The Turquoise Lament (15 page)

"Maybe she's home. I wouldn't know."

"Oh. Then why are you asking all about Howie?"

"I'm conducting a survey. Fahrhowser's first name is?"

"Jefferson."

I thanked him. As I got into my car I looked through the show window into his office and saw Rine Houk standing rubbing his head and looking at himself in a wall mirror. He brought himself to attention. He still looked damned old, either way.

I got back to the Flush at three thirty, and after I had made a big sandwich and eaten half of it, I looked at the map in the front of the phone book and dialed information for Area 512, and asked for Corpus Christi information, the home number of Jefferson Fahrhowser, F as in February, A as in April, H as in Hudson River, R as in Railroad-Fahrhowser.

I direct-dialed it and got a woman with a drunk voice. She had a lot of slurring range, most of it baritone. I wanted to talk to Jeff and she said I had to mean Jeff senior because Jeff junior was in Cuba or some other goddamn commie hideout, and if I just happened to mean Daddy Jeff, then I was shit out of luck because about six months ago, give or take a week, his heart blew up like a baked potato you forgot to stick a fork into before you put it in the oven, son of a bitch was dead before he hit the floor, and besides that, I was slowing up a great pool party and tequila contest, which I could come over and join if I needed some laughs. I said I was in Florida and it would take too long, and she said this had the look of one of those parties that would go right on through the end of this year and into the next one, and she said she was Bonnie Fahrhowser, the grieving widow lady.

I said that I was looking for a line on Susan, the wandering daughter, and where could I get in touch. She said she wished she could get back all the money Daddy Jeff had spent in that jackass search for that dreary girl. And you wanna know the worst, Florida boy, the very bitter goddamn end? There is one big slug of dough all locked up in an escrow account, and we've petitioned the probate court and so on, but she can't be declared dead for years and years and years. Jesus! Any fool could tell you that dim little slut was an OD years ago, buried someplace by the taxpayers. I got to get back in the game. It's Zen water polo. You play it with an imaginary ball. You can still make the party, friend. The best parts haven't even started to get warmed up yet."

As I walked around finishing my sandwich, I tried to guess what Meyer would tell me. Not to walk while you eat. It makes crumbs and you step on them.

I opened the shallow drawer under the phone desk and pawed through the junk in there. It is where I too often empty my pockets. I quickly found the envelope Pidge had forced upon me. "Take it away." she said. "I don't want to throw them away, and I don't want them around where I can look at them and get strange again. Keep them, darling, and we can look at them again when we're old and gray."

Twelve square prints, twelve negatives in strips of three. I sat where the light was strong and good, and studied the first nine prints, one at a time. I knew that waterfront area of St. Croix. And it was a nice trimaran from Houston. Howie was in two of them. Smiling. Huge. Happy. And then the last three. The snapshots my Lou Ellen had taken of the imaginary stowaway, Miss Joy Harris. Empty forward deck of the Trepid. Empty hatch cover. No one standing at the rail.

I noticed that the color values weren't quite as good in the last three. Probably due to the direction of the light. Automatic cameras were never meant for taking pictures in the light Overexposure bleaches the emulsion out, fades the color values.

Then I realized it wasn't really overexposure. It was more of a kind of yellow-green cast over the whole print.

Suddenly I was aware of the bump, bump, bump of my heart, and of coldness in the pit of my belly. My hands shook as I tried to put the prints back into the envelope. I dropped half of them, and after I finally got things organized, I headed for the phone.

Doris came out of the house as I got out of the car. She said, "He's very angry with you, and you really have to stay for barbecue, Travis. He loves to talk to you. Talk and talk and solve all the problems of the world."

"I should stay because he's angry?"

"Because like I heard him say to you on the telephone, you never come around unless you have a problem."

"It's strange, you know? I really relish coming here. I like to be with you two. What happens?" She has that lovely matte Chinese complexion, without flaw,, and looks more like a sister than a mother to her eldest daughter, age thirteen. "What happens? We all waste our days doing dreary things, Trav, instead of the things we want to do. You will stay and eat with us? Wonderful! Let's see how Gabe is doing."

We walked around the big house to the back garden. Gabe was chugging the length of the new pool, getting almost all the impetus from his powerful arms. He paused and held up three fingers.

"Three more laps only." Doris said. "It's best he finishes the whole forty at one time."

"Is it helping?"

"Oh, yes. For the first time, this year, he's been almost without pain. Poor lamb. He so hates exercise."

Soon he clambered out, pulled himself up, shouldered himself into his terry robe, and leaned against the step railing to dry his face and hair. Then he came swinging nimbly over to us on his aluminum crutches.

He stared hard at me as he sat down at the glasstopped terrace table. "Well, what do you know!" he said.

"That's a weird greeting."

"There was an edge to your voice on the phone. I wondered if it showed in person. It does. So, whatever your problem, it's more personal than professional."

