The Empty Copper Sea Read online

  She broke out some ice, and I wrapped some in a hand towel and got the bleeding slowed to where I could get a good look at the gash. It was an inch and a half long, quite shallow, close to the eyebrow, and slanting toward my left ear. The impact had evidently broken a little bleeder close to the surface. I had her cut a dozen very narrow strips of adhesive tape with her nail scissors. I sat on the closed lid of the toilet and held a hand mirror so I could instruct her in just how to pull the wound shut, lacing it with the narrow strips of tape in a series of X’s. Then we placed a small gauze compress against it and taped that in place.

  She said she knew how to get the dark dapplings of blood off the chest and shoulder of my pale blue shirt, and she took it into the tiny kitchen alcove and set it to soaking in something.

  She told me she had thought he was giving me a terrible beating and it had made her start to cry. She told me it had been a funny time for her lately, kind of bored and listless and lonesome, like waiting for something to happen. She said if I was to happen to her, it would be okay, no matter what she said earlier. She said she knew what she was doing. She wasn’t any kid. In the right light she could pass for twenty-five because she’d had a real good Mexican lift, “but don’t ask how old I really am because I always lie.” She hung on me, and I took her to bed, but after a while she got up and put a yellow towel on a small lamp on the other side of the room and turned the other lights out and said she always slept with a night light on. She said she had some really good grass, and did I want to share a joint? I said I didn’t, thanks, and she said she had some coke too, not very good because it was cut too far down, and maybe I’d like some. I said no thanks, and she said it really didn’t mean anything to her one way or the other, except she didn’t believe in the hard stuff, ever, but would I mind if she had just a little grass?—because then she could be sure of getting it off. I said I didn’t mind, so she got a saved butt out of a little box in the nightstand drawer, good for five deep drags, well spaced, then pressed it out and came back down to me with that sad, sweet, oriental tang on her breath.

  Four

  I awoke a little after four in the morning. I could look across her to her improvised night light. It made yellow highlights on the sprawl of her small lean naked back and small mound of buttocks. She had her face pressed against my ribs, and I felt the long, slow heat of each exhalation from the depths of her sleep. She had one leg linked over mine, her right arm across my middle. A frizzle of that kinked platinum hair tickled me just under the armpit with each breath I took. The night bugs made small whirring sounds, and a wind made a sudden rain-sound in the palm fronds.

  I sighed in a kind of habitual dismay at my own involvements. This one had a locker-room drabness about it. Hey, guys, the first night I stayed there, I screwed the piano player.

  How was it, fella?

  Well, to tell the truth, not bad. A lot of little extra frills and trills and improvisations, just like her piano playing, but not much real intensity, you know.

  The why and when of the inadvertent affair is never simply explained. I remembered a few years ago, Meyer pressing a book upon me by one L. Rust Hills, entitled How to Be Good. Mr. Hills was explaining to his peer group how one might retain a modicum of goodness in a sadly corrupt world. One chapter in particular seemed appropriate to the situation in which I now found myself. He described the awkward union which he terms “the charity fuck.” This is when a person finds himself in a situation where he suddenly realizes that the other party is ready, willing, and eager to make love, and because the place is available and private, and the time is available, and both parties are reasonably healthy, the only possible reason for saying no thanks is because you find the other party physically unappealing. Any excuse at that time—not in the mood, have this little headache, and so on and so on—will be so feeble as to lead the spurned party to the inevitable conclusion that she is indeed sexually unappetizing. This is such an unthinkable blow to give to another person’s ego and self-esteem, it is far more charitable to gird the old loins and hop to it.

  So here she was in the sweet depths of her post-coital slumber, reassured once more of her sexuality and desirability. As I was wedged back against the wall, there was no hope of stealthy departure. I took hold of her shoulder and gave her a little shake.

  “Whassawharra?” she said into my ribs.

  “Got to leave, B.J.”

  She groaned and hoisted herself up onto her elbows and lifted a bleared face to stare at me. “Whachawannago?”

