The Empty Copper Sea Read online

  Olivera said, “Sure, my by-line was on almost all the Hub Lawless stories, and on almost everything else too. What it is, we don’t have the horses to put out the Bay Journal seven mornings a week, and we don’t have the budget. It is an ABC figure of fifteen thousand, and we were picked up two years ago by Southern Communications, Incorporated, which has maybe twenty smallish papers and a dozen FM rock radio stations. They sit up there in Atlanta with their computer printouts, looking at the gross and the net, and they write ugly letters to Harry Dister—he runs the paper and has ulcers on his ulcers—asking how come he paid fourteen cents more a ream for copy paper this year than last year. They don’t give a shit what our editorial position is or our politics. They make us buy the cheapest syndicated crud on the market, and they make poor Harry hustle his ass off for advertising linage.” He picked up his glass of white wine. “No point in telling you all my problems, gentlemen. Yes, I covered the Lawless mess, and I didn’t do any digging because I can’t spend or spare the time.”

  Meyer said, “I hope you understand our position, Mr. Olivera. If Lawless is alive and well, we have to go after the available property in one way, and if he is indeed drowned, then we go after it another way.”

  “I can see that, sure.”

  “So I guess what we are looking for—with Devlin Boggs’s help—is an educated guess on what to expect,” I said.

  Walter Olivera took his time. “I see it this way,” he said finally. “Mr. Lawless was a proud man. He was born right here in Timber Bay. When he was in his second year at the University of Florida at Gainesville, his mother, father, and older brother were killed in a light-plane accident. His brother had rented the plane. Hit power lines trying to set it down in a field when the motor quit. After everything was settled, there was just enough left to see Hub through school. He took business courses. He came back here and married Julia Herron. Her father was D. Jake Herron, who was a state legislator from this area for thirty years, right up to when he died.

  “Hub borrowed some money from his father-in-law to get started in the construction and land-development business, and paid it all back with interest. He worked hard. He worked all hours. Every time he got a little bit ahead, he’d branch out. He started Hula Marine Enterprises, Double L Ranches, and Lawless Groves and nursed them through the early years and turned them into profitable businesses. It was a process of constant expansion. I think he was a millionaire, on paper at least, by the time he was thirty-five. He liked making things work out. But luck always enters in. He had no way of knowing everything would start to go sour at about the same time.”

  “Everything?” Meyer asked.

  “Just about. He took the money he got from selling Hula Marine to Associated Foods, and he put it into two big tracts of land, one about two miles east of the city line on State Road Three fifty-nine, and the other way out beyond the south end of Bay, down on a little road that winds on down toward Pepperfish Key. Good waterfront land, and a lot of it. The land on Three fifty-nine was to be a shopping center, a big one. You can drive out and take a look at it. He got the land prepared, roads paved, foundations set. The waterfront land was going to be a big condominium development. Six high-rise buildings, fifteen hundred units. He’d borrowed right up to the hilt, and he was counting on the cash flow he could generate from his other interests to keep the new ventures going.”

  Meyer nodded and said, “Hard freeze?”

  “You bet it was. A little freeze is okay. It even helps make the crop juicier. They say Hub was up all night long, roaring around in that yellow jeep. They burned smudge pots and tires and ran big fans off generators. They tried everything. But when there is absolutely no wind and the temperature stays below eighteen degrees for almost five hours, there isn’t anything anybody can do. It froze and split some of his older trees. He didn’t even end up with cattle feed. And you know what has happened to the price of beef and beef cattle in Florida. They say he could have squeaked through, by getting the shopping center up as fast as he could. The center was going to be anchored by a big store, one of the big chains. He had a good lease, all signed. And a lot of little people were beginning to flock around on account of the traffic that would be generated by the chain store. And all of a sudden they went the way of Grant’s. Bankrupt. Finished. And his lease was worthless. He wanted to make the condominium project first priority, but all of a sudden the state came into the act and said that the project was going to damage valuable wetlands. They wanted a setback from the beach that would have made it impossible for him to put the buildings up in the area left, and they asked for an environmental-impact study, which would have delayed it at least eighteen months even if the answer had been favorable to him.

