MEYER was sitting up in a chair in his room having his evening meal when I arrived. I sat on the bed and told him that he looked a lot less like a reject from a wax museum.

"I took a shower," he said. "I am eating a steak as you can plainly see. A very skimpy little sawdusty steak, but a steak nonetheless. This will be the last night I shall be attended by Ella Marie. You can pick me up and take me home Tuesday noon. That is New Year"s Day, I believe. If the prospect displeases, I can make other arrangements."

"You are better. And up to your old standards of unpleasantness."

"Let me know when I exceed them, please. Then I can back off a little. If you are wondering what this is, they started with green blotting paper, ran it through a shredder, soaked the pulp in bacon grease, and then pressed it into little molds so that it came out looking exactly like overcooked string beans. They have other esoteric-" He stopped and put his fork down. "I"m sorry. I was so busy showing off, I didn"t really take a good look at you. What"s happened, Travis?"

I got through the explanation about the pictures and my other discoveries. He took giant steps in logic which made detailed explanations of significance unnecessary.

He said, "Sorry to be so slow to see that something had you by the throat, my friend. Illness is an ego trip, especially after you begin to feel a little better. You turn inward. How do I feel right now compared to five minutes ago, an hour ago, yesterday? Is this pain in my hip connected with the infection? Is it something new? Why can"t they come when I ring? All intensely personal. Petulant. To each one of us, the self is the most enchanting object in all creation. Sickness intensifies the preoccupation with self. And, of course, the true bore, the cla.s.sic bore, is the person who is as totally preoccupied with himself all the time as the rest of us are when we are unwell. The woman who spends twenty minutes telling you of her last four experiments with hair styling, for example."

"I like that Spanish definition of yours better."

"Gian Gravina? A bore is a person who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company."

They came and got his tray. He got up cautiously, waved away the helping hand, and waddled slowly to the high bed. He operated the side b.u.t.tons to give himself the perfect angle of repose, the right degree of support under the knees. And then he sighed. The sigh of tiredness and great accomplishment.

"Gabe said that-"

He stopped me with a hand slowly raised. His eyes were closed. "Let us think. Let us erase all past impressions and conceptions of Howard Brindle and then paint him back into our stage set without going too far, the other way, creating fangs, hair on the palms and the fetid odor of the great carnivore."

I tried to think. Linear logic was beyond me. My mind kept bouncing off the stone barriers of anxiety and running in circles. He was breathing deeply and steadily, and I wondered if he had fallen asleep.

"Marianne Barkley backed me into a corner right after the doctor"s death and bent my ear into strange shapes with her dossier on Fred and Lois Harron," he said.

Sometimes there"s no way of sidestepping her. She is a large lady who dresses in gypsy fashion and runs a small successful shop in the complex called Serendipitydoo. She sells yarn, needlepoint kits, creative pots, literature of the occult and j.a.panese prints. She works up detailed horoscopes, breeds Siamese cats, instructs in decoupage, gets around on a Honda and writes a weekly society gossip column for a throwaway called the Lauderdale Bystander. She knows everybody, has a certain fringe position in the old-settler social order and has outlived three husbands, all rumored to have been talked to death.

Meyer went on. "Twenty minutes of conversation boils down to pure soap opera. Dr. Harron had started to have some real trouble with the bottle. The doctor union was very close to closing the operating-room door. Booze had put the marriage in jeopardy for the usual reasons. His impotence making her wander afield, a few drunken beatings. Marianne suspected that a psychiatrist friend had recommended the long vacation aboard the Salamah. The whole point of her a.s.sault on me was to tell me how lucky Lois Harron was. Some mutual friends had tied up fairly near them in Spanish Wells and reported that Fred was getting so totally smashed all day every day, the Harrons had to hire a fellow to operate the ketch. Death by swimming accident left Lois pretty well fixed, she pointed out. The long slow death from booze would have meant professional disgrace and bad memories and no money left at all."

"It sounds more likely than the account Mrs. Harron gave me. But where are you going with it?"

