The Empty Copper Sea

by John D. MacDonald

  Meyer said, “I don’t imagine you would have any objections if I set up a hypothetical situation. Suppose, just for instance, that Mr. Allbritton made a decision, based on our examination of the properties, to make an offer of one million dollars for Tract So-and-So. Could the various claimants be brought together to reach an understanding? Could title be passed somehow?”

  For an instant a faint gleam of hope illuminated Devlin Boggs’s long sad face, but it faded away. “I wouldn’t think so. I don’t know. It’s a bureaucratic tangle as well as a legal tangle. Some kind of accommodation would have to be reached with the IRS … I suppose Harold Payne might be able to give you better answers than I can. He is the bank’s attorney, and he handled Hub’s affairs as well. Elfording, Payne and Morehouse. They’re in this building. Seventh floor.”

  I awaited Meyer’s next move. He was doing very, very well. One door had been wedged open. Duplicity was hard on Meyer. It frayed his nerves and upset his digestion.

  “Mr. Boggs,” he said, “it is quite evident from what we have heard so far that … people asking questions are not exactly welcome in Timber Bay lately. I can always show my letter of authority, but I would rather not do that except when dealing with a man of your position. Perhaps you might be able to give us … some sort of notes, possibly on the back of your business cards?”

  Once he started, Meyer kept him going. Fifteen minutes later we were out on the broad sidewalk. Meyer leaned against the bank. I leafed through the little packet of cards. Devlin J. Boggs wrote in a very neat small black legible hand.

  They were directed to Harold Payne, to Walter Olivera of the Timber Bay Journal, to Lou Latzov of Glennmore Realty, to Julia Lawless, and to Hack Ames, the Sheriff of Dixie County; and one read, “To Whom It May Concern.”

  In his tight little script he said that we had his confidence, and any help they could give us would be deeply and personally appreciated by Devlin J. Boggs.

  Meyer was breathing deeply, eyes closed. “How was I?”

  “You’ll never be better. We start now from the top. A new sensation for Meyer and McGee. Tools of the power structure. Servants of the establishment.”

  He smiled modestly. “No, I was never better.”

  So we walked to where I’d parked, got into the car, and split up the cards. He took the lawyer and the real-estate broker. I took the Sheriff and the newspaperman. His were downtown, so I took the car.

  Five

  Haggermann “Hack” Ames maintained his headquarters in the East Wing of the County Court House. Once it had been determined I was not an emergency, I was told to sit and wait in a cramped and dingy little room. The tattered magazines on the table were all hunting, fishing, and firearms oriented, looking as if some very sweaty-handed people had tried to escape into them.

  Florida elects its sheriffs on a party basis, a shockingly bad system. Elections come around too often. Unqualified men can slip in. People with political clout are seldom harassed by the Sheriff. Good politicians do lots of favors. Every time when, by a change in state law or by local option, they try to set the office up on an appointive basis with specific qualifications, thousands of loud right-wing nuts rise up out of the shrubbery and start screaming about being deprived of their democratic rights and their voting franchise. Law enforcement has become so complex, technical, and demanding, so dependent on the expert use of expert equipment, one might as well say it would make as much sense to elect brain surgeons from the public at large as sheriffs.

  A surprising number of them are very good in spite of having to be political animals in order to survive. An unsurprising number of them are ninety-nine-point-nine percent worthless. Having heard from Van Harder of the attempt to kick him awake, I expected the second kind.

  But as time passed, I began to revise my judgment. The people who hurried by the waiting-room door were slender and young and in smart uniforms, male and female. No fat-guts, pearl-handled, hat-tilted-over-the-eyes, good-ol’-boy deputies. I could almost make out the words of the woman handling communications, calling the codes for various types of alarms.

  Finally I was sent in to the Sheriff’s small office.

  “Just a minute,” he said. “Sit.”