  “He was a very up-front guy. He admitted everything wasn’t going too great. But he smiled a lot and he was confident, and everybody figured Hub Lawless would work his way out of it the same as other times when he had been caught in a narrow place. I heard rumors he was sleeping on a cot out at his ranch office, and that his marriage had gone bad and he had something going with a woman named Petersen. She was an architect, and she was supposed to be helping with the designs of the shopping center and condominium project. If he had something going, then maybe he wasn’t thinking too clearly. As I said, he was proud. If he hung around, he was certainly going to go steadily and inevitably down the tube. He was going to have to see those corporations go into bankruptcy, and he was going to have to go into personal bankruptcy, resign from the board of the bank, resign from a lot of civic activities and church things. It was certainly going to spoil his image with his daughters, Tracy and Lynn. Sixteen and fourteen are tough years to suddenly go broke. So he decided to milk every dime he could out of every account, every source of funds, fake his own death, and go on the run, realizing that nobody could step in and grab the proceeds of the big insurance coverage on his life away from Julia Lawless. I want the lentil soup, please, a big bowl, and an order of the whole wheat toast, no butter.”

  After we had all ordered, Olivera made his little summary. “He had no really good choices. He had no way of knowing that it would look so suspicious that the insurance company would refuse to pay the claim. He did so many things so well, it’s funny he didn’t manage his own disappearance better.”

  “Would you guess he’s in Mexico?” I asked.

  “That seems to be the current rumor. I wouldn’t fault it. He went down there quite a few times. He liked the country. He and John Tuckerman used to go down and hunt a lot. Hub spoke enough bad Spanish to get by. Apparently he started squirreling away cash about the first of the year. It would give him a lot of time, almost three months, to establish a new identity.”

  “With the lady architect?”

  “And lots and lots of pesos,” Olivera said cheerfully.

  “Apparently Tuckerman was in on the deception,” Meyer said.

  “Had to be. And I think it was very, very rough on John Tuckerman. He thought Hub Lawless was the finest man who ever walked. Hub had a way of generating a lot of loyalty. If Hub had asked John to set himself on fire, he’d have run after the gasoline and the matches. Unquestioning. Okay, John helped him, and did exactly as he was told. And after it happened, John crawled into the bottle and he’s been there ever since.”

  “What was his position anyway?”

  “He was supposed to be a vice-president of each of the four corporations. What he did was make sure the cars were gassed and maintained, and he made reservations and carried luggage and told jokes. He has no family except a sister. Hub Lawless was his family, and the Lawless enterprises were his home.”

  “What’s he doing now?”

  “Drinking. He has a beach shack down there on the land Hub bought for the condominium project. The ownership of that land is in limbo. He’s a squatter, technically, but I don’t think he’ll be rousted out of there right soon. If I had to make a guess, I would say that Hub probably gave John enough cash to keep him going.”

  “If you had
to make a guess,” Meyer said.

  Olivera turned and stared at Meyer and then over at me. “Look, you guys. This is a favor, okay? Boggs, the big man, asked me to cooperate.”

  Meyer looked wounded. “Please don’t misunderstand, Walter. Did I sound disapproving? I wasn’t. We’re here to make guesses. Good newspaper people make guesses based on hunch and experience and then check them out to find the facts, right?”

  Olivera relaxed again. “What I’m working on is not exactly the Washington Post.”

  “Does the paper do any crusading?” I asked.

  “If it doesn’t cost anything.”

  “Here’s one that might not cost much. If we assume Hub Lawless had the whole thing planned ahead, and if we assume John Tuckerman was in on it and helped out, then it follows that Van Harder, running the boat, was given a funny drink. So he lost his license to skipper a boat carrying passengers for hire. So he got labeled a drunk who passed out while the owner fell overboard.”

  Olivera thought it over, frowning, turning it this way and that. “I suppose we could have an editorial. But to get his case reconsidered, there would have to be some hard facts.”

  I decided to run a little test. “Hard facts. For example, a reliable eyewitness who’d swear to having seen Lawless in Mexico in April?”

  “That might do it,” he said. “That would be great, sure.”

  So either he was a great actor or he didn’t know about the photograph. I resisted the temptation to be a nine-cent hero and take the picture out and explain it to him.

  “What’s all this about Harder anyway?” he asked.

  “He’s just a sample of all the people who get hurt when somebody pulls something off, when somebody sets up a conspiracy to defraud,” I said.

  While we ate, quite a few people who passed our booth on their way out spoke to Walter Olivera. He kept grinning and nodding and flapping his hand at them. And it seemed obvious that every one of them was wondering who we were. Small cities have a very compact power structure, and it is always more evident when the tourist season is over.

