John D MacDonald - Travis McGee 17 - The Empty Copper Sea

by The Empty Copper Sea(lit)

  Ambulances were soon leaving. Tow trucks were untangling the torn metal. The flares were extinguished, traffic resumed, and the spectators began drifting away.

  The kid said, "That's the first time I used it for real. You done it often, mister?"

  "Second time for me. The first was a drowning. Didn't make it."

  "You take the CPR course?" he asked.

  "Nobody should ever try cardiopulmonary resuscitation without taking the course. You could do more harm than good."

  "That's what they told us too. You think that old guy will make it?"

  "I hope so," I said. I saw B. J. Bailey heading back toward the main building of the Resort, and I hurried and stopped her by clamping a hand on her shoulder.

  She turned and said, "And what the hell do you want?"

  "I want to know how you got Nicky so charged up about me. What the hell did you tell him?"

  "I didn't tell him anything."

  "Listen to me, Billy Jean. Whatever you told him, it made him come after us with a shotgun. He shot to kill. Believe me. He missed. He tried to reload. I took the gun away from him. He ran out into traffic and got hit and killed."

  "Killed!" she said, aghast. "You're joking. You got to be joking."

  "You killed him, Billy Jean."

  We stood near a driveway lamp, and it shone pale yellow across her small face. Her mouth broke and she hunched her shoulders high. "No, I didn't! I didn't! I told him you came here after him. He gets kind of weird about maybe there are people after him. He's on crystal. It makes people like that. I thought he would fight again, is all. I thought maybe he'd beat you up this time. I didn't think he would... oh, no. Oh, no."

  She stood hunched and sobbing.

  I gave her some clumsy pats on the back and said, "Look I didn't mean to hurt your feelings last night."

  "You came back here with..."

  "I know, I know. That was dumb. I do some very dumb things like that. Frequently. Forget you ever knew me."

  "I can't stop thinking about Nicky. I just can't. I can't work tonight. Oh, Jesus. Look. One thing. You get the hell away from me. Okay? Get away and stay away. Okay?" She glared up at me out of her grief swollen face. I stood and watched her walk away.

  Meyer came up behind me and said, "More diplomacy?"

  "Are you all right?"

  "I'm going up to the room Where will you be?"

  "Right here, waiting for the Sheriff."

  "You called?" Sheriff Ames said, at my elbow. He said we could both come with him-sit in his car and chat a while. I explained Meyer's problem, and he pointed to where he was parked and let Meyer go to freshen up for a few minutes.

  Thirteen

  I TOLD him the story while we sat in his car waiting for Meyer to return. When Meyer returned, he had Meyer tell it again. He got the shotgun out of the pickup and found the right barrel loaded with a fresh shell of number 12. We went over and studied the rental Dodge. The first barrel had blown a hunk the size of a cantaloupe out of the right front tire at seven o'clock. For a time we couldn't find where the second one had gone, and it was Meyer who spotted the tiny streaks of ricochet atop the mound of the trunk cover. So he had been swinging it when he fired, and the first one had slain the tire and kicked the muzzle up, so that only the bottom few pellets of the pattern touched the trunk when the rest of them sailed off toward the tennis courts. I could estimate that the second pattern had been directly over us as we tumbled past the rear of the car. I had one skinned elbow and the knee was gone out of my slacks. Meyer had taken a crack on the back of the head and slid through grease on his behind.

  Ames drove us to the hospital, and we went in through Emergency. Meyer and I sat in wicker chairs in a small waiting room while Ames went wandering off after information. The clock ticked. Nurses rustled by. A child was crying. The available magazines were devoted to health, diet, maintaining the right attitude toward life, and how to manage a hospital. Two young, thin black girls came in and sat on the couch, hugging each other and sniffling. A nurse came and got them, and a little while later I heard a terrible grieving desolate scream, and wondered if it had come from one of them.

  Ames sauntered back in, pale, worn, and dusty-looking, a drab man of no particular emphasis or importance. He sat and said, "They're still working on Noyes, still operating on him, but I get the feeling they're giving up. Now they're doing what's called the practice of medicine, with Dr. Ted Scudder running the show. He'll come on down here shortly, I'd say."

  "What about that old man?"

  "That was a Mr. and Mrs. Whittaker Davis, from Watertown, New York, looking for a place to retire. Safe to say it won't be here."

  "Was?" Meyer asked. "Or is?"

  "Oh. Sorry. Is. At least for now. They're breathing for him, but they've got heart action. He's in cardiac intensive care, all wired up to the machinery." He turned so as to look directly at Meyer, frowning. "His wife says a man who looks like you, who worked on him, and who would be you, wouldn't it? He said he was a doctor. There's a law I'd have to look up about impersonating a licensed profession."

  "I'm a doctor," Meyer said. "I didn't tell her my specialty."

  "What would that be?"

  ''Economics. I misled Mrs. Davis. Guilty. She was trying to interrupt the CPR."