"I"m linking it up with a conversation I had about that time. I can"t remember who I was talking to. But they had an aura of reliability. Maybe somebody official. Something about a blood alcohol test in Na.s.sau, and a mild astonishment that a man carrying that much load could stand up long enough to dive."

"Oh," I said. "But I don"t think Lois Harron is a very good liar. She said that she and Howie were below and heard the crunch when he dived into the dinghy."

He opened his eyes. "Let"s say they anch.o.r.ed off Little Harbor for a swim. All three of them swam. Fred Harron drank and swam and pa.s.sed out on deck, loaded. And then Lois and Howie went below and took off their wet suits and had s.e.x. Afterward, let"s say that Lois drowsed off. Howie heard the dinghy swing in the tide and wind change and b.u.mp against the hull. He certainly knew the marriage situation. Maybe he wanted to do her a little favor. He could give such a great start it would wake her up and he could pretend to be agitated and say, "What was that? What was that? Didn"t you hear it? A big thumping noise. Maybe we pulled the hook." He could yank his swim trunks on, hurry topside, take a quick look around at the empty sea, scoop the surgeon up and launch him headfirst into the dinghy, bawling to Lois to hurry up just as the doctor landed."

I got up and looked out his window into the early darkness. "A little favor for a lady, eh? Like killing a hornet, or parking her car in a narrow s.p.a.ce, or helping her over a fence. Meyer, you never used to be able to think so badly of people."

"I used to lead a sheltered life. Does it fit, emotionally? Does the concept have internal logic?"

"Enough to give me the crawls. No proof possible. Ever."

"You take a turn. Try Susan from Texas."

"Okay. Erratic, neurotic, alienated. And hostile. So she located her father"s boat somehow. Maybe she was still in contact with a friend in her hometown who would know. She moves aboard, pleads with Howie not to tell her folks. They become intimate. He likes living aboard boats. She is an added convenience. He doesn"t have to go out and find a girl if he wants one. Maybe he never wants one badly enough to go to any great lengths to find one. But if one is right there, within reach, he"ll reach when he feels any mild urge. Okay, so she thinks she"d got the leverage on two counts, letting her stay aboard and laying her. Hostility is the clue, maybe. A little lady lib mixed in. Do just what I want you to do, or I"ll blow the whistle on you, Howard. And maybe she would anyway, because she was erratic. End of a convenient way of life. Big problem of where to live and what to do. So he turned her head a little further around than it is supposed to go, wired her into a weighted tarp, put her and her stuff into the launch by the dark of the moon, and probably deep-sixed her up one of the ca.n.a.ls. How many of those freaky, wandering, bombed little girls disappear every year without a trace? Thousands? I don"t know. But I think it adds up to a lot of them."

"Very nice," Meyer said. "It fits the same pattern. A casual response to a minor problem. Why do we like Howie Brindle?"

"Rhetorical question?"

"Not exactly. There is something childlike about him. A kind of placidity, a willingness to be moved about by events. You sense that he does not want to be an aggressor, to take anything you have from you by force. He is cheerful, without being at all witty. He loves to play games. He likes to be helpful. He watches a lot of daytime television. He has a short attention span. He won"t dream up ch.o.r.es, but he"ll do faithfully what you tell him to do, if you"re explicit. His serious conversation, a rare phenomenon, seems to come from daytime televon drama. He loves chocolate bars and beer. He doesn"t want trouble of any kind, and he"ll lie beaufully to get out of any kind of trouble. He has absolutely no interest in the world at large. r.e.t.a.r.ded? Hardly. I think he may have a better intelligence than he is willing to display. But something is wrong with him. For lack of a better word, call him a sociopath. They are very likable, plausible people. They make superb imposters, until they lose interest in the game of the moment. They form few lasting attachments. As a rule, they are liars, petty thieves, sometimes brawlers, but seldom are they killers. I can explain why they are so dangerous, the ones willing to kill. Because they are absolutely immune to polygraph tests. The polygraph measures fear, guilt, shame, anxiety. They don"t experience these emotions. They can fake them by imitating the way the rest of us act under stress. But it"s only an imitation. When the only thing in the world that concerns you is not getting caught, you would kill for very small reasons. In fact, murder that is the result of irritation plus casual impulse plus an elementary slyness is the most difficult to solve."