  “It was really a hell of a blow to this town,” Olivera said, when his lentil soup was gone. “High hopes. You know. Two big projects. More jobs. The best thing that could happen would be if some organization could come in and pick up right where Hub left off, iron out the bugs, and get those projects moving again. I would think most of the creditors would listen to reason.”

  “If we knew who to buy the rights from,” Meyer said.

  “I know. The official result was: Missing, presumed dead by misadventure. Now the general feeling is: Missing, presumed alive. If seven years pass with no trace of him, I think they can declare him dead. And that is too damned long to wait.”

  He had to get back to the paper. He shook hands around, thanked us for the lunch, told us he would be glad to help in any way he could. And he said that everybody he could think of would be glad to help us too.

  After he was gone we ordered more coffee. I told Meyer the Haggermann Ames story and gave him a stealthy look at the picture of Hub Lawless in Guadalajara. He was enchanted, but agreed with me that it was the kind of evidence that would not stand up in any court of law. It would have to be backed up by direct examination of the person who had taken the photograph.

  He had spent all his time with Harold Payne and said, “One very cool and cautious fellow. Very reluctant to violate any client-attorney relationship, even after I hinted that, if Mr. Allbritton’s firm came in here, I would recommend they use his services for local legal matters. That didn’t thaw him. He said he had been Mr. Lawless’s personal attorney for many years and that he had set up the corporations Mr. Lawless had controlled and had advised him on tax and estate matters. He said he had blocked an attempt by the IRS to proceed with a computation of estate tax and had contested a writ to have his client’s personal safety-deposit box opened. He had not filed a copy of the will and would not do so until there was positive proof that Hubbard Lawless was deceased.”

  “Did he have any opinions about what happened?”

  “He didn’t express any direct opinion. He said it was entirely possible that, had his client not met with an accident on the night of March twenty-second last, he would have been able to explain his very good reasons for having enhanced his cash position.”

  “ ‘Enhanced his cash position’?” I said.

  “A direct quote,” Meyer said. “Payne is okay. The firm represents the bank, too. It puts him in a curious position, a sort of ex post facto conflict of interest. So he is doing the smart thing, following the letter of the law, keeping his head down, keeping everything in stasis until more information comes to light.”

  “Are we getting anywhere?” I asked. “Are we doing Van Harder any good? That’s what this is all about. Remember?”

  “To replace the fledgling in the nest, one must first climb to the top of the tall tree.”

  “Oh, boy.”

  “About five or six o’clock back at the Resort—forgive the expression?”

  “Have a nice afternoon.”

  Seven

  The vast expanses of the parking areas at Baygate Plaza were less than half filled, and I wondered at the wisdom of Hub Lawless’s decision to build another big shopping center in Timber Bay.

  Once I found my way into the Mall, I located an orientation map, one of those YOU ARE HERE! things, and found where I was in relation to Top 40 Music. I plodded along the tile-finished concrete under the perpetual fluorescence, past all the jewellery stores, shoe stores, cut-rate blue-jeans stores, gift marts, caramel-corn outlets, and health-food hustles. I plodded along in the din of canned music, in the perpetual carnival atmosphere of everyday, past the custom T-shirts, the pregnant ladies eating ice cream cones, and the lines of children on school holiday waiting to get into another revival of Star Wars, shrieking and jabbing at one another and pretending to die of serious wounds.

  When I came to Top 40 Music, I turned out of the slow parade and went in, feeling as if I were leaning into the blare of somebody electronically amplified, yelling, “Babybabybabybaby …”

  There was an extraordinarily beautiful young woman in there, in white slacks and a pink top, with flawless figure and flawless complexion. She had one disconcerting flaw, though—she had such a mouthful of big white projecting teeth that she couldn’t quite close her lips. She had a smoky drift of dark hair, dark eyes, and a fine way of holding herself, of walking. I could almost read her lips and knew she was asking me if she could do anything for me.

  I leaned toward her and yelled into her ear, “Miss Ambar?”

  “Yes?”

  “Can we go somewhere and talk?”

  “What about?”

  “Hub Lawless.”

  “No way!”

  I handed her the To Whom It May Concern card signed by Devlin Boggs. She looked at it and shrugged, then handed it back.

  “Please?” I shouted.

