Condominium (50 page)

ON THURSDAY MORNING
Fred Hildebert, president of the Athens Bank and Trust Company phoned Marty Liss to see if he was free and then rode up to the twelfth floor of the bank building to see him. Fred bustled into the office, obviously upset. His eyes seemed to goggle larger than usual behind the heavy lenses. His bald head was dewed with sweat and there was a faint sharp odor of nervous anxiety about him.

“What are you
doing
, Marty?”

“I am taking things out of these drawers and I am putting them in this box.”

“Why?”

“Jesus Christ, Fred! Why don’t you keep better track? Wannover is gone because he is getting immunity for giving testimony against me. Lew Traff is gone because there is nothing here for him to do anymore. The Irishman is gone because she is doing better selling apartments for me than running a desk. I let the other two
girls go because—maybe you noticed—the Marliss accounts downstairs are frozen and so are the Letra accounts. So I can’t afford the rent here. And don’t tell me I have a lease, pal. Marliss had a lease until you froze the funds.”

“Me? You know better than that!”

“Sit down. You’re making me nervous. I know it was the Feds that froze the account balances. Money can come in. Nothing goes out. Great. Wish I could always do business that way. Want to buy a nice desk? Look at it. Real slate and teak and pewter, pal. Beautiful. Thirty-four hundred bucks it cost. You can have it for one thousand cash.”

“Marty, I came up to talk to you about
this
!” He held out a bound report.

“What have you got there? Oh, the big report on how we’re going to have two keys out there instead of one. Where’d you get it?”

“Mr. and Mrs. Davenport brought it in. A very nice old couple. They’re in Seven-C in Golden Sands. This upset them terribly. And me too. What’s it all about?”

“Didn’t you read it?”

“Of course I read it. It says that a hurricane will cut the key in two and wash away Golden Sands, Captiva House, Azure Breeze and the Surf Club, right?
If
it hits here at the right time and the right angle. I mean, Marty, what is it
about
? Why this?
If
lightning strikes me on top of the head, I will probably fall over dead.
If
your aunt had balls, she’d be your uncle. Do you know how much paper we’ve got on those apartments out there in those four condos you built?”

“Lots and lots.”

“Do you know how much we’re already writing off anyway?”

“Lots more.”

“What I do not need is some jackass engineer predicting those buildings are going to be washed away. How can you let stuff like this get distributed to your customers, Martin?”

“
My
customers? I’m out of all four of those. I wheeled and dealed and sweat blood to buy that Franciscus tract nine years ago on credit, Fred, and what I thought I had left out of it was some money, a good reputation, and a nice feeling of pride whenever I drove by and looked at those honest buildings. I did that. Me. Martin Liss, who twelve or thirteen years ago didn’t have enough income to warrant an audit. Thirteen years ago I was still partners with Jerry Stalbo and we were scramblers, believe me. You know what? I think that if that hurricane comes anywhere near close to here, those four buildings are going to go, just like the man said.”

“Don’t
say
that, Marty. Don’t even
think
it. I’m in enough trouble with my board and the examiners already. Just a little bit more bad luck, and we are going to be so weak we are going to get shoved under the wing of some bank holding company strong enough to pick up our losses and bail us out. And where am I going to be if that happens? Oh-you-tee, out. In the street. And I’ve put a lot of my life into that bank.”

Marty sat in his big black judge’s chair and put his sandals on the slate desk, ankles crossed. He thumbed the wiry hair of his goatee and smiled up at Fred Hildebert. “Fred, I’m crying for you. See? I’m all cracked up over your terrible problem. You, you son of a bitch, set me up with that Sherman Grome, and he fixed me good. I still have your letter guaranteeing me a line of credit. Eleven million. Your honor, I present this letter in evidence. Mr. Hildebert told me he could not honor it, and he sent me to Mr. Grome, assuring me that Mr. Grome could loan me what I needed. I thought that Mr. Grome was okay because my own banker advised me to do business with him.”

“Hey!” Fred said. “Hey, no!”

“But that is exactly how it was, friend. Exactly.”

“No. You leave out how I told you that it was a very very bad time to get into anything that big. But you wouldn’t listen. You wanted to go ahead with it. And at that time, as far as anyone knew, Grome was substantial and reliable.”

