A Flash of Green (31 page)

“People still wonder about her. I was at a conference in Atlanta last year. When a biologist from Johns Hopkins heard where I went to school he asked me if I was there when they trapped the Hegasohn woman, and then he wondered out loud what had become of her. I didn’t tell him. You could make a story of it, Wing. It would be, in a different sense, like those reviews of famous crimes of the century. But it wouldn’t be a decent thing to do.”

“Thank you for being so cooperative, Mr. Willihan.”

“Remember one thing, please. She’s a clever woman. She’s clever enough to have been able to fake her way back into the profession with a new identity. But she didn’t. She accepted banishment. She made a moral decision to live with it. I have to respect that.”

“She’s been doing odd jobs for marine biology groups working in the area.”

Willihan frowned. “They’d be upset to find out who has been helping them. Even though it might be a perfectly straightforward relationship, if it came out it would cast a shadow on whatever they’re publishing. I know how ridiculous that sounds, Wing, but every profession has its own stupidities. Research programs are conducted with the assistance of grants from foundations and institutions. Boards of directors are too easily alarmed. They’d be dubious about backing any further work on a project where Doris Hegasohn had been involved, even if the only employment they gave her was brewing tea for the field workers. I suppose they think of her and use her as a trustworthy layman.”

“I guess that’s the relationship.”

“Can you stay and have lunch with me?”

“Thanks, no. I have to be getting back.”

Willihan smiled as he stood up and held his hand out. “I don’t know why I have to feel so protective about that fat old harridan. I think she liked me. You usually like the people who like you. And that, I suppose, is just one of the general forms of stupidity.”

Jimmy Wing went from the waterfront offices of Stormer and Willihan to the St. Petersburg
Times
offices. He checked the annual index for 1939, and then viewed the microfilm projections of the pertinent dates. He jotted down the dates and page numbers involved, and left an order with the library girl for photocopies, paying in advance for reproduction and mailing charges.

As he drove south in the heat of midday, he found himself remembering a flight down the coast in a private airplane three years back. He often remembered it as he drove the Tamiami Trail. Jimmy had been on the port side of the four-passenger aircraft, directly behind the pilot. The sun had been setting as they left Tampa International. The pilot flew at five thousand feet about a mile offshore, following the contour of the coast. The great dark mass of the silent land stretched off toward the east, toward an invisible horizon. The Gulf was a silvery gray and the land was blue-gray. Stretching all the way down the coast, almost without interruption, was the raw garish night work of man, the crawl of headlights, bouquets of neon, sugar-cube motels, blue dots of lighted pools. When the trip was almost over, just before the plane turned inland to land at Palm County Airport, Jimmy Wing had seen it all in a fanciful way which he had never been able to get out of his mind. The land was some great fallen animal. And all the night lights marked the long angry sore in its hide, a noisome, festering wound, maggoty and moving, draining blood and serum into the silent Gulf. Now Doris Hegasohn Rowell had given him a name for it. The plague of man. The sore
was spreading. The dark earth endured this mortal affliction. Dead bright junk circled the moon, orbited the planet, hundreds of bits of it. Every living vertebrate, from a newborn rhino to a white-muzzled chipmunk, carried radioactive material in its bone marrow. Men were digging burrows in the ground, hiding away food and water, waiting for the skies to scream, for the earth itself to shudder, die and begin to rot.

In all this, he thought, in all this which diminishes me, no act of mine, or of anyone else, has consequence. Morality is a self-conscious posture. Dedication is delusion, based on a fraudulent interpretation of fact, a wishful projection of our present velocity. The only valid role is that of observer. Soon we will all eat stones.

He turned into the parking lot at the bank just as Kat was walking toward her little car. The lot was almost empty. He touched the horn ring. She turned and stared, then came swiftly toward him, such a smiling welcome on her face his heart seemed to move higher in his chest.

She looked in the car window at him. “Golly, Jimmy, I’ve been saving up so many things to talk to you about, I know I’m going to forget half of them.”

“How was yesterday? You have a very red nose.”

“And my forehead is getting crusty, and I have ten billion little pinhead blisters on my back and shoulders. Yesterday was okay. It got bad a couple of times. When it did, I’d run into the water and swim as hard as I could as far as I could. So along with the blisters, I’m lame. Where were you today?”

