"Get your mind off it."

"The only way I could take you now is suckerpunch you first. And that isn"t my style. There"s no fun in that."

"Can you whip everybody in Timber Bay?"

"Pretty much most of them."

"Nicky Noyes?"

"Oh, h.e.l.l, yes! He hits like he was throwing rocks, but he don"t aim. What you doing right now? Want to walk around to a couple of places and check the action? We can find us some a.s.s and bring it back here to the boat. It isn"t widespread like you got it in Lauderdale, but it"s around if you look. That"s what I was planning on, it being Sat.u.r.day night."

"Can I take a look at the Julie? Don"t mean to trouble you."

"h.e.l.l, no trouble."

He gave me the tour. I looked it all over. In spite of my protests, I had to look at the engines. He lifted the hatch and shone a light on the big GM diesels. The daylight was almost gone.

"A man could eat off that block there," he said proudly. "That"s one thing ol" Van always yapped about. And I ain"t slacked off an inch since he got busted."

"What"s going to happen to her?"

"G.o.d only knows. The bank is giving me walkaround money for staying aboard her and keeping her up. I expect they"ll get the t.i.tle cleared and sell her."

"I understand you were out of town when the trouble happened."

"That"s right. I was up to Waycross, where I come from. My daddy was bad off. It had been coming on a long time, but he was a stubborn old coot. He got hoa.r.s.e and it hurt him to swaller. And his neck started getting bigger. My mom noticed that and she nagged him and nagged him until he went to the doctor. Soon as the doctor told him he wasn"t a-going to make it, my daddy started going fast. He was nearly gone when I got there, but he could smile and nod at me, and write words on a pad. You know, I never made that man happy with me. Not one time. I d.a.m.n almost did when I got into the University of Georgia on a football scholarship, but then I got throwed out of the first two games I got into. I was a right tackle, and then I got throwed out of the school itself, signed on in the Navy, and got throwed out of that for discipline problems. He wanted so bad for me to be somebody. But, s.h.i.t, I"m all I want to be. I think my daddy lasted two days and a half or so after I heard Mr. Lawless got lost overboard. I was holding his hand there at the end. His hand gave this little quiver and then lay slack. Felt weird."

I went forward to the spot where Lawless was supposed to have fallen overboard. There was a bow rail, braided cable threaded through stanchions, ending abruptly about eight feet from the bow, where the cable was angled down from the final stanchion and made fast to a fitting in the deck. So, if he was on the starboard side, say about seven feet back from the bow and pointed out to the right, bracing himself for the vessel to turn sharp right, and it had instead turned sharp left, then the angled cable would have hit him in the shins and he would have tripped over into the chop and into the night"s blackness. They had worked the story out nicely.

"Seen enough?" he asked. "Let"s go get a drink McGee."

As we walked by the lighted office, the little darkhaired lady waved. "Don"t futz with that one there," DeeGee said. "Marjory is Coop"s old lady He"s the one right there, in the white, runs the place. She acts like she"d fool around, but she doesn"t."

"What do you think about the Hub Lawless situation?"

"I wouldn"t tell you this if you weren"t my friend. Anybody whips me like you did, they"re my friend. I think they decided there was no way they could buy Van off. He"s straight. So they give him a mickey. h.e.l.l I know the routine. Whenever we got rolling, whenever we settled into cruising speed Mr. Lawless would bring a couple of drinks topside one for me and one for Van. He"d check the dials and the course and look around at the weather and either stay with us and have his drink up topside with us, or go on back below with whoever he had aboard."

"Women pa.s.sengers?"

"No way. Not even that Norway a.s.s he got mixed up with. Jumpin" B. Jesus, but I would have liked me a chop at that one She was steamy I"m telling you She had a fire burned all the time. A tilty little swivel-a.s.s like to break your heart, and she knew it and she waved it. And really great wheels. Mr. Lawless got into that and stopped giving a d.a.m.n for much of anything else, and no man would blame him too much. But he never brought her aboard. I couldn"t hardly believe that he and John Tuckerman had Mishy and that Mexican friend of hers aboard. Mishy is okay. I"d guess offhand that Tuckerman chopped her once in a while. She isn"t exactly a pro, but she likes to work you, you know? She needs room rent, or some d.a.m.n thing, or something to send her poor old mother for her birthday. The way I see it, it was easy to give Van a mickey because of the way Mr. Lawless always gave him a drink. The two girls were below, and I think they were just to dress up the act a little. I think there was somebody in a boat waiting for him to jump, and they took him to an airplane somewhere, maybe a seaplane. They say he took off with a million dollars. You can buy a lot of help for a small piece of that kind of money."

