.

  She played a medley of old standards. She did a lot of flowery, tinkly improvisations, moving far away from the melody and then sneaking up on it again. I like a firmer structure, a more emphatic rhythm. Then the improvisation is supported, as with Joe Pass on that incredible guitar of his. But she did well enough. And looked good while doing it. And seemed to sigh at one point, looking around, seeming to grimace.

  I got up and walked over to her. It was a long walk. She watched me arriving, her smile polite. She kept the music going with a little bit of right hand and hardly any left at all.

  “Maybe ‘Lush Life’?” I asked.

  “My God, a thousand years ago I used to do that. I’ll have to fool around with it and work into it. Sure. And?”

  “And a drink with me on your break?”

  “If you can hum it, I can fake it.”

  I went back to the bar. She found her way into “Lush Life” and, with but one stumble, got the words out of the music box of memory, did it very straight, and then moved into it with enough class to silence the salesmen for all of thirty seconds. She closed it off with her theme and came over, standing small at my elbow.

  “As always, Mitch,” she said to the barman. “Over there,” she said to me and headed for a narrow booth for two. I paid the tab and carried her drink and mine to the booth.

  “Thanks, friend,” she said, “for bringing that old one up. I don’t know how it fell out of the repertoire. It goes back in. I am Billy Jean Bailey and you are …?”

  “McGee. Travis McGee. Been working this lounge long?”

  “Practically forever. Hell, it’s all right. Good people own and operate this place. I used to do the resort-tour thing when I was first down here. I started in Youngstown. I used to do the Maine coast thing, and the Catskills and Poconos in the summer, and down the other coast here in the winter. Lauderdale, Hollywood, Miami, and so forth. But that can kill you off before your time. Then Danny died. He was my agent and kind of boyfriend. And they wanted me back here. That was three years ago. And here I am. Still. McGee, you drive one of those shrimpers for Hula? No? I thought you looked sort of the type. Like around boats and so forth. Jesus, this is one dead night here. Been in town long?”

  “Checked in here this evening. I don’t know anything about the town.”

  “There’s no action, if that’s what you mean. Oh, there’s a couple of discos like everywhere, mostly all kids.”

  “No games?”

  “You’ve got to be kidding. Oh, they probably play for lots of money over at the Elks or maybe the Legion. But you don’t mean that.”

  “No, I don’t mean that.”

  “So you can look at it this way, McGee. We’re right at the heart of all the Thursday-night action there is in Dixie County.”

  “You’re all the action I need Billy Jean Bailey.”

  Her mouth hardened. “If you mean what that sounds like, you are in for one hell of a sudden disappointment.”

  “Whoa. I meant it is nice to sit and talk and have a few drinks and listen to the piano lady.”

  She studied me, head cocked. “Okay. Maybe I keep my guard up too high. But you know how things are. I don’t even sit with guys much. I don’t know why I did this time. You didn’t come on strong, and I liked what you requested, I guess.”

  “Friends?” I asked.

  “Sure.”

  “I’ll be around for a while. I’m over here from Lauderdale with a man named Meyer. He’s my best friend. He’s gone to bed in the suite, but I didn’t feel like folding yet. What he’s here for, he’s looking into property that some bank might be liquidating that belonged to a man named Lawless.”

  “Oh, Jesus, another one.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “McGee, dear, you have no idea the people who have come to town because of that Hub Lawless thing. My God, There is the IRS and people from the Department of Agriculture, and bank examiners, and investigators from the Justice Department, and FBI people, and insurance people. It is a real mess. You have no idea what a shock it was to this town. And still is. It has really sort of put this place into a depression.”

  “Did you know him?”

  “And the newspaper people and the television people. The town was full up already, it being March, the end of the tourist season, and some of them were even sleeping in their cars. Did I know him, did you say? Just casual, like he came in sometimes, always with a bunch of people. Hey, Mitch is making motions. I got to go earn my bread. Don’t go away.” She finished her drink, patted my hand, slid out, and ambled to her pink piano, swinging along in her silver pants, patting her silver hair, tapping her mike with a fingernail as she swung it close to her lips, saying in her oddly deep voice, “Well, here we are again, back into it, dears, don’t all of you go away, because … recognize this? Of course you do. Made famous by a lot of people including me, your own Billy Jean Bailey.…”

  Above her and beyond her I could see the night stars. Though the room was nearly empty, she didn’t dog it. She worked her stint, making music, including one very showy arrangement of
“Flight of the Bumblebee” based on the old Red Norvo arrangement, but without as much drive as the way Norvo did it because she did not have the power in her left hand to roll the heavy bass. She moved from that into her theme, at which point I went over and got another pair of drinks and got back to the table with them just as she arrived, delicately winded from the session, saying, “And that is all for this here Thursday night because it is ten past Cinderella. Saturday we go until two. Friday until one. Monday not at all, thank God.”

