by G. M. Ford
Her heels clicked as she crossed the room, took the chart from my hands, and returned it to its place at the foot of the bed. No perfume; just soap, leather, and hair spray drifted in her wake.
"What happened?" I asked.
"He was hit by a truck."
"Where?"
She hesitated before answering. "On First Avenue."
"When did this happen?"
"Three days ago."
"Did they get the driver?"
"It wasn't his fault. He stopped. Heck walked right out from between cars. There was no way he could have stopped in time."
"What time of day was this?"
"Just after midnight."
I retrieved the chart and again pretended to study it. This called for some discretion. Most of the things a guy could get on First Avenue at midnight were not things you wanted to discuss with his wife.
"What was he doing in that neighborhood at that time of night?"
When I didn't get a response, I rephrased the question.
"Did he have a meeting or something?"
My question struck some kind of nerve. Marge heaved a sigh, pursed her full lips, and reached a hand out toward me. She pulled the chart from my hands and hugged it to her chest.
"This isn't going to work," she said quietly. "This what?"
"This . . . you . . . none of this. I thought maybe . . . you being a detective and all. I'm sorry, Leo. You were just a wild idea I had—but this isn't going to work." She turned away toward the bed, fussing with the pillows, as if Heck knew the difference.
"I'd like to help."
"Thanks anyway, Leo," she said, continuing to prop and preen.
When I didn't move, she tried again.
"Sorry for wasting your time. I'll tell him you were by."
"He's even easier to control when he's in a coma, isn't he?"
I don't know where that came from. It crossed my lips before it ever crossed my mind. I must have had it stored in some dank internal warehouse where the collected injustices and indignities of adolescence bide their time until that day when they'll all be sorry. She turned slowly from the bed with that big smile.
"Leo," she said with a bit too much control, "get a grip. Better than that, get a life. It's twenty-three years later. What? Am I supposed to still feel bad about breaking up the Ballard Boys' Club?"
"Still?" I countered lamely.
"You're right."
She stepped in close, nodding her head. We were eye to eye. Her face makeup seemed to contain little specks of gold glitter.
"When you're right, you're right, Leo. You always were the brightest of the lot, so let's get this over with. I didn't feel guilty about it then, and I don't feel guilty about it now. There. I said it. The man was damn near thirty-five years old. I don't care about what you and the other Lost Boys wanted. It was time for Superman to get on with his life. You and the rest of those
perpetual adolescents ought to try clicking your heels together and repeating 'I'll never grow up. I'll never grow up.' See if that works."
I surprised myself again. "You could have done it differently."
She pivoted and walked past me to the west wall. I figured she was going to show me the door. Wrong again.
"I was young," she said quietly. "I only knew what I wanted and what was in my way. In those days, I didn't think much further ahead than that. I was— what's the word?" She studied a diamond-encrusted knuckle. "Smitten, I guess. I'd never seen anything like him in my life. I mean, he wasn't my first or anything."
She turned to face me.
"I was an early bloomer. They'd been after me since I was twelve. First my uncle Jack, then anything else that could walk or crawl—but nothing like Heck."
"He was special," I agreed.
The moment seemed to grant me a reprieve.
"Heck and I hadn't talked much lately. He'd been sleeping on board."
"On board what?"
"The Lady Day."
"I didn't realize you still had her."
"Oh, well, we couldn't sell never-never-land, now could we?" The bitterness crept back into her voice. "Hell, we borrowed money at absolutely criminal rates when we expanded the business, rather than sell the clubhouse. He wouldn't even use the damn thing as collateral. He and Nicky were gonna—" She hugged the chart tighter. "They've warned him. They've fined him. They've threatened to take away his berth."
"Who's warned him about what?"
"Sleeping on board. There's no living aboard anymore. The city put a stop to that years ago."
The Lady Day was built to fish. She had berths all right and a galley and the obligatory head, but nobody in their right mind was ever going to mistake her for a five-star hotel. Whatever demons had driven Heck from a warm spot next to Marge to the sparse shelter of the boat must have been serious indeed.
"I'd like to help," I offered again.
Marge wandered over and leaned on the steel restraining rails of the bed. She gazed absently at Heck as she spoke.
"You know, he always kept track of you, Leo. He's got that famous picture of you and the two . . . er . . . two working girls, in the fountain in front of the Four Seasons, framed on his office wall."
That particular incident not being the highlight of my career, I didn't know what to say.
"He's got an envelope in his desk with all these clippings about you and your cases. All the times you made the papers. I found it the other day when I was going through the desk trying to straighten things out. That's when I thought maybe ... I don't know."
"I'd like to help." Third time's the charm, right? "I'd consider it a privilege to do anything for Heck that I can."
"What about working for me? Would that be a privilege?" she asked. "The way things are"—she put a hand on Heck's chest—"it looks like. . . temporarily at least, you'd be working for me, not for Heck."
She patted him gently.
"You and I will have to work it out as we go along," I said.
She turned and looked me in the eye for a long moment. Her gaze had the same unsettling effect on me that it had twenty-three years ago. This time, I was the one who turned away.
"Fair enough," she said.
