JL02 - Night Vision (17 page)

“Who knows?”

“I can see why Roberta Blinderman is upset with the story. Women will be terrified to join the club. Men will be inhibited for fear of being reported to the police if they come on too strong. The whole fantasy game will be stifled.”

“So the killer will answer the personals column in the
Journal,
and we start from scratch.”

“In which case you lose the chance to see Mrs. Blinderman, at least on official business?”

That one stopped me. “Say what?”

Charlie exhaled and enveloped me in a cherry-flavored cloud. Years ago, I had asked him to stop smoking for his health, but he refused, insisting that
Nicotiana tabacum
was his only remaining vice. Now he was grinning like a bearded leprechaun. “You are intrigued by her, are you not?”

“Charlie. It’s business. I’ve been cultivating her because she can be useful to—”

“Yes, of course. And she has helped despite her schizophrenic behavior?”

“Schizophrenic is a little strong, don’t you think? Sure, she helped by not appealing the subpoena order and by voluntarily turning over the record of Mary Rosedahl’s calls. But after today, I think the tall lady has concluded she doesn’t care for me.”

Charlie jabbed at me with the briarwood bowl of his pipe. “Oh, to the contrary, I’d say she doesn’t like the fact that she likes you.”

“How’s that?”

“Did you realize the two of you were circling each other as you talked, creating your own little universe?”

“No, but what of it? Knife fighters do the same thing.”

We jockeyed for position in front of the one elevator that was still working. A horde of hungry lawyers elbowed each other, their competitive juices stirred by the thought of saving ninety seconds on the way to the lobby. When we squeezed aboard, Charlie said, “It reminded me a bit—you’ll forgive me, Jake—of a male and female hyena in the mating ceremony. They approach each other quite warily, then after a while lift a leg to the other, exposing their private parts. Then they sniff each other to see if they like the scent. Finally they lick each other and get on with it.”

“I don’t see how you can compare—”

“I think the two of you are sniffing around.”

“Charlie, she’s a married—”

“Now, she is attractive in a modern way, I suppose, though that androgynous look doesn’t appeal to me. I like women a little rounder, a little softer. Not all angles and planes.”

“Are you quite finished, you chauvinistic old lech?”

“Quite, unless you want to hear about the widow-lady toxicologist who seduced me during a spectrophotometry procedure late one night at the morgue.”

“Already heard it, Charlie.”

“Dear me.
Senex bis puer.
‘An old man is twice a boy.’ I shall have to watch myself.”

In the lobby we walked under a mural of the early Spaniards making nice with the Caloosa Indians, trading food for clothing and other blatant historical lies. On the wall were portraits of distinguished judges, some of whom had never been indicted. I started telling Charlie about the professor. He started telling me about his testimony for the defense in a malpractice case where the doctor failed to save the life of a man who shot himself in the head, trying to commit suicide. Then he interrupted himself.

“You know the female hyena is often larger than the male, and her private parts resemble those of the male. Early naturalists thought the hyena was a hermaphrodite because of the female’s false scrotum and a pronounced clitoris that was mistaken for a penis.”

“Charlie, is there a point to this?”

“Well, it makes you wonder about the evolutionary process. Eons ago, female hyenas with pronounced male-like features fared better than more feminine hyenas. So today every female hyena appears male at first glance.”

“Or first sniff.”

“Exactly. Perhaps it was easier for the male hyena if the structure appeared familiar. Perhaps androgyny is mankind’s future as well. Women in pants and short hair, some looking like motorcycle hoodlums or—what is that style called—pest?”

“Punk. I don’t think it ever caught on.”

“
Deo Gratias!
Thank God.’”

We headed out the front door and down the steps onto Flagler Street. An overloaded bus belched a cloud of black smoke at us as we crossed the street to Flanigan’s Quarterdeck Lounge.

“I’ll buy you a Reuben on rye if you promise not to mention hyenas or bodily functions,” I offered.

“A deal.” Then, after a moment’s deliberation, Charlie said, “I think it was Pliny the Elder who wrote that hyenas were
ab uno animali sepulchra erui inquisitione corporum.
”

“Come again.”

