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

by The Empty Copper Sea(lit)

  "Maybe he doesn't care."

  "Oh, no. Hub cares. That's how come people can't understand it, really. He's a good man. Everything just got to be too much for him. I've been thinking about it a lot. I think that if everything had worked out just fine for him in a business way-the new shopping plaza and that huge development nine miles south of the city-he would still have done something nobody would be able to understand. Maybe blown his own head off."

  It surprised me. "Why?"

  "Things aren't all that great. You play craps?"

  "Once in a while. I'm no big fan."

  "Imagine a man like Hub Lawless at a great big crap table. He's keeping a dozen bets going all the time. He's on the come line and the field. He's betting with fours and tens, against sixes and eights. He's bending over that table, sweating, changing bets, doubling up, drawing down, watching the dice and the stick man and the other players. He keeps winning because he is working harder than anybody else, and he's figuring the odds closer, and he's keeping track every minute. For a long time it's fun. And one day he finds out that they've chained him to the table. That's it, his whole life, piling up counters. He can still keep going as hard as before, but it's different. Choice is gone."

  It was a striking analogy. "He used to get away a lot."

  "No. Not a lot, and not for long. Everybody thought he was such a happy guy, such good spirits, so friendly. I knew him real well, Mr. McGee, and in the last few years he seemed to me to be kind of... wistful. He was getting heavy and out of condition, and he smoked too much. He didn't have time to stay in shape. He didn't have time for much social life or home life, either. Nice home. Lovely wife and daughters. But he had chained himself to the table without realizing it. He knew, or had started to realize, that the rest of his life was going to be pretty much the same."

  "One of those evaluations that come along at forty?"

  "I suppose so. But he felt the weight of the people who depended on him for jobs. I guess he even felt my weight. I wrote all his coverage, and I don't mind saying I'll miss the business. I guess a man gets to feel the need to experience more lives than the one they give him a chance to lead, no matter how well he does at it."

  "And along comes the lady architect."

  "Sure thing. Ever shoot a sandhill crane?"

  "No.

  "I got talked into going over to Texas one time with some old buddies of mine and shooting crane. They put me in the tall grass downwind from this little sort of marshy pond. And after a time this big gawky old bird starts to soar in for a landing. They yelled to me to shoot it. So I stood up and shot it. It was about as tough a shot as standing on the end of a runway and shooting a seven-forty-seven. Blew most of his feathers off, and he landed thump dead about eight feet from me. Made me sick to my stomach. People will do some funny things in the name of sport. That's the way Kristin Petersen shot old Hub down. She blew all the feathers off him and he landed thump. He was ready for her. He was ready for anything that was going to change things around for him. Nothing tasted good to him any more. He stopped giving a damn what anybody thought of him. When the dice came to him, he wanted to show off for Kristin, so he bet the whole pile and lost it, and there was nothing left for him to do, if he wanted to keep her, but steal and run. And that is just what he did."

  "He didn't do it very well."

  "If he'd done it well, he'd have left Julia with her pride and with plenty of money. That was how he justified it, I guess."

  "I certainly appreciate your being so open with me, Mr. Stenneninacher."

  "Nobody in Timber Bay calls me that. It is too damned long a name. I'm Ralph to everybody. You come back any time you want to talk about Hub Lawless. I knew him about as well as anybody except John Tuckerman. Poor John."

  "He's off the sauce. His sister has it under control."

  "I heard she was taking care of him down there. I remember her when she was in high school here. Gretel was a beautiful girl."

  "Still is."

  "I get to know all the high-school kids. I do my magic shows."

  "Magic?"

  He smiled and pulled a long yellow pencil out of his ear, snapped it in half, threw the pieces up in the air, and caught the pencil as it came down whole. "When you think of magic, think of Ralph the magician. And think of insurance because it will be magic if you can get by without it."

  "Oh."

  "I get them in junior high, before they get too sophisticated. Levitation. Magic rings. Mystery fire. The multiplying rabbits. I practice one hour every morning of my life. I get up that extra hour to get the practice in." He stopped smiling as he thought of Tuckerman again. "John went downhill very very fast after Hub left. He drank himself into the hospital that first month, and that's where what little money he had left went to. I hope he works himself out of it. But I certainly don't know what will happen to him. He lived off Hub's energy and luck all his life. I can't think of anyone around here who'd hire him. There was something besides booze involved. Dr. Sam Stuart knows more about that than I would."

  "Drugs?"

  "Something like that. Something that bent his head out of shape."

  I thanked him again, and I waved good-by to Dora, the Serf-Person, as I left. I hesitated when I got off the elevator, then decided it was as good a time as any to see Devlin Boggs about Kristin Petersen's banking affairs.

  I waited near his office. He was somewhere in the back of the bank. Soon I saw him striding across the carpeting, erect as a doorman, neat as an undertaker, lugubrious as a liberal in Scottsdale. I told him what I wanted to find out, expecting that he would turn the chore over to an underling, some pathetic little vice-president, but he wanted to handle it himself.

