“I’ve put ten thousand dollars aside for expenses.”
“l want to think about it,” I told him. “I’ll be in touch one way or the other.”
So we shook hands around and he went down the ladderway and back to the stern and down the little gangway to the dock. I heard his heels on the cement as I watched him walk off, passing under the dock lights, his long shadow moving and changing with each light.
I went back and sat by Meyer. “So?” he said.
“So. So I know now that I can’t make it doing odd jobs here and there, and if I want to make it, I will have to seek honest work, like in Rob Brown’s Boat Yard. Or with Acme Diving and Salvage. Or working for a yacht broker. Travis McGee, your friendly boat salesman. With a salary, bonuses, and a retirement plan.”
“And,” said Meyer. “on your days off you can sit around here on the houseboat and whine and whinny about how jaded life has become.”
I stared over at him in the darkness. “I have been doing that quite a lot, haven’t I?”
“Not more than I can stand. But enough.”
“What can I tell you? I swam for three hours yesterday, some of it as hard as I could go. I woke up this morning feeling great. Absolutely great. Busting with energy. Know something? I want to get involved in the life and times of Esterland and son. I want to go out and con the people. I want to have to bust a couple of heads here and there and have somebody try to bust mine for me. Why should I feel a little bit guilty about feeling like that, Meyer?”
“Maybe you got so, you were enjoying the ennui.”
“The what?”
“Ennui, you illiterate. That is the restless need for some kind of action without having the outlet for any action at all. It is like weltschmerz.”
“Which, as you have so often told me, is home sickness for a place you have never seen. I miss Gretel, Meyer. God, how I miss her! But she is dead and gone, and the stars are bright and the night wind blows, and the universe is slowly unfolding, revealing its wonders. What was your impression of Ellis Esterland?”
“I did spend a couple of evenings with him. And Miss Renzetti. Not actually out of choice. He wanted to pick my brain, and I his. He wanted to know some of the banking practices in Grand Cayman, and I wanted to know which plastics companies were going to lead the pack in the future, based on new discoveries. What was he like? He tried to give the impression of being bluff and hearty and homespun. But he was a shrewd and subtle man. A good watcher. A good listener. I had no idea he was as sick as they say he was because that had to be-let me think back-two years ago in May, two months before he died.”
“What happened to his lady? Do you know?”
“Anne Renzetti? She stood up to him pretty well. I think he had a habit of bullying his women. I heard that she’s over in Naples, Florida, working in a resort hotel. Mmmm. Eden Beach! Correct.”
“She was in the will?”
“I don’t know, but I would think she was. She had been an employee. When he sold out his plastics company years ago, he set himself up as a management consultant, specializing in chemical and plastics companies, and from what he said I think he must have had a staff of a dozen or so. The offices were in Stamford, Connecticut. When he got sick he sold out and kept the Renzetti woman as a private secretary to help him put his affairs in order. After he was killed, the executor let her live aboard the boat until it was sold.”
I went back to the rail, snuffed the night. No traffic sounds. No surf sounds. Fifty boats away a night woman gave a maniacal cry of laughter, as abrupt and meaningless as the honk of a night-flying bird. I did not trust the rising sense of anticipation I felt. I had tried to fit myself to somberness, to a life of reserve. I had located a couple of boats for people, for a finder’s fee. I had ferried a couple of big ones-a Hatteras over to Mobile, a Pacemaker up to Maryland-and flown back. I’d done some work for one of the brokers, putting bargain boats through their paces for people who wanted to believe how easy it was before making the down payment.
I told myself I had lived in a house of many rooms, but there had been a fire, and it was all charred to hell except for a small attic bedroom. A bed, a chair, a table, and a window. And if anybody wanted to take a shot, I would happily stand in the window.
But you can’t cut your life back like some kind of ornamental shrub. I couldn’t put the old white horse out to pasture, hock the tin armor, stand the lance in a corner of the barn. For a little while, yes. For the healing time.
It was more than economics. I could tell myself I needed the money.. And I did. More than the money, I needed the sense of being myself, full size, undwarfed by my disasters.
I turned to Meyer and said, “I think I could find something where the chance of some kind of recovery would be better.”
“Maybe.”
“Ron Esterland is a little paranoid about the whole situation. He’s got a hang-up about his father. He isn’t thinking clearly.”
“Probably he isn’t.”
“I don’t see what Anne Renzetti would be able to tell me that would be any help at all.”
“Neither do I.”
“Want to ride over to Naples with me?”
“I would enjoy that. Yes.”
“Thanks for talking me into it, Meyer.”
“For a little while I didn’t think I could do it.”
Two
MEYER WAITED in my old blue Rolls pickup while I, talked money and time with Ron Esterland. Then in midmorning on a fine April Saturday, I drove over to Alligator Alley and we went humming westward past the wetlands, the scrub palmetto, the dwarf cypress. Traffic was heavy. Each year the gringos stay down longer. Each year too many of them come down to stay forever. Once the entire state becomes asphalt, high rises, malls, highway, fast food, and littered beaches, they will probably still keep coming.
The computer in one of the basements inside Meyer’s skull predicts an eventual Florida population of thirty-two million folk, and by that time it will level off because it will not be any more desirable to live in Florida than it is to live in Rhode Island or West Virginia.
“What can you remember about Ellis Esterland’s murder?” I asked Meyer. He walked back into his computer room and checked out the right floppy disc and played it back for me.
“On a very hot day Esterland drove up to Citrus City, in River County. That is about a hundred and twenty miles from Fort Lauderdale. Miss Renzetti offered to drive him, but he said he would go alone. She said he was feeling much better that month, even though he was depressed by his daughter’s condition. He did not tell Miss Renzetti why he was going to Citrus City. And nobody ever found out. He was driving a dark gray Lincoln Continental. He had lunch alone at the Palmer Hotel, in the center of the city, and sat in the lobby for a time reading the Wall Street Journal. No one noticed his departure. Apparently he drove his car back over to the Florida Turnpike and stopped at a rest area six miles south of the interchange for Citrus City. A trucker found the body and reported it on CB radio. He was face down on the floor in front of the rear seat with his legs doubled under him. His wallet was on the front seat. His money was gone. Miss Renzetti said he probably had about two hundred dollars with him. He had been severely beaten. Blood beside the car and spattered against it indicated that he had probably been tossed into the back after the beating. Skull fractures, jaw fracture, broken facial bones, broken ribs. Nobody saw anything. No witness ever came forth. There were no clues.”
“I think I was out of town at the time.”
“You were. It was an overnight sensation. DYING MILLIONAIRE SLAIN. KILLED IN HIGHWAY ASSAULT. But it soon became yesterday’s news. Oh, as I remember there was a second little flurry when the terms of his will became known. GIRL IN COMA INHERITS FORTUNE. That sort of thing. I think the headlines called him the Plastics King.”