The Turquoise Lament Part 12

"... the everlasting glory and the Infinite mercy and the chance of everlasting life..."

They looked with curiosity at the new face going by, suspicious and unsmiling unless I smiled. Then the smile was answered. When I asked, they told me that T. K. Lumley knew the history of the park. He kept records. Go ask T.K. Straight ahead, turn right at the big banyan that the road goes around, a hundred feet on your right. An old square trailer painted gold color.

T. K. Lumley was cricket-size, all of him except a W. C. Fields nose-a red potato with pores like moon craters. He was in a wheelchair painted in the same gold fleck as his trailer.

"Set," he said. "Can't get up because I broke my G.o.dd.a.m.n hip last July. First the quacks said I'd die of it, then they said I'd never get out of bed, and now they say I'll never walk again. Maybe what they do is try to make you so G.o.dd.a.m.n mad, you get better just to spite them. Greedy b.a.s.t.a.r.ds charge a left t.i.t to look at you, then figure they can put it in the bill to the estate. You wanted to know about the Brindles? s.h.i.+t, I don't even have to go look them up. They moved into number one-oh-eight way back about... fourteen years ago. Molly and Rick and that fat kid named Howie."

"One-oh-eight?"

"Number of the site. You buy the mobile home that's on it and take over the land lease. Used to be people named Fitterbee had one-oh-eight, then he got so crazy their kids moved them into a nursing home, her too, so she could help care for him. Then she died there and he got over the crazy spell and got married again, but you don't give a d.a.m.n about that. We don't get so many kids in the park. People here had their litters long back. That fat kid was okay. Obliging. Ask him to stop doing something, he wouldn't give you a lot of mouth. And he didn't have a bunch of kids coming in here racing around. He didn't mind being alone. Rick and Molly didn't have any extra change to spare, so the fat kid was handy to run errands for two bits or a dime. One thing he did got on my nerves a little bit. If he'd run an errand over to the grocery store, if he had enough money, he liked to buy himself one of those cans that squirt out whip cream or icing or chocolate for the top of a cake, and he'd go walking past, happy as a fat clam, squirting sweet goo straight into his mouth. It's hard for grandparents to bring up a kid, but Howie was just about the only kin they had left in this half of the country. There was a married daughter in Oregon with family, but n.o.body left back in Ohio. Terrible thing happened. Rick and Molly couldn't talk about it without choking all up over it. Howie was the middle one of three kids of Rick and Molly's son and his wife, and they had a little cabin on a lake where they went summers. There was a roach problem, and apparently young Mrs. Brindle forgot over the winter what container she'd put the poison in, because she used it in cooking, and the only reason the fat kid didn't die in the night too was because she'd fixed something he didn't like much and he ate only a little. Maybe that was why the fat kid wasn't like the other kids, the way he could fool around all alone and be perfectly happy. There were some here said they missed little odds and ends of things, change and postage stamps and candy, but the truth of it, the people around here are always missing things, with or without Howie Brindle around. They just forget where they put them last. I'm taking one h.e.l.l of a time getting around to when Rick and Molly Brindle left. It was... four years and four days ago. I can remember because it was the day after Christmas: Night of the twenty-sixth, twelve minutes past two in the morning, there was the G.o.dd.a.m.nedest WHOOMP you ever heard, and then clang, bang, tankle, ding as big pieces and little pieces of that old trailer came falling back down into the park, landing on other trailers and cars and all. It nudged three trailers off their blocks close by. It killed old Bernie Woodruff. He hopped out of bed and started running up and down the road, whooping, and finally just fell on his face. Heart attack. And it sure killed Rick and Molly. They never knew what hit them. The way it was reconstructed, they got new bottle gas delivered the day after Christmas, and there was a cracked fitting in the copper tubing right where it come through the trailer wall. The pressure of the new tank opened that fitting a little, a slow leak. Propane is heavier than air. So in the night it filled the trailer up like a faucet turned on slow, filling a bathtub. When it was full up to this high, it got up to the little pilot light on the counter-top gas range, and that's all she wrote. Wasn't one piece of side wall standing. We had a big switch to electric around here. Real big. If you squint through the bushes, you can see a big white job with blue trim past those cabbage palms. That's number one-oh-eight, and from coming to going, they lived there just about ten years, a little over."

