Then I had the feeling he had run down. He had pre-planned the airport pickup, the ride, getting me settled, taking me to the mall. But it ended there. He had no key for the rewind.
“How is it going?” I asked.
“Going?”
“Cleaning up her affairs.”
“Well, there is a will. Everything comes to me. She didn’t get around to changing it. She previously changed the beneficiary when my sister died.”
“Is there much involved?”
“It-it seems to be complicated.”
“Okay. So you don’t want to talk about it. Okay.”
“No, Travis. It’s not that. I don’t want to compromise what you might think by telling you in advance what I think.”
“In advance of what?”
“I made an appointment for us with Roger Windham.”
“Her lawyer?”
“At three o’clock in his office in the Houston Trust Building.”
“Let’s cover a couple of things first,” I said. “Take a good close look at this.” I handed him the Kodacolor print.
He looked at it and gave me a puzzled look. “So?”
“Take a closer look at the man’s hand.”
His eyebrows lifted in surprise. “Good Lord! I remember Pogo telling me how he lost those fingers. He was boating a mako, and a loop in the wire leader slipped around his fingers just as the shark shook his head for the last time. Nipped them right off. Now I can see that it really is Pogo. In the picture in the paper I thought-”
“So did I. Then I wondered if maybe Evan Lawrence had been below when that woman took the picture. I tried to check it out. I went to the gas dock over at Pier Sixty-six. I went from boat to boat along Charterboat Row. Here is my best guess. Evan Lawrence was-handy. He caught on quickly. There was no need for the expense of a mate aboard when Hack took Evan and Norma out. In the rough chop out beyond the sea buoy Hack would want to stay at the wheel. So when Evan couldn’t make it, he hired Pogo. Norma was hooked on game fish. If Evan wasn’t feeling too great I don’t think she would have stayed ashore in some motel room just to hold his hand, even if it was a belated honeymoon. So with no proof at all, it is my belief that Evan didn’t get blown to bits. He seemed like such a hell of a nice man, it’s hard to take the next logical step.”
“He arranged to blow up my boat.”
“Exactly. And living aboard for a couple of weeks, he had a chance to go through your papers and come up with that Chilean connection to use as a red herring. Why did you jump an the idea so quick and easy Meyer?”
“You’ll know after you hear Windham.”
I waited until it became obvious he wasn’t going to say any more. So then I gave him the next chapter, about Hack Jenkins giving the boatyard, Dalton and Forbes, thirty-eight thousand in advance to turn the HooBoy into a fifty-mile-an-hour bomb, and it would be finished within a week.
“Young Dave came to me with the information. He was very upset. Couldn’t see his daddy mixed up in drug running.”
“Can you?” Meyer asked.
“I don’t know. I don’t know what pressure could have been brought to bear against him. Maybe he was tired of seeing his friends making it big. But the thing that bothers me there is that his friends make out pretty well using the same old slow fishing machines, just by knowing their way around the area.”
“It doesn’t sound like Hack. He was about the best in the whole marina,” Meyer said. He shrugged. “On the other hand, these are the days when people are turning strange. Doing things they never thought they would do.”
The food was better than I had any right to expect. Walking back through the mall to the exit nearest our part of the parking lot, we passed one shop which sold computers, printers, software, and games. It was packed with teenagers, the kind who wear wire rims and know what the new world is about. The clerks were indulgent, letting them program the computers. Two hundred yards away, near the six movie houses, a different kind of teenager shoved quarters into the space-war games, tensing over the triggers, releasing the eerie sounds of extraterrestrial combat. Any kid back in the computer store could have told the combatants that because there is no atmosphere in space, there is absolutely no sound at all. Perfect distribution: the future managers and the future managed ones. Twenty in the computer store, two hundred in the arcade.
The future managers have run on past us into the thickets of CP/M, M-Basic, Cobal, Fortran, Z-80, Apples, and Worms. Soon the bosses of the microcomputer revolution will sell us preprogrammed units for each household which will provide entertainment, print out news, purvey mail-order goods, pay bills, balance accounts, keep track of expenses, and compute taxes. But by then the future managers will be over on the far side of the thickets, dealing with bubble memories, machines that design machines, projects so esoteric our pedestrian minds cannot comprehend them. It will be the biggest revolution of all, bigger than the wheel, bigger than Franklin’s kite, bigger than paper towels.
Eight
DOWNTOWN HOUSTON seemed an empty place on a Friday afternoon. Bulky skyscrapers faced with granite and marble stood in a kind of gloomy silence in the golden smog. There was light traffic, few pedestrians, few stores, a broad deserted public square. Meyer ducked down a ramp into an underground parking garage.
Once we left the garage, I realized why there were so few pedestrians out on the streets. The underground tunnels were cooler and busier. We missed an important sign and had to double back to an intersection before we finally found the elevator bank for the Houston Trust Building.
The law offices of Sessions, Harkavy and Windham were on the twenty-seventh floor. We waited ten minutes on plastic furniture looking at sections of newspaper before Roger Windham’s secretary, a rangy graying redhead, led us back to a small conference room.
Roger Windham was waiting for us. He was tall, in his early thirties, with red-blond bangs, a ragged reddish mustache, pale blue eyes that looked red and irritated. He was in shirt sleeves with a conservative tie, perfectly knotted. I wondered how many ties you could find in downtown Houston when the temperature was over a hundred.
I saw Windham trying to put a label on me as we were introduced, and as we sat in three chairs at the end of the conference table. I manage to look out of place in an office. Too much deep-water tan, too much height, too many knuckles, too many fading scars of past tactical errors and strategic mistakes. Had I come to repair the wiring in the overhead ducts, he would have had not a glimmer of curiosity about me.
Windham opened the folder in front of him, closed it again, and sighed. He scratched a freckled wrist. His shirt sleeves were turned back, midway up the tendoned forearms of the tennis buff.
“As I understand the situation, Mr. McGee, you are here as a friend of the deceased’s uncle.”
“And someone,” I said, “with a lot of curiosity about how it happened to happen.”
“You’re not alone,” he said tiredly. “I’d handled Norma’s legal affairs and advised her on financial matters for probably four years. The longer I knew her, the better I liked her. I must confess to a certain bias in this whole affair. I did not realize what a complete damn fool I had been until all of a sudden I discovered that she was in love with Evan Lawrence, he had moved into her place with her, and they were going to be married. She was one hell of a woman. I didn’t know how far I’d fallen for her until… it was too damn late. I wasn’t planning to tell you this, Dr. Meyer-”
“Please, I am just Meyer. McGee is Travis. You are Roger. We’re talking personal things, so it will be easier without formalities.”
“Okay. Let me give you the financial picture the way it was before she went to Mexico. She was very bright. I guess you knew that already, Meyer. She got her degrees at a tender age. Am Dexter, who is wise in the ways of geologists, snapped her up six years ago. He hired her away from Conoco and talked her into a long-term contract, with a smaller royalty override than she was maybe worth then, and certainly smaller than she was worth at the time… at the time she died.”