Part 15 (1/2)

”Ted Lewellen trusted you. Pidge trusted you. How did you expect to get away with making a deal on Lewellen's research and maps? Big strikes get publicity. She'd remember the name of the sunken vessel, wouldn't she? Publicity would smoke you out. Then she'd have some questions.”

”Get me out of here!”

”No way.”

”Wait! What did you want to know? About the daughter? She'll be locked up. n.o.body will be paying any attention.”

”Locked up for what?”

”Emotional problems. There's a history of instability. The deal is I can get appointed guardian. Her husband gets the income from the trust.”

”You made a deal with Howie Brindle?”

”Help me. Please.”

”Want to see how many shovels it takes to cover your head?”

”What do you want?”

”Howie wouldn't make a deal with you. Even in a hole in the ground, in the last five minutes of your life, you keep on lying. Howie is a wonderful guy. Ask anybody who knows him.”

”Brindle is a bug! Listen, he worked for me. Any lawyer with experience in criminal defense knows that kind of a bug. Five minutes after I started chatting with him about the death of Fred Harron, I knew he'd killed Fred. Maybe he did Lois a favor. That's beside the point.”

”Howie wouldn't hurt a fly.”

”Dammit, man, he admitted he killed Fred. He sat in my office and blubbered and moaned and howled and wrung his hands and swore that he hadn't meant to hurt the doctor, that he was just horsing around, and he'd never hurt anybody before in his whole life. He was good. You could almost believe him. But if he's true to form, there's a whole full-strength platoon of bodies stretching back into Brindle's past. He wasn't going to admit a thing, not even after I'd trapped him three or four times. Then he began to realize I was going to push for an indictment if he kept lying, and might make a deal if he would admit it. So he admitted it, and it didn't make him very happy when I played the tape back to him. Not right then, because I think he'd have taken the tape and left me on the office floor. Later, when I could tell him that he was listening to a copy of the original tape. n.o.body had ever owned him before. It was very hard for him to get used to knowing that he had to do whatever I told him. I told him to stay in the area and keep in touch. I had a different project in mind for him, but then Ted Lewellen got killed in an accident and it shaped up into a better project. I told him to marry her.”

”You thought he could?”

”The water is getting deeper.”

”So drown a little.”

”My heart is beating too fast. It really is.”

”It'll get a long long long rest.”

”You're a bug like Brindle. You're rotten! You know that? You've got a cold heart. Yes, I told him to marry her and he married her. He hung around. He ran her errands, did her ch.o.r.es. He was always there. She was alone. He seems like a nice boy. I told him the cruise was a good idea. Why not? They had the boat and the money. I told him to use any way in the world to make her think she was losing her mind. When people start to think that way, it can happen. They get irrational. They act funny. And once they're on the inside, you can usually manage to keep them there.”

”You'd say he's a murderer. Why didn't you tell him to kill her?”

”She's worth too much. So there'd be too much publicity, especially about where the money came from. And there might be too many pictures of Brindle in a wire-service pickup, and somebody might show up with some stories out of the past. I warned him that if he killed her, I was going to cook him good, with an apple in his mouth. McGee, I could write the whole thing out for you.”

”Do you think he's killed her?”

”I don't know. People like Brindle, they get impatient. They get bored. If he could figure out a way where n.o.body would question it was an accident, he'd do it. Or suicide while of unsound mind. They've conned people ever since they could walk. They think people are uniformly stupid. They think we're all as empty on the inside as they are. It's a risk. Either way, I thought she couldn't raise any questions. Dead or crazy, she's out of the picture. McGee, it's worth taking risks for. It could be millions. You won't get another chance like this. You'll live small all your life.”

”I guess I will,” I said quietly. ”I guess I expect to.”

There he was down in his hole, with water up to his ears. Ted had probably trusted and respected him. Please help me with my problems, Mr. Collier. Help me take care of my girl in case I happen to slide under a truck.