"Lucky for Howie he wasn't home."

"He was home up until noon on the twenty-sixth, and then the friends he was expecting came and John D. MacDonald picked him up and they all went off back up to Gainesville, because that year they had some kind of bowl game going on New Year's Day, and there was final practice. Howie never got to play. Maybe he could have, but that boy was just too stunned. It took the heart right out of him. It was pitiful the way he walked around here like walking in his sleep. Everybody tried to do for him, but there wasn't much of anything to do except bury what was left. Never have seen him since. He never came back here at all, and n.o.body would blame him for that. That boy is as alone in the world as anybody can get."

T. K. Lumley backed his golden chair up and ran it forward again at an angle; chasing the suns.h.i.+ne. He grimaced and said, "We got all the kinds of dying around here anybody can ever hope to use. We got the cancer, coronaries, strokes, pneumonia, the emphysema. Gobbles us up, one by one, and the new ones move in getting ready for their turn. A good woman in this park could use up all her days cooking up a covered dish and toting to wherever somebody died. So when somebody goes violent, the way Rick and Molly went, it's a strange feeling. Death in the midst of death. Like when C. Jason Barndollar fell off the pier and drownded. Or when Lucy McBee was setting at a window table in the Sears restaurant and some old tourist stepped on the gas pedal instead of the brake and leapt his Dodge through the window and killed her right there, eating shortcake. I keep a log of the coming and going. A history. But I don't know who in h.e.l.l will ever care one way or the other. Every day people give less of a d.a.m.n about the day before. n.o.body wants to even listen to anything. You are a real good listener, young fellow, and I want to tell you I appreciate it. And it's keeping me from what I have to do and hate even thinking about, which is I got to roll around the side there, where my neighbor fixed me up a bar where I can hang on and stand up and take baby steps. It hurts like the fires of h.e.l.l, but it's the only way on G.o.d's earth I'm going to get to stroll into the office of that doctor and tell him how G.o.dd.a.m.n little he knows vout how much it takes to kill T. K Lumley."

I went back to the airport and turned in the pink car, found Coop, and took him upstairs in the terminal to buy him some lunch.

"I showed them the stuff on the BD-5 that just come out," he said. "A lot of them are going to send out to Kansas for the p.o.o.p. Forty-one hundred and fifty-five parts for twenty-six hundred bucks, including the forty-horse engine. Single-place, thirteen feet long, twenty-one-foot wingspan, cruise at a hundred and eighty-seven, weighs three hundred and twenty pounds, a thousand-mile range. Are you listening?"

"I guess not. Sorry."

"Did you get some bad news?"

"We can skip Gainesville. All I would find out there would be more of the same. And I've hit my gag limit."

"If I built me a BD-5, I wouldn't have any room to take anybody anywhere."

"What?"

"Oh, forget it. I didn't say anything."

"I'm sorry."

"Once we get off the ground, you'll start to feel better. Up in the air, everything looks better."

Fourteen.

LATE THAT afternoon, Meyer sat brooding in the chair placed at an angle to the window. I sat in the straight chair on the other side of the bed, waiting for Meyer to digest the lumps of information I had brought him.

"I would guess," he said, finally, "that your Officer Stanley Shay was off at some other college or off in the service when Howard was orphaned for the second time."

"Or he would have mentioned what happened to the grandparents. Right. I went through that equation."

"Had we but the two disasters, the poisoning and the explosion, and knew nothing else about Howie Brindle except the impression he made upon us before they got married, we would label him a person luck frowned upon, and marvel at the adjustment he has made."

