“So why did Frank go nuts?”
“Frank gave a map to Concannon, so we could mark all the graves and waste little time once the deal went through. Amy stole the map from Concannon and hid it.”
“Why?”
“Concannon told her what we were up to, the idiot. Amy wanted to kill the deal. She liked to call herself an environmentalist, but really she just liked to do anything she could to hurt me. She’d join any group opposed to my land deals and fund them with money she stole from me. She started up with Concannon just to hurt me. She did everything a woman could to influence him and sway him against me.”
“She must have been very angry with you to go that far.”
“She hated my guts.”
“So Frank killed her to shut her up and ransacked her room to get back the map,” I said.
“He panicked. He wanted everyone who knew anything about the bones dead.”
“Including you?”
“I don’t think he’d dare try to kill me.”
“Why? Because your rich?”
“Because I’d squash him like a bug.” Curry took a step toward me. “I want the Shinnecock land deal to go through and you want to live your life and not give a shit about what goes on around you. I’m prepared to give you what you want, which is to be left alone, and all you have to do is do what you do best. Mind your own business and keep your mouth shut. We’re the only two people alive who know about Frank Gannon’s private little graveyard. I wake up one morning and find that clearing crawling with FBI agents, well, then neither of us gets what we want, if you know what I mean. I make one phone call, and before the end of the day you’re dead and buried where no one will ever find you. Do you understand?”
Again, I said nothing.
“All I’m asking is for you to be yourself. That’s all. It has nothing to do with you. That’s all I’m asking you to do is remember this.”
The dim lights in my living room created a pale pocket of yellow light. Curry and I were the only beings standing in it. I wondered then how a half-dozen or so people could be killed and nothing really change all that much.
“You see,” Curry began, “the trick, Mac, is finding a man’s price.” He held up the folder and then tossed it onto my couch.
I looked at it and waited for a while before I said, “I don’t want your money.”
“It’s not for your silence. We had a deal, remember. I honor my deals.”
“You hired me to find your daughter’s killer.”
“I hired you to bring Frank Gannon down, and you did. Take the money. I insist.” He gestured toward the folder with his head. “In it is a check for the other ten grand I promised, plus a stocks fund. It’s a Thornburg fund and there’s ten grand in it. Leave it be, and in twenty years it could be a million dollars. A little something for your future.”
I didn’t make a move toward the folder. After a moment Curry picked up his briefcase and snapped it closed and stood before me, ready to go.
“I know all about you, Mac. I know about what that asshole Van Deusen put you through. I know that he thought he owned you and that you thought he wouldn’t ever let you go. You were right, he wouldn’t. He’d invested quite a bit in you, teaching you all those languages you know, all that hand-to-hand-combat training, making you his little bodyguard. He’d never walk away from that kind of investment. Plus, you were plenty scared of him, weren’t you? That meant a lot to him. It’s okay, we were all scared of him. But it was a good thing for you that that boating accident happened to come along when it did, though, don’t you think? Damn good thing. I don’t know, maybe it was an accident, maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was a little of both.
“Maybe I’m right in thinking what I think about what happened that night, and maybe that’s why you live the way you do. Maybe you think this shitty little life is all you deserve. Maybe it eats away at you. Maybe you’re trying to pay what you think is some karmic debt in your own way. But let me tell you one thing I do know for certain. You’re no different from me, or from Frank Gannon, for that matter, Mac, so don’t fool yourself.
“You did what you did that night to get out alive. And because of that you know, deep down in your heart, that you’re capable of anything, just like the rest of us motherfuckers you hate. That’s why Frank Gannon wanted you around. And that’s why I want you around. Because you’re just like me, and maybe someday I’ll need you services again.”
I looked at him and said nothing. My heart pounded as hard as it pounded that long- ago night out of Sag Harbor, the night that sailboat went down and I made my choice.
“I’ll see you around,” Curry said.
He moved past me then. I didn’t look at him. I heard him close the door behind him and walk down the hall. I listened till he was down both flights of stairs, then picked up the folder and held it for a moment before tossing it onto my coffee table. I left it there and went into my bedroom and sat on the edge of my bed in the dark and looked out the window.
***
The folder lay unopened on my coffee table for three days. I tried to forget that it existed but I could see it from almost every point in my apartment. I knew it was just numbers on paper, but it connected me to something that I wanted to be over and done with and far behind me.
On the fourth morning after my visit from Curry I got up, opened the folder, and pulled out the cover sheet. On the letter head was the broker’s contact information. I took it and went to my phone and dialed. A woman answered, and I told her my name and who I wanted. Almost immediately a deep and cheerful male voice came on the line.
“Mr. MacManus, good morning. This is Gordon Banks. How can I help you?”
“I have a question about the Thornburg stock fund James Curry set up for me,” I said. “Could I have it put in someone else’s name?”
“Of course.”
“I would like to do this anonymously, if possible.”
“I’ll have to contact the person you want to transfer it to.”
“That’s fine, as long as I can remain anonymous.”
“Certainly.”
“I also have two checks for ten thousand dollars. I’d like it all to go to the same person.”