  “I enjoyed it.”

  “Good. It was kind of for you. I’m glad you happened along tonight. I don’t know why, but I’ve been down. You know. All blah. What do you really do for a living anyway, McGee?”

  “Free-lance salvage work.”

  “Like sunken treasure?”

  “Sort of like that.”

  “But you’re not working on this trip? You’re just here with your friend whatzis.”

  “Meyer. I can help him out on …”

  She beckoned to someone beyond and behind me. He came over. He dragged a chair over from a table and plonked it down beside the shallow booth and sat down, saying, “Hi, B.J.”

  “How you, Nicky? I want you should meet my friend Travis McGee. McGee, this is Nicky Noyes. Nicky used to work for Mr. Lawless.”

  Noyes looked like an American Indian fullback who broke training five years ago. He had a lot of long black hair, a drooping pistolero mustache, rubbery brown jowls, flinty little eyes deep-set under thick black brows, buffalo shoulders, a lacy white guayabera stretched taut across chest and stomach, a lot of dangling gold trinkets on a thick gold chain nested in the black chest hair, and a sharp tang of some kind of insistent male perfume.

  He looked me over with skeptical thoroughness. “So I used to work for Hub. Isn’t that damn fascinating?”

  “It makes me tingle all over,” I said.

  Chemistry was against us. We shared a simultaneous loathing for each other. No special reason. It was just there.

  He turned toward the piano player, hunching his left shoulder forward to close me out. “You want to go over to Stel’s?” he asked her.

  “I don’t know. I guess not tonight.”

  “You rather sit around and let somebody pick your brains about what you know about Lawless?”

  “Come on, Nicky! McGee isn’t in town about Lawless, honest.”

  He stared at me. “And you don’t know the first thing about it, I bet.”

  I shrugged. “I heard some hick businessman and one of his business buddies took a couple of hookers out on a cabin cruiser and everybody got slopped and the hired captain passed out and the local big shot fell overboard and drowned, and everybody got all worked up about it. But I guess there isn’t much to get worked up about around here anyway.”

  It made his big neck bulge. It made his face darker. It turned big hands into fists and made his voice uneven. “Sure, you know a lot. All you know is that newspaper shit. I never see Hub Lawless liquored up in my life. Not once. And I happen to know the fellow ran the Julie for Hub, and old Van wouldn’t take more than just one drink ever. As for what you call hookers, Hub didn’t fool around. I wouldn’t say not ever, but anyways not around here, where he was a director in the bank and a deacon in the church, with a good marriage and those two daughters. Who are you calling hookers anyway? ’Licia Ambar, she works in Top Forty Music over in the Baygate Plaza Mall, and she’s a good kid. Michele Burns, she works waitress over to the Cove. She’s no hooker.”

  “Nicky, she’s about as close as you can get and not be. Jack had to tell Mishy not to come cruising this bar, remember? Come on, you guys. What’s to get so edged up about?”

  He gestured toward me. “People like McGoo here who know everything about everything, they gripe my ass, B.J.”

  “McGee,” I said. “I think I know how you spell your last name.”

  “Hey, guys!” she said sharply. “You’ll get me in trouble, dammit.”

  “Lawless didn’t drown,” he said to me, almost inaudibly.

  “Nicky!” she said nervously.

  “Shut up, B.J.” He held up a big hand and ticked the items off on his fingers. “One. He sold off the trucks for cash, cheap. Two. He stopped paying all the accounts coming due, and at the very end he cleaned out the bank accounts. Three. That girl left town the next day.”

  “Girl?” I asked.

  He hesitated and then sighed. “What am I doing? It isn’t any business of yours anyway.”

  “Tell me one more thing, Noyes.”

  “What?”

  “Do you believe in the tooth fairy too?”

  That did it. He got up very nimbly for a man that size, leaned his perfume close to me, gold trinkets a-dangle, and said, “Outside, McGoo. Now!” And he left.

  “I shouldn’t have even noticed he was here,” she said dolefully.

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  “You’re not going out there!”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s childish, and because he’s really mad enough to really kill you. I’ve never seen Nicky so worked up.”

  “Do you know if he was ever a fighter?”