I went to the foot of the bed. "We"ve seen some of those, Meyer. Remember?"

"Not if I can help it."

"We like him because he"s just a mischievous little kid."

"That"s the ultimate simplification. Mommy gives all her time to new baby sister and won"t make peanut b.u.t.ter sandwiches when you come home from school, so put the pillow over baby sister"s little face and push down on it and listen to the clock going tick."

"But what the h.e.l.l good is all this doing Pidge?"

"She doesn"t fit the pattern of his other... solutions."

"No. This seems more complicated. Seems! It is. It"s as if... he hasn"t been able to figure out the best way to go-to kill her or drive her crazy."

"Remember his first and only rule. Don"t get caught."

"So?"

"So if the ramifications of killing her made him cautious and indecisive a year ago, nothing has really changed so much. And you are in the equation now. He knows you talked to her about the things she couldn"t comprehend and convinced her she had been hallucinating. I think that might be the best favor you could have done her."

"I don"t understand."

"I"m thinking out loud. And not making much sense. Sorry. I think that if she were to confront him on this trip to American Samoa with his having tricked her into thinking she was losing her mind, she might not last the whole voyage."

"But you think she will?"

"My G.o.d, don"t take my hunch for reality. She could be face down right now, off a lovely atoll, drifting down and down into that incredible turquoise blue, with Howie squatting and watching her sink, his only lament a vague disappointment at having to give up something of about the same pleasure quotient as a chocolate bar."

"Why are you-"

"Whoa! The veins in your neck are standing out. I had to steer you away from childish optimism. Remember, there is a very cold and strange ent.i.ty that hides inside Howie Brindle. It is the imposter. He is the stage effect. It has refined the role until good ol" Howie knows all the tricks of quick acceptance, of generating fondness, of making people glad to help him out. The thing inside pulls the strings and pushes the little levers, and Howie does all your ch.o.r.es for you. Cheerfully."

"What the h.e.l.l should I do?"

"First, stop yelling. Second, on your way out, tell them I am ready to go to sleep: Third, you could backtrack Howie a little bit further. Fourth. Hmmm. Fourth. Oh. Tom Collier comes into this thing too often to be shmmm... suggle..."

"Meyer?"

"Garf," he said softly, the "f" lasting on and on. His eyes were closed. I stared up through the ceiling, hands spread wide, and spun and left him there.

Thirteen.

SUNDAY MORNING was crisp and bright, but so windless the smog- was going to build up quickly. Coop flew me over to the Sarasota-Bradenton Airport in his little red-and-white BD-4. It is a very happy and responsive four-place, high-wing ship. It is comfortable, reasonably quiet, and cruises at a hundred and seventy miles an hour on its hundred and eighty horses.

Coop is always ecstatic at-the chance to fly me anywhere in the state. I buy the gas and pay the landing fees. He can"t charge for the flight or his services because he built his airplane from a kit. The FAA cla.s.sifies it as an Experimental Amateur Built airplane. Coop paid $7200 for the kit. He is one of five or six hundred people who fly planes made from the same kit. He put in twenty hours a week for forty weeks, and the FAA, who had been looking over his shoulder as he built it, watched him climb into it and fly it, and gave it an airworthness certificate. There is nothing about it he doesn"t maintain perfectly, and nothing about it he can"t fix.

I always forget his square name until I see it behind the gla.s.sine on the instrument panel. Pelham Whittaker. He is known as Coop because he looks astonishingly like Gary Cooper until he either talks or stands up. He has a very fast high-pitched voice. And he is about five foot five. He teaches in the adult-education program in the high school at night, so he can fly his BD-4 in the daytime. His wife teaches in junior high in the daytime, so she won"t have to go flying with him.

