“You should probably run along now,” she replied. “I’ve a million things to do.”
Fiona typically kept busy when I was there, pausing occasionally to look at me. Her eyes, like the rest of her, were lovely—almost teal, almost sapphire—but she gave up little of them while rather obviously trying to get rid of me. I didn’t take the bait, instead watching as her gaze wandered uncomfortably from the figures in her account book to the clock on the wall to the front door of the mercantile. Suddenly, she looked at me as if about to confess, her expression less a sinner slipping into the confessional than the chagrined wife who has rear-ended someone while trying to simultaneously drive and apply her makeup.
“Connor—”
She didn’t finish.
“What’s going on?” I pressed.
“Nothing,” she said. “Nothing’s going on.”
“That’s not true. You’re being weird. Mrs. Judson is being weird. I was at Mr. Judson’s this morning and he was weird, too. And the same four guys have been guarding the boathouse all week. Why aren’t the other men helping? What’s that about?”
Fiona didn’t look at me, instead directing her gaze to the stockroom door, peering at it as if words flowed across its surface; words, I thought, for the briefest moment, she was about to share with me. She didn’t.
“I have to go to the back,” she said. “You should run along.”
She made for the stockroom, disappearing inside for a few minutes before returning with a large box. I was still there, eliciting a sigh from Fiona that she hid poorly.
“Wouldn’t you rather be off with Alex or your friends doing something fun?” she asked, feigning nonchalant cheerfulness that made me mad. The woman I loved was hiding something from me.
“Wouldn’t you?” I retorted.
Fiona shot me a peeved look and then headed down one of the mercantile’s three broad aisles. Halfway along it she stopped and began to unpack her box, placing indigo-and-ruby tins of Quaker oatmeal on a shelf already filled with them. I joined her.
“Connor, I’m really swamped today,” she said without looking at me. “Lots to unpack and stock.”
“I can stay and help.”
“It’s summer. It’s your vacation. I can’t make you work on summer vacation.”
“I don’t mind.”
This back-and-forth went on for a while until Fiona became cross.
“Connor, you have to go. I’ve a lot to do.”
She had never kicked me out of the mercantile and I must have suddenly looked like a wet dog to her—half mad, half miserable. Her expression softened.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean hurt your feelings. It’s been a tough week.”
Now this was the place where a smart fellow who has been around the track with women a couple of times knows to keep his mouth shut, offering an understanding nod of his head, the tight line of his mouth providing the only evidence that a woman has dented his fender. I was a boy and not that smart.
“Yeah? What’s been so tough about it?” I muttered.
Fiona frowned and now it was her fender being dented.
“Mind your manners, young man,” she scolded. “If I need someone to speak to me like that, I’ll find myself a husband.”
I didn’t grasp the irony of her remark until I was much older. It wouldn’t have mattered if I did. She clearly didn’t trust me and I was pissed off.
“I gotta go,” I said, tossing more words over my shoulder as I headed for the door. “You’re not the only one with a lot to do.”
I was behaving badly and knew it. But I wasn’t lying. I had plenty to do. I was determined to find out what was going on inside C. Herbert Judson’s boathouse.
Chapter Thirteen:
Dinkle’s mousetrap
It should not be surprising that a man like Cyrus Dinkle had both a fondness for mousetraps and a talent for inventing new ways to attract and catch a mouse. Back in the Indian Territories he’d garnered cheese for his traps by providing Indians with guns and then convincing the U.S. Army that Indians with guns were best disarmed and forcibly removed from land Dinkle then claimed as his own. He subsequently divided his vast holdings into small parcels he sold to homesteaders from the east. Once they were settled, he cut off their water supply until the hardscrabble pilgrims were forced out, their meager savings in Dinkle’s pocket, the land once again made available as bait for the next mouse. From there he expanded into banking, railroads, and oil. Along the way he collected a wife, a beautiful meatpacker’s daughter who saw him as a chance to escape marriage to someone exactly like her father. The marriage ended in divorce after only a few years and Dinkle’s ex-spouse was now more than grateful to be a meatpacker’s wife back on Omaha’s South Side.
