Case of Lucy Bending (3 page)

"I thank you, Bill," the old man said.

"My pleasure, professor."

Lloyd Craner had a white mustache and goatee, a knuckle of a nose, the brows and eyes of a grandee. He glowered at the world from a face that belonged on a cigar box. His false teeth clacked.

Between his knees was propped his rosewood cane with a silver toucan's head for a handle. He sat stiffly upright, scanning the sea, daring it. All his movements were precise and calculated. He was determined not to die.

"Nice night," Bill Hollo way offered.

The ex-professor of geology stuck his beak into the snifter, inhaled, then dipped his tongue.

"Ambrosia," he said. "I saw a flurry out there a few minutes ago. Some phosphorescence."

"School of mullet," Holloway said. "Maybe."

"The sea, the sea," Craner recited. "A man has not lived until he has known the sea, until he has felt the giant bounds the soul takes upward when the eyes look upon a world without limit, beauty without end. Always, everywhere, the sea rolls forever. Men come and go, and nations, and civilizations. But the sea! That is life, constant, eternal."

"Very nice," Holloway said. "Who wrote it?"

"I did," the professor said. "When I was young and innocent."

"You were never innocent," his son-in-law said.

The old man showed his teeth and took a swallow of brandy.

"Excellent dinner tonight," he said.

"Was it?" Holloway said. "I can't get used to Florida lobsters. They look like amputees to me."

"Because you're from New England. They may not have claws, but the flavor is subtle."

"I'll take your word for it."

"What was the fight about?"

"With Maria? Jane said she had put too much saffron in the rice. Maria told her that in Cuba she had been a great lady who had servants working for
her.
Jane said maybe she'd be happier back in Cuba. Maria told her in explicit detail what she could do with the saffron rice. Too bad you don't speak Spanish; it loses something in translation."

"Is that the end of Maria?"

"Probably," Holloway said indifferently. "She's lasted three weeks; that's par for the course."

They sipped their brandies slowly. A thick southeast breeze whipped the fronds of palms screening the terrace. They heard the plash of the sea. A vee of pelicans flapped north across the glow of the moon.

"Montana was never like this," Lloyd Craner said.

"Sometimes I feel I'm living in a travel poster," Holloway said.

"I thought you liked it."

"I thought I did. Now I'm beginning to wonder. Too much sea. Too much beach. Too much perfect weather. That damned sun . . . My brain is turning to mush. I used to read eighteenth-century poetry. Now I read the
National Enquirer. ''

"You still play chess."

"Badly."

"A game tonight?"

"Sorry, professor. I've got to have a drink with Luther Empt. Some business proposition he wants to talk about."

"What do you know about him, Bill?"

"Luther? He came down from Chicago about twelve years ago. Started his own business producing slide presentations for corporations and advertising agencies. Then he got into eight- and sixteen-millimeter educational and training films. Lately he's been processing TV commercials and video cassettes. Seems to be a very capable man."

"Ambitious?"

"Oh yes. Teresa is his third wife. I heard some talk that it was her money that enabled him to expand into the television field."

"Was she married before?"

"Once."

"Going to Jerusalem," the codger said.

"What?"

"That's what we used to call the children's game of Musical Chairs. He's been married three times, his wife twice. Ronald Bending has been married twice, and so has Jane. I never knew there were so many widowed, divorced, and remarried people in the world until I came to Florida."

"Going to Jerusalem," Holloway repeated. "Good name. Florida: the new Jerusalem. Let me get us a refill."

He took the brandy snifters back into the living room. It stretched the width of the house, decorated in shades of beige and brown. He hated it.

Jane was curled into one end of a ten-foot couch upholstered in chocolate velvet. She was wearing a tube of fuchsia jersey, down to her ankles. She was filing her nails, watching their oversize TV set.

"How's the movie?" he asked pleasantly.

"Shit," she said.

He poured his father-in-law another brandy and himself a double vodka on ice with a squeeze of lime.

"Where's Gloria?" he asked his wife.

"Doing her homework over at the Bendings'. With Lucy."

"And Eddie?"

"Upstairs. Unless he's gone out the window again. Let me have a gin martini. Lemon peel."

He mixed the drink and brought it to her. She took the glass from his fingers without moving her eyes from the television. He carried the other drinks out to the terrace.

The moon was higher, paler, smaller. Dimly, in the gloom, they saw a pack of five joggers pounding down the beach.

Far out in the darkness, a necklace of red lights moved northward.

"Probably commercial fishing boats," Holloway said. "Heading for the Jupiter Inlet."

"This Luther Empt ..." Lloyd Craner said. "You think he's an honest man?"

"As honest as he has to be. Why the sudden interest in Luther Empt?" He paused a moment. "Good Lord, professor, don't tell me it's his mother. Gertrude? Is it Gertrude?"

"What we used to call a fine figure of a woman," his father-in-law said softly.

"Going to Jerusalem," William Jasper Holloway said.

Two vodkas later, he slipped off his canvas moccasins, carried them and, barefoot, scuffed down the beach to Empt's place, only two homes away. The coarse, gritty sand held the day's heat. There were sand burrs and shards of shell. He didn't care. For some reason he could not understand, it was good to feel. Even pain.

He knew he was softer and pudgier than he should have been. He wanted to be as lean and hard as Turk Bending, but only succeeded in being as plump as Luther Empt, but without his energy and resolve.

He was a medium man, of medium height, with hair and eyes a medium brown. All his clothes were medium size. He supposed he had a medium mind and, perhaps, a medium soul.

He wore a knotted silk ascot in the open neck of his white, short-sleeved Izod shirt. He always wore an ascot, an affectation that amused his Florida neighbors. And his flower-patterned polyester slacks would have earned a guffaw from his poofy Boston friends.