"And wonder why he never mentioned the disasters?"

"Too painful to mention. Or maybe even a kind of traumatic semi-amnesia. We'd make excuses for him. Even right now, we have no proof of anything. Only a chain of incidents so long and so consistent that our life experience tells us he is an amiable maniac. Both of the incidents involving family fit what we discussed before, Travis. An almost casual Impulse. Irritation plus opportunity plus slyness, plus a total absence of human warmth and feeling. Maybe his parents had put him on a diet because he was too fat. Maybe his siblings had everything they wanted to eat. So put the powder from one container into the other container, and eat just a little bit. G.o.d knows how the grandparents managed to irritate him. I would guess that he didn't know, or didn't even really care very much whether the act of loosening or cracking a fitting on the gas line would be lethal. They could smell it and have to go to a lot of trouble and worry to get it fixed. It could start a fire which they might flee from. I would guess that he has often b.o.o.by-trapped the environment and left, not knowing what the results, if any, would be. The act of laying the trap would give him the satisfaction he needed. A parallel would be writ!ng bad words with spray paint on the wall of a business which you believe overcharged you. Letting air out of tires."

"This has to be going somewhere."

"Of course. It just points up how different the current situation is. Let me put it in terms of an equation. H is for Howie. V is for victim. O is for opportunity. M is for motive, even though it is only a very casual and unimportant motive. D is for death. And so, time and again, we have H + O + M = V + D. Number the victims. V sub 1, V sub 2, V sub 3, up to G.o.d only knows what score. Maybe Linda Lewellen Brindle is V sub 20. Follow? Good. Now let us examine what is happening to the equation. It is stalled, short of completion. Is there any change in the values of our symbols? Howie remains the same, I would say. Opportunity has a far higher value than ever before with anyone. Certainly, as regards motive, she has given him cause to be very irritated with her, many times. As regards the D for death, we have two occasions where he acted it out but stopped short, causing her to fall overboard but then rescuing her, and shooting a rifle at her head but intentionally missing her. Can we say that were she to disappear at sea, the subsequent notoriety would unmask him as a killer? It might, of course, but I don't think his mind would work that way. So we have to put a new factor on the left side of the equation, something or someone which has changed his pattern insofar as Pidge is concerned. Call that factor X. And I believe the right side of the equation has become less precise and less simple. There is a solution other than D, possibly. L for lunacy? Such an end result requires far more complex planning, making us even more sure of the X factor on the left."

"Go shake up Tom Collier, which is what you started to tell me when you fell asleep last night."

"Did -I?"

You could have said it again, instead of all this formula and equation stuff. Instead of giving your brain to science, I think I'll have it dipped in ferrocement and use it for a doorstop."

"If you underestimate Tom Collier, I'll be the one trying to decide what to do with your head."

"So give me an approach."

"I don't think you can trick him. I don't know if you can scare him. He is a tough-minded man. I would a.s.sume that the trust officer, the man I liked, Lawton Hisp, might have some knowledge. You might do better going at Hisp first."

On Sunday night I phoned the Hisp house and got a girl with a strong Scottish accent who said they were out for the evening and would not be back until late. There was a lot of child-noise in the background. On the morning of the last day of the year, I borrowed Arn Yates's red Toyota wagon and went to take a look at 10 Tangelo Way, home of the Lawton Hisp family. I did not want to take anything as memorable and remarkable as Miss Agnes into the neighborhood.

The house was a little more than I had antic.i.p.ated, a daringly architected structure, like seven or eight huge boxes of various dimensions, with redwood siding applied diagonally, stacked one box and two boxes tall, as by an indifferent giant child. There were slit windows, horizontal and vertical, and there were railings around terraces on top of the boxes, several outside stairways of heavy timber, planting areas of rough gray stone at ground level. The area at the sides of the house and beyond it were enclosed by a shadow fence of horizontal cypress boards with a vehicle gate at the end of the driveway. It was the sort of house which murmurs a base price of two hundred thousand, and once you get a look at the inside, you can start upping the estimate.

