The Empty Copper Sea (24 page)

At the table he told me about Dr. Stuart. "He's younger than I expected him to be. Sort of a jumpy, impatient, high-strung type. He has a crusade going. But he thinks it's lost before he can even get it off the ground. But he is going to try. He seems to be that sort of a person. What do you know about PCP?"

"Is that the name of his crusade?"

"It's an animal tranquilizer. Phencyclidine. It was developed for use in hypodermic guns to knock down grizzly bears in national parks and keep them down while they were transported to less accessible areas."

"If it's also called angel dust, I've heard of it. It makes a very rough trip, I've heard."

Meyer looked in his notebook. "It is known by different names in different areas. Hog, crystal, peace pill, blasting powder, and sugarino. Range of symptoms: it can produce a staggering walk, slurred speech, and slowed reaction times, imitating the effects of alcohol. It can produce bizarre sensations and hallucinations. People act out violent fantasies. It upsets the neural linkages in the brain. With repeated use it can cause permanent brain damage, with the lingering effects of paranoia, suspicion, anxiety, tendencies toward inexplicable violence, distorted memory, sporadic amnesia. It can duplicate acute schizophrenia."

"Nicky Noyes?"

"He's pretty sure of it. He thinks that it is the root cause of a lot more death and violence than people realize. One-car accidents, suicides, mass murders, sniping, stranglings. The effects are
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almost completely unpredictable, varying with each individual. He says the whole situation terrifies him."

"Isn't that just a little bit strong?"

"You should hear him, Travis. He made a believer out of me. He's had a couple of fifteen-year-old kids blind themselves with their fingernails."

I stared at him. "That made my stomach turn right over. They better stop that stuff at the source."

"That's the problem. Any college chemistry student with four or five hundred dollars can set up production in a shed and be turning out phencyclidine in a few days out of easily available materials. They turn the liquid into a crystalline substance. A marijuana cigarette doctored with a pinch of angel dust goes on the street for ten dollars, and five or six little teenagers can turn on on one cigarette, and the chemists who set up the lab can make five figures a week wholesaling the stuff. He says there is an underground lab somewhere in the Timber Bay area. He says he thinks Noyes was one of the several local dealers."

"Oh, great."

"Dr. Stuart says Noyes wasn't too stable to begin with. He'd been in various kinds of trouble before Lawless ever hired him. Lawless straightened him out."

"I wonder if Nicky gave Tuckerman some of his free samples."

"I wondered about that too, and I asked Dr. Stuart if that could be possible. He thought it over and said that it would be impossible to separate the effects of angel dust and the effects of acute alcoholism. He said Tuckerman had been a heavy drinker for years, thinking of himself as a social drinker but getting ever nearer the edge, and in the process doing quite a bit of physical damage to himself. He said that after Lawless left, Tuckerman drank himself into a series of alcoholic spasms in April that destroyed a lot of brain tissue-maybe as much as a dozen series of electroshock treatments. Tuckerman has fatty degeneration of the heart, twenty percent liver function, coronary artery disease, and borderline diabetes."

"Does Gretel know all that?"

"He did mention that he had talked to her about John's condition, so I guess she was given all the bad news. He said he told her that John was erratic but probably not dangerous."

"She'll have to stay with him, then."

"There isn't anyone else," Meyer agreed.

And I knew that Gretel was not the sort of person to sidestep any obligation of the blood or the heart. Tuckerman would probably hang on for years. Nice timing, McGee. Your usual luck.

After lunch we went back to the suite at the Resort. I felt restless. I talked it all over again with Meyer. We had been up one side of it and down the other. We had done a lot more prying than our limited function warranted. We knew more about Timber Bay than we had wanted to know.

Good ol' Hub Lawless was down there in Yucatan trying to turn his his personal clock back to the steamy days of his young manhood.

I wandered around the sitting room, wishing I was on Gretel's beach with Gretel. I stopped at the windows and looked out, and saw a small familiar figure coming around the edge of the tennis courts, beyond the backstops, heading for the pool. By leaning close to the window, I saw her take up position on a chaise on the apron of the pool.

