Tomlinson said, “I’m surprised at you, man. Thinking viscerally like this. Gathering information with your instincts, finally letting yourself cut across the meadow instead of taking that long-ass linear road. Yep, I think you’re making progress. Becoming an actual human being.”
We were face-to-face at the dining booth in the cabin of his boat. I could smell kerosene and wood oil, hemp rope, old books and diesel fuel. There was something else… soy sauce maybe, and cold rice. Yeah, and incense, too. Sandalwood, that burned-musk smell. He must have just finished lunch. Or meditating.
I was sitting with my back to the cockpit. Up the varnished steps, through the open hatch, if I turned, I could see the binnacle, the boat’s big stainless steering wheel, the folded steering vane, a black plastic bag with black tube hanging from the boom: a solar shower.
On the table to my left was a paper tube unevenly scrolled: a chart of the Dry Tortugas, an anchorage off Garden Key marked in pencil.
Tomlinson was planning a trip. I’d looked. A straightedge course, Sanibel lighthouse to Tortuga’s Channel, with compass headings and the piddly little amount of deviation figured in.
And the man chided me for being obsessive?
I said, “I didn’t come here to discuss my heart or my brain. I came to get your advice. So let’s try to stick to the topic.”
But he wasn’t done with it. “Nope. Sorry. No can do. This is what my first sensei, Jasper Freeberg, would have called a minor breakthrough. You said the guy seemed dangerous from the way he looked in his picture. That was your strong first impression, the way you felt. Don’t deny it.”
“Freeberg? Jasper Freeberg? You’re telling me that you learned Zen Buddhism from a guy named… Jesus, I don’t want to hear it. I was asking what you thought about the bank statements. Here… you haven’t even read them yet. The bank statements and the photographs.”
He wouldn’t relent “Any other time in your life, you take a look at the photograph of a first rate maloojink like… like this oddity, this dude Jackie Merlot, you’d say, ‘The human eye can’t communicate emotion.’ You’d say, ‘Some of the most prolific killers in history had faces like choir boys.’ You’d say, ‘I don’t judge people by the way they look,’ when, in fact, we all do. You’ve never admitted any interest at all in letting your senses interpret what your eyes see. Until now.”
“Mal-what? Mal-oo-jink? What the hell does that mean?”
“It’s Tahitian. Or maybe from the lost language of the Easter Islanders. It means evil man. No… that’s not a precise translation. It means evil being. I look at this guy, the first thing I see is something… unhealthy in there hiding behind that smile. You felt the same way when you saw his picture, I’d bet on it The intuitive knowledge, go ahead and ‘fess up. This person is… different. I’ll tell you something else”-Tomlinson’s iridescent blue eyes seemed amused-“this person scares you. The first man I could ever say that about. Not that you’re some asshole macho kind of guy, Doc, no. It’s just that you’re always in control, the way you size men up, like in two seconds, because you’ve met about every kind of man there is. You know what they’re like, so what’s there to fear? But you’ve never met a guy like Jackie Merlot, because he’s not really a man. He’s a being and that scares you. You want to know something else?”
I waited.
“He scares me, too.”
I said, “Oh?” wondering if it was true. Was I frightened of the man in the photograph?
Tomlinson said, “He scares me because he’s empty. Like a pit. That kind of emptiness.”
When Tomlinson takes off on a tangent, the best course is to play along. In the long run, it saves time. I said, “You can tell all that just from looking at his picture?”
“Can’t you?”
“No. You’re taking the few facts we have and dramatizing the guy’s negatives. His powers, too. What I think is-and I’m not judging him by his appearance, understand-but what I think is, he’s a user. A small-time con man, that’s my guess. Nothing more.”
“So you don’t think you need to be in a big rush to find your old buddy’s wife?”
He had me there. Since seeing the photograph I had, for the first time, felt a pressing urgency. Gail Richardson Calloway was in trouble. How I knew, I wasn’t sure, but I was now convinced that it was true. “Seeing the guy’s picture has had an effect on me,” I said. “I’m willing to admit that.”
