Again to Carthage Read online

  “And they really didn’t have a clue?”

  “Well, it could have been closer, but one of my conditions was that after they announced their team, I got to select the order they ran in. I knew from Jamie that Karl was their slowest, so I made him run first leg.”

  “Why first? I would think you’d want him running anchor so you could … what was that you used to say, smoke him!”

  “What I wanted was to put the thing out of reach as quickly as possible, so I made Karl run first. He runs a sixty-nine or seventy-second quarter and I ran a fifty-eight flat and that was pretty much all she wrote.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Surely you can see this. They were nearly a hundred yards back before the first baton exchange. Naturally I slowed down a bit, and the next guy was faster than Karl, but he was running completely by himself. He made the rookie mistake of trying to close the gap right away, and of course he died completely. Same with the next guy. They just kept falling farther behind. I ran about a 4:10, which was pretty much all I had, and they were nowhere to be seen.”

  “Impressive. One athlete taking on four runners …” Roland said.

  “Guys, Roland, they were four guys, not runners. Karl was clueless. Without a clue. Afterward he was asking me all kinds of questions about training, illegal substances, weird stuff like that. He didn’t seem to understand that there’ve been lots of high schoolers under 4:10, for crying out loud.”

  “But how’d the Post get wind of it?”

  “I didn’t find that out until later. Wiggins told me …”

  “Yeah?”

  “Karl invited him out to watch.”

  8

  Lucia

  FRIDAY NIGHT AND Winkler was with his team at an away game, so when Cassidy got in from his run at near dark he decided dinner would be a bowl of chili at Deacon’s on South Dixie Highway. He had worked late and for once passed on Friday-night happy hour.

  He showered and pulled on some faded khaki Bermudas, a white T-shirt, and some flip-flops, and he was off, hotfooting it down a shadow-strewn sidewalk, enjoying the flower-scented tropical air and the nearly perfect solitude of the deserted neighborhood. Behind the hedges of hibiscus and ligustrum central air units whirred in the night, bluish flickers bounced around living room interiors, and the eastern seaboard of the U.S. of A. began easing its way into its nightly alpha-wave coma of detective shows and sitcoms.

  There was something about clip-clopping along a south Florida sidewalk that always took him back to his childhood and he couldn’t resist removing the rubber sandals and slipping them into his waistband at the small of his back, luxuriating in the familiar gritty traction of the warm concrete on the soles of his callused feet. You didn’t see kids going barefoot much anymore—or walking anywhere for that matter—and he wouldn’t have been surprised to hear that an adult walking a city street without footwear was in some way illegal.

  Going shirtless in Palm Beach surely was. He went out on his nightly runs half wishing to be ticketed so he could give the town’s attorney, Bill Eaton, a little lesson on Florida con law in the Fourth District.

  Deacon’s was busy, but not unpleasantly so, and the Deacon himself, skinny, unshaven, dour, and horn-rimmed, looking exactly like the former Washington Square beatnik he was, was holding court. He looked up and, spotting Cassidy coming in, immediately set a mug under a running beer tap. He reached under the counter for one of the big white bowls and held it up questioningly to Cassidy, who nodded yes.

  Pete Dexter, a feature writer for the Post, was cozied in at the bar across from the Deacon. Cassidy plopped down, leaving a stool between them.

  “Pete here’s been on assignment again,” said the Deacon, gesturing at the shaggy-headed writer.

  “Pete,” said Cassidy.

  “Counselor.”

  “Don’t tell me you been hiring out as a migrant worker again.”

  “Nope. Just got back from Orlando.”

  “Let me guess. You went on the jungle cruise?”

  “Sort of. I was a highly sought-after recruit visiting a company HQ. They thought I was a hot prospect.”

  “Some kind of real estate scam? Time share?”

  “No, better. This is a company called Dare to Be Great, Incorporated.”

  “Isn’t that a Glenn W. Turner deal?”

  “Yup.”

  “Some kind of cosmetics pyramid-sales thing where you make money by recruiting other people to come in?”

