Condominium (32 page)

“Unless you can get to the point …”

“What I’m saying is that Sully, Mr. Sullivan, changed the rules all of a sudden. You people all know the way it is now. I’m following his orders, and his orders to me were to do everything possible to make everybody happy here. I have been busting a gut doing everything like you ask, and you got to admit I’ve been trying.”

“Everybody is happy for the change in your attitude, Higbee, but that is neither here nor there.”

“I heard that you were planning to maybe stop paying the management fee, so I phoned Mr. Sullivan and I asked what I should do. What he did was send me a letter to read here to you all if you were deciding to do anything like that.”

Julian took the letter out, unfolded it, cleared his throat and read. He was not a good reader. Though he stumbled over the words, the meaning was clear. “ ‘Gulfway Management is one of
the subsidiary management companies of the Services Management Group, a Florida corporation based in Miami. The last monthly intra-office report stated that SMG now manages on long-term contracts, through its subsidiaries, one hundred and three condominium complexes, containing a total of eight thousand and eleven residential units. Julian, please tell the directors there at Golden Sands that we would merely report any moratorium on payments to SMG and, because of the implications of such a precedent, I feel quite sure that SMG would defend our legal position with utmost vigor. I do not believe any accommodation could be reached in this matter.’ ”

As he refolded the letter, Julian said, “That’s what my point was, Mr. McGinnity. The letter is to me instead of you people, but the easiest way to tell you was to read it and—”

“Thank you, Julian,” McGinnity said. There was a different atmosphere in the room. The faces were changed. McGinnity had no doubt but that, had the letter been read before the vote, the vote might have been different. He was glad he had rammed the vote through before Julian took the floor.

Someone said, “Maybe we ought to give it a little more …”

“Do I hear a motion for adjournment?” Pete McGinnity asked, leaning toward the microphone.

“So move,” said Wasniak.

“Second,” Dave Dow whispered.

“In favor? Carried! Meeting adjourned.” As he got up he accidentally kicked the card table leg. The table collapsed toward the audience and the microphone slid off and bounced onto the carpeting. Rolph Gregg made a hiss of dismay and snatched it up and spoke into it.

“Testing!” the huge hollow voice said. “Testing. One two three four.”

THE NEWSROOM WAS
on the second floor of the
Athens Times Record
building on Bay Drive, three blocks from the north bridge onto Fiddler Key. During the seven years Mick Rhoades had been on the paper, he had gradually desk-hopped his way back into a badly lighted corner.

He was in his middle thirties and looked younger. He was trim, five eight with his lifts, dark hair, small neat mustache, soft brown eyes which conveyed a false impression of naïveté and gentleness. He was as naïve and gentle as a pit viper. He was always spick-and-span, tailored and barbered and manicured. He affected white: white suits, slacks, shirts, shoes, socks. He had an impressive memory.

On this Saturday morning in late July he was at his desk earlier than usual. He had covered a breakfast meeting of the County Planning and Zoning Board. Local governments were learning to live with the Sunshine Law. The simple answer was to schedule
lots of meetings at inconvenient times and places, and send out the proper notifications. Sooner or later there would be a meeting where no press and no public showed up. Then the off-the-record political trades and deals could be made with impunity. He was pleased at the sour hush which had fallen over the small group in a corner of a motel dining area when he had joined them. Nothing of any consequence was said. He had nothing to write. As Holmes had explained to Watson, the significance was that the dog had not howled in the night.

He had a small television set on his desk, the sound off, the screen showing white words appearing on a green background, the local cable channel for news and music. They were repeating a lot of Friday news. It was happening more frequently lately. Automatic equipment. Stay in bed. Let the sucker run. They were turning Saturday into a second Sunday. Pretty soon no mail. Then they’d get to work on Monday morning. And when the bastards did work, when they weren’t striking, they had starting blocks screwed to the floor so they could get positioned and be out the door at thirty seconds before five.