  “Daylight soon. Don’t want old Jack watching me creep out of here, do you?”

  “Shidno, swee.”

  I clambered over her and got into my clothes.

  “Shirdsonahanganashar.”

  “What? What?”

  “When I got up before, I hung your shirt on a hanger in the shower, but it probally isn’t dry.”

  “Oh.”

  It wasn’t. Not quite. I pulled a sheet up to cover her. I kissed her lazy mouth and patted her rump, and she told me to make sure the door locked behind me. It did. I felt a dampness in the cool touch of the predawn air. My brow felt fine, but my arms were leaden and dulled by the deep ache of the bruises from Nicky Noyes’s big fists. Hell of a night, all told. Too much travel, too much to drink, a stupid brawl, and finally some romping with a small wiry tanned lady who was lonely enough to be potential trouble. By diligent effort I seemed to be prolonging my adolescence to total absurdity.

  On impulse I turned away from the walk and found my way by starlight down to the beach, and out of my east-coast habit looked for that touch of light along the horizon which would warn of the new day. Then I realized it would come up behind me, over the land. I walked to a chaise and stretched out on the damp canvas.

  Between love and sleep, she had given drowsy answers to my elaborately casual questions.

  —What did Nicky mean about a girl leaving town the next day?

  —Huh? Oh, her. She left town the next day.

  —Who?

  —Who what?

  —Who left town the next day?

  —Well, they said she and Hub Lawless had something going. Then there were other people said there was always talk about a woman like that, like Kristin Petersen, whoever she was working for, and they said Hub and Julie Lawless had too good a marriage. Then her leaving town the very next day while the Coast Guard and everybody was hunting Hub’s body …

  Her voice had faded down into a muttering and then into slow, heavy breathing. A little bit more for Meyer’s notebook. One Kristin Petersen, who had worked for Hubbard Lawless in some capacity as yet unknown and who was a natural target for gossip. A veritable battalion of women were thronging the Timber Bay scene: B. J. Bailey, Felicia Ambar, Michele Burns, Julia Lawless, and now Kristin, who had departed.

  There was beginning to be such a subtle additive of light that I could make out the ghostly shape of a marker off to my left, where North Pass entered Timber Bay, and beyond it some shadowy tree shapes on the outcroppings that sheltered the bay. The Gulf was quiet, with a gentle lap and slap of small waves on the packed wet sand. I heard a deep-throated diesel chugging through the wet noises of the sea and soon saw the outline of a shrimper heading out. There was a pale yellow rectangle in the amidships area, with a man standing against the glow, and I saw him lift his arm and realized that he was lifting a cup of coffee to his lips. It was so vivid I could smell the coffee.

  And I had a sudden wrenching urge to shed my own identity and be somebody else. Somehow I had managed to lock myself into this unlikely and unsatisfying self, this Travis McGee, shabby knight errant, fighting for small, lost, unimportant causes, deluding himself with the belief that he is in some sense freer than your average fellow, and that it is a very good thing to have escaped the customary trap of regular hours, regular pay, home and kiddies, Christmas bonus, backyard bar-B-cue, hospitalization, and family burial plot.

  All we have, I thought, is a trap of a slightly different size and shape. Just
as the idea of an ancient hippie is gross and ludicrous, so is the idea of an elderly beach bum. I dreaded the shape of the gray years ahead and wished to hop out of myself, maybe into the skin of the coffee drinker now far out of sight in the just-brightening morning. And he, the poor deluded bastard, would probably have changed places willingly.

  I stood up and stretched my sore arms again and decided, What the hell, when in doubt turn to the obligations of the moment. Van Harder was a tough, humorless, competent seaman, and I had given him my word, and he deserved my best effort. If I questioned my own value, then he was likely to get less than his money’s worth. He was the innocent bystander who’d been run down by somebody else’s fun machine, and all I had to do was repair his reputation somehow. And stop moaning about myself.

