Say No to Murder

by Nancy Pickard

The light that rimmed the closed door of the trailer gave it a false air of welcome. When Ashley Meredith flung open the door, the first person I saw was a short, fat man who was smiling smugly. Definitely one of Webster’s. He didn’t speak, but waved his arm grandly toward the far end of the trailer as if introducing the main act at the circus. Just in front of me, Ailey Mason made a strange, strangled sound in his throat.

  Officer Meredith stood back to let the three of us enter. Before I got both feet in the door, I heard Geof say to someone, “All right, we’ve brought her.”

  I stepped in, glanced past the short fat man and his nondescript buddy. Suddenly I was looking full in the face of the man who would not talk to the police until he talked first to me. He was, indeed, wearing a wet suit, complete with a tight black hood that compressed his hair to his scalp, accounting for the bald silhouette. An orange life preserver was fatly fastened around his chest, so that his upper torso seemed disproportionate to the rest of his long graceful body. He was more tanned than you’d expect a man of nocturnal habits to be. His eyes were a fine, clear gray. And the reason for the young policewoman’s admiration was apparent: this man, with an edge of silver hair showing at the rim of his black hood, was handsome enough to be famous.

  He smiled sweetly at me.

  “Geof,” I said wearily for the second time that week, “I don’t believe you’ve met my father.”

  “Mr. Cain,” Geof said, more gently than the man deserved. “Did they hurt you? How’s your head? Do you want us to call an ambulance?”

  “Hold on there!” the short fat man expostulated, but Geof turned a ferocious face on him and waved him to silence. My father, as usual, bypassed the direct questions in favor of ones that had not been asked. “Every night, you know, I watch this project through my binoculars.” He nodded wisely at Geof, one guardian of the peace to another. “Just as I promised Jack Fenton I would, you see. Well, this night I saw so many bright lights come on over here. Then as I watched, I saw figures of men moving surreptitiously. I knew I must take action at once. There was no choice but to come ashore and take matters into my own hands.” He looked down at the long fingers that had rarely done anything more physical than swing a club or a racket.

  Geof looked quizzically at me.

  “Ailey,” he directed, “get an ambulance over here. I think Mr. Cain may be suffering from concussion.”

  “Geof,” I said, “I wouldn’t worry. He’s always like this.” But when my father raised one of those slender hands to rub the back of his head, I was glad for Geof’s concern. I turned to rebuke Web’s vigilantes, but they saw it coming and the short fat one stepped forward aggressively.

  “How were we to know he was your father?” he demanded, shoving his face into mine. “And what the hell difference does it make? Everybody’s somebody’s father. Jack the Ripper probably had kids, you know what I mean? This guy here was sneaking around the project up to no good. What was he doing with a knife, you want to tell me that? How about that wrench? Sure, he’s your dad, you’re going to believe what he tells you, but me, I’m an objective observer, and I say we got our man.” He pointed at the dignified figure in the black wet suit. “Right there, by God!”

  “Back off,” Geof snarled. “Sit the fuck down.”

  Reluctantly, the short fat one did as he was told, failing heavily back into one of the kitchen chairs that Goose used to conduct business. Behind him, I noticed that the other vigilante had his back turned to us because he was on the phone. With my eyes, I signaled that message to Geof, who prodded Ailey into movement. With two long strides, the young detective had one hand on the man’s shoulder and the phone receiver in his other hand. “Say good-bye,” said Ailey gently and handed the phone back to the man, who did as he was told. Ailey then dialed 911 to command an ambulance.

  I began to unfasten my father’s life preserver. He let me do it for him, much as he would have allowed a valet to undo the diamond studs on one of his tuxedo shirts. “Let’s get this thing off, Dad,” I said. “You look like you’re wearing a beer barrel. Where’d you get the wet suit?”

  “Jennifer,” he whispered. His eyes twinkled at me. “It was fun.”

  “Oh Dad.” I helped him pull off the black hood. The great mane of silver hair gleamed under the overhead light. “You might have been killed.”

