'If you were a bass, would you chomp one of these?' he asked.
'If I were a bass, I'd want to be a tarpon,' I said.
Charlie grumbled something unintelligible and speared a fat worm with his hook. He swung his cane pole-no graphite rods and championship tackle for him-into the canal and waited. On the marshy bank, a great white heron peg-legged along, a full five feet tall on those matchstick legs.
Charlie's line drifted with the almost imperceptible current, the moon tugging the endless waters from the ocean to the straits to the bay to the great slough of the Everglades. 'Can't eat the bass anymore,' Charlie said. 'Mercury poisoning.'
I had seen the Journal headline: chemical threatens glades. Two inches of type, tops. A Florida panther dead, its liver laced with mercury. Nearby, a mess of bass floating belly up. I imagined an innocuous headline dated December 1, 1941: Japanese flotilla steams southeast.
In the whirl and buzz of today's world, the men and women stuck in traffic jams cannot see the fouled streams, the poisoned pastures, the sea creatures strangled in plastic nets. Between punching in and punching out, getting ahead and stashing away their IRA, they have no time to consider the invisible menace. Meanwhile, in well- lighted conference rooms, finely groomed men in charcoal suits coolly discuss their budgets for R amp;D, SG amp;A, and the profit ratio of malignant poisons that coat the vegetables and artificial hormones that lace the beef.
Their computer models tell them how many tankers will cruise the Gulf before one strikes a reef and the appropriate tonnage that will ooze into the precious estuaries. Mathematically, they can figure when the waters of the Everglades will become as deadly as a toxic dump, when the song of a million birds will be stilled. No problem. The boys in insurance gotcha covered. Five million primary for the basic risk, fifty million excess reinsured with Lloyd's to protect the company's net worth and their own pensions. The public-relations folks-experts at damage control-are ready to fax prepackaged news releases that explain the company's profound concern at this unanticipated and unfortunate incident.
Just that morning Charlie and I heard thunder roll in the distance to the west. Not from the sky, but from underground explosions set by an oil company searching for a fortune beneath the river of grass. At dawn we watched their trucks, obscenely white, roll along the old levee, seismic sensors protruding like the antennae of steel-jacketed insects. Exploratory only, the company says, for it has no drilling permit. Just wait. After lobbyists pay their nighttime visits, it will only be a matter of time. The drilling will start, and some dark lonely night, through human error or computer breakdown or metal fatigue, the black gunk will belch into the marshy hammocks and over the sawgrass and through the canals. The crude will pour into the aquifer that supplies our fresh water. A bad enough spill and Palm Beach, Fort Lauderdale, and Miami will go bone dry. The roaches will inherit the concrete shells of forsaken condos, which in the end might be what was intended all along.
'Itemize it for me,' Charlie Riggs ordered, as if I were a fuzzy-cheeked intern.
We were sitting on the wooden dock behind his cabin on an Everglades canal. Charlie wore hiking boots and khaki shorts that were stained with fish guts or worse. I wore gray practice shorts and an old tear-away jersey, number fifty-eight, which the Dolphins somehow managed not to retire. In the glare of the late-afternoon sun, I tried to talk and pull the porcelain stopper on a sixteen-ounce Grolsch at the same time.
'Two young women who live alone are strangled a week apart. They have no known enemies, no common friends. Neither was robbed. The first may have had sex shortly before death, though it could have been a solo flight. The second victim clearly had sex in close proximity to death. Seminal fluid revealed an assailant or lover with blood type A, according to young Dr. Whitson.'
'Assailant or lover?'
'No sign of a struggle,' I said. 'Other than the injury to the neck, no contusions. Also no skin under the fingernails and no torn clothing. It appears consensual.'
'Unless it was postmortem.'
'I hadn't thought of that.'
'Well do, and please continue.'
Charlie gets ornery if you overlook anything.
I said, 'A message at the first scene echoed Jack the Ripper and taunted us. A message at the second scene reflected animosity toward women. Other than that, there is no apparent connection between the two murders, except…'
Charlie yanked on the cane pole and came up with a palm frond.
'Except,' I continued, 'both victims belonged to a sex-talk club. Both were frequent fliers on the computer wooing circuit, including the night each was killed.'
'Anything else?' he asked, keeping his eyes on the rippling canal.
'Victim one was having a fling with the politically ambitious state attorney. Didn't seem too serious on either side. What the kids call a sport fuck.'
Charlie scowled and flipped his sunglasses down from the bill of his cap like a shortstop under a pop-up. 'Our language,' he moaned, 'In partibus infidelium. 'In the hands of infidels.''
'She may have been poking into Fox's war record.'
'I assume you haven't queried Fox whether she asked him about Vietnam.'
I took a hit on the cold Grolsch. 'Right. Too early. I try not to cross-examine a witness until I know at least as much as he does.'
Charlie smiled. He had burned me from the witness stand more than once when my eagerness exceeded my experience.
'No one knows what Marsha was up to,' I said. 'The news director says she was working some investigation on her own, doesn't know what. She wouldn't tell him anything about it except she had a confidential source. He didn't take it too seriously. Didn't take Marsha too seriously, for that matter.'
'Uh-huh,' Charlie said. I thought the old wizard had come up with some revelation, but he was just pulling in a small blue-striped fish.
'Looks like a bream,' I said.
'No. A damn tilapia. Belongs in somebody's den in an aquarium. Folks started dumping their exotic fish out here, now they've taken over the bedding areas. No wonder you can't find bluegill.'
Charlie tossed the fish back, chose another night crawler, and baited his hook. 'Maybe Nick Fox didn't take her seriously either. Maybe she was just a sport-I can't say it-to him until he found out she was onto something.'
'But then there's Mary Rosedahl,' I said.
'Yes, and unless you're willing to believe that Fox killed a second time to cover up the motive for the first…'
'Hold on, Charlie. We have no proof Fox had anything to do with the first. You can't take this kind of speculation to a grand jury.'
Charlie smiled and scratched his beard. 'Easy, Jake. We're just postulating. Covering all the possibilities. Stop thinking about probable cause and proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Be a scientist for a moment. Consider every happenstance, no matter how remote. When a person is killed, always ask, cui bono? 'Who stands to gain?''
I drained the beer. It didn't help my powers of concentration. 'That assumes a rational motive and not a crazed psychopath.'
'And you assume we're dealing with a psychopath.'
'Guys who leave nutty notes at murder scenes don't usually have rational motives, right?'
Charlie watched his line as little water bugs skittered across the surface. 'Unless the messages are purposeful distractions…'
'That's what Pam Maxson said about the Ripper note.'
'Or they could be the product of an irresistible urge to scorn, to goad the authorities.'
I nodded. 'Pamela Maxson said serial killers sometimes do that. They need thrills or something.'
'Excitement,' Charlie said. 'Some psychopaths seek a whirlwind of excitement. Rather than seeking security, they crave risk.'
I opened another beer. Before I could take a drink, Charlie chuckled and said, 'You've been quoting Dr. Maxson a lot lately. What should I read into that?'
'My admiration for her…credentials.'
