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  Conspiracy theories sell well. Common sense is very difficult to merchandise. And someone is always ready and eager to manufacture something that will sell, no matter how meretricious.

  He decided he was just about finished with the C. Noble Winney phenomenon. It had been weeks since he had been given a guided tour of Winney’s incredible workroom, with its giant scrapbooks, color codes, reference files and intricate cross-indexing. The amount of drudgery involved in accumulation and organization was a clue to the strength of the compulsion.

  He had even been given a look at the special correspondence. It was kept in the safe file, in clear plastic envelopes in a leather three-ring notebook, zippered and locked. Letters to and from the legendary Mr. Hunt and Robert Welsh, Senator Joe McCarthy, George Wallace, Ronald Reagan.

  Stilted letters of praise from Winney, noncommital acknowledgments from the recipients. Winney showed them to him, standing beside him, damp with pride and excitement, sour of breath, turning the pages slowly so Henry could read them. He did not know what to say. He remembered the old joke about what to say about a new baby, and so he said, “Now those are letters!”

  “I knew you’d see their importance, Henry. Can you make the discussion group tomorrow night?”

  “I don’t really think so.”

  “The subject is ‘The Plot Against Nixon.’ ”

  “Sorry, Noble.”

  “I’m sorry too. The time you did come, you contributed a great deal.”

  “Maybe another time.”

  One meeting had been enough. Six men: Brooks Ames and two of his volunteer guards, Fred Dawdy, Winney and himself. Winney guided the discussion and supplied “facts” when needed, out of a most impressive memory. Brooks Ames’s discussion technique was to outshout anyone. Dawdy kept bobbing his head, agreeing with everyone. Mrs. Winney supplied coffee and cookies. Winney handed out little file packets of material relating to the discussion as they left.

  There was nothing more to be learned from Winney. His grotesque theories of vast conspiracies came in conflict with history. And when they did, Winney bent history to conform to the theories. At times it was an almost hypnotic performance, with Winney radiating such a concern and sincerity one wondered, after all, if perhaps he might be right in part of it. But some of it contradicted bits of recent history of which Henry Churchbridge had very specific knowledge, knowledge never published. So if part of the structure is that far from the truth, then all of it must be intricate fabrication.

  He could go further with his new insight without any help from Winney. The specter was fear. Fear was the product of age. The green ripper stalked the golden beaches, filling all too much space in the Athens Times Record, filling all too many fresh-dug holes in the marl and sand of what Hernando DeSoto had called a barren sandspit unfit for human habitation. With bifocaled stare and arthritic finger they ran down the newspaper columns checking the ages: 81, 74, 57, 68, 68, 60, 95, 84, 63, 71.… The golden years had the mortality rate of a Cuban infantry battalion. Jamming the elderly together emphasized that epidemic of the incurable disease, age. And as more caught the disease, they came hurrying down to join the already afflicted, the years bending them closer to the ever-receptive earth.

  Yet the culture has labeled death unthinkable and unspeakable. One is forbidden even to think about it. It could come out of nowhere with its first horrid warning: a lump here or there, black stool in pink toilet water, a raspiness of voice, sudden weakness of a leg, lights flashing behind the eyes. Don’t think about it. Don’t do anything about it. It will go away.

  And that is, of course, the perfect promise of the green ripper, because it will, indeed, go away, taking you with it as it goes.

  Unable to turn inward, all fear turns outward, hence all the weird sects, massive door locks, electronic alarm systems, rejection of bond issues, religious fever, pinched, bitter, ugly, suspicious faces in Florida, California, Arizona—wherever the old ones gather for dying.

  Fear is resonant, he realized. It bounces around the condominium walls, growing stronger rather than fading. We reinforce each other’s terrors. By guarding against assault, Brooks Ames creates the fear of assault. By speaking always of conspiracies, C. Noble Winney creates more fear of conspiracies.

  We are not leavened by the generations we’ve sired. All the children would dilute fear by not believing in it. For the first time in the history of the world, millions of the elderly are isolated from the rest of life, and somehow it brings out the worst in us.

  I will write it all down, he thought, and felt a little tingle of excitement. Maybe it is an insight familiar to lots of sociologists, but by God it is brand new to me, and I am in the middle of it, and I have had a grand total of five articles published, all on aspects of foreign service, and working hard at this one may help delay the rotting process that seems to have started in my head. I find it increasingly difficult to remember, each morning, whether or not I have taken my pills.

  21

  BENJIE SAID to Lew Traff, “Maybe you are remembering I’ve got ten kids to think about?”

  “I know, I know. Ages one to thirteen.”

  “Two to fourteen.”

  They were riding down the sixth fairway of the Gator Hole Golf Club in a white cart with a yellow canopy. Benjie Wannover was at the tiller. It was eleven fifteen on a thick hot Saturday in July. Cole Kimber and a dermatologist named Francis Frake were in another cart on the far side of the fairway. Lew Traff got out and decided he would try to reach the green with his five wood. Frake was away. He swung. Neither Benjie nor Lew saw the flight of the ball.

  “Don’t sway,” Benjie said.