  It was a tiny office with a steel desk, steel chairs, dark gray carpeting, off-white walls, and no window at all. A big steel floor lamp hurled so many watts against the white ceiling, it was bright enough in there to make a television series. Me and Hack. He was signing what appeared to be requisition forms. He was a medium man with dusty brown hair and an unhealthy pallor. He was carefully reviewing the list of items on each requisition.

  When he had finished he pushed a button on the base of his fancy telephone, and a uniformed woman came briskly in and took the requisitions away.

  “Between the damned state auditors and the goddamn nitpicking Washington desk jockeys, a man can spend his life doing the paperwork,” he said. He stared at me carefully for the first time. His eyes were brown, and they looked as dry and dusty as his hair. “Didn’t you get picked up here in Dixie County five-six years back?”

  “No, Sheriff.”

  “I could have swore. Do me a favor. Stand up.”

  What can you do? I stood up. He came around his desk and stood in front of me and looked up at my face. He backed off and bent and took a good look at my shoes.

  He sat down again and said, “No lifts. The one I mean, the one that looked like you, he was about six foot even. Once a man gets his height, he don’t grow any more than that. Sure looks like you in the face. What’s your name again? McGee. From Lauderdale? What’s that you got there?”

  I reached across the desk and handed him Boggs’s card. He read it, looked at me, read it again, and put it down in neat alignment with the corner of his desk. He reached his hand across to me and we shook hands.

  “Nice to know you, Mr. McGee. Now just what is it that I can help you on? You just tell me and we’ll give it a try.” It was as if I had suddenly turned into a Dixie County voter.

  “What’s the current status of the investigation of the Hubbard Lawless disappearance?”

  “My investigation isn’t the only one in town.”

  “I didn’t think it would be.”

  He shifted around in his chair. If he’d had a window, he’d have gotten up and stared out of it. “Our investigation so far tends to show that Hub Lawless is still alive.”

  “Where is he?”

  He picked up Devlin Boggs’s card again and asked me if I would mind stepping out of the office and closing the door. He said it wouldn’t be more than a couple of minutes, and it wasn’t. He called me back in and I sat down.

  “You’ve got to keep this quiet, Mr. McGee.”

  “I intend to.”

  “I gave one of my deputies, a man name of Wright Fletcher, that speaks pretty good Mexican, leave of absence to go on down to Mexico with an investigator from the insurance company has the big policy on Hub’s life. Both those men thinks there’s a pretty good chance of getting a line on him, and if they can locate him, there’s enough federal heat involved, we should be able to get him extradited.”

  “So how did he get from the Gulf of Mexico to Mexico?”

  “You know how he turned everything he could into cash, picked everything clean; that gave us the lead on premeditation.”

  “But wasn’t there a hearing and a verdict that he was missing and presumed dead?”

  “That was when the whole thing had just happened. Everybody liked Hub. What it looked like, he was just getting a bunch of cash together to put it into something good where he could turn it over fast and come out ahead. He’d done that kind of thing before. And nearly everybody knew he couldn’t swim a stroke. It’s like that with a lot of Florida native born. Me, I’ve lived all my life close enough to the Gulf to near spit in it, and I can’t swim no more than Hub could. And the Gulf water is right cold in March. Once we get a line on Hub, we can open the whole thing up again. That insurance company sure-God doesn’t want
to presume him dead. And Julie Lawless wants to take them to court to get the money.”

  “What do you have to go on?”

  “First there is kind of negative reasoning. We can show how he was turning stuff into cash. Hundred-dollar bills is all you can get hold of nowadays without attracting attention. You know how much space and weight is involved in six hundred thousand dollars? That is six thousand pieces of paper. It will weigh right around twenty pounds. If it was all mint, which it wasn’t, it would make a package six inches by seven and a half inches, and ten inches high. We’ve not found it or any part of it. And we have looked. We’ve looked good.

  “The next part is negative reasoning too. When they got around to inventorying the stuff on the books of those four corporations of his, there was a jeep missing he used a lot. An old yellow jeep with dune-buggy tires that he could run crosscountry at the ranch and the grove. It has never turned up. His other two cars were here, but the jeep is gone.”

