John D MacDonald - Barrier Island Page 2

  "Just like I've done a couple thousand times before."

  He started the inboard-outboards as she went forward. As he eased up toward the hook, he realized how pleased he was with Wilbur Barley's reaction. Right from the first contact, there had been the possibility that they were trying to set him up. Bribing a federal officer. A pilot with a telephoto lens. But little oP chubby Wilbur had come through like a champion. Helen's sudden appearance had been the stress test. Because, had it been a trap, Barley would have realized at once that the woman could give false information in an affidavit that would cause the jaws of the trap to snap shut on air. Wilbur would have had to be a first-class theatrical actor to handle it the way he did.

  And, in addition to his help this time, you never knew when you might like to have somebody well placed in Wilbur's spot for anything else that might come up in the future. There were people here and there in Jackson and Biloxi and Washington who had come to like doing favors for Tuck Loomis and having favors done in return. That was the way you got to sit in the owner's box to watch the game.

  He saw Helen lean and lift the hook out of the water, careful to keep it away from the hull. She lifted the small forward hatch and stowed it. When she stepped back down into the cockpit, he pushed both throttles forward and when the boat was on the plane, he pulled the throttles back and balanced them off at twenty-eight hundred.

  She stood beside him, a hand on his shoulder. "I suppose I shouldn't ask what that was all about, huh?" She had to lean close to him and speak loudly over the engine roar.

  "You suppose exactly right."

  "It's the condemnation on Bernard Island, isn't it?"

  "I don't like smartass women."

  "Like you told that Barley, you can trust old Helen."

  He smiled up at her. "I sure can, little buddy. If I didn't have a good lock on you, you wouldn't have been out here at all."

  "What kind of a lock?"

  "I don't mean I've got something I can hold over your head. It's just that we had a good time together and we parted friends and stayed friends. Okay? You're my buddy, aren't you? My old pal?"

  "I guess so. Sure. Why not?"

  "You don't sound all eager and happy."

  "Should I? Hell, I don't know. My life doesn't seem to go anyplace at all lately. Not since Cordell died."

  Every time she mentioned his death, her mind slipped back into the same old groove, like a repeating track worn in a record. Cordell Strange had been hurrying back home to her from a meeting in Gulfport, and going so damned fast in a light rain in that stupid Trans Am he was outrunning his headlights. And he came upon a big dead dog in his lane that someone else had hit. He swerved and lost it and went a hundred feet off the highway before he smashed head-on into an old cypress. Somebody had phoned in to have the dog pulled off the road, and when a state policeman got there and got out of his car he heard the tape still playing in the Trans Am and he went looking and found Cordell in the car, all crushed and dead.

  She examined all of it every time it went through her head. If only this. If only that. If only the other thing.

  "I shouldn't get sour with you, Tuck. I guess you were good for me. I needed somebody. Everything in the world turned so flat, you know? You were very sweet and I appreciated it. Of course, you can be mean as a snake too. But I don't know, I think when Cordell hit the tree I lost my luck. It wasn't a good move to marry Buddy Yoder. I think you tried to tell me that, Tuck."

  "All I think I told you, if I remember, I kindly told you that Hubbard Yoder, Attorney at Law, ain't too playful."

  "Well, it's over. He doesn't think it is but it is. I don't know what's wrong with me. I'm doing pretty good. I'm making money. This afternoon I'm showing the old Crown house to some people who want to turn it into one of those bed and breakfast places, very elegant, like the best in England. I've worked up all the figures on it and I know what they have to come up with to make it bankable, and I worked up all the expenses they'll run into including the rezoning, and I had Jeanie run off a pie chart on the PC. It's very nice-looking. I think I've got a good chance. This is the third time I'll have been over it with them. They want to dicker the commission, but there's a place I won't go lower than. I figure I'll net ten or eleven thousand out of the deal, and I bet you've put in a hundred hours on that sucker so far. I have some leverage on them because I had them put up five hundred nonreturnable on a two-month option so nobody would steal it out from under them, and I had one hell of a job talking old Mrs. Crown's legal guardian into taking such small money. Hey, I'm getting hoarse yelling at you, Tuck. And you don't want to hear all this dreary stuff anyway. Who's that coming?"

  "Looks like Jersey Joe in the African Queen. Yeah. He'll e going fifty or sixty miles out working red snapper. Even " he's into a million of them, another boat shows on the horizon, he pulls up and moves. Joe don't share. He's got eight stations for those big electric reels of his."

  "So excuse me," she said and went below.

  They passed close enough to wave. Soon the mainland shore was in view, and Loomis made a course correction to hit the markers at the mouth of Alden Bay and the Alden Kiver. His most successful residential housing development was six miles up the river. Parklands, a two-thousand-acre complex northeast of West Bay. He went up the narrow channel dead slow against the current, enjoying the look of the old trees with the beards of moss, the gentle roll of the countryside, the children of summer playing in the river and n the Fawns. He liked the summer smell of the land, a hot and slightly acrid fragrance. His headache was gone.

