The Empty Copper Sea (8 page)

It made a cheerful midday din of voices, ice, silverware, and laughter.

Olivera said, "Sure, my by-line was on almost all the Hub Lawless stories, and on almost everything else too. What it is, we don't have the horses to put out the Bay Journal seven mornings a week, and we don't have the budget. It is an ABC figure of fifteen thousand; and we were picked up two years ago by Southern Communications, Incorporated, which has maybe twenty smallish papers and a dozen FM rock radio stations. They sit up there in Atlanta with their computer printouts, looking at the gross and the net, and they write ugly letters to Harry Dister-he runs the paper and has ulcers on his ulcers-asking how come he paid fourteen cents more a ream for copy paper this year than last year. They don't give a shit what our editorial position is or our politics. They make us buy the cheapest syndicated crud on the market, and they make poor Harry hustle his ass off for advertising linage." He picked up his glass of white wine. "No point in telling you all my problems, gentlemen. Yes, I covered the Lawless mess, and I didn't do any digging because I can't spend or spare the time."

Meyer said, "I hope you understand our position, Mr. Olivera. If Lawless is alive and well, we have to go after the available property in one way, and if he is indeed drowned, then we go after it another way."

"I can see that, sure."

"So I guess what we are looking for-with Devlin Boggs's help-is an educated guess on what to expect," I said.

Walter Olivera took his time. "I see it this way," he said finally. "Mr. Lawless was a proud man.

He was born right here in Timber Bay. When he was in his second year at the University of Florida at Gainesville, his mother, father, and older brother were killed in a light-plane accident.

His brother had rented the plane. Hit power lines trying to set it down in a field when the motor quit. After everything was settled, there was just enough left to see Hub through school. He took business courses. He came back here and married Julia Herron. Her father was D. Jake Herron, who was a state legislator from this area for thirty years, right up to when he died.

"Hub borrowed some money from his father-in-law to get started in the construction and landdevelopment business, and paid it all back with interest. He worked hard. He worked all hours. Kvery time he got a little bit ahead, he'd branch out. He started Hula Marine Enterprises, Double L Ranches, and Lawless Groves and nursed them through the early years and turned
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them into profitable businesses. It was a process of constant expansion. I think he was a millionaire, on paper at least, by the time he was thirty-five. He liked making things work out.

But luck always enters in. He had no way of knowing everything would start to go sour at about the same time."

"Everything?" Meyer asked.

"Just about. He took the money he got from selling Hula Marine to Associated Foods, and he put it into two big tracts of land, one about two miles east of the city line on State- Road Three fifty-nine, and the other way out beyond the south end of Bay, down on a little road that winds on down toward Pepperfish Key. Good waterfront land, and a lot of it. The land on Three fifty-nine was to be a shopping center, a big one. You can drive out and take a look at it. He got the land prepared, roads paved, foundations set. The waterfront land was going to be a big condominium development. Six high-rise buildings, fifteen hundred units. He'd borrowed right up to the hilt, and he was counting on the cash flow he could generate from his other interests to keep the new ventures going."

Meyer nodded and said, "Hard freeze?"

"You bet it was. A little freeze is okay. It even helps make the crop juicier. They say Hub was up all night long, roaring around in that yellow jeep. They burned smudge pots and tires and ran big fans off generators. They tried everything. But when there is absolutely no wind and the temperature stays below eighteen degrees for almost five hours, there isn't anything anybody can do. It froze and split some of his older trees. He didn't even end up with cattle feed. And you know what has happened to the price of beef and beef cattle in Florida. They say he could have squeaked through, by getting the shopping center up as fast as he could. The center was going to be anchored by a big store, one of the big chains. He had a good lease, all signed. And a lot of little people were beginning to flock around on account of the traffic that would be generated by the chain store. And all of a sudden they went the way of Grant's. Bankrupt. Finished. And his lease was worthless. He wanted to make the condominium project first priority, but all of a sudden the state came into the act and said that the project was going to damage valuable wetlands. They wanted a setback from the beach that would have made it impossible for him to put the buildings up in the area left, and they asked for an environmental impact study, which would have delayed it at least eighteen months even if the answer had been favorable to him.

