by Peter Colt
“I need you to contact the police departments in LA, Las Vegas, Seattle, and San Francisco. I need you to call around and ask some questions about the addresses that Hammond lived at when he lived there. I need to know what was going on there at the time, and if there was any police activity during the times that he was at those addresses. Tell your people not to talk to a desk clerk but someone from Detectives or Narcotics.” I then read him the list of questions I had come up with.
“Okay, I will see what we can come up with. I have some interns that I can use. It might take a couple of days. What are you looking for?” He was less on edge now that he was assured that I was actually working on something and not just vacationing with his client’s money. The client that he was making out to be his ticket to being mistaken for a respectable WASP.
“I am not sure, but I will know it when I see it.”
“What are you going to do now?”
“Now? Now I am going to go get some dinner.”
Danny said some bad words that I am too polite to repeat and slammed the phone down. I washed my hands to get rid of any trace of sewing machine oil. I finished my whiskey and took my own advice about dinner.
My new work boots were stiff, and the fishermen’s sweater itched where it rubbed against my chin. The khaki shirt saved most of my neck from the itchy sweater. My jacket from Bean’s was damp, but with the sweater on it didn’t matter too much. I had slid the .32 in between my belt and jeans, where it was held pretty snugly in place and couldn’t be seen under the sweater.
The rain had settled into a chilly drizzle and mist. I walked past the Brotherhood, having eaten there twice in less than two days. The wind was still blowing, but the sweater was warm and my feet were dry, so I didn’t mind being on foot. Off in the distance I could hear the foghorn blowing its mournful two-note song. This was Sam Spade weather, but this wasn’t San Francisco.
I took care crossing the street in the fog. I was headed downhill toward the water. In my walks around town I had seen the Atlantic Café, which looked like it had a nice, warm bar for a cold night. The Atlantic Café wasn’t far from the Greek Revival Athenaeum building and its nice garden. It wasn’t an unpleasant walk in the fog and chill. It reminded me of a Sherlock Holmes story. Somewhere there should have been a hound howling.
I pulled open the door and stepped out of the raw damp into a warm, smoke-filled bar that was half full of regulars. The lights were soft, but not dim. There were people sitting at tables, having dinner, and I opted for a high stool at the bar. The music didn’t stop, and none of the locals looked at me as though I didn’t belong, so that was a start.
I found a seat at the bar, and the bartender slid over. He was tall and had one of those tans that spoke of a life of sailing and surfing, and skiing in the winter. He brought me a Löwenbräu and a menu when I asked for them. On the TV, they were showing a football game that I wasn’t that interested in, but at regular intervals people cheered or booed. The bartender came back and took my order for a cup of French onion soup and prime rib with a baked potato. He seemed more interested in the game on TV than making small talk with me. I wasn’t complaining. I was thinking about the little cottage by the bogs and how I hadn’t found out anything about the owner. I hadn’t come any closer to finding the elusive Charlie Hammond or even finding out if he was still alive.
I had finished my food, and the game was winding down. I looked out at the fog and decided that I was in no rush to go out in it. I was uncertain about what the next move was. I had to come up with something or Danny would be pissed, and he would have to tell Deborah Swift to pull the plug on the investigation, or at least my being a part of it. I was going over it all in my head, trying to find some little thread that I had missed, when I felt a hand on my elbow and heard a gentle, mocking voice in my ear.
Chapter 16
“Tomcat, you finally found your way out of the rain?” I turned and saw the waitress from the Brotherhood at my elbow. She was smiling, and her eyes glinted in the bar’s dim light. She was wearing faded blue jeans and a dark turtleneck sweater. Saying she looked good was like saying the John Hancock building had a couple of windows.
“Even tomcats get sick of being wet. What about you? Will the people at the Brotherhood be upset with you for being in another bar?”
