The Mangrove Coast df-6 Read online

Maybe Tomlinson was right. Maybe the lady was in more trouble than I suspected.

  Thought about Gail some more as I jogged Tarpon Bay Road to the beach, then turned toward Captiva Island. Occasionally, my thoughts strayed to Maggie, my married friend from Tampa. I hadn’t heard from her for a few days. Were we going to get together and work out this week?

  I stayed on the harder sand near the surf line, running at a pretty good pace. The sun was behind me, gathering heat. A little-known but potentially useful fact: When children wander away from their parents while on a beach, they almost always go in a direction that puts the sun at their back.

  Same with aging runners.

  For some reason my thoughts shifted from Gail Calloway to the apparent difficulties of maintaining a marriage. Running promotes a random, free rein of thought, so it seemed a natural progression to end up thinking about my own failed relationship with a woman who was as impossible not to love as it was impossible to be her lover.

  Pilar Fuentes Balserio, that’s who I was thinking about. Pilar is the prominent chief executive of the small Central American nation of Masagua. I’d met her when she was the wife of the President of Masagua.

  We became lovers nearly a year before her husband’s term came to an end. Shortly thereafter, she gave birth to a son. It was also at about that time that she ascended to power.

  I suspect I played more than a small role in her success, occupational and otherwise.

  There were reasons, all political, why I’d been able to see Pilar only occasionally. It became clear to me that circumstances weren’t going to change. How? Pilar had sat me down and told me in unambiguous terms.

  A very strong woman.

  Here’s what she offered: We could have a few days at Christmas, perhaps. Maybe a week when the Masaguan National Assembly recessed for summer. Maybe a weekend if she could wrangle a few days in Miami for research. And secretly. Always, always secretly, arranged in ways so that absolutely no one could know.

  But my feelings for Pilar are such that occasionally just wasn’t enough. So, slightly more than two months ago, I’d taken a few weeks to think about it, another week or two to build up sufficient courage, and then I sent her a telegram.

  The guy at Western Union seemed surprised by the request. In this age of E-mail, he did mostly money transfers, not messages.

  But I liked the style of the thing. Stupidly, I pictured a kid with a weird little hat pedaling up on his bike to make this dramatic delivery: “Telegram for you, ma’am…”

  The telegram consisted of four words.

  It was a proposal. The only one I’ve ever made.

  Hopefully, it will be the last.

  The first two words of the telegram began: Will you…?

  Pilar’s reply had come three thoughtful days later; the only time she’d ever risked telephoning me. She was tearful. She was resolute.

  Her answer was no.

  It had to be no, she said. She had no reasonable options.

  Consider, she said, who I was: A North American; a gringo. How could that possibly be accepted by her people?

  What she really meant was: Think about who you once were, about the work you once did to hurt my country.

  I felt like an even bigger dope than usual. I pride myself on being reasonable, but I hadn’t even taken the time to analyze her position. Of course she had to decline. She had no other choice. So why the hell had I risked her refusal? It was out Of character for me to put so much emotional currency on the line.

  Tomlinson’s assessment had been uncharacteristically blunt: “You’d have never asked her, Doc, if you thought for a minute she’d say yes. Most people live alone because they have to. But you… you live this way because you like it.”

  Was that true? I wondered about it as I ran along the beach.

  No, I decided. It wasn’t true. My proposal to Pilar had been genuine. I liked the idea of entering into a partnership with her… the woman and her handsome blond-haired son. That she could say no, that she had to refuse, still caused a jolt of disappointment in me that was as powerful as any physical pain I’d ever felt.

  One thing was obvious: If I did not marry Pilar, I would ultimately lose her. And she would not allow me to marry her…

  That realization created in me a feeling of internal deflation that seemed to wither my perceptions about whatever future I hoped to have. That is not a dramatic assessment. For weeks after making the decision not to see Pilar again, I felt like crap. I mooned around like some adolescent idiot. I felt embarrassed by my inability to control my own thoughts and feelings. The only emotion I’d ever experienced that was as intense was when I’d lost another good woman, a powerful woman named Hannah Smith. Finally,

  I began to get mad. Mad at myself, no one else. And that’s when I began the slow, slow process of recovery.

