The Empty Copper Sea (20 page)

"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
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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
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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."

"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?"

"Junior and senior. Four years of him."

"He's dead."

"No shit, Marie! OD'd?"

"Hit by a tourist Cadillac while crossing the street."

"You've got to be kidding."

Meyer came out, and the deputy went in to take his chewing for being overweight. We went out and suddenly realized we had no transportation. After we phoned a taxi and stood waiting, Meyer said, "What took you so long in there?"

"He thought I was being cute about something, so he went around and around, coming in at me from new angles. He finally decided I was some kind of out-of-town law, so I told him why we're here."

"So he said go back to Lauderdale?"

"Almost. Not quite. Without saying so, he sort of appointed me official cat's-paw."

"How nice for you!"

"I didn't tell him what we've got so far."

"Which is next door to nothing at all. What we know changes nothing."

"It locates Lawless as of the next morning, ashore and alive."

"Which he is conceding anyway, Travis," Meyer said, opening the cab door.

We stopped at the Galley to make certain that it was really too late to get anything to eat, but it wasn't. Dave Bellamy said he was delighted to take care of old customers.

Good ol' Dave. He supervised the preparation of a pair of extra-dry Boodles gin martinis.

Meyer looked beat. He beamed at the drink when it was placed in front of him. And, as on other occasions when the martini is badly needed, he quoted Bernard De Voto on that subject: "The rat stops gnawing in the wood, the dungeon walls withdraw, the weight is lifted. Your pulse steadies and the sun has found your heart. The day was not bad, the season has not been bad, and there is sense and even promise in going on. Prosit."

"Saved a life. Maybe," I said.

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"And almost lost one or two. But didn't," he said. "About that picnic tomorrow."

"Maybe that lithesome person hates picnics."

"She's living a picnic out there. I saw a deli next to the supermarket at Baygate Plaza Mall. I can get one of those big wicker hamper things, and a big cooler. I'll set up a picnic like she never saw before, from shrimp to champagne."

"What you're talking about is a Care package."

"What do you mean?"

"When you start hauling great quantities of food to a female person, it means you really care. It always has. I think it is some primal instinct. The hunter bringing spoils to the cave."

"Hmmm. Meyer, would it offend your sense of fitness if I called Gretel a girl?"

"Instead of a person or a woman or some such? You want to be patronizing and chauvinistic, eh? Look down upon her?"

"Cut it out, Meyer. I can go with all that approach right up to a point. When it doesn't mean much one way or another. You know. But here we have one of the truly great, all-time, record-breaking, incomparable girls. And I want to call her a girl."

"And take her a ton of food. Ah, me. Ah, so. And so it goes. Let's order before I faint from hunger. You are a child of your times, McGee. And so am I. Call her what you will, but call me a waiter."

Fourteen

THERE ARE days you can't ever forget. It doesn't mean that anything really startling has to happen. It was a great glowing golden day in May. A Sunday numbered twenty-two. There you are in the midst of life, and one of those days comes rolling at you, and it is just like one of the magical days of childhood, like the first Monday after school is out.

We couldn't warn John Tuckerman and Gretel Howard we were coming. We had to hope they'd be glad to see us when we showed up an hour before noon. And they were. Demonstrably glad.

She knew how to accept gifts. None of this "Aw, you shouldn't have." She went through the hamper and the cooler, giving little yelps of delight. "Hey! How about this? Wow! Look here, Johnny! Hey, you crazy guys. A jar of red caviar! Have you gone nuts, bonkers, utterly strange?"

I was glad that Meyer had realized it would be best not to bring any booze, or any beer.

Tuckerman seemed slightly dazed. He wore a gentle smile. He rocked back and forth, heel to toe. You had to speak to him twice to get an answer.

"I said is the fishing any good?"

"Oh. Sure. I mean, I guess so. Haven't done much good. But they're out there, all right. They're out there."

He looked much better. It took me a few moments to realize that not only had he shaved; his mustache and hair had been trimmed back a little. He seemed to want to be part of the festivities, but he could not quite keep track of the chatter. We were not trying to dazzle him with repartee or profundities. It was just your normal picnic conversation, but it was as if he were a foreigner among us, looking back and forth with a slightly baffled expression, able to speak the language, only not all that well.

One odd little incident happened. Gretel stopped in the middle of a sentence and stared at John.

He sat with his eyes squeezed shut and his jaw knotted. She put her hand on his rigid arm.

"Are you going to be all right?" she asked.

He nodded. And in a little while the tensions went out of him. I asked her about that later, after we had swum down the beach and were walking back, and she said that it was hallucinations.

They happened now and again. Some sort of a cousin of delirium tremens, the result of the
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booze with which he had almost killed himself. She told me that was the reason she did not want to leave him alone. She didn't want to take him into town yet, or go in without him. Hence her magic washing machine. She thought that I had guessed the problem, and that was why I had brought enough food for fifteen people. By great exercise of character I made myself admit I hadn't guessed it.

We sat on the side of a dune. We could have been the only two people in the world. I wanted to kiss her. My heart was in my throat. I felt fifteen again. I looked into her eyes and saw her amused acceptance of us, and knew I could. It was immediately intense, astonishing both of us, as was admitted later. We lay back against the slope of the dune, as closely enclasped as we could get, and it was all very delicious for a long time, and then it began to get a little bit too yeasty for the time and place. "Hey!" she said in a muffled voice. "Hey you! McGee!" And then, with a muscular squirm, she kicked us over far enough so that we began rolling, and we rolled over and over down to the bottom of the dune and had to go into the Gulf again to rinse off the sand that had caked on our sweaty bodies.

It was a great day. Eating and swimming and napping, walking and talking. A simple day. I can remember the precise pattern of the white grains of sand on the round tan meat of her shoulder, and the patterns of the droplets of seawater on her long thigh. Gretel filled my eyes. I learned her by heart, wrists and ankles, mouth corners and hairline, the high arches and slender feet, downy hollow of her back, tidy ears, flat to the good skull.

There would never be enough time in all the world for us to say to each other all the things that needed saying, time to tell all that had happened to each of us before the other had appeared-a sudden shining in the midst of life. In so many ways she was like a lady lost long ago, so astonishingly like her-not in appearance as much as in the climate of the heart that it was like being given another chance after the gaming table had already been closed for good. She had a great laugh. It was a husky, full-throated bray, an explosion of laughter, uncontrolled. And she laughed at the right places.