The Empty Copper Sea Part 10

"I just met you a few hours ago."

"I came here at Van Harder's request, to clear his name."

"You're a private detective, then?"

"Me? No. Those people have to have licenses and be bonded and carry insurance and report to the law people wherever they go. They charge fees and have office phones and all that. I just do favors for friends. Sort of salvage work."

"But Van Harder is paying you?"

"No. He offered me ten thousand dollars in time payments if I could do it. He thinks his good name is worth twenty thousand. When I find things for people, I keep half. But I won't take that kind of money from him. I'll have to find some way of saving his pride, if I can get his situation reconsidered. He's spent his life on the water. It isn't fair that he should be victimized by some sharp operator rigging his own disappearance with other people's money."

"And leaving his best friend, as he always called John, flat broke in the bargain."

"Self-preservation. A strong instinct."

She poked away at the sand, bent so far forward I could not see her face. I looked at the smooth brown legs, the flow of the complex curves, one into the next, lovely as music. She had shed the work s.h.i.+rt. It lay on the weathered wood between us. The bikini string bit into the skin of her warm brown back, and I followed the way her back narrowed down to her waist, then flared to the hips. I read the calligraphy of the round knuckles of the bent spine, and of the twinned dimples farther down.

She turned sharply and caught me staring at her. She said, "I suppose your hairy pal is worming it all out of John anyway."

"I could say yes in hopes it would open you up. Actually, I don't know. He may be leaving it up to you to decide."

She laughed. "When we were alone he gave me a little lecture on how people have washed their garments, down through the ages. He's really a nice person."

"Maybe we both are."

"I have a track record that tells me not to trust my instincts. I have been undone by scoundrels, sir."

"And probably scoundrels have been undone by you."

"Sometimes. Thanks for the confidence. Anyway..." She told me what she had learned from her brother, little by little.

When things had begun to go bad, Hub had begun joking about escape. He and John had made up wild plans, as a sort of running fantasy. But as things got worse, the jokes became strained, and the planning became more serious. John had not learned until very far along in the planning process that it had been, Hub's wish, all along, to take Kristin Petersen with him, or to meet her there. John had thought this ironic, as the architect was really the person who had encouraged Hub to make the land purchases which had finally foundered him. Apparently, according to John's observations, the affair between Hub and Kristin was intensely physical, the kind of obsessive infatuation which seemed to blind him to all consequences.

The most delicate and intricate ch.o.r.e had been the conversion, over three months, of a.s.sets into cash, with frequent trips to Tampa, Clearwater, and Orlando. They had taken a four-day trip to Mexico in late February, ostensibly to hunt cat in the mountains, actually to arrange for surgery in Guadalajara at a later date, and to set up a hideaway for Hub and Kristin after the operations.

When I asked where, she said that John didn't know, that he had remained in Guadalajara while Hub flew off somewhere, but John had the impression Hub went to Yucatan.

They had done a lot of the planning right there in the cottage, arguing, picking flaws, finding solutions.

The cash had been hidden at the ranch. On March twenty-second, Hub Lawless had put the cash in the yellow jeep and driven out to the cottage. John Tuckerman had driven out there and picked him up and taken him back into Timber Bay. John had arranged for the two girls to come along on the Julie so that there would be innocent witnesses to the accident. Hub had made certain neither girl saw the powerful tranquilizer in powder form being dumped into Harder's token drink.

Just when it was about time for one of them, John or Hub, to go topside and "discover" Harder, one of the girls became seasick and went up and saved them the trouble. After she came down, they went up to see, then turned the cruiser around to go back. Hub went below and told the girls what they were doing, and also told them that now they were going into the wind, and it was very cold and ugly up above.

Hub went back up. John had taken the Julie as close insh.o.r.e as he dared. When they came opposite the harsh gleam of the Coleman lantern John had left lighted on the deck railing of the beach cottage, Hub clapped John on the back, thanked him, shook his hand, and went overboard. When he was in the sea, he quickly yanked the cord that inflated the life belt he was wearing. They had tested it several times in rough water off John Tuckerman's beach. Hub was confident using it and could make good time through the water.