  “Sort of. The cosmetics thing is called Koscot Interplanetary, which was started by the same guys. All their goop is supposedly made with mink oil, which is so wonderful they couldn’t believe the minks were keeping it to themselves. That was set up as a pyramid deal and I’m told it was fairly legit. This new thing is some kind of an offshoot. They decided mixing up all that eyeliner was too much work, so now you just pay to join the organization so you can get the right to recruit other numbskulls. That’s really it. There’s no complicated products or services to worry about. They send you some motivational tapes and such to get you all fired up about it, but that’s it.”

  “Wow. What did they say when they found out you worked for the paper?”

  The writer took a long pull on his draft, set the mug down, and gave Cassidy a sheepish grin.

  “They were, shall we say, taken aback for a moment. They asked me what I did at the paper, and I said that I loaded the trucks. They laughed their asses off, and said, ‘Hey, son, you don’t want to be doing that for the rest of your life.’”

  “What’d you say?”

  “I said, ‘Heck no. One of these days I’m going to be driving one of those babies.’”

  The chili was wonderful. Simmering in a Crock-Pot all day, it was the Deacon’s personal secret recipe. (“Brown sugar and whole canned tomatoes,” he had once whispered conspiratorially to Cassidy. “Keep it under your hat.”) Topped with a handful of chopped raw onions and some grated cheddar, served with a couple of chunks of garlic bread, chased by more than one draft.

  Cassidy ate with his usual postrun gusto while Dexter recounted anecdotes from his trip. Finally Cassidy pushed the empty bowl to the back of the bar, but slid the mug down to Deke’s waiting hand.

  “This state has always been a scut bucket for charlatans,” Cassidy said. “Who invented reptile farms and underwater real estate?”

  “And all those phony rocket launches and moon walks,” the Deacon interjected.

  “Damn straight. Shoot some eight-ball, Pete?”

  “Like to, but I gotta get back and finish this story. It’s running Sunday and I’m leaving in the morning for the Keys.”

  “You being recruited by some flimflam shrimping operation?”

  “Naw. Executive editor wants to go bonefishing.”

  “Greg Favre is a bonefisherman?”

  “Not from where I sit. I don’t think he’d know a bonefish from a sardine. Said he wanted to see what all the hubbub was about. Steve Hull blurted out I was a fisherman.”

  “Did you tell Greg the hubbub is about catching inedible fish in extremely shallow water?”

  “Tried to.”

  “Well.”

  “Just seemed to get him going,” said Dexter, sliding carefully off his stool.

  “Well, if either of you figures out the fascination, give me a jingle when you get back.”

  “You don’t want to go?”

  “No, sir.”

  “What a surprise.”

  “Got a brief due at the Fourth District Tuesday and if I didn’t I’d lie about it.”

  “Gotcha. See you, Deke. See you, counselor.”

  “Take it easy, Pete. And hey …”

  Dexter stopped his loose-limbed amble toward the door and looked back at Cassidy with a raised eyebrow.

  “You’re too good for this boig, see?” said Cassidy, doing a remotely recognizable Cagney. “You should be writin’ novels or somethin’. Go talk to Exley out on Singer Island. He’ll set you straight.”

  “Yeah, yeah …” Dexter said, aiming his flip-flops for the door.

  Cassidy walked home feeling contented, slightly righteous over his long workday, his late and swift seven-miler (circling the Breakers twice), his abjuring the siren call of the Friday-night Greenhouse rabble, and even his losing game of eight-ball—to an out-of-work small-engine repair guy from Terre Haute who was so drunk the only thing he said that Cassidy could understand was: “Briggs and fuggin Stratton! Hah!” This right before undercutting the cue ball and sending it off the table and bouncing toward the PacMan game. He looked up at Cassidy through the smoke of the Marlboro dangling perilously from the corner of his skinny lip and gave him an outrageous wink, as if to say that a sporting gentleman like Cassidy could surely tell he had done it on purpose.

  Cassidy scratched on the eight-ball on the next shot and knew immediately that this was not going to be a good pool night and that his big empty bed was looking ever so much like the better part of valor. So he headed home, this time wearing his flip-flops on his feet.