  I sat and listened to him call the Atlanta Southern Bank and Trust and say those mystic words which enabled him to pierce the secretarial barricades and get through to a certain Mr. Chance McKay. I thought that a dashing name for a banker-maybe not for an Atlanta banker. Finally Boggs made it through to him, and it is to be noted that the southern businessman and banker tends to relate to the telephone the way a four-wheeler relates to CB nineteen. Regardless of regional origin, he becomes just a bit mushmouth.

  "Hey Chance? This here's Dev Boggs down at Timber Bay, Florida.... Sure.... Just fine, mostly.... No, I couldn't make it this year. Surely missed it, too.... Old buddy, I need a small favor from you, won't cost you a dime. We're looking at a big loss down here on business and personal loans to a skip. Maybe it wouldn't look big to you, but it is king-size for Timber Bay, and it might could eat a hole in our loan-loss reserve that'll take a time to fill back. This skip took off, we think, with a girlfriend who's one of your customers up there, and if we. could get a clue on where checks are maybe coming in from on her account, or where the closeout balance was sent, it might help us find the skip. The name is Petersen, first name Kristin with a K. Account number four-four-eight, four-fourone.... Sure, take your time.... What?... Oh, okay."

  Boggs kept the phone at his ear and covered the mouthpiece and said, "He thinks he had an earlier request on that. An official one."

  "It would be likely."

  "Right here, Chance.... Yes, go ahead." Boggs listened and wrote down numbers. "Yes.... I see.... Sure. Listen, I want to thank you. 'Preciate it.... What?... I do hope to make it this year for sure. Our best to Molly, hear? 'Bye."

  He read to me from the scratch paper. "Her checking account balance is twenty-one hundred and twenty dollars and five cents. The last check was dated March twentieth, a check made out to cash for five hundred, and there has been no activity in the account since. She has passbook savings of about eleven hundred dollars. She has a one year Certificate of Deposit at six and a quarter, percent in the amount of seven thousand dollars, due in July, and two four-year CDs for fifteen thousand each, due year after next. She also has a safe deposit box."

  "A prudent lady. A tad over... what? Forty thousand? One assumes she's planning to return."

  With mournful look he said, "If she's prudent
, she wouldn't want to lump her money in with what Lawless absconded with. If anything went wrong she could lose hers too. I imagine she's woman of the world enough to know that the affair can cool off at any time. She left herself a place to go back to."

  Sixteen

  WHEN I couldn't find Meyer, I decided it was a good time to locate Eleanor Ann Harder. I had the address and phone number van had given me. She answered the phone and said she had just gotten off duty, but if I came right over, we could talk.

  It was a small frame cottage on a small lot, with so many trees and bushes it was almost hidden from the street. She was a big woman, thick and solid rather than fat. She had a pale, rectangular face, small features, erect carriage. She could have been thirty or fifty. She wore her white uniform. We sat on the little screened porch at the side of the house and talked.

  "We're so grateful to you, Mr. McGee, for anything you can do. Take Van's occupation away from him and he's lost. He's a very proud man. He's a very decent man."

  "We should be able to work it all out. The Sheriff is cooperative. The whole situation looks different today, not like it looked two months ago."

  "He phoned me yesterday afternoon from Sarasota and said things were going well, and wanted to know if I'd seen you. I said not yet but that you would probably stop by. I told him about Nick Noyes and how the paper said he had fired shots at you and your friend before he was killed accidentally. Van was very upset about that. He couldn't understand why Nick would do such a thing. He hadn't thought there would be any danger involved in your coming over, or he would have warned you."

  "He's making pretty fair time."

  "He'll be here Thursday, he thinks. Should I tell the marina?"

  "They're all set. No need. I would imagine you are certain Van didn't get drunk that night."

  Her chin came up and her eyes got smaller. "Mr. McGee, I met my husband almost five years ago. I worked at Tampa General at that time. His shrimp boat was run down by an ore ship, and he spent four days out in the Gulf before they were rescued. He came down with pneumonia, and he was on my station. He is a fine man. We were married two weeks after he got out of the hospital. As an RN I know the symptoms of the abuse of alcohol. I knew of the ceremony of taking one drink aboard the Julie at the beginning of each cruise. It was his... I don't know how to say it."

  "I know what you mean. Proving to himself each time he had whipped it."

  "And he had. I know he was given something very strong to knock, him out like that. He was fuzzy minded for days. His memory was quite disorganized."

  "But he didn't go to a doctor."

  "I begged him to. A doctor might have detected something in specimens. Van is one of the world's most stubborn men. By the time he went to Dr. Stuart, it was too late for anything like that. He had three strikes on him around Timber Bay anyway. You see, he came from here."

  "I didn't know that."

