“Again? Are you kidding me?”
She quickly explained what she had learned and said, “I got it from Sally Ann Lesser, but that’s not for general distribution.”
“Katherine, I could have used you as a staff G-2 in a couple of wars. Those idiots obviously thought they were going to catch us off balance. Can you come here at five o’clock tomorrow?”
“Let me think. Yes, I can make it.”
“Good girl. I’ll see if I can track down some more information on it tomorrow. I’ll call a meeting of the Executive Committee. The big question now is to find out exactly when they’re going to make their first move, and then we’ll know how much time we have.”
“Maybe... we can’t stop it this time.”
“Why not?”
“These are local men, Tom. They’ll have things pretty much all their own way.”
“Don’t be such a defeatist, Katherine. Of course we’ll whip them, just as we did before. Last time we whipped them in the very first round, the public hearing. We’ll try to do the same thing this time, but if we don’t, there are a lot more things we can do. Remember? We’ll get it into the courts and we’ll stall them until they give it up as a bad job. All we’ll have to do is maintain a united front. I imagine there’ll be some new pressures on our membership this time, local in origin, so it’ll be up to us to keep the membership in line. I promise you one thing, Katherine, I’ll never look out this window at Grassy Bay and see dredges out there.”
After she had hung up it took almost a half hour for the hearty confidence of the colonel’s voice to lose its persuasion. She recalled Van’s sour comment on Tom Jennings. “That’s the type who’d lead the Light Brigade up the wrong ravine, yelling ‘Charge!’ and grinning like an idiot.”
But at the end Van had to admit Tom had organized it well.
It seemed a pity it had to be done all over again.
She finished her letter to her sister in Burlington, sealed it and put it where she would be certain to see it on her way out in the morning. She read two pages of a book and put it aside. She turned the television set on and searched the channels and turned it off. She walked back and forth through the silence of the house in a restlessness all too familiar.
When she went into her bedroom the arrangement of her cosmetics on the top of her dressing table did not look quite right to her. She examined it more closely and saw that several jars and bottles were not as she had left them. It had been Frosty, of course. She examined a lipstick and found it worn down in a manner different from the way she had left it. Balled tissue stained with the same shade was in the bottom of her wastebasket. She was surprised at the extent of her own irritation, and tried to tell herself it was a perfectly normal thing for any fifteen-year-old girl to do.
But somehow having Frosty do it made it less palatable. She did not like Frosty, or Frosty’s seventeen-year-old brother, Jigger, or the twelve-year-old sister, Debbie Louise. They were all superbly healthy, beautifully coordinated children, pale blonds with dark-blue eyes. Toward all adults they exhibited a watchful, impenetrable politeness which somehow had a false flavor, as though it were a mask for a contemptuous amusement. More than any other teenagers she knew, they seemed to confirm the assumption of the marketing experts that this was a new and separate race, a special people with only limited contact with the adult world.
It seemed too simple, somehow, to say they were spoiled. There had always been the pocket money in whatever quantity they seemed to need, and the use of the family charge accounts. Burt Lesser certainly imposed no disciplines on them. He was a big soft balding man with such mild indefinite features that he could be caricatured by drawing an egg and putting heavy black glasses frames on it. He dressed more formally than most of the businessmen in Palm City. He had a loud methodical baritone laugh which he used either too soon or too late, and generally too often. Burt had obtained his realtor’s license soon after they had moved down from Wisconsin, fifteen years ago, the same year Sally Ann had received the final and most massive installment on her inheritance. Through a sweaty, earnest, fumbling diligence he had managed to do quite well at the trade. And Sally Ann had done well too, by buying in her own name those investment bargains which came up from time to time. Burt was an active workhorse member of a wide range of civic organizations.
There were those who said you just had to admire ol’ Burt for the way he gets out and digs when, as far as the money is concerned, he could lay right back and take it easy.
But one night, on the Lessers’ patio, while Van was still alive, Sally Ann, at one of the rare times when she was conspicuously in her cups, had given what was probably an accurate explanation. Somebody had been kidding Burt, asking him when he was going to retire. “Retire, for chrissake!” Sally Ann had roared. “As long as he can walk and talk, he’s going to have an office to go to. I told him when I married him he wasn’t going to clutter up the house all day long. That was the deal. It would drive me nuts having him around here trying to wait on me so he could feel useful.” Burt had laughed, but it had been a hollow effort.
On reflection it seemed to Kat that Burt Lesser was an unlikely person to be heading up this new Palmland Development Company. He did not seem sufficiently directed, or properly ruthless. But he was well known and his reputation was good.
She was in bed by eleven-thirty. After she turned her light out, she stared wide-eyed into the darkness and kept trying new positions, hoping to find one which would relax her. When it was quarter after twelve by her bedside clock she gave up and took one of the green capsules Ray Coplon had prescribed for her. In a little while the familiar feeling of the drug began. The black world began to expand, moving out and back and away from her, leaving her smaller and smaller and smaller in an enormous bed — small and silky and dwindling away.
Four
It was nine-thirty when Jimmy Wing arrived at the home of County Commissioner Elmo Bliss, three miles east of the city line, out on the Lemon Ridge Road. It was a huge old frame house, and Elmo had put a lot of money into modernization over the past few years. The house, and how he had acquired it, had become part of the legend, and had suffered distortions as had most other parts of the legend.
Jimmy Wing often caught himself in the act of exaggerating the man’s past. Elmo had that inexplicable capacity to seem just a little more thoroughly alive than anyone else. Now, in his early forties, he looked like a leaner and younger version of Jimmy Hoffa, but with a roan-brown brush cut, and that tough sallow cracker skin the sun can’t mark, and eyes of a clear pale dangerous gray. He had Hoffa’s abrupt charm, his uncomical arrogance, and the same air of absolute certainty, diluted not at all by the back-country drawl, a lazier way of moving. In the past few years Elmo had settled on the kind of clothing he would wear for all except the most formal occasions. He wore slacks and sports shirts in plain colors, in dull hues of gray, blue and green, all in an understated western cut, along with pale hats which were never quite ranch hats, but gave a subtle outdoor-man impression.
Jimmy Wing knew the bare outlines of the story, and it always pleased him to be able to add little incidents which had the flavor of truth. He came from a large clan noted over the years for the frequency of their trouble with the law, as well as a casual inbreeding which did the stock no good. Poachers, commercial fishermen, guides, ’gator hunters, brawlers. But Elmo was the one who became an All-State wingback, and picked the best deal out of all the scholarship offers and went on to Georgia. When Jimmy had begun senior high, Elmo had been gone three years, but the legends still circulated in the high school.