No one knew where Dinkle had been raised. He had a patrician way of speaking suggestive of Philadelphia or the Upper East Side in New York City, but Miss Lizzie always thought she detected something more raw and brutal. “South Boston, maybe, or Chicago,” she opined. “He hides it well…makes people think he’s pheasant under glass or filet mignon…but there’s corned beef and cabbage in there somewhere.”
While I made my way to C. Herbert Judson’s boathouse, Dinkle was actually enjoying a corned beef on rye his cook had prepared. He ate in the mansion’s cavernous dining room, alone as usual. Dinkle liked being alone. He knew the mealy little nobodies who made up the population of Tesoro viewed his solitude with both fear and pity. He relished their fear, disdained their pity. “They need, need, need. None of them could stand alone like I did in the Indian Territories,” he often bragged to his man. “They spend their days scratching out an existence and their nights clinging to each other against sounds in the darkness. Pathetic! They make me ill. They fear the world will crush them if they let go of one another. Well, I say they deserve to be crushed. They were born to it.”
Dinkle ripped a bite from his sandwich just as one of the Boops, the chirpy one, appeared in the arched doorway of the dining room, followed a moment later by the Russian Boop. He pursed his lips approvingly. Although the Russian girl was fully dressed for the day, Chirpy Boop wore a lacy thing that didn’t much tax a fellow’s imagination. It was about half of a usual nightgown, its lower edge fluttering just below her hips.
“That’s what you’re having for breakfast?” she said. “Corned beef?”
“This is lunch. I had breakfast hours ago,” Dinkle growled.
Dinkle had hired the Boops to work in a San Francisco house of ill-repute that he owned, immediately appreciating a mature shrewdness and absence of scruples despite their youth—neither girl more than twenty-two years old at the time. The establishment’s madam was near the end of her active career, preferring the company of a bottle to that of revenue-generating men, and it hadn’t taken much time for the chatty hooker and her Russian friend to take over the books and day-to-day operations. From there Dinkle set them up in an office on New Montgomery in the Financial District, where they now managed one of his money laundering operations. They’d given him no reason to regret his decision. Chirpy Boop and her Russian cohort quickly exceeded his expectations, earning generous raises to their salaries despite shameless skimming of company proceeds. He didn’t mind their thievery. Duplicity was comforting to him, an utterly predictable slice of human nature. Indeed, Dinkle preferred doing business with crooks as he considered honest men to be annoyingly fickle, their consciences too often getting in the way of opportunity. Besides, even though the Russian Boop was a bit regal for his taste, Chirpy Boop offered additional services he occasionally enjoyed, even at his age.
“We have to get back to San Francisco this afternoon,” Chirpy Boop told him. “We’ll need your man to drive us.”
“That’s fine,” Dinkle said.
“Also, we realize the foreclosures are set to execute after ninety days but thought perhaps we could get our end n
ow. We’ve been thinking it would be nice to travel a bit. Maybe Cuba…or Europe.”
The foreclosures she referenced were in the small print Fiona had warned me about. Between the first and last pages of the credit agreements the bewitched Tesoro men had signed was a tiny clause requiring the borrower to indicate in writing by ninety days an intention to renew the terms of the contract. Otherwise, the loan balance—or the collateral if the money wasn’t paid—would be due in full on the ninety-first day. It was Dinkle’s mousetrap. No one read the clause on the day the agreement was signed. No one would read it until he called in the loans. Not a single borrower would be capable of fulfilling the obligation. They would all default and he would take not just ten percent but the entirety of their ambergris shares—two million invested in the lines of credit neatly turned into more than thirty million dollars. A nice summer’s work.
“Are you listening, Cy?” Chirpy Boop pressed when Dinkle didn’t answer. “How about giving us our end now?”
Dinkle scowled. “You know the policy. I don’t give advances.”
After entering the dining room, the Russian Boop had poured herself a coffee and now sat at the opposite end of the huge table, using a file to smooth a ragged fingernail. She typically allowed her friend to do the talking, but the old man’s response made her look up.