So I went down there and came up on her quietly, and sat cross-legged on the tile beside her chaise without invitation. Billy Jean wore giant sunglasses with rose-purple lenses, a yellow turban, yellow bikini, and a quart of coconut oil.

"I'm still supposed to stay the hell away?"

She shrugged. "Stay. Go. It doesn't matter, does it?"

"I was wondering if Nicky was on angel dust."

"You mean often, or just the other night?"

"Both."

"Okay, yes to both. He hit it pretty good, but like he said, it's okay for some people and it isn't
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okay for other people. I guess it wasn't so great for him either, shooting off a gun like that in the parking lot."

"B.J., he was trying to kill me."

"You say."

"Please believe me. He really tried, and if he hadn't been so unsteady, he would have done it."

She got up and pulled the back of the chaise out of the stops so she could lay it flat. She got back onto her towel face down.

"Okay," she said wearily. "So he really tried. And if he hadn't missed, I could have gone to your funeral. Just think."

"But it was an extreme reaction. It was crazy."

"Nicky was a crazy kind of person. Nobody ever really knew what he'd do next. He did whatever he felt like. You always knew things would be lively around Nicky. So the crystal rotted his head out. Okay, he's dead, isn't he? Why are you worrying about him? I thought the only person you ever worried about was Travis McGee."

"Did you try crystal?"

"Ha! Once, baby. Just once. That is a hit like you can't believe. Christ! There I am crawling around on my floor, and it keeps bending under me, and I'm scared shitless I'll fall through. I sit in a corner where I think it's safe and I look at my hands and my fingers had all grown together so my hands were like-you know-flippers. Like pink mittens. I saw a kid like that on television.

His mother had taken the wrong kind of medicine when she was pregnant. I had these pink flippers instead of fingers and I started screaming and screaming and screaming. But they said afterward all I did was make a little mewly sound and I kept staring at my hands with the tears running down my face. No way I would ever try that crystal again. Nicky said I might get a real good ride out of it the next time, but it wasn't worth trying. I still dream about my hands looking like that. I'm at the piano and somebody asks for something that's tough to play, and I look down and there are those goddamn flippers again. No way. I stay with a little grass now and then, and not much of that either. And some hash when I'm on vacation."

She turned her head and looked at her hand and spread the fingers, worked them, closed the hand into a fist and put it under her cheek.

"B.J., I'm sorry I screwed up our friendship."

"I could certainly have done without you showing up with that pig Mishy, especially after the nice note you gave me when you left the lounge earlier."

"I apologize."

She rolled onto her side and plucked the purple glasses off and squinted intently at me.

"If you want to pick it up where we left off, forget it. You hurt me. You really hurt me, and the kind of person I am, I can't ever ... you know ... recapture a mood, not after I've been hurt. I thought you were a truly great person. It just goes to show."

I nodded. "You're right. It goes to show. I will cherish the memory of the little time we had."

"You will? Honest?"

"Yes, I will."

She grinned and put her glasses back on. "Okay. So will I. And that's the best way. A wonderful memory. Right?"

"One of the best."

"Maybe you're okay, McGee. Maybe you've got some heart after all. Listen, I'm sorry I got Nicky all worked up about you. I had no way of knowing he would do anything like he did. I mean, who could ever guess?"

I went back up to the suite. Meyer read me perfectly, and was amused I should take the trouble to placate Miss Bailey. I don't know why it should amuse him to have me try to get back in the good graces of people I have offended. It is just the sort of thing he does. But I offend more than he does. Oftener and more thoroughly.

I went into my bedroom and got the four-by-five color print of Lawless out of the nightstand
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drawer where I had put it. I straightened it out. It had cracked a little bit where I had folded it before. I took it to the bright light at the window and studied it.

Okay, so it was taken April eighth in Guadalajara, according to the accompanying message. And that would date it just seventeen days after a heart attack. He looked substantial, hearty, and cheerful, sitting there pouring his beer. So maybe it wasn't a heart attack. Maybe some kind of violent attack of flu. Or maybe he mended very quickly.