  He had just propped himself up in bed with the first book on the stack, The Fourth Floor by Earl E. T. Smith, when the phone rang and Lucia Finch-Hatton inquired what he was doing.

  “Not too much, what are you doing?”

  “I asked first. Are you … with anyone?”

  “You must think I enjoy a pretty exciting lifestyle over here on South Olive,” he said.

  “There’s been talk.”

  “Well, let’s see. I just got back from Deke’s and was curling up in front of the fireplace with a good mystery,” he said, “by myself. What are you doing?”

  “I believe everything but the fireplace,” she said. “I’m roasting over here.” She didn’t like air-conditioning, but her little apartment was on the Intrac
oastal so there was usually a breeze.

  Cassidy mumbled something. He was never quite sure how to take Lucia, who had been a year ahead of him in law school and now clerked for one of the district appellate judges. He had always been attracted to her pretty, angular face and sinewy dancer’s body, and she had met his interest with that hot-cold thing women do because they think it’s beguiling or because they can’t make up their minds.

  “I was looking for you at the Greenhouse earlier,” she said.

  “Would have found me usually. But tonight I worked late. Brief due Tuesday out at your place.”

  “I’m impressed. I thought you were a true last-minute kind of guy.”

  “Thanks very much. Got a deposition up in Vero Monday, so this was as last-minute as I could get away with.”

  “Well, anyway. I saw some of your friends.”

  “I hope they were reasonably well behaved.”

  “Not really.”

  “Ah.”

  “And that place was just awful. So many people all jammed together in there. When I asked about you, your friends said to stick around, you’d be in sooner or later.”

  “I thought you hated that stuff.”

  “A girlfriend wanted to go. I told her I’d keep her company. And, as I say, I thought I might bump into you.”

  “Well, I’m flattered.”

  “No you’re not.”

  “I can be flattered if I want.”

  She was silent for several moments. Then:

  “So. Do you want to come over?”

  So it was back into the Bermudas and flip-flops and—after some serious gargling and brushing and pit checking—it was only two blocks to her little duplex on Flagler, across from Lake Worth. There was no traffic at all and it was darker and stiller now that most of the televisions were off. But it was balmy and pleasant and he felt like the last guy awake in town, maybe the world. Central air-conditioning units ruled the night.

  He saw her dimly through the jalousies and she opened the door before he could even smile. The apartment was dark save for some candles fluttering softly in the windowsills from the breeze off Lake Worth. He could see from the streetlight that she was wearing a flimsy nightgown and that was, really, all.

  She was tall, tall, tall and though her breasts weren’t large, they were perfectly and somehow aggressively shaped and he had long believed that they would be incredibly firm as he believed the rest of her was, and that had made him a great deal more interested, in theory at least, in the ballet, as well as in her person.

  The usually primly professional “up” hair now hung nearly to her shoulders and some of it fell across her face as she reached for him, untucking his shirt and encountering gooseflesh. Her fingers felt surprisingly cool. Green eyes looked up at him through a curtain of hair, mock shyly now, really putting it on, tugging, making little noises with her tongue and lips.

  Cassidy nuzzled into the hair curtain, remembering now a dozen little come-ons and semirejections over the years, going back to a Remedies class they’d had together with old man Hughes.

  He was just about to say something about it when she got a really good handful of T-shirt and pulled him down to a surprisingly hungry mouth. She was a little drunk, of course, and Cassidy could only think, Christ, a clue would have been nice. An exchange of greeting cards. Something.

  But later, on her little bed, as the graceful etchings of her hardened body arched and slipped sideways to find and interlock fleetingly with the wet fluted lines of his own, he thought, It must be a tropical thing, this kind of night heat that keeps a reserved young appellate lawyer girl sleeping alone in her proper single bed, simmering in the juices of old glances and innuendoes until at last it all boils over in a phone call so late at night that only the air conditioners are awake.

  9

  The Island

  THE TIDE WAS ON the flood so the little open fishermen had to battle their way out of the Jupiter Inlet.

