"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 b.u.t.ton 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 G.o.d-awful bright on the best of days. The script I"m going to try is that the body just now came ash.o.r.e, 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 dental work, and it is Hub Lawless, not looking too good after two months in the water."

"Honest to G.o.d? 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. n.o.body 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 a.s.s out of here, Fletcher. It makes me feel sick to look at you. I"m going to think up an a.s.signment 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."

"n.o.body 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 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 d.a.m.ned 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.

"Now because it has Hub Lawless in the picture, it could be like thousands of other slides and prints that have come through here with the Lawless family on them. They talk about other people having a hard time on account of Hub taking off the way he did-I am the one really hurting. I can"t even guess the thousands and thousands of feet of Super Eight movie film he took of those girls and his wife. And every time Hub went off hunting or fishing or cruising, he"d be back in with a dozen rolls of color to be developed. And he was gadgethappy. I must have sold him forty different cameras over the years. And lenses and tripods and monopods. Flash attachments, viewers, projectors, screens. Name it and he"d buy it. I took back a lot in trade, of course, but I can tell you Julia had a lot left out there for that garage sale. I went out and helped her price it out to move it, and I hear they did well getting rid of it at the prices I suggested."

"Did John Tuckerman ever bring the film in and pick it up?" the Sheriff asked.

"John? Sure. He was Hub"s errand boy. It would be more often John than Hub when it came to picking up film."

"Did John take any of his own?"

"You know, I don"t think he owned a camera. I know he used to take some pictures sometimes, for Hub, when Hub wanted himself in the picture, like with a big fish, something like that. Snapshots. Aim and fire. Maybe he owned a camera. Maybe Hub gave him one. But John never seemed much interested."

"Did John pick up any film after Hub disappeared?"

"No. There wasn"t any here. Hub stuck me for a hundred and something dollars on the books, an open account, when he took off."

"Did Hub get his pictures developed soon after he took them?"

Ben laughed. "Nearly always. But the man had too many cameras. And he had a habit of leaving exposed film in the cameras and forgetting what it was taken of. You can"t do that with professional film and expect to get much. But you can leave amateur color film in a long time and not lose much. They know people tend to leave film in their cameras. They build it to last."

"So this slide here, developed in April, that could be a picture taken in February?"

"Or even last year sometime. I can tell you this wouldn"t have come through my store here, seeing as how it is April, and a.s.suming it was Hub"s. It wouldn"t have to go through any retail store, you know. A person can buy a slide mailer and send it to Kodak and get the slides back in the mail."

"Did Hub use those mailers?"

"Sometimes he bought some, when he was going to be away awhile. He"d mail in the film and then the slides would be waiting at home for him when he got home."

The Sheriff drove me back to the courthouse, where I had parked. I sat in his car with him for a few minutes. "What we"ve got so far, based on too d.a.m.n many a.s.sumptions," he said, "we"ve got Hub in Guadalajara in early February, with John Tuckerman. We know they went down there hunting cat, but we didn"t know they went to Guadalajara. We got Hub asking John to take a picture of the street there, with Hub over to the left. He isn"t even looking into the camera, like a man does when his picture is being taken. What would make John want to sneak a picture way back then?"

"Maybe in the next slide, number twelve, Hub Lawless is smiling into the camera. Maybe John took it too soon."

"Why would there be any picture taking anyway?"

"You mean if they-if Hub-was planning the escape route, setting up the clinic appointment, and all? I suppose he was trying to stick with his normal routines. He always took pictures. He always came home from trips with pictures."

"Maybe Tuckerman got it developed and managed to mail one print from Orlando. Too much, McGee. Too d.a.m.ned thin. Too d.a.m.ned improbable. And why the h.e.l.l would John Tuckerman want to screw up Hub"s plans after helping him carry them out?"

"Because he didn"t like getting the short end."

"You"re getting along with him all right?"

"Pretty good."

"Maybe you could see if he wants to talk any photography or if he acts funny. Just to satisfy your own curiosity?"

"Not yours?"