I pulled my notebook from my back pocket and turned around. She was seated in the heavy blue chair next to the bed. I clicked my pen.
"Where to start?" she said to no one in particular.
Usually, by the time people come to me, they've told their story numerous times and have it down to a science. Detectives aren't anybody's choice for a first resort. Marge's manner suggested the opposite. I had the feeling that I was the first person who was going to hear whatever was to follow. As she spoke she looked at the unmoving Heck as if at any moment he would rise up and save her from this painful duty.
"Nicky had—" I thought she was going to balk again, but instead she plunged ahead. "Nicky was diagnosed with cancer about eighteen months ago. Bone cancer." She hesitated. "For a while, it looked like he was going to lose a leg. Then they said they had it under control. Then, he needed to go for those treatments again. Chemotherapy."
She waved the words away.
"They're a bunch of witch doctors. They can maybe slow it down but other than that they don't have a clue."
She sighed heavily and reached out to Heck again, stroking his cheek.
"Heck took it hard. Harder than Nicky. Heck—" She began to edit herself. "To make a long story short—"
"No need," I said. "It's probably best if I hear it all."
She nodded resignedly. "Heck took it hard. Nicky meant everything to him. He must have forced that poor kid into about a dozen second opinions. Nicky was like a pin cushion, but Heck just had to do something. Couldn't stand feeling helpless. He just had to do something to fix things. He always had to fix things." She paused.
"Anyway, when he got more or less the same diagnosis from everybody, Heck had this harebrained idea. He and Nicky were going fishing together. Back into business. They were going to refit the Lady D
ay and hit the high seas together." She shook her head. "I don't know what he was thinking. Other than taking the Clipper up to Victoria, Heck hadn't been out on the water in ten years."
Another pause, as she reminisced.
"Well, we did have a little thirty-foot Sea Ray for a while there, but somehow it just seemed to make him sad." She flicked a gaze in my direction. "So we sold it."
"Heck and Nicky were going fishing," I prompted.
"Heck said it would take Nicky's mind off it all. That the sea air would do him wonders. None of it made any sense, but he wouldn't listen, and Nicky— well—he just idolized Heck. Whatever his dad said was gospel."
She was winding up now. "He gave Nicky the Lady Day. Signed it over to him. He gave Nicky his trust fund so they could refit the boat. They knew damn well they wouldn't get the money from me," she added defiantly.
Catching herself, she went on.
"The boat was sound. Heck always kept it up, but it needed new electronics. The navigational equipment and radar were out of date."
She shot a murderous glance at the inanimate Heck. Her hands closed into bejeweled fists. I recognized the signs. Her resolve was waning. Clients often reach a point where they'd rather live with the problem than have to finish telling the story to a stranger.
"And?" I said.
"And, they almost got it finished." "Then?" A chill ran down my spine like a drop of icy rain. She transferred her glare to me. "And then Miss Allison Stark came along." This time I waited.
"Nicky met her at one of his therapy sessions. I
don't know what she was doing there. He used to go to these meetings with other cancer patients. You know, support groups. Where they could share. Heck hated it. He kept saying that Nicky didn't have cancer like those other people. Not like lung cancer or liver cancer. He couldn't face it, just couldn't stand it."
She was losing her thread. I poked her back on track.
"Allison Stark?"
"Allison Stark Sundstrom," she snapped, angry I'd reeled her in. "They're married?"
"They're dead," she said quickly, hitching her breath. "Or that's what everyone except Heck thought."
I could hear Heck's smooth breathing, the muted hum of machinery somewhere in the bowels of the building, a toilet flushing next door.
"Let's start back with Allison Stark," I suggested.
"She came over Nicky like . . ." Marge mused, "like . . ."
She read my mind. "Yeah . . . like I did over Heck. But"—she wagged a finger at me—"this was different."
"Different how?"
"There was something about that girl. It's hard to describe."
My eyebrows gave me away.
"I know that sounds strange, Leo, but it's true. From the minute I met her, something in me knew the girl wasn't real."
"You're gonna have to fill this in for me."
Suddenly we were in a movie that Marge had run before. The original definition of the word rehearsal strolled across my mind: To raise up or resummon the dead. Grief, anger, and guilt all give us pause for rehearsal.
"First, there's the basic situation." Her voice rising.
"We've got this beautiful kid, twenty-two years old, God love him, who's undergoing chemotherapy, who may well never live to see twenty-three." She rubbed her temples, going on. "His hair is falling out in clumps. He's a splotchy light yellow color most of the time from all the chemicals. It takes him three days to get up and around after each treatment, and what happens?" I shrugged.
"Out of the blue, it's like suddenly this little beautiful creature just can't live without him. And does anybody but me be find that strange? No way. Makes complete sense to them. Those two were just like the rest of you. They just blandly assumed it was Nicky's charm. Men always assume it's their charm. It's what makes them so damn easy."
I ignored the jibe.
"What else?" I prodded.
"The age thing. I mean she looked great, perfect little petite figure and all, no cellulite, not a ripple, not so much as a vaccination mark, but there was no way she was the twenty-six she claimed to be. Women can sense things like that. Heck wouldn't listen to me, but as I'm sitting here, she was no twenty-six. You couldn't see the lines because of that tan, but she'd had the work done, I know it. I've seen it before in my friends. Everything was just a bit too tight. You could have bounced quarters off her cheeks."
"Anything else?"
"The stories. This goes along with the age thing. You wouldn't believe the stories. At first, I thought she was just eager to please—you know, trying to make an impression—but it never let up. To hear her talk she'd been everywhere and done everything—model, advertising exec, aerobics instructor, river guide, travel agent, butcher, baker, candlestick maker. Leo, I swear to you, you'd have to be eighty years old to have had all the experiences she claimed. Yet"—she waved a finger again—"not one verifiable detail. Not one thing you could check. Only child. Parents killed in a plane crash. Raised by a rich aunt. Supposedly from Wisconsin. It went on and on."
"And nobody but you noticed?"
"She charmed the socks off both of them. They were pathetic. Nicky was so in love she could have had horns and he wouldn't have noticed."
"And Heck?"
"Heck was just so relieved to see Nicky happy again." She shook her head sadly, anticipating my next question. "I had to either shut up or become the enemy. I shut up. I figured, given a little time, they'd see through her. God knows she was transparent enough."
"What did—" I began. She interrupted me.
"If I'd had any idea they were getting married, I'd have kept at it. I'd have set new records for bitchery. I wouldn't have cared what either of them thought of me. I'd have kept at it until they paid attention."
"The marriage was a surprise, then?"
She clicked her tongue.
"They were supposedly just going to Vegas for the weekend." "Came back married."
She nodded. "That bitch had it planned all the way. I told Heck the day they left that they'd come back married."
"How did you know?"
"I just knew."
"And then?"
"And then what in the hell was I going to do? My only son was married. What was I going to do? I had to at least seem supportive, didn't I?"
"So they came back married. What then?"
"The honeymoon. They began to plan the honeymoon. We offered to buy them a Hawaiian honeymoon, the Bahamas, the Caribbean, you name it, we
offered it. Oh no. They already had their minds made up."
I could sense we were coming to the end now.
"They'd, or rather she had, decided to lease a yacht for a month. Fifty-some-odd feet—just restored—a beautiful thing. They were going to cruise down to Baja and back. It was her idea. She said that would save Nicky the embarrassment of the public beaches, what with his hair and all the splotches. Just the two of them, you know. She was always so very thoughtful."
"So?"
"So, they left on a Thursday morning, a month ago next Thursday. Heck and I went down to Magnolia and saw them off. Champagne across the bow, the whole bit."
She heaved a massive sigh. "Friday afternoon we got a call from the Coast Guard that the boat had blown up and sunk with all hands. Not a trace. They say the explosion was so loud it woke everybody in Gig Harbor, which was the better part of five miles away. Supposedly a fuel leak. They recovered two . . . parts of two . . . bodies. Brought them back here."
She was having trouble maintaining her facade now.
"One was Nicky . . . Dental records. No question. The other body was female. That's all they could say for sure without something to compare it—the remains—with."
"And Heck didn't think it was them?"
"Nicky's for sure. Even Heck couldn't dispute that. Heck didn't think she was on board, though."
"Any particular reason?"
I sensed that I'd asked the wrong question again.
"Guilt. It had to be the guilt. Heck felt guilty fo
r not listening to me about that little bitch. I think he was punishing himself for being so damn stupid. I think he needed somebody to blame. He needed to feel he was doing something. First he couldn't face Nicky's illness; then he couldn't face his death. As long as he kept this ridiculous thing going, he didn't have to face the facts." She swallowed. "So childish.
"What I really think is that my son is dead, and my husband may well be a vegetable for the rest of his life, and that none of that macho bullshit is going to bring either of them back to me."
"So there was nothing tangible about his suspicions?"
"There was the missing money and the mortgage on the boat."
"I thought Heck refused to mortgage the boat."
"He did. That's where it gets sticky. Nicky mortgaged the boat during the two weeks before they left on the honeymoon. Never said a word to Heck or me. Very out of character for Nicky. Five hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars. He also cleaned out his trust fund. Another three hundred fifteen thousand. Altogether that's the better part of a million dollars missing."
"Missing?"
"Thin air." She snapped her fingers. "The bank said they couldn't tell us anything. Some privacy law. Just that the accounts were no longer active. Nicky was over twenty-one, and it was a joint account with Allison. Right now, their deaths are officially accidents. We need a court order to get the bank records."
"So, if it wasn't Allison on the boat, who was it?"
"Heck hung around the terminal for weeks, pestering everybody. Eventually he became convinced it was some wharf rat he'd seen hanging around the marina while they were working on the Lady Day."
"That's all? Wharf rats come and go. Heck knows that. Doesn't sound like much to me,"
"When he couldn't stand hearing that from me anymore was when he moved aboard. It was ridiculous."
"Why call me, then?" She was ready for this one.
"I've been asking myself that for days, and I think I've finally come to an answer. It's because I need this finished. I need some sense of resolution, of closure. If this wild goose chase turns out to be the last thing Heck ever does, so be it, but it needs to have an end. I need to feel I've done everything I can."