  Roland sat like some grand pasha on the big cooler in the back of Cassidy’s boat, swathed in a huge terry-cloth robe, arms akimbo, his face hidden under an umbrella-sized sombrero, his generous schnoz glowing with zinc oxide though it was still dark. The sun hadn’t thought about coming up yet.

  Cassidy steered, standing barefoot at the center console, and when the twenty-two-foot craft crested a particularly large backsliding roller and they plunged down the other side, it sent a sheet of warmish seawater over them, eliciting a startled “Egad!” from the pasha.

  “Sorry,” said Cassidy over his shoulder.

  “Is there no way to drive this contraption with more decorum?” He shook the water off his oversized hat brim.

  “Not with this tide. We could have run down the Intracoastal and gone out Palm Beach, but that would have cost us some time. We’ll be outside in a minute or two and it’ll settle down.”

  Cassidy was always surprised when Roland wanted to go on these excursions. The crossings could be rough, and once in the Bahamas, the lifestyle was rigorous. Most of them slept right on their boats, a kind of waterborne camping trip, but Roland always checked into the Jack Tar Hotel on Grand Bahama Island and began making friends with room service.

  He had no interest whatsoever in hunting fish with a spear and wouldn’t touch a rod and reel under threat of physical punishment. But he was surprisingly agile in the water, and with the monster weight belt he wore to counter his natural buoyancy, he dove deep and stayed long. The first time he’d seen it, Cassidy was amazed.

  “I’m not kidding you,” Cassidy told Winkler. “He’s like some great albino sea mammal. First dive he was down a minute and a half. And all he does is collect shells and take pictures. He’s got this expensive plastic-encased rig, with lights and a battery pack. I told him if that’s all he was going to do he should learn to tank dive. Know what he said?”

  Winkler arched his orange eyebrows.

  “He said, ‘Bubbles scare fish,’” said Cassidy.

  Winkler’s eyes widened in admiration.

  “And then he said that he already knew how to tank dive, that he’d been certified for years.”

  Winkler was a photographer too, and soon whenever he and Roland got together Cassidy couldn’t get a word in edgewise for all the talk of f-stops and depth of field and such.

  The Gulf Stream was as smooth as slate and this first crossing of the spring was as easy as any he’d ever made. The four little boats were able to run at more than twenty-five knots the whole way, and it was still early when Cassidy raised Indian Head Rocks on the hazy horizon. He picked up the microphone.

  “Argus, Granfaloon.”

  “Granfaloon, Argus. Go ahead.”

  “Argus, I’ve got the rocks about five degrees off your port.”

  Cassidy adjusted course slightly and Bill Eaton’s Argus and the other little boats fell in with him. Soon the water went from the deep purple of the Gulf Stream to deep turquoise as the bank began to rise from the depths. A school of dolphin appeared from nowhere and cavorted ahead of their bow wave, rolling and diving. If you looked carefully you could see purple sea fans and reefs and even swimming fish a hundred fifty feet below.

  Cassidy stood at the wheel with his eyes closed for a moment, breathing in the flowery land-scented breeze of an island nation and thought, I was six years old the first time I smelled this and all these years later the feeling is still the same.

  After they cleared customs and got Roland checked into his room, the boats went in different directions. Roland went on John Kern’s boat along with some others who wanted to snorkel on shallow reefs. Two other boats wanted to go tank diving. Winkler left his boat, Gator Bait, tied up to the dock at the Jack Tar and came onto Cassidy’s boat and they headed north in the general direction of Walkers Cay to dive for lobsters off the scattered coral heads in the middle of nowhere.

  It was a day made of blues and greens with no clouds. The pale turquoise water was ten to fifteen feet deep in all directions, without a speck of land in sight. They had run for about forty minutes before they started to see the dark blobs under the water that indicated coral heads.

  “You want to be dragg-urr or draggee?” Cassidy asked.

  “I’ll stay dry for a while longer,” Winkler said. He was already at the wheel and had a cup of coffee going.