John piloted the Julie to Timber Bay, went in the pa.s.s, thumped the bow onto the sandbar, began yelling for the girls, and threw the life ring over. He stayed and answered all questions, over and over and over. It was very late when he got back to his apartment. In the early morning he drove out to the cottage and to his consternation, saw that the yellow jeep was still there. He found Hub Lawless on the cot in the corner of the living room, gray, sweaty, and short of breath. Hub had the feeling, he said, that some round heavy weight was pus.h.i.+ng down on his chest. It was more of a feeling of pressure than of pain. He had been much farther from sh.o.r.e than he had realized when he went overboard. He had struggled for a long time and had finally come to sh.o.r.e, elhausted, a long way south of the lantern light. The cold wind chilled him as he walked up the beach, ond he had a nagging pain in his left arm and shoulder. It was not until he had climbed the dune that he had fainted. He did not know how long he was out, but he did not think it was very long. He got 1limself up the stairs and into the cottage, stripped oft his sodden clothes, and dressed in the fresh diy clothing. The nausea had started then, and the weakness. He did not feel equal to driving the jeep to Tampa, as planned, and anyway he had already missed his early flight from Tampa to Houston and thus also his HoustonGuadalajara connection. The tickets and the tourist card were in the false name he had selected; Steven Pickering, the name he had used with the clinic in Guadalajara.

He told John Tuckerrxlan to drive back to Timber Bay, contact Kristin Petersen, and tell her what had happened and to come to the cottage. In the original plan she had been supposed to hang around for a week mourning Hub, and then go back to Atlanta, where she had lived when they met. Later-originally-she was to fly to Mexico and join him at some unknown place in Yucatan. But now, Hub gave John a sealed note to give her. He told John to conceal the jeep nearby in the brush before he left and to stay away from the cottage for a few days.

When John went back to the cottage, there was no one there. Hub was gone. The jeep was gone. There was no note and no money. John had understood that Hub was going to leave him some of the money, which he was to tuck away in a very safe place and not dip into for as long as possible.

"So they went off together in the jeep? With the woman driving, if he couldn't."

"That's what it looks like."

"What was going to happen to the jeep if they'd followed the original plan?"

"Hub was going to leave the claim check for the jeep and the jeep keys in an envelope at the National Airlines desk, and John was going to get down there somehow and claim the jeep and bring it back and take the back roads to get onto the ranch property, and then just park it somewhere on the ranch, as though Hub had left it there."

"Why a jeep, not a car?"

"This road and the hard road become almost impa.s.sable five miles south of here. A storm tore it all up. A car couldn't make it, but the jeep could. He was going to come ash.o.r.e and change, drive the jeep south, and be in Tampa before dawn."

"Carrying money, lots of money? Oh, sure. No baggage check leaving this country, and no baggage check disembarking in Mexico."

"Especially for the first-cla.s.s pa.s.sengers. And he had been in and out enough times to know the routines."

"Having the woman leave Timber Bay on the twenty-third, with its being pretty, much common knowledge there was something between them-that made it look more like an arranged disappearance."

"Yes, it did. My brother worried about that. He says that Hub worked so hard and carefully to make sure Julia would get the insurance money, it's a shame that all these rumors started. I suppose it was unavoidable. If he couldn't manage the running all by himself, the woman had to help him."

"It seems Hub made it to Guadalajara. Deputy Fletcher and the insurance investigator are down there now."

"Who told them about Guadalajara?"

"When a case like this breaks in the papers, the police get a flood of crank mail and phone calls. They sort them out. Some young woman in Orlando sent an anonymous letter with a color slide to the Sheriff. She had taken the pictures on a Friday, April eighth, at a sidewalk cafe, of a street scene. She recognized the man in the left of the picture later as being the man whose picture was in all the area newspapers. She said she couldn't come forward because her boyfriend thought she was visiting a friend in California. Sheriff Hack Ames made the connection with the big face-lift and cosmetic surgery business there."

She stabbed the stick viciously into the sand. "I could spit," she said. "He sits down there fat and happy, and he left all this ruin behind him. Will they find him?"

"I don't know. Bringing him back would be something else. We have an extradiction agreement. But he didn't hold anything up with a gun. Right now there isn't any warrant out for him that I know of. And if he has any political friends down there, it could take a long, long time."

"Was that woman in the picture too?"

"No."

"She must be a real charmer. A dandy person."

"Hub Lawless must have been vulnerable."

"Like my dear little husband, Billy Howard, was vulnerable. Vulnerable and full of big schemes. G.o.d! I was eighteen when I married him. We got a job managing a ski resort forty miles from the end of the earth, and I learned to ski well enough to teach beginners. I cooked and kept the books and waited table and cleaned the rooms and drove the bus and sold the gear too. We c.r.a.pped out. Too much snow. They couldn't keep the roads clear. The customers couldn't get in. We operated a tennis camp for an old pro who gave the lessons and kept trying to hustle me into the bushes. I cooked and kept the books and waited table and cleaned the rooms and drove the bus and sold the gear, and got to play pretty good tennis. Until the old pro dropped dead on the court and his sister fired us. Shall I go on? Why am I telling you all this?"

"Because I want to know all this."

"Sure. We ran a summer camp for little rich kids. I taught archery, riding, swimming, diving, woodcraft, judo, finger painting, and track. I cooked and kept the books and waited table and drove the bus and pitched softball. Billy made a pa.s.s at one of the young mothers who came up to visit, and she told the owners, and we got hurled out in the middle of August. More?"

