Excerpt
The Lonely Silver Rain
One
Once upon a time I was very lucky and located a sixty-five-foot hijacked motor sailer in a matter of days, after the authorities had been looking for months. When I heard through the grapevine that Billy Ingraham wanted to see me, it was easy to guess he hoped I could work the same miracle with his stolen Sundowner, a custom cruiser he’d had built in a Jacksonville yard. It had been missing for three months.
When I heard he was looking for me, I phoned him and he said he would appreciate it if I could come right over. Billy had come down to the lower east coast early and put himself deeply in hock to buy hundreds of acres of flatland too sorry to even run beef on. After he put up the first shopping mall, he went even deeper into hock. He and Sadie were living aboard a junker with a trawler hull at Bahia Mar, living small while he made his big gambles. He was betting that the inland would have to build up to support the big beach population, and he kept right on pyramiding his bet until all of a sudden it turned around, and he became F. William Ingraham, owner of shopping malls, automobile agencies, marinas, a yacht brokerage agency, and a director of one of the banks which had been tightening the screws on him a few years earlier.
He bought waterfront residential land and one day when the house they had planned together, he and Sadie, was half built, she was there one morning looking at tile samples for the master bathrooms when she gave the young subcontractor a strange look, dropped the tile she was looking at and toppled into the framed area where the shower was going to be. She was two and a half weeks in intensive care before everything finally stopped.
They’d been married twenty-eight years and had no kids. He sank into guilt, telling anybody who’d listen that if he hadn’t been so greedy he could have cashed in earlier and smaller, with more than enough to last them the rest of their lives, and she would have had a few years in the house she wanted so badly. Everybody who knew him tried to help, but we couldn’t do much. He went into that kind of decline which meant he was going to follow her to wherever she had gone as soon as he was able.
But a woman half his age named Millis Hoover pulled him out of it. It took her the best part of a year. She had been working for him. Sadie’s house had been finished and sold. And he had sold off everything else, paid his debts and resigned from all boards and committees, and put the money into insured municipal bond funds. He lost all interest in making money, in wheeling, dealing and guessing the future.
It was Millis who worked him around to buying a penthouse duplex in the new Dias del Sol condo, three twenty-story towers about eight miles north of Fort Lauderdale. It has indoor and outdoor pools, health clubs, a beach, boat slips on the Waterway, a security staff, a good restaurant, room service, maid service and a concierge to help with special problems. It cost him one point two five million to buy it and, with Millis’ help, to furnish it. One room was set up as a small office, because it was more efficient to have her working there. Then she moved in, because that was more convenient too. She nagged him into using the bodybuilding equipment, into sunning himself, into doing laps in the pool every day, into eating sensibly and even into giving up his smuggled Cuban cigars and his half bottle of bourbon a day.
After he began to take pride in how he looked and how he felt, he began to take more of an interest in how Millis looked and, in time, how Millis felt. And that did not surprise anyone who had been following the woman’s reconstruction of Billy Ingraham.
Anyway, I was given the expected security check in the small lobby of Tower Alpha at Dias del Sol at a little after ten in the morning on October 3, a Wednesday, and after Mr. Ingraham had confirmed to them that I was indeed expected, they aimed me toward the elevator at the end of the row.
Billy let me in. He has a big head, big thick features, a white brush cut and little brown eyes. He is instantly likable. In that sense, he has always reminded me of Meyer. Both of them treat you as if you are one of the high points of their day. Both of them listen. Both of them seem genuinely concerned about you.
“Hey, Trav! You look like you been adrift on a raft. You look damn near scrawny. What’s going on? Where were you?”
“Bringing that old sloop of Hubie Harris’ back from Marigot Bay at St. Lucia.”
“Hope nothing happened to Hube.”
“Nothing permanent. He fell and broke up his knee. Those two kids of his, twelve and thirteen, wanted to try to bring it back by themselves, but he didn’t want them to try. I’m not much for sloops, or any kind of sailing, so the kids were useful. What took so long was dodging here and there, trying to stay away from a tropical storm that was trying to be a hurricane but couldn’t decide which way to travel. Got in and they told me you wanted to talk.”
“Come on upstairs and we’ll have some coffee.”
We went up an open iron circular staircase and through a doorway that opened onto a wide patio garden overlooking the sea. The view was spectacular. I could see the deeper blue of the Stream way out. A tanker, deeply laden, was riding the Stream north, and closer, this side of the Stream, a pair of container ships were working south. Small boats danced in the glare and dazzle of the morning sun.
Millis was grubbing at a flower bed. She wore a wide straw hat, a black string bikini and red sandals. She was sitting on her heels. She turned and stood up and dropped her cotton gloves and grubbing tool by the flowers and came toward us, cool and elegant and remote inside her coffee-cream tan, her slenderness, looking out at us through the guarded green lenses of her tilted eyes, smiling a three-millimeter smile.
“Travis, you know my wife, Millis? You know we got married last June?”
“William darling, Mr. McGee was at the wedding!”
“Oh, hell. Sure. I’m sorry. I wasn’t tracking real good that day.”
We sat on white iron chairs at a round white table and Millis brought us coffee and went back to her flower chores. “I guess you heard about our new boat getting stole.”
“I heard it was taken, but I didn’t hear any details.”
He got up and went away and came back in a few minutes with some eight-by-ten color shots of the Sundowner, some of them taken from a helicopter.
“Very pretty,” I said, studying them.
“A real gem. Fifty-four feet. Big diesels. Solid as a rock. What scalds me, Trav, was the timing of it. We wanted to take our honeymoon trip in it right after the wedding, but there’d been a delay in getting it outfitted just the way we wanted it. Well, sir, by the fourth of July I had it all equipped and provisioned, and ready for a test run. We went north up the coast, with me running it fast and running it slow, checking out the radar, Loran, recording fathometer, digital log, ship-to-shore, Hewlett-Packard 41-C with the Nav-Pac for this area. We checked out the stereo system, television reception, AC and DC, the generators, auto-pilot, battery feed, navigational lights, cold locker, stove, every damn thing. It all worked fine, but you know me, Trav. I’ve owned enough boats for enough years to know that when you really go cruising, the things you need most are the things that quit first. She was all provisioned too, even to two cases of that Perrier champagne Millis likes.
“The sea held calm and a little after noon I came to a little inlet I’ve been through before, but the chart showed just enough water for me to ease through on a high tide and we were a couple of hours shy of the high, so I moved around to the lee of a big sandbar island, worked in close, threw the hook and let it slide on back to deeper water. We were planning to take our trip up the Waterway to New England, and start in a day or two, and I felt we had the right boat for it and I felt good about making that trip. I’d always wanted to do that. We had lunch and some of that good wine out in the hot sunshine and the summer breeze. I dropped off and when I woke up Millis had swum and waded over to the sandbar island.”
