The Mangrove Coast (17 page)

“With cash from the ATM?”

“Yeah, I see your point. But there’s no reason to get upset until we find out for sure what’s going on. When you were going through your mother’s stuff, did you find any letters, any notes from Merlot?”

“A card, that’s all. It must have come with some flowers or something. It said, ‘Not even these are as beautiful as you.’ Can you think of a slimier line than that?”

I was puzzled. “Your mom has an eight- or nine-month relationship with this guy, but he didn’t send her a single note? Nothing in writing?”

“Nothing that I found. Just the flower note.”

“That doesn’t make any sense at all.”

“They were E-mail friends, I already told you. She’d be on the computer half the night with him. Where’ve you been? People don’t write on paper anymore.”

“Is the computer still at her house?”

“Yeah, but I didn’t think to check it.”

“You mean you could go back and check her old letters if you wanted to?”

“Maybe. Depends on if she saved them or not.”

“But you’d have to know her password, right? Or some kind of entrance code?” Tomlinson had become obsessed with his little briefcase-sized portable. I’d picked up a little bit of information just hearing him talk about it.

“I already know her password. Mom, her memory’s so bad, she uses the same PIN number for all her cards, her message service, the electronic security system at home, everything. She uses the same three numbers as her password to get on-line. It’s simple: two-seven-two. A-R-C on the phone dial, which stands for Amanda Richardson Calloway. My name. One day she’d forgotten something—to pick up her laundry, I think—and she was laughing about how absentminded she was, and that’s when she told me. She said it was her way of honoring me.”

Amanda’s voice cracked again just a little when she added the last sentence. A daughter worried about her mother; trying to keep the emotions in check.

“Then check her computer, see what you can find. Is the phone still on at her house? The phone needs to be on, right?”

“It’s on temporary disconnect. I’ll have the phone company switch it on as soon as I can. Probably late this afternoon,
if I get pushy about it. You want me to try to find letters that Merlot sent to her.”

“Anything that has to do with him and your mom. Maybe there’ll be some hint about where they are.”

“Then I should forward what I find to your computer. So I’ll need to know your E-mail address.”

I reminded her that I didn’t have a computer but I did have a telephone. If she found something, she could call me and read it to me.

“I keep forgetting, you’re maybe one of the three or four people I know who doesn’t have a computer.”

I said, “A regular dinosaur, that’s me. And, Amanda? Something else you need to do is call whoever you talked to at the Broward County Sheriff’s Department. The FBI, too. Tell them you want to send them copies of the bank statements, it might get them interested. Tell them what you think: that your mother is being robbed. They’re a lot better-equipped to handle stuff like this than we are. And don’t forget to call Frank, tell him about the money.”

“You think it’ll make a difference?”

“With the cops? No. Not right away. But at least it will keep your mom’s file open in case there really is something wrong.”

Talking about Merlot, all that missing money, had upset her, so I tried to swing the conversation around before I said good-bye; give her a chance to calm down. Sat there with the phone wedged against my ear, looking out at the water, at small boats fishing the mangrove hedge, while I listened to her ask more questions about her father.

There was something oddly forlorn and touching in her tone. She was frightened for her mother’s safety and deeply missed the father she had never met. She had no conscious recollection of ever seeing the man, of being held by him, but she was inexorably connected; seemed to know and understand him on a bone-marrow level. One thing I did not doubt: Amanda was the daughter of my old friend Bobby Richardson.

I answered her questions as best I could. Then she
changed the subject on her own: told me she’d spoken with Tucker Gatrell a couple of times since she’d gotten home.

I said, “You mean he’s been calling you?”

“No, I called him. I like him. He makes me laugh. And I think he’s honestly worried about what’s happened to my mom. So I told him I’d keep him updated on how it was going, what we were doing. He seems to know a lot about Central America. He was asking me all kinds of questions.”

I said, “Central America. Yeah, he used to be in the import-export business down there. Just ask him, he’s a real expert.”

I’d never risked inquiring, but there wasn’t much doubt that, along with dealing cattle from Managua to Colon, Tucker had dabbled in drug running during the wide-open, early years of dope smuggling. A Florida cowboy who’d somehow found his way to the jungle. He liked the women, the lawlessness of the place. Probably liked the way that a man with money could live like royalty. Something else I never asked was how he’d managed to piss all that easy money away.