“If I get indicted and have to go to trial, Fred, will you appear for me and testify that you put me in touch with Sherman Grome? Because if you don’t I can make it sound a lot worse.”

Fred took out a big white handkerchief and mopped his mouth and his bald head. “It’s the least I can do for an old and good customer.”

“Can’t you lay off that paper on the apartments somehow? Can’t you discount it with somebody?”

“I don’t know. We took … just the class-A risks out there.”

“How good are they if the buildings fall down?”

Fred went to the window wall and looked out toward the key. “It’s all crap. They won’t fall down. I could discount those mortgages and peddle them. Sure. Then I have to explain it at the next board meeting when the hurricane has long since hit the Texas coast and died in New England. It would be like giving away money. ‘What are you, Hildebert, some kind of hysteric?’ What do I do, read them this Harrison report? Put it in the minute book as an exhibit?”

“How much paper do you have? Approximately.”

Hildebert pulled a short length of machine tape out of his pants pocket. “We’ve got a hundred and twenty-one total at an average present payoff of twenty-eight thousand three hundred, or three point four million.”

“Of which a certain amount would be collectible even if the buildings blew away.”

“A certain amount, sure, with a lot of legal diddling around and a lot of insurance adjustor finagling, and a lot of it would be a plain dead loss because some of those people, a lot of them, in fact, have an okay income to live on but no cushion at all. And on the other hand, of course, over a certain age we make it a stipulation they have to pay diminishing term insurance on the outstanding face amount.”

“So it would be fine if they got washed away with the people in them, huh, Fred?”

“It would be nice to be able to carry on a civilized conversation with you, Martin.”

“You came to the wrong place at the wrong time. Get out of here, Fred. Don’t forget your disaster report. I’ve got a copy. I feel good about one thing. I’ve had to suck up to you for years, and now that I don’t, it feels good. I never liked you, Fred. I tried to, but I never could.”

“You’re a slippery little bastard, Liss. I never trusted you. Not for a minute.”

“You loaned me a hell of a lot of money over the years.”

“You’ll never be back in business in this town.”

“Don’t bet on it.”

Mick Rhoades of the
Athens Times Record
sauntered casually into the private office of Billy Scherbel, the assistant to the Palm County manager. Mick wore white slacks, white shoes, a short-sleeved white shirt and the kind of white cap one sees in old newsreels of gentlemen golfers. His gentle brown eyes peered placidly out from under the down-tilted brim of the cap. His face and arms were very brown from outdoor labor on the grounds around his new house.

Billy looked up sharply when Mick closed the door.

“I said I wasn’t to be interrupted!”

Scherbel was middle-sized, soft, petulant, with thinning blond hair and glasses with thick black rims. Mick didn’t answer until he had lowered himself into an armchair and shoved his cap back. “It’s sure God humid out there, Billy.”

“How’d you get
in
here?”

“Me? You saw me walk in. I walked in here. I hung around until Helen had to go to the can. That girl has a very small bladder.”

“You can leave, Rhoades. Right now.”

“Don’t you want to know how I happen to know that the whole thing is going to blow?”

“What whole thing?”

“Denniver. Marty Liss. Payoffs. Harbour Pointe.”

“I know all about it. Don’t you read your own paper?”

“And it’s going to blow you up too, Billy.”

The door was flung open. Helen said, whining, “I didn’t let him come in here, Mr. Scherbel. Honest, he just—”

“It’s okay,” Billy said. “Shut the door.”

Helen glowered at Mick and pulled the door shut. Mick said, “You still balling her, Billy?”

“Never! I’m a happily married—”

“Forget it. We’re wasting time.”

“You’re wasting my time.”

“When we had a little conference about this whole thing, I told the guys that it was my opinion that you were not in on any payoffs. And I really don’t think you were. Traff was the bag man for thirty-six thousand, minimum, that got passed along to Jus Denniver. It’s obvious that Denniver, as the ramrod, kept the biggest part of it. He would pass some along to Steve Corbin and Jack Dorsey. They said you probably got a share and I stood up for you. I said you were honest, in a certain limited sense of the word.”

