The Empty Copper Sea

by John D. MacDonald

  I moved slowly and carefully past Hubbard Lawless’s golf clubs, golf cart, tennis equipment, bowling ball and bowling shoes, shotguns, rifles, target pistol, fly rods, spinning rods, surf rods, tuna rods, reels and reel cases, boxes of lures, boxes of flies, weights, punching bag, Nikon cameras, lenses, lens cases, strobe lights, tripods, slide boxes, slide projectors, movie cameras, movie projectors, light stands, ten-speed tour bike, binoculars, sheath knives …

  The man liked nice things, and he kept them in good shape. He didn’t buy things and put them away. They showed signs of wear and signs of care.

  A splendid custom shotgun caught my eye. It was in a fitted pigskin case, with an extra set of side-by-side barrels. Spanish walnut stock. Initials inlaid in gold. H.R.L. Beavertail forearm. Single nonselective trigger. Ventilated rib. English scroll engraving on white steel. It was Orvis Custom, built to Hub Lawless’s physical dimensions, and I knew it had to represent a minimum three-thousand-dollar investment. A dandy toy for a grown-up boy. It was priced to move at five hundred. I assembled it and tried it. The drop at the comb and the heel was wrong, trigger distance wrong. And the initials were wrong. A man the same size as Hub Lawless could find a great bargain here.

  I moved along and then went back to the billfish tackle, and fended off a lust to buy some of it. The man had good taste in equipment.

  “Well?” Julia asked.

  “You got good advice. The prices of the things I know about are in line. Fair for the buyer and the seller.”

  “He never stinted himself,” she said flatly. “Good old Hub. The best was just barely good enough.”

  “Mother!” Lynn said, defending the beloved daddy.

  “Sorry, chick,” Julia said, reaching to ruffle the girl’s hair. “Thanks for easing my mind about the prices. They seemed kind of low. I know what he paid for some of those things.”

  “I know nothing about golf equipment or bicycles.”

  “Oh, those prices are okay. I didn’t know about the outdoor jock stuff.”

  The next stall of the garage was filled with standard garage-sale household items, Julia’s and also items brought over by Doris Jennings and Freddy Ellis, for a joint effort. It was a predictable array: Cribs and high chairs. Ornate beer steins and souvenir plates. Bonus books from book clubs. Floor lamps and suitcases. Rotisseries and bulletin boards. Tricycles and feather headdresses. End tables and tablecloths. On being pressed, I said it looked as if they had a lot of good stuff there.

  Finally, as a reward for my patience and help, and for having known her father, she took me back into the living room for the obligatory conversation.

  She sat curled in a corner of a large couch. I sat across from her, with a glass coffee table between us.

  “It’s so damned depressing,” she said. “I’ve still not tackled his dressing room. I’ve got to get rid of all that stuff. Goodwill, I guess. Or the Salvation Army or somebody.”

  “A lot of people seem to think he’s in Mexico.”

  “Say the rest of it too, Mr. McGee.”

  “Such as?”

  “He stole the money and ran. He took off with his Norwegian piece of ass to live happily ever after.”

  “He was having an affair with her. An architect, wasn’t she?”

