Meyer nodded at me approvingly. Warner Housell took notes. “Now then,” he said, “are you aware of any threat on your life as a result of the Santiago conference? Any threat, no matter how indirect?”
“I didn’t expect any, so I really wasn’t being observant. No strange letters, phone calls, confrontation. Nothing.”
“Mr. Service, for reasons of his own, considers this a fruitless line of interrogation. Your turn, Mr. Service.”
Rowland Service took out a small notebook and, in silence, leafed through page after page, his forehead furrowed. It is a tiresome device.
“What is your source of income, Dr. Meyer?”
“Please, I do not like doctor used as a form of address except for brain surgeons and such. I am used to being called Meyer. My income comes from lecturing, from consultant work, and from dividends, interest, and capital gains from my investments.” He snapped his ferret head around to stare at me from those two pale close-together eyes. “And you, sir?”
“Me what?”
“What is your source of income?”
“A little of this and a little of that.”
“Impertinence makes me uncomfortable, MeGee.”
“Me too, Service.”
Housell broke in. “Please, let me explain what he’s trying to establish-”
“Damn it, I’ll ask my own questions!”
“After I explain the background. Two organizations in Washington have contacts within the underground groups in Chile, with information contacts arranged through our embassy. The regime has an information network as well. Mr. Service here spent most of yesterday and yesterday evening drawing a complete and total blank not only on the so-called Liberation Army of the Chilean People but on any antipathy toward any economist who attended the Santiago conference three years ago. Things have quieted down a great deal there. There has been enough economic progress to make people look with more favor on the generals. Within the context of everything those groups know, the attack upon Dr. Meyer here is incomprehensible to them. And so the-”
“I’ll take it,” Service said. “The way we see it, that phone call claiming responsibility was a cover story, intended to mislead. It is far more likely that the explosion was connected to the drug traffic that has proliferated along the Florida coast.”
Meyer set his coffee aside and stared at the man. “Drug traffic!” he said incredulously. “Drug traffic! My niece was a respected geologist who worked for-”
“Don’t get agitated. She checked out clean as a whistle. We are wondering about her husband”-he turned a page in his notebook and read off the names-“Evan Lawrence, and the boat captain, Dennis Hackney Jenkins, a.k.a. Hacksaw Jenkins.”
“Not likely in either case,” I said. “Evan Lawrence came over here with his wife from Houston because she wanted to have him meet her uncle, her only living blood relation. Hacksaw was a successful charterboat captain. He had a long list of people who wouldn’t fish with anybody else. He had a talent for finding fish. He kept that fishing machine of his in fine shape at all times. He was booked solid every season at premium rates. Once upon a time he was a professional wrestler. Once upon a time he spent a year in a county jail. He was raised down in the Keys. There are dozens and dozens of Jenkinses there, all related to him. He settled down when he met Gloria. He was fifty a couple of months ago. I went to the birthday party. They have three sons. The youngest is fifteen. Neither Hack nor the kids would be into drugs in any way, shape, or form.”
The ferret looked bleakly at me. “We’ll check all that out, of course.”
The big florid staff person said, “Please forgive my temporary associate here. He has an unfortunate manner.”
“I’m here to do my job,” Service said, “not beat the bushes for votes.”
“Do it elsewhere,” Meyer said.
They both looked at him. “What was that?” Service asked.
“That was the end of cooperation. No more questions and no more answers. End of interview. Leave.”
“I know all about you high-level experts,” Service said angrily. “Next time you come sucking around the government for a consultant contract, maybe you’ll find-”
Housell stood up abruptly. “Come on, Rowland, for God’s sake. You’re acting like a jackass.”
“And you don’t know the first thing about interrogation!” Service yelled.
Housell led him off, still protesting, and turned to smile apologetically at us. The door closed. The bell bonged as they stepped on the mat at the head of my little gangway to the dock. Meyer went over to the galley and poured himself fresh coffee. I saw the cup tremble slightly as he lifted it to his lips for a cautious sip.
He sat and frowned down into the cup. “I wanted them out of here so I could think. They were a distraction.”
“An incompetent distraction?”
“That too.” He sipped again and set the cup aside. “Of course it could have something to do with drugs. Somebody cheated somebody or, turned them in, and a bomber was hired and he hit the wrong boat. But the anonymous phone call rules that out. The caller knew my name. I’m thinking out loud, using rusty equipment, Travis. Forgive me.”
“Keep going.”
“The phone call came about eight minutes after the explosion. So the caller knew it was going to happen and had a vantage point where he could watch for it and then make his call. So the explosive had to be placed just before Hack took the boat out.”
“I’d agree with that.”
“If the caller knew that much about what was going on, wouldn’t he have known I wasn’t aboard?”
“Reasonable assumption.”
“Then the call was intended to deflect attention from the real motive and the real victim. Somebody wanted to kill Hack, or Evan Lawrence, or Norma. So there was one victim and two innocent bystanders, not three.”
“Hack Jenkins?”
“It’s possible, I suppose,” he said. “I keep wondering why he wanted to go on out into that chop.”
“While you were in Toronto, Hack took them outside after fish. Your niece developed a taste for it. She and Evan were good sailors. Some of it was in fairly heavy weather, so I guess Hack learned how much the Keynes could take, and he had some confidence in the boat. If he had word there was something working a little way out into deep water, I think Evan and Norma, especially Norma, would have urged him to take a shot at it and then come running back in if it started to get a little too rough.”
“She really liked it?” he said, eyebrows raised.
“Hack put them into some small tarpon about two days after you left. She hooked a forty-pounder that jumped into the cockpit green, smashed a tackle box, and flipped on out again, and she managed to keep it on the line and bring it to gaff. She told me all about it, with lots of gestures, lots of energy. So, I can understand his heading out past the buoy.”
“Evan liked it too?”
“Whatever Norma wanted was fine with him.”
“It seemed like a good marriage,” Meyer said. “Never knew what hit them. Hell of a phrase, isn’t it? Nothing can happen so fast that there is not a micro-instant of realization. Each nerve cell in the brain can make contact with three hundred thousand other cells, using its hundreds of branches, each branch with hundreds of terminals, and with electrical impulses linking cell to cell. Ten trillion cells, Travis, exchanging coded information every instant. The brain has time to release the news of its own dissolution, time to factor a few questions about why, what, who… and what is happening to me? Perhaps a month of mortal illness is condensed into one thousandth of a second, insofar as self-realization is concerned. We’re each expert in our own death.”
And I knew that strange last statement was correct. We’re experts. We get it done the first time we try it. And we spend too much time thinking about it before we do it.