John Finn

by Vincent McCaffrey

  ​She straightened up a little on my more positive assessment. Then she nodded at me, and raised an eyebrow.

  ​“So how did you screw things up?”

  ​I shrugged, “Still a mystery to me.”

  ​Another customer came. Afterward she turned back again. This time she had lifted one foot onto the other so that one knee was bent. It gave her a bit of a pose.

  ​“So, what would you do over again if you could go back to high school?”

  ​I didn’t shrug at that. No hesitation. I hit the line as if it were ready and waiting. “I’d probably ask you out for a date.”

  ​She made a face as if to say, likely story. “Fabian would have killed you.”

  ​“Yeah. . . Well.”

  ​She nodded and worked the knee back and forth a couple of times.

  ​“So, what’re ya doing tonight?”

  ​I said, “Work.”

  She rubbed one shoe on the other and considered the situation a moment longer.

  ​“Call in sick.”

  ​I nodded. A small wave of guilt went through, but it didn’t linger.

  ​“What time?”

  ​“Seven. I’m out of here tonight at seven. D’ya have the price of a dinner?”

  ​“Sure.”

  ​“See you at seven then.”

  ​In the parking lot again, I called up Connie and asked him if he had anybody to fill in for me. He wasn’t happy about it.

  ​“What is this? What are you into?”

  ​I just told him, “You don’t want to know. But if a woman calls up looking for me, tell her you fired me for not showing up.”

  ​Funny thing is, that’s the last thing Patty Moriarty said to me when I left her apartment last night.

  She said, “What is this?”

  ​She wasn’t happy either. She had a fresh bottle of vodka on the table, and a stomach full of pretty good lasagna from one of the better restaurants on the South Shore, and half her clothes off before I made it to the door. I had done my best to keep it from going too far and made my exit as soon as I could. Like Jimmy Stewart, I had my story.

  But I did say I was sorry.

  ​I had traded with Connie for my slot on the schedule last night and worked his morning’s shift at the Gallery. Then I grabbed my manuscript and went to see James.

  He didn’t look very happy either.

  “What is this?”

  This is James. I have listened to him romance a woman with the empathy of a trained psychotherapist. I have watched him entertain a room full of authors and keep their attention for over an hour—a lot more difficult than the cliché about herding cats. Life for James was all in the performance. And if you caught him off guard, without his mental make-up on, it was usually an unpleasant experience equivalent to waking up in bed with someone you’ve never had the disappointment of seeing at first light before.

  He placed a stiff index finger straight down on the manila envelope I laid on the bar, pinning it like an insect.

  I said, “It’s a story.”

  The tone of his voice did not change. “Why are you giving it to me?”

  “Because you’re my agent.”

  “What gave you that idea?”

  “You did.”

  “That’s a ‘who.’ I said ‘what.’ Do we have a contract? I don’t remember a contract.”

  “A verbal contract.”

  “Isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on. I think Samuel Goldwyn said that first.”

  I wasn’t in the mood for this.

  “So write me up a fucking contract and start acting like my agent instead of an asshole.”

  James slid off his stool. He’s almost five feet tall—on his feet. This is very intimidating if you know that he works out three times a week and he’s closer to your jewels than you are to his jaw. Standing, he has a habit of tilting his head to the side just enough to keep an eye on your face.

  “Don’t be presumptuous. I’ve known you for what? Twenty years? What have you ever come through with in twenty years? You never re-wrote your damn Civil War novel like I told you. You never finished that book about the glass flowers. I believe I still have the first ten chapters of that in a drawer in my office. It’s in the same folder with that dead-weight about Henry David Thoreau and his pencil factory that you spent so many years on. Now you want me to read more of this shit. Why should I? I read that first part for you. I told you it had promise. Until you get your head out of your own asshole I’m not going to waste any more time on you. And you won’t get a contract until I see something approximately finished that I think is approximately publishable.”

  The thing here was to just keep talking. Whatever his disposition was, he would get beyond it.

