“The thing is, she had a knack of sensing what was pertinent information and what was junk. With all the pertinent data in the computer, it could draw you a map of the subsurface structures that was clean and pretty, without anomalies that give you questionable areas. Norma put us out front of a whole mob of little exploration companies. She could take the series of computer maps and go into a trance, dreaming of what the earth was like at that place once upon a time, and she’d put down a little red circle with an N inside it. Her mark. Drill here. Or she would throw the whole thing out. There’s no big demand for dry holes, she’d say.
“Hell, we got a lot of other benefits from the data processing. We never lose track of a lease rental payment. We’re right now revamping the software to catch up with the changes in the WPT. We got all the payout status reports up to date. And we do our own econometric studies. But keeping track of all the nuts and bolts is housekeeping. Using computer technology to process information about, what might be a couple of miles underground, and draw maps of it, that was her contribution, and she came in for a percentage of every well after payout, a certain percent for the ones she worked on and smaller for the others, and for the development wells based on her original recommendation. Having that engineering under her belt gave her a practical base for all the rest of it.”
“I understand her percentages stop now?” Meyer said
“You sound like you disapprove. You don’t understand the picture. I’m not running a farm team to train people for the seven sisters to snatch up. It’s all spelled out. She came in with her eyes open. The longer good people stay, the more they make. If they quit, their percentages go back into the pot. If they retire, they keep the percentages until they die, provided they have at least fifteen years in. In case of accidental death, there’s the insurance, and the percentages keep on going for the full calendar year following the year of death, payable to the heirs. So you’ll make out okay. Not to worry.”
Meyer seemed to swell visibly. He said in a very quiet gritty voice, “I never approve or disapprove of practices with which I am not familiar. I would suspect that when a person becomes contentious and defensive about a given practice, without cause, then there could be reason to doubt either its efficacy or its morality. I did not come here to learn how I would ‘make out,’ as you put it. I. came here to see if you could give us any useful information about Evan Lawrence. Mr. McGee and I are quite convinced he killed my niece. If we are ever to find him, we must learn more about him.”
Dexter stood up from the corner of his desk and stared at Meyer and then at me. “Jesus H. Jumping Christ!” he whispered. “Killed Norma? For the money? Jesus, if he stuck with her,. in ten more years she’d be spilling money on the way to the bank. Talk about killing the goose!”
Then he made a funny little bow to Meyer. “Excuse me. I had you all wrong. I thought a band of nuts tried to blow you up but got Norma and her husband by accident. I thought you were here to find out how much you were going to get. In my line of work, there are a lot of people who spend all their time trying to find out how much they are going to get. They generally get less than if they spent less time thinking about it. What did that husband do? Blow up a stand-in?”
“Good guess,” Meyer said. “No part of any body was recovered. In a photo taken moments before the explosion, from another boat, Norma and Captain Jenkins are recognizable and the third person has been identified, but not officially, as a hired mate. Authorities can find no trace of any such terrorist organization. Of course, there could be an international organization with a compulsion to kill economists, an urge I would find understandable, if not sympathetic.”
Meyer startled me. It was almost the very first glimmer of humor I had detected in a year, and it came at an unexpected time and place.
“But you do have more to go on than what you’ve told me?”
“Just behavior patterns. But convincing,” Meyer said.
“I think I told you what I know about the husband. A pleasant guy. Maybe not very motivated. Maybe twelve years older than Norma, maybe less. He seemed like the kind of person who makes lots of friends and has lots of contacts. A salesman type. He had a good laugh. I decided he’d make a pretty good husband for Norma. That is, if she had to have a husband.”
“Any distinguishing marks or characteristics?” I asked. “We had dinner with the two of them aboard my houseboat, and we can’t come up with anything. Maybe five-ten-and-a-half or -eleven. Close to two hundred. But pretty good shape. Brown hair, receding a little. Green eyes, I think. Nose a little crooked. Plenty of tan. Good teeth.”
“Big hands on him,” Dexter said. “Real big. Thick wrists. Big bone structure. Spoke some Mexican.”
“We know how they met,” I said. “If he swindled her out of her money and killed her, he’ll make himself hard to find. We want to go down his back trail and see if we can turn up anything. We need a good picture of him. We thought maybe somebody at the wedding took some.”
He called a plump woman in from the outer office and asked her.
She remembered that one of the women in the office had taken a lot of pictures of the ceremony. Her name was Marlane Hoffer, and she lived with a friend in a little apartment in the Post Oak area. She went out and typed the name, address, and phone number and brought it in and gave it to Meyer.
Marlane was on the third floor of a new nondescript apartment building a block off Westheimer Road, behind the Galleria development area. Marlane’s friend checked us through the peephole lens and rattled the lock chain. He was a big man with long hairy legs. He wore short running pants and an unbuttoned yellow shirt. A slab of brown belly bulged over the top of the running pants. He had a big head and a lot of brown hair and blond beard.
As soon as he let us in he turned and bawled, “Marl! It’s the guys about the pictures. Marl!”
“Okay, okay,” yelled a voice from behind a closed door.
She came out in a few minutes in a floor-length white terry beach robe, her hair turbaned in a blue terry towel. She was a small woman with a pert, friendly face. The friend had gone over to an alcove off the living room and was stretched out watching automobiles racing somewhere, noisily.
She spoke over the roar of engines. “I want to go down to the pool, but he says it’s too hot. Here’s the pictures I took. I didn’t do so great with them. What I got, it’s this Pentax he used to use until he got a Nikon, and he never explained all the buttons so I could understand.”
We stood and looked at the pictures together. There was one where she had evidently tried to get them both in a closeup. It was an outdoor shot, under some trees. In that picture Evan was looking directly into the camera, with a slightly startled expression. Norma was beyond him, out of focus.
“It was in this sort of garden out behind a restaurant, a really great place to get married. The food was absolutely delicious, and I kind of busted loose on the wine. They said it was Spanish champagne, but what do I know? Look, take the whole thing. She was my friend and now she’s dead and I don’t want her picture around, okay?”
“If you’re really sure you don’t…” Meyer said.
“You can bet your ass I’m sure. You, being her uncle, I can understand how you’d want pictures. But she wasn’t one of my best friends, you understand? It’s a hell of a thing, dying on a honeymoon. But there you are.” She whirled and yelled, “Can’t you turn that shitty noise down?”
“You don’t like it, go out in the hall!” he yelled. We thanked her and left. Through the closed doors, as we walked toward the stairs, we could hear her squalling at him and him roaring back. I made sure we had the negatives, including the one of Evan. “Now we find a good lab,” I said.