"He was a very up-front guy. He admitted everything wasn't going too great. But he smiled a lot and he was confident, and everybody figured Hub Lawless would work his way out of it the same as other times when he had been caught in a narrow place. I heard rumors he was sleeping on a cot out at his ranch office, and that his marriage had gone bad and he had something going with a woman named Petersen. She was an architect, and she was supposed to be helping with the designs of the shopping center and condominium project. If he had something going, then maybe he wasn't thinking too clearly. As I said, he was proud. If he hung around, he was certainly going to go steadily and inevitably down the tube. He was going to have to see those corporations go into bankruptcy, and he was going to have to go into personal bankruptcy, resign from the board of the bank, resign from a lot of civic activities and church things. It was certainly going to spoil his image with his daughters, Tracy and Lynn. Sixteen and fourteen are tough years to suddenly go broke. So he decided to milk every dime he could out of every account, every source of funds, fake his own death, and go on the run, realizing that nobody could step in and grab the proceeds of the big insurance coverage on his life away from Julia Lawless. I want the lentil soup, please, a big bowl, and an order of the whole wheat toast, no butter."

After we had all ordered, Olivera made his little summary. "He had no really good choices. He had no way of knowing that it would look so suspicious that the insurance company would refuse to pay the claim. He did so many things so well, it's funny he didn't manage his own disappearance better."

"Would you guess he's in Mexico?" I asked. "That seems to be the current tumor. I wouldn't
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fault it. He went down there quite a few times. He liked the country. He and John Tuckerman used to go down and hunt a lot. Hub spoke enough bad Spanish to get by. Apparently he started squirreling away cash about the first of the year. It would give him a lot of time, almost three months, to establish a new identity."

"With the lady architect?"

"And lots and lots of pesos," Olivera said cheerfully.

"Apparently Tuckerman was in on the deception," Meyer said.

"Had to be. And I think it was very, very rough on John Tuckerman. He thought Hub Lawless was the finest man who ever walked. Hub had a way of generating a lot of loyalty. If Hub had asked John to set himself on fire, he'd have run after the gasoline and the matches.

Unquestioning. Okay John helped him, and did exactly as he was told. And after it happened, John crawled into the bottle and he's been there ever since."

"What was his position anyway?"

"He was supposed to be a vice-president of each of the four corporations. What he did was make sure the cars were gassed and maintained, and he made reservations and carried luggage and told jokes. He has no family except a sister. Hub Lawless was his family, and the Lawless enterprises were his home."

"What's he doing now?"

"Drinking. He has a beach shack down there on the land Hub bought for the condominium project. The ownership of that land is in limbo. He's a squatter, technically, but I don't think he'll be rousted out of there right soon. If I had to make a guess, I would say that Hub probably gave John enough cash to keep him going."

"If you had to make a guess," Meyer said. Olivera turned and stared at Meyer and then over at me. "Look you guys. This is a favor, okay? Boggs, the big man, asked me to cooperate."

Meyer looked wounded. "Please don't misunderstand, Walter. Did I sound disapproving? I wasn't. We're here to make guesses. Good newspaper people make guesses based on hunch and experience and then check them out to find the facts, right?"

Olivera relaxed again. "What I'm working on is not exactly the Washington Post."

"Does the paper do any crusading?" I asked. "If it doesn't cost anything."

"Here's one that might not cost much. If we assume Hub Lawless had the whole thing planned ahead, and if we assume John Tuckerman was in on it and helped out, then it follows that Van Harder, running the boat, was given a funny drink. So he lost his license to skipper a boat carrying passengers for hire. So he got labeled a drunk who passed out while the owner fell overboard."

Olivera thought it over, frowning, turning it this way and that. "I suppose we could have an editorial. But to get his case reconsidered, there would have to be some hard facts."

