And at the town hall, I wanted to see what exactly was on the ballot.
Tyler’s town hall looks like a large white two-story house, complete with black shutters, and is located in downtown Tyler proper, right next to the uptown fire station. Inside the cool tiled lobby, it took me all of five or so seconds to find the ballot posted on the bulletin board, and then to locate the gambling warrant article. I read it and reread it, and then it took me about five minutes of effort, trying to puzzle out what the hell it meant, before I gave up and threw myself on the mercy of the Tyler town clerk.
As in other towns, the town clerk is an elected position, meaning it was usually retired folks who ran for office, and the Tyler clerk was Matilda Glenn, a retired Air Force master sergeant who worked in finance and could make numbers dance in a conga line if she had the desire. She was thin, muscular, and tough, like she started each morning in the Air Force doing laps around runways.
“Lewis,” she said, as I made my way to her. “I hear you’re not writing for Shoreline anymore. True?”
“Unfortunately it is,” I said.
“Christ, that sucks,” she said. “What are you going to do to make ends meet?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe run for selectman if there’s an opening on the ballot next year.”
She snorted. “Do that and the general IQ of the board will go up, which unfortunately will make you stupider in the process. What’s up?”
“I was wondering about Article 13 on the ballot.”
“Blah,” she said. “Wish it had never appeared.”
“You against casino gambling, then?”
“Christ, no,” she said. “I take a bus down to Foxwoods as much as I can. No, it’s just dividing Tyler and making people pissed off at each other, like we need more excuses. What’s your question, then?”
“I read the article and it says something about a special zoning district being set up on a part of Tyler Beach, near the casino. But it doesn’t say anything about who owns that property.”
“Oh, so you want to know who owns the land that will be carved out, thereby giving the lucky owners the chance to rake in huge amounts of money?”
Her tone of voice was mocking, but since I don’t keep up with the local news like I should, I guess I deserved it. “Let me guess,” I said. “Other people want to know, and I’m not the first.”
A couple of men stood behind me in line and I could tell Matilda wanted to hurry things along. “Sorry,” she said. “I forget sometimes that you’re from away. That scrap of land and property belongs to the Tyler Beach Improvement Company.”
“Which is what?”
“Which is a post office box in town, three people who don’t say shit, and I’m sorry, Lewis, unless you and I have a couple of hours, that’s all I can say right now.”
That sounded okay, and I slipped out.
I saw that it was just past eleven A.M., and I headed to Frida’s sub shop in downtown Tyler, got two lunches to go, and made sure they were wrapped in foil and foam containers so they would still be warm when I got to the county courthouse. I left the food and my Beretta in the Pilot—why bother trying to get them into the building?—and when I got upstairs to the third floor, the doors to the courtroom opened up and folks started filing out.
Including Paula Quinn. I caught her eye and she gave me a quick, warming smile, and I went up to her and said, “Lunch break?”
“Rest-of-day break,” she said. “We’re fully adjourned. What’s up?”
“In my Pilot I have a freshly made steak-and-cheese hot sub, with all the veggies, just waiting for you.”
“Oh,” she said. “Well, you know, I gave those up a while ago, when I started dating Mark. He said they were too fattening and I should stop eating them.”
“Oh,” I said, mimicking her, and I added, “Well, if you’ve got time, we can—”
She laughed, slipped her arm through mine. “Silly man. Just because I gave them up doesn’t mean it’s not appealing to me. Boy, I haven’t had one of those in ages, and I’m starved.”
I held her arm close to me all the way down the wide stairs.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
We mostly ate in silence in the front seat of my Pilot, save for a few expansive moans and groans coming from Paula as she polished off her loaded steak-and-cheese sandwich. I ate more slowly, and when she was finished I could tell she was looking jealously at what was left of my own sandwich. I tore off a chunk and passed it to her. “Go at it,” I said. “Looks like you need it more than me.”