“I thought so. All things in nature are repetition on a theme, man.”
“So you’ve said many times,” I replied dryly.
“Make fun of me if you want, but you’ve heard of what the astronomers called ‘dark anomalies’? They are these extraordinarily dense… I forget the name for them… uhh-h-h, these things in space. Not planets, not suns, nothing that’s orderly and normal. They are energized globs created by negative energy. Anti-matter. Black holes. You’ve heard of them, haven’t you?”
I sat there listening.
“Mark my word, amigo, certain people have that same kind of anti-matter energy. Strictly negative. You’ve met women like that. Destructive bitches unrelated to their sex. Same with men. A very, very heavy counterproductive gig that gauges success by the amount of chaos and pain they can cause. You don’t believe me, take another look at this photograph. Not just at his face, but what the dude is doing.”
Tomlinson slid the photo of Merlot across the table. Looked once more at Gail’s mild, expectant smile; saw the shape and richness and warmth of her, plus something else. Uncertainty? Maybe. She appeared uncertain and there was a curious glaze to her eyes, an expression that I associate with people in shock. Then I turned my attention to Merlot. Studied him for a while before I said, “The way he’s got his arm around her, it’s a possessive gesture. Is that what you’re talking about? Merlot’s hand is on her ribs, but his thumb has been elevated just high enough so that it touches the underside of her left breast. He’s making a statement. Familiarity. Intimacy. Ownership. He could be saying any of the three.”
Tomlinson was leaning across the table, head tilted to see, twisting a strand of his shoulder-length hair, a familiar gesture. “Right, right, that’s exactly what he’s doing. But he’s claiming more than intimacy. You’re trying too hard, man… which is so typical of you. Relax, soften your senses, look at the picture and just let it happen.” Tomlinson waited impatiently for a few seconds before he added, “Don’t you see what he’s doing with his fingers, man?”
Once he said it, I wondered how I’d missed it before. The middle finger of the hand Merlot had placed around the woman’s waist was extended ever so slightly, as was the middle finger of his right hand, the hand he had folded on his bloated marshmallow stomach.
Tomlinson said, “He’s looking at the camera, flipping everyone the bird. Merlot picked out this photo. I’d bet anything on it. The daughter said she found it framed on her mother’s mantelpiece? Guaranteed, Merlot’s the one who had it framed and maybe even placed it over the fireplace where it was easy to find. See how the lens caught the woman’s eyes? A flash was used and it created a glare. She wouldn’t’ve had a picture like this framed, because she doesn’t look her best. That’s how I know Merlot did it. He had it framed because he’s telling the ex-husband, his old business partner, fuck you. Using finger-a-grams to do it. Probably got a big kick out of imagining this rich guy, the guy who helped put him in jail. Calloway? What’s his name, imagining Frank Calloway walk into the room, finding the picture and going ballistic. Saying to him, I’m screwing your wife, asshole! Like that. You see it now?”
Yeah, I could see it.
“The guy is evil, Doc. Slimy. One look and I knew. Your instincts are right, so why bother to be so intellectual about it? He’s sneaky evil but a force, so it’s no wonder he scares you.”
No… that wasn’t true, I decided. I wasn’t frightened of Merlot; not just from looking at his photo, anyway. That he used his middle fingers to send a message seemed idiotically adolescent, not evil. What else? I didn’t like him… okay, that much I was willing to concede. And partly because of the way he looked. I could understand now why Calloway had reacted the way he did when he learned that Merlot was sleeping with his ex-wife.
Revulsion, yes. There was something about Merlot’s expression, his appearance, that triggered the gag reflex. Another admission: The fact that Merlot was apparently manipulating Gail infuriated me on a visceral level. The worth of a man or a woman is established wholly by the worthiness of the people who are devoted to him or her. Gail had been the lifetime love of a good, good man, Bobby Richardson. That a person like Jackie Merlot could defile that bond seemed to illustrate the tragic potential of all life.