  She looked me over more carefully. I tried to look responsible and respectable. I could almost hear her sigh. She hurried into the back and came out with a small white-haired lady with a smudge of dust on her cheek. Then Miss Ambar walked by me and out into the pedestrian traffic. She turned back and looked at me. “So come on!” her lips said, inaudible in all that babybabybaby din.

  • • •

  We sat at a counter fifty yards from the music store. I had coffee and she ordered a tall Red Zinger tea with honey. She had the ghost of an accent. We kept our voices down.

  “What she did, what Mishy did, she call me up like I guess it was two o’clock that day, and she said, Hey, ’Licia, you wan we go on a boat tonight down to Clearwater? I said I din wan to do nothing like that at all, I had a date and so on, but she begged and begged and said how it was such a nice boat and all, real fast, real lovely, and where she works, the Cove, she had heard Mister Tuckerman, he was saying they were going down in the boat, and she asked maybe a fren of hers and her could come along, and he said, Hell, why not? So
she wouldn’t go without me and she said she had a girlfren there in Clearwater, we could stay in her place, and then her girlfren’s boyfren, he could drive us back up here next day. Chee, I tole this seven tousand times, I think. Over and over and over.”

  “Are you originally from Mexico?”

  “From Honduras. When I was a little kid. I got no accent now at all. How you can tell?”

  “I just guessed.”

  “Okay, so I got to the Cove about eight thirty all set to go, and pretty soon Mr. Tuckerman, he picks us up, and then he picks up Mr. Lawless from downtown, and we go down to the marine place and get on, and it was beautiful, it really was. I didn’t know they were so nice inside. Just like in some kind of high-price trailer, television and hi-fi and everything, and ice and booze. I thought that what it was, it was some kind of pass. You know, like we were going to put out on account of we were so grateful to be on that boat. What Mishy does is her business, but I wasn’t going to, no matter what. But it was no problem on account of they acted like maybe we weren’t there at all. They were in the other end of that living-room-type place, having a drink, talking in low voices, talking business. After we had been gone from the dock about twenty minutes, maybe less, Mr. Lawless made a drink and took it up and gave it to that Captain Harder. I din know his name then. I found out his name later on. Okay, so they were talking again, Lawless and Tuckerman, and the boat was going up and down, kind of, and I began to feel kind of sick. I said I was feeling sick, and Mr. Tuckerman said I should go up topside and the cold air would make me feel better. I went on up there and it really was cold and the wind was blowing something scary. Then I saw that Captain Harder on the floor up there, like he was dead. I ran back down there screaming and the men went running up, and then Mr. Tuckerman came back down and said they had decided to go back to Timber Bay, which was just fine with me, because by then I was sorry I’d ever said I’d come along for the ride, and Mishy was sorry too because she wasn’t feeling real great either. It was more bouncy on the way back, and it seemed to take longer, which I found out later it did, on account of Mr. Lawless was driving it by hand. What Mishy and I were doing, we were running in and out of that funny little bathroom, throwing up, taking turns. Then finally the wind wasn’t so strong, but we were bouncing up and down terrible, and there was one awful jolt that threw me right on the floor—I mean deck. Then Mishy thought she heard somebody yelling for us and then I heard it too, and neither of us would go up alone, so we both went. We were inside the pass by then, I think. Mr. Tuckerman yelled to us that Mr. Lawless had fallen overboard and we were to help look. The Captain was still on the deck passed out. It was a real nightmare. You couldn’t see nothing. Nobody could run the radio they have on boats like that. So we had to go in. Mr. Tuckerman banged the boat something terrible against the dock and there was some man there who came running to help with the lines, and pretty soon the police and everybody was there, and by then, I can tell you, I didn’t give a damn what anybody did with me, I was so glad to have my feet back on ground again. I was so glad I could hardly stand it. I thought it had to be about three in the morning, but you know what? It was only about an hour and a half, just a little more than an hour and a half from the time we’d left. It was a terrible experience, I can tell you. We had to make statements and wait and sign them after they were typed up for us, and later we had to testify at the hearing. I’d never done that before. It isn’t as bad as I thought it would be. It was the worst night of my life. I din wan to go in the first place. That damn Mishy. She gets me into bad things. I doan wan to do anything with her again. But you know how it is when somebody keeps calling up. What the hell. She’s some crazy person, that Mishy. She likes a lot of stuff happening, and it sure happens aroun her. I tole all this nine thousand times. It’s been in the papers, every word of it.”