In a few more minutes we were in the relaxed stage of sipping from our cold drinks and exchanging napkins and little moist towels, as I gathered up our trash and gently deposited it in the rear of my Pilot. Paula said, “Looks pretty damn clean back there.”
“Thanks.”
“You get tired of not sleeping back there?”
“In a word, no.”
“Hell of a word, no,” and then she belched loudly and said, “Dear me!”
I said, “I guess your body’s telling you ‘thanks.’”
She nudged my shoulder with hers. “No, I’ll say ‘thanks.’”
“You’re welcome,” I said. “How was court today?”
Paula said, “You looking for an extensive debrief?”
“No,” I said.
“Good,” she said. “Fairly boring. Forensics expert from the state police going on and on about the pistol used to kill Fletcher Moore, and Hollis Spinelli trying to screw him up whenever possible, trying to poke holes in his experience and his testimony. Fairly dull stuff.”
“Thanks,” I said. “See, that wasn’t so bad, was it?”
“No, it wasn’t,” she said, smiling. “Anything else on your mind?”
“A quick history lesson, if you don’t mind.”
“I have some time for you,” she said, “so go ahead.”
“What can you tell me about the Tyler Beach Improvement Company?”
Paula burst out laughing, bringing a napkin up to her face, and I said, “Glad I’m providing comic relief to my favorite reporter.”
She wiped at her eyes and said with a smile, “Assistant editor. Don’t forget that, my friend. Assistant editor. Well. Where to begin?”
“Why not tell me why you’re laughing.”
“Oh, it’s just the humor of the whole thing,” Paula said. “Lewis Cole, amateur sleuth and historian, possible game show contestant when it comes to trivia, who claims to love all things historical, especially about Tyler and its famed beach, and yet . . . I’m sorry, but really, you don’t know anything about the TBIC?”
“Well, now I know it has an acronym, so I’ve got that going for me.”
“Goodie for you,” she said. “Okay. Here’s your history lesson for the day, with no quiz afterwards.”
“Considering how many times I’ve done the same to you, it sounds only fair.”
“Hey, it does, doesn’t it?” She wiped her hands again and said, “Okay, after the war—”
“Which one?”
“The first one. The Great War. World War the First. The war to end wars ended, people were in a good mood, the boys were coming home, and a few businessmen in Tyler thought there’d be a bit of a postwar business boom. They looked around and saw the town of Tyler, and out at the northern end of the beach, the Lafayette House. That’s it. Some cottages and sheds for the fishermen, but nothing else. The Lafayette House held on because of the train and trolley business, but just barely. But the automobile was getting more popular, and these businessmen saw an opportunity.”
“A resort at Tyler Beach, then.”
“Yep. Not many records are left from back then, but at a town meeting a couple of years after the war, there was an article on the town warrant to have the town lease a good chunk of the beach to the Tyler Beach Improvement Company. In exchange for the lease, the town let the company develop the beach, put in roads, water, and fire hydrants. If somebody wanted to build something on the beach, they
had to pay rent to the company. The residents back then saw a wasteland of sand and dunes and thought the businessmen were idiots.”
“So how long did this go on for?”
She chuckled. “Still going on. The town signed the lease for ninety-nine years, and the rent—get this—was five hundred dollars a year.”
“Five hundred bucks? Kind of hefty back then. What’s the rent now?”
“Still five hundred bucks. For most of the whole beach. It never had an inflation adjustment clause or anything like that, so maybe in the first decade or so, the owners were taking it in the shorts, but since the 1930s, it’s been a license to print money.”
“And the town never tried to get an increase in the rent?”
“Sure. Three or four times over the years, but the courts—even the federal courts—said hey, the paperwork’s in order, it’s not the corporation’s fault the selectmen back then were thick as a plank. It’s sort of like that movie, about Bugsy Siegel, the one with Warren Beatty and Annette Bening, how Las Vegas got built. Right?”
I wiped my fingers on my own napkin and said, “So who are these businessmen now? Unless they’re vampires and are still alive.”