Amanda said, “He wants to help. I told him that’d be fine with me.”

I said, “Oh?”

“Why not? What could it hurt?”

All my life I’ve been baffled at how someone as transparently self-serving as my uncle can so quickly and completely earn the confidence and loyalty of otherwise-intelligent strangers. Tucker was a rare, rare being in that you had to know him well before you could distrust and dislike him.

I said, “Just don’t loan him any money. And don’t let him get you alone in a room.”

“You’ve got to be kidding. An old man like that?”

“Look, I know what I’m talking about. You don’t … okay, let me tell you a story. I listened to a TV reporter interview him; this attractive woman not much older than you. This was a couple of years ago. Tuck was trying to
get rich selling swamp water, saying it was from the Fountain of Youth. The way you just laughed, you don’t think I’m serious, but I am. That’s exactly the con he was trying to pull.

“So this woman’s interviewing him, talking to him like he’s the Old Man of the Everglades, which is a role he loves to play. And she asks him, ‘Mr. Gatrell, at what age does a man stop thinking about his own needs and start thinking about more spiritual things?’ Tuck didn’t miss a beat. He said, ‘Sweetheart, if you’re talking about sex, you’re gonna have to ask someone a hell of a lot older than me. You want, I’ll prove my point.’”

Amanda was laughing. “But he was joking.”

“No. No, he wasn’t joking. It was one of the few honest things I’ve ever heard him say.”

“Hey, come on, Doc, it isn’t my place to tell you, but … okay, you seem like the nicest guy, a very reasonable man until you start talking about your uncle. Why? It doesn’t make any sense.”

I told Amanda, “Believe me, it makes sense. I know him. You don’t.”

“Is it the way he acts? He likes to be the center of attention, there’s no doubt about that. Or was it something he did?”

I said, “It’s both. But mostly it was something he did.”

We talked for a while longer after I’d said, yeah, maybe someday I’d tell her about it.

So, slightly after noon, when I was finished with my morning’s work in the lab, I wandered over to the marina to see if Amanda’s package had arrived. Stopped on the dock and talked to Mack for a little bit. Mack is stocky and rumpled, smokes expensive cigars and wears cheap flipflops. Mack’s a displaced Kiwi who came to the U.S. where, as he is fond of saying, “Free enterprise is just a little free-er.” He owns Dinkin’s Bay Marina. Most of it, at least. And he is the marina’s devoted advocate, peacemaker, judge, host of Friday-night beer bashes, boat trader, wheeler-dealer,
fish cleaner and collector of clowns, both real and clowns painted on canvas. Mack normally maintains an attitude of predatory amusement that he shields with a professional coolness not uncommon among those who must deal day-in, day-out with the marina-going public. But on this hot April afternoon, Mack was anything but cool. He was, in fact, in a fiery mood.

“The goddamn bureaucrats,” he told me. “The goddamn bureau RATS … there, that’s more like it. They were snooping around the marina this morning, acting like they owned the place, telling me how to run things. They were telling me I had to do this, I had to fix that or they’d shut me down, and you know what? Those tight-assed little bastards don’t have a clue what it’s like to run a business. They’ve never made a payroll in their life. They’ve never gambled their own savings on a business of any kind, let alone a ballbuster like a marina. And they’ve never lain awake all night worrying that they wouldn’t take in enough cash the next day to make a mortgage payment that’s due by four
P.M.
And they’re judging me? They’re telling me how to run MY business?”

I said, “One of the inspectors find a snake in the restaurant again?”

A year or so before, that’s exactly what had happened. While looking behind one of the refrigerators, a woman from some esoteric state agency had come eyeball to eyeball with a very large and very territorial rat snake. How long the snake had lived there, Joyce, the fry cook, could not guess, but the woman’s reaction had coupled hysteria with a mobile incontinence that darkened a fast trail between the restaurant and the parking lot.

After that incident, Mack had had to shut down the takeout’s fry vats and the grill for more than a week. It cost him several hundred dollars, plus the snake disappeared and no one got a chance to admire the thing or even reward it.