“Very well. To whom would you want this to be transferred?”
I went to my window and looked down on the train station. A woman waited for the 9:33 eastbound. There was no one else on the platform. She was wearing jeans and a man’s overcoat and running shoes. Sitting at her feet, like a pet, was a large suitcase. Her hair was dark brown and thick and shoulder length, like Catherine’s had been the day she left for New York.
“Mr. MacManus?”
“Yes.”
“I asked to whom did want these funds to be transferred.”
“His name is Tommy Miller,” I said. “Tommy Miller.”
“A relative of yours?”
I waited a moment, watching the woman waiting on the platform. She had a fifteen minute wait for her train. I knew I would stand there and watch her till she got aboard.
“What?”
“I said, is he a relative of yours?”
Somewhere on Elm Street someone sounded a car horn. I heard silence from the other end of the phone.
“Yeah,” I said. “In a way, yeah.”
Winter was coming, and days passed faster than I could keep track of, or even cared to. During the first week of December I found a bank to loan me the money to buy a secondhand taxi from a cab company in the city and went into business with Eddie. We formed a cab and car service, and I drove six days a week, twelve hours a day, and in my first week I took home fifteen hundred dollars. I made four runs to JFK in three days at a hundred and fifty dollars a pop. Tina put the house on Little Neck Road up for sale and left my apartment over the Hansom House and moved in with Lizzie’s parent’s house across town. I got her to see that she needed a family and that I couldn’t be enough for her. I would, as Augie’s will specified, be her legal guardian, as well as the trustee of the nearly
quarter of a million dollars his life insurance paid to her, until she reached the age of eighteen. As close as we were, and as much as we understood each other now, she could not live with me under the same roof. Our town was just too small for that kind of thing, and anyway what kind of life was this for a girl like her?
Less than a week before Christmas I ran into Gale in the grocery store in town. She was wearing a dark wool coat over her nurse scrubs. Her cheeks were red from the cold and by her eyes I could tell she was tired. She seemed tense and had very little make up on.
We left the store and went to a café on the corner of Nugent and Main for coffee. We got service from the woman behind the counter and then picked a table by the window. The first thing Gale asked me when we sat down was how my shoulder was.
I shrugged. “It’s fine. I took the stitches out myself. Thank my doctor for me.”
She said nothing to that. She held her cup of coffee in both hands for the warmth. She looked out the window for a while, at nothing in particular, I guessed, before she finally spoke.
“I was kind of hoping I would never see you again,” she said.
“I’m sorry I put you on the spot like that.”
“No, it was okay. I thought of calling you a hundred times, to see if you were okay. But I figured if something happened I would have read about it in the paper, that or Eddie would have told me. I figure I would have heard somehow.” She looked at me. “I’m sorry about Augie. I wanted to go to the funeral.”
“Why didn’t you?”
She looked down. “I just didn’t think it was a good idea.” She wouldn’t look at me. “How’s Eddie?”
“Eddie’s fine.”
“I hear the Chief is in a real fight for his life, career-wise. He’s firing cops left and right, trying to look good for the FBI. I guess if anybody can squirm his way out of this kind of trouble it’s him, right?”
I looked at her for a moment, then said, “What’s wrong, Gale?”
She shrugged. “There’s nothing really wrong, Mac. Who you are and what you do, they’re the same thing. With you, what you see is what you get, and for some reason I just can’t stop thinking of that.”
She glanced out the window at the people passing on the sidewalk and said, “So I seem to have a problem. And I don’t know exactly what to do about it.”
I wasn’t sure what to say to her, so I said nothing. I looked at her for a long time. I thought of those long-ago nights in the hospital, when she was all I knew, when her presence was all I hoped for. Then I thought of her in her black turtleneck and lavender panties, of her lying beside me.
I wanted to reach out and touch her hand but didn’t. Finally, I nodded my head once and said, “I’m not going anywhere, Gale. I’m not going anywhere.”
She smiled at that. We sat there and drank our coffee and said nothing. She reached across the table and took my hand for a minute.
The next afternoon I went to the house on Little Neck Lane to help Tina move what was left into storage. I found her in the basement, surrounded by boxes and boxes of her father’s things. She was sitting cross-legged on a fragment of rug on the cement floor, going through papers. Around her lay envelope after envelope of surveillance photographs and her father’s notebooks. Beside her right knee was an old photograph album. It seemed older than I.
Tina hadn’t heard me come down the stairs and looked up, a little startled, when I said her name.
“Mac,” she said.
“What are you doing?”
“I’ve been looking through Augie’s notebooks and junk. He kept a record of everything.”
“He was a thorough man.”
“Yeah, that’s putting it mildly.”
“I was trying to figure out what to make for din--”
“--Did you know that he’d been spying on Frank since we moved out here. Over something that happened a long time ago, as far as I can tell. It almost seems that’s why we moved out here. His has notes from conversations between him and the Chief about it. I’m beginning to think that Augie went to work for Frank just to get closer to him, to find something out.”
“What?”
“I don’t know.”