“Well, some folks would say they’re vampires, sucking out the life of the folks and businesses down there. You can invest and pour money into a restaurant or a hotel, but the land, the land isn’t yours. Nope, the original developers have passed on, but it’s their descendants who run the corporation, and man, you’d have a better chance at joining the College of Cardinals than getting behind the curtain with these folks.”
“But if they’re a corporation, there must be paperwork over in Concord.”
“Sure. The minimum. The chair of the corporation, the vice chair, and the secretary. That’s it.”
“You try to talk to them?”
“Who hasn’t?” Paula said. “But the three ladies, they’re retired. Oh, they’re still New Hampshire residents, but one lives in Key West, another in Bermuda, and yet another in Cancún. Which means interviews are pretty much off the table.”
“Damn,” I said. I checked my watch. It was getting close to two P.M., which meant court would be back in session soon. “But this casino project, if it goes through . . .”
“Yeah. The ninety-nine-year-old lease will expire in a few years and the corporation will be in a pretty place to keep on raking in the money.”
“But Fletcher Moore’s murder . . .”
Paula checked her own watch. “Not much of a coincidence, I know. But so far the police and the attorney general’s office are content to let Felix be the shooter. Maybe there’s more of an investigation going on. Maybe not. And sure, perhaps the Tyler Chronicle should lead a balls-to-the-wall investigation into the casino, Fletcher’s murder, and the Tyler Beach Improvement Corporation. If we had the money and the resources—hell, we don’t even have an internship program anymore—we could pull something like that off.”
She gathered up her bag. “That kind of journalism is dead, Lewis. I hate to say it, but we’re mostly court stenographers now, just regurgitating whatever’s fed to us. And what we’re all feeding on now is Felix Tinios, on trial. He’s in the state’s crosshairs, tied to a chair, and not moving anytime soon.”
“But what do you think?”
She said, “I spent a few days with him last fall. I get that. But while he was charming, friendly, and very brave, there’s something dark behind that smile. Now I toss it back to you. If Felix was hired by somebody to kill Fletcher Moore, and the paycheck was big enough, you don’t think he’d hesitate to take the job?”
More people were going into the courthouse. I knew Paula would have to leave in a moment or two. I waited.
“Lewis?”
“Maybe he would,” I admitted. “But the scene, so sloppy. Not Felix.”
“I agree. And maybe that was the plan all along. Ever think of that?”
“That Felix left the scene sloppy so even if he was caught, there’d be reasonable doubt that it had been him? If he had a half-decent defense attorney, maybe so.”
“Maybe so,” she said. “Popular phrase.”
One more glance of her watch. “Dear me. Time to head out. Thanks for lunch.”
“Thanks for the history lesson.”
Paula looked at me and I looked at her, and I saw something in her eyes, something in the slight curve of her smile. As she reached for the door handle, I reached out, put my hand softly around the soft base of her neck, and gently tugged her toward me. She was smiling as she came to me, and I kissed her, and kissed her. She tasted of peppers, burnt onions, and grease, and she tasted wonderful.
I eventually pulled away. She blinked, smiled again. “Thanks for dessert.”
“My pleasure.”
“Me, too.”
Paula opened the door, and I watched her slim figure go across the parking lot and then up to the courthouse.
I waited, and when she was gone, I started up the Pilot and left.
I went back to Porter and its famed traffic circle, and then went to the Port Harbor Realty Association, in its tidy little strip mall. There was a sign on the door that said BE BACK IN FIFTEEN MINUTES! but no indication of when it had been hung up. I took in its neighbors—a bridal gown boutique, a comic book store, and a gold jewelry store—and decided I had to kill at least a quarter hour. So where to go to cool my heels? I owned no gold jewelry and wasn’t in the mood to purchase any, and if I went into the bridal store, that would raise a few eyebrows and concerns, especially since I wasn’t going in with a fiancée.