“Is not advance,” she pouted defiantly. “Is our take.”
Dinkle glowered at her. Like his valet-chauffeur, Yurievsky, the Russian Boop was tall, solemn, and subtly menacing, a thinly veiled air of foreboding about her that unsettled the ex-gunrunner.
“Is our take,” the Russian Boop repeated. “Is not given. We earn. You owe.”
Dinkle slammed his hand on the table, causing Chirpy Boop to startle so violently, her flimsy nightgown nearly fell off.
“Stop begging!” he shouted. “You’ll get paid when I pay you! Understand? Not a goddamned minute sooner.”
Unlike her talkative friend, the Russian Boop was unaffected by Dinkle’s outburst. She remained silent and motionless, her eyes so icy and defiant they might have murdered him on the spot were eyes capable of homicide. Meanwhile, Chirpy Boop fashioned a single crocodile tear, managing to fully expose one breast in the process. The tear had no effect on Dinkle, but his affection for women’s breasts, in general, and Chirpy Boop’s, specifically, softened his tone.
“I don’t even know how much the stuff is worth,” he said. “There’s an analyst coming from back East. If things check out, we can talk about an advance.”
Chirpy Boop smiled wanly, using the hem of her nightgown to wipe away the solitary tear, an absence of undergarments offering further evidence of her inducements.
“Okay, Cy honey,” she said, shushing her friend with a glance. “We understand.”
There were 197 households in Tesoro with around 800 residents among them. Not counting Dinkle, one hundred ninety had signed the Boops’ papers. None had read the fine print. Thus, as I pedaled my bicycle across town toward the marina and the boathouse, only Roger Johns, C. Herbert Judson, Miss Lizzie Fryberg, Fiona Littleleaf, Angus MacCallum, and I, by way of my mother, had failed to nibble the bait in Dinkle’s mousetrap.
Chapter Fourteen:
I discover the truth
Tesoro had no police force. We were under the authority of the county sheriff who occasionally sent a deputy our way—a stringy, pigeon-chested fellow with a pencil-thin moustache, a slight paunch, and enough slack in the seat of his pants to make one wonder if he had any buttocks at all. He followed the same routine: Cruise the main drag through town two or three times, then park in front of the mercantile and go inside where he tried to sell Fiona on the notion that a man with a badge was a bit of a catch. Fiona wasn’t buying. “One of my friends over in Stinson Beach went out with him,” she reported to Ma one day. “He’s a little too handy, if you know what I mean.”
Our lack of resident police protection had prompted round-the-clock guards at the boathouse, the sleepless nights quickly unpopular for fellows accustomed to days that ended with eight or ten hours of uninterrupted snoring. Thus, as I pedaled toward the boathouse, I couldn’t help wondering if attrition had shrunk the regiment down to the four men who had taken over the duty for the last week or so.
Mr. Johns was at his post when I rode up. Miss Lizzie was with him, firing off words like bullets and waving her finger about as if trying to direct the billowy, overhead clouds into a swirl. I have previously suggested that Miss Lizzie was the smartest person in Tesoro and this is no exaggeration. “She’s playin’ two-deck canasta whiles the rest of us be stook on crazy eights,” Angus MacCallum once claimed. Miss Lizzie’s intelligence was mostly a virtue, but she could be snappish when confronted by a something she found stupid, and had long ago stopped disguising her disdain in such instances.
“I can stand a watch, Roger. I’m quite accustomed to being up at night,” she was saying as I climbed off my bicycle and approached. “Most babies are born after dark, a good many after midnight. I probably do more night duty in a month than you men will do in your lifetimes.”
“It’s not about sleep, Miss Lizzie,” Mr. Johns contended. “Let’s face it, men are physically stronger than women. If fisticuffs or some such were necessary, we men are simply better equipped to fend off a ne’er-do-well.”