"Darling!" Doris said sharply.

"It's okay," I said. "It's okay if Gabe Marchman reads me. He's read a lot of faces in a lot of bad situations."

"It happens in the eyes," he said. "And something about the tilt of the head and the shape of the mouth. Mostly in the eyes, though."

"Somebody very important to me could be in a very bad situation. I don't know. It depends on what you tell me. I almost don't want to ask you."

"Do we go into the lab?"

"Maybe you won't have to. Here. A roll of twelve exposures, Kodacolor, shot on an inexpensive Instamatic. Tell me anything you want to tell me about them."

He slipped them out of the envelope and dealt them out on the plate glass like a game of solitaire. I watched him separate the three of the empty forward deck of the Trepid and put them in a row of their own.

Next he turned the nine prints face down. In a few moments I saw what he was doing. It irritated me that I had not figured out something so simple. The paper had a pattern on the back, the word "Kodak" over and over, imprinted in diagonal rows. He worked by trial and error until finally he had the nine prints all in a row, with the trademark matching at every edge. Next he tried to find even one of the three greenish ones which would fit at either end of the strip of nine. None would fit. He found that two of the greenish ones matched. But the third would not fit on either end of the short strip of two. Only then did he examine the negatives. He turned all the prints face up, in the same order. He matched them up with the negatives, which were in strips of three. He gave the most intensive examination to the strip which related to the three prints of the empty foredeck.

He leaned back in the white iron chair, shrugged and said, "All I can tell you is that the prints come from at least two separate rolls and possibly three. If I had to bet, I would say two rolls. This shift toward the greens and yellows indicates that the film, before exposure, either in the film package or in the camera, was subjected to too much heat. Probably when in the camera. That's how it usually happens. The other nine are from a roll that didn't get too hot prior to exposure. I am guessing two rolls because the degree of shift seems to be identical, on these two taken in sequence and on this one. This one is a stranger. At first glance it seems to be a print from this end negative on this strip of three, but if you look at the top of the negative and the top of the print, you see that the print covers one support of the rail that the negative doesn't. I would say that whoever developed and printed these runs a small operation. He's a little slow or a little stingy about changing his chemicals. And you can see that the prints were clipped apart by hand, probably on a small cutting board. Here is one where someone made a false start, backed off, and got it centered better between the two prints. That's all they tell me. And I can see that it isn't what you want to hear."

"No. It isn't what I want to hear."

He looked at the front of the envelope, hand stamped with the name of the establishment. He read it aloud. "Pierre Joliecouer, Rue de la Trinite. Fort-de-France. Martinique. Photographic services and supplies. What haunts you, McGee?"

"You might as well be a hauntee too. A man and a woman are cruising the islands, alone on a motor sailer. At a port the man smuggles a transient girl aboard. I don't know how he hoped to keep her a secret. Maybe he didn't give a damn. The stowaway comes up through the forward hatch to sneak some sunshine. The wife sees her and makes a record of it. Three pictures. The stowaway sees her taking the third and last one. She ducks below. She tells the man. Meanwhile the wife takes the film out of the camera and hides it in a safe place aboard. When the wife is asleep the man filches her camera and drops a cartridge of film in it and takes a full roll, twelve shots, of the empty forward deck from several probable angles. At Fort-de-France he manages to follow her-or maybe there are not too many places where you can get color film developed-and takes his roll to the same place. I would guess he uses money to persuade the proprietor to rush the processing of the two rolls. Maybe he says he wants to play a harmless joke on his wife. He returns to the shop and sorts out the prints and negatives. He removes the pictures of the stowaway and substitutes pictures which show roughly the same area, but empty, of course. He makes one mistake, as you pointed out, in matching negatives to prints. He leaves the prints there for his wife to pick up."

"I don't feel haunted yet," Gabe said.

"You see, he had already told his wife that she had imagined the girl. They had a scene about the stowaway. He said no girl had ever been aboard at all."

"Oh, dear," said Doris in a small voice.

"And he even dropped a raft into the sea and paddled away and let his wife search every inch of the boat, and there was no girl, and they had not been anywhere near land since she had taken the pictures of the girl."

"Now I feel haunted," Gabe said. "That is very nasty."

"I am a very sound and logical and all-wise person," I told them. "So when the wife called to me for help I flew out to Hawaii and looked at these pictures and convinced her that she had been hallucinating."

"I would say that you should get back to her in a hurry," Doris told me.

"That is a very sound idea. Except that right now she is somewhere south southwest of Hawaii in that very same motor sailer with that very same wonderful guy."

Doris's hand was on my arm at once. A good gesture of comfort. "Oh, my dear," she said. "How really foul. He has to be quite mad."

"Where are they headed?" Gabe asked.

