The Empty Copper Sea (25 page)

Julia drove in and got out of her car, carrying a bag of groceries. The daughter went to her and took it and apparently asked her if she wanted to talk to me. She nodded and smiled at me, and the girl went into the house with the bag.

We talked once again in the living room, with the coffee table between us. Yes, she had heard that the investigators had established that Hub was in Mexico subsequent to the twenty-second of March. She said that was nonsense. He was dead, and she knew it.

"Did Hack Ames show you a picture of Hub taken in Guadalajara on April eighth?"

"He tried to show it to me. I said it was impossible. It just couldn't be. I wouldn't even look at it.

I said it was some kind of a trick. He got very annoyed with me. He really did."

"I've got a print of that picture here."

"Don't try to show it to me!"

"Julia, please. I was wondering what sort of clothing he planned to take with him. It could indicate where he was intending to go, whether he got there or not."

She hesitated, and then with a sigh of resignation she took the picture and turned it toward the light. She closed her eyes for a few moments, then studied it again, and handed it back.

"You can't learn much from that bush jacket," she said. "That's the last one of four he bought at Abercrombie and Fitch at least fifteen years ago. They were made out of their special Safari Cloth. They wore like iron. That was the last one. Shoulder straps. Four pleated pockets with buttons. I remember mending the left sleeve in front. You can see the mend. He ripped it on a branch."

"Do you know what other clothes he took?"

"I have no idea. He'd moved a lot of his stuff out to the ranch, you know. He was supposed to be sleeping out there."

"Could you tell by looking to see what's missing?"

She heaved a great sigh. "Well, I've got to go through that stuff sooner or later."

"Maybe it would be better to put it off for a while."

"No. I'll go look. Not that it will do any good." She came back in five minutes, taking long
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strides for such a small person. She was bent forward, eyes glaring, jaw set.

"Here, damn you!" she yelled and hurled something at me. I got a hand up in time and caught the wadded cotton. Julie stood over me. "I told him and I told you that goddamn picture was nonsense. Look at it! Look at the sleeve! What did he do, smart man? Wear that to Mexico and sneak back after April eighth and slip it into his closet with the rest of his stuff? I told you. I told everyone. Hub is ... is . . ." She collapsed onto the couch and began to weep.

"Julia? Julia!" I had to say her name very sharply to bring her back for a moment from the selfinvolvement of her tears. She stared at me, her face small, lined; and anguished.

"I agreed to tell you why I came here," I said.

"If it was to prove he's really dead . . ."

"To clear Van Harder. To get his license back. A favor for a friend. That's all."

Her stare showed she found it hard to believe. "Just for that? My God, you go plunging around, kicking and thumping, just for that? What kind of an idiot project is that?" Tears were drying.

"Your husband and his dear friend left Harder way up the creek. Harder was loyal to your husband. They gave him a very cheap shot."

"What do you think he gave me? And his daughters?"

"And his bank and his friends and his other employees too. I guess I stepped in just now because I didn't want to see some grown person crying for him."

"He was my husband!"

"When I was small there was a neighborhood kid who had a lot of toys. Whenever we played with him we all knew that whatever the game was, we had to let him win. If we didn't, he would pick up his toys and leave. He was kind of a fat kid."

"You've got some sort of adolescent infatuation with the idea of gallantry and fair play," she said. "He was doing what he thought was right. Damn you, why have you got me defending him?

Would you leave? Please?"

Sheriff Haggermann Ames saw me in his little sterile windowless office at quarter to four that Monday afternoon.

He looked at the paper bag I brought in. "What have you got?"

"You won't like it."

"Would you like a list of the things that happen every day that I don't like and never expect to like?" I sat opposite him and took the bush jacket out of the bag. I shoved the print he had given me in front of him, unfolded the bush jacket, and pointed to the mended rip in the front of the short left sleeve. His face did not reveal a thing. He told me to stay put. He came back with a slide projector, the kind which comes in a small tin suitcase which opens up into a tent-shaped ground-glass screen. The slide is projected onto the back of the ground glass. He plugged it in, turned it on, inserted the slide, turned it to sharp focus. Then he compared the shirt I'd handed him to the shirt in the photograph. He compared the shoulder straps, collar, mend, the buttons on the flap pockets. He turned the projection lamp off, tilted his head back and stared at the ceiling.