  “Sure, sure,” Lew said, and hit the five well, almost too well. It rose and sailed and came down on the far side of the green and just trickled over, out of sight. He got back into the cart and said, “Because I don’t have ten kids, I would enjoy being convicted of a felony?”

  Cole hit next, dropping a towering iron into the trap at the right of the green. Frail-looking Benjie had outdriven them all. His eight iron hit beyond the pin, bit and rolled back to within a foot of the hole.

  “You sorry little bastard!” Kimber yelled.

  They all took their try, to rule out a miracle, and then Benjie dropped his short putt. As they whirred toward the seventh tee, they all heard the grumbling in the east and glanced at the huge thunderheads reaching halfway up from the horizon, and agreed that they might finish the first nine, but that would probably be it for the day.

  They decided to have lunch and see if it would clear, but by the time they had finished the lightning and thunder had stopped and rain was coming down so hard and so steadily Cole called it an old-time frog strangler. They changed in the locker room and Lew had one of the boys from the pro shop go bring his car around near the side door of the clubhouse. He drove Francis to his car and Cole to his, and then parked beside Benjie’s Olds station wagon.

  “I don’t want to scare you,” Benjie said. “Shit, I don’t want to scare myself either. These two guys are FBI out of Tampa.”

  “How does that work anyway? Who blows the whistle?”

  “What happened was that Mister Sherman Grome, of Equity Mortgage Management Shares, Incorporated, has been borrowing his money to loan out from two banks, maybe more than two, in the Atlanta area. So during the normal course of events along came the bank examiners from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and they went through the loan files. Usually they would not bother checking out a loan where the payments are up to date. But these are different times. A lot of development loans have gone sour, and a lot of real estate investment trusts have taken a dive. So, because EMMS was into this bank for a bundle, the examiners decided to check the books of the borrower. They have that right. They fine-honed it down to two months ago and related the last big bite to the money loaned to the Letra Corporation. Then they got a quick reading on the land cost, the Silverthorn tract, and made a report to the FDIC office in Atlanta, the regional office. After the b
oss man up there read the report, he bucked it to the U.S. Attorney in Tampa, saying there might be a little panky and a bit of hanky adding up to some kind of indictment somewhere down the road, and so the U.S. Attorney turned the file over to the Special Agent in Charge of the Tampa office of the FBI with a request to look into the Letra Corporation with particular regard to the expenditures made so far out of the big loan from Sherman Grome’s outfit, because, you see, if the loan to Letra is sour, then the loan from the Atlanta bank to Grome is just as bad.”

  “Oh, dear Jesus Christ on a raft!”

  “The FBI likes to hire lawyers and they like to hire accountants. These two guys are old hands: Barber and Grosscup. Like I explained in the office, it is no use making them go get subpoenas.”

  “I know that.”

  “I heard about how those aborigines in the Australian deserts, those jokers can be walking across a sandy waste and they can all of a sudden stop and kneel down and stick a straw down into the dry sand about eight or ten inches and suck up fresh sweet water. They know exactly where to start sucking. So do Barber and Grosscup.”

  “But how bad off are we? Level with me.”

  “What we did, when Letra took over the project, when the Marliss Corporation transferred everything to Letra, the plans and drawings and permissions and what all, then I had Letra reimburse Marliss for all the predevelopment expenses.” Suddenly the rain was heavier and a gusty wind rocked the car. “Tucked in there, labeled ‘Fees and miscellaneous,’ was fifteen thousand for which I don’t have a scrap of backup. Five thousand went out one time and ten thousand another time.”

  “You mean that out of the millions for the construction loan they pick a lousy—”

  “They didn’t pick it. They came across it, is all.”

  “You heard Marty tell me: ‘Don’t worry, Lew. Don’t worry.’ ”

  “The same thing Sherman Grome is probably telling his people in Atlanta: ‘Don’t worry your little heads.’ Let me tell you something, my friend. Guys like Martin Liss, like Sherman Grome, they are programmed for boom times. They cut a lot of corners, and it works. They get fat. But when things pinch down, they turn out to be spread too thin. You can’t reach out on the table and pull all your bets back because you’ve covered too many numbers. Lew?”

  “What, Benj? What?”

  “When they go down, people go down with them.”

  They looked at each other. The rain was bouncing high off the hood of Lew’s car, seen dimly through the mist on the windshield caused by their body heat and exhalations. Lew sighed and thumped his fist against his thigh.

  “Where are we, then?”

  Benjie shrugged. “I’m not saying it’s time to cut and run, even if we knew which direction or how far. Here’s where it is. They got these two dates and they came up with the two canceled checks. Both checks on the separate account we set up for Harbour Pointe. I was careful with that account. Even the prorated charge for overhead, I would write a check back from that account to Marliss, so when the time came we could substantiate capitalizing everything they would let us capitalize, so we’d look better tax-wise. Anything on that special account for one thousand and over takes two out of any three signatures, you, me and Marty being the three. So the five was last February, signed by Marty and me, and the ten was in May, signed by you and me. The checks were cashed. My books show miscellaneous fees and cash expenses. That is fine for nineteen dollars and fifty-seven cents. It is not too great for fifteen thousand. They want better identification.”