  Pilar was out of my life.

  Fine. I had my work, my routine, my fish tank, my boats.

  And no more proposals. Not of that kind, anyway.

  One night, when I had dumbly observed, “Love can be extraordinarily painful,” Tomlinson had sagely replied, “No shit, Sherlock.”

  An insightful man.

  But not me, I told him. Never again.

  I tried Calloway a couple of times at his office on Monday, didn’t get him. It was a Lauderdale area code. Apparently Frank did his work over the phone or by computer and probably made the occasional cross-state commute.

  By car, Boca Grande to Lauderdale would have been two and a half, maybe three hours.

  By chopper, maybe forty minutes.

  I wondered if the efficient secretary who took my messages was the infamous Skipper. The wise thing to do when in doubt is to ask, so I finally asked.

  No, indeedy, I was told. I was speaking with Ms. Betty Marsh, Mr. Calloway’s executive secretary. Without prompting, she added, “Ms. Worthington hasn’t worked since she became Mrs. Calloway.” Her tone carried the careful professional indifference that is designed to mask disapproval. I also noted the judgmental ‘hasn’t worked’ instead of the more specific ‘hasn’t worked here.’

  Calloway’s longtime secretary clearly did not approve of her boss’s new young wife.

  I wondered how far she was willing to go with it. I said, “I was aware that Frank married her, but I didn’t know she’d left the office.”

  “Well, she has. Hasn’t worked here for nearly a year now.”

  I said, “Must be nice,” with the slightly cynical, the-world-just-isn’t-fair chuckle that always accompanies that phrase.

  And that’s when she closed the door just a little. “Who did you say you are?”

  “Ford. First name Marion, middle initial D, which is why most people call me Doc. I’m a friend of Amanda’s.”

  Her voice brightened. “You are? In that case, I’ll save you another phone call: Mr. Calloway won’t be available till tomorrow morning, maybe early afternoon. You try then, I’ll put you right through if he’s here in Lauderdale or give you the number where he’ll be. She’s one of the good ones, Amanda is. Enough character in there for two or three people. He’s in meetings today with investors, the whole bunch of them working late. Over in Tampa.”

  So I went back to the lab where I’d spent much of the day carefully removing otoliths from grouper I’d collected.

  It was exacting, painstaking work. First I used my Buehler low-speed saw to cut paper-thin sections, then Histomount to mount the sections of bone on a slide. Careful polishing was then required to make the annuli visible.

  When I was done, the tiny white discs were as bright and delicate as cultured pearls. And so thin that a puff of wind could blow them around like autumn leaves.

  If the annuli were readable (all too often, they weren’t), then and only then was I able to count the rings through my compound microscope.

  One ring equaled one year of growth.

  Painstaking work, yeah. Sometimes frustrating, but it’s the kind of work I enjoy. It requires precision and offers clar
ity.

  So why was I spending so much time trying to figure out the age of a fish? Simple. The black grouper is no ordinary fish. It’s a large, aggressive bottom dweller that inhabits coral reefs and rocky ledges from North Carolina to southern Brazil. It’s a popular sport species as well as the most important commercial species of grouper in South Florida.

  You see grouper on a restaurant menu, it’s most likely black grouper. Translation: economically, it is a very, very valuable animal.

  An interesting thing about the fish is that, like most grouper species, black grouper are hermaphrodites.

  That’s right, hermaphrodites.

  Protogynous hermaphrodites is the exact scientific term. What that means is, all grouper are born female and, at a certain stage of maturity, most (perhaps not all) make the transition to male.