"And he"s in Mexico?"

"Sure. He went there a lot. Him and John Tuckerman, hunting, fishing, horsing around. They were best friends of each other. John has been way into the sauce ever since. Bombed out of his mind. What did he ever have besides being Hub"s best friend?"

"You liked Lawless?"

"h.e.l.l, yes. Everybody that worked for him liked him. It really hurt him bad when he had to start laying people off from the businesses he ran. And I know for a fact he was trying to sell the Julie. Some people came aboard and looked her over. But it"s hard to move a boat like that. She won"t suit people with really big money, and she"s too much for the average boat fella. I guess if he"d sold her, he"d have had to disappear some other way that would look like he died, so the insurance would go to Mrs. Lawless and the girls."

"Did they come out on the boat much?"

"His family? Oh, sure. But a lot oftener before than after things started to get tight for him. I mean you can run a lot of dollars through those diesels just to move that thing out for an afternoon picnic. She"s way overdue for bottom work right now, too. Like the man said, if you have to ask, you can"t afford it."

He stopped and motioned me ahead of him, and we went into a place called Lucille"s. It was long and dark, with a mahogany bar, a bra.s.s rail, sawdust, spittoons, Victorian nudes in gilt frames, bowls of salted peanuts, and a game show on the television perched over the far end of the bar. Lucille squeezed past one of her bartenders to come down toward the entrance and take care of us herself. She was roughly the same size as Walloway, and of only slightly different dimensions. She wore what looked at first glance like a blue bathrobe. She had curly shiny black hair, like a poodle. Her face was white and stiff as wallboard, and she wore lots of eye makeup and lots of burgundy lipstick: I guessed her at about sixty.

"No thumping anybody tonight, Deej!" she ordered in a whiskey contralto.

"Meet my friend name of McGee. He whipped me three times."

She looked me over. "Looks as if he could do it again if he had a mind to. Welcome to my place. Deej, you start anything, you can bet your bucket I"m calling the law early."

"I was only funnin", honey."

"What would you done to him was you serious?"

"I"ve never been serious in my whole life. Double Bellows and a Miller"s chaser." I settled for the chaser. He was almost offended, but I explained I had other places to go and I didn"t want to start more than I could arrange to finish. I said the previous night was still too fresh in my memory, what I remembered of it.

He told Lucille we had been talking about Lawless and Tuckerman. "If I had a shiny dime for every time I"ve heard those names in the last two months, I could quit and live ladylike," she said.

"Seen John Tuckerman lately?" he asked her.

"No. He"s down to that shack on that land nine miles south Hub bought for his girlfriend to design apartments on, and they say his sister is there and she has got him dried out and she"s keeping him dry, but his brains are still mush. I don"t never want to see him back in here. He was flat-out pitiful. I don"t want to see people that make me sorry I sell the stuff. I don"t need that kind of guilts. I got more than enough other kinds to go around."

"Did you know Hubbard Lawless?"

"Everybody knew Hub. The business people in this town, of which I am one, aren"t never going to find it, easy to forgive him for what he done to the town. He left us in a depression here. Everything is tied into everything else, and when something quits, other things get hard up on account of it. They say we got fourteen percent unemployment here, and I can feel it in my gross, believe me. But at the same time, everybody knows Hub worked hard to make things work, and he did things for the good of the place too. He contributed to everything when he was doing well. Community Chest, Boys" Club, Cedar Pa.s.s Park, bandstand, the Pirate Pageant. He didn"t keep regular hours. He was out at that ranch by dawn. He"d work at getting stuff shipped in the middle of the night. n.o.body ever knew when that man slept. He always had a smile and a little joke. The way it looks to me, when he got the money for Hula Marine, he should have used it to sh.o.r.e up the other businesses instead of buying the wrong land at the wrong time for the shopping center and that condominium thing."

"What you forget, Lucille," DeeGee said, "he wasn"t thinking straight. He had a bad case of nooky disease."

"I don"t allow dirty talk in here, and you know it."

"I would have said it nice if I knowed how, Lucille, dammit. You know as well as I do that architect woman had him going in circles."

"Well," she said, "n.o.body is perfect, and I hope that wherever he is, Mexico or wherever, he"s found some kind of peace, because he sure got awful jumpy before he took off. The town will make out. People will keep coming down from the north. " 1"hings will keep going. They always have."

"You have a kind heart, Lucille," DeeGee said.

"Not kind enough to set you up a freebie."

"Okay. Hit me again anyway. Same thing. You, McGee?"

I excused myself and left. He seemed disappointed to have me go. I imagine he got over it in about forty seconds. It would take him about that long to get a good look at the two young women who were going in as I was leaving.

