The Mangrove Coast df-6

by Randy Wayne White

  No matter where I’ve been in my life, I can get within ten miles of an ocean and feel it. Can sense the implied weight of the sea even if the horizon is blocked, fogged in, you name it. Thatch-roofed huts or trees or mountains or high rises, it didn’t matter what stood between us. The convexity of sky is always different. Brighter? No, but there is a distinctive sheen to it, as if rarefied by lightning or chemical reaction: saltwater, oxygen, wind, isolation. I always, always know if the sea is near.

  The Calloway house was several blocks from U.S. 1, just off Bayview at the corner of 8th Street and Middle River Drive, not far from Bayview Elementary and the Coral Ridge Yacht Club. Very solid-looking brick one-story painted key lime yellow with vines that trailed up the walls and framed the bay windows. Pie-shaped quarter-acre corner lot, old tropical vegetation, the weathervaned masts of sailboats showing above the roofs of neighboring homes.

  A yachting community. Each house with its own dock out back.

  I noticed a frayed rope hanging from an oak tree in the side lawn. Presumably it had once held a swing. I noticed the plywood remnants of a tree house in said oak and thought about Amanda with her tomboy attitude. Sometimes you can look at a house and read what’s gone on there. This had once been a child’s place; a family place. A little girl had once lived here with her mother and stepfather. Not now, though. The property had the sterile look of weekly yard maintenance and vacant bedrooms.

  You take one look at such a place and you guess that someone’s dream came unraveled here.

  The front door of the house was cracked open, though, as if to let stale air escape.

  Amanda’s little car was in the drive.

  “Jesus Christ, what happened to my mom’s computer?” Amanda, wearing gold wire-rimmed glasses, sat at a desk in a study just off the master bedroom, her face illuminated by the monitor screen.

  No T-shirt for her now. She was wearing pantyhose, a pale gray pleated cotton skirt, white blouse with pearl buttons and a navy blue blazer. The way she dressed, it not only changed the way she looked, it changed the way she handled herself. An athletic-looking redhead with some lanky size, maybe handsome but not pretty. Interesting face, with her mom’s great cheekbones but her dad’s tough-guy nose. Not a person to take lightly. She moved and spoke without hesitation, the modern businesswoman.

  The backseat of her car, I’d noticed, was crammed with boxes and folders and pieces of some kind of plastic shelving, maybe something that had to do with dispensing medications. Just a guess. It looked as if she’d been making the rounds, calling on her clients, and had interrupted a busy day to meet us at her old house.

  “What kind of friends do you have, Doc? A person who can do something like this to a stranger’s computer… my God! He changed all this through the telephone modem?”

  It was hard to tell if she was impressed or spooked. Bernie had recolored each and every screen icon in rainbow shades. They appeared to drift randomly, not unlike pinballs, on a fluorescent wallpaper backdrop of pink flamingos in flight.

  The exception was a folder labeled PILAR.

  It sat in the center of the screen, many times larger than any other icon, and it flashed as methodically as a smalltown caution light. One of his little jokes.

  “What’s pilar mean?”

  “It’s Spanish. It means, well… like a support or a column. Something that will hold up a building.”

  “But here he means like support for my computer program, right?”

  “For the computer… sure. That kind of support. What else could he mean?”

  “Is he some kind of drug freak or something? These colors, all the activity, just looking at the screen is giving me a headache.”

  “A drug user, you bet,” Tomlinson said, nodding. He was looking over Amanda’s shoulder, riveted. “This kind of genius, there almost has to be synthetics involved. Yes… yes, I’m sure of it. It’s a professional guess, but still a guess… yeah, I believe this whole scene demonstrates certain signature effects that I associate with what may have been the bitchingest acid ever produced. The Hitchcock Estate, Dutchess County, New York, nineteen sixty-seven. Dr. Leary had a hand in that one, God bless him.” He turned to me. “If this buddy of yours has a tab or two to spare, I’ll pay top dollar. I know you don’t approve, but I just got a nostalgia rush you wouldn’t believe. All I want is enough so I can go back and revisit some old friends. Maybe talk to the dead, visit my own karma in the afterlife. Nothing fancy. You don’t mind, why don’t we take a second and jot his number down-”

  Amanda said, “Hey, be quiet a minute.”