“‘The only animals that dig up graves searching for corpses.’”

“Old Pliny never met a coroner,” I said.

“Howdy,” said the man in the canvas hat.

“Howdy,” I said right back.

The canvas hat had little brass eyelets and a drawstring tied around his neck. Long pale hair stuck out below the hat and over the ears. The face was tanned to a tree-bark finish from the middle of the nose down. The chin was strong and the mouth firm, and if he ever smiled, he didn’t let it linger. The shirt was khaki with lots of buttons and flaps, and the pants matched, with loops here and there and enough pockets to boost all the T-bones from the A&P. He reminded me of someone, but I couldn’t curl my mind around a name.

I had parked next to a line of juniper bushes. I got out, contorted myself into a couple of spinal twists and dropped into half a dozen knee bends. My back had stiffened into little knots and coils on the drive up the turnpike. The ancient but amiable convertible can still hum along at ninety without tossing a piston, but there is little to relieve the tedium of a narcotizing drive through the middle of the state.

I had headed the old convertible north from Miami, past Lauderdale, the Palm Beaches, and Fort Pierce, then northwest away from the coast, through Okeechobee County north of the lake. I shot past Orlando, where ten million tourists queue endlessly under a broiling sun for a two-minute ride twenty thousand fathoms under an irrigation ditch, where every motel is walking distance to a wax museum, a water slide, a dolphin show, or a jousting tournament, where “attractions” substitute for mountains, rivers, and open spaces, where our joy is computerized and packaged and spic-and-spanned, a place where every developer, syndicator, and huckster would sell time-share parking spaces if only there were a place to park.

I made a pit stop at Fort Drum. The turnpike rest areas have been remodeled into a trendy architect’s idea of Florida. It is a vision never shared by the Caloosas, Seminoles, or Miccosukees. Pink and pale blue stucco with gables and tile trim. Wooden trusses overhead like a SoHo loft or a Beverly Hills Tex-Mex eatery. On the walls, pink neon palm trees say it all.

In the gift shop, not much has changed. The orange juice is still fresh, the coconut patties still stale. Next to the alligator postcards and cretinous bumper stickers is a rack of miniature orange trees guaranteed to last twenty-four hours anywhere north of the Mason-Dixon. There is a collection of key chains, ashtrays, and doodads shaped like the Florida peninsula. Does anybody buy this junk or are those the same knickknacks I saw when I drove the old buggy down here in ‘74?

The restaurant has changed but the food would still make an astronaut nauseous. Premade hamburgers indistinguishable from the Styrofoam container, gritty metallic coffee from a giant urn.

Welcome to the Sunshine State. Having wonderful time. Wish you were here. Come on down, the weather’s fine.
Six thousand folks a week follow the postcard’s advice. They leave the acid rain and radon soil and descend on a land of drained swamps, where the phone number for mosquito control is second in popularity to 911. They did a survey a couple of years back on the best place to live. Not a popularity poll, but a statistical study of crime, alcoholism, divorce, and traffic congestion. Every Florida city flunked. By objective standards, the place is a humid hellhole, a place that attracts drifters and grifters, where the streets are crowded and the streams will soon run dry.

Work crews were busy patching one of the turnpike bridges near Orlando. That’s going on all over the state. Especially the newer spans. At the beginning of the century, they built concrete bridges to connect the Florida Keys with the mainland. The cement was thickened with tough granite rock and was allowed to harden for more than a week. The bridges have lasted eighty years.

In the 1980s, the smart guys in Tallahassee built new bridges of watery cement, then added a dash of soft Florida limerock and a splash of chemicals to make it dry faster. The cement began cracking as soon as the saltwater hit it. No matter, though, if the new bridges don’t last fourscore years. By then, global warming will likely melt the ice caps. Key West will be a suburb of Atlantis, and they’ll sell beachfront lots in Orlando.

***

I had pulled up at the log cabin outside of Silver Springs just after nine. The parking lot was a dirt field covered with wood chips. He appeared out of the darkness, quiet as the night.

After the howdy, he asked, “You Lassiter?”

“Guilty as charged.”

Tom Carruthers studied me with a drill instructor’s look. “You going into the woods like that?”