  "They say you knew what you were doing."

  "We are DC Number Two Basic Rescuers, both of us," Meyer said proudly. He gave me a smug nod. I sighed. He had insisted. He had nagged at me until I agreed. What was the result? Two dreadful hours of hard labor on a drowned and dark blue girl before finally the professionals had shown up and told us we were wasting our time. She was gone. And now a dying old man whose ribs I had broken. Great.

  A round, weary, red-faced man dressed in operating-theater green came scuffing in and collapsed into a wicker chair. There was a brown splatter of blood across his chest. His plastic mask dangled. He shoved his little green hat back, took his glasses off, and began cleaning them on a tissue. "Official time of death, Hack, make it nine twenty-five. Ten minutes ago. But he was dead as chopped liver the minute the car hit him. Busted all to hell inside. Ripped and ruptured. Liver, spleen, kidney, bowel. He was nearly torn in half. The certificate will say internal injuries."

  The Sheriff introduced us, explaining that we were in town on business, seeking to arrange the purchase of some of the Lawless holdings.

  The Sheriff said, "I told them up there I want a blood sample and urine sample to go to the lab. Damn fool ran right into traffic. Check for booze and foreign substances, I told them, and they'll tell my deputy when he gets over here."

  Scudder got up and sighed. "My turn in the barrel. Four to midnight. I draw that one on Saturday night once every five weeks. Try to keep everything quiet for the rest of my tour, Hack."

  "Try to."

  We checked on Mr. Whittaker Davis again before leaving. No change. Because there was a fatality, possibly two, Ames vvanted our statements on tape. He said they'd be typed up for signature in the next few days. Probably by Tuesday afternoon.

  He made it sound like routine, but once he got me into his office and over at a small conference table at the side, with the tape all hooked up and tested, with me on record as saying I was giving the information of my own free will, he did more digging than I had anticipated. He covered my first encounter with Noyes, the absurd fight in the parking lot, the second encounter at the Cove, and what had been said back and forth on all occasions. And the third and final encounter. Very final for Nicky Noyes.

  Hack Ames was good at his job. He had all the tricks. For a time I found myself going along in his rhythm, but then the alarm bells began to sound and I hauled back on my own reins. A good questioner will ask a question, get what sounds like a complete answer and sit there in silence, mildly quizzical, until you qualify or add to the answer. A good questioner will ask very simple questions requiring short and simple answers and slowly increase the pace until when he throws a curve, the silence seems to last too long, and you fe
el a compulsion to give an answer quickly. Any answer. A good questioner will ask a dozen questions about situation X, and then a dozen questions about situation Y, and finally he will start a series about situation Z, but the fifth question may be about Y and the seventh may be about X, questions you have already answered, but phrased just a bit differently. A good questioner will give you back your answers, twisted very slightly, and wait for the corrections. And he will ask you a question that is absurd, or grotesque, stop you before you can answer, and throw in a much better question while you are still off balance from the earlier one. There is always this problem. If you can know and anticipate and deal with the skilled questioner, you slowly begin to realize that you are doing so much bobbing and weaving that, in itself, it becomes significant. You cannot start refusing to answer. You cannot fake anger. You become aware of little inconsistencies here and there, and he gives you no chance to patch them up.

  He turned off the recorder. He scratched at his dusty head, yawned, and said, "You're almost good enough, McGee."

  "For what?"

  "For playing games with tired old county sheriffs on a Saturday night."

  "No games."

  "Unless a fellow is trying to borrow money Dev Boggs will just about believe anything you want to tell him."

  "Meyer has a letter from-"

  "I saw the letter he left with Boggs. I phoned that big man Friday afternoon, that Allbritton. Never could get him. Imagine if I got him, he'd back it up, but that letter, you know, doesn't really say much of anything. I checked back through your registration there at the North Bay Resort, and I called a friend over in Fort Lauderdale. He looked around and called me back. You two keep a low profile over there. This Meyer seems to make out doing talks at conferences and being a consultant once in a while."

  "He's sort of an investor."

  "Sure. And you are sort of a salvage consultant or some goddamn thing. And Billy Carter is a field hand."

  "What are you trying to say to me, Sheriff?"

  He cracked his knuckles and blinked his tired brown eyes. "What I am saying is that I get sick of being insulted. I've got a job here and I do it and I do it damn well, if statistics mean anything. For two months now I've had federal employees and state people coming into Dixie County and padding around, fumbling into this and that, screwing up the detail, living on travel and per diem, without the courtesy of checking in with me. A lot of them are supposed to be officers of the law, though what law and what office is often hard to tell. The general attitude is maybe I am involved in whatever it is they are overpaid to try to look into. Or I am some dummy barely competent to set up speed traps and arrest drunks. Hub Lawless is responsible for a whole batch of them coming in. I am getting tired of it, McGee. I am going to start throwing asses into the little slam here, and I can't see any special reason why I shouldn't start with yours. The way I read you, you are either U.S. or state level, and you are over here on the Lawless matter, or you are here on the new drug thing, and the one phone call I'm going to let you have, it better work out because you're not going to get two."