  Tomlinson said, “Huh?”

  “Look at this. There’s something wrong here.”

  I watched Tomlinson’s face as he looked at the screen. Maybe from his reaction I’d be able to read what was going on.

  She said, “I just tried to sign on to my mom’s account, but I get this damn thing.”

  There was a message corralled by a blue border: “Invalid Password. Please try again.”

  “I thought you said that her password still worked. That you’d tried it.”

  “It worked fine last night when I came over to turn on the computer.”

  “Maybe her bill hasn’t been paid and they’ve terminated her service.”

  “Nope, it’s a credit card thing and the money’s taken out of her account just like everything else. She’s got plenty of money left for stuff like this.”

  “Try signing on again.”

  She did.

  The response was the same: Invalid password.

  “Someone’s changed it,” she said. “That’s the only explanation. Someone had to. Which means it had to be my mom.” Her voice gathered a little energy. “So that’s good, right? It means that she’s near a computer and she’s still… that she’s still okay.”

  Tomlinson was patting her shoulder, comforting her but also asking her to move. “Tell you what, let me dig into the folder that Doc’s hipster friend sent. Maybe it’s got the juice to find the password, recover the old files, the whole works.” He glanced at me. “Your buddy said everything would be self-explanatory, right?”

  I had my arms crossed; stood there trying to picture someone with a computer on a sailboat in Colombia. But yeah, why not? There were phone lines and notebook computers everywhere. I said, “I told him you’d done some of your own programming, that you knew all the basics. He said no problem then.”

  To kill time while Tomlinson worked, Amanda walked me through the house. The furniture was draped with white sheets. Her old bedroom was pink with flowers, neat as a museum. There were trophies on the shelves: tennis and softball. An athlete. One big window looked out onto the screened pool and the canal beyond.

  “See all those Australian pines across the Intracoastal? That’s Birch State Park. At night, when I was, like, a sophomore or something, I used to sneak out and paddle our canoe across. I’d have the beach all to myself. Not too far from here, you look across and you can’t see anything but condos. Bahia Mar, where Frank and his little soulmate moved. Places like that, there’s no skyline, just buildings. The people there, you got these old men the color of bagels, plus all the yachties and the beach bunnies.”

  Playing tour guide while Tomlinson worked.

  I noticed that the closet door was wide and the boxes therein were open, scattered, as if someone had recently ransacked them. She replied to my quizzical expression: “I was looking for more photographs. While I was waiting for you guys to get here.”

  “Why? You already sent the ones of your mom and Merlot. That’s all I wanted.”

  “I know, but I started wondering after you asked me. The pictures of me when I was a little girl? I thought I’d piled them all in the same box. Now I can’t find the box. My mom must have put them somewhere, someplace she thought was safe.”

  “You can’t find them.”

  “No, but it’s okay. Mom probably hid them. She knows how sensitive I am about how… about, you know. How my eyes looked.”
/>
  Like she was kidding, Amanda said, “Mom was probably worried I might burn the whole bunch.”

  It took Tomlinson slightly less than three hours to nail the password and recover the lost correspondence between Gail and her E-mail friends. Three intense nonstop hours, during which he shouted orders and updates to us from the study:

  “Beer! Bring me beer! My fluids have been sapped. I need to rehydrate!”

  “This fucking computer can kiss my ass on the county fucking square! Killing’s too good for it! Burning this noxious bitch would be a kindness. Where’d your mom GET this piece of junk?”

  “Amanda, dear? Ahum-m-m. Oh-h-h-h-h Aman-N-N-N-da? Would you mind very much if I, uh, have a smoke in your mom’s study? Now… before you even answer, I know what you’re thinking but you’re wrong: It’s not tobacco, so you’ll hardly even notice the smell.”

  She said yeah, sure, he could smoke a joint.

  That surprised me.

  Dressed in her power clothes, she was still coming across as a much different person than she’d been at Dinkin’s Bay Marina. We were the guests here and she was comfortable with being in charge. Wasn’t self-conscious, not at all reluctant to show little bits and pieces of herself.