Collier took care of her. He had a jolly sociopath standing by, waiting for an odd job, and then this new opportunity came along. Take care of Ted's girl. My girl. Give her to good old Howie Brindle.

The white cold light filled the hole, and the moths were down there, fluttering around Tom Collier. He made a strange sound and I looked closer and saw that he was crying. His underlip was protruding and vibrating. Poor Tom. Playtime is ending. All the sweet tastes are fading away. Someone else will have to chomp the good steaks, snuff the bouquet of the wines, count the crisp bills, spread the warm ivory thighs, buy the favors, laugh at the jokes, buy the trinkets.

I held the spade handle so tightly my hands ached with the strain. It was my impulse to start spading that dirt into the hole as fast as I could, working from the feet toward the head, fill it in and stamp it down and spread the sh.e.l.l over the raw place. The weeping noises were almost as small as the sounds of the tree toads.

I stretched out and leaned into the hole and sliced the few layers of filament tape that held his arms snugged together. I picked the Coolite stick out of the water, retrieved the other one, and used their light as I walked back to the car. So intense had been the desire to kill him and so narrow the escape, I walked like a gawky marionette with an amateur working the strings. I could not remember which arm was supposed to swing out first when walking. It was like those supreme attacks of insomnia that are so bad you cannot remember where you put your hands and arms when you sleep. I couldn't even find the lights on Miss Agnes. As I backed out, my coordination came back, and then I began to s.h.i.+ver with reaction. I turned around by the locked wire gate and hurried back along the ca.n.a.l bank, turned over his bridge and hit the highway toward home.

When the s.h.i.+vering went away I began to take some relish in thinking of the jolly host returning to his party. I'm back, girls! Here I am in my sodden jump suit. My hairpiece is full of mud. My wallet is empty and I've got these shoulder cramps and this sore jaw. And I've been crying a lot.

I knew what he would probably do, after he found his way home and got cleaned up. He would shut himself in a room and phone Hisp's home. And when Lawton Hisp answered, Tom Collier would wish him, after a long pause, a very happy New Year. And then Tom would hang up and sit there and think about it. He would think of all the things he would like to do to me. In the end he would realize why there was not one d.a.m.ned thing he could do.

There were two hours left in the old year. I did not want to spend them with anybody. Not even Meyer.

At Bahia Mar, I threaded my way past some parties I wanted to escape, and when I was aboard the Busted Flush, I was chary about turning on too many lights. There were some residual s.h.i.+vers from time to time. I quelled them with a chill flagon of Plymouth gin. It cheered me enough to warrant my digging out a personal steak and preparing it for broiling when I was ready. I leafed through the ca.s.sette stacks and put Mr. Julian Bream on, wanting something expert, mannered and complicated.

I showered and changed to an old blue robe, rebuilt my drink and sat and picked tenderly at the new blister on the heel of my left hand. Meyer says that somewhere between aphorisms and sophistry there is, or should be, a form of expression called sophorisms. These express the mood of emotional soph.o.m.orism. If the wish is the deed, then I killed him. If I hadn't killed him, somebody else would have. If Howie hasn't killed her yet, he isn't really trying.

I got up and got the big atlas and opened it on my lap and pulled the lamp closer. I found the big double-page spread of the Pacific and slowly ran the edge of my thumbnail down the shades of blue which showed the great depths, the rare shallows.

They were out there, a microspeck moving down the flat blue, as invisible to the naked eye as a microbe on an agar dish. Now they would be coming up on the Line Islands. A five- or six-hour difference. The sun had wheezed its hot, tired way westward, and the girl to be known henceforth as Lou Ellen was under its late-afternoon glare, lifting and falling to those big bland rollers, with six or seven hours before her New Year's Eve.

I studied the good names out there printed on the blue dye, Christmas Island Ridge, Tokelau Trough, Pacific Basin, and tried to think about those names, tried to wonder how they had measured the shocking depths out there. The mind is a child that keeps turning back, reaching for the WET PAINT sign. I kept seeing, superimposed upon the blue, Meyer's image of her, with the slightly negative buoyance of the newly drowned, going down and down, through the lambent layers of undersea light, through the blues, greens, turquoise.