  "Wrong on all guesses," I said.

  "Bullshit, McGee! You think I don't know when a man is being evasive? You think I can't recognize fancy footwork?"

  "Okay, okay. Van Harder asked me to come over and see if I could find out enough to get a rehearing on his license. He's bringing my houseboat around. I got a reservation for it at the Cedar Pass Marina."

  He looked startled and incredulous. "You some kind of lawyer?"

  "No."

  "Licensed investigator?"

  "No. It's just a favor for a friend."

  "A friend? How come Harder is a friend of yours?"

  "Because he fished charter out of Bahia Mar. He had the Queen Bee Number Three. He sold her to a man named Fazzo when he went into shrimping. Harder was already there when I began living there. All the permanent people around a marina know each other."

  "Why did he ask you? What qualifications have you got?"

  I waited a while on that one and finally said, "Indignation."

  "All right! Okay! It's justified. It wasn't at the time. At the time, McGee, it looked exactly like what it was supposed to look like, a reformed drunk who fell off."

  "And his friendly Sheriff tried to kick him back up onto his drunken feet."

  "I've been sorry about that ever since. I did it because I was angry, dammit. I like Van. It scalded me he should be such a jackass. Since then things have shaped up different. I'll go along with what he kept saying, that there had to be something in that drink Hub took up to him. All the rest of it was staged too perfect. Van could have come to me. I mean it. He can come to me and I can get that license give back to him, and I kindly think I'll go ahead and get it done anyway without his asking."

  "Sheriff, if you really know Van, you know why he won't come to you."

  For just an instant he looked puzzled, and then he nodded. "I know. I kicked him. Not hard or anything. But I kicked him. You don't kick a man like Van Harder. Those people that gave Hub a dollar and a half of work for every dollar of pay, they've certainly got cause to despise that man. Harder, Noyes, all of them."

  We sat in silence. I wondered what on earth Meyer would be thinking, sitting out there waiting. "I ought to chase your ass right out of my county," he said. "I really should."

  "Mr. Boggs still has Meyer's letter."

  "Don't try to keep conning me with that. Okay?"

  "Okay."

  "Maybe you decided to help Van Harder out because you knew about this case and thought you might run across some money."

  "The thought crossed my mind, Sheriff."

  He grinned for the first time. "Crossed a lot of minds. But it has all pretty much died down. It's pretty certain Hub is in Mexico and he took it with him, and got that lady architect with him too. Walking hand in hand into the Mexican sunset. Smiling a lot. Hard to believe Hub Lawless did that to his own town, to all of us. Wife, kids too. With them, of course, he told himself the insurance would take care of them. Except, on a big policy, they look for any loophole to keep from paying off."

  "But you don't know all the answers yet, Sheriff. Things don't quite fit."

  He tilted his chair back and stuck his thumbs inside his belt. He squinted at the desk top and said, "Now if I wasn't tied hand and foot by the restrictions of this office, I could churn around here and there, telling lies, making jokes, pushing buttons, hustling and scrambling. Maybe some pieces would fall out of the box and I'd get to know more. No! Don't tell me you understand a damned thing, because I don't want to hear anything about your understanding. There isn't any understanding. You might come back in here some day and have a chat, if you have some interesting conversation. I get bored a lot in here. I spent fourteen years in a car out on the roads. It gets tiresome in here."

  "Before I go, it was kind of a shock to have Noyes trying very hard to kill me, or both of us."

  "It knocked Nicky way off balance when Hub took off. He went away for a little while and came back with merchandise. We knew he was dealing, and we got a pretty good customer list. It's easier to keep your finger on a network you know than to try to unravel the next one that starts up. He got to hitting his own goods. Dr. Sam Stuart knows more about it than I do. He's worried all to hell lately. Something the kids are taking. We had a thirteen-year-old girl sit on a gravel pile last month and swallow gravel, a chunk at a time, until she had four pounds of rock in her belly. Weird. God only knows who'll take over where Nicky leaves off. Maybe the others we got will just start handling more."

  "Meyer is waiting out there."

  "Oh, sure. Send him in. It will only be a few minutes for him. I'll expect to see you around?"

  I nodded. Meaning clear. See me around or he would come and get me. I went out and sent Meyer in. I sat and waited. A sturdy woman typed slowly. I could just hear the dispatcher. A gigantic deputy came in slowly and said to the woman, "What's it about?"

  "You know what it's about."<
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  "Not the damn charts again. Don't tell me it's the charts."

  "You're sixteen over again, Rudy."

  "But, damn it all, I'm not fat!"

  "He says you got to be no more than two twenty-five. Weren't you in high school with Nick Noyes?"