Which is the reason I don’t mind getting out in the tourist rush occasionally, eating dinner at a favorite restaurant. The people you meet are usually pretty nice. Interesting, too.
Tomlinson came tapping at my door at twilight, looking dapper in blue jeans and silk Hawaiian shirt, pink flamingos and golden tiki huts thereon, his bony hands offering two cold bottles of beer.
“Its very important to rehydrate in this hellish spring heat,” he explained. “But if you want to wait for dinner, I’ll drink both bottles. Waste is a terrible thing. As we speak, there are Christian alcoholics absolutely Jonesing for a drink in places like Iraq and Libya. Parts of… somewhere else, too. Arkansas? Yeah, probably Arkansas. I’m telling you just in case you feel like refusing this beverage.”
I took one of the beers from him. “Nope, I’m thirsty.”
“Just checking.”
“Did you go over Gail’s bank slips?”
“I did indeed. Three, nearly four solid hours of pure cerebral exercise. I made a few phone calls, too. So… I have some ideas on what’s going on. Some very strong opinions, you might say.”
“I thought you might. Frank Calloway left a message for me at the marina. He wants to get together in Boca Grande on Thursday. Which means I can work all day tomorrow. I hope. I’ve got to call him back.”
“I don’t know why the hell you just don’t get an answering machine like everyone else. This fucking decade has cut the nuts off every male between here and Fumbuck, Egypt, but it hasn’t even scratched your paint. I think it’s because you haven’t been paying proper attention. Seriously, Doc, you haven’t been playing fair. The damn decade’ll be gone before you even realize it was here.”
“Spare me, Tomlinson. But… yeah. I may get a recorder. I keep thinking maybe someone important has tried to call and I wasn’t home. That feeling, like I’ve missed something… I don’t deal with it as well as I used to.”
“I know whose call you’re afraid of missing. Pilar calling from Central America.”
“Nope. I don’t even think of her much anymore.”
“ Right. Just like you seldom think of Hannah Smith anymore. I’m going to tell you something you may not like: I still miss Hannah. She was the most sensual woman I’ve ever met in my life.”
“If you know I don’t want to hear it, why say it?”
“No disrespect intended.”
“None assumed. So let’s not discuss her anymore.”
“The island bookstores, they all say they’ve sold a bunch of her books.”
“That ought to make you pretty happy. You wrote it”
“Hannah wrote it. Orally, at least. I just typed it up.”
I increased my pace. “Is there a reason why we’re still talking about her?”
We’d crossed the boardwalk, through mangroves, onto the island. Now we were walking the shell drive from the marina that became Tarpon Bay Road. It was an hour after sunset. Dark. I could hear chuck-wills-widows making their whippoorwill sounds. I could hear screech owls and car traffic and Ralph Woodring running his bait shrimper on the grass flat outside the mouth of the bay. When he cranked the nets up or down, the rusty booms screamed like something that should be chained behind bars.
Through tree limbs overhead I could see the demarcation between night horizon and stars. That line of trees, the muted colors, were as distinctive as a Navaho sand painting. It was a warm night with lots of island smells: jasmine and sulfur and windy beach. It was nice seeing the stars through the trees.
We crossed Palm Ridge past the gas-pump fluorescence of the Pick Kwik and stayed on Tarpon Bay Road. The Timbers was just off to the left, across from the fire station, a restaurant decorated as if by beachcombers: life rings and mounted fish, bamboo umbrellas, driftwood and shadows.
After Matt showed us to our corner table and after Lin brought us each another beer, Tomlinson folded the napkin across his lap saying, “The withdrawal slips and the deposit slips. I went over and over them. I even called a banker friend of mine to see what he thought. Well… actually, he’s not a friend, he’s an acquaintance. Bankers, the respectable types, tend to… let’s just say they tend to be very uncomfortable around me. As if I’m widely known as the islander voted most likely to climb the fucking bell tower. With a firearm, I’m talking about, which frankly, Doc, really pisses me off because I’ve never even fired a damn cap pistol… at least, not since that ugly incident in Chicago-”
“Tomlinson… Tomlinson. You’ve drifted way off the subject.”
He appeared surprised that I’d interrupted. “What?” Then: “Oh. Right. Okay, what the banker said was, with all that activity, the woman was either investing in something or gradually changing banks. Maybe transferring the money to accounts outside the country. Which can be illegal if you don’t go about it the right way.” He paused. “So that’s one possible explanation we’ve got to consider.”
“Not just possible,” I said, “but probable. In any circumstance like this, the simplest solution is almost always the correct solution. So that’s your best guess? That she was moving her money?”
He said, “No. As much as you hate to admit it, Doc, we think so much alike about stuff like this, the serious stuff, I bet you already know what my best guess is.”
“Tomlinson, we so seldom think alike that I can count the times on one hand. Five times, max.”
“Oh, is that right?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, it’s six times now. Or maybe six dozen.”
“We’ll see. Tell me why Gail Calloway withdrew so much money before she left the country with Jackie Merlot.”
He smiled. “You’ve gone over those withdrawal and deposit slips as many times as I have. Why do YOU think she was moving around all that money?” Before I could answer, he chimed in, “Blackmail, that’s my guess. Judging from the deposit slips, it’s blackmail. Same with you, huh? Tell the truth now.”
I said, “I’ve got blackmail down as one of three possibilities.”
Tomlinson’s expression said that he wasn’t surprised. “Damn right, blackmail.” He smiled. “You want me to tell you the other two most probable scenarios?”
“No. I’d rather hear about the deposit slips.”
I told him that the deposit slips were the only things I couldn’t make fit neatly into a plausible chain of action. I meant it.
“Don’t feel like the Lone Ranger,” he said. “It took me a solid hour of very intense brainwork to figure out why they’re important. You got any ideas at all about them?”
I shook my head.
“But blackmail, you figured blackmail as a possibility. How the feds could miss this one is beyond me. See? We do think alike.”
“Two peas in a pod, you and I.”
“Exactly. I meant it when I said you’re starting to come along. That’s great news for the people who think your heart’s about half the size of your brain. No offense, Doc, but you’re working your way up to becoming a real human being.”
Tomlinson surprised me by ordering the pompano cooked in parchment paper. He’s been an uncompromising vegetarian since the day I met him but, in the last few months, he’d broken form often enough for me to know that he was going through some changes in his life… as we all do.
“I’ve decided that eating animal flesh is a way of ingesting cellular communion,” he explained when the waitress had finished taking our orders. “And let’s face it, if I dropped dead in a field tomorrow, every goddamn animal for miles would be scrambling to bite a piece out of me. A chunk of biceps, a chunk of my beezer. They wouldn’t give a damn. Protein is protein, when the shit really hits the fan. For those omnivore bastards, it’s any port in a storm.”