  I slipped the preserver off his arms, then laid it on the floor of the trailer. It was still damp enough to ring Goose’s linoleum with moisture. When I straightened up, I said, “Dad, this is a friend of mine. Detective Geoffrey Bushfield of the Port Frederick police department. And Detective Ailey Mason.”

  For once, my father’s eyes were sharp and attentive.

  “Not,” he said eagerly, “the Bushware, Inc., Bushfields by any chance?”

  “Yes, sir.” Geof smiled. “I’m the wayward son.”

  But my dad was off in other circles, social ones. “Fine parties they used to give, your people. Only the finest wines, the best orchestras. I remember one time for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the company, your mother had the club put out little tool boxes for party favors. Cutest darn thing I ever saw! Why do you know, the wrench I brought over here with me is a Bushware wrench!” He looked around for it, finally sighted it on the kitchen table which served as Goose’s desk, and pointed proudly at it. Then, mercurial as always, he seemed to droop in his wet suit. “We lost something in this godforsaken burg when your family moved away.” His face was as long and sad as Gatsby’s ever was when he mooned over Daisy. “Nobody can play as good a game of doubles at the net as your father could. Does he still play?”

  “Tennis?” Geof looked bemused. Ailey stared at my father as if he were a strange creature from another star. “Yes, sir, I think he still plays. Mr. Cain, when did you get back to town?”

  “Geof!” I said, not believing what I heard.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, turning to me with real regret on his face. “But you know I have to go through the formalities, your father or not. Just bear with me, all right?”

  “Yes, all right.” But suddenly I was nervous, a state that was not improved when Webster Helms flung open the trailer door with a startling bang.

  “Congratulations!” he said loudly to his vigilantes, who had brightened considerably at his entrance. Now I knew whom they’d called so quietly: their Great White Leader. Webster wheeled on my father like vengeance personified. “Jimmy Cain!” he said, puffing out his thin chest. “It wasn’t enough that you singlehandedly threw this town into a recession by putting hundreds of people out of work! No! You had to come back to destroy our renaissance!”

  “Webster!” I was frightened by the expression on my father’s face. He seemed, for once, to be listening to the person who was talking to him. And suddenly I was afraid that my father was going to get hit by the realization of his shortcomings right there in that tatty trailer surrounded by people who didn’t love him or know him. He looked as if he had been struck by a blow that was infinitely more painful than any that a loose board could inflict.

  Geof had opened his mouth to stop Webster, but the little architect would not be halted. He whirled on the detectives and shouted, “I want this man in jail where he belongs! Everybody knows that Jennifer is your lover, Bushfield, and you’d better not show any preferential treatment of this . . . criminal . . . or the whole town will want to know why!”

  “Stop it, Web,” I pleaded. “Please, can’t you see what you’re doing to . . .”

  “You look at him, Jennifer,” Webster said, more calmly. “What you see is a man who hasn’t been back to this town in years, am I right? And he just happens to come back when all this trouble starts, am I right? And he just happens to be apprehended on the site of the project which has just happened to be the site of acts of violence and sabotage, am I right? I’m saying that he rained this town once, and he means to do it again.”

  I felt as if I couldn’t breathe, as if the walls of the trailer were sliding in on me and my family, squeezing out of
us what little was left of the juice and flavor of life. This couldn’t be happening, not again. I thought of my mother who still hovered, comatose and certifiably crazy, in a mental institution; of my sister who was only beginning to come out from under the shame of my father’s earlier failure; of Geof, who had not bargained on this public disaster when he dreamed his wedding plans for us.

  Somebody said, “Jennifer,” in a gentle, loving voice.

  But I was lost in the confused, hurt gray eyes of my father. “Jenny,” he said, “does this mean they won’t name the harbor after us?”

  chapter

  20

  “Jenny.” Geof spoke privately to me a few minutes later when we were outside again under the floodlights. It was going on eleven o’clock. “Of course I’ll let him go. I have no intention of allowing him to go to jail. But you understand that he was trespassing on plainly marked private property, and that it will be worse for him in the long run if I don’t put him through the usual drill. Because he’s your father, I’ll have to be extremely careful to see that he receives no preferential treatment.” He smiled slightly. “At least no overt preferential treatment.”

