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.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope. So he kept running. He said he ran clear to the Cape Coral bridge and back. Stretched a double into a ten-K jog.”
“Good Lord.”
“Because in baseball, he said, the good feelings don’t last long enough and the bad feelings, when you screw up, they last way too long. He told me the same with life. So why stop running?”
Felix was quiet for a moment, then he said, “Know what? I used to play baseball back in high school and the man is absolutely right. It’s pretty weird what he did, but, when you think about it, yeah, hit one in the gap and just don’t stop. You think he’s a dope, a real goofball, until you think a little more and then he seems like the smartest guy around. Not normal. No one would say that. But smart.”
I said, “Yeah. I know what you mean.” I was putting the photos, the bank statements back into the envelope. I looked beyond the docks to where No Mas, Tomlinson’s old Morgan sailboat-white hull, green canvas-sat bow- tethered on a strand of anchor line two hundred yards off the channel that led to Woodring’s Point and the mouth of the bay.
Sailboat out there all by itself, fusiform shape on a blue-green plain, mangroves in the background… the water-space where the man had lived for the last nine years.
His new Avon dingy, a bright orange husk, was tied off the stern.
The man was home.
I told Felix I had to go.
I needed to speak with Tomlinson.
9