He is a very careful, fussy pilot. They are the best kind. It was such a nice morning he took it right across the peninsula and emerged a little north of Fort Myers. Once over the Gulf, he took it down to a thousand feet and stayed a half mile off the beaches as we went up the coast. Even looking toward the morning brightness, I had a good view of the coast. I hadn"t seen it from that alt.i.tude for several years. Boca Grande looked much the same. And so did Manasota Key. But the small city of Venice, and Siesta Key, two keys north of Venice, were shocking. Pale and remarkably ugly high-rises were jammed against the small strip of sand beach, shoulder to shoulder. Blooms of effluent were murking the blue waters. Tiny churchgoing automobiles were stacked up at the lift bridges, winking in the sun, and making a whiskey haze that spoiled the quality of the light.

After he had his instructions from the tower and had turned inland to start his pattern, I could see, in the haze to the north, the tall stacks of the mighty Borden phosphate and fertilizer plant in Bradenton, spewing lethal fluorine and sulphuricacid components into the vacation sky. In the immediate area it is known bitterly as the place where Elsie the Cow coughed herself to death. I have read where it had been given yet another two years to correct its ma.s.sive and dangerous pollution. Big Borden must have directors somewhere. Maybe, like the Penn Central directors, they are going to sit on their respective docile a.s.ses until the roof falls in. There are but two choices. Either they know they condone poisoning and don"t give a d.a.m.n, or they don"t know they condone poisoning and don"t give a d.a.m.n. Anybody can walk into any brokerage office and be told where to look to find a complete list of the names of the directors and where they live. Drop the fellows a line, huh?

Coop put it down and rolled it over to the ap.r.o.n in the private aircraft sector. I knew he would stay in the area, answering questions about his kit plane, and talking flying-with hand gestures-with all the other Sunday flyers. When I neared the terminal and looked back, I could see that he had already acquired an audience of two, and would tell all about Jim Bede and his magic airplane kits.

A lanky miss behind the Hertz counter leased me a pink Torino which stank of stale cigar, even with the windows down and the speed up. I hesitated, then found my way out to Route 41 and turned north to Bradenton. I had checked a phone book in the airport to be certain it wasn"t going to be too easy. No Brindle. I didn"t even know if it was his paternal grandfather who"d brought him to Florida. Fast traffic was zapping by me on the northbound side of traffic divided highway, whooshing through a tacky wilderness of franchised food, car dealerships, boat dealerships, trailer dealerships, motels, auction houses, real estate agencies, factory clothing outlets, furniture warehouses, rent-anything emporiums, used cars, used trailers, used campers, used boats. Had I not seen a boat for sale every few hundred yards, I would never have known I was within five hundred miles of salt water. That"s what"s going to flatten the old wallets, guys, that missing feeling of being near the sea. It has done gone.

A Sunday that is the next to the last day of the year is a poor time to run a trace back through ten years, even in an area that hasn"t grown an inch. But I was impatient, and I hadn"t been able to get in touch with Tom Collier. And Coop wasn"t doing anything.

I fumbled my way out of the fast traffic and down to the heart of town, and from there, with some directions, found the City Police. I parked the pink cigar a block away and went into the station. The two men on the front didn"t come panting over to see what I wanted. It is the way with cops to make you wait a little while because a great deal can be read from the way a person waits. And it is a nice opportunity to look the visitor over. They were looking while they talked. Okay, so I am large, leathery, bigboned, with some visible signs of violent impact in years past. The shirt, fellas, is L. L. Bean, lightweight wool. The pants are Sears best quality double-knit stretch. This here cardigan I am carrying over my shoulder is Guatemalan, knitted by durable little brown people up in the Chichicastenango clouds. The shoes are After Hours, pony hide I think. The watch is by Pulsar.

And I wait amiably, see? Sort of lounging here, with half smile. So I could be the guy who comes and climbs the pole and fixes the phone. Or the driver of a big rig looking for a safe place to leave it because he can"t deliver it today. Or I could be fuzz on vacation, stopping in to patronize the local brotherhood. Or I could be a dude from Palm Beach stopping by to report the theft of an original Dufy from the salon of his motor yacht. An eccentric dude without siyled hair, capped teeth or tinted contacts.