  I went up to our second-floor suite, showered, changed, and looked out at the early slant of sunshine, and at two young men in warm-up suits volleying on the farthest tennis court, one strung so much tighter than the other that the sounds were in different keys—pink—punk—pink—punk. A shirt-sleeved, necktied man, thick around the middle, came hurrying out. The boys looked up at the windows of the hotel and shrugged and moved slowly and disconsolately off the court, picking up the yellow balls and putting them back in the cans. I guessed that the necktie was Manager Jack, doing his managing. Beyond the courts I could see the roof of the row of cabañas and estimated the exact place where B.J. lay deep in sleep in the yellow glow, surrounded by all the silent music, still and dead in the grooves of the records, frozen into the emulsion on the tapes, locked into the calligraphy of her sheet music and the stilled cleverness of her piano hands.

  “You up?” Meyer said, astonished. He had come out of his bedroom into our shared sitting room. He plodded to the corridor door, looked out to see if there was a morning paper there, and gave a grunt of annoyance on finding that service not provided. He wore a robe in awning stripes of pink, yellow, and black, and he looked and acted like a cross performing bear which had escaped a small circus.

  “You want some morning news?” I asked. When he stopped and glowered at me I said, “Mystery woman Kristin Petersen, employed by Hubbard Lawless, disappears the day after alleged drowning. Nicholas Noyes, one-time superintendent of Hula Construction, states that Lawless sold equipment for cash before disappearing. And cleaned out bank accounts. One of the two young ladies aboard the Julie the night of the accident was one Michele Burns, known as Mishy, who is a waitress at the Cove and is reputed to be a part-time hooker. The other, Felicia Ambar, known as ’Licia, works at Top Forty Music in the Baygate Plaza Mall.”

  The glower was unchanged. “So?” he said.

  “Don’t you want to write it down?”

  “What happened to your face?”

  “Nicky Noyes took an instant dislike to it.”

  Meyer nodded. “I can see his point.” He went into the bath, and soon I heard the shower. Meyer is not a morning person. Neither am I. But he is one of the non-morning persons who set the standards for all the rest of us.

  After his breakfast and after the morning paper, Meyer was ready for communication.

  “Officially,” I said, “I ran into that jungle-gym thing in the dark.”

  “Why?”

  “Both combatants were last seen with one Billy Jean Bailey, who is the piano player here and has been for three years, and Jack the Manager does not like to have piano ladies causing fusses between bar patrons. Or guests of the house.”

  “Who fixed it?”

  “Miss Bailey.”

  His nod was approving. “Neatly done.”

  “I’ve been wondering about the best way to use that great letter of yours.”

  He found the right page in his notebook. “The top man at the Coast National Bank and Trust is Devlin J. Boggs. And it is not a chain bank, a situation that gets more rare every day.”

  “Should I go along with you?”

  He studied me, head tilted, and finally nodded. “I think so. We’re going to be linked anyway. You’d better be working for me.”

  “As what?”

  “Maybe … as knowledgeable in the area of groves and construction and marine holdings. And ranchland.”

  “I can handle that. I’ll carry a pack of Marlboros and grunt a lot and look open-air sincere.”

  • • •

  The Coast National Bank and Trust Company occupied most of the ground floor of a ten-story office building at the corner of Bay and Main. All the window glass had an orange-yellow tint, making a golden glow inside. The executive offices were glass cubicles along the left wall as you went in the main entrance on Bay. There were lines at the tellers, and people crisscrossing the broad expanse of carpeted floor. Friday is a busy banking day.

  Boggs was talking to two men seated across his desk from him. Meyer gave the secretary his plainest and most impressive card after writing on the back of it, “Representing Emmett Allbritton.” She started to put the card down, read what he had written, looked at us again, got up and tapped on the door and took the card in and placed it by Bogg’s elbow, and came back out.

  Within moments he was ushering the two men out. He came out with them and took us in and got us properly seated before he went around and sat in his judge’s chair. Devlin Boggs was about fifty, a tall and very erect fellow with a long and lugubrious face, an iron-gray military haircut, a lantern jaw, and a dark and elegant suit.