  "It's hard to find out very much about Van from Van. As a young man he was a notorious drunk. He broke places up and was thrown in jail dozens of times. You knew him in Lauderdale after he'd sobered up and become a respectable citizen. A reputation hangs on. For example, when he lost his shrimp boat, there was talk around Timber Bay that he'd been at the helm, drunk, when it happened. When Hub hired him at Hula Marine, people said Hub would live to regret it. Hub Lawless enjoyed hiring... misfits. I think he enjoyed gratitude."

  "Then it was pretty damned cruel to feed Van a mickey."

  "It was wicked in the way that word is used in the Bible."

  "It was part of the plot he dreamed up."

  "So he could escape punishment as a thief and adulterer. His soul will scream in hell forever." She meant it. She was not the mild lady I had thought. Her knuckles were white and a muscle under her eye twitched and leaped.

  "Mrs. Harder, I wanted to make something clear to you. Van thinks that I am undertaking this venture for money. I'm not. I'll take expenses, if he insists. But no ten thousand. I pretended to go along with that because if I said I would do it as a favor, he wouldn't have wanted me to come over here at all."

  "I know. He's planning to pay it. It might take three years, but he'll pay it. You can't stop him. If you do what you promised to try to do, then nothing on earth can stop him from paying you the rnoney, as long as he is alive and working."

  "Is there some way I could sneak it back to you?"

  "I would never betray him like that. He'd walk right out of my life if he ever found out. I wouldn't blame him. I couldn't stand losing him."

  When I told Meyer about her, when we met at the bar at the Galley, he said that when he had been little an elderly aunt had given him an image of the devil which had lasted all his life. "The traditional figure, of course. Lean, very white face, all in black, black goatee, cloven feet, bat wings, a tail with a strange pointy end like an arrowhead. And a pitchfork with little barbs on the tines. Whenever a wicked person dies, there is a final exhalation. The soul emerges on that final breath, looking a bit like a small graveyard spook, a little evanescent thing in a white sheet with black eyeholes. The soul tries to rise up to heaven, but the devil is right there, making his rounds of the dying wicked ones, and he spears it with his fork and stuffs it into a specimen bag he wears on his belt. When the bag is jammed full he turns it over to a messenger-type demon. That demon gives him an empty bag and takes the full one on down to hell. He goes down the nearest well, or mine shaft, or newly dug grave, and keeps right on going. He dumps the bag out and picks up an empty one. The resident in-house demons set upon the bagged souls and start all that frying, basting, slicing, and so on we hear about."

  The bartender forced a laugh. Meyer stared at him. "You don't believe in hell?"

  "Well, not that one, thank God." He wandered away, touching his throat.

  "So what about Dr. Sam Stuart?"

  "I'll tell you at the table, Travis."

  As we finished our drink, awaiting the table call; I told him about Kristin's idle forty thousand. And I told him about how Tannoy and Deputy Fletcher had nailed down Hub's presence in Guadalajara subsequent to the supposed drowning.

  At the table he told me about Dr. Stuart. "He's younger than I expected him to be. Sort of a jumpy, impatient, high-strung type. He has a crusade going. But he thinks it's lost before he can even get it off the ground. But he is going to try. He seems to be that sort of a person. What do you know about PCP?"

  "Is that the name of his crusade?"

  "It's an animal tranquilizer. Phencyclidine. It was developed for use in hypodermic guns to knock down grizzly bears in national parks and keep them down while they were transported to less accessible areas."

  "If it's also called angel dust, I've heard of it. It makes a very rough trip, I've heard."

  Meyer looked in his notebook. "It is known by different names in different areas. Hog, crystal, peace pill, blasting powder, and sugarino. Range of symptoms: it can produce a staggering walk, slurred speech, and slowed reaction times, imitating the effects of alcohol. It can produce bizarre sensations and hallucinations. People act out violent fantasies. It upsets the neural linkages in the brain. With repeated use it can cause permanent brain damage, with the lingering effects of paranoia, suspicion, anxiety, tendencies toward inexplicable violence, distorted memory, sporadic amnesia. It can duplicate acute schizophrenia."

  "Nicky Noyes?"

  "He's pretty sure of it. He thinks that it is the root cause of a lot more death and violence than people realize. One-car accidents, suicides, mass murders, sniping, stranglings. The effects are almost completely unpredictable, varying with each individual. He says the whole situation terrifies him."

  "Isn't that just a little bit strong?"

  "You should hear him, Travis. He made a believer out of me. He's had a couple of fifteen-year-old kids blind themselves with their fingernails."

  I stared at him. "That made my stomach turn right over. They better stop that stuff at the source."

  "That's the problem. Any college che
mistry student with four or five hundred dollars can set up production in a shed and be turning out phencyclidine in a few days out of easily available materials. They turn the liquid into a crystalline substance. A marijuana cigarette doctored with a pinch of angel dust goes on the street for ten dollars, and five or six little teenagers can turn on on one cigarette, and the chemists who set up the lab can make five figures a week wholesaling the stuff. He says there is an underground lab somewhere in the Timber Bay area. He says he thinks Noyes was one of the several local dealers."