"Can there be more?"

"You can believe it. So we got a job running a fat farm for California ladies. A dietician cooked. Local high-school girls waited table and cleaned the rooms. All I had to do was run all the exercise cla.s.ses, keep the books, keep the weight charts, organize their day to keep them all busy, drive the bus, and so on and so on. So I was taking them on a little jog, and I looked back, still jogging, to see how the stragglers were coming along, and one of them ahead of me fell down, and I tripped over her and broke my wrist. See, it wasn't set exactly right It's a little bit lumpy."

I examined her right wrist. The bone seemed to jut out a little. Her forearm was baked to a warm golden brown, with the fine hairs, scorched white by the sun, lying against the brown with a tender, infinite neatness. I said it didn't look lumpy.

"We're coming to the best part," she said. "I couldn't keep the books and records. The owners had to hire a bookkeeper. They cut my pay. The bookkeeper was cute. Dear darling Billy ran off with her. She couldn't even keep the books right. She was one of those helpless ones with the big melting eyes. She sighed a lot. I don't think she bathed as much as her mother might have wished And the reason I couldn't come here sooner, after I had seen the whole mess in the papers and called John, was because I was not supposed to leave the state until I got the final papers of divorce. The lawyer said it might gum things up. He said I could go if I wanted, and it would probably be all right But I wanted to be very d.a.m.ned sure that my seven years of marriage were over. Aren't we supposed to change completely every seven years, all the cells or something? I was ready. Wow, was I ever ready! I put in seven years of sixteen-hour days. Seven years of hard, hard labor."

"What are you going to do afterward? After all this?"

"When the time comes, I'll think about it."

Our eyes caught and held for a few moments. When she looked away I had a very strange feeling. I felt as if I had shucked some kind of drab outer skin. It was old and brittle, and as I stretched and moved, it shattered and fell off. I could breathe more deeply. The Gulf was a sharper blue. There was wine in the air. I saw every grain of sand, every fragment of seash.e.l.l, every movement of the beach gra.s.ses in the May breeze. It was an awakening. I was full of juices and thirsts, energies and hungers, and I wanted to laugh for no reason at all.

I reached and caught the lumpy wrist, and she looked at me with surprise and faint irritation, gave one tug to get away, and then did not resist. I did not have to worry about her reaction. I could make her understand anything.

"Gretel, thanks for telling me all you know. Thanks for trusting me. I'm going to help you with this. Meyer and I will help you, and we'll get it all sorted out."

"For half of what?"

"For half of the way you look right now."

"Come on! You've been in the sun too long." She s.n.a.t.c.hed her work s.h.i.+rt and we headed back. She seemed to have been infected by some of my exuberance. At one point she sprinted away from me, running on the packed sand where the tide had receded. She ran well, and it took a determined effort to overtake her. She stopped when I clapped my right hand on her left shoulder. She was breathing hard, and she inspected me and discovered I wasn't.

"Good shape, huh?" she gasped.

"Better than my usual. I helped a friend bring a big ketch up from the Grenadines to Lauderdale. Lots of wind, all from the wrong direction. A person could get in the same kind of good shape by spending a month working with weights while rolling downhill."

"Are you a freak about condition?" She was recovering her wind quickly.

"I guess to a certain extent. I get into situations where it is nice to be quick, and healthy to be persuasive. I get into them oftener than most. If I get bloated and slow, somebody is going to put me out of business. So when I get the slow bloats, I get the guilts, and when I'm in shape I feel righteous and smug-but what I do is keep going from one extreme to the other, and getting it back gets rougher every year. How about you? Freaky?"

"Not really. But I'm sort of a jock. You know, born with good coordination and good muscle memory. I learn physical things quickly. I like compet.i.tion. I don't have to tell you I am one big girl. Six foot one-half inch. One hundred and forty-eight pounds of meat. Solid meat. You are one man who doesn't make me feel all that huge, though. I guess I like to stay in shape because you can do things better, and you feel so much better. It's kind of a... a hummy feeling. You know your motor is running."

We went back to the cottage. Meyer was on the veranda deck reading a copy of the Reader's Digest for July 1936. He said it had a lot of uplift in it. He said he had heard that the ideal article for the Reader's Digest would have a rather long t.i.tle: "I Dropped My Crutches, Abandoned My Electronic Submarine, Climbed the Undersea Mountain and Found G.o.d." He said John Tuckerman was napping. He had felt very tired.

John came yawning out as we talked. He sat in an old rocker and nodded from time to time as Gretel told him that she had told me all about the plan he had cooked up with Hub for the disappearance. He did not seem especially concerned.