  “Okay. So he was having an affair. His very first. Believe me, it was his first. It started last year. In the summer. She was recommended to him. She was supposed to be some kind of an expert in the design of shopping centers. She did a big one in Atlanta and one in Jacksonville. When everything went to hell with the one he was supposed to build here, she should have taken off, right? But she stayed on, drawing pay from the big shot who was going broke. Oh, I am so goddamn sick of these little Scandinavian broads with their little breathy accents and no makeup, maybe a trace of lipstick, and their pale green eyes and their big boobs and no more morals than rabbits. I don’t mind telling you I was really really hurt. I couldn’t believe it at first. Then when we had a nose-to-nose battle, he wouldn’t deny it. Finally he confessed and promised he would break up with her, but he didn’t. He claimed he tried, but he didn’t try hard enough. I asked him if he gave a damn about Tracy and Lynn. It marks a child terribly when there is family trouble when they’re in their mid-teens, just sixteen and fourteen. We had more rotten fights and then he started sleeping out at the ranch, in a room back of the ranch office out there. That was in late January. I’ve had a chance to think lately. And I can … almost begin to understand this Kristin business. Hub had a dream. He admired my daddy so much. What he wanted to do was build a base. Money and power. And then one day he was going to run for governor and become somebody in Florida. But last year, when times were hard and things began to go bad, he could see his dream fading. He had been too confident. He’d made a bad judgment of the situation. It was going to spoil his track record to be brought down after forty. And there wouldn’t be enough time to build it all up again. He was really seriously upset. He always had such great drive and spirit, and he couldn’t find a way out of the spot he was in. Some men would go a little crazy. Some would take to the bottle or go onto Valium. Hub took up with that architect person, proving his manhood, I guess. Maybe she kept telling him he was a great man. Maybe I should have done that so she wouldn’t have to. Maybe I nagged him some. And maybe it was Hub’s way of going a little bit crazy. Am I making any sense?”

  “I think you are.”

  “You really listen, don’t you?”

  “I’m interested.”

  “You have been sitting there, looking right at me, and nodding and making little sounds in your throat. You are so damned earnest about listening to me, you made me rattle on and on and on.”

  “You wanted to talk about it. That’s all.”

  “So I open up to you and I don’t even know you.”

  “That’s the easiest way of all, when you don’t know the other person.”

  “Maybe.”

  “What makes you so sure he’s dead?”

  “We were always very close. Very close, until the last eight months of his life. We were in touch with each other on some kind of level most people don’t have. Once I had a feeling of blackness, of terrible fear. He’d gone hunting with John Tuckerman. I wrote down the exact time it happened. I couldn’t get in touch with him. I was beside myself with worry. Finally he phoned me from Waycross, Georgia, and said he’d been bitten on the wrist by a big cottonmouth, but he’d been treated and it was going to be okay and he would be home in two days. When we compared my note with the time he had been bitten, it was correct to the very minute. He knew the time because it had bitten him on the left wrist, near where his wristwatch was. Once when the girls were both in school, in the first and third grades, he came charging home in the middle of the afternoon, convinced something was wrong. I’d fallen from the shed roof and wrenched my back so badly I couldn’t stand up. I couldn’t even crawl to the phone or to the neighbors, it hurt so badly. I’d ruptured a disc. I knew that if I waited he’d come. I knew that he knew I was in trouble, and he came. There were lots of little things like that that happened between us. Those are just two of the biggest ones. When they told me that night that Hub was lost off the Julie and believed drowned, I didn’t believe it. I kind of reached into that private world where he and I were always in contact, and I knew he was still there, so he couldn’t be dead.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “It was a distasteful situation—with those two young girls going with two middle-aged men out on that lovely boat named for me—but not some kind of disaster, really. I didn’t know what was going on. I got to sleep quite late. The girls were terribly upset, Tracy and Lynn, and I had to get them settled down. They loved their father so much. They couldn’t understand what was happening to their world. I am very concerned about them, about Tracy particularly, she’s getting so strange and secretive. Anyway, I took a sleeping pill and I didn’t wake up until after ten the next morning, March twenty-third. Everything came rushing back
into my mind and I reached out, or over, or down, in some direction I can’t describe, to find the same reassurance I’d felt the night before, and there was nothing. Absolutely nothing. It was a cold, dead, abandoned place in my mind. I knew he was gone. There is no doubt at all in my mind. My husband is dead.”

  “Forgive me, but that is not exactly the sort of evidence that will mean much to the insurance company.”

  “I found that out. They want any excuse not to pay, because it is a very big policy. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they hadn’t started all those rumors about Hub being in Mexico. He loved Mexico, granted. If he were alive, it would be a reasonable place for him to run to, if he wanted to hide.”

  “Cleaning out those bank accounts makes it look as if he had running and hiding on his mind.”

  “Maybe he did. I don’t know. We weren’t communicating. I suppose it would have eased his conscience about me and the girls if he could fake his own death and leave that insurance for me.”

