Free The Empty Copper Sea by John D. MacDonald Page B

cheerfully.
    "Apparently Tuckerman was in on the deception," Meyer said.
    "Had to be. And I think it was very, very rough on John Tuckerman. He thought Hub Lawless was the finest man who ever walked. Hub had a way of generating a lot of loyalty. If Hub had asked John to set himself on fire, he'd have run after the gasoline and the matches.
    Unquestioning. Okay John helped him, and did exactly as he was told. And after it happened, John crawled into the bottle and he's been there ever since."
    "What was his position anyway?"
    "He was supposed to be a vice-president of each of the four corporations. What he did was make sure the cars were gassed and maintained, and he made reservations and carried luggage and told jokes. He has no family except a sister. Hub Lawless was his family, and the Lawless enterprises were his home."
    "What's he doing now?"
    "Drinking. He has a beach shack down there on the land Hub bought for the condominium project. The ownership of that land is in limbo. He's a squatter, technically, but I don't think he'll be rousted out of there right soon. If I had to make a guess, I would say that Hub probably gave John enough cash to keep him going."
    "If you had to make a guess," Meyer said. Olivera turned and stared at Meyer and then over at me. "Look you guys. This is a favor, okay? Boggs, the big man, asked me to cooperate."
    Meyer looked wounded. "Please don't misunderstand, Walter. Did I sound disapproving? I wasn't. We're here to make guesses. Good newspaper people make guesses based on hunch and experience and then check them out to find the facts, right?"
    Olivera relaxed again. "What I'm working on is not exactly the Washington Post."
    "Does the paper do any crusading?" I asked. "If it doesn't cost anything."
    "Here's one that might not cost much. If we assume Hub Lawless had the whole thing planned ahead, and if we assume John Tuckerman was in on it and helped out, then it follows that Van Harder, running the boat, was given a funny drink. So he lost his license to skipper a boat carrying passengers for hire. So he got labeled a drunk who passed out while the owner fell overboard."
    Olivera thought it over, frowning, turning it this way and that. "I suppose we could have an editorial. But to get his case reconsidered, there would have to be some hard facts."
    I decided to run a little test. "Hard facts. For example, a reliable eyewitness who'd swear to having seen Lawless in Mexico in April?"
    "That might do it," he said. "That would be great, sure."
    So either he was a great actor or he didn't know about the photograph. I resisted the temptation to be a nine-cent hero and take the picture out and explain it to him.
    "What's all this about Harder anyway?" he asked. "He's just a sample of all the people who get hurt when somebody pulls something off, when somebody sets up a conspiracy to defraud," I said.
    While we ate, quite a few people who passed our booth on their way out spoke to Walter Olivera. He kept grinning and nodding and flapping his hand at them. And it seemed obvious that every one of them was wondering who we were. Small cities have a very compact power structure, and it is always more evident when the tourist season is over.
    "It was really a hell of a blow to this town," Olivera said, when his lentil soup was gone. "High hopes. You know. Two big projects. More jobs. The best thing that could happen would be if some organization could come in and pick up right where Hub left off, iron out the bugs, and Page 29

    get those projects moving again. I would think most of the creditors would listen to reason."
    "If we knew who to buy the rights from," Meyer said.
    "I know. The official result was: Missing, presumed dead by misadventure. Now the general feeling is. Missing, presumed alive. If seven years pass with no trace of him, I think they can declare him dead. And that is too damned long to wait."
    He had to get back to the paper. He shook hands around, thanked us for the lunch, told us he