And Sheriff Hack Ames had received the slide in the mail just about one month later.

Probably, if it was a heart attack he would not be anxious to undergo a lot of complicated surgery, and that was why he had never showed up at the Naderman-Santos Medical Clinic. So why hadn't he gotten his five hundred back or at least rescheduled his appointment? Lawless could not have felt he had left a trail leading directly to Guadalajara. John Tuckerman knew where he was going, but John was loyal. But how loyal does a man remain when you take off and leave him penniless?

Some woman in Orlando had been projecting her Mexican slides and had recognized Lawless as being the man pictured in most of the newspapers in Florida, and featured on TV newscasts.

And now Tannoy and Fletcher had nailed it down. Lawless had, been seen in Guadalajara subsequent to the twenty-second of March.

The photograph wasn't telling me a thing. I looked at his clothing. The short-sleeved khaki jacket was bleached by sun and age to an off-white. I wondered what other clothing he had taken with him. Whatever he had decided to take, he had probably left packed in a suitcase in the jeep, down there under the cottage on stilts. It might be of some vague help to know what was missing from his wardrobe. It might be a clue to where he intended to hole up with the architect.

Beach stuff would give one answer, and a lot of sweaters missing would give another.

I interrupted Meyer's somber inspection of the Monday Barron's. "I think maybe I'll go check something out with Julia Lawless."

"Do you owe her an apology too?"

"No. I thought it might make a difference to know what clothes he took with him."

"If you're that restless, Travis, why don't you drive down and see Gretel? I'm sure she'd be happy to see you."

"Am I being busy for the sake of being busy? Is that what you think?"

"All I know is you're making me nervous. Go somewhere. Please."

"Where will you be?"

"Right here. Asleep, if everything works out."

Seventeen

WHEN I arrived at 215 South Oak Lane, I saw that the garage-sale sign was still planted in the lawn. The sallow housewife with the dark blond hair and bitter smile sat in a folding chair in the shade just inside the overhead doors of the big garage: A very pretty young girl was standing at a table nearby, polishing a brass candlestick.

"Hey McGee," the woman said. "We met the other day. I'm Freddy Ellis. Did you meet Tracy Lawless?" The girl gave me a quick glance. "Hi," she said and turned her attention back to her chore.

"Looks as if you did well," I said.

"Damn well, considering. The gang of locusts came and went over the weekend. Several times.

We're down to the dregs."

"Is Mrs. Lawless around?"

"She'll be back after a while," Tracy said. "What is it you want?"

"She told me I could stop back if I wanted to ask her anything else."

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"About what?"

"Tracy!" Freddy Ellis said warningly.

"I'm sorry, but there've been enough people bothering her. This has been very hard for her. This sale and all. She's exhausted."

"When she gets back, if she doesn't want to talk to me, I won't push it."

She studied me and then nodded. She polished the last of the white residue from the candlestick and placed the pair on display. I looked around and noticed that all the guns and fishing tackle were gone. Most of the photographic equipment seemed to be gone. His ten-speed bike, rowing machine, and bowling ball were still there.

Tracy said, at my elbow, "I found out that they drill holes in a bowling ball to fit whoever buys it. I don't think my mother knew that either. I guess it won't sell. I don't know why the bicycle won't sell. It cost nearly six hundred dollars, and we've got it priced at two hundred, and it is practically new. He was going to get in really good shape. He was going to ride with me and Lynn every morning, and then he was going to ride it to work. I think we did that three times.

Maybe even four." She did not sound especially bitter. Just factual.

A tall surfboard was propped against the wall. When I looked more closely at it, she said, "I'm holding that for a girl that has to ask her father if she can buy it It used to be mine."

"It's a good one."

"I know. But it is dumb to have a surfboard here. When is there any surf to ride? Just in storms, sometimes. I didn't even ask for one. He just bought it as a surprise year before last. He threw away a lot of money that way."

"It's fun to buy things for people you love."

"That's one of the reasons, I guess," she said, and turned away. The bitterness had been visible for a moment.