  Soon he was inside Parklands, heading for the yacht club, Passing the elegant homes on both sides of the river. Gate guards, large lots, golf course, country club, tennis courts. He Was comfortably aware of the five hundred acres of land not yet subdivided and marketed. Money in the bank. Parklands was the best address within miles of West Bay. All the bankers and lawyers and doctors and politicians. Fred Pittman and Colonel Barkis had been in with him on that one, right from the beginning. Big plans. Big loans. It had started strong and then after the first year it began to stall out. And the interest had begun to eat them up.

  Fred and the Colonel had lost their confidence in the Parklands project. They kept at him all the time about spending too much money. But he knew it would work. And he wished he had the money to buy them out. He tried to borrow it. He tried to talk them into taking his personal notes. But then the project began to pick up, began to move, began to prove itself out. He had learned to handle his deals by himself from then on. Except, of course, when you wanted to cut somebody into something nice, just as a favor for a good friend.

  At the weekly poker sessions with Pink Derks, Sam Loudner, Woodrow Daggs, Warner Ellenson, Fred Pittman and the Colonel, he could detect a new quality of cordiality and respect, quite unlike the coolness he had sensed when it looked to the others but not to him as though Parklands was going down the big tube. He enjoyed the change of attitude. He had been the new boy in the group, a little bit out of place with the men representing the biggest bank, the biggest construction company, the biggest law firm and the political structure. But Parklands bought him his legitimate membership, and they had begun to solicit his opinions on local development and the probable direction of the population expansion.

  Smiling to himself, he eased the Thelma III into her slip, cut the engines and tossed the lines to the boy who came running down from the dockmaster's office.

  TWO

  The Monday morning staff meeting at Rowley/Gibbs Associates was over by ten-fifteen. After their people had filed out, Wade Rowley stayed in Bern Gibbs' big corner office, behind the closed door, after sending Dawn Marino, Bern's secretary, back out to her desk.

  Bern sat at his big slab desk, chair tilted back, fingers laced at the nape of his neck, heels propped on the desk corner. The collar of his white shirt was unbuttoned, his tie pulled down. He was a lean man with a narrow face and a sailor's tan. He had thick black hair brushed back to cover the top half of h
is ears, and trained to loop across his forehead to hide the receding hairline. His eyes were a bright and startling green. Except for a recent thickness around the middle, he looked fit. His sleeves were rolled halfway up his wiry, hairy forearms.

  "That Beth's red Toyota out there?" Bern asked.

  "The air quit yesterday and the wear on the front left is bad, cupping the tire. So Wally will pick it up and get it back here by five." Wade sat in the secretarial chair at the end of the desk, where Dawn always sat to take notes on the meeting. Wade Rowley was a big fair-skinned man with a bland, stolid, mid-American face, a John Denver face. His light brown hair was habitually tousled, combed forward into an uneven fringe of bangs. His eyes were brown. He moved slowly and often looked sleepy. Today he wore a white guayabera and blue seersucker slacks. He rested his forearms on the end of the desk. "Not too bad of a report for the middle of July, partner."

  "I like that Yoder sale on the Crown place. If it goes through okay."

  "A hundred thousand earnest money in front indicates sincerity," Wade said. "And like Helen said, she's been working on it for months, doing the research they should have done. I've talked to them twice. If they work at it, they'll make some money. But I get the feeling they're not going to cut it. They've both always worked for other people and their wives haven't worked at all. More restaurants go broke than anything else in the world."

  Bern yawned. "We don't have to worry about it. We get ours out of the front money. Let the bank sweat it."

  "I'll worry. Because I always worry about things like that. I'll see them on the street and I'll worry. And what's new with you?"

  "Funny thing. I had lunch Saturday with Bill Glover. We're the entertainment committee for the Lions this coming year. He lives out there at Parklands. He and Hilda get in a lot of early tennis. Okay, they were playing Friday morning and the court they were on isn't too far from the yacht club docks. He saw Tuck Loomis' little boat come in. Tuck tied it up and then he walked around to the parking area and pretty soon he showed up again back near the dock in an old blue and white Chevy van. And pretty soon Helen Yoder came scrambling out of the boat with some kind of blue clothes over her arm, popped into the van and yelped the tires in a big hurry to get out of there. Didn't they used to see a lot of each other?"

  "For a little while, I think. Back before she married Buddy. Not long after Cordell got himself killed. What are you getting at?" Wade asked.

  "I don't know. Bill said it was kind of a sneaky scene."

  Wade shrugged. "They're grown-up people. Buddy and Helen are separated. Tuck is a stud. He and Helen probably ran into each other at that Thursday night benefit at the Parklands Yacht Club, had a couple of drinks and took a boat ride."

  Bern sighed and said, "If it wasn't, like they say, too close to the flagpole, I'd like to get me some of that. The young kids are too jumpy. Ol' Helen looks like she'd settle right down to it. A real worker." Bern stared at Wade and then shook his head and laughed. "I talk like that and you always get that look on your face. You some kind of prude, partner?"

  "Only when it comes down to the people working for us."

  "So pardon me all to hell."

  "Who was it came up with the plan to get Mrs. Karp out of that condo?"