It was not take-home pay from the First Oceanside Bank and Trust Company.

I drifted slowly through the elegant neighborhood and made a selection of a round woman in a purple jump suit, yellow picture hat and red garden gloves, kneeling and digging in a flower bed beside the step and got out and went toward her with my best smile.

"Mrs. Dockerty?" I said, mostly because the little metal sign stuck into the lawn said "The Dockertys." She sat back on her heels, expression dubious. "Yay-yuss?"

"My name is McGee. I'm not selling anything."

"That's a lovely coincidence, because I'm not buying anything."

"I'm doing an informal survey in regard to a possible ordinance regarding approval of architectural plans for new residences in established neighborhoods."

"Do you work for the City?"

"The reason I'm making inquiry in this neighborhood is to get honest reactions to the architecture of the Hisp residence. Were you living here when it was built?"

She sprang up, concealing the effort it cost her to be nimble. She looked startled and slightly disconcerted to find that I still towered over her. "Oh, yes, we were here. They moved here... five years ago. You want an honest reaction? I'll give you an honest reaction. We all thought it was some sort of horrible joke. We tried to find some way to stop it. It looked like some kind of warehouse. It's enormous. We thought it would hurt property values around here. But... I guess we've gotten used to it. And they are a very nice family. It really doesn't look at all bad to me now. And I haven't heard people complaining about it in a long time. It even won some awards in magazines."

"Do you think neighborhoods should be protected against a new residence which is out of keeping with the others already there?"

"I don't really know. It's kind of a landmark now. Maybe we're almost proud of it or something."

"People who go in for strange architecture often have quite unusual life styles."

She looked puzzled, and then said. "Oh, you mean like artists and writers and pot parties and so on. Not in this case. Mr. Hisp is a banker. They are... a little different, but I guess that's because Mrs. Hisp, Charity, has money in her own right, and she has full-time help. And she is a great one for reading and concerts and so on, and going to New York to the galleries. They have four wonderful children. I'm sorry ours are too old for them. I guess the youngest is six and the oldest thirteen or fourteen. I would say that we see them socially... maybe twice a year."

"Thank you very much for your cooperation, Mrs. Dockerty."

"Do you want to talk to my husband too?"

"Does he feel the way you do?"

"Yes, but he wouldn't admit it. He'd tell you he still hates the house and there should be a law against it. But he doesn't believe that, really. He likes to object to things. I guess that if you have money you can afford to be different. Maybe that's the best part of having it."

"From the looks of the house, Mrs. Hisp has it."

"Oh yes. Her maiden name was Fall. You know the law firm, of course. Fall, Collier, Haspline, and b.u.t.ts. The senior partner was her grandfather, and I understand that once upon a time he owned four whole miles of ocean beach frontage. Imagine. Four miles!"

"Pretty nice little piece of land. Well, thank you." As I backed out, she got back to her digging. I drove two miles to a shopping center and called the Hisp residence and got the Scots girl again. No, Mr. Hisp was out. Mrs. Hisp? Just a moment.

She had a young voice and she was panting audibly. "h.e.l.lo?"

"Hi. I wanted to find out when Lawton would be home. Have you been running?"

"We've been trampolining. Who is this?"

"My name is McGee. Travis McGee."

"Is this some sort of business thing? Today is a holiday, you know, and I just hate to have him use his holidays to..."

"It is a business matter; and it is a very serious business matter, and it is the kind that neither he nor I would care to discuss at the bank."

"There isn't anything he can't discuss at the bank! What are you trying to say?"

"Mrs. Hisp, I can imagine that there were some matters which came up that old Jonathan Fall in years past preferred not to discuss in his office, and I do not imagine your grandmother knew much about those matters, do you?"

"Who are you? Do I know you?"

"I can't recall ever meeting you."

