Murder Came Second

by Jessica Thomas

  So I parked, and Fargo and I walked down the alley to the Rat, where I secured him to a large anchor outside, with his choice of sun or shade, and entered the building.

  It was filled with tourists, apparently enjoying both the fare and the décor, the unmatched chairs, bare tables, uneven floors and the determined sea going atmosphere. Fishing nets hung along every wall, festooned with ancient boat hooks and oars, dried starfish and lobster pot markers, small kedge anchors and dried seaweed. In one corner stood an old ship’s telegraph, harvested from a long-dead ferry. Its indicator was frozen on Dead slow astern, which really said it all for the Wharf Rat Bar.

  Joe, the owner and bartender, waved and pointed toward an empty barstool. “Hi, Alex. There’s no tables right now, this’ll have to do. But I got a nice cold Bud, been sittin’ on ice for you all morning.”

  “I’ll take it with pleasure.”

  Joe uncapped the beer and poured it into a frosted glass. I did not think tourists received these niceties.

  “Boy, this is nice and cold! It’s getting hot outside.” I turned on the stool and checked the front table. As expected, Harmon and friends were there. Harmon was halfway through a hamburger, and I elected to let him finish before bothering him. I tuned in to their conversation in time to hear Harmon pontificate on a new and different, yet not entirely dissimilar subject.

  “Of course the alligator is real. How do I know, you ask? Well, now, you guys know I ain’t no stranger to the criminal mind.” He leaned back in his chair, hands hooked in his overalls bib, and took on a professorial mien. “Sonny Peres can tell you, I’ve worked on many a case with him. This ain’t really so different. Same old trouble of a fallin’ out among thieves. Why only this morning, Sonny said to me, ‘Harmon, I can’t tell you what all your help means to me.’” His listeners looked impressed. I suppressed a giggle.

  “Early this morning,” he continued, “right square in the middle of Pearl Street, I found an important message and took it di-rect to Sonny, so he could get right on it. It were hand-printed on a piece of light cardboard and had two holes punched in the top, like a string had been put through it at sometime or other . . . so you could maybe hang it on a doorknob or the like. It said, ‘Your stuff is at my place. If you want it, come and get it.’ And it were signed, ‘Al.’”

  I was lost. So, it seemed, were the round table denizens. But not Harmon. He translated for us.

  “You see, with all my experience, I tumbled to it right off. Some drug dealer up here owed a big bunch of money to a big Florida distributor and was trying to buy still more from him, without no cash up front. So the distributor, he planned a little surprise for the dealer. The message meant the drugs are here in town, if you want ’em, come on to our reg’lar meeting place. And ‘Al’ stood for alligator, but the dealer, he didn’t know that. He had no idea his distributor had brought that four-legged thing right up from Florida with him.”

  Harmon took a swig of beer. “So when the dealer walked in on the supposed roundyview, there would be the gator, ready to kill him. These big distributors, you don’t fool with them. But the alligator, he got out somehow and chased that lady instead. I tell you, Sonny was impressed!”

  I could imagine that he was. Harmon had never been right yet about a drug dealer. The law of averages said that at some point, one of his outrageous guesses would be correct. Could this be it? I caught his eye and called out, “When you finish eating, could I see you a minute?” He nodded.

  Sometime later I caught the sharp aroma of raw onions and beer and realized that Harmon had joined me. I told him of the problems with the deck, and he agreed it sounded like a job he could easily finish in two days or less. We agreed he would go to the cottage around nine tomorrow morning and look it over, then go get what lumber and paint he needed and come back and start work. “If there’s any problem,” I said, “Call me. Otherwise I’ll see you tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Yeah, sure, Alex. Okay.”

  I knew he’d be there and do a good job. I bought him a beer and prepared to leave, when I realized I didn’t have enough cash to pay my bill. It was no problem. Joe was always happy to run a tab, but it reminded me I’d best stop by the bank.

  I collected Fargo and we mushed slowly through the summer traffic. Entering the bank, I looked around and spotted Cindy in the middle of the main floor. Neither Cindy nor I are inclined toward public shows of affection, even around close friends or