She laughed, and it was a nice sound. “No, on an island this small no one holds it against you when you go out.” She slid onto the seat next to me without asking or being invited. I was not one to protest. The bartender slid over the way they do when a woman sits down at the bar.
“Hiya, Shelly, what’ll it be?” he said, directing all the warmth at her that he was unwilling to squander on the likes of me.
“Hiya, Rolling Rock and another for him.” She jerked her left thumb in my direction.
“What brings you out to the island, Tomcat? You don’t seem the tourist type . . . too serious by far?” Her smile was a little crooked in one corner, and her nose was button cute and wrinkled slightly when she smiled. She had the type of All-American good looks that sold a lot of soap and shampoo.
“Andy, not Tomcat. Would you believe me if I told you that I was on sabbatical?” I attempted a smile and was pretty sure that she thought I was in the middle of a muscle spasm. She shook her head slowly with mock seriousness and slightly pouty lips.
“Maybe I am out here looking for someone?” I tried not to sound too serious.
“Tomcat,” she said, clearly ignoring my perfectly good, perfectly nice, normal name, “that is so sweet that you came out here and have been looking for a girl like me.” Her sarcasm was honey-coated but sarcasm all the same.
“I won’t deny that you are what I have been looking for, but you are not the who I am looking for.” I wasn’t good at flirting or witty repartee, but I was making up for that with effort.
“Next you are going to ask me what a girl like me is doing in a place like this.” She smiled again, and I saw incisors and started to wonder again if I was not the cat in the game of cat and mouse.
“I hope I wouldn’t be so clichéd if I asked you that. Maybe I might say something along the lines of ‘What brought you out here to the island?’”
“Not bad. What makes you think that I am not a native daughter of the Gray Lady of the Sea?” She leaned back against her chair.
“Your accent is wrong. A little Midwest, a little flat . . . maybe a hint of the South, a lot of things, but you are not from around here.” I tried smiling again, and my face must have loosened up because it seemed easier.
“You aren’t wrong. I moved around a lot. My dad was in the air force.”
“Aha . . . but that doesn’t tell me anything about why you are out here.”
“Art.”
“Art? Who is Art?”
“Not a him, but an it. I am a graduate student at Brown. I came out to work in a gallery and on my thesis . . . eleven months later, I am still here and my thesis is stalled.”
“What is your thesis about?” I was pretty sure that I was not interested, but it seemed wrong not to ask.
“I am not sure anymore. I started off writing about the effects of the Great Depression on twentieth-century art. Now it has kind of evolved into the study of a couple specific artists and the effects of the Depression on their art.” She paused to drink from the green glass bottle that the bartender had placed in front of her. “Or maybe the effects of the Depression on the works of a couple of artists.”
“Out here? This doesn’t strike me a big artist’s community.” I drank from my own green bottle.
“You’d be surprised. A lot of artists came out here in the thirties and forties. It was close to New York; they could rent little beach shacks for studios. The island wasn’t crowded in the summertime like it is now. If someone wanted some peace and quiet and a place to write or paint, this was it.”
“And that is what brought you out here?” I was one hell of a detective.
“There are a couple of those artists who still
live out here, and the gallery that I work at features a lot of their work from the postwar period. It is a pretty unique opportunity to see their original works and interview them.” She was looking at me directly with large, unblinking blue eyes.
“It sounds like you are in the right place to work on your thesis.” I took another pull on my bottle of beer and didn’t ask the obvious question about why her thesis was stalled.
“You are wondering why if I am in this great place, with access to these great paintings and the artists themselves, my thesis is stalled?” Her gaze was more direct as though challenging me.
“I was curious, but it isn’t for me to pry. I would imagine that writing a thesis paper isn’t easy.” I had known a lot of people who hadn’t been able to finish them. I hadn’t been able to start one.
“Have you ever been hungry? Not the type of hunger from being a few hours late for a meal, but that real, deep hunger that makes you shaky?” She was looking at me with an intense expression, brows knitted, and eyes searching my face for any trace of mocking.