  “What if he tried to fake it, and something went wrong and he died?”

  “That would fit the way he acted before he disappeared, and it would fit the way I feel about his being so definitely dead.”

  “Hypothetical question. Suppose somebody showed you a picture of Hubbard Lawless taken at a sidewalk café in Guadalajara on the eighth day of April, sitting and pouring dark beer into a glass?”

  “I would have to say the picture is a fake.”

  “Who would bother to fake it?”

  “The insurance company, of course. To muddy the waters and hang on to their two million dollars. The insurance is mine. I am the owner of that policy. It’s all in the records of the trust department at Coast National Bank and Trust. You can ask Rob Gaylor all about it. He’s the Senior Trust Officer. He handles what my daddy left in trust for me. It isn’t enough to maintain this house and raise two girls. Thus the garage sale, and also, I am going to list the house and look for something smaller and less expensive to maintain.”

  “It’s a beautiful house, Mrs. Lawless.”

  “Julie, please. I know. But houses can go sour on you, all of a sudden. You remember too many birthdays and Christmases. What do people call you?”

  “Travis. Trav. I wonder if you could tell me who could give me the most information on Kristin Petersen, Julie.”

  “She wasn’t the sort of person who goes around making dozens of new friends. She subleased a condo apartment at North Pass Vista. That’s just north of the North Bay Resort, where you saw Lynn beat Sandra Ellis—”

  “And where I’m staying with my associate, Meyer.”

  “North Pass Vista is a kind of town-house arrangement. They have a rental office there where you could ask.”

  “If I think of more questions I want to ask you, may I come back again?”

  “Of course. But you are not really interested in buying land, are you?”

  “My associate is.”

  She looked at me steadily, with care. “I think he probably is, but not to the extent you’d have me believe. You’re here for something entirely different. To find out something. To help someone.”

  “You know, you could make me pretty uncomfortable with all that.”

  “I don’t want to. I’m not a witch. I just can read some people sometimes. Whatever you do, Travis, you are very damn good at it.”

  “Thank you. I’m not sure you’re correct.”

  “I’ve got to get back out there to the old-table-lamp department and start pricing. Will you tell me some day why you’re here?”

  “If you’re interested.”

  “I wouldn’t ask if I weren’t.”

  I got back to the North Bay Yacht and Tennis Resort at quarter past six, feeling grainy, listless, and depressed. There was no Meyer and no note from Meyer. I peeled off the little compress and then, with great care, pulled off the thin strips of adhesive. The skin held together nicely, so I dabbed some disinfectant on it, purchased from a drug-store near the bank, and covered it with a flesh-colored waterproof Band-Aid from the same source. I stared into my own pale and skeptical eyes. An unenamored lady had once termed them “spit-colored.” Deep-water tan, a few little white scars here and there, a nose but slightly bent, a scuffle of sun-baked hair, responding to no known discipline and seldom subjected to any.

  Out on that ketch, the Antsie, beating our interminable way up from the Grenadines to the Virgins to Keasler’s Peninsula, I had wanted the night lights and the gentle ladies and the best of booze, with enough music to make them mix properly. And here I was, up to my hocks in all such ingredients and wishing I was back aboard the Antsie, being yanked and hammered and pounded by the ever-insisting sea. Life is a perverse art indeed.

  I left a note to Meyer that he could find me in the lounge. Feeling somewhat better after the shower and the change of clothes, I went on down and walked in on a very busy bar, plus Billy Jean Bailey tinkling away on background music as opposed to the performance numbers she did later at night. When she saw me, her smile lighted her up from inside, like candles in a pumpkin, and my heart sank. She had on a silver-blue cowboy shirt and tight white jeans. She switched the music to tell me that I had come along from out of nowhere, and then she had me walking out of a dream, and then the music said she was in love, in love, in love, with a wonderful guy.

  “No, no, no,” I yelled, in the back of my brain, and beat on the cell bars. “No way. Please.”

