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

your average fellow, and that it is a very good thing to have escaped the customary trap of regular hours, regular pay, home and kiddies, Christmas bonus, backyard bar-B-cue, hospitalization, and family burial plot.
    All we have, I thought, is a trap of a slightly different size and shape. Just as the idea of an ancient hippie is gross and ludicrous, so is the idea of an elderly beach bum. I dreaded the shape of the gray years ahead and wished to hop out of myself, maybe into the skin of the coffee drinker now far out of sight in the just-brightening morning. And he, the poor deluded bastard, would probably have changed places willingly.
    I stood up and stretched my sore arms again and decided, What the hell, when in doubt turn to the obligations of the moment. Van Harder was a tough, humorless, competent seaman, and I had given him my word, and he deserved my best effort. If I questioned my own value, then he was likely to get less than his money's worth. He was the innocent bystander who'd been run down by somebody else's fun machine, and all I had to do was repair his reputation somehow.
    And stop moaning about myself.
    I went up to our second-floor suite, showered, changed, and looked out at the early slant of sunshine, and at two young men in warm-up suits volleying on the farthest tennis court, one strung so much tighter than the other that the sounds were in different keys-pink-punk-pink-punk. A shirt-sleeved, necktied man, thick around the middle, came hurrying out. The boys looked up at the windows of the hotel and shrugged and moved slowly and disconsolately off the court, picking up the yellow balls and putting them back in the cans. I guessed that the necktie was Manager Jack, doing his managing. Beyond the courts I could see the roof of the row of cabanas and estimated the exact place where B.J. lay deep in sleep in the yellow glow, surrounded by all the silent music, still and dead in the grooves of the records, frozen into the emulsion on the tapes, locked into the calligraphy of her sheet music and the stilled cleverness of her piano hands.
    "You up?" Meyer said, astonished. He had come out of his bedroom into our shared sitting room. He plodded to the corridor door, looked out to see if there was a morning paper there, and gave a grunt of annoyance on finding that service not provided. He wore a robe in awning stripes of pink yellow, and black, and he looked and acted like a cross performing bear which had escaped a small circus.
    "You want some morning news?" I asked. When he stopped and glowered at me I said, "Mystery woman Kristin Petersen, employed by Hubbard Lawless, disappears the day after alleged drowning. Nicholas Noyes, one-time superintendent of Hula Construction, states that Lawless sold equipment for cash before disappearing. And cleaned out bank accounts. One of the two young ladies aboard the Julie the night of the accident was one Michele Burns, known as Mishy, who is a waitress at the Cove and is reputed to be a part-time hooker. The other, Felicia Ambar, known as 'Licia, works at Top Forty Music in the Baygate Plaza Mall."
    The glower was unchanged. "So?" he said.
    "Don't you want to write it down?"
    "What happened to your face?."
    "Nicky Noyes took an instant dislike to it."
    Meyer nodded. "I can see his point." He went into the bath, and soon I heard the shower. Meyer is not a morning person. Neither am I. But he is one of the non-morning persons who set the standards for all the rest of us.
    After his breakfast and after the morning paper, Meyer was ready for communication.
    "Officially," I said, "I ran into that jungle-gym thing in the dark."
    "Why?"
    "Both combatants were last seen with one Billy Jean Bailey, who is the piano player here and has been for three years, and Jack the Manager does not like to have piano ladies causing fusses Page 20

    between bar patrons. Or guests of the house."
    "Who fixed it?"
    "Miss Bailey."
    His nod was approving. "Neatly done."
    "I've been wondering