Twelve.

I FOUND Meyer in a booth in the lounge. Business was better than usual. Billy Jean Bailey was tinkling away at her compulsory background-music stint, with no one listening. She looked at me and through me, with no change of expression, and looked away, smiling and nodding at someone else.

After I brought a drink back to the booth, Meyer reported on the rental Mazda.

"I had to wait quite a while for Mr. Wedley. He was out with the tow truck on a pickup. Shorthanded. The boy pumping gas did not know anything about anything. When Wedley came back he was busy on the phone for ten minutes. Finally he was able to tell me about the Mazda. Five days after Lawless disappeared, he got a collect call from airport administration at Orlando. The car had been left in rental car return with the keys behind the sun visor. No one knew when it had been left. Airport administration got into it when Hertz complained that it was their s.p.a.ce and they needed it.

"Garner Wedley"s Texaco station address and phone was on the key tag, so they had phoned him and he had arranged to get it picked up. He said that Bonus Rental was a small operation and he had an area franchise, and it said on the rental contract that the car had to be returned to him, but it wasn"t. It made him angry to talk about. He said that Hub had rented it for that Scandihoovian female of his, and it worked out to ninety-five seventy-five Hub owed him that he would never see. He told the Sheriff about it, and after an investigation the Sheriff said that it was reasonable to a.s.sume that Miss Petersen had driven the car to Orlando, arriving during the morning of the twenty-fourth. He had obtained a picture of her, from the files of the Bay Journal, taken when Lawless had given a press party to announce the plans for the new shopping plaza, and had carried the picture over to Orlando and questioned the airline personnel, but found no one who remembered her. He questioned the rental-car people as well, because it has apparently become a popular device to abandon an automobile in an airport parking area and immediately rent another and drive away. Did you know that?"

"Not until this minute."

"If there is any point in it, I suppose we could get one of those pictures from Walter Olivera. But we seem to be getting far afield from Van Harder"s problem."

"We are and we aren"t. I don"t think anybody in authority would take anything Tuckerman might say seriously enough to get Harder some kind of reconsideration. One thing we might do is ask that doctor if Harder"s symptoms were consistent with the brand of horse tranquilizer Lawless used at the ranch."

Meyer looked into his notebook, thumbing the pages over. "Here it is. Dr. Sam Stuart. Tuckerman"s doctor too, apparently. Shall I make a note of that for Monday? And do it myself?"

"Who else have you got written down there, that we should see?"

"There"s Van Harder"s wife. Eleanor Ann Harder. She"s a nurse at Bay General. And the insurance investigator. I found out his name, by the way: Frederic Tannoy. The company is Planters Mutual General. Tannoy is a troubleshooter for a consortium of middle-sized insurance companies, working on a fee-and-percentage basis. The local agent who sold the policies is a general agent named Ralph Stennenmacher, in the Coast National building.

"Tannoy is with that deputy in Mexico," I said. "Meanwhile, I"ll see Stennenmacher on Monday."

B.J. Bailey walked past our booth, giving me one brilliantly venomous glance as she went by It depressed me. I often wonder what basic insecurity I must have to make me so anxious for approval. I touched the tape over my eye. It had not been entrapment, or even pursuit. No promises made. It had been a happening, not important, happening only because of the time and the place and the shared, nagging sense of depression. There in the yellow-glowing darkness she had been small, limber, greedy, slightly sweaty, her hair stiff from sprayings, humming with her pleasures and making them last. I knew the reason for the hate. No matter how she thought of herself, she was a se verely conventional little person and could not accept pleasure for the sake of pleasure, but had to cloak it in romantic rationalization. Like one of her lyrics-it must be love because it feels so good.

I found it ironic that I shared her disease, that puritanical necessity to put acceptable labels on things. The quick jump had always made me feel uneasy. Life cannot become a candy box without some kind of retribution from the watchful G.o.ds. I had shared her bed with such a familiar antic.i.p.ation of the uneasiness that would follow that I had been unable to enjoy her completely. This is the penalty paid by the demipagans, always to have the pleasures diluted by the apprehensions, unless all the labels are in order.

She had found the only label which permitted her all the customary fictions. She was woman betrayed by a scoundrel, a low fellow who had won her with promises, promises, and then turned his back on all her bounty. I leaned out of the booth and looked for her, saw her in the center of a small group of men, laughing with them, drinking with them, eyes a-sparkle. I decided that, when the chance occurred, I would give her a further fiction to apply like a fresh dressing to her pride. Maybe I was in danger and sought to avoid endangering her. Or I was an alcoholic, or dying of something, or had a wife and six kiddies-anything, in fact, which would fit into your average morning soap opera as something worth dramatic dialogue. Meanwhile I would have to accept being an object of hatred, one of your good old boys, one of your male-chauvinist-pig types that went around thinking of women as being something you used when you felt the need, receptacles rather than persons.