  “Do you have any positive reasoning, Sheriff?”

  He looked at me, and in those dusty brown eyes I could read a very serious message. Though he looked like a mild man, I would not want to irritate him and not have a little card from Boggs to keep him in check. He exhaled and let his white knuckles relax.

  “We got a lot of calls. After the whole thing went on the wire services, we got calls he was seen in Tacoma and on Maui and in Scranton, P-A. People called up and said that if there was a reward they’d tell us where to come pick him up. Key West, Detroit, Montreal. Everybody knew right where Hub Lawless was hiding. When a man has money and you can’t find the body, these calls always come in.”

  “But that is—”

  “Wait until I finish. We don’t have the budget to check out all that nonsense. But we check out what looks possible. Just ten days ago in the Tuesday mail we got a letter from Orlando. There was a slide in it, in a cardboard mount. There was a typed note in with the slide. I’ve got a copy here of what the note said, and a print made from the slide.”

  He read me the note. “ ‘The man in this picture I took looks like the man in the newspaper pictures. I took this picture on Friday April eighth in Guadalajara. I can’t give you my name or address because my boyfriend thinks I was in San Diego visiting my sister.’ ”

  The print was a four-by-five, sharp and clear. It showed a sidewalk café, a sunny street, traffic, buses, buildings in the distance, nearby shops with signs in Spanish. There were several tables occupied. A man sat alone at one of them, off to the left. He was almost facing the camera. He was carefully pouring what was evidently beer into his glass.

  Hack Ames came around the desk, leaned over my shoulder, and tapped that beer-pouring fellow with his finger. “Hub. No doubt of it. We projected that slide as big as we could with the best projector we could locate. Hell, it even shows the detail of his ring, the little scar at the corner of his mouth. The experts say it was taken on Ektachrome X with a good-quality lens that was a medium-wide angle, like maybe thirty-five millimeters. It was developed at one of the Kodak regional labs, and the date stamp in the cardboard of the mount says April. You can see that she wasn’t trying to take a picture of Hub. I think she didn’t even know what she had until she got the slides and used a viewer or a projector.”

  Hubbard Lawless was wearing an open khaki jacket with short sleeves over a yellow T-shirt. He had a blunt cheerful face, snub nose, bland brow, thinning blond hair combed and sprayed to hide the paucity of it. His hands were big, his forearms thick and muscular. He wore a small frown of concentration as he poured his beer.

  “So it places him in Guadalajara a month and a half ago. That’s where your deputy and the insurance investigator went?”

  “With copies of this picture. Wright Fletcher is a very hard worker. He’ll show that picture to ten thousand people if he has to. But they’re going to concentrate on the clinics.”

  “Clinics?”

  “That’s the world center for cosmetic surgery. Lifts, nose jobs, hair plants. There are dozens of very qualified surgeons working down there.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “If he’s been and gone, there’ll be before-and-after pictures in the files. That and this picture and the date of the operation would prove he didn’t drown when he allegedly fell off the Julie.”

  “What about Kristin Petersen?”

  “You mean is she with Hub? It looks that way. Funny thing. A man gets to be forty and he gets itchy, and it’s usually a woman sets him off, trying for a different kind of life. It happens every day. But most men, when they go off the deep end, they don’t influence the lives of so many other people. They don’t raise such hell with a community. This has upset a lot of applecarts.”

  “We’re staying at the North Bay Resort. Maybe you could let me know if your deputy finds out anything.”

  “I don’t exactly see where you fit into this.”

  “We fit where Mr. Boggs said we fit.”

  “Sure,” said the Sheriff. “Great.”

  “Can I keep the picture?”

  “If you want it. We had a lot made.”

  “Are the city police in on this in any way?”

  “There aren’t any. There was a referendum and the county took over law enforcement for everything inside the county. They get more service for less money this way. We absorbed their staff and equipment and gave up their office space two years ago.”

