The Empty Copper Sea

by John D. MacDonald

  “Weren’t you going to get into Clearwater pretty late?”

  “Like four in the morning. Something like that. It was a crazy thing to do, but that’s how Mishy is.”

  “Why were Mr. Tuckerman and Mr. Lawless going down there by water? Did you get any clue to that?”

  “Some kind of business thing. Nobody really said.”

  “And the Captain was really out?”

  “Man, I thought he was dead!”

  “Were they drinking?”

  “Little bit. Not much.”

  I smiled at her. “Somebody said last night over at the North Bay Resort lounge that you’re a nice person.”

  She lighted up. “Hey! Who says that?”

  “Nicky Noyes.”

  She lost the sparkle. “Oh, that one. I see him around. I doan go out with him. He used to work for Mr. Lawless, you know? Some kind of good job, he says. I couldn’t say. Lunchtime some guy I know was in buying tapes and he said Nicky was in the hospital from being in some kind of fight someplace.”

  “Does he get in fights a lot?”

  “Not often on account of he’s so big. But he comes on evil—bigmout’, you know. He was over to North Bay last night. Huh! What happened over your eye anyhow?”

  “I ran into something in the dark.”

  “Something like Nicky?”

  Her very dark eyes were merry. So take a chance, McGee. “What if it was?”

  “Good for you! That sumbitch likes hurting. He busted Mishy’s finger once. He walk into a room, she walks out, you bet.” She looked at me more carefully. “No more marks? Just one? Maybe you had a stick?”

  “Footwork.”

  “That bank card says help you out. From the president yet. And you go around hitting. That doesn’t sound like a bank.”

  “Did the fellow say how Nicky is?”

  “Oh, he is okay. He said they were letting him out. He was just in, you know, for overnight. He goes to Emergency a lot. Nicky is always worried about his bod. If he feels hot, right away he wants to find out his temperature, and he thinks maybe he’s dying. He was some kind of big person around here in high school, and then he went to play football in Tallahassee, but he got sent home for some kind of gambling. He had a good job with Mr. Lawless. I doan know what now. For a little bit, he drove beer. Now he seems to be okay for money, but they say he’s a dealer, nothing real real heavy, just grass and coke and hash. Mishy is into that sometimes when she feels real down, but not me. Never. It’s too scary. I got to know where I am and where I’m coming from.”

  “Is Mishy a special friend of John Tuckerman?”

  “Huh? Oh, you wanna know if it’s all that special? Maybe. It wouldn’t mean all that much to Michele. I mean he’s kinda nice and funny. But she never mentioned it especially.”

  “Is it okay to tell her I talked to you?”

  “Sure. But why bother anyway, with me or her?”

  “I’m working for people who want to buy Mr. Lawless’s land. So we need to find out if he’s dead.”

  “Chee, we can’t help. I’m telling you, there was a hell of a lot of black water out there, all bouncing up and down, and me knocked on the fl—deck. They say he couldn’t swim at all. They say he’s in Mexico. What that means is he didn’t have to swim. Mishy and I talked about that. So if he comes ashore, he’s in Timber Bay, where all around the bay it’s built up. A wet man walking around? They say the tide was going out strong. What was there? A boat? I doan know, mister. You said your name is what? McGee? I just doan know. I theenk that sumbitch is dead. Hey, I got to get back or Carol’ll kill me dead. Sure. Talk to Mishy. But for what?”

  The Cove was about two hundred yards south of the North Bay Resort, a rambling frame sun-bleached structure which extended out over the bay, supported by thick pilings. The dining area was the farthest from the shore, beyond a large bar area hung with nets, glass floats, mounted fish, and funny sayings. They were having their midafternoon lull. A salesman was playing pinball, hammering the corners of the machine with the heels of his hands. A chubby white-haired couple wearing identical horn-rimmed glasses sat at a corner table drinking draft beer and playing gin. A tall hollow-chested bartender with a gay-nineties mustache and hairstyle was polishing stemware and inserting it upside down into the overhead racks.

  I slid onto a padded bar stool and said, “Mishy Burns around?”

  “She comes on at four,” he said.

  “Draft beer, please.”

  He served it with a nice head. He said, “When she does come on, she’s working. She has to set up the tables. When she comes on, she’s not on her own time.”

  “Are you trying to be unpleasant?”

  “I’m just telling you the way it is, friend. What she does on her own time is her business.”

  “You own this place?”

  “I’m one of the owners.”

  I was getting very tired of contentious attitudes. I smiled at him. I said, “I’ve always wondered about places like this.”

  “Wondered what?”

  “Suppose, just for the hell of it, you took a list of all the regulatory agencies that have any kind of authority over the way you do business here. County, city, state, federal. You know, the food-handling ordinances, and the tax people and the liquor people. Then suppose you went through this place and made a list of every single violation of every law, ordinance, and regulation.”

