The Turquoise Lament (17 page)

Coop is always ecstatic at-the chance to fly me anywhere in the state. I buy the gas and pay the landing fees. He can't charge for the flight or his services because he built his airplane from a kit. The FAA classifies it as an Experimental Amateur Built airplane. Coop paid $7200 for the kit. He is one of five or six hundred people who fly planes made from the same kit. He put in twenty hours a week for forty weeks, and the FAA, who had been looking over his shoulder as he built it, watched him climb into it and fly it, and gave it an airworthness certificate. There is nothing about it he doesn't maintain perfectly, and nothing about it he can't fix.

I always forget his square name until I see it behind the glassine on the instrument panel. Pelham Whittaker. He is known as Coop because he looks astonishingly like Gary Cooper until he either talks or stands up. He has a very fast high-pitched voice. And he is about five foot five. He teaches in the adult-education program in the high school at night, so he can fly his BD-4 in the daytime. His wife teaches in junior high in the daytime, so she won't have to go flying with him.

He is a very careful, fussy pilot. They are the best kind. It was such a nice morning he took it right across the peninsula and emerged a little north of Fort Myers. Once over the Gulf, he took it down to a thousand feet and stayed a half mile off the beaches as we went up the coast. Even looking toward the morning brightness, I had a good view of the coast. I hadn't seen it from that altitude for several years. Boca Grande looked much the same. And so did Manasota Key. But the small city of Venice, and Siesta Key, two keys north of Venice, were shocking. Pale and remarkably ugly high-rises were jammed against the small strip of sand beach, shoulder to shoulder. Blooms of effluent were murking the blue waters. Tiny churchgoing automobiles were stacked up at the lift bridges, winking in the sun, and making a whiskey haze that spoiled the quality of the light.

After he had his instructions from the tower and had turned inland to start his pattern, I could see, in the haze to the north, the tall stacks of the mighty Borden phosphate and fertilizer plant in Bradenton, spewing lethal fluorine and sulphuricacid components into the vacation sky. In the immediate area it is known bitterly as the place where Elsie the Cow coughed herself to death. I have read where it had been given yet another two years to correct its massive and dangerous pollution. Big Borden must have directors somewhere. Maybe, like the Penn Central directors, they are going to sit on their respective docile asses until the roof falls in. There are but two choices. Either they know they condone poisoning and don't give a damn, or they don't know they condone poisoning and don't give a damn. Anybody can walk into any brokerage office and be told where to look to find a complete list of the names of the directors and where they live. Drop the fellows a line, huh?

Coop put it down and rolled it over to the apron in the private aircraft sector. I knew he would stay in the area, answering questions about his kit plane, and talking flying-with hand gestures-with all the other Sunday flyers. When I neared the terminal and looked back, I could see that he had already acquired an audience of two, and would tell all about Jim Bede and his magic airplane kits.

A lanky miss behind the Hertz counter leased me a pink Torino which stank of stale cigar, even with the windows down and the speed up. I hesitated, then found my way out to Route 41 and turned north to Bradenton. I had checked a phone book in the airport to be certain it wasn't going to be too easy. No Brindle. I didn't even know if it was his paternal grandfather who'd brought him to Florida. Fast traffic was zapping by me on the northbound side of traffic divided highway, whooshing through a tacky wilderness of franchised food, car dealerships, boat dealerships, trailer dealerships, motels, auction houses, real estate agencies, factory clothing outlets, furniture warehouses, rent-anything emporiums, used cars, used trailers, used campers, used boats. Had I not seen a boat for sale every few hundred yards, I would never have known I was within five hundred miles of salt water. That's what's going to flatten the old wallets, guys, that missing feeling of being near the sea. It has done gone.

A Sunday that is the next to the last day of the year is a poor time to run a trace back through ten years, even in an area that hasn't grown an inch. But I was impatient, and I hadn't been able to get in touch with Tom Collier. And Coop wasn't doing anything.

I fumbled my way out of the fast traffic and down to the heart of town, and from there, with some directions, found the City Police. I parked the pink cigar a block away and went into the station. The two men on the front didn't come panting over to see what I wanted. It is the way with cops to make you wait a little while because a great deal can be read from the way a person waits. And it is a nice opportunity to look the visitor over. They were looking while they talked. Okay, so I am large, leathery, bigboned, with some visible signs of violent impact in years past. The shirt, fellas, is L. L. Bean, lightweight wool. The pants are Sears best quality double-knit stretch. This here cardigan I am carrying over my shoulder is Guatemalan, knitted by durable little brown people up in the Chichicastenango clouds. The shoes are After Hours, pony hide I think. The watch is by Pulsar.

And I wait amiably, see? Sort of lounging here, with half smile. So I could be the guy who comes and climbs the pole and fixes the phone. Or the driver of a big rig looking for a safe place to leave it because he can't deliver it today. Or I could be fuzz on vacation, stopping in to patronize the local brotherhood. Or I could be a dude from Palm Beach stopping by to report the theft of an original Dufy from the salon of his motor yacht. An eccentric dude without siyled hair, capped teeth or tinted contacts.

All I know as I wait so disarmingly is that I have done a lot of things wrong here and there, but with what there is left of this Howie Brindle fiasco, I am not going to make bad moves.

"Help you, sir?"

"I don't know. If I could get a look at a back file of city directories."

"Trying to find someone?"

I quickly suppressed the terrible compulsion to tell him that I wanted to see if I could still tear them in half. "He moved here when he was about twelve; I think. That would be thirteen or fourteen years ago. I guess he left when he went to the University of Florida, which would be about seven years back give or take. Howard Brindle."

"You say he left? Then he's not here."