  When she took a break, she came around to the far end of the bar and wormed her way in to stand close beside me, with maximum contact. She put her hand on my neck and pulled my ear down to where she could talk into it. “I’ve had the most goddamn delicious day of my whole life, thinking about you, bun.”

  “Uh.”

  “I’ve never turned on like that before. Couldn’t you tell?”

  “Uh.”

  “We’re so fantastic, I can almost get it off just thinking about how it was. I can get right to the edge, bun.”

  “Bun?”

  “Bun rabbit. My dear darling bun rabbit baby. Oh, God, time is going so slow, it will never be midnight.”

  “Don’t you go Friday until one?”

  “Oh, Christ! It is Friday.”

  “Yes. It sure is.”

  She kissed me on the ear and went switching back to her piano. I was conscious of considerable amusement among the bystanders. She had not exactly concealed the relationship. My ears felt hot. Visitor makes immediate dear friend of the piano player.

  I wrote her a very short note, paid for my drink, took the note over to the piano, and put it where she could read it. She did so and made a kiss shape with her small mouth and then a big happy smile, and I went lumbering out and met Meyer just as I got outside the door.

  “Where are you going?” he asked.

  “It’s very close in there.”

  “With that ceiling?”

  “Take my word. Close. Very close. Let’s … uh … have a drink at the Cove. Very close by. Walking distance.”

  “I know. I saw it. Are you all right? You act strange.”

  “Tell me about your afternoon, Meyer.”

  “Mr. Glenn and Mr. Latzov drove me all over this county and showed me fantastic bargains in ranchland, grove land, raw land, development opportunities, waterfront land, and swamplands. They told me this area is right on the threshold of fantastic, unbelievable growth, and every dollar put into land values here would be like investing in St. Petersburg Beach in nineteen fifty. Every time I tried to bring up the Lawless holdings, they would whip me out into the scrub country and show me something much better, available right now.”

  Once we were wedged into a corner of the long bar at the Cove, I asked him what Mr. Glenn and Mr. Latzov thought about the Lawless affair.

  “A terrible tragedy. A legal tangle. A sorry affair. You never know what a man will do when he’s pushed too far. They said that considering how smart Hub Lawless is, the odds are very small that anybody will ever find him. And they estimated his geta
way money at closer to a million.”

  It was payday in Timber Bay. The noise level at the Cove was overwhelming. Waitresses worked at a dead run. Harley had two helpers behind the bar. Suddenly I noticed Nicky Noyes over in a corner of the bar area, at a bare table beyond the row of pinball machines. He sat behind a round table, and the two couples with him looked as if they had just climbed down off their big road cycles. They looked quaint. They are fading into history, like Pancho Villa’s irregulars. All the macho whiskers and the leather clothes and the dead eyes and their feral, abused little women. Hundreds of them roar up and down the highway in formation, making formal protest about the law forcing them to wear a helmet. It is a violation of their freedom and liberty, they say. Very macho. But when they don’t wear helmets, they abuse the taxpayers, taking a couple of weeks to die in intensive care, their primitive brains jellied by hard impact with the concrete highway. Somebody has to pick them up when they go down and deliver them to Emergency, regrettably.

  I saw Noyes gesture toward the bar, and moments later all five of them were looking directly at me, a stare of speculation and obscure challenge.

  I said to Meyer, “Beyond the pinball machines at the round table, the fellow with his back to the wall, facing us directly, is Nicky Noyes.”

  “With the headband and all the gold trinkets?”

  “Himself.”

  “Wholesome company he keeps.”

  “Isn’t it, though? I keep getting the feeling that Nicky isn’t very tightly wrapped. He could be working himself up to jump me.”

  “Right here?”

  “Or wait outside for me.”

  “For us.”

  “Thank you, Meyer. Very nice instinct. Here he comes, incidentally.”

  Nicky came plodding toward me. He walked oddly, putting his feet down with care. His strong cologne arrived three steps before he did. I shifted carefully, coiling all my springs without appearing to do so. Nicky came inside my normal space and stopped, broad belly almost touching me. His gaze moved rapidly side to side, up and down, back and forth.