"No. If I wanted to learn anything about anything, all I have to do is have Deputy Fletcher saddle up and ride. Besides, I"m not permitted to deputize anybody unless we have a declared state of emergency."

"Sheriff, if I happen to find out anything I think you might want to know, I might want to tell you about it." I had my hand on the car door, ready to get out.

"Set quiet one minute longer, McGee."

"Yes, sir!"

"You could aggravate me pretty good if you put your mind to it, McGee. Be that as it may. I dropped by to see a man this morning, and he swore up and down you told him you were a lawyer."

"No way!"

"Stanley Moran."

"Oh. I told him I"d lay a subpoena on him if he didn"t behave. I didn"t pretend to be a lawyer. He asked me if I was a lawyer. I didn"t answer the question."

"It bothers me, too, the way that architect lady up and left so sudden. Looked like she packed up and left and drove over to Orlando and flew out, never to come back. Meant to look like that, you think?"

"I don"t know exactly what you mean."

"This morning I looked at the stuff she left behind. I wondered if it was anything worth taking with her. I borrowed the painting she left. Only so big. Hardly bigger than a legal-size piece of paper. Frame is light. It had the name of a gallery down in Clearwater on it, on the back. Can"t p.r.o.nounce the name of the artist. The t.i.tle was Tide Watch. I phoned the gallery about it and they said it was purchased by a Miss Petersen in January of this year for seven hundred and fifty dollars, plus tax. It would fit in a suitcase easy, between clothes. A fifty-dollar painting, a hundred-dollar painting, a person could be so absentminded on account of wanting to leave in a hurry, they could overlook it. But seven hundred and fifty dollars?"

"And a person could pack her stuff, put it in her car, drive to Orlando, buy a cheap ticket, check the stuff aboard, leave the car at the airport, miss the flight, take a bus to practically anyplace, and the luggage would end up in an airline warehouse somewhere."

"Which fits nice with the information she hasn"t touched her checking account since before the twenty-second of March, over two months."

"Or, if you are in a rush and traveling light, why bother with a seven-hundred-and-fifty-dollar painting when you are on the run with eight hundred thousand or so?"

"If somebody knew the entire scam, McGee, if they intercepted Hub and his new lady, took the money, buried them deep, then pulled that picture trick to steer everybody toward Mexico..."

"Somebody like?"

"I know. I know. Not like Tuckerman. Certainly not Julia Lawless."

For a moment, for one moment, I was tempted to tell him what I had learned from Gretel and John about the whole scheme as devised by Hub, and about the heart attack the yellow jeep, the message John took to Kristin Petersen. But Gretel had trusted me, and she had induced John to trust me. If my luck ran really bad, one day this dusty dangerous little man would find out what I had held back and find out I had held it back. In a perfectly ordinary manner, with his ordinary face and gestures and tone of voice, he had a knack of creating a respect that bordered on dread.

In late afternoon I aimed the gray Dodge Dart southward, pretending I was intent on my mission of involving John Tuckerman in some small talk about photography. But Gretel filled my head, and I leafed through the hundred pictures of her, taken by a personal invisible camera which had produced instant three-dimensional colored shots,. vivid, never fading. I whistled. I decided that the unraveling of the Hubbard Lawless mystery was just a nervous reflex on my part. None of my business. Van Harder would be absolved and relicensed. The Sheriff was willing to arrange that without much further urging.

For all of me, the whole area could strangle in angel dust. All I wanted to do was find some way to pick up my woman and run, preferably in the Busted Flush, once Van Harder had turned her back over to me.

I steered around the deeper potholes. The sun was sliding down the sky, off to my right. A rabbit sat up and stopped munching as I drove slowly by. There was a small hawk perched on the mailbox, and it went arrowing off as I turned in. Soon the stilt house was in view, with the square green Fiat still parked under it. I popped the horn ring a couple of times as I drove into the yard. I got out and looked up, expecting to see her come out onto the veranda. Empfiy. There was not the slightest breath of a breeze. There was not the slightest stir of leaves or gra.s.s. Nor any bird sound.

The creak of the weathered stairs seemed loud as I went quickly up to the veranda deck.