  “We run a good clean place here. We don’t violate anything!”

  “Nonsense, good buddy. There is no way to avoid being in violation of something. The rules are contradictory. You know it and I know it. Right now you are subject to fines, suspension of licenses, civil suits. That’s the way the establishment keeps you in line. If you get feisty, they come and look you over and tell you you have to build a whole new kitchen, or replace all your wiring, or put in ten more parking spaces.”

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “I am the fellow who came in here a little while ago, very quietly, and sat right here and asked you if Mishy Burns was around, and got a big discussion of her working hours and who pays her. We can start over again. Okay? Mishy Burns around?”

  “She comes on at four,” he said.

  “Draft beer, please,” I said, and he took the empty and refilled it and moved down the bar and left me alone, which was exactly what I wanted.

  Michele came in ten minutes later. I had been building a mental picture of her, and so I was totally unprepared for a twenty-two-year-old Doris Day. She came a-dancing and bubbling in, full of warmth and life and high spirits. She brightened the place up. The salesman knew her and the gin players knew her. The bartender motioned to me and she came over and put her hand out and said, beaming, “Hello! I’m Mishy Burns.”

  “Travis McGee. The man says you’re on his time and you can’t talk to me.”

  “About what, love?”

  “I’ve been talking to ’Licia about your cruise.”

  She made a face. “Oh, God. That again!”

  She was in constant motion, constant changes of expression, posture, tossing her hair back, rocking from heel to toe, so much so that one wanted to clamp firm hands on her shoulders and settle her down, position her, quiet her. I realized that all the animation gave the impression of prettiness, and that perhaps in repose her face would look quite plain.

  “Harley gets itchy, don’t you, Harley? Look, love, let me go put on the house garments and brush up the dining room a little and then we can talk, because things will be dead as a snake until five past five and all the car doors start chunking shut out there in the lot.”

  I saw her in a little while, trotting back and forth in the dining room, wearing a crotch-length tennis dress with a sailor collar and a little white yachtsman’s cap. Another waitress had joined her. A couple of construction workers—off at four—came in for beers. Somebody started the juke. I watched Michele. She had absolutely great legs. I felt guilty at the way I was going to try to booby-trap my question. Not very guilt
y. Anticipatory guilt, the kind that Meyer calls chessboard guilt, when you realize that the weaker player is making a frail response to a standard opening, and you are about to ram your bishops down his throat.

  When she beckoned to me, I went into the dining room and followed her over to a service bar where she had coffee waiting. She said, “Coffee? Black? Okay. Look, I have talked myself out on that boat ride. Believe me, it was a long, long time ago. To me, two months is long. Lots and lots of things happen in two months. I have told about it so much that what I remember now is not the boat ride but all the times I talked about it.”

  “It can happen. Felicia is just as tired of it, I guess.”

  “You would never believe how sick we got. Maybe I would have been okay, but as soon as she lost it, I was gone too.”

  “There was just one thing I wanted to get straight, Michele.”

  “Such as?”

  “Exactly how did John Tuckerman word it when he asked you to come along for the ride and bring a friend?”

  “You got it wrong. I asked him if we could go along.”

  “ ’Licia says that’s what Tuckerman told you to say.”

  “Why, God damn her! She agreed never to tell anybody—”

  And suddenly she stopped all motion. She was a subdued, plain-faced blonde with deeply bitten fingernails, staring at me from way inside herself, like an animal looking out of the brush.

  “You rotten bastard,” she said in a low voice. “You faked me out, didn’t you?”

  “Look at it this way. If Lawless is still alive somewhere, the whole thing was a conspiracy to defraud. He needed bodies to dress up the conspiracy.”

  “That shows how much you know, you bastard.”

  “I know this. You lied under oath. Right? So far, that’s between the two of us. And Felicia. But you keep on with the garbage mouth, I see no reason to keep your little secret.”

  We stood facing each other, each with an elbow on the service bar. For a few more moments the wary creature stared through her eyes at me, out of the thickets at the back of her mind, and then dropped out of sight, and she was Miss Cheerleader again, all bounce and joy, all twinkle and grin.

