Double Whammy (10 page)

First he needed to meet with Gault again, a distasteful prospect. He could do it this evening, back in Miami; it wouldn't take long. From the motel room Decker called and made reservations for the following night on a seven-P.M. United flight to New Orleans. The Cajun Invitational Bass Classic was this week's stop on the professional fishing tour, and a good place for Decker to get his first glimpse of Dickie Lockhart in action. He had seen the famous TV angler's face on a billboard across from a bait shop on Route 222: “Dickie Lockhart Loves Happy Gland Fish Scent! So Do Lunker Bass!” Decker had been so intrigued by the billboard that he'd asked a man at the bait shop if the Happy Gland company made a formula for humans. The man at the bait shop dutifully checked behind the counter and said no.

Before leaving Harney, Decker tried to call Ott Pickney at the newspaper. Sandy Kilpatrick, the birdlike editor, said Ott had gone out early to do some interviews. The note of concern in Kilpatrick's voice suggested that pre-lunchtime enterprise was uncharacteristic behavior for Ott. Decker left a message to have Ott call him that night in Miami.

 

At that moment Ott Pickney was slurping down black coffee at Culver Rundell's bait shop on the southern shore of Lake Jesup. Culver Rundell was behind the counter and his brother Ozzie was out back dipping shiners. Ott was trying to strike up a conversation about Bobby Clinch. Ott had set his reporter's notebook on the counter twenty minutes earlier, and the pages were still blank.

“Sorry I'm not much help,” Culver Rundell said. “Bobby was a nice guy, a pretty good basser. That's about all I can tell you. Also, he favored spinnerbaits.”

“Spinnerbaits.”

“Over plastic worms,” Culver Rundell explained.

Ott Pickney could not bring himself to transcribe this detail.

“I understand you were here when they brought in the body,” Ott said.

“I was. The Davidson boys found him. Daniel and Desi.”

“How awful,” Ott said.

“It was my truck that took him to the morgue.”

Ott said nothing about the autopsy. Dr. Pembroke was third on his list of interview subjects.

“I hated to miss the funeral,” Culver Rundell said, “but we had one hellacious busy morning.”

“The casket was made out of Bobby's boat.”

“So I heard!” Culver said. “What a neat idea. I wisht I coulda seen it.”

Ott tapped his Bic pen on the counter and said amiably, “I was amazed how handsomely they did it.”

“What I heard,” said Culver Rundell, “is they got a regular oak coffin from Pearl Brothers, sanded off the finish, and paneled it with long strips from the hull of the boat. Cost another two grand, I know for a fact. The bass club is paying.”

Ott Pickney said, “And who would have done the work, the funeral home?”

“Naw, it was Larkin's shop.”

Larkin was a carpenter. He had done all the benches at the Harney County Courthouse, and also the front doors on the new U.S. Post Office.

“He's the best in town,” Culver Rundell remarked. He thought he was doing Larkin a favor, a little free publicity for the business.

“Well, he did a damn fine job with the coffin,” Ott said. He left two one-dollar bills on the countertop, said good-bye, and drove immediately to Larkin's shop. Ott hoped there would be something left to see, though he had no idea exactly what to look for.

The shop was more of an old A-frame barn with a fancy new electric garage door, the kind used on those big import-export warehouses in western Dade County. The door to the wood shop was up. Ott saw plenty of raw furniture but no carpenters. It turned out Larkin wasn't there; it was a slow morning, so he'd gone fishing. Naturally.

A young black apprentice carpenter named Miller asked the reporter what he wanted.

“I'm doing a story about Bobby Clinch, the young man who died in that terrible boating accident at the Bog.”

“Yeah,” Miller said. His workshirt was soaked. Sawdust and curlicued pine shavings stuck to his coal-black arms. He looked as if he were in the middle of a project, and wanted to get back to it.

Pushing things, Ott Pickney said, “This shop did the custom work on the coffin, right?”

“Yeah,” Miller said, “the boat job.”

“It was really something,” Ott said. “How did you guys do that? You won't mind if I take some notes—”

“Mr. Larkin did it all by himself,” Miller said. “I guess he knew the deceased.”