“Yeah, I’ve been that hungry.” I was always hungry in Basic Training, we all were. It was all the PT, all the marching, and all the learning how to kill. The army wanted its killers to be lean and hungry. Later, Airborne school; more running, more PT, then running around the woods trying to earn my Green Beret, and then, much later, in the steamy jungle after having to ditch my pack and run for an extraction point. I had been hungry and lean. I had been young, and it was two lifetimes ago, but I still remember being hungry and scared.
“Well, when you were hungry and you could suddenly eat—eat anything you wanted—was it tough to decide what to have?” She hadn’t stopped looking me in the face with the same intense expression.
“Yeah, I know what you are saying.” It hadn’t been hard to decide, but I understood what she was reaching for. She was picking at the white writing on the bottle that wouldn’t come off. Her fingernail was making a slight popping noise against the raised lettering. The bartender brought us another round without our asking, and we didn’t complain about it. We didn’t complain when another round showed up after that one, or a couple of thick, short shot glasses with amber bourbon to warm us from the chill of night.
“Well, Tomcat, what really brings you out here? You aren’t looking for someone; no, you are running away, like most people who end up here.” She sipped off of the top of the bourbon shot and shuddered a little.
“Maybe they are the same thing. Maybe I am on some Zen journey to get lost and find myself.” I smiled through my beard at her, but I can’t say for sure that I wasn’t leering at her.
“Tomcat, that is one of the funniest things I have heard in a long time. You are one of those shaggy tomcats, out in some back alley. A little unkempt.” She tugged at my beard and tussled my shaggy hair. “Hungry and unkempt, like one of those cats that needs a good home, a saucer of milk, and is too stubborn to want to be anywhere but out in the alley on some rainy, cold night.” She let go of my beard and went for another sip of the bourbon. I did, too, and felt it shudder and burn its way down to my stomach.
“Are you implying that all I need is the love of a good woman to fix what ails me?” I smiled as I thought about it. I had thought that Leslie had been the answer, but that hadn’t worked out too well. I had been restless as long as I could remember, and it hadn’t gotten better when I had come home from Vietnam. College wasn’t the answer; I always sat near the window and looked out while the professor droned on. The cops hadn’t been the answer; I knew it could have easily been me at the wrong end of the nightstick if things had been different.
“I don’t know if you would take it if offered for more than a little while. You don’t strike me as the type who is into permanence.” She winked at me, and I wasn’t sure she was wrong. I finished my bourbon and so did she, and the bartender refilled them.
“What makes you say that?” Now I was looking at her with a little bit of faux suspicion.
“It is the way you walked into the restaurant, or the way you were sitting at this bar. You don’t mind being alone. Most people hate eating alone. You look like you prefer it. You sit quietly but never seem to be still. Those aren’t the hallmarks of permanence.”
“I hadn’t ever thought of it that way. Let’s just say that I prefer no company to bad company.” More bourbon followed by cold beer.
“Tomcat, you are a mess. Maybe you don’t know it, but you are. You may look like the actor from the remake of King Kong with your beard and shaggy sandy hair. You may smile, all charm through that beard, and your eyes might crinkle at the corners under that shaggy hair, and I am sure that you do all right for yourself most nights . . . but you are a mess.” She drank down her bourbon and eyed me over the rim of the glass. She wasn’t right about all of it, but she was right about enough of it.
She was sitting back against her chair and looking at me with eyes that were a little glassy and a smile that was a little loopy.
“Tomcat, they are getting ready to close for the night.”
“That prospect makes me more than a little sad.” It did make me sad. There are few things better than being out in a warm bar with a pretty girl on a damp, chilly night.
“Tomcat, we should go.” With that, she stood up and headed to the door. I was quick to follow after dropping cash on the bar. She stopped at the coat hook by the door and pulled on a yellow rain slicker. I put on my jacket, which wasn’t damp anymore. Outside, under the lighted sign, she looked up at me and said, “Walk a girl home in this fog?”