  My father sat in the back of an ambulance, staring out the window at me like a puppy in a pet shop.

  “I can’t bear this,” I said.

  “Sure you can. Listen to me. This all depends on whether or not the owners of the mall decide to press charges. And since I’m the one who’s going to describe tonight’s events to them, you can be fairly sure they won’t do it.”

  “I don’t want you to get into trouble.” In truth, I might have sacrificed anything or anybody to avoid this latest family humiliation.

  He smiled. “I’ve been known to take care of myself. You want to come down to the hospital and then to the station with us, don’t you?”

  “Yes. And no.”

  “That’s what I thought.” He gave me the keys to his car. “Follow us then. And don’t worry any more than you absolutely have to, do you hear me? I’ll take care of your father. He is a funny old guy, isn’t he?”

  “How nice of you to put that interpretation on it. Oh God, wait until the papers get wind of this. Wait until my sister hears about it. Lord, I guess I’d better call my stepmother in California. And our lawyers. And . . .”

  “Don’t,” he said sternly. “Don’t break down now, I mean. He needs you.”

  “You haven’t any idea of the irony of that statement.”

  “I know all about that, Jenny,” he said. “I know how little he was there when you needed him. At the moment, that’s irrelevant, don’t you think? He’s your father. You’re his only functioning daughter. Sometimes life comes down to equations as simple and basic as that.”

  “You have an overdeveloped sense of duty.” But I reached up to kiss him on the cheek. The hell with Webster Helms and Officer Ashley Meredith and all the others who were avidly watching us with sidelong glances. If there was anything I’d learned from my crazy family, it was if you’re going to make a spectacle of yourself, by God make a spectacle of yourself.

  Then I followed my father to the hospital.

  Four hours later, he was released into my custody. I couldn’t take him to stay at Geof’s house with me, because of the uproar that would cause—suspect rooms with top cop—so Geof drove us over there, I packed a few of my things, put my exhausted father into my car and moved onto the Amy Denise with him.

  He was staying in the large aft cabin where Geof and I had unsuccessfully tried to spend one night. I moved myself into the forward V-berth. My father went quietly to bed without inquiring what I intended to do with him next. What I did was to climb to the bridge, start the engines and steer us to an out-of-the-way cove that I knew. I dropped anchor in the middle of it, out of shouting reach of the shore. Any reporter who wanted this story would have to find us first and then row through heavy chop to reach us. It was uncomfortably bumpy for us in that cove, too, but that was a small price to pay for refuge, no matter how temporary or illusory.

  When I crawled into my narrow bunk it was five o’clock in the morning of another hot and cloudless day. There were, however, clouds on my internal horizon. They didn’t keep me from sleeping.

  My travel alarm clock went off at seven. Work awaited, regardless of the fate of feckless and/or felonious fathers. The night before, in order to get to the Amy Denise anchored in Liberty Harbor Bay, we had had to take the Boston whaler back out again. Because the Citizens’ Watch Committee was convinced it had its man, they’d gone home, so there was no one to stop us. Geof had managed to delay the impounding of the Boston whaler for evidence, a sleight of hand he’d have to deal with when he faced his higher-ups in the morning. I had the queasy feeling I was corrupting an honest cop, one who might decide that the price of having me was not worth the loss of his integrity. But on this morning, I was practically, not philosophically, minded.

  Rather than go to the considerable effort of winching the small boat up to the bridge of the Amy Denise, I had merely tied her to the aft deck and crossed my fingers. Now she was still there, bobbing happily in that way that Boston whalers have of seeming to say, “Let’s play.” I rolled up my business clothes in a plastic trashbag, then stuck my purse and briefcase in it as well, left my father a stern note on the refrigerator, and climbed down the swim ladder to the little boat. I was commuting to shore in a swimming suit. The whaler had an engine which my father the spy had chosen not to use the night before, opting, instead, for the stealthy silence of the oars; for once in my life, I followed his lead. No use advertising our comings and goings with any more noise than necessary. I rowed to shore, knowing a short walk would take me to a pay phone, which would get me a taxi, which would take me back to the marina so I could pick up my car and go to the office.