Miss Lizzie pulled herself up to her full height—a substantial pull as she was quite tall. It fashioned a posture that caused Mr. Johns to recoil slightly as Miss Lizzie was a daunting figure in any circumstance, but when stretched out and ready to fire words, could be a considerable force. I’ve often wondered why she spent her life in our little village. She was too big for Tesoro, too smart, too able. She never married and had no children. Maybe that’s what we were: her children. She liked solving our problems and was remarkably good at it, making her indispensable to us. Being indispensable is a powerful drug for a person who likes to be counted on. As for marriage, some of the snarks in town postulated that she preferred the company of women, but I suspect her spinsterhood was a matter of choice regardless of preferences. She was simply unwilling to kowtow in the way a marriage requires. She certainly wasn’t about to kowtow to Mr. Johns.
“When was the last time you were in a fight, Roger?” she barked. “Have you ever been in a fight? I have. I’ve held down a hysterical woman with one hand and flipped a breech baby with the other. Fisticuffs, for God’s sake! Fisticuffs? Ne’er-do-well? What’s that about? Have you been reading Jane Austen? Fisticuffs! I’ll show you some fisticuffs right now if you like.”
This went on for a while with Mr. Johns slowly backing up until he was pinned against the wall of the boathouse by the finger Miss Lizzie threatened to shove up his nose. Finally he noticed me, the look of relief on his face that of a man reprieved on the gallows.
“Connor! What brings you here this morning?”
His question temporarily put a cork in Miss Lizzie’s spout and halted her waggling finger, although she kept it pointed at him lest he try to escape. She followed his eyes to me.
“At last…a real man,” she said, lowering her finger. She faced me. “What took you so long? I expected you to figure this out days ago.”
I knew Miss Lizzie preferred for people to get to the point. And so, I did.
“I want to look inside the boathouse,” I said.
Miss Lizzie didn’t answer, instead leading me along a floating wooden dock to the double doors that marked the seaward entrance. There was a latch with a padlock. Miss Lizzie extracted a key from her pocket and inserted it into the lock. Moments later we stood inside the dark boathouse, with the doors once again closed. Slowly, my eyes adjusted to the dim light as I struggled not to vomit. The smell was overpowering.
“Hold this,” she said, handing me a jar of eczema remedy compounded from camphor and sandalwood. She pulled off the lid and dipped a finger into the ointment, afterward putting a generous amount just un
der her nose. I did the same and the pungent salve suppressed the stench of the boathouse just enough to calm my stomach.
I had been in Mr. Judson’s boathouse before. He had taken me sailing on his C. Breeze a few times. I loved being on his boat, scampering over the polished deck or ducking under the boom as it swung about on a tack. He’d even let me man the tiller on occasion. This time there was no sight of the C. Breeze inside the boathouse, the sloop temporarily relocated to an open slip to make way for our ambergris. However, there was no evidence of the ambergris, either. The huge mass originally had been placed on a tarp that was then attached to the boat hoist and lowered into the water with the hope that the brine would convert more of the exterior crust to pure ambergris. The boat hoist and tarp remained there. However, the blob I’d discovered on the beach nearly two months earlier was merely a greasy sludge on the surface of the water. A small orange crate sat on one of the interior walkways. Miss Lizzie pointed to it.
“Take a look in there,” she said.
I did and found a large egg-shaped object about the size of a football. It was whitish and hard to the touch. Scars remained from where Angus MacCallum had shaved off a few slivers. I looked at Miss Lizzie.
“What happened to our ambergris?”
She smiled grimly, a humorless thing that filled me with unease.
“It wasn’t ambergris, Connor. We think most of what you found came from the sewage tank of some ship. They must have dumped it overboard.”
“What’s this?” I asked, indicating the egg.
“That’s real ambergris. It was stuck inside whatever they threw off the ship. When Angus scraped off the crust he just happened to hit the ambergris by chance. It was luck…dumb luck.”
People are funny. Even when confronted by circumstances that can’t possibly lead to anything good, a person will cling to the thinnest shred of hope—the egg stain on a necktie might not be noticeable; the bank might honor an overdraft; the firing squad might miss their target. I’m no different. I felt as if I were staring into a phalanx of gun barrels but wasn’t quite ready to accept what now seemed inevitable.
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