"That is right. That is absolutely right, Officer. I want to see if he has relatives still living in Bradenton."

"What have you got in mind?" The questions are always automatic. The more you ask the more you know. And you might get an answer you don't like. I gave him one of the six clean cards. "Title Research Associates," he read aloud. "McGee. Fort Lauderdale."

"It's just a little research to clear a title," I said. He pushed the card back across the counter and I picked it up, tucked it away. "You come around on a business day, you can find old city directories at the Tax Office, and maybe the Chamber, or even the library."

"I had to come over here anyway, and I guess I was trying to save myself two trips. You know how it is."

"Sure. I don't know how I could help you."

"It might be that somebody in the Department would know Brindle. He played football for the high school here. Offensive backfield. Big fellow. Light-colored hair. Went to Gainesville on a football scholarship."

My man looked blank but the other one put a file folder down and ambled over, saying, "Sure. I remember him. A great big son of a bitch, more pro size than high school. Short yardage situations, they'd bring him in to get the distance or be a decoy. Quick as could be getting through that line, but once he got into the backfield, they could catch him pretty good. He couldn't go for the long gainers. He never did much at Gainesville, and I expected him to show up in the pros, but he never did. What ever happened to him?"

"He married a little money, I understand."

"That's the way to go! Say, dint you play some pro? I heard Dave here say McGee. First name?"

"Travis."

"Oh, sure. Tight end. Kind of way back. Like you were up there two years, and you got racked up bad. Give me a couple of minutes and I can come up with the Detroit guy that clobbered you."

I stared at him. "Nobody can remember me, much less who messed up my legs. You've got some kind of hobby there. It was a rookie middle linebacker named DiCosola."

He put his hand out. "Ben Durma. I memorize all that stuff. My wife thinks I'm nuts. But I win a lot of beers. Too bad you couldn't stay in long enough to last into the good money like they get nowadays. You're a good size for a tight end. Well, about Brindle's folks, I wouldn't know. But I got an idea. Let me check the duty roster."

He came back and said, "I asked the dispatcher to bring Shay back in. He was playing for the high school the same time Brindle was. Stan Shay. He was too small for a scholarship."

"I don't want to upset anything. I could wait around."

"No problem. It's very, very slow out there. Tonight it will start building and tomorrow night will be a disaster area. We're running light so we can beef up the shifts for the trouble time. In the last hour and a half, one stolen bike, one guy chasing his old lady naked around the yard with a ball bat."

Shay was one of those elegant cops. Handsome and dark and trim, the kind who has blue jowls no matter how close the shave, wears tightly tailored uniforms, sports a very careful hair style, walks like a lazy tomcat, and looks as if the eyelashes are false. But they are real, and the toughness is real, and you do not want to say anything which could possibly be interpreted as a challenge to his virility or authority. The desk had business when he came in. They aimed him over at me where I sat on a bench, but Durma called him back to give him a better fill-in. I was standing when he arrived. We shook hands and he said he had to be next to his cruiser because he was on call. We went out to the parking area and he sat behind the wheel, door open, turned sideways so he could hook his heels on the step plate. I leaned against the side of the car.

"We were on the same squad. He was a good kid. He never crapped out on what had to be done, but he never exactly pulled more than his share either. He liked to get by. You know. I had to work my tail off to stay even, to make up for not having the beef, and I used to tell him that if he worked like I worked, he could own the world. He could have been big. I really mean it. You want to know about his folks, Ben says. I went there a couple times when there was something he wanted to pick up and we were on our way somewhere else, so it was a couple of minutes. It was an old trailer park called the Bayway Trailer Haven, and they were way back in toward the middle you could get lost in there-in a blue house trailer with a screen porch on one side and the built-on room which was Howie's room on the other side. The only people he had, they were his grandfather and grandmother. Their name was Brindle. They seemed to be jawing at him all the time he was there, the two or three times I was along, but he didn't seem to hear anything they were saying to him, or even be able to see them standing there. They could still be there, for all I know."

I wanted to ask if Howie got into any trouble while he was in high school, but I had the feeling Stan Shay would jump on any deviation from the pattern. So I moved at it sideways. "I guess you're right. He could have made it big. But when there isn't enough motivation, natural ability isn't enough. From what I hear, he's gotten pretty close to trouble a few times. Since he got out of college."

"Trouble?"

"I don't know any of the details. I just got the impression he might have a bad temper. And if a man that big loses his temper…"

"No. Not Howie. I can guaran-damn-tee you can't make ol' Howie mad. There was an old country boy named Meeker, moved over here from Arcadia, a good running guard, took it on himself to rile Howie. Called him Fats, asked him when he was going to buy a bra, snapped red marks on his ass with a wet towel, put his good shoes in the shower. That was third year. Howie just beamed and chuckled. Some of Meeker's tricks were mean. There was no use asking Meeker to ease off because it just made him go after Howie more. But Howie never minded it one little bit."

"Where did Meeker go away to school?"

"He would have had a lot of offers, but he never made it. First of June, that third year, we had a class party over on the beach at Anna Maria Island, bonfires and beer and all that. Meeker got pretty loud and pretty drunk and so did a lot of other people. If he'd driven out there, probably he'd have been missed sooner. But he rode with somebody, so they thought he'd rode home with somebody else. There was so much noise and music, nobody could have heard anybody yelling out there in the dark. About everybody went swimming at least one time, but Meeker went ahead and drowned, and nobody knew it for sure until two days later a fisherman wading next to Tin Can island spotted his body coming in on the tide, rolling over and over across the bar."

I tried it. A hearty laugh.

He snapped his head up. "That's some kind of joke to you?"

"No offense. I was just thinking. After all that towel-snapping, maybe Brindle went swimming at the same time as Meeker."