  Every now and then, she’d flip open her cell phone like it was some kind of Star Trek communicator. I’d listened to her say, “Larry… Larry, I realize the woman’s a pain in the ass and I realize what she’s asking is unfair. But it’s her hospital and it’s a major account and I want you to do whatever it takes to make her happy…” I listened to her say, “Kath? Amanda. Look, girlfriend, about dinner tonight… I’m up to my ass in work and I don’t think I’m going to be able to get away.” She gave me a sly glance before she added, “Yeah, I’ve got company, but they’re a couple of gorgeous hunks, so it’s okay.”

  Once her cell phone rang and I listened to her say, “Steve, I’m going to make this short and sweet. I don’t want you calling anymore. I don’t want you leaving any more messages. I’m sorry, but I don’t feel that way about you and there’s nothing you can do about it. No… no more of your idiotic lines from Casablanca. We never crossed the Broward County line, so don’t even fucking talk to me about Paris.”

  After that, she stomped off toward the study and came out a few minutes later, exhaling smoke.

  Behind her, I heard Tomlinson say, “Pretty good shit, huh?”

  I said, “Dope fiends, I’m surrounded by dope fiends. Jesus.” And I watched her smile at me.

  She had removed her blazer. Through the white blouse I could see that she wore a gauzy-half bra. It showed her washboard body like a relief map. I pretended that I didn’t notice. It was an old buddy’s daughter, for Christ sake. Which was probably why she was going out of her way to show me that she was now an adult woman making adult decisions.

  Mostly we sat around and waited.

  I used her cell phone to make a couple of calls. She gave me the number and the name and I reached Deputy Melissa Grendle at the general investigations desk, Broward County Sheriff’s Department. Amanda had already told Grendle about the money that had been withdrawn from her mother’s accounts, but I decided to give it a try myself. Grendle was still uninterested, unimpressed. Polite indifference is a common buffer mechanism and she used it.

  I hung up disappointed, but not surprised. Law enforcement may be the most demanding yet thankless job in America. Cops are underpaid, overworked and held up to public inspection and public ridicule to a degree that no other profession would tolerate. Which may be why the demarcation between outstanding cop and incompetent cop is becoming increasingly wide. The good ones, the really good ones, do it because they love it and they are intelligent enough to accept the job’s drawbacks philosophically. The bad ones do it because it answers some tough-guy film fiction they have chosen to portray, and they are too stupid or lazy to actually do it well.

  Officer Grendle was one of the lazy ones. Perhaps one of the stupid ones, too, although I didn’t speak with her long enough to pass judgment.

  When I clicked off, Amanda gave me a look like: See? I told you.

  FBI agent Mitchell Wilson, however, was neither stupid nor lazy. “It’s like I told the daughter, Mr. Ford, we’ve got a copy of a written report, the local sheriff’s department, saying the woman stated that she planned to leave the country willingly. That’s not kidnapping, no matter what the daughter thinks. Now, okay, this other business, the money, all those withdrawals, yeah, I agree, it has an odor to it. Maybe it stinks. I want you to keep me informed about it because you sound like a reasonable guy and, like I said, what’s going on has an odor. A little bit of a smell; something may not be right. But we don’t know enough yet to warrant an investigation. Understand what I’m saying?”

  I understood.

  The last call I made was to Frank Calloway’s Lauderdale office where the hardworking Betty Marsh confirmed that Mr. Calloway hoped to meet with me tomorrow afternoon in Boca Grande, but that, yes, he would call me personally to confirm.

  “Thursday,” she said, as if double-checking an appointment book. “In the late afternoon. He said something about you coming by boat?”

  I said, “Yep. But have him call me early, just in case the weather’s bad and I decide to drive.”

  I gave her Amanda’s cell phone number as well as my home number.

  A couple of minutes later, I heard an electronic voice say: “ Welcome. You’ve got mail!” And then Tomlinson was calling us: “Hey! Looky, looky, looky at all the letters this lady got. Your mother, I’m talking about. Lots of letters. They were all deleted, but I got ‘em back.”

  Shouting because he’d cracked the code.