“I thought the tie would be useful in an emergency. An unexpected dinner invitation, maybe.”

“What the hell do you call those shoes?”

“Actually, except for right and left, I haven’t named them.”

He didn’t crack a grin.

“But they always come when I call them,” I said, looking down at my black wingtips and then at his shin-high thick-soled brown boots.

“You’re a real city slicker, aincha?”

It didn’t sound like a compliment, so I didn’t thank him. Now, who did he look like? It still didn’t compute.

“I came straight from court, drove six hours,” I told him.

“You a lawyer?”

“Guilty to count two.”

“I hate lawyers.”

“Well, I’m not a very good one.”

He pointed toward my shoes. “You can’t go into the woods like that.”

“I’ve got basketball high-tops in the car.”

He spat into a bush. “Sneakers?”

Overhead, unseen birds sang little jeering songs. A stiff breeze rattled the juniper leaves and filled the air with their tangy fragrance, the violet berries glistening in the fading light. Somebody once told me that juniper was used to flavor gin. I fought off the urge to disclose this treasure of woodsy knowledge.

I had missed dinner, and Tom Carruthers didn’t offer me any. Now he stood behind me and stared into the 442’s trunk like a cop without a warrant. My trunk is a lot like me. Big and messy. There’s enough rust on the floor to let wet windsurfing equipment drain onto the asphalt. There’s a gym bag and miscellaneous beach gear crusted with sand. I tossed aside two or three universal joints, a battered sail, and a couple of booms. I found a bruised briefcase full of half-baked pleadings and a lawyer magazine with articles about your Keogh plans, your 401-Ks, and how to double-bill your clients and not get disbarred. Finally I uncovered an old pair of black high-tops with decent enough tread for pickup games on the asphalt.

Carruthers was still looking into the trunk. “No tents allowed,” he said, pointing at the pile of junk.

“That’s a six-meter sail, not a tent.”

“Thought it was one of your new Miami fashions, a purple-and-orange tent for the fancy-pants drug dealers.”

“Why would I want a tent for a hike?”

He laughed and spat perilously close to my chariot’s fender. “Forty-eight hours in the woods, some folks want to use a tent. But you can’t get your survival rating if you sleep in a tent. You gotta—”

“What forty-eight hours?”

“—sleep under the stars or build yourself a hut, a lean-to, a wickiup.”

“A wake-me-up?”

“Wickiup. Indian hut made from tree poles covered with brush, bark, what have you.”

“I thought this was just a two-hour hike.”

He spat again. “Not with me, no candy-ass stroll to watch the birds. I put you in with a bunch from the Pensacola Survival League. A few mercenaries, ex-marines, Klansmen.”

“Sounds like the juries I’ve been getting. If it’s all right with you—”

“They’re already in the forest. You’re late.”

“So just give me the mini-version. We walk in, talk, have a beer, walk out.”

“You want a little hike in the woods, one of the park rangers can arrange that tomorrow. You want Tom Cat, you go forty-eight hours, minimum. No food, no water, no matches, no compass, no sleeping bags, no tent.”

“Tom Cat?”

Finally the hint of a smile. Weathered creases showed at the edge of his mouth. “They’ve called me that for years. In the woods, I’m a cat. I can walk over a branch of pine needles two feet from your ear, you’d never hear me.”

He bent over, put a hand on a knee, and started a slow crouching walk, bringing each foot up high, then coming down gently on the outside ball of the foot, rolling to the inside, and finally, silently bringing down the heel.

“A Seminole taught me how. I added my own refinements. Up here, they call it the Tom Cat Stalk.”

“What do you stalk?”

“Everything from squirrel to deer. You ever kill a deer with just your bare hands and a knife?”

“Not that I recall.”

He almost laughed. “You’d remember if you had. Stalking a deer’s almost impossible, even for me. You gotta have ‘em trapped, nowhere to run. Or you can jump out of a tree, get ‘em by the neck. Slice and choke. They’ll buck and try to throw you off. You gotta hang on, blood spurting like water from a garden hose, all hot and sticky, covering you, splashing your face, filling your mouth. Squeeze the life out of them, but love them all the while.”