“One of the Futch boys was running some big corporate boat, had five or six girls topside, out there on the bow all oiled up and baking. Frank Davis had him an even bigger boat and more women above deck. The swimsuits now, they come in these bright colors like pieces of Easter candy. That’s the way the girls looked. Sweet as candy out there. Two of them had just their bottoms on and both seemed to like Mr. Palmona. They waved a lot.”
Felix’s client had a dreamy, reflective expression on his face.
Yeah, he’d enjoyed his morning fishing in Boca.
I glanced around to see if any of the manna’s female liveaboards were nearby. I don’t have much patience for the hardcore politically correct It’s the newest form of Fascism. But living on a boat requires a certain drive and independent spirit that, for good reason, would not allow our marina women to tolerate their kindred being discussed as mindless confections. JoAnn Smallwood, pretty Donna Legges of the sailboat Bowhard, and Janet Mueller were aboard Tiger Lily, sitting in deck chairs and locked in animated conversation. But they were close, well within listening distance, so I decided to change the subject. “You catch any fish?”
“We jumped four tarpon, landed one. About a hundred-pounder, wasn’t he, Mr. Palmona? One of those juiced-up males, Doc, that’s harder than hell to get to the boat.”
Felix’s client was still wearing the bemused expression. He wasn’t following the conversation. “The girl in the apple-green bikini,” he said, “she really did seem to be waving at me. There was eye contact, I’m absolutely certain. Looked right at me and kept looking at me. I’d swear to it, I really would.” He seemed to be talking to himself.
Felix said, “Or the fish could’ve gone maybe one-ten. Pretty good-sized tarpon, Doc, but one of the kind that doesn’t want to jump. We had to chase him through the whole fleet, then follow him halfway to Siesta Key. He was a beauty, huh, Mr. Palmona?”
I smiled at Felix when the man said, “Beauty? Oh, she was absolutely gorgeous. Her hair, that kind of cinnamon-colored hair, it’s my favorite. The green suit, the red hair. And the way she singled me out and waved at me. I found that very flattering. It was a wonderful day on the water. An absolutely wonderful day. Wish I didn’t have to fly home to Chicago, Felix, or I’d book another trip. Maybe two or three trips. But if I work things right, get one of our younger partners to cover for me, it’s possible, just possible, I can be back in a couple of weeks. Will the big boats still be fishing Boca Grande Pass?”
Felix was smiling back at me. Guides made their living on repeat business, and Mr. Palmona clearly planned to be a regular. “You bet, Mr. Palmona. Fishing will actually get better, plus there’ll probably be lots more big boats carrying pretty girls.” Then, as he finished swabbing out his boat, Felix said to me, “Hey, I forgot to ask. How’d you and Tomlinson do in your baseball game Sunday?”
I had opened Amanda’s manila envelope and was shuffling through the contents. There were several bank statements, to which I gave a quick look and then set aside, as I answered Felix: “We lost, six to four. Pretty good team from Minnesota. Their pitcher had a nasty slider.”
“You catch?”
More bank statements that verified many withdrawals and, surprisingly, several computer-printed deposit slips. I placed those in the stack. “Yeah. Went oh-for-three but hit the ball hard twice. Their centerfielder made a heck of a play.”
“What about Tomlinson?”
There were two glossy photographs. The first was of Gail Richardson Calloway and ex-husband, Frank. She hadn’t changed that much since the photos I had seen years ago in Cambodia. Dark hair that swept across her forehead and curved to her shoulders. Cheeks and chin and eyes, those eyes. I could picture her in an aerobics class, dark leotard, a mature woman working hard to stay fit… or in a 1940s movie, black and white, with a lot of night scenes, streetlights and bus stops, the kind of film where women with faces as haunting as hers paused on street corners to light cigarettes. Frank looked articulate, moneyed, smart. I said, “Tomlinson has had better games.”
“Yeah? What, he make a few errors?”
I put the photo of Gail aside. “It wasn’t so much that as he just kind of… well, he wasn’t there.”
“You mean he didn’t show up?”
“No, we rode in together, like always. But bottom of the first inning, he hit this shot into the gap, and he just kept running: From second base, he veered off into the bullpen, then ran out of the stadium. Never changed stride. We didn’t see him again until just after the game.”
The other photo was on the table now, and I glanced at it-my first look at Jackie Merlot.
Felix said, “That Tomlinson, he’s a weird one. But a good guy.”
“Yeah.”
“Sometimes he says stuff, I don’t have a clue what he’s talking about. The other guides, it’s the same with them, too. Was he drunk?”
I said, “Huh?” I was looking at this hugely overweight man, spray-hardened hair on a head the size of a pumpkin, his haunch of an arm wrapped around Gail Calloway’s waist.
Felix said, “Tomlinson. Why would he do something like that? Get to second, then run off the field. Was he drunk?”
I looked up from the photo, but my eyes drifted back. There was something compelling about a combination so… grotesque? Yes, grotesque. No other word fit. Bobby Richardson’s widow, healthy, fit and breasty in designer jeans and dark sweater, dwarfed by a man who had to weigh three-eighty, close to four hundred pounds. He might have been a sumo wrestler or an NFL offensive lineman but for his face. Amanda had described it accurately. It was the face of a prepubescent boy; a strangely feminine face, hairless, very pale, with tiny, tiny dark eyes.
Something about his expression made me uneasy, set me on edge. It was the expression of a man who was working hard to project personality. Big smile, lots of teeth, big dimples above the folds of double chin. Hair combed perfectly and gelled in place… or maybe a toupee. Yeah, probably a wig.
But that’s not what troubled me. It took a moment; I couldn’t figure it out, but then I knew. Part of it, anyway. There is the certain rare child, because of chemical imbalance or neurosis or freak genetics, who is so genuinely manipulative and evil that he or she must necessarily learn to communicate an air of perfect innocence. It’s more than an expression, it’s an attitude, it’s body language… and it is a totally contrived act. They perfect that act quickly because their survival depends on it… and they feel nothing but contempt for those gullible enough to mistake the act for honesty.
Merlot’s expression reminded me of that… but there was more, too. There was something in his eyes, those tiny dark eyes. They were not much bigger than black pinholes in the folds of white flesh, but there was an intensity in them that misrepresented their size and that seemed vaguely reptilian.
I had to think hard to remember, and then it came to me: A monitor lizard, that’s what I thought about when I looked at his eyes. Komodo dragon: another name.
I’d seen monitors on the islands off Sumatra that were the size of rottweilers; animals that wind-scented carrion with their viper tongues.
Their eyes had that same black, bottomless glare. With the huge face, the massive folds of fat and those obsidian eyes, Jackie Merlot was a strange-looking man indeed.
“Doc? Hey, Doc! You okay?”
Realizing that Felix was all but yelling at me, I jumped slightly. I said, “Huh?”
“I asked if you’re all right. You look like somebody just walked over your grave, man.”
I said, “Sorry… wasn’t paying attention. You were asking me something…?”
Felix was giving me a very odd look. “About Tomlinson. Why he ran off like that, left the game.”
I forced myself to look away from the photograph of Jackie Merlot, his massive arm locked around the waist of my dead friend’s wife. “Why Tomlinson did what? Oh! The baseball game. Yeah, he said the feeling was so good, hitting a ball into the gap like that and running, he just didn’t want the feeling to end right away.”