Now he said, “I wish to hell it’d been a bloody rattlesnake. Or … one of those tiger snakes from Oz. One of the deadliest snakes in the Outback. See how they deal
with somethin’ that’s real instead of their tight-assed little rules and regulations. Those people live in a bloody fantasy land. The way they act is, we work for them. Like they’re doing us a favor just to let us stay in business. Mark my word, when bureaucrats refuse to respect private enterprise, this country’s in big trouble! And ninety percent of the inspectors they send ‘round, I wouldn’t hire as dock help. They got attitude without brains. Cadillac dingoes. They remind me of bloody Cadillac dingoes!”

When Mack said Cadillac dingoes, he meant poodles. When he said Oz, he meant Australia.

Yes, he was definitely in a mood. And since I count among my good and trusted friends several of the “goddamn bureau-rats” to whom he referred, I decided to leave him to his anger. For many years, it was car salesmen and insurance salesmen who drew the generalized contempt of a judgmental public. Then it was attorneys. These days, it’s government employees. I have known too many first-rate men and women who happened to be car salesmen or attorneys, or worked for county or state governments, to fall into that easy and unfair trap. Want a tough job? Try selling Oldsmobiles, whole-life or anything else for a living. Try dealing with red tape and outraged citizens all day long. But I have noticed that the contempt reserved for bureaucrats seems more fervent than that aimed at other groups. Why? Mack is a good and fair businessman, and I trust his judgment and his intellect. And he is quite right: There is something desperately amiss when government and private enterprise are at philosophical odds.

The whole gradual shift in attitude suggests an unhealthy antagonism: the government cadre (count teachers and union workers among them) versus businesses large and small, as well as any self-reliant individual who chooses to live independently by his or her own wits. There is no doubt that the cadre’s membership is dominated by talented, reasonable professionals. Unfortunately, it is the cadre’s least-gifited members who tend to be the nosiest. It is this group that the Macks of the world find infuriating because these
members project an attitude of intellectual elitism that is, in truth, the kind of adolescent stupidity that nearly destroyed China. It now threatens Westernized powers, Mack’s New Zealand among them.

These dopes loathe the public and anything that the public embraces. It is this stunted, snobby minority that generates genuine hatred from the “bourgeois.” That a few of them have their hands near the reins of power is a frightening thing indeed.

Mack’s anger was real. One or more of the stunted ones had, apparently, visited the marina and my friend’s reaction was both protective and illustrative.

As I walked away, Mack called to me, “The guy who was the worst of them, I told him I’d run his ass off if he ever came back to the marina again. Took up two solid hours of my time with absolute bullshit. You know—just to prove he was in control; making sure I understood that I might pay all the bills and taxes, but he was the one in charge. Know what he said when I threatened to run him off? He said ‘Try it.’ My property, all the work I’ve put into this place, and his exact words were: ‘
Try it.
’”

From my lab, I’d telephoned in an order for a fried conch sandwich, coleslaw and iced tea, which Joyce served to me in a brown-paper sack with a stack of napkins. As I left, she said, “In case you haven’t heard, stay out of Mack’s way. He’s on the warpath.”

I said, “Too bad the snake didn’t make an appearance. That would have made him happy.”

“Oh yeah, the snake. What I’m still worried about is that drunk we had as a part-time cook—Laurie?—that Laurie cooked the thing and served it. The snake I’m talking about. When I was away on vacation, she have any specials with Italian sausage? Bratwurst, anything like that?”

I was smiling. “I usually stick to the conch or the grouper.”

“Playing it safe, I don’t blame you. Just the same, it worries me. And I meant it about Mack.”

I said, “I know, I know,” and carried my lunch, along with Amanda’s envelope, out onto the docks.

The fishing guides were just returning from the morning charters, and I watched them tie up their skiffs as I took a seat at the picnic table which was beside the big bait tank between the Red Pelican gift shop and the water. Jeth Nicholes was now running an eighteen-foot Hewes,
BUSHMASTER
painted in red script on port and starboard sides. Big Felix Blane—all six feet, five inches and 250 pounds of him—was backing his twenty-four-foot Parker,
Osprey
, into its slip, and Nelson Esterline was hunkered down in the live well of his Lake & Bay, transferring fish into a bucket, getting ready to head to the cleaning table.