  “I don’t think so. He’s never said anything. He was Mr. Lawless’s superintendent, building those houses on that ranchland south of Baygate Plaza Mall. Please don’t go out there, McGee.”

  “It’s been too long since I’ve been childish, I guess. Want to come watch?”

  She responded with a certain unwholesome anticipatory delight that she tried to conceal. Stripped down to essentials, it was a primitive situation. The two bull males and the nervous skittery female. He was in the parking area near the entrance to the lounge, standing near a blue Chevy pickup. It was a balmy night. He had shed his expensive guayabera, exposing an impressive mat of black hair. I told Billy Jean Bailey to stay where she was, under the palm trees, and I went on out to him, and he tried to finish it with one big looping right-hand lead. I got my left arm and shoulder up in time and moved a little bit inside it, but the inside of his wrist and forearm thumped the side of my head over the ear, enough so I knew he could hit. A lot of big men can’t hit. A punch has to have snap in it, terminal whipping velocity; otherwise it is a big slow push.

  I wanted him to be in a big hurry to finish it. I got my shoulders high and my arms high, and tucked my chin into my chest, bobbing under some of the roundhouse rights and lefts, taking others on my shoulders, elbows, forearms, moving in the direction of the punches to soften them as much as I could. But they still hurt, laming my arms a little. He gave whistling grunts of effort with each swing. Canvas shoes squeaked and flapped on the asphalt. I wondered how the thumping and the thudding of the blows sounded to B.J. Bailey. When he began to tire, I encouraged him by backing away toward a pale car nearby. I encouraged him further by turning to my left and bending over so my back was toward him, my fists covering my ears, risking the chance he might know enough to take a really punishing shot at my right kidney.

  “Had enough?” he gasped. “Had enough, you son of a bitch?”

  It was not much of a risk—I had guessed from his style what he would probably do. He would put his left hand on my right shoulder, spin me around to face him, and pop me with that big right hand.

  I felt the grasp of the left hand, resisted it for a moment, then spun with it, feet and heels braced just right, using all the momentum of the turn to drive my very best left hand deep into the sweaty meat just below the V of the floating ribs. I covered my jaw with my right arm as I swung, chin tucked into my elbow. To make a blow truly effective, you have to hit through the target. I tried to hit so far through it I would feel the knuckles of his spine against the knuckles of my left hand.

  It burst the air out of him, drove him back, and dropped him. His right hand had hit me just over the left eye, lightly, as my punch landed. I felt the warmth run into my eye and down my cheek. Nicky rolled, groaning, onto his hands and knees and fell onto his side, hugging his middle. B.J. came running t
o me, gasped, and cried, “You’re all bleeding!” Nicky rolled to his pickup and managed to climb up the side of it, hand over hand, until he was on his feet and could lean against it. I took the wad of tissue B.J. handed me, wiped my eye with one, and pressed the rest against my eyebrow. I walked over to the pickup.

  Nicky had his right forearm pressed across his middle. “I think you bust something inside,” he said huskily.

  “What’s my name?” I asked him. The ritual of the schoolyard, the necessary childishness.

  “McGee,” he said, with no hesitation and no resistance. “I can’t hardly breathe at all.”

  I opened the truck door, turned him, helped him hoist himself up to sit behind the wheel. He dug into his pocket slowly and found the keys, sighed, sorted the right one out and sighed again, and put it into the switch.

  “I’m hurt real bad,” he said.

  “Go home and get some rest,” I told him. He started the truck, turned on the lights, and drove away.

  “Do you have to call a doctor or anything?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Jack isn’t going to like it at all.”

  “Who’s Jack?”

  “The manager here. He doesn’t like for there to be any kind of trouble.”

  “I don’t think it’s much. I think we could pull it together with some adhesive.”

  She had some in her cabaña beyond the pool. We kept to the shadows. She babbled nervously in a semiwhisper. I gathered that Jack wouldn’t care for this sort of thing, either. She said these cabañas had been designed to look out toward the beach, but then they had to put up the tennis courts and the locker rooms, and so her windows looked at the back of the locker rooms and you couldn’t see much of anything at all, but then again it went with the territory, and beggars couldn’t be choosers, and there you are.

  She unlocked the door and let us in, and pulled the heavy draperies across the windows before turning on the lights. She was, as she had explained, clean but not neat. Her three-quarter bed had not been made back into a couch. There was a bright spill of lady-clothes on the available furniture, sliding stacks of Billboard and Variety and sheet music. She had a little Sony music center and a tumbled cupboard of records and tapes. She had show-biz glossies of a lot of people I’d never seen before Scotch-taped to the walls.