  I said, “Four years.”

  “Fours years, what?”

  “I spent four years on the Thoreau novel. And I’m going to finish it. After this. No. After this, I’m going to finish the story about my New Hampshire school teacher. I’m going to bring him home from Appomattox. Then I’m going to figure out Mr. Thoreau. But for now, I want to know what happened to Mary Andrews. And I need some help.”

  “What about the glass flowers?”

  “They’re broken. I can’t fix that.”

  He turned his head toward the bar, where my manuscript was laying next to an empty glass about on the same level as his nose.

  “This is a real pain in the ass. You know that?” He turned back toward me and repeated himself. “You know that? No. You have no idea.” He stood up on the chair rail and slid back into the seat. “You want empathy. You want compassion. You want understanding. You don’t want an agent. You want a woman. But you can’t keep your women happy because you haven’t got a clue, or you don’t have the balls. It’s not about the writing. It’s about you.”

  He was going for the psychobabble. He does it very well. I ignored it.

  “Can you read it?”

  He turned all the way and stared out over the room where thirty or forty young women seemed to be actively engaged in conversation with thirty or forty young men, each of them just released from their offices and wanting to make something human out of a day already half wasted in front of a computer monitor with some useless series of procedures that made things difficult out of matters that should be as simple as a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ and a handshake.

  He did not look back at me when he spoke. His eyes were on the women.

  “You remember that time you and Mary Ellen had me over to the house for Thanksgiving dinner? Those girls of yours were all excited about the new dog and kept slipping food under the table. You could float a lifetime away on the smells of that food. It was like Norman Rockwell.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I was thinking about that. Recently. Sitting right here. On Thanksgiving day. You know? This is where I spent Thanksgiving. I was thinking that I would give up just about everything I had in the world just to have what you had once. You had it. And you blew it.”

  “Yeah.”

  He turned back to the bar and held his glass up at the bartender and I asked for a beer and sat down next to him.

  He said, “I forgot. What happened to that dog?”

  “He got out the front door one day and ran into the street.”

  “Damn. Still. You know, I need a dog. Unconditional love. It’s all any man needs. How’s Mary Ellen?”

  “She’s finally got a boyfriend.”

  “Good. How are the girls?”

  “Susanna’s making a go of it in New York. She doesn’t tell us how she’s doing. Still the self-contained one. But I think things are okay. No boyfriend that we know of. Sarah’s doing well at school. But I think she’s about to run off and marry Connie’s boy. Connie’s hoping his boy joins the Marines first. But something’s going on there. And Matty has a boyfriend we don’t like and we’re worried it’s going to get out of hand before she even makes it to her senior year. High school isn’t like it used to be.”

  James b
arked a laugh at me, loud enough to turn a few heads, and swallowed half the scotch in his glass.

  “Maybe your high school. Not mine. You don’t know what it’s like to be the only midget in a high school full of girls with hormones pouring out of . . . their ears. I barely survived.”

  It was a funny thought. I raised my beer to it.

  “That’s just you. You have a nose for hot hormones.”

  I think we sat there without a word then for maybe five minutes. I didn’t know what he was thinking about. Maybe all those lost hormones. I was thinking about Thanksgivings past. I liked that dog. And Desiree was crazy for dogs. She had told me that was the one thing she missed, living in the city. She wondered aloud once if maybe she could find a law office in a small town somewhere and have a house of her own and a dog. That was not so much to want.

  Finally, James said, “How’s the professor?”

  “She’s unhappy with me.”

  “Because of the lawyer.”

  “Yes.”

  “No word about her yet.”

  “No.”

  “I guess that’s the trade-off. If you let yourself get involved. Everybody has a story. You get your stories mixed up and then they don’t come apart so easily.”

  “No.”

  He liked this bar because of the young women looking for something more in life than the cold stare of a computer monitor. But he was getting too old for it. They didn’t find his height so exotic any more. I knew that much. I suppose that would be enough to keep me in a bad mood if I were in his shoes.