But that was another world, in another time.

He came up to the Empt place. He leaned against the concrete seawall to brush sand and burrs from his bare feet and tug on his moccasins. He heard murmurs from the terrace and glimpsed the ghostly figures of Luther and Bending standing near the glass-and-stainless-steel table.

William Holloway's home, and Ronald Bending's too, were built on half-acre plots. Luther Empt had a full acre of waterfront property—and what that might be worth stunned the mind. But of course Empt had bought it ten years ago. Still . . .

The house, like most of the others on the beach, was stuccoed cinder block built on a concrete slab anchored to pilings driven deep into the sand. Most of the other homes had shingled roofs. Empt's had red Spanish tile set in a fish scale pattern.

The lawn facing the highway was beautifully maintained. There was a formal garden, Olympic-size swimming pool, a gas-fueled outdoor barbecue grill. The house itself had been featured in
Architectural Digest.
The article was titled "Florida Gold Coast Villa."

"That makes you a villain," Bending told Empt.

Luther had forced a laugh.

Holloway walked up the short flight of stairs from the beach. His stairs were wooden. Bending's were cinder blocks. Empt's were slabs of coral rock.

The three men shook hands and got themselves seated in low canvas slings. Luther had put out a bucket of ice cubes, bourbon, scotch and vodka. There were crystal glasses, slices of lime, pieces of lemon peel.

"I'm not going to wait on you bums," Empt said. "Help yourselves."

"I may get stoned," Bending warned, pouring bourbon over ice.

"Go with it," Empt said. "I'll see you home."

"The last time you told me that," Bending said, "I ended up sleeping on the beach."

The two men laughed, and Bill Holloway felt left out. He poured a heavy vodka on ice and squeezed a wedge of lime. Empt was drinking warm scotch.

"What's the occasion, Luther?" Holloway asked.

He sat back with his drink. He could see through the big picture window. Teresa and Gertrude Empt were playing backgammon on a low cocktail table in front of a brick fireplace. The only fireplace Holloway had ever seen in south Florida.

"Lemme give you some background," Empt said. "When I came down here from Chicago, I had some good ideas but not so much cold cash. None of the local cracker banks would stake me. Including yours, Bill."

"You had no track record," Holloway said equably.

"True enough," Empt said without rancor. "Anyway, I ended up at a bank in south Miami. The name don't matter. At the time it was capitalized for about fifty million and was handling an annual cash flow of about five hundred mil. What does that tell you?"

"Mob money," Bill Holloway said.

"Or cocaine cash from Colombia," Turk Bending said.

"Or both," Empt said, nodding. "But who gives a goddamn as long as it's green? They gave me a loan. Stiff vig-orish, but I paid back every cent. And that was the only time I had any dealings with them. I got rolling, and now I'm A-number-one with the local banks. Am I right, Bill?"

"Correct," Holloway said, although it wasn't
quite
correct. He leaned forward for more vodka.

"About a month ago," Empt continued, "I got a call from a VP at the Miami bank. He said a couple of good old boys had a business proposition they wanted to talk to me about. He could vouch for them,
mucho dinero,
and would I listen to their pitch? I said sure, send them up. We met in my office. We talked for maybe three hours, then drove up to Palm Beach for dinner at the Breakers. All in all, I was with them almost six hours."

"Mob?" Holloway asked.

"You guessed it. That's who they were, but you couldn't tell. I mean, no pinkie rings or dese, dem, and dose talk. Conservatively dressed. Quiet-spoken. Polite. No threats. Very, very smooth. But not soft, if you know what I mean. It was plain they had looked me up. They knew my bottom line and who's holding my paper."

"What did they want you to do?" Bending said. "Run white slaves over to the A-rabs?"

"Not exactly," Empt said. "To explain what they wanted, I gotta get technical on you. Better have another drink."

They helped themselves and settled back. Empt was silent a moment, frowning. He was a slow-moving, slow-talking, slow-thinking man.

He had the hard, massive face of a Wehrmacht colonel. Gray hair in a flattop cut. Small, meaty ears set close to his clippered skull. Shrewd coal eyes. A stiff mouth with folds from the corners to his chin.

He was wearing a guayabera shirt to conceal his belly. In swimming trunks, he looked like he had swallowed a cannon ball. His ponderous shoulders, back, arms, chest were covered with a thick black pelt.

He hunched forward in the sling chair, powerful forearms resting on his knees. His white shirt and white duck slacks gleamed in the dusk. He loomed, monumental in his solidity. His hands always seemed clenched into fists.

"I'm gradually switching from film to video cassettes for training and educational movies," he said in his raspy voice. "Eventually I'll be taping everything. It's the coming thing, no doubt about it. Everyone says so. Right? The price of video recorders and players will be down to five hundred in another year. Right now, you can buy old movies on tape for thirty to sixty bucks. In that range. That price will probably come down, too.

"But the whole industry is in an uproar. Different systems, noncompatible. Video cassettes and video disks. No standardization. Like LPs when they first came out. All sizes, shapes, speeds. Now the goddamned Japs have announced a video cassette no longer than an audio cassette. Everyone's rushing to get in on video tape. Everyone agrees it's going to be a billion-dollar business. And you know what? I think everyone's full of shit."

He sat back smiling secretly, arrogant.

"What does that mean?" Bending said. "You're going bankrupt?"

"Not me," Empt said with a coarse laugh. "I got a sweet business. Educational and training cassettes and disks for corporations, schools, the government. I can't miss. But when people talk about a billion-dollar business, they're talking about a mass market, like for LP records, eight-track tapes, and audio cassettes. So I ask: What? What? Where's the billion-dollar market? Turk, what's the best movie you ever saw?"