"As I was saying," Meyer said.

"Sorry about that."

"Now that I have your attention, let"s go over the actual movements of the vehicles and people, as we understand it at the moment. Let this matchbook be the beach cottage. And this one be the Vista. And this one way over here is Orlando. This match is the jeep. This match is the car Tuckerman no longer has. This match is the Petersen Mazda. Here is Tuckerman driving down to the cottage on the morning of the twenty-third to find that Lawless is still there, and sick. Here he goes back to the Vista. He stays there. Kristin goes down to the cottage in the Mazda, let us say in the late morning of the twenty-third. Tuckerman stays away, as Lawless asked, and goes back on the twenty-fifth or -sixth, and finds nothing. The Mazda had been driven to Orlando, where it was discovered on the twentyseventh. Now let"s see how many a.s.sumptions we can make about the vanished jeep."

"How many? Lawless recovered enough to drive it on south, over that bad portion of the road, down to Horseshoe Beach, and then he cut over to the main road, and went on down to an airport somewhere, and flew to Mexico."

"And if he didn"t recover enough to drive?"

"Let me see. Kristin drove to the cottage on the afternoon of the twenty-third. She finds he is too sick to drive. If he wasn"t, they could have stayed with the original plan, for her to hang around mourning her drowned boyfriend for a week or so before following him to Mexico. But with him too sick, she goes back to the Vista after dark packs, loads the stuff into the Mazda, and comes down and gets him. She could have had him in the back with the luggage, covered with a blanket or something, when they went back through town. They abandoned the Mazda in Orlando, took a flight to Miami, let"s say, traveling separately, and flew Mexicana from there over to Cancun, Yucatan."

"You"ve developed an interesting point, Travis. About their adhering to the original plan if he was well enough to drive the jeep. But what happened to the jeep, if we follow your scenario?"

I shrugged. "Ran it into the swamps or into a deep pond."

"If he wasn"t well enough to drive, he wasn"t well enough to hide a jeep."

"I see her as an intelligent woman, and physically competent. It wouldn"t be anything she couldn"t handle."

"Let me change your scenario in one respect. Rather than make two trips out to the cottage in a conspicuous red car, she could have brought Lawless back in with her when she packed up her belongings and left her apartment."

"I"ll buy that. It was dark when she drove back. It"s a better guess than two trips."

We sat at the booth, staring at the matchbook covers and the matches. "Whichever," I said, "he got to Mexico."

"Whichever," Meyer said, nodding.

There was a deep-throated din of male voices in the big room. Piano tinkle had begun again. I did not want the half drink left in my gla.s.s. My stomach felt close to rebellion. This room was not real. It seemed misted and murky, like the contrived visuals in French movies of the second cla.s.s. Nine miles south reality began, in the long flowing line, that most gentle curve, of the top of a caramel thigh. It began in flecks of gold set close to the black pupil. It began with that elegant balance of the upper body on the pelvic structure, moving in grace to a long long stride.

"Who was Gretel?" I asked Meyer.

"She was pretty shrewd. She held an old chickenbone out of the cage for the witch to feel, to hide the fact she was getting plump enough to cook and eat."

"How about a nice beach picnic tomorrow?"

"Nine miles from here?"

He looked at his notebook again. "Eleanor Ann, Stennenmacher, Dr. Stuart."

"Monday we see them. Okay? Monday."

When we walked out of the place, Noyes lurched into me. It seemed half intentional, half inadvertent. He was sweating heavily. His pistolero mustache looked dank and defeated. He had a pale blue guayabera on, so wet the matted chest hair showed through it. The flinty little Neanderthal eyes stared at me, hostile and slightly unfocused.

"B.J. told me the whole thing, you son of a b.i.t.c.h."

"Hey. Take it easy."

"Don"t tell me how to take anything, nark."

"Nark?"

"And it"s supposed to look like I resisted arrest, right? You don"t like people out on bail, right?"

"You must be drunk."

"Check with Mitch. I haven"t had drink one."

"Get out of the way, please."

"You think I"m going to let you kill me?"

""You are boring us, Nicky. You are boring me and you are boring my friend Meyer. And you were boring the people at your table at the Cove last night You are making a new career out of boring people."

"You want to come outside?"

"Walloway says you can hit, but you can"t aim. Save yourself a short walk."

He stepped sideways to catch his balance, putting a hand out to grab at the edge of the bar. He muttered something I could not quite hear.