That last word rattled Ott. He glanced up from the notebook to catch the cutting look in Miller's eye. The look said: Don't patronize me, pal, I got better things to do.

“Blue metal-flake casket, man. Looked like a giant fucking cough drop.”

Ott cleared his throat. “I'm sure they meant well . . . I mean, it was supposed to be symbolic. Sort of a farewell gesture.”

“I'll give you a farewell gesture—” Miller said, but then the phone rang in the far corner of the workshed. The apprentice hurried off, and Ott quietly poked through the shop. He wondered why he'd never gotten the hang of talking to black people, why they always looked at him as if he were a cockroach.

Miller was talking in a loud voice into the phone. Something about a walnut dining table and an unpaid bill.

Ott Pickney slipped out the front way, then walked around to the back of the shop where Miller couldn't see him. Against one wall stood two long green dumpsters filled with fresh-cut lumber remnants. They were the sweetest-smelling dumpsters Ott had ever come across. He stood on his tiptoes and looked inside. In the first he saw a pile of wooden chips, blocks, odd triangles and rectangles, a broken sawhorse, a hogshead, empty cans of resin and varnish; Mr. Larkin's predictable junk.

At the second dumpster Ott found a similar jumble of pulp, plywood, and two-by-fours, but also something else: molded chunks of blue-sparkled fiberglass. It was the remains of Bobby Clinch's Ranger bass boat, sawed to pieces in the customizing of the fisherman's coffin.

Ott boosted himself, using an empty gallon can of Formsby's turned upside down. He stuffed the notebook into the back pocket of his trousers and stretched over the rim of the dumpster so his arms could reach the wreckage. As he sifted through the fiberglass scraps, Ott realized it was impossible to tell how these jigsawed pieces had ever comprised a nineteen-foot boat.

The one fragment he recognized was the console. Ott found it in the bottom of the dumpster.

Every expensive bass boat has a console, a recessed cockpit designed to give anglers the same sensation as if they were racing the Daytona 500 instead of merely demolishing the quietude of a lake.

To Ott Pickney, the cockpit of Bobby Clinch's fishing boat more closely resembled the pilot's deck of a 747. Among the concave dials were a compass, a sonic depth recorder, a digital tachometer, an LED gauge showing water temperature at five different depths, power-tilt adjusters, trim tabs, a marine radio and an AM-FM stereo, with a tape deck. All these electronics obviously were ruined from being submerged in the lake, but Ott was fascinated anyway. He hoisted the console out of the dumpster to take a closer look.

He set the heavy piece on his lap and imagined himself at the controls of a two-hundred-horsepower speedboat. He pretended to hunker behind the Plexiglas windshield and aim the boat along a winding creek. The only trouble was, the steering wheel wouldn't budge in his hands.

Ott turned the console over, thinking the shaft had gotten snarled in all the loose wiring. But that wasn't the problem; the problem was a short length of black nylon rope. The rope had been wrapped tightly around the base of the steering column beneath the console, where it wouldn't be seen. Ott plucked fruitlessly at the coils; the rope had been tied on with authority. The steering was completely jammed.

Which meant, of course, that the direction of Bobby Clinch's boat had been fixed. It meant that Clinch himself needn't have been at the wheel at the instant of the crash. It meant that the fisherman probably was already dying or injured when the ghost-driven bass boat flipped over and tunneled bow-first into the chilly water.

Ott Pickney did not grasp this scenario as swiftly as he might have. It was dawning on him slowly, but he became so engrossed in the contemplation that he lost track of his surroundings. He heard footsteps and looked up, expecting to see Miller, the carpenter's black apprentice. Instead there were three other men, dressed in the standard local garb—caps, jeans, flannel shirts. One of the visitors carried a short piece of lumber, a second carried a loop of heavy wire; the other just stood dull-eyed, fists at his side. Ott started to say something but his greeting died beneath the grinding whine of a carpenter's table saw; Miller back at work inside the shed. The three men stepped closer. Only one was a local, but he recognized Ott Pickney and knew that the reporter could identify him. Unfortunately for Ott, none of the men wished to see their names in the paper.