He got up and went and got himself coffee out of the machine, with cream and sugar to kill the taste of acid and paper cup. As he went back to his desk a voice directly behind him said, “Your name Rhoades?”

It made him spill coffee on the back of his hand. He looked up at a tall, broad and substantial fellow, browned and weathered by wind and sun, a fellow of khaki, and leather, and metal buttons, with pilot-type shades and a white canvas hat.

“What you are supposed to do, you are supposed to let that lady out there at the desk use her phone and call me.”

“There is no lady out there. Not at the moment.”

“Oh. What do you want?”

“It’ll take a few minutes. My name is Sam Harrison.”

“What is it that’s going to be worth a few minutes, Sam?”

“Are you the red-hot environmentalist they say you are? Or is that a pose?”

“Come and sit down a minute.”

“Thanks.”

Mick Rhoades tilted back in his chair, eyes half closed, fingertips touching, and said, “Now don’t say anything. Let me guess. You represent some gigantic land-development interest, and what you want to say to me is that there is no way on God’s earth we can stop people flooding down here from the frozen North, and so if they are going to be coming down anyway, then the thing we have to do is face the inevitable and do it right. Your company has the money and the know-how. You are an advance man, sticking your toe in the hot water, and you’ve been told that if Mick Rhoades will buy your story, it might be easier to get started here in Palm County. Okay, what are you laughing at? What’s so funny?”

“If I was very very stupid, I would talk about how my vast project would broaden the tax base.”

“Bigger is cheaper, sure. That’s why property taxes are so much lower in New York City than they are in East Greenbush. Was my guess off?”

“Way way off. How serious are you on the environmental thing?”

Mick Rhoades shrugged. “This paper is owned by a chain. Their policy is, What’s good for business is good for the paper. It isn’t like the Lindsay papers in Sarasota, where they’ll really slug it out with the spoilers. They keep me around because I am sort of the environmental conscience, along with covering the City Council and the County Commission. I get in a good lick now and then. If I start to sting the wrong people too badly, they get me
reeled back in. The power structure is very cozy here. Good old boys, all on a first-name basis, all thinking they know what’s best. They think bigger is better, progress is wonderful, and so on and so on. They’ll keep thumping tubs right up until the day we run out of water completely. They’ll make that day happen sooner, and then wonder what happened, and the ones who have made their money out of all the progress will move the hell away and leave the pigeons here to cope. Where do you fit in?”

“I read your article about the Silverthorn tract.”

“A half page that got cut down to a filler. Sure. Beautiful!”

“Why?”

“News has to be timely. It took me too long to dig out how those sons of bitches did it.”

“Which sons of bitches?”

“I have to know more about you.”

“Can it stay off the record for now?”

“If you want it that way.”

Sam Harrison unzipped the old leather portfolio he was carrying and put some drawings in front of Mick Rhoades. Then he picked up his chair and moved it around beside Mick’s chair.

“Here we are. I did some digging. It took quite a few days to come up with all this, and some of it is guesswork. Here is the shape of Fiddler Key as far back as I could check it out, about 1875. It turned out I could get pretty good information on about a twenty-five-year interval. Here’s 1900, then 1925, and 1950. And this last one is an aerial that’s in scale with these others, showing it as it is now.”

“It certainly changes!”

“Because the whole damned thing is what you could properly call transient land. Here is how the cycle works, Mick. You have a narrow island off the mainland, and you have a pass at each end of
the island. Okay, you have a littoral drift on this coast in this direction. It tends to silt up the passes. As the passes grow shallow, less volume of water goes in and out on each tide. The bays themselves do not become shallower. The heavy load of water is still in there, but it is trapped by the shallowness of the passes. After a time the whole setup gets more and more fragile as it approaches a period of dynamic change. The dynamic change is caused by a hurricane, and by hurricane tides. Waves and tide are wind-driven across the island, filling the bay much higher than normal, creating great pressures for that captive water to escape. A lot of it, of course, is going to go out through the passes. But the greatest escape pressure will occur here, around the midpoint of the island, and given half a chance it will cut across and cut
through
the island. These offshore keys are glorified sandbars. They are subject to dynamic change. Nature changes and renews. This process has been going on for a long long time here. Just think about the names of the passes up and down this coast. New Pass. Midnight Pass. Hurricane Pass. September Pass. And you haven’t had a hurricane come in around here in twenty years and more. Look in the aerial how narrow and silted the passes are.”