That left the comic book store.
Why not?
I went in and the door jangled behind me, and the scent of paper and ink quickly overcame me. There was a waist-high counter on the left near the door, and the store owner or clerk, a young man in his mid-thirties, was involved in a heated discussion with a younger couple over the powers of a certain superhero whose name I didn’t recognize. The couple was smiling as they argued, but there was heat behind their words, rising above their baggy jeans and long-sleeved T-shirts. The floor was uneven concrete with long folding tables covered with cardboard boxes, and inside the boxes were thousands of comic books, all sealed within plastic wrappers. I started randomly flipping through them and instantly felt lost, a stranger in a very strange land. In the artwork and drawings there was a fierce urgency of telling a dramatic tale, but I didn’t recognize the names of the characters, or the artists, or even the publishers.
I moved along, heartened here and there by seeing a Superman, a Batman—who I guess was the same as the Dark Knight—and some other familiar names from my childhood, and then my mood really improved when I saw some knocked-together bookshelves at the end of the poorly lit store, holding scores of old, battered science fiction and fantasy novels.
The smell of the pulp paper and cardboard covers zapped right into my brain and brought back fond memories of my reading in grammar school through college and beyond. I passed many pleasurable minutes flipping through the paperbacks, greeting the authors’ names like old friends: Asimov, Norton, Heinlein, Bradbury, Zelazny, Clarke, and Dick. I took my time rummaging through them, recognizing the titles, loving the bright colors of the covers. Even in the chaotic years of the 1950s and the 1960s, all of the covers seemed to promise a bright future, even in the midst of the real-life turmoil going on in the world.
I picked up two Clarke paperbacks and a Heinlein and headed to the front. The turmoil was still out there, but the promise seemed to have been forgotten.
As I got to the counter, the young man snapped, “Well, that’s just your opinion,” and he stormed out with his lady friend, the jingle-jangle of the door louder than usual. The storeowner just shook his head, took my books, totaled them up, and after I’d passed over six dollars, he said, “Kid thinks he’s so smart. Thinks because I run a comic book store, I can’t be too bright.”
He passed over my purchase. “My aunt owns this strip mall, and she charges me a fair rent on the
lease. The utility costs are minimal—heat and lights—and it’s a cash business, meaning Uncle Sam doesn’t need to know how much I make every year. I got a nice condo over in Maine, a tidy little bank account, and a couple of times a year, I go to conventions where sweet young things turn very friendly when you say you own a store like this.”
I picked up my books. “Seems like you got it all figured out.”
“Damn straight,” he said, sitting back on a high stool. “If you want to create the next app or be the captain of your own universe, go right ahead. Me, I get to spend my days in fantasy and dreams, and I love every second of it. Fuck the world.”
I kept my own counsel, about how sometimes it’s the other way around, but I just nodded my thanks and went back outside.
I tossed my books into my Pilot, checked the time. I had been in the store for nearly a half hour. I went back up to the door of the Port Harbor Realty Association, where the front door was still locked, and the sign promising BE BACK IN FIFTEEN MINUTES! was still hanging there, in shame, I hoped.
Broken promises.
Boy.
I knocked on the door once, twice, and thrice, and looked up and down the narrow sidewalk fronting the stores. I went out to the parking lot and then walked around the building, going past a service driveway that ended with a Dumpster. I went to the left, past the Dumpster, to a rear alleyway that provided access to the service entrances to all three stores. I ignored the one for the gold and jewelry shop and stopped at the one for the real estate office.
I turned the knob.
Unlocked.
I took out a handkerchief, wiped the knob, and then, with the handkerchief still in hand, twisted the knob again. The door swung open, and I called out, “Hello? Anybody here?”
No answer.
I opened the door wider, stepped in. My loaded Beretta was in my right hand. I didn’t recall how it got there so fast. I stepped in, found myself in a little break room that also had a copier machine and some neat piles of paper, envelopes, and folders.
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