  With breathy laugh and salacious wink, she said, “What it was, and I’ll trust you, I really will, John Tuckerman has this thing about Felicia. You wouldn’t believe how horny he is for her, right from the first look he got at her. He said he would give me a nice present if I could get ’Licia to come along. What it was, it was a way of getting maybe a good chance to set her up. She didn’t know what was coming down. She’s a funny kid. She’s not much for sex. She lived with some cat for a while but she’ll never talk about it, and I think it was some kind of bad start for her, so now it’s all yeck to her. What happened was we got seasick, and then Harder passed out and we had to come back and you know what happened. Right in the beginning John Tuckerman had told me to say it was me asked him if we could come along. Later on he said it was even more important I should say that, because if it got out he asked us, it would look bad. Mr. Lawless wasn’t real turned on by having us come along. He hardly spoke to us at all. The way Felicia found out was, after the testimony and all, I got a little high and I started kidding Felicia about Tuckerman giving me a hundred dollars to talk her into that terrible boat ride. She was really pissed off at me. She wouldn’t talk to me for a week, but then she began to see how funny it was and she forgave me. She said even if it had been the best boat ride the world ever saw, Tuckerman wasted a hundred dollars. I don’t see why she’s like that. He’s sort of old for her. He’s thirty-eight, he says, but probably forty. I told her he’s not kinky or anything like that, and very sweet and generous, and he lives on that great beach, but she doesn’t want anything to do with him. It isn’t as if she thinks she’s the world’s best. She has this idea she’s ugly. Somebody told her once that with those teeth she could eat a Big Mac through a venetian blind. She doesn’t see why anybody would want her.”

  “Which finger did Nicky Noyes break?” Her face got red. “She’s got all those big white teeth and she’s got a great big mouth too.”

  “Here come customers.”

  “Oh, God, with four kids yet. We close the kitchen at ten and I’m off by ten thirty.”

  “If I’m not at the bar there by ten thirty, give up on me.”

  “But you’ll be around?”

  “Sure. For a while.”

  Eight

  I went right from the cove to 215 South Oak Lane, to the long white house with the three-car garage. I arrived at about quarter to five. There were two cars in the drive, a weatherbeaten old Cadillac convertible, rusting out under the white paint, and a new little gray Honda Accord. The front door was open. Through the screen I heard women laughing—not social laughter, but contagious yelps of delight.

  I had to ring the bell a couple of times. A woman came hurrying to the door and looked out at me, brows raised in query. She was small and lean and sun-brown in yellow shorts and a T-shirt. The black-gray bangs of her Prince Valiant hairstyle came almost to her black brows. Her face was sun-weathered, hollow-cheeked, with deep squint lines, deep brackets around her mouth. Her eyes were dark blue.

  “Mrs. Lawless?” I said.

  “Yes, but I don’t want a thing, thanks.”

  “I represent a group trying to purchase Double L Ranches and Lawless Groves, and I would appreciate a little of your time.”

  I sorted out the calling card which said on the back “Dear Julia” and was signed “Dev.” She opened the door a whole quarter inch to receive the card and then latched it again.

  After she read it slowly and carefully, she frowned at me and said, “I can’t sell that land. You certainly know that much.”

  “If your husband is alive, the problem is more complicated.”

  “Hub is dead.”

  “Perhaps you could help us ascertain that fact.”

  “I’m through talking to people about my husband.”

  “Because they wouldn’t listen?”

  “Something like that.”

  “I listen pretty good. Not as good as D. Jake Herron used to. But pretty good.”

  Her face softened slightly. “You knew my father?”

  “Just slightly. A friend of mine and I helped D. Jake nail a game warden some years back who was in the alligator-hide business as a sideline. The warden took a couple of shots at us.”

  “I remember hearing about that!”

  “I remember him saying that night that nobody ever wasted their time listening.”

  “Well … come on in. Maybe you’ll buy something.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “We’re tagging stuff for the biggest garage sale ever presented on South Oak Lane. Maybe the only garage sale.”

  I went through the house with her and out to the area in the rear. There was a big screened cage, a swimming pool, a flagstone terrace beyond the cage, and a barbecue area beyond the terrace. Two women were working with Julia Lawless. There was a beefy cheerful redhead named Doris Jennings and a sallow and mocking blonde named Freddy Ellis. One Lawless daughter was there, introduced as Lynn. She looked familiar, and I suddenly remembered where I had seen her.

  “Nice going, tiger,” I said to her.

  “For what?” she said, looking at me with that apathy they reserve for ancient male strangers.

  “For whipping Miss Languid in the salmon dress over at the North Bay Resort courts. She wouldn’t shake hands on it, I noticed.”

  She gave me a quick, warning wink. “Thanks. That was Sandra Ellis. I never beat her before.”

  Freddy Ellis said, “Hey. You mean my snitty little daughter lost ungraciously?”

  “I didn’t mind, honest,” Lynn said.

  “I mind,” Freddy said ominously.

  Doris Jennings asked me if I would be willing to look at the prices they had put on Hub’s possessions and see if they were out of line. She said she had gotten advice from the sporting-goods stores which had sold him a lot
of the things. They were arranged on display in the nearest stall of the garage.