Scherbel was staring at him with horrified fascination. “Who were you talking to?”

“Just a little group of people who’d like to have a cleaner city. I told them your trouble is that you’re always horny, in town or out of town, and if somebody wanted leverage on you, all they’d need do is set you up with jailbait and document it. I said you’d be in too much of a hurry to worry if the lady was thirteen or thirty-nine.”

“This is an outrage!” Billy Scherbel said too loudly.

“For a puffy, balding, myopic-type guy, I must confess that you certainly seem to get your share, Scherbel. You do pretty well.”

“What are you trying to
do
to me?”

“I’m worried about you, Billy. Aside from doing too many favors for that son of a bitch, Justin Denniver, you are a pretty fair bureaucrat. You are a hell of a lot more effective than your boss, Tod Moran, himself.”

“Why should you worr—”

“You’ve seen the Harrison report on Fiddler Key?”

“It’s nothing official. I heard about it. I did a little checking. It doesn’t come from any official governmental source, Mick. It’s just another one of these so-called scientific studies of doom from another one of the ecology freaks.”

“Let me tell you something that’s in that report. It says that if the Silverthorn tract had never been cleared of all its natural growth, and if a great deal of dredging and draglining had not gone on, then the key would have been in a lot less danger of a new pass occurring at that point. The report is out. There are lots of copies. A lot of people have read it. Now you’re a pretty fair practical politician, Billy. Let’s say that Ella, or the storm that follows her, or the one after that, comes ashore out of the Gulf near here. And let us say that the engineer, Sam Harrison, who, by the way, is a very impressive and competent guy, is right, and the pass does
cut through, and ten million dollars’ worth of buildings fall down, with a considerable loss of life, and a special grand jury is appointed to look into the whole mess. They are going to come across that little article I wrote about how the land clearing and burning permit and the permit for some minor work, scouring a channel, were slipped into a long list of dull stuff you read to the commission. They are going to be made aware of the payoffs over several years from Marty Liss to Justin Denniver and company. Would you say it is a fair guess that they are going to haul your ass in front of that grand jury and they are going to tag you with some of those funny words like misfeasance, malfeasance, misprision and plain old common corruption?”

“But the report is nonsense!” Scherbel said in a high thin voice.

Mick Rhoades leveled a finger at him and said slowly, “I believe every single word of it. Every single word. And even if it wasn’t as persuasive as it is, are you in a position to take a chance on standing on the tracks when that kind of a train might be coming? Suppose even one person is killed if the condos fall down? Suppose twenty die? Liss and Traff and Wannover and Denniver and Corbin and Dorsey will be straining in every direction to find some dumb jerk they can nail it on. Could be you. It might fit, pal. It could be you.”

Scherbel shoved the folders aside and took off his glasses and patted his eyes with a Kleenex. He said, “You think you can come in here and …” His voice was listless. “Oh, shit, I don’t know. This goddam job. Neither of those permits should have been granted. I slipped them in. You know that. If they had been considered on their merits, Troy Abel or Wally Wing would have started jumping up and down, and there would have been so much fuss, Jack Dorsey would probably have broken away and gone with Abel and Wing and killed it.”

“Why did you do it?”

“Not for money.”

“That was my guess.”

“You guess pretty good. I went to a conference in Orlando in January, and they set me up with a girl at the bar I thought I was picking up. Cindy Martinez or Fernandez. One of those names. They got an affidavit how I took her to room so-and-so at the Tropic Winds Motel and laid her, and they’ve got a copy of her birth certificate. Everything is notarized. She was fifteen. Hell, I’ve got a daughter seventeen. And my wife, Bets, would leave me if she knew. I couldn’t ever get through life without Bets. I guess I wasn’t flexible enough. So they needed a better handle on me, so they set it up. I didn’t know about it until the first time I wouldn’t go along with what Denniver wanted. That was the permit for scouring an existing channel, when I knew they were going to build a whole yacht basin. So I dragged my feet and they set the hook and gave a good yank, and I went along. I shouldn’t be telling you this.”

“Expect to read it on the front page tomorrow?”

“No. You’ve always been pretty straight with me. I want to be able to … find some way out of all this if the roof does fall in.”