I decided to run a little test. "Hard facts. For example, a reliable eyewitness who'd swear to having seen Lawless in Mexico in April?"

"That might do it," he said. "That would be great, sure."

So either he was a great actor or he didn't know about the photograph. I resisted the temptation to be a nine-cent hero and take the picture out and explain it to him.

"What's all this about Harder anyway?" he asked. "He's just a sample of all the people who get hurt when somebody pulls something off, when somebody sets up a conspiracy to defraud," I said.

While we ate, quite a few people who passed our booth on their way out spoke to Walter Olivera. He kept grinning and nodding and flapping his hand at them. And it seemed obvious that every one of them was wondering who we were. Small cities have a very compact power structure, and it is always more evident when the tourist season is over.

"It was really a hell of a blow to this town," Olivera said, when his lentil soup was gone. "High hopes. You know. Two big projects. More jobs. The best thing that could happen would be if some organization could come in and pick up right where Hub left off, iron out the bugs, and
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get those projects moving again. I would think most of the creditors would listen to reason."

"If we knew who to buy the rights from," Meyer said.

"I know. The official result was: Missing, presumed dead by misadventure. Now the general feeling is. Missing, presumed alive. If seven years pass with no trace of him, I think they can declare him dead. And that is too damned long to wait."

He had to get back to the paper. He shook hands around, thanked us for the lunch, told us he would be glad to help in any way he could. And he said that everybody he could think of would be glad to help us too.

After he was gone we ordered more coffee. I told Meyer the Haggermann Ames story and gave him a stealthy look at the picture of Hub Lawless in Guadalajara. He was enchanted, but agreed with me that it was the kind of evidence that would not stand up in any court of law. It would have to be backed up by direct examination of the person who had taken the photograph.

He had spent all his time with Harold Payne and said, "One very cool and cautious fellow. Very reluctant to violate any client-attorney relationship, even after I hinted that, if Mr. Allbritton's firm came in here, I would recommend they use his services for local legal matters. That didn't thaw him. He said he had been Mr. Lawless's personal attorney for many years and that he had set up the corporations Mr. Lawless had controlled and had advised him on tax and estate matters. He said he had blocked an attempt by the IRS to proceed with a computation of estate tax and had contested a writ to have his client's personal safety-deposit box opened. He had not filed a copy of the will and would not do so until there was positive proof that Hubbard Lawless was deceased."

"Did he have any opinions about what happened?"

"He didn't express any direct opinion. He said it was entirely possible that, had his client not met with an accident on the night of March twenty-second last, he would have been able to explain his very good reasons for having enhanced his cash position!"

"'Enhanced his cash position'?" I said.

"A direct quote," Meyer said. "Payne is okay. The firm represents the bank, too. It puts him in a curious position, a sort of ex post facto conflict of interest. So he is doing the smart thing,.

following the letter of the law, keeping his head down, keeping everything in stasis until more information comes to light."

"Are we getting anywhere?" I asked. "Are we doing Van Harder any good? That's what this is all about. Remember?"

"To replace the fledgling in the nest, one must first climb to the top of the tall tree."

"Oh, boy."

"About five or six o'clock back at the Resort-forgive the expression?"

"Have a nice afternoon."

Seven

THE VAST expanses of the parking areas at Baygate Plaza were less than half filled, and I wondered at the wisdom of Hub Lawless's decision to build another big shopping center in Timber Bay.

Once I found my way into the Mall, I located an orientation map, one of those YOU ARE

HERE! things, and found where I was in relation to Top 40 Music. I plodded along the tile-finished concrete under the perpetual fluorescence, past all the jewelry stores, shoe stores, cut-rate blue-jeans stores, gift marts, caramel-corn outlets, and health-food hustles. I plodded along in the din of canned music, in the perpetual carnival atmosphere of everyday, past the custom T-shirts, the pregnant ladies eating ice cream cones, and the lines of children on school holiday waiting to get into another revival of Star Wars, shrieking and jabbing at one another and pretending to die of serious wounds.