All I know as I wait so disarmingly is that I have done a lot of things wrong here and there, but with what there is left of this Howie Brindle fiasco, I am not going to make bad moves.

"Help you, sir?"

"I don"t know. If I could get a look at a back file of city directories."

"Trying to find someone?"

I quickly suppressed the terrible compulsion to tell him that I wanted to see if I could still tear them in half. "He moved here when he was about twelve; I think. That would be thirteen or fourteen years ago. I guess he left when he went to the University of Florida, which would be about seven years back give or take. Howard Brindle."

"You say he left? Then he"s not here."

"That is right. That is absolutely right, Officer. I want to see if he has relatives still living in Bradenton."

"What have you got in mind?" The questions are always automatic. The more you ask the more you know. And you might get an answer you don"t like. I gave him one of the six clean cards. "t.i.tle Research a.s.sociates," he read aloud. "McGee. Fort Lauderdale."

"It"s just a little research to clear a t.i.tle," I said. He pushed the card back across the counter and I picked it up, tucked it away. "You come around on a business day, you can find old city directories at the Tax Office, and maybe the Chamber, or even the library."

"I had to come over here anyway, and I guess I was trying to save myself two trips. You know how it is."

"Sure. I don"t know how I could help you."

"It might be that somebody in the Department would know Brindle. He played football for the high school here. Offensive backfield. Big fellow. Light-colored hair. Went to Gainesville on a football scholarship."

My man looked blank but the other one put a file folder down and ambled over, saying, "Sure. I remember him. A great big son of a b.i.t.c.h, more pro size than high school. Short yardage situations, they"d bring him in to get the distance or be a decoy. Quick as could be getting through that line, but once he got into the backfield, they could catch him pretty good. He couldn"t go for the long gainers. He never did much at Gainesville, and I expected him to show up in the pros, but he never did. What ever happened to him?"

"He married a little money, I understand."

"That"s the way to go! Say, dint you play some pro? I heard Dave here say McGee. First name?"

"Travis."

"Oh, sure. Tight end. Kind of way back. Like you were up there two years, and you got racked up bad. Give me a couple of minutes and I can come up with the Detroit guy that clobbered you."

I stared at him. "n.o.body can remember me, much less who messed up my legs. You"ve got some kind of hobby there. It was a rookie middle linebacker named DiCosola."

He put his hand out. "Ben Durma. I memorize all that stuff. My wife thinks I"m nuts. But I win a lot of beers. Too bad you couldn"t stay in long enough to last into the good money like they get nowadays. You"re a good size for a tight end. Well, about Brindle"s folks, I wouldn"t know. But I got an idea. Let me check the duty roster."

He came back and said, "I asked the dispatcher to bring Shay back in. He was playing for the high school the same time Brindle was. Stan Shay. He was too small for a scholarship."

"I don"t want to upset anything. I could wait around."

"No problem. It"s very, very slow out there. Tonight it will start building and tomorrow night will be a disaster area. We"re running light so we can beef up the shifts for the trouble time. In the last hour and a half, one stolen bike, one guy chasing his old lady naked around the yard with a ball bat."

Shay was one of those elegant cops. Handsome and dark and trim, the kind who has blue jowls no matter how close the shave, wears tightly tailored uniforms, sports a very careful hair style, walks like a lazy tomcat, and looks as if the eyelashes are false. But they are real, and the toughness is real, and you do not want to say anything which could possibly be interpreted as a challenge to his virility or authority. The desk had business when he came in. They aimed him over at me where I sat on a bench, but Durma called him back to give him a better fill-in. I was standing when he arrived. We shook hands and he said he had to be next to his cruiser because he was on call. We went out to the parking area and he sat behind the wheel, door open, turned sideways so he could hook his heels on the step plate. I leaned against the side of the car.