  "ToVn Hatchuk told me it was Joyce's idea. Everybody has been trying to solve the woman's problem. Mrs. Karp's deal is one of the reasons we fired Chuck. He shoved her in there way over her head. So Joyce said maybe Freedom Federal would deal. She owed eighty on it. Tom went to Al Wescowitz at Freedom and asked him what he'd take in cash to get out of it, and dickered him down to sixty-eight thousand, with a cancellation of the back interest. Then Tom went to Mr. Knight, told him he had a good tenant lined up, told him the new price, and Knight bought it on spec for seventy-five cash money. Freedom got paid off and Mrs. Karp got off the hook. Because this agency got her into that mess, we swallowed the commission."

  "Tom too?"

  "One thousand for creative thinking. Plus he makes a little off the rental. But if it's okay with you, I want to give Joyce Kindred a little bonus for a good idea."

  "I think we should."

  "You know, Wade, these Monday meetings make me kind of uneasy."

  "You keep telling me that."

  "I don't want to stop them. They keep everybody in touch with what the others are doing. A lot of good ideas get bounced around. But you never handle the meeting."

  "You're good at it."

  "Okay, pal, we each own half the stock in this here Chapter S corporation, and here I am with the big corner office, and I handle the meeting and I sign the paychecks."

  "And it works fine, doesn't it?"

  "Sometimes I get a little pissed. You sit over there in the corner and keep your mouth shut, and when somebody brings something up they're not sure they should, they beat around the bush and they keep glancing over at you to see how you're taking it. If you start frowning they back off, and if you give one of those little nods of yours, then they charge ahead. I mean I'm handling the meeting but I'm not in charge."

  "We're both in charge, Bern. Sometimes I veto you and sometimes you veto me. That's why it works out okay."

  "That's why it used to work out."

  This, Wade knew, was uncomfortable ground, to be traversed with great care. "I think we've both been a little bit tense lately."

  "Just tell me one time when I vetoed you."

  "On the Bernard Island deal."

  "That was over a year ago."

  "And I still think we made a mistake."

  "It was a nice little gold mine while it lasted. Tell me what's wrong."

  "Yesterday morning early I went out with Tod in the Whaler after specs. Flat calm. We worked the grass flats out near Petit Bois and did pretty good, and then as the sun got higher and the tide changed, they stopped biting."

  "How's Tod doing?"

  "He's enjoying being sixteen. Says it is a lot older than fifteen. And he's catching up okay in summer school. Anyway, I decided we could take a look at Bernard Island. We pulled the Whaler up on the sand at the west end and we waded all the way around the island. Well, not all the way. It drops off pretty deep out there at the southeast by the old high dunes, so we went ashore and walked by that part. We found a lot of the stakes Tuck's surveyors put in. Galvanized pipe with a red ribbon streamer on the top, and lot numbers in black paint on the side of the pipe. Lot of bugs out there, Bern. And a lot of lonesome. So quiet all you could hear was all those bugs and peepers shrilling away. How many lots were actually deeded?"

  "Let me make sure." Bern opened the middle drawer of his desk and took out a yellow legal pad. He leafed back through several pages. "Here we are. Seventy-four. That doesn't mean that many buyers. Almost all of them took two half-acre lots."

  "What's the most expensive one we've processed?"

  "Two hundred and ten thousand for a full acre. A high piece, near the marina."

  "Got the total so far?"

  "Five-point-one-eight mil. Which at one-and-a-half percent negotiated commission is seventy-seven thousand seven hundred dollars for this splendid organization called

  Rowley/Gibbs Associates."

  "I stood there in warm water halfway to my knees, Bern, and I looked north and I couldn't see any part of the mainland. Not any part of it. And then I thought about water supply, sewage disposal, fire and police protection, dumb stuff like that. And I thought about the dredging that would have to happen before barges loaded with building supplies could get close enough to unload onto the island. I thought about grocery shopping and health care and all the permissions Loomis would have to get. Don't you think about things like that? Ever?"

  "Every time I read one of those big think pieces in the Courier Journal by your old pal Brud Barnes. Otherwise not too often, partner. Developers are visionaries. They take big risks to make big profits. Name of the game, isn't it? Listen, Tuck has good contacts with a lot of rich people here and in Florida and Alabama and Louisiana. Rich people like seclusio
n. There'll be a little airstrip and a helicopter pad on the island. He's going to use some kind of new Swedish waste disposal system. He's going to generate his own electric. All those things are his problems, not ours. A lot of people thought Parklands was a bad idea. Look at it now. He's a responsible man, Wade. He's done a lot for this area."

  "I've got some more questions."

  "It figures. I've heard them before, right?"

  "He has qualified people working for him. He's got his own broker's license. He could have processed all these deeds. How come he made us a gift of seventy-seven thousand?"

  "I guess his people were busy on other things. Or he didn't want to be bothered."

  "If those buyers are so rich, why did they pay him such tiny little down payments?"

  "Didn't you read the fine print? Interest and mortgage payments start when all the required permits have been granted, and the first phase of road construction starts. If the project can't be started, the down payments are returned with ten percent interest."