He smiled at me and said, "I tried to talk Hub out of it. I really did. I told him he was letting all his friends down. He was letting down the people who were still working for him, who were still loyal. He wouldn't listen. He said everything had gone to h.e.l.l and there was no way to salvage any of it, except to leave and take what he could with him. All he could really think about was getting into the Petersen woman's pants. Excuse me, Gretel."

"Was she all that great?" Gretel asked.

"Depends on what you like," John said. "She's kind of pale and round-faced, but with hollows in her cheeks, pale green eyes, soft quiet little voice, silver-blond hair that she braids a lot, and a slender body, but with real big t.i.ts. She's quiet but she's used to giving orders, and when she tells somebody to do something she has a way of making them jump and do it. She walks into a room and you know she is... somebody. Somebody important."

"How did she act when you gave her the message?" I asked him.

"Oh, she was upset. She paced around her place, nibbling her thumb knuckle, telling me to shut up whenever I tried to say I was leaving."

"She had opened the note?"

"Yes, but she didn't tell me what it said."

"But the verbal message," Meyer asked, "as I think you told me before your nap, was to tell her to come out to the cottage, was it not?"

"Yes. To tell her he'd had some kind of mild heart attack and to come out. He told me to stay away from the cottage for a few days and to hide the jeep in the brush before I left."

"Then," said Meyer, "the written message had to be some kind of instruction to her, to do something before coming out, because if he was going to see her out there, he would be able to tell her any other instruction. And it had to be something he didn't want to tell you."

"I don't know what that would be. He knew he could trust me."

"We have one problem to solve first," Meyer said. We looked at him. He looked very pleased with himself. "It's so obvious," he said. "Certainly she didn't walk out here from the town!"

In the silence, Gretel said, "It's like that game of logic where you have to get everybody across the river in one boat in so many trips. What kind of car did she have, Johnny?"

"A small rental car. A red Mazda five-door hatchback. Hub rented it for her from Garner Wedley, owns the Texaco station out on Dixie Boulevard and has the franchise for Bonus Rental. I know because I had to take it to be ga.s.sed and serviced a few times. It drove nice."

"Oh, John, did you have to do things like that for him? Putting gas in his girlfriend's car?"

He shook his head as if in irritation at her denseness. "Honey you just don't understand. Anything that Hub asked me to do, I was glad to do. It didn't matter what. I worked for him, and I was his friend too. And I still am, no matter what."

"Did the Texaco station man get his car back?" I asked. I saw Meyer nod his approval out of the corner of my eye.

John Tuckerman frowned. "My memory has gone so rotten. It seems I remember Garn chewing at me about something or other, about that car. But a lot of people were chewing at me about a lot of things back then, that last little bitty part of March. My feeling is he got it back but there was something wrong with it, wrong with the deal somehow." We asked some more questions. What sort of container was the money in? It was in a fake gas can chained and padlocked to the rack on the back of the jeep. How much money? Hub never said. But it was a lot. A real lot. Hub said he was sorry he'd never see his daughters again, and never see John again. But a man had to do what he had to do.

Where had the money been hidden out at the ranch? As they had collected more and more of it, turning pieces of paper and equipment and supplies into cash, Hub had kept it in various places, moving it every time he got nervous about it. And the more it got to be, the more often he got nervous.

What did you mean by a fake gas can? It was one of those heavy-duty GI gas cans, tall and narrow and painted yellow like the jeep. There were two of them, and they fitted in brackets in the back, on either side of the spare-tire bracket. Hub had hacksawed a can in half and soldered a f.l.a.n.g.e on the inside of the lower half, so the top half could be fitted back on. He packed all the money in there, put the can in the bracket, ran the heavy-duty rubberized chain through the heavy handle that was part of the top of the can, pulled the chain tight, and padlocked it. From then on he felt easy about the money. He could park it right down near the bank. Whenever he left the jeep, he took the distributor rotor along with him. He made jokes with John Tuckerman about the kind of gas in the gas can. He told John some of it was his and would be left behind.

I said to John, "I suppose you've hunted for the money for what he was supposed to leave here for you."

John looked at me. He wore the somewhat defiant expression of a sly child. "I won't say."

"We looked for it," Gretel said wearily.

"We never did!" John yelled. "Never!"

And from the subtle gesture she made, I knew it was time for us to go.

It was almost four fifteen on Sat.u.r.day afternoon when we headed back toward Timber Bay.

Meyer said, "I haven't heard that infuriatingly tuneless whistling of yours for a long, long time. Congratulations."

"On what?"

"On coming back to the land of the living."

"It shows? I was that bad?"

"You were that bad, and for a long time. You were, in fact, committing the eighth deadly sin."

"I was? What is that?"

"You were boring, Travis. Very boring."