  After introductions, Meyer handed him the letter. Boggs read it and said, “I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Allbritton about, I think, fifteen years ago. He spoke to the Association in Houston about future problems in energy supply. Prophetic indeed. It is quite … heartening to know that they have long-range plans for this area.” He looked inquiringly at Meyer.

  Meyer said, “I wouldn’t, of course, be at liberty to discuss the little I know of those plans at this time.”

  “Of course. What sort of”—he looked at the letter again—“holdings large and small would he be interested in?”

  “Anything available.”

  “Raw land, developed land, actual business operations?”

  “He would expect me to make recommendations.”

  “But I assume you are coming to me because of the possible availability of some of Hubbard Lawless’s holdings. We have all been terribly shocked by what has happened. We had great confidence in Hub’s energy and judgment. He was one of our directors, you know. Things were slow this year. Everybody complained, Hub included. He had borrowed up to the statutory maximum percentage from the bank. Three million dollars. These loans were to four corporations he controlled, and also to himself as an individual. The loans were secured by the assets of the corporations. After … it happened, we were able to inventory, or try to inventory, the assets. The books were in … very untidy condition. It would seem that for many weeks he had been systematically selling off the assets of his companies for cash, out of town.” He took out a snowy handkerchief and wiped his lips. “He had been ignoring his accounts payable, making a special effort on collections. During the week before he disappeared, he drained every single one of his corporate accounts down to minimum balance. He even took out the compensating balance against his personal loans, which he had agreed to leave untouched. Understand that the company accounts included tax reserves, FICA monies, retirement debits, money due for his upcoming payroll. He was down to about forty people from the hundred and twenty he employed at this same time last year.”

  “How much did he get away with?” I asked.

  “There are too many ways to compute it, Mr. McGee, for me to make a valid estimate. My horseback guess would be between six and seven hundred thousand dollars. I would say that those assets remaining behind which can be converted into cash would result in a recovery of maybe one and a quarter million dollars, and most of that value would be in the appraised value of the ranch and grove lands.”

  “So the bank stands to take a bath of one and three quarter million dollars,” Meyer said.

  Bogg
s wiped his mouth again and said dolefully, “If it were only that simple. There are a lot of other claims and liens against those assets. We may have the senior debt instruments, but we might have to prove it in court. It is such a terrible tangle that it might drag on for years. Legal fees and court costs will eat up a great deal of the remaining equity. In the meanwhile, such a huge write-off against our loan-loss reserves might mean that we would have to … give favorable consideration to an acquisition offer we have been rejecting. I have always felt that a locally owned, locally managed bank is far more responsive to the needs of any community, and … excuse me. Our banking problems are of no interest to you.”

  Meyer gave a sympathetic sigh and said, “And I suppose that the state banking authorities and the examiners from the FDIC are stating that you didn’t exercise prudence and good judgment in so setting up the loans to Mr. Lawless that he was able to market the assets without your knowledge and able to withdraw his compensating balance.”

  “I see you know banking, sir.”

  “Everybody is always full of wisdom after the event.”

  “Hub was in and out of the bank a couple of times every day. He was a director. He was on the Loan Committee of the board. He was a very hard-working man. And very … personable. Anyway, I wish we were in a position to be able to offer to sell some of the remaining real-estate assets to Mr. Allbritton’s corporation. But, with no legal decision as to whether Mr. Lawless is dead or alive, you can see the terrible legal tangle we are in here.”

  “Do you believe he is dead?”

  Boggs hesitated a long time, choosing the right words. He said, “I did at first. Now I am not so sure. Neither, of course, is the insurance company. Julia Lawless is the owner of that two-million-dollar policy. It was taken out seven or eight years ago, for half a million, and as his affairs kept getting more involved, he kept adding to it. She owns the house free and clear. The land it’s on was a gift from her father when they got married. I think she has some sort of very small income from her father’s estate. Not enough, I wouldn’t think, to run the house. I suppose … she is another of the victims of this disaster.”