"Get it from Julia?" he asked.

"Yes. She did the mending. He bought four of them a long time ago. This was the last one left."

"What the hell made you go ask?"

"I don't know. I began to wonder if too many trails led to Mexico. I wanted her to look and see what sort of things he took. I had the idea that if he took snowshoes and thermal underwear, it might mean people were looking in the wrong place. I sort of fell into this."

He looked at the shirt as if he wanted to set fire to it. "I fall into things too. They are like accidents, but not quite. Something in the back of a cop's head keeps nibbling away."

"I'm not a cop."

"Maybe you should consider it."

"I don't think so, Sheriff."

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"Well ... where the hell are we? As near as we can tell Hub was down in Mexico sometime in February. Maybe the woman took the picture then and got confused about the date. I don't like that. She was too positive."

"She was selling that date. She was selling the idea Hub is alive."

"And she was steering us toward Guadalajara," he said. "What if that architect lady wanted the whole pie? What if she was just using Hub? The way I read it, her career wasn't exactly climbing.

Okay, so they meet the morning after he was supposed to drown. Maybe they meet at the place where he stashed the money. I don't think he jumped overboard with it. She knows the plan is to go to Mexico, get plastic surgery, hole up somewhere, and have a long happy life. But she doesn't like that kind of risk, being tied to him, maybe caught with him. So she pops him, buries him, and leaves with all the cash. To lay the false trail, she sends the slide to me."

"If she did that, Sheriff, the best and safest thing she could do would be go back to Atlanta, keep the money hidden away, and pick up the strings of the life she led up there. But there's been no transactions in checking or savings for two months, and she's got forty thousand dollars up there in the Atlanta Southern."

He gave me one of his mild, tired, dusty looks. He scratched the back of his head. "Dig, dig, dig."

"I was curious about her."

"Sure. So am I. The couple who subleased her apartment up there are curious too. And she took a leave of absence from the firm she was working with. They are wondering."

"Mr. Boggs was glad to make the inquiry."

"Sure. What else do you know you haven't got around to mentioning?"

"I brought that bush jacket right to you."

"Yes, you did. And sidestepped the question too."

"Can I ask a question?"

"Such as?"

"Who paid for Deputy Fletcher's trip to Guadalajara?"

He focused a bleak stare on the wall behind me and then turned and pushed a button on his intercom. "Pull Fletcher in from wherever, on the double, in my office."

He looked at me and said, "One thing about Wright Fletcher, he ain't too god-awful bright on the best of days. The script I'm going to try is that the body just now came ashore, positive ID

from the dental work."

"He was going down to that shack where Tuckerman is staying and putting pressure on Tuckerman until the sister ran him off."

He smiled. I wouldn't want him smiling at me like that. "Now that's nice to know."

Ten minutes later I had my first look at Wright Fletcher. He was as big as the side of a house. He was as big as Walloway. He came creaking and jingling in, all leather and whipcord and the metallic necessities of office. At Ames's suggestion, I had moved back into a chair against the wall, almost behind the chair where Fletcher had to sit.

He looked uncomfortable. There were two rolls of sun-baked fat on the back of his neck.

"That was a real nice break for you, flying down to Mexico like that with Mr. Tannoy. You know we could never have pried loose the money to send you down there. And we couldn't have sent you down official without probably an act of Congress, Wright."

"Well, Mr. Tannoy really needed me. He doesn't speak any Spanish at all. I'm not what you'd call fluent, but I was able to help him a lot."

"That's nice. I'm glad you were able to help him. And you are one thousand percent sure Hub Lawless is down there?"

"Well ... I'm a thousand percent certain he was there. We found that sidewalk cafe place where that picture was taken, about three blocks from the main square, and I took another picture of it and gave it to you."