  “Like I should go get a receipt from Justin Denniver and his wife? What are you going to do?”

  “Stall around. I don’t know where they stand legally on this. But that doesn’t make much difference. I’ve seen it happen too many times. These agencies, they’ve got all the muscle. You do like they say, or they get Justice to hit you with an indictment. Then you are under a cloud for eighteen months and maybe it is dropped or maybe it goes to trial. Either way, you are fucked. If it goes to trial and you come out innocent, you are twenty to forty thousand poorer because of the cost of defending yourself, and people say you hired an expensive lawyer and got yourself off. Hell, there is no middle ground between a public defender and an expensive lawyer. There is no bargain-price defense.”

  “Can we fake some backup for that fifteen thousand?”

  “Sometimes, Lew, you really surprise me, you turn so stupid. I told you, these are pros. The way we play it, we just can’t remember. We run a busy shop. We’re shorthanded. Somebody should have made a memo. We deal with a lot of cash from time to time. We’ve plain forgotten. If something comes up that reminds us, we’ll let them know right away.”

  “What do they suspect?”

  “My guess is they suspect it is okay. They know how these things work. A little money has to be passed under the table, or nobody would ever get anything started or built or finished. They just like to have it look plausible, instead of half-ass careless. They seem to be more interested right now in the price Letra paid Marty for that fourteen acres. That’s why I wanted a chance to talk to you. I had an old feasibility study stapled to my work sheets on the Harbour Pointe project. In that study I put down the land cost at $1,480,000, with $1,252,000 going to the Silverthorn estate, and $228,000 going to Marty personally for his option, which he held for twenty months before he sold it to Letra. It comes to $105,700 an acre. Yet on our books it shows $1,228,000 to Marty for his option, and $1,252,000 to the estate for the land, or $177,000 an acre. Barber and Grosscup got that same figure from Atlanta, from whoever looked at the EMMS books.

  “Anyway, Grosscup comes to me and says it looks like a sudden change, a million more in May than it seemed to be worth in March, and I told him land prices tended to move quickly, especially waterfront. He’s got a funny smile. He smiled and said that they certainly did move quickly, and lately they seemed to be mostly moving down. I pointed out that the land had moved for more than that an acre in this area, and when you have a fourteen-acre tract, it is so hard usually to put a waterfront piece together that size, it ups the price. Then I went and got those two letters that came in from those two big outfits on the East Coast, to Marty personally, offering just about the same. He looked at the letters and smiled his funny smile and said, ‘This one is under investigation by the SEC for fraudulent sale of unregistered securities, and this other one is within a couple of weeks of filing in bankruptcy. Very interesting, Mr. Wannover. Very very interesting.’ And he walked out of my office, back to that little conference room they’re working in.”

  “I saw those offers. They look legitimate. They look good. And I would bet that there’s no good way to prove that Sherman Grome asked those people to make those offers. It would be tough to take it to court, even to tax court, to try to deny him long-term capital gain status to that one million dollars.”

  “You take the extra million loaded onto Harbour Pointe and you take the debt service Grome stuck us with, and there isn’t any way at all to make it work out, Lew. No way.”

  “Can that be proven?”

  “I think so.”

  “Then, Benjie, maybe we all get named as part of a conspiracy to defraud. You and me, Grome and Marty, God only knows who else.”

  “Especially if they subpoena brokerage account records.”

  “You know, you could have gone all afternoon without saying that.”

  “Did you make out?”

  “Not too bad. I shorted fifteen hundred shares at an average eighteen bucks a share. It went down to five two weeks ago and when it started to move up, I covered and got out. After commissions it was eleven dollars a share net. Ordinary income, of course. I made about sixteen thousand five.”

  “It’s down to three and five eighths on yesterday’s close.”

  “You still in?”

  “I got out of some. But I’m still short on four hundred shares. Monday I cover. Lew, look. We’re in kind of a funny position. We’ve known each other long enough and well enough, we kn
ow better than to trust each other too much.”

  “Right.”

  “I think things are going to move along pretty fast. I think they are going to close down Sherman Grome and put in a receiver, and I think they’ll put in somebody with good footwork, and he’ll come down here and cut Harbour Pointe off right now and pull back that eight million sitting in certificates of deposit in the Athens Bank and Trust. That is going to leave Letra with our equity in Stalbo’s Tropic Towers and the fourteen acres behind Golden Sands and about eleven cents in cash, against … call it five and a half million owed. So Letra goes bankrupt, and Harbour Pointe is dead. Don’t ask me how I happen to know, but I do know that Marty has been putting money into Swiss francs. And the other day I walked in on Irish and she was reading brochures on the Greek islands. What would Marty hang around for? What would he need offices and staff for? He’s got Frank West and Sully running the two money machines here, with the money flowing into the Services Management Group in Miami and coming back to him as dividends. We are going to be unemployed, Lew.”

  “How soon?”

  “One month. Two. Right after Grome comes tumbling down.”

  “What’s with him?”