  The data compiled by doctors Crabtree and Bullock had already produced some interesting statistics. We’d examined 1,164 black grouper and found that approximately 50 percent of the female population had reached sexual maturity at an age of slightly more than 5 years. By the age of 15.5 years, half the sampling had transformed into males.

  This was noteworthy because Florida imposes both recreational and commercial regulations on black grouper caught in state waters. To be killed, a grouper must be at least twenty inches in length-a fairly large fish.

  In isolated regions of rock and reef, did this mean that the largest fish, all males, would be the first to be exterminated? And, if so, would grouper respond differently to fishing mortality than typical gonochoristic species?

  In plain English: Would the depletion of male stock cause the species to adapt more quickly? Would smaller, younger females make the transition to male in order for the species to survive?

  I found the question intriguing. Successful species have an extraordinary ability to adapt quickly to ensure procreation. In humankind, adaptability tends to be behavioral rather than physiological, but the ability is there because the mandate is so strong.

  I wondered vaguely if Gail Calloway’s strange behavior was symptomatic of some deep need to reacquire a full-time male partner.

  From what Amanda had told me, her acceptance of Jackie Merlot had been so quick, so unquestioning that it had the flavor of panic. Maybe she was reacting to some powerful internal drive that was deeply coded. I’d heard the wartime stories of total strangers desperately copulating in bomb shelters. To be abandoned by a husband of many years had to be no less traumatic, no less terrifying than war.

  Tomlinson was right. Divorced middle-aged women were easy targets indeed. I’d never given it much thought before, but I’d seen enough of them to know. And there is no shortage. More than half of America’s marriages end up in divorce and, in a generation of Baby Boomers, it means there are a lot of forty-something women out there going it alone. By the dumb measure of generations past, too many of these women see themselves as failures because they failed to maintain a marriage and “keep their man.”

  What nonsense.

  Women between thirty and fifty-five are at the height of their intellectual and physical powers. That they and their former mates have separated effectively obscures that fact. Nor are they necessarily victims. What these women illustrate is the changed dynamics of a changing society. Yet their sense of desperation proves that the self-image of modern women has yet to catch up with the realities of modem times. That’s why they are so very vulnerable… and way, way too eager to reprove their worth.

  Why else would a woman like Gail Calloway give herself to a man that her own daughter had described as a pile of mashed potatoes beneath a face that made her skin crawl?

  Clearly, she was troubled, desperate. The question was, what kind of man was Jackie Merlot? And to what degree would he try to take advantage?

  Frank Calloway called me the next morning, Tuesday, talking at first on a speakerphone-the bad audio was distinctive-but picked up the handset when he realized that he had me on the line.

  “Sorry I didn’t get back to you yesterday, Dr. Ford. It’s a busy time of year in my business.”

  In a state that attracts nearly a thousand new out-of-state residents a day, I wondered if there was such a thing as a slow time of year in the land syndicate business.

  “No need for the prefix, Frank. I’m not a physician.”

  “Then is Ford okay?”

  “Ford’s just fine.”

  “In that case, Ford, I apologize for not getting back to you. I gather you’re in a rush. I should have made time.” Very easy, very congenial, not at all like when I interrupted his dinner party.

  “Amanda’s the one in a rush. I’m not so sure what my approach should be. You apparently know Jackie Merlot, so help me out: Should we be in a hurry to find your ex-wife?”

  “Aside from a recent and unpleasant reintroduction, I haven’t spoken to Mr. Merlot in fifteen years.”

  “Was he a patient of yours?”

  “I really can’t comment on that.”

  “Frank, I’m trying to help your stepdaughter and your ex-wife. If you won’t answer the easy questions, what’s going to happen when we get to the hard ones?”

  “It’s frustrating, yes, I understand that, but there are professional considerations here that I can’t-and I’m talking about state and federal laws-that I can’t breach. I’d tell you if I could. The law won’t allow me. My professional conscience won’t, either. When psychologists begin to breach the confidence of patients, psychology will no longer be a valid tool.”

  “Would it make a difference if we met privately, just you and I?”