Dennis Gault was holding a stack of VCR cassettes when he answered the door. He was wearing salmon shorts and a loose mesh top that looked like it would have made an excellent mullet seine. Gault led R. J. Decker to the living room, which was filled with low flat-looking furniture. The predominant hue was cranberry.

Gault put a cassette in the video recorder and told Decker to sit down. “Want a drink?” Gault asked. He smelled like he was on his tenth Smirnoff.

Decker took a cold beer.

A fishing show came on the television screen. Gault used the remote control to fast-forward the tape. Two guys in a bass boat, Decker could tell; casting and reeling, casting and reeling, occasionally hauling in a small fish. Fast-forward was the only way to endure this, Decker decided.

A commercial came on and Gault abruptly hit the freeze button. “Theeeeere's Dickie!” he sang derisively.

On the screen Dickie Lockhart stood by the side of a lake, squinting into the sun. He was wearing a crisply pressed basser's jumpsuit, desert tan; his cap was off and his hair was blow-dried to perfection. He was holding up a sixteen-ounce bottle of Happy Gland Fish Scent, and grinning.

“Does that stuff really work?” Decker asked. A bit off the point, but he was curious.

“Hard to say,” Gault replied. “Stinks like a sack of dead cats, that's for sure.”

He speeded the tape forward until he found the segment he'd been searching for. He froze the picture as the angler in the bow of the boat hoisted a fat black bass to show the camera.

“There! Look now, pay attention!” Gault said. Excitedly he shuffled on bare knees across the floor to the television screen, one of those custom five-foot monsters that eats up the whole wall. “There, Decker, look. This fish is a ringer!”

“How can you tell?”

“See here, the eyes are flat. Not cloudy yet, but flat as tile. And the color's washed out of the flanks. No vertical stripes, not a one. Muck is the color of this fish.”

“It doesn't look too healthy,” Decker agreed.

“Healthy? Man, this fish is DOA. Check the dorsal. The guy is fanning the fins for the camera. Why? 'Cause they'd fold up otherwise. This fish is de-fucking-ceased.”

“But they just showed the fisherman reeling it in,” Decker said.

“Wrong. Now watch.” Gault backed up the tape and replayed the fight. The rod was bent, the water around the boat boiled and splashed—but the angles and the editing of the video made it impossible to see the actual size of the bass. Until the fisherman lifted it for the camera.

“That rookie caught a fish,” Gault said, “but not
this
fish.” He hit a button and rewound the tape. “Want to watch another one?”

“That won't be necessary,” Decker said.

“You see how easy it is to cheat.”

“For a TV show, sure.”

“It's even easier in a tournament,” Gault said, “especially when your partner's in on it. And the weighmaster too. Not to mention the goddamn sponsors.” He went to the kitchen and came back with a beer for Decker and a fresh vodka-tonic for himself.

“Tell me about what happened in Harney,” he said.

“Met a guy named Skink,” Decker said.

Gault whistled and arched his eyebrows. “A real fruitbar. I fished with him once on the St. John's.”

“He's going to help me catch Lockhart.”

“Not on my nickel!” Gault protested.

“I need him.”

“He's a maniac.”

“I don't think so.”

“He eats dead animals off the road!”

“Waste not, want not,” Decker said. “He's the only one up there I'd trust. Without him I quit the case.”

Gault folded his hands. Decker drank his beer.

“All right,” Gault said, “but be careful. That guy's got Texas Tower written all over him, and neither of us wants to be there if he ever reaches the top.”

What Gault meant was: If there's trouble, don't drag my name into it.

“What else did you do?” he asked Decker.

“Went to a funeral.”

Gault licked his lower lip nervously.

“Robert Clinch,” Decker said, “late of your hire. Nice of you to tell me.”

Gault toyed with the stack of fishing videotapes, pretending to organize them. Without looking up, he asked, “Do they know what exactly happened?”

“The coroner says it was accidental.”

Gault smiled thinly. “We know that's horseshit, don't we? The only question in my mind is: How'd they do it?”

Decker said, “My question is: Who?”

“Who? Dickie Lockhart, that's who!” Gault said. “Don't be stupid, man. Dickie knew I was closing in and he knew Bobby was working for me. What do you mean—
who?”