  By ten, I was dry, dressed and walking in the door to be greeted by Faye Basil and Derek Jones.

  “Just because you’re the boss,” my assistant said grumpily, “doesn’t mean you get to sleep ’til noon!”

  chapter

  21

  Within the hour, it was clear that my presence was not only not a help to the Port Frederick Civic Foundation, but that it was a hindrance of awesome proportions. As if through some intuitive cue, the deluge of phone calls began as soon as I sat down at my desk and tried to focus on the work for which I was being paid.

  My sister Sherry got to me first, the press having gotten to her first. She was strangely, uncharacteristically calm. “I don’t have anything to do with this,” she informed me in clipped tones. “I don’t have anything to do with him. I am leaving town. I am packing and going away to Europe on the next Concorde and I am taking my family with me. I am not hysterical, Jenny. Please note that I am not hysterical. I am merely leaving, that’s all. If they hang him, save me a piece of rope for old times’ sake.” Now that was more like the loving sister I knew so well.

  “Bon voyage,” I said without bitterness. Any crisis was easier to handle with her out of the way. As for my ailing mother, there was no reaching her with this or any other news. It was going to be Dad and me, alone together on the deep blue sea.

  Her call was followed in quick and frantic order by one each from two local newspapers, a TV station, three radio stations, the regional cable affiliate and a reporter from Boston who’d already got wind of the news. To each in turn I said politely, “No comment.”

  “What’s your dad got against that town?” the reporter from Boston pressed. I was just tired enough to be goaded into answering her.

  “This is his home,” I replied. “He loves it like any other native son.”

  “Is this part of a conspiracy that includes the bankruptcy of Cain Clams?” she asked sharply.

  “Oh, please,” I said in disgust.

  “Have they charged him yet with the murders of that man Reich and that what’s-his-name McGee fellow?”

  “No! And there is no reason for you to assume they will. My father had nothing to do with those tragedies. Please don’t
jump to such awful conclusions.”

  “I hear he was a champion archer at Dartmouth.”

  “Oh, Lord,” I sighed. “He went to Brown for half a semester in his freshman year before he flunked out. To my knowledge he has never lifted a bow and arrow in his life.”

  “But he’s a mean man with a wrench,” she said nastily.

  I hung up on her, something I should have done several questions earlier. But she was the only ugly one among the dozen or so who called; the others were locals who knew me personally. They were courteous, apologetic, as kind as they could be considering the questions they had to ask. “It’s a terrible sign,” I said to Faye, “when reporters are kind and gentle with you. It means they like you, and they sure are sorry, but they’re going to crucify you because they think you’re guilty as hell. They think he did it, Faye.”

  She reached across my desk to pat my hand.

  I felt my eyes fill and quickly blinked.

  “Your father,” she said sweetly, “wouldn’t kill a fly. Mainly because it would never occur to him to do it himself.”

  I looked up at her in surprise, saw the kind twinkle in her eyes and began to laugh, I was still smiling, and feeling cheered, when the phone began its siren call again.

  “Jennifer,” said Webster Helms with a new formality in his voice that boded ill for my family. “I was appalled to learn this morning that your father has been released instead of being held in jail where he should be. I am sorry, Jennifer, but the man is a menace to this community. I think it only fair to warn, you that I intend to do everything in my power to see that the full force of the law is brought to bear against him and that a full-scale investigation of his recent activities be launched by an independent, nonbiased investigator.”

  “Are you reading that, Webster?” I said recklessly. “Or did you memorize it before you called?”

  There was a moment of charged and angry silence on both ends of the line. Finally he said stiffly, “Don’t say I didn’t warn you, Jennifer.”