  There were a couple of hundred letters, counting the junk mail ads for porno shows and moneymaking schemes. Maybe three hundred letters. A bunch.

  I said to Tomlinson, “So this is the great educational network you’ve been telling me about. Finally, I get to see what I’ve been missing.”

  The cursor was highlighting one of the letters. It was titled Betty Bell and Her Twin liberty Bells. Free Sex Show!

  “You see, Amanda?” Tomlinson said. “You see how cynical he can be? At least admit that this one’s patriotic. Man… we’ve got a lot of reading to do, huh? Your mom had plenty of spare time on her hands.”

  A middle-aged divorced woman, yeah, with enough money. Nothing to do but sit at the computer.

  We started going through the letters at random, concentrating on the ones written by people whose screen names reappeared over and over. Merl was one of the two most common screen names. The other was Darkrume. There were dozens of letters from each and dozens of replies.

  “Merl,” Tomlinson reasoned. “Pretty safe bet that’s Jackie Merlot. One of those friendly sounding screen names. Harmless. Trying hard to sound harmless anyway. The other one… what? Someone who likes fantasy novels? Darkrume…”

  Yeah, Merl was Jackie Merlot. According to the status bar, the first E-mail that Gail received from him was dated just less than a year before. The three of us scanned the first couple of letters. He wrote long, windy sentences. They seemed stuffy-formal. Had a pseudo-intellectual tone that masked a false sincerity impossible to miss.

  Well, not impossible. The lady had apparently been fooled…

  “Dear Gail, It has been a long time since we talked. I heard it thru the executive grapevine that you and that salesman you married, Frank something, are divorced. So here I am to say that he has to be a very unstable person to let go of someone as beautiful as you. You may remember from the past that I loved doing volunteer social work. I love helping people. I want you to know that I am volunteering to help you any way that I can. My business is so big now and demands so much time but I don’t care. It is an international company and I am C-E-O and C-F-O. I cannot live in the United States because it would be an unwise move due to tax obligations. It does not matter. Fifteen years ago I was there for you and I am still your loyal servant if you require assistance.”

 
“My God,” Amanda said. “I can’t believe she even bothered writing the guy back. What a jerk. I’ve got all kinds of E-mail friends but none that illiterate. This noble-knight-on-a-steed stuff tells you how lonely she really was. The fact that she would write him back, I mean.”

  The next letter was dated two days later. Yeah, Gail had replied, so Merlot repeated his offer to help. He wrote: “I would love to be the shoulder you need to rest your head on. I am a man of honour. You never judged me by the way I looked but how I looked in my heart. These small people who are losers and quick to judge make me sick. That is because you are smart enough to see me for the real person I am. Anytime you need my shoulder, write me. I’m thinking about renting a place in Lauderdale for a few months to take care of some business…”

  She said, “It was like he could sniff the wind and smell how lonely she was. Thinking about renting a place in Lauderdale, my ass. He was tracking her.”

  “It does indeed seem that way.”

  “He sounds like he dropped out of school in the tenth grade.”

  “Let’s skip ahead twenty-five or thirty letters just to see where it takes us.”

  I was in the chair now and I used the mouse to scan down. Most of the letters from Merl were labeled NO SUBJECT. But there was one from Darkrume that was labeled HOW YOU MAKE ME FEEL, and that’s the file I opened.

  Amanda was apparently a faster reader than I. I was only a couple of sentences into the letter when she grasped my shoulder and said, “Oh… God. I’m not up for this.”

  She had a strong grip; I could feel her nails digging in.

  She said, “This is just… just sick. I can’t read this crap. Anybody who’d write that kind of trash to my mom is… and I thought Jackie Merlot was an asshole.” Then she turned quickly and left the room.

  I returned my attention to the letter as Tomlinson said, “Know what? I don’t blame her.”

  The letter wasn’t just sexual, it was detailed, graphic, aggressive. It combined the language that I assume is in porno novels with terms of endearment that I associate with people who feel genuine affection for one another. Gail was “My dearest darling.” She was “My soul mate, the kindest, funniest, sexiest woman of all time.” She was the woman who “writes like an angel and thinks like a whore.”