  I did not ask about Patrice. I supposed that was water under the bridge and long gone.

  Before I left, I told him, “I think you’re right. I think you should get a dog.”

  He told me I should go do something anatomically impossible. But he kept the manuscript.

  I showed up at Rebecca’s without calling. I didn’t know what I was going to say in any case, so calling would have been a waste.

  I think she must have seen me through the window because she opened the door right up. She was already wearing her pajamas.

  She said, “What is this?”

  I could imagine that tone delivered to one of her students who’d presented a half-baked thesis.

  “This is just me. And I was just thinking. I was thinking about Thanksgiving. I was thinking I shouldn’t have left that night. I didn’t want to. I just didn’t think it was right to stay. Given everything else. Because, I was thinking that night that I loved you too. And I had never said it to you either. Given everything else—you cooked a Goddamned turkey for me. That was a very nice thing to do. And I thought I should have told you. I do love you. And you ought to know that, despite everything else. If you can understand that. And I hope you do. . . I was hoping you might understand it.”

  She just looked at me. The street light over my shoulder caught at the green in her eyes. I waited. There wasn’t much else I could think of adding. I smiled, but I just waited. She licked at her bottom lip. She does that. She was thinking.

  Then she opened the door up wider and stood aside.

  25. Tatterdemalion

  ​Detective Wise used another nice word when he called this morning. The law is full of such gems: seisin, replevin, comity, escheat, gravamen, moiety, moot, and subpoena. Subpoena has a sexual sound to it. Something of the quality of a grammatical rape.

  Wise had found a DA and a judge in Texas to give him a subpoena for phone records. There was news from that. Neither George Jefferson Adams nor his wife had been accurate about where they were that last weekend in October. They had possibly been together, but not in Houston. In Boston. And, in that neither had returned Wise’s subsequent phone calls, the Detective had asked the Houston police department to make a visit to Adams’s law office for further inquiry.

  ​I was suddenly lying awake in bed and oddly giddy over this. Something like a sudden sugar high. Something was going on. At least the investigation into what had happened to Desiree Perry was not being lost in the shuffle.

  ​Bill Wise had been somewhat apologetic in his tone. “Look, I appreciate your staying out of this. It makes my life a lot easier. Like I said, just let me do my job. I’m telling you what’s going on so that you know I’m doing it. When we talked yesterday I could see it on your face. You were worried things were getting buried. But that’s not the way it works. Not with me. Things take time. I’m telling you about Adams and his wife so you can see that it’s happening. Don’t screw it up. Let me follow the facts. And don’t go saying anything to someone else. Like I said before, keep it in your hat.”

  ​I did not contradict him. And there was no reason to tell him everything I was doing. Especially in that my own inquiries had amounted to nothing. And watching Higgins had been a bust. But who was the someone he thinking I would tell?

  ​I said, “You mean Rebecca?”

  ​“Whoever.”

  ​“Yes sir. Under my hat.”

  ​In fact, I avoided talking with Rebecca about anything to do with Desiree. There was no upside there anymore.

  ​She was already unhappy with the amount of time I had left for her. A new romance is more about time than almost anything else. Even sex. And I was trying too hard to compensate for the one with the other.

  ​There just wasn’t enough time.

  ​I had already cut back on watching Higgins, in any case. He was very regular in his habits. Up at six. At work by eight. Off to lunch by eleven-thirty. Back by one. Out the door of the office again by six. He partied on weekends. It appeared that he scored his drugs during one of his lunch breaks, but he only made use of them on weekends. I was fairly certain of that much. I’d been keeping a part time eye on him for about seven weeks. He had not come home on three out of the four Saturday nights I had been able to be there myself. Or on two of the three Friday nights. Sunday through Thursday, his light was out by eleven. This was actually far more disciplined than I would have given him credit for.

  ​In the light of that, the news about George Jefferson Adams was good. I wanted to think it was, in any case. I didn’t like Mr. Adams and if he were responsible for doing something to Des, I wasn’t going to be unhappy about taking care of him if that’s what it came down to.

