When they were back in the car, Betty said, “He sounded awful certain, that old man in there.”
“So let’s add a few knots and get out of here. It would have been fun in Miami, but I wouldn’t want to have to sit it out in a car.”
The gray car, gray as the rain, sped through the moist heavy air. It threw up a great spume of spray behind it. It traveled fast on Route 19. When the winds became strong enough to make the car swerve, Bunny had to slow down.
Chapter 3
Johnny Flagan stood shaving in the light of cold fluorescence in his bathroom. He was a suety man in his fifties, with gingery gray hair surrounding a bald spot the size of a coaster. He had once been a strong man, but the years had run through the puffy body; the years of the cigars and the bourbon and the hotel room parties. There were brown blemishes on his lard-white shoulders and back, a matronly cast to his hips. But all the drive was still there, the hint of harshness.
He was an amiable looking man. Sun and whisky-kept his soft face red. He smiled easily and had the knack of kidding people. He wore round glasses with steel rims, and the glasses were always slipping a little way down his blunt nose, and Johnny Flagan would look over his glasses at you and grin wryly about his morning hangover, and you would never notice that the grin did nothing to change the eyes. The eyes were small and blown and watchful.
If you walked down the street with him, you would soon come to believe that he knew more than half the people in Sarasota.
— But what does he do?
— You mean Johnny Flagan? What does he do? Well, he’s got a lot of interests, you might say. He was in on some pretty good land development stuff on the keys. He’s got a fellow runs a ranch for him down near Venice. Santa Gertrudis stock, it is. He’s got a piece of a juice plant over near Winter Haven. Then he’s director on this and that. And he’s got some kind of interest in savings and loan stuff. Hell, Old Johnny keeps humping.
— Successful and honest, I suppose.
— Successful, sure. You understand, I’m not a fellow to talk about anybody. Gossip. That kind of thing. But you go throwing around that word honest, and there’s a lot of people got different ideas of what it means. Johnny’s a sharp one. I don’t think he ever in his whole life done anything he could get hisself jailed for, but you get on the other end of a deal from him, and you got to play it close. Like that lime, it was seven, eight years ago, there was this old fellow down Nokomis way didn’t want to let loose of some land Johnny wanted to pick up. Both Johnny and the old man were pretty sure the State Road Department was going to put the new road right through his land. Well, sir, one day these young fellow’s come to the old man’s house, and they’re hot, and they want a drink of water. They got transits and so on, all that surveying stuff, and the old man gives them the water, and they get to talking, and it turns out they’re surveying for the road and it just doesn’t come nowheres near the old man’s land. Very next day the old man unloads his land on Johnny, trying to keep a straight face. Inside fourteen months the new road cuts right across the land and Johnny has himself a bunch of prime commercial lots. That old man just about drove them nuts up there in Tallahassee, but he never could find out just who those surveyors were. Sure, Johnny’s honest, but he’s, well — sharp.
— He lives right here, does he?
— Near all his life. Married one of the Leafer girls. They never had any kids. She stood him as long as she could, I guess about eleven years, and then they got divorced. He’s one to, like they say, play the field. He talked her into taking a settlement, and it wasn’t much of a one they say. Johnny is almost a native. His daddy, Stitch Flagan, come down here from Georgia forty years ago and went broke in celery and went into commercial fishing and got drownded out in the Gulf with Johnny’s two brothers way back thirty years ago. Johnny would have got the same medicine but he didn’t go along night-netting the macks that time on account of a girl down around Osprey he was chasing. Now he lives alone out there on St. Armands Key, has him a woman that comes in to clean up three, four times a week. Couple of times a year he gives a hell of a big party. Most nights you find him around town someplace. The Plaza or the Colony or Holiday House or the Hofbrau. Everybody knows him. And I guess he tips pretty good...
Johnny Flagan blew the sandy stubble out of the razor, coiled the cord, put the razor in the toilet-article case he used on trips. He padded out to the phone and called the airline office again to ask about flights. “Not a chance, eh?” he said disgustedly. He hung up and cursed with considerable feeling. He looked up Charlie Himbermark’s home phone number and called him.
“Charlie? Johnny Flagan.”
“Yes, Mr. Flagan.”
“They’ve grounded the flights. We got to drive up there. Pick you up in about forty-five minutes.”
“Isn’t it raining pretty hard to...”
“Charlie, I got to go up there. You be ready.”
“Yes, Mr. Flagan.”
He hung up. Charlie was going to be great company on this kind of a trip. Cold little fish. All he knew was accounting, but he certainly knew that.
Johnny wondered what Charlie would say and do if he knew the real reason for the trip. Charlie believed in following all the rules, cutting no corners. That was why he made such a good assistant. The books were always in apple-pie shape.
Johnny Flagan dressed quickly and finished packing. He went into the bedroom closet and opened the wall safe and took out the thick manila envelope. He took it out into the pale gray light and opened it and ran his thumb across the thick pad of currency.
He stood there for a moment and thought of all the things that could happen if for any reason he couldn’t get this cash up to Danboro, Georgia, before tomorrow noon. It made him feel weak and sick to think of the consequences. He and Stevenson and Ricardo would all be in the soup for sure.
It had been a calculated risk. Flagan knew he was worth somewhere around a half-million. But it wasn’t cash. It was tied up in land that was increasing in value day by day. He and Stevenson and Ricardo owned the majority shares in the little savings and loan company in Danboro, and they had been in on speculative land ventures together in the Sarasota area. Then a few weeks ago a new opportunity had opened up. Flagan couldn’t swing it alone. He couldn’t handle any part of it without selling off land he wanted to keep. So he’d flown up and explained the deal to Stevenson and Ricardo. They were in the same spot he was in. Temporarily overextended. So they had decided to take the calculated risk of taking the cash out of the cash reserves of the savings and loan company without making any ledger entry. Flagan had used the cash to buy in. Ricardo had a connection whereby he would learn in advance of any sneak audit. The deal didn’t move as fast as Flagan had expected. Yesterday Stevenson had called up, more upset than Flagan had ever heard him, and told him about the audit due tomorrow. Johnny couldn’t get the money back out of the new venture. Stevenson told him how much they would need to cover. So Johnny Flagan had spent a busy afternoon, and he had sold some choice land parcels he had meant to hold on to, and now had the money in cash.
There was no point in thinking of what might happen if the money didn’t get up there. It would get there, and it would go in the vault, and it would be counted, and the audit would give them a clean bill. There were some other things that had to be done up there sooner or later, and so it would kill two birds to take Charlie along this time.