“Working on that feature I told you about.”

“Are you busy now?”

“Later would be better.”

“I promised Jackie I’d do two hours on the phone as soon as I get home. Can you come out about six and have a drink and stay to dinner?”

“Sure. What’s going on?”

“Dozens of things, most of them bad. I want to tell you all of it, not just bits and pieces.”

He arrived at her house at a little after six. She was in shorts and a halter, her sore back and shoulders greased. “Excuse how I look,” she said. “Clothes hurt. And excuse how I sound. I’m hoarse from arguing and arguing over the phone. Jackie and Ross are coming to dinner too, but they won’t be here until after seven. Now, sit down and I’ll get your drink and I’m going to talk you blind.”

She told him about Dial Sinnat quitting. She told him somebody had gotten at Dial through Natalie. It surprised him that Elmo had been able to move so quickly and effectively. It puzzled him that it had worked at all. Kat gave no details about Natalie. She merely said, “The girl did something that could be made to look pretty awful.”

For a few moments his mind wandered. He did not hear what she was saying. He realized she was looking at him expectantly.

“I know it’s a lot to ask of you, Jimmy.”

“Sorry, dear. I wasn’t tracking. What are you asking me to do?”

“Find out who is being so ugly about all this! Somebody spied on Nat, Jimmy. And two men talked to Di on the phone and scared him right off the committee, and he didn’t recognize the voices of either of them. You know everybody, Jimmy. If you could find out who is being so terribly rough, maybe we could do something about it. Couldn’t you sort of ask around, in a quiet way?”

“But people know I was on your side last time, and they know it will be the same again. If I start asking questions, why should anybody answer me?”

She sat on a foot stool, glowering into her drink. “Buck Flake, Leroy Shannard, Doc Aigan, Bill Gormin, Burt Lesser. Jimmy, maybe one of them is in real bad financial condition. You could find that out, couldn’t you? If a man was worried, he might do terrible things. I saw that Buckland Flake with a
very
spectacular girl.”

“I suppose I can ask around.”

She stared at him. “Well, don’t be overcome with enthusiasm.”

“I don’t know exactly where to start, Kat. But … I’ll see if I can figure out something.”

“When are they going to petition for a change in the bulkhead line?”

“At the County Commission meeting tomorrow morning at ten o’clock.”

“So soon!”

“It’ll be an open battle from then on.”

“Excuse me. I thought it had already started.” She tilted her head and listened. “Here’s Jackie and Ross.”

Jackie came striding in first, gawky, flamboyant and slightly drunk, wearing a denim dress, carrying half a drink in a huge old-fashioned glass. “Unless you had a lot better luck than I did on the phone, Katty love, let’s not talk about it, because I find it extremely distressing. Hello, Wing. What have you done for us lately? Excuse me, dear. You probably have some adorable ideas. Meager but adorable.”

“She’s been working on this since about quarter of six,” Ross said. “She’s a swinging thing tonight.”

“Give my little husband a weak drink, somebody,” Jackie said. “Leave him in shape to take me home over his shoulder. Honest
to God, Kat, this Dial Sinnat thing floored me. After you called Tom from the bank this afternoon to tell him definitely no dice, he spread the bad word. I never heard Tom sound so low. So I phoned Dial. He’d just gotten home. The son of a gun thanked me for my interest in his personal decisions. He brushed me off like an expert. Then poor Wally Lime phoned me and we wept together, and then I started belting these lovely things. Are we mice or people? Are we a committee or a burial detail? I’ve got the general idea, kids. Somebody pressured Di. So let’s us pressure some of their boys. Walk me to a bay filler, fellas. I’ll lunge at his jugular. Bring me a big one. Like Flake, or a little one like Aigan. Makes no difference to Killer Halley tonight.”

“Can’t she fill a room, though?” Ross said with awe and pride.

Kat’s children came home from the Sinnats. Kat filled their plates and said they could stay up until nine-thirty if they played quietly in Roy’s room, and didn’t spill any food in there. Jimmy guessed that Kat was serving the small buffet sooner than she had planned. Jackie needed food and coffee.