"Pago Pago, with an ETA of Thursday January tenth. Twelve days from now. She's going to break up with him. Or has broken up, whatever you want to call it. She's helping him take the boat down there because he has a buyer for it."

"And she is very important to you?" Doris asked. I tried a smile which probably looked like the best efforts of a skull. "She's very rich and she can cook. She's too young for me. She says we're for keeps. I've been fighting the idea every way in the book."

"Wait a minute," Gabe said. "They took the boat all the way from Martinique to Hawaii? Just the two of them?"

"Yes."

"Why is she in any more danger now than she was then?"

"She was in danger then," I said. I told them about the two other incidents. "I've been trying to figure it out," I said. "Let's say, just for the hell of it, that Howie Brindle is a total flip, and he knew when he was marrying her that he might kill her. What if they took off from Lauderdale together and three days later he arrives in Nassau saying she fell overboard? It would be one big loud dirty news story. The authorities and the news people would start unraveling his background."

"Howie Brindle!" Doris said. "What a marvelously ordinary name that is."

"And he never met a man who didn't like him. Dammit, he is a big cheerful likable guy."

"What about his background?" Gabe asked.

"I haven't really begun to dig, and I've come up with two possible kills, not counting the stowaway."

"For money?" he asked.

"I don't think there has to be very much reason. Mostly it would be a case of opportunity, plus some kind of minor annoyance. He's quick and powerful and sly. I don't think he's clever. I'd say a clever man would have gotten this set of pictures back from his wife after they'd had the desired effect on her."

"To make her think she was losing her mind?"

"To make her tell a few friends she thought she was losing her mind. The way she told me. And he can tell people how worried he is about her. Maybe this is the first time he ever tried to plan something out. By the time something fatal happens to her, he is going to be able to point back to all the months they had together, nearly a year and a half of cruising the oceans, before she did herself in. And there are friends to step forward and say that she has been getting very, very strange. Maybe always before, he killed strangers. And there wasn't any real gain. But this time it is the best part of a million dollars. So he has to be careful. I have the feeling that he doesn't really feel anything very much. He cries easily. He might be one of the most plausible liars in the world."

Doris said, "Can't you get them by radio or something? Won't ships see them? Or airplanes?"

Gabe said, "You are a very nice girl, honey. Let me tell you how big that ocean is. Several wars ago a lot of airplanes, a lot of ships, a lot of people on islands and on radio watch tried for weeks to locate a whole fleet of warships. Oh, and a lot of submarines were hunting too. It was located finally by accident. An old tin goose was way off course, going from here to there, and happened to see it. And a fleet, honey, is a very distinctive-looking thing. It covers several square miles of ocean. One motor sailer is something else. There are hundreds of little inter-island craft out there, under sail. But you can fly across ten times without ever spotting one. If you can track down a radio contact, and if the vessel gave its location and you know where it is going, it is possible to find it, if you are standing by with a long-range search plane."

"There'd be no reason for the Trepid to give a position unless they were in trouble," I said.

Silence at the round glass table. Gabe squinted at the bright hazy sky. The old instincts of the newsman were at work. "Coming into port alone would be bad," he said. "If a man says his wife fell or jumped overboard, my first guess is she was pushed, no matter how many years they've been sailing across the oceans. So you check and you find they're married less than two years, that it's all her money. And any idiot would realize he would have to have a body aboard, or it will be a long time and a lot of heavy legal expense in order to collect."

I wondered if the lawyers' union put the same big bite on an estate under those circumstances as they do in the case of a contested will. If the litigant wins a piece of the estate, the standard practice almost everywhere is for the lawyer to take 45 percent of the amount awarded, regardless of how strong or how flimsy the claim, regardless of how much or how little work is involved in pursuing it. And what agency regulates and enforces these legal fees? The Bar Association.

There is one thing they don't do. They don't publish their rate schedules in advance. They let it all come as a surprise. A big surprise.

When I recover something that the victim never expected to see again, I take half. That is made clear in advance. And who regulates my rate? The victim. He can try other methods.

Sometimes we can negotiate the percentage, especially when it is a very simple salvage job. It would be easier to sit behind a desk and shake my head solemnly and sadly and say, "Buddy, I surely wish I could cut the fee, but I have to abide by the rules and regulations of my association."

And by the same rules they take 4 or 5 or 6 percent of a gross estate even when there are absolutely no problems at all. Absolutely no chance of paying an hourly rate. Know why? "It wouldn't be fair to those, heirs of other estates where a lot more work is involved. Your dead daddy left you a gross of one hundred thousand, fella? My six percent comes off the top. Six grand. Local bar-association schedule. Hminni. Then there's an estimated thirtytwo percent additional taxes and expenses, so you will stand to inherit… sixty-two thousand dollars! I know it will only take about two hours of my time and about a half a dozen forms for my secretary to complete and process. But you are paying to have it done right, fella."