Tom Collier was right. Bugs like Howie have this terrible, incurable optimism. If n.o.body sees you do it, n.o.body can prove you did it. And people have always believed you. Howie is a nice little boy. He's so helpful and willing and happy. Fat people are jolly people.

Next step, McGee. If, through some miracle of timing and coincidence, you should achieve radio contact, what would you say? h.e.l.lo, there! By what law of the high seas can you send Captain Hornblower aboard his frigate to wrest the legal wife from her legal husband? How do you get yourself air-dropped onto the deck, a.s.suming the Trepid could be located at all?

The next step is wait. Wait here, or fly out and wait there. But wait, no matter what. It would be ironic indeed if the one Howie flipped out of the tree would be McGee. I sweetened the drink, changed the music, put the steak in. I had a slight and somber buzz from the astringent gin. Whee. Whoopee. Happy New Something.

Sixteen.

MY JET flight from Honolulu arrived at Pago Pago International Airport at three in the afternoon on Sat.u.r.day the fifth of January. The airport is at Tafuna, about seven miles from town. The airstrips are on crushed coral rock, extended out into the sea. It is the only way one is going to find any flat land on those islands.

We were supposed to come in a little earlier, but it was the rainy season and a black, heavy tropical storm was moving across the big island, covering most of its fifty or so square miles. There are tricky winds in those storms, so we strolled around in a big circle on high, waiting for it to move away from the field.

We came down into a scrubbed, s.h.i.+ny, dripping world, full of a smell of flowers, rain freshness and jet fuel. I had learned that there is an n in the name when it is p.r.o.nounced, that the first vowel sound had about the same value as the o in mom, and the g was halfway between hard and soft. Hence Pahng-o Pahng-o. When you say things correctly, you become an instant world traveler. Because of the rains, it was off season, and about eight of us got off. I had only carry-on, an unusual event at Tafuna, apparently, when the visitor is not reserved back out.

It is known as American Samoa. The U. S. dollar is accepted. The taxi driver accepted an impressive number of them to drive me into town to the Intercontinental Hotel. I had heard that the place was hot. It had seemed very hot to me when I came off the bird. But that had been the coolness after the rain. The driver said he would take me everywhere during my wonderful stay on the incredibly beautiful island of Tutuila. In his s.h.i.+ny elderly Plymouth with its square wheels and its ineffectual little fan buzzing directly into his sweat-s.h.i.+ny face, he would take me up and down all these perpendicular green mountains for a very nice price.

As we came around a corner of the coast road, I saw Pago Pago Harbor. I had seen it from the air, but height flattens things out. I'd been told it was the most beautiful harbor in the world. It is the most beautiful harbor in the world. Once, uncounted centuries ago, it was the fiery, bubbling pit of a volcano. The crater ate at its own walls, consuming itself, growing larger, until finally a whole side of it fell into the sea, and the sea came smas.h.i.+ng into the red, boiling crater. That must have been a day. That must have been something to see and hear. We don't know how long it took the sea to win. Now, inside the steep green hills, it is tranquil in victory.

He turned into the hotel drive. The first half ounce of raindrops from the next cloud began to splat as I paid him. It was a very handsome hotellow buildings, rounded thatched roofs, in the turtle fale island, style. But the thatch, of course, was covered ferroconcrete, and there were a hundred and one rooms, all air-conditioned, and a lower level with free-form pool, umbrellas over the tables, an outside bar and a view across the harbor of Mount Pioa, the Rainmaker. The Rainmaker was on the job. The day deepened from bright sunlight to deep dusk as the rain thundered down.

It does not take very long to make your appraisal as you walk across a lobby. A gift shop on the left full of bright overpriced instant artifacts. Little sc.r.a.ps of this and that on the floor. Bleared windows. A man in a uniform yawning and scratching his behind. Some overflowing ashtrays.