Mick Rhoades bent and studied. He said, “Complaints all the time from the yacht-club types. They can’t get in or out except on the high if they draw four feet.”

“Getting ready for change,” Harrison said.

“Damn! You know, I’ve known this all my life, without knowing I’ve known it. I sensed it would happen some day, but I didn’t know why it would happen.”

“Now here is an overlay for the aerial. Let me get it positioned. It is possible to make a pretty fair guess about where a pass might open up. First I took the three lowest and narrowest points in the mid-key area, along this two-mile stretch here, and marked them
with grease pencil. They are possibles, but one of them is my favorite. Right here. Reasons are, first, this area here has been recently stripped of all protective growth. Second, the positioning of these two buildings on the Gulf front—”

“That would be the Azure Breeze and the Surf Club?”

“Right. They would tend to funnel a high incoming tide between them. The water would cross the key along this line here, from this swimming pool area across the road about here, and down this drainage ditch and onto the cleared land. It would gutter the cleared land and the dredged material and run off into the bay.”

“Don’t they have seawalls and rocks and things in front of Azure Breeze and the Surf Club?”

“I inspected them. They might as well have feather pillows. It’s a cheap job. They should have thought in terms of maybe a thousand dollars a linear foot for the revetment with the seawall behind it. First let me explain that the bottom deepens more rapidly off that area than elsewhere. They’ve got seven- to eight-foot depth about fifty to sixty feet offshore. See how it darkens on the aerial? I won’t go into the math, but the revetment isn’t thick enough, and it is sloped wrong, and the stones are too small. There isn’t enough toe protection. Second, the wall behind it is just as bad. Judging from the height, I think the piling depth is probably too shallow, going down maybe eight or nine feet instead of fifteen. There’s evidence of toe failure and some scouring and loss of fill down under the wall already. Wave dynamics are tremendous. Those big beasts will come marching in, smash like freight trains, bust things up, pull them back toward the waterline on the runoff. They’ll take the revetment first and then suck away the wall. Ten minutes after the first wave breaks against that wall, it will be chunks of concrete spread wide and slowly being covered by the sand. My
third point is that the water depth offshore gives the waves a chance to move farther in before breaking, and also there is the water depth in the bay. The bay is wide there, as you can see, and here is the channel they are quote scouring unquote out to the regular channel. My fourth reason is that this area lacks the protection of that offshore bar that starts farther south down the key.”

“Right along there is where the road floods after heavy rains,” Rhoades said.

“Low area. Here is the picture. The storm crests will smack and run up the slope after they’ve finished off the wall. As they run back they’ll suck back sand and dirt. When the tide gets higher, the water will spill across the road and it won’t run back. The higher the tide, the farther into the key the waves will break. If everything goes right—or wrong—you could have ten to fifteen feet of water across the key and across the bay and into the city. They better have the keys evacuated by then.”

“Fat chance.”

“They better work on it. When the runoff starts, it will come across the key in the lowest place. At first it will run off across the key everywhere, but as the water level behind the key drops, it will run off where it is gouging the best channel. And that should be right through here. The deeper the channel gets, the more runoff it can accept. And this is where you’ll have the new pass.”

“How big could it be?”

“The least it will be has to be three hundred feet wide and five to six feet deep. I would guess from here to here, almost straight across.” He marked the area.

After a time Mick looked up at him, eyes wide and round. “But Jesus Christ, Harrison, that would wipe out these four condos, wouldn’t it?”

“You can bet the family jewels on it.”

“Who the hell
are
you? You sell marine insurance?”

Sam grinned and dug into the portfolio. “Here’s a copy of my résumé.”