  I had fallen asleep again this morning after Rebecca had left for her first class at six a.m. Even with the time change, that’s too damned early when you’ve been up late. I didn’t know how she could do it.

  I’m the type that automatically wakes up when there is some sort of natural light to see by. This morning the light came a bit later because of a steel gray rain that blistered the glass on the bedroom window. It was Wise’s phone call that forced me to finally open my eyes.

  ​Rebecca had left coffee in an urn and a stack of raisin toast. She had probably hoped I would get up before she left, but I was tired. I called her and left a message. Just a ‘thanks.’

  I was coming off a solid week of all-nighters at a club over on Lansdowne. It was Burley who’d been covering duty with the musicians previously, but he was sick or something. And that was another thing. I had to find out what was up with Burley sooner than later. Thankfully, the rock group had finished their gig and I had some days off now. I needed to use the time wisely. Basically, I have to get some more writing done. And I wanted to take Rebecca someplace.

  ​Rebecca had left me a note clipped to a manila envelope. It doesn’t seem appropriate to quote any of that note here, but for one thing, she told me about the copy of the Elisabeth Cutter letter she had received from a friend at the DAR in Washington. “I think you will be pleased.” Rebecca has a knack for understatement. I had wanted to see it last night, but then things got busy.

  When I finally opened the manila envelope this morning, I was sitting at the little table by the window in Rebecca’s kitchen and looking at the assault of hard December rain on the colorless grass in the small back yard. The ground had frozen earlier and now the rain bounced back and made a low haze there that was mes
merizing to watch.

  I tried to find some reference to pull my mind away from that. Because of all that I had been reading, I was quick to imagine the rain that had occurred on April 18, 1775. What would have happened if it had continued through the 19th, as nor’easters here can often do for days? Would the American Revolution have sputtered out at its very beginnings?

  What I held was a photocopy of a transcript labeled ‘Browne, Elijah 12a—1775.’ Each sheet was typeset, as if copied from a book, but the name Elisabeth Lawrence Cutter had been hand written at the top margin along with page numbers 312, 313, and 314. From the dark margins, it appeared to have been copied from micro-film and then recopied on a scanner. The letter had lost its first page in the process, but it used a word in the very first sentence fragment of the second page that I liked. ‘Tatterdemalion.’ Seeing it, I felt the giddiness again just as I had when speaking with Bill Wise earlier. I knew that word. I had read it before. I guess I’m getting to be a little girl in my old age.

  ​There is something special about a good letter. The quality of the writing isn’t the whole deal. The best is when you can see in your mind the person who wrote it—unlike most of the letters of the period that I’ve encountered that amount to minimal requests, orders, or acknowledgements.

  In the past week, at the Boston Athenaeum, I’d found a copy of a Minuteman’s journal, a carpenter from Andover named James Stevens, who very functionally and phonetically spelled out his daily doings and offered a wonderful insight into the dialect and spoken accent of the moment:

  ​“April ye 19 1775 this morning a bout seven aclock we had alarum that the Reegerlers was gon to Conkord we getherd to the meting hous & then started for Concord we went throu Tukesbary & in to Bilrica we stopt to Polords & eat some bisket & Ches on the common. We started & wen into Bedford & we herd that the regerlers was gon back to Boston we went through Bedford. We went in to Lecentown. We went to the metinghous & there we come to the distruction of the Reegerlers thay cild eight of our men & shot a Canon Ball through the metin hous. we went a long throug Lecintown & we saw severel regerlers ded on the rod & som of our men & three or fore housen was Burnt & som hoses & hogs was cild thay plaindered in every hous thay could git in to thay stove in windows & brike in tops of desks we met the men coming back very fast we went through Notemy & got into Cambridg we stopt about eight acloke for they say that the regerlers was got to Chalstown on to Bunkers hil & intrenstion we stopt about two miles back from the college”