“I don’t know you, Mr. Gault.”
“You know I’m rich, and you know I’ve got a problem. That’s enough.”
“I know you kept me suffocating in your neo-modern earth-tone lobby for two hours,” Decker said. “I know your secretary’s name is Ruth and I know she doesn’t keep any Maalox tablets in her desk because I asked. I know your daddy owns this skyscraper and your granddad owns a sugar mill, and I know your T-shirt looks like hell with those trousers. And that’s all I know about you.”
Which was sort of a lie. Decker also knew about the two family banks in Boca Raton, the shopping mall in Daytona Beach, and the seventy-five thousand acres of raw cane west of Lake Okeechobee.
Dennis Gault sat down behind a low Plexiglas desk. The desk looked like it belonged in a museum, maybe as a display case for Mayan pottery. Gault said, “So I’m a sugar daddy, you’re right. Want to know what I know about you, Mr. Private Eye, Mr. Felony Past?”
Oh boy, thought R. J. Decker, this is your life. ‘Tell me your problem or I’m laying.”
“Tournament fishing,” Gault said. “What do you know about tournament fishing?”
“Not a damn thing.”
Gault stood up and pointed reverently to a fat blackish fish mounted on the wall. “Do you know what that is?”
“An oil drum,” “Decker replied, “with eyes.” He knew what it was. You couldn’t live in the South and not know what it was.
“A largemouth bass!” Gault exclaimed.
He gazed at the stuffed fish as if it were a sacred icon. It was easy to see how the bass got its name; its maw could have engulfed a soccer ball.
“Fourteen pounds, four ounces,” Gault announced. “Got her on a crankbait at Lake Toho. Do you have any idea what this fish was worth?”
Decker felt helpless. He felt like he was stuck in an elevator with a Jehovah’s Witness.
“Seventy-five thousand dollars,” Gault said.
“Christ.”
“Now I got your attention, don’t I?” Gault grinned. He patted the flank of the plastic bass as if it were the family dog.
“This fish,” he went on, “won the Southeast Regional Bass Anglers Classic two years ago. First place was seventy-five large and a Ford Thunderbird. I gave the car to some migrants.”
“All that for one fish?” Decker was amazed. Civilization was in serious trouble.
“In 1985,” Gault went on, “I fished seventeen tournaments and made one hundred and seven thousand dollars, Mr. Decker. Don’t look so astounded. The prize money comes from sponsors—boat makers, tackle manufacturers, bait companies, the outboard marine industry. Bass fishing is an immensely profitable business, the fastest-growing outdoor sport in America. Of course, the tournament circuit is in no way a sport, it’s a cutthroat enterprise.”
“But you don’t need the money,” Decker said.
“I need the competition.”
The Ted Turner Syndrome, Decker thought.
“So what’s the problem?”
“The problem is criminals,” Gault said.
“Could you be more specific?”
“Cheats.”
“People who lie about the size of the fish they catch—”
Gault laughed acidly. “You can’t lie about the size. Dead or alive, the fish are brought back to the dock to be weighed.”
“Then how can anybody cheat?”
“Ha!” Gault said, and told his story.
There had been an incident at a big-money tournament in north Texas. The contest had been sponsored by a famous plastic-worm company that had put up a quarter-million-dollar purse. At the end of the final day Dennis Gault stood on the dock with twenty-seven pounds of largemouth bass, including a nine-pounder. Normally a catch like this would have won a tournament hands down, and Gault was posing proudly with his string offish when the last boat roared up to the dock. A man named Dickie Lockhart hopped out holding a monster bass—eleven pounds, seven ounces—which of course won first place.
“That fish,” Dennis Gault recalled angrily, “had been dead for two days.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I know a stiff when I see one. That fish was cold, Mr. Decker, icebox-type cold. You follow?”
“A ringer?” It was all Decker could do not to laugh.
“I know what you’re thinking: Who cares if some dumb shitkicker redneck cheats with a fish? But think about this: Of the last seven big-money tournaments held in the United States, Dickie Lockhart has won five and finished second twice. That’s two hundred sixty thousand bucks, which makes him not such a dumb shitkicker after all. It makes him downright respectable. He’s got his own frigging TV show, if you can believe that.”