“The trouble with us,” Jackie said as they were all eating, “we’re too damn nice. Even you, Wing. Perfect little gennlemen. What have we got left? A couple army types, you and me, Kat, a darling art gallery type, little Wally—our Madison Avenue South—and who else? Oh. Fat Doris. You know, it comforted me having Di on the squad. I thought he was the one with
cojones
, but he turns out to be a capon.”

“Down, Jackie!” Kat said firmly.

“What? What’s the matter?”

“You don’t know all the facts or all the reasons or how Di feels. Maybe you’d do the same thing. How can you tell?”

Jackie looked at her with one eyebrow tilted abruptly. “Sweet Katherine,” she said. “Sweet, gentle, forgiving, understanding Katherine.”

“Now, honey,” Ross said.

“The thing,” Jackie said, “is to see him in proper perspective. Okay? He could fool around with our little project as long as it didn’t cost him anything except time and money.” She turned her bright stare toward Jimmy. “The wise old owl that doesn’t say a word turned out to be a pretty stupid bird.”

“Am I supposed to say something significant?” he asked.

“You could give it a try.”

“I said it last week when I was talking to Kat about this. I said people were going to play rough.”

“And so are we!” Jackie said, banging her plate down.

“Fight, team, fight,” Ross said.

Jackie stood up and looked solemnly at her husband. “Funny man,” she said, and walked out of the house.

“Should you … go with her?” Katherine asked, worried.

“She’s okay,” Ross said. “Good groceries, Kat. Oh, she’ll hike around with steam coming out of her ears. She gets sore. She works it off. She’ll be back.”

They finished eating. Jimmy helped Kat take the dishes out to the kitchen. Jackie came back, as noisy as before, with Burt Lesser in tow. “See what I got!” Jackie said. “A hunk of the opposition. He was home alone, helpless and apologetic.”

Burt Lesser acted as though it was some sort of party game, as if he were the permissive, good-humored trophy in a scavenger hunt. He wore a pale blue coverall suit with short sleeves and a tricky brass buckle and his initials in dark red on the breast pocket.

“Well, well, well,” he said, and took out a handkerchief and took off his heavy glasses, huffed on the lenses, and stood wiping them, looking at them all with an uncertain yet jolly look, his oval fleshy face naked without his glasses, and his belly thrusting the brass buckle forward with a look of comfortable arrogance.

Kat went to him quickly and said, “Burt, you know you’re
welcome here any time. We didn’t send Jackie out to bring you back.”

“Cowards,” Jackie said. “Sit right there, Burt boy. This is an inquisition. We’re getting tough. We’ve got some questions to ask.”

Burt sat on the couch. He put his glasses on and looked hesitantly at Jimmy Wing. “I’m not in a position to make any official statement.”

“This is off the record,” Jimmy said, “whatever you say, Burt.”

“Get him a drink, Kat,” Jackie said. “Then you all sit down. I’ll be Perry Mason.”

Jackie stalked slowly back and forth in front of Burt Lesser, scowling, darting fierce looks at him from time to time. She was the only one who didn’t seem to sense the awkwardness of the situation.

“Now then,” she said, “are you the president of the Palmland Development Company?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Is it the purpose and intent of this company to fill Grassy Bay and make a lot of money?”

“Uh … to make a lot of money for everyone. Yes indeed.”

“You were not in favor of the Grassy Bay fill two years ago, Mr. Lesser. Is that true?”

“I wasn’t in favor of it. I didn’t … uh … actively oppose it, but I wasn’t in favor of it either. But this is a different situation.” He smiled at Kat and Ross and Jimmy, the smile of someone who is going along with a joke and wants to be appreciated.

“What’s so different about it?”

“Several things, Mrs. Halley. Several important things. We’re in a little business slump in Palm County, and we weren’t two years ago. This could be a tremendous shot in the arm. Also, having local people in control of it assures a real tasteful development.
We don’t want to foul our own nest, you might say. Palmland Isles will be a credit to the area in every sense of the word.”

“Is that what you’re calling it? Ugh!”

“In every sense of the word. And we shall place all possible contracts and orders right here in Palm County. I have close contact with all the businessmen in the area, Mrs. Halley. I can assure you that the support for Palmland Isles is overwhelming. I think that you people are … uh … doing a disservice to the community by trying to oppose it.”

Jackie paced for a few silent moments. She stopped, whirled, pointed her finger so energetically at Burt that it made him flinch. “You have the feeling that this project will go through?”