  “Where is the Julie, Sheriff?”

  “Over to Cedar Pass Marina. The fellow that was mate, DeeGee Walloway, he’s living aboard and keeping an eye on it.”

  “Can I tell him it’s okay with you if I take a look at it?”

  “Now why would you want to do that?”

  “It can’t hurt anything, can it?”

  “I guess not. But there’s been enough people trying to be some kind of Sherlock Holmes around here.”

  “Was Harder really drunk?”

  “He looked drunk, smelled drunk, talked drunk, walked drunk, and all-around acted drunk. So, like it said in the paper, I didn’t get him tested for drunk. So I can’t swear he was passed-out drunk. Besides, he’d done a lot of jail time for D and D.”

  “Before he was born again.”

  “Those born-again ones fall off too, McGee. And hate to admit it. One drink. Van said. Like the ones we pick up wavering all over the road. Two little beers, they say. John Tuckerman and those girls swore Hub took Van up just that one drink. But he could have had a pint bottle in his coat, sucked it dry, and heaved it over the side. He comes from here, you know. And a lot of people remember the hell he raised when he was young. He finally left here and moved on down to Everglades City, did some guiding and gator poaching, got in trouble down there, found Jesus, moved to Lauderdale, and finally wound up back here again. The ones that swear off, most of them they go back onto it sooner or later, get pig drunk and locked up.”

  “Something special you’ve got against drunks, Sheriff?”

  “Married to one for a long time. Too long. She finally drove into a tree one night.”

  “Nice of you to give me so much time, Sheriff.”

  “What happened there, over your eye?”

  “I cut across the grounds last night, heading toward the beach, and ran into some of that playground stuff in the dark. Nothing important. Appreciate your help.”

  When I stood up, he tilted his chair back and looked up at me. “There have been some people coming into Timber Bay, nosing around here and there, thinking to come up with the kind of leverage that might would get them a piece of the money Hub is supposed to have taken.”

  “I can well imagine.”

  “It would hurt me to find out that you people had conned Devlin Boggs and you’re after the same thing as those other sharpshooters.”

  “You mean they think the money is here?” I asked, trying to look as though I were stupid enough to ask such a question.

  With patient exasperation he said, “They hope to get a line here on where he went from here. A
nd then they hope to go to wherever they think he is and take the money away from him.”

  “Oh.”

  “Hub Lawless could be a real surprise to anybody who found him and had ideas.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “One time some red-hots up from Tampa tried to take the payroll money at Hula Marina—that was before he sold out to Associated Foods. There were three of them and Hub shot one in the stomach, threw one of them into a wall, and broke the wrist on the third. He moves fast. I’ve hunted with him. He’s got real good reflexes, and he stays in shape. Jogging and so on. Weights.”

  I thanked him again and left. This was one complicated man, this Sheriff Ames. He had a mild look. But those dusty brown eyes kept asking more questions than were spoken. He made me wonder if I had actually come to Timber Bay to get a line on all that money. He made me feel guilty for things I’d never done. He made me conscious of that capacity for blackhearted evil which every one of us shares with everyone else—and never speaks about.

  Six

  I was the first to arrive at the Captain’s Galley for lunch, having set up the date by phone with Walter Olivera, phoned Dave Bellamy for the reservation, and left word at the desk at the North Bay Resort for Meyer to join us. I had a one-drink wait at the bar, and then Bellamy brought Walter Olivera over.

  At first glance I thought he was a high-school kid. Tall, skinny, with long dank blond hair, a goatee, embroidered jeans, two strands of heishi, and little Ben Franklin glasses. But each time I got a better look at him, I added five years, and I finally guessed him at thirty.

  Meyer arrived right after him, and Bellamy gave us the same booth as on our first visit. Olivera sat on the inside, and I sat across from them. The place was full of locals from the marts of trade—secretaries, brokers, salesmen, and city-hall types, along with lawyers, dentists, and contractors. It made a cheerful midday din of voices, ice, silverware, and laughter.