"You make it sound as if my husband was involved in... "

"Is he due back soon?"

"He just went to buy... on an errand. He'll be back any minute."

"I'll come right out. I think I owe Hisp the courtesy of listening to what he has to say before I go to the U.S. Attorney."

I could have made it in five minutes. But forty minutes gave them more stewing time, more time for discussion. Lawton Hisp answered the door himself. He was an inch or so over six feet tall. Narrow head, a big beak of a nose, a thick and glossy and neatly tended squirrel-color mustache. I put him at about thirty-five years old, minimum. Hair darker than the mustache, but just as thick and glossy. Long chin and a long neck, prominent Adam's apple, sloping shoulders. He wore big gla.s.ses with a faint amber tint. He wore shorts, sandals and a yellow sport s.h.i.+rt open at the neck. The shape of his head and the long neck gave him a look of frailty. But the bare legs were st.u.r.dy, brown and muscular. The chest was deep, and the arms looked sinewy and useful.

Even before I gave him my name I saw that he was right on the edge of losing control. He said, "You have ten seconds to tell me why I ought to let you come into my home."

"Ten seconds? So I'll do it with names. Professor Ted Lewellen. Tom Collier. Howie and Pidge Brindle. Take your time. I'll come in and talk or I'll go away. It's your choice."

"We manage a trust account for Mrs. Brindle."

"Else I wouldn't be here, Lawton baby."

He looked pained. "Do you purport to represent Mrs. Brindle?"

"No."

"Because I cannot discuss any aspect of any trust agreement without direct authori... you said no?"

"I said no."

"I don't understand. What do you want?"

"I want to talk to you about hanky-panky."

"You have to be out of your mind, McGee. The estate and the trust were handled exactly as the decedent wished, and there are no problems, at all."

"So maybe there is some hanky-panky you might not know about. And if you don't know about it, somebody might want to find out if you were negligent not knowing about it. In other words, hanky-panky can rub off on the bystanders."

He smoothed each side of the mustache with the ball of his thumb. He looked over my shoulder into remote distances. "Come in, Mr. McGee," he said.

It was very nice inside those big boxes. They had balconies with doors opening off them. He led me into a tall box and down into an oval conversation pit entirely carpeted in gray s.h.a.g. The c.o.c.ktail table that filled the middle of the pit was the biggest oval hunk of slate I have ever seen. There was the sound of children at play, very muted, and some music coming from everywhere, softly.

She came quickly into the room and said, "I am going to sit in on this. You must have some reason for letting him into our home."

She was a slender, sallow, pretty woman, dark hair pulled tightly back and locked in place. White slacks, black turtleneck, no makeup except pale lipstick. No jewels. A general air of neurotic sensitivity. "Mr. McGee, I would like to-"

"My G.o.d, Lawton, you don't have to do an introduction. He knows who I am, and he told me his name is Travis McGee. This is not a social situation. It's an intrusion."

"How do you do, Mrs. Hisp," I said.

"You're too tolerant with boors, dear," she told her husband. She sat on the other side of the pit, a dozen feet away. Hisp and I sat a few feet apart, half turned to face each other along the curve of the steep padded step.

"I have to know relations.h.i.+ps," Hisp said.

"I was friendly with Ted Lewellen. I went on one of his excursions with him. You remember Meyer, who came to see you with authority from Pidge to find out from you the status of her father's affairs?"

"Yes. I do remember him. A most acute interrogator."

"He is my best friend. I know Pidge well. I saw her in Hawaii in early December."

"You did! I sent funds to her there. We'd been holding them in an interest-bearing account because she'd been out of touch. She didn't want the entire acc.u.mulation. Just a few-"

"Who are these people you're talking about?" Charity asked.

Lawton Hisp's neck seemed to grow longer. "My dear, you are welcome to sit in on this discussion, but in the interest of saving time, I believe you can wait until Mr. McGee is gone. Then I will answer any questions you may have."