  “It would make no difference whatsoever.”

  “The inference is that, yes, Merlot was once a patient of yours.”

  “If that’s what you infer, I won’t argue. The thing I can and will talk about is business dealings I’ve had with Merlot in the past. That might be useful.”

  “He’s in development and construction?”

  “No… what he now does for a living, we can talk about later. But back then he sold real estate. That, and he was involved with making… souvenirs? Something like that. T-shirts and hats, maybe. Some kind of cheap tourism scam. This was more than fifteen years ago. Merlot signed a note to invest in one of the first land packages I ever put together. It wasn’t for a lot of money. Five thousand. Not much. I let him in as a favor. He practically begged me to get involved.”

  I said, “It was that good.”

  “Yes, it really was. It was a beautiful little project. A kind of mini gated community; half a dozen duplexes built with enough taste and sufficient screening to give the impression of total privacy. At the center was to be a courtyard: nice little pool, Jacuzzi, propane grills, a small workout room with weights and sauna. This was before the fitness craze. We’d lowballed a chunk of riverfront near Wauchula that abutted a small state park and couldn’t really believe it when the sellers accepted.

  “You ever hear of Highlands Hammock? Beautiful place and you can’t find a nicer town than Wauchula. So we had immediate land equity, a built-in buffer, guaranteed appreciation on the land and plenty of eager investors. But believe me, even a project as small as that one, five thousand doesn’t buy much of a piece. Like I said, I was trying to do the guy a favor.”

  “Because…?”

  “Because I felt it would be good for him. Good for his… well, let’s just leave it at that. Even in those days I occasionally tried to be a nice guy.”

  “So what happened?”

  “The gas shortage, that’s what happened. Remember how it was? An ineffective president, interest rates were close to twenty percent, national confidence was nose diving. Then all of a sudden you had to get up at four A.M. and wait in line for an hour, sometimes more, just to get a tank of gas. No one knew how long it was going to last. Maybe a couple of months… or maybe the United States of America really was on its last legs and economic collapse was just around the corner.

  “Panic is contagious and people panicked. The contractor w
e’d subbed to clear and grade the property was only a week or two from being done, but he had to stop because he couldn’t get diesel. The construction guys had two of the units all framed and inspected, but they couldn’t buy gas for their cars. Most of them lived near Sarasota, fifty, sixty miles from the job, so how were they going to get to work? Same with our potential buyers. We planned to draw the young, upwardly mobile types; professionals who wouldn’t mind commuting twenty or thirty miles to work. Today, no problem. But back then, no way, not after a fuel panic like that. My investors got scared and the project died on the vine. We lost everything. The only project I ever did where my backers lost money. But it was good experience, a good lesson for me.”

  “How did Merlot take it?”

  “That’s what I’m getting at. Merlot didn’t. He refused to make good on his note. He hemmed and hawed and finally said, hey, it was all my fault, I should have planned a little better, so why should he have to pay?”

  “You’re telling me the kind of guy he is.”

  “Exactly. I’m telling you the kind of guy he is. Or at least was.”

  Calloway went on. “I told Merlot that if he refused to honor his debt he could forget investing with me ever again or, for that matter, anyone else in Broward County. I also told him I was going to sue. Which I did. He didn’t even bother fighting it, but I never collected a cent. Not that I expected to. Turned out he’d passed bad paper to other investment groups around the state, and my little suit pushed his reputation over the edge. The district attorney got after him, and I think Merlot actually spent some time in prison. Four or five months, not much. I was deposed but never actually testified.”

  “He blamed you for sending him to prison?”

  “Probably me among others. But without good cause. My suit was one of many. I never spoke with him again after that. I didn’t know he was still around until Amanda told me that he was involved with Gail.”

  “How’d you take it? When you heard that Merlot was dating your ex-wife?”

  “Is that question pertinent to finding Gail?”

  “It might help give me a clearer picture of how it was between you and Merlot.”