“Of course, it would be the only chivalrous thing to do.”
“So, you are some sort of gentleman?” She said it the same way she said Tomcat, poking fun at me.
“Something like that.” It was foggy out and walking beside me, her head just came up a little bit over my shoulder.
“We’ll see about that.” She giggled, and off in the distance the foghorn replied. We walked down to the end of the block and turned toward the water. We ended up standing by a staircase leading up to the second floor of a wooden building that was perched over the water. The building faced the harbor, and on the other side, the ferry bobbed on its moorings.
“Tomcat, would you be offended if I asked you to come up and look at my etchings?” I could see her smiling up at me.
“I would be offended if you didn’t.”
I wasn’t sure she could see me smile in the dark and the fog. She stepped close to me and held her face up to be kissed. I kissed her, slowly at first and then with more intensity. She smelled of tobacco, beer, and honeysuckle. She broke away and smiled up at me and said, “Emmn nice.” She took my hand and led me up the stairs to her apartment. Her hand was small and warm against my own. The uncomfortable hunk of metal in my belt dug into my side, reminding me of its awkward presence. She unlocked the door, and we went into a small apartment, the closest thing the island had to a loft. Inside, the main room was dominated by what, after a few minutes, I realized was a fireplace, but appeared to be a large, upside-down, orange metal funnel raised three feet over an orange metal circle. The wall opposite the kitchen was made up of all windows and looked out on the water. Every wall that didn’t have bookshelves in it had art prints push-pinned into it. They were nicely spaced and composed the way they would be if put there by someone who worked in a gallery.
“Tomcat, sit down. Make yourself comfortable. There is beer in the fridge and whiskey in the cabinet. I am going to slip into something more comfortable.” She giggled at the end, but it didn’t sound forced or clichéd. I skinned off the coat and slipped the Colt out and put it in the inside pocket. I folded my coat and put it on the floor next to the couch.
She came out a few minutes later wearing a T-shirt for a band that I had never heard of and a pair of panties that were cut high up on her thigh. Her hair was loose, and her breasts swelled against the T-shirt. She walked across the room toward me, all curves and moves like rolling seas. She got close to me, stood on tipt
oes, put both arms around my neck, and pulled me down to her for a long, slow, wet kiss. It seemed to last for a long time and reminded me of necking at high school parties, the innocence and excitement and the need to literally come up for air.
She took a half step back and reached down at my sides for the sweater and pulled it up over my shirt. The sweater ended up on the floor near the couch. She slowly unbuttoned my shirt, and we kissed again. This time my hands found her, one on her young, large, and proud breast and the other on her beautiful bottom. She groaned, and her tongue worked against mine. Her hands were unbuttoning my shirt and finding their way in and onto my chest. I raised her T-shirt up, over her head, and while her arms were raised, I lowered my hungry mouth to her waiting, eager, hard nipples. She undid my belt and zipper; then her small, chilly hand was wrapped around me. We were both hungry and acted like it. She pushed me down on the couch and kneeled in front of me. Later I was kneeling in front of her, smelling only that most precious scent of hers. Eventually we were both naked on the couch. She ended up on my lap, facing me, with her legs wrapped around me and my hands under her beautiful and perfect bottom. When we were both spent, we laid on her couch.
She shivered, and I pulled her close. Her hands were running over my body.
“You’re cold.” I was the master of the obvious.
“Not so much.” She snuggled into the hollow of my arm with her legs across my lap. Her scent was in my nose and on my lips.
“Do you want a blanket?” I was a gentleman of sorts.
“No, I want a fire.” She showed me where I could find the kindling and wood, and in a few short minutes the room was filled with orange flickering light. We made love on the couch again, slowly, savoring each other. Later, she lit a joint and ran her hand over the scars on my chest, thighs, and back.