"We were on the same squad. He was a good kid. He never c.r.a.pped out on what had to be done, but he never exactly pulled more than his share either. He liked to get by. You know. I had to work my tail off to stay even, to make up for not having the beef, and I used to tell him that if he worked like I worked, he could own the world. He could have been big. I really mean it. You want to know about his folks, Ben says. I went there a couple times when there was something he wanted to pick up and we were on our way somewhere else, so it was a couple of minutes. It was an old trailer park called the Bayway Trailer Haven, and they were way back in toward the middle you could get lost in there-in a blue house trailer with a screen porch on one side and the built-on room which was Howie"s room on the other side. The only people he had, they were his grandfather and grandmother. Their name was Brindle. They seemed to be jawing at him all the time he was there, the two or three times I was along, but he didn"t seem to hear anything they were saying to him, or even be able to see them standing there. They could still be there, for all I know."

I wanted to ask if Howie got into any trouble while he was in high school, but I had the feeling Stan Shay would jump on any deviation from the pattern. So I moved at it sideways. "I guess you"re right. He could have made it big. But when there isn"t enough motivation, natural ability isn"t enough. From what I hear, he"s gotten pretty close to trouble a few times. Since he got out of college."

"Trouble?"

"I don"t know any of the details. I just got the impression he might have a bad temper. And if a man that big loses his temper..."

"No. Not Howie. I can guaran-d.a.m.n-tee you can"t make ol" Howie mad. There was an old country boy named Meeker, moved over here from Arcadia, a good running guard, took it on himself to rile Howie. Called him Fats, asked him when he was going to buy a bra, snapped red marks on his a.s.s with a wet towel, put his good shoes in the shower. That was third year. Howie just beamed and chuckled. Some of Meeker"s tricks were mean. There was no use asking Meeker to ease off because it just made him go after Howie more. But Howie never minded it one little bit."

"Where did Meeker go away to school?"

"He would have had a lot of offers, but he never made it. First of June, that third year, we had a cla.s.s party over on the beach at Anna Maria Island, bonfires and beer and all that. Meeker got pretty loud and pretty drunk and so did a lot of other people. If he"d driven out there, probably he"d have been missed sooner. But he rode with somebody, so they thought he"d rode home with somebody else. There was so much noise and music, n.o.body could have heard anybody yelling out there in the dark. About everybody went swimming at least one time, but Meeker went ahead and drowned, and n.o.body knew it for sure until two days later a fisherman wading next to Tin Can island spotted his body coming in on the tide, rolling over and over across the bar."

I tried it. A hearty laugh.

He snapped his head up. "That"s some kind of joke to you?"

"No offense. I was just thinking. After all that towel-snapping, maybe Brindle went swimming at the same time as Meeker."

I saw his eyes change. His eyes went back into uniform. He was accepting it as a possibility. The cop years had given him the cynical awareness of what people are willing and capable of doing to one another. The first time a young officer of the law finds a starving three-year-old in chains, curled up on a cement floor amid its own fecal matter and dotted with the festering burns made by cigarets wielded by its loving daddy, who only "wanted her to mind," that cop becomes a better cop because he is more aware of the dimensions of his profession.

"The whole squad was honorary pallbearers," he said. "And Howie cried. I remember that. He cried quietly the whole way through."

"Didn"t that strike you as strange?"

"I thought it was because he was just a nice guy." Just as I saw a beginning suspicion of my motives, he got an emergency call to go help with traffic control. A gas truck had flipped over at the intersection of DeSoto Road and Route 41. He was under way as quickly as it can be done.

I parked the car under the shade of ancient live oaks and walked back into the trailer park. The park had been there a long time. Shade trees and tropical plantings had grown up around them. The Sunday birds sang. So many "Florida" additions had been affixed to these old aluminum boxes that it was hard to visualize any of them as having once rolled along the open road. The dewheeled village seemed to be trying to nestle itself further into the turf, forgetting the old bad dreams of tires, traffic and tolls. I saw a dedicated game of bocce, some chess boards, some people merely sitting, moving their chairs to follow the warm December sun. From radios and television sets, turned politely low, I heard the Sunday intonations as I walked past. "... and so I say unto you, brethren.:.."