"That was a big help. Now let's say a body came drifting in and we just got a positive on the
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dental work, and it is Hub Lawless, not looking too good after two months in the water."

"Honest to God? Did the body come in?"

"Wait a minute, Deputy! You seem pretty ready to believe that it did. I thought you had him all nailed down in Mexico. Is there something the matter with your investigation work down there?"

"N-no, Sheriff. No, there wasn't nothing wrong."

"It works out nice for Tannoy if the company doesn't have to pay off, doesn't it?"

"I think he gets some kind of a percentage commission."

"On two point two million! Must be a nice commission."

"I guess so."

"Now you had five people on the report you gave me, each ready to swear they saw Lawless down there after March twenty-second. Five good sound reliable witnesses. People we could put on the stand?"

"Well ... we didn't tell them they'd have to do that."

"Did Mr. Tannoy give them something for their trouble?"

"A couple of hundred pesos, Sheriff. Like about ten dollars. As, you know, a courtesy."

"I know. He put you up in a good hotel?"

"Very nice."

"Good food, good booze, a little night life?"

"Aw, Sheriff, like Mr. Tannoy said, it was kind of like a vacation anyway. Nobody should mind if we enjoyed ourselves, as long as we got the job done."

"Maybe there was a little bonus for you too?"

"Not really a bonus."

"Well, what?"

"Just a silver belt buckle, for a souvenir."

"And?"

"Well ... a necklace for Madge."

"Silver?"

"Yes, sir."

"How many people did you talk to who remembered Hub Lawless, but remembered him as being there back in February?"

"Quite a few."

"Ten?"

"Well, more."

"I don't see their names on the report."

"Mr. Tannoy said they wouldn't do anybody any good. He said it was all perfectly clear that Hub took off with the money, and it wasn't right he should get to rip off an insurance company at the same time. He said that whenever people rip off an insurance company, the rates go up for all the rest of us."

"Get out of here!"

"Sir?"

"Get your fat sly ass out of here, Fletcher. It makes me feel sick to look at you. I'm going to think up an assignment for you you'll never forget. Git!"

After the door closed, he said, "So much for the Mexican connection. Can't blame Tannoy too much. A professional company man. Any company that'll pay him. Where are we now? It would be a pretty safe guess that Hub hasn't been to Mexico since February. Maybe he sent along the slide. False trail."

"After going to all the trouble to make it look like accidental drowning?"

"Okay, so then he realized it wasn't going to work. Remember I didn't get the note from Orlando with the slide until the tenth of this month, McGee."

"Nobody was talking about Guadalajara until you got it. So even if he knew what was going on around here, even if somebody was keeping him up to date, the escape route was still safe. And
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the complete change of appearance was still a good idea."

Ames thought in silence for a few moments. "We have to remember that he had already missed his appointment at the clinic by the time I got the picture of him." He pinched the bridge of his nose, squeezing his eyes shut. "Let's back up. Who would know about Guadalajara? Lawless, Kristin Petersen, and John Tuckerman. I put in a lot of hours back there toward the end of March, working on John Tuckerman. I couldn't move him an inch. He wasn't giving me the story word for word every time. That would have tipped me off. But it was damned close to word for word. All right, so he had to be in on the scheme. Those two were always close. I had to back off. I had nothing to go on. Harder was no help. Those two girls backed up Tuckerman's story.

So if he was in on it, he certainly didn't get paid off. He had to give up his place. He wrecked his car. He was in the hospital screaming at the big polka-dot lobsters that were crawling all over him and up the walls. What would he get out of sending that slide to me? How would he manage it?"

He took the slide out of the projector. "Number eleven," he said. "Out of twenty or thirty-six.

Developed by Kodak in April. Along with the thirty-nine billion other slides they processed in April." He looked at his watch. "We can make it to Ben's Camera House before it closes."

Eighteen

BEN HAD a florid face and a curly red beard. He said, "Hack, there is absolutely no way to tell a thing about this slide. It is just about perfect exposure, but these days of automatic, through-the-lens, CD cells and all, the exception is when we get things through here that are over or under.