“There isn’t anything in there by any chance about why he didn’t tell me that he knew my father?”
“No. I’m sorry. You know, I’ve been meaning to tell you, he didn’t stay mad at you long, Mac. Last Thanksgiving, I mean. And I don’t think he was really mad. I think he was more scared than anything else.”
I paused, then nodded. “We should get started,” I said. “There’s a lot to do.” I turned toward the stairs.
“Wait. C’mere. I want you to see something.”
I turned back. “What?”
“Something I found mixed in with some surveillance photos.”
I walked over and stood behind her, looking over her shoulder. She held up a faded black-and-white photograph of four men. A crease ran down the middle of it. Tina pointed to one of the two men in the center.
“That’s Augie,” she said. She sounded happy, almost proud.
My interest piqued and I knelt, leaning in close for a better look. I smiled at the sight of his young, still-forming face. He looked like an early model of himself. “You’re right, it is,” I said.
All the men in that photo were young, not yet in their twenties. They wore chinos and cloth jackets and stupid grins. They could have been Jack Kerouac and his boys. Tina pointed to one with longish hair on the right flank of their line.
“Any idea who that is?”
I leaned in even closer. I laughed once. “Jesus, that’s the Chief,” I said.
“No.”
“Yeah. Look.”
She brought the photograph closer to her face. “Oh my God. The hair.” She pointed to the man at the left flank. “So could this be Frank?”
I looked closer still. “Yeah, I think it is.”
Then she pointed to the man between Augie and Frank. “So then who’s this?”
I looked at the face and my smile faded.
“That’s my father.”
Tina turned to look at me. “You’re kidding?”
I shook my head as casually as I could. “No.”
She looked back at the photograph. “My God, Mac. When was this taken, I wonder.”
“Nineteen sixty-five, maybe sixty-six.”
“How can you tell?”
“Augie joined the marines in sixty-seven. He doesn’t exactly look like a marine yet, does he?”
“No.” She ran her fingers over the surface of the photograph. “They were so young.”
“They’re all so thin. They’re all as much boys as they are men.”
“Do you have a photo of your father?”
“No.”
She looked over her shoulder again and held it out for me. “Take it,” she said.
“It’s yours, Tina. It belonged to Augie.”
“I’ve got other pictures of him. Tons. Take it. I want you to have it, if you want it.”
I hesitated, as if taking it would commit me to something. Then I took it from her hand and looked at it closely.
I hadn’t seen my father’s face since I was seven. He was smiling widely in the photo, laughing wildly. They all were, their eyes focused on something behind the camera. They were standing shoulder to shoulder, holding short-necked bottles of Schaffer beer, arms around each other, making a kind of chain of men. They were standing on a dirt road, and behind them were spring trees.
When I got back to the Hansom House I placed the photograph in top drawer of the bureau in my living room, where I used to keep my Spyderco knife. I laid the photo next to the one of Catherine. These were the only two photographs I owned. As the night went on I became more and more aware of the bar buzzing two floors below me. It felt at times like the engine of a ship humming up through the decks.
That night I couldn’t sleep. Sounds for the first time in my life kept me awake. I could hear everything from every corner of t
he Hansom House, from basement to attic.
I got out of bed and sat in my chair and looked out my window. I watched the night bleed pale. In my mind I kept seeing that photograph of the four of them. Eventually I got up and took the photo out of the bureau drawer and held it again. I kept looking at Augie’s face, nothing else, just his face, and it wasn’t long before I knew what I had to do.
I went down the two flights of stairs to the bar and closed the door of the old-fashioned phone booth behind me and opened the phone book. I didn’t care about James Curry anymore, about our deal, about the reservation, about who killed his girl and why. I didn’t care what he thought he knew about me, about the secret I keep. I didn’t care about anything except this truth: Men like Augie Hartsell don’t die so rich men can get richer. There was no way I was going to let that happen.
I looked up the number of the local branch of the FBI and dropped two quarters and dialed. It was early but I was connected to an agent and told her just what to look for and where to look for it. Then hung up and went back upstairs to my apartment. My heart was pounding. I didn’t give a damn about Curry now, or his land deal. I didn’t care about anything, just like he wanted me to.
A few days before Christmas I was coming back from JFK when Angel called me on the dispatch and told me that Eddie wanted to see me. I told her I was a half hour away. I heard nothing more for a minute, and then her voice came over the speaker again. “He’ll meet you at Road D in a half hour,” she said.
That didn’t seem right to me for some reason. I had a half hour to think about it. I did nothing else. I felt curious and guarded when I made the turn off Dune Road onto the short dead end called Road D. Eddie’s old repainted Checker was the only other car in the lot. I parked beside it. He wasn’t behind the wheel. I got out, looked around, then headed between the dunes to the beach. It was the only place he could be.
When I spotted him he was a hundred yards away, at the shoreline, facing the ocean. When I finally reached him I said, “Eddie, what’s up?”
He turned his head to look at me but kept his body facing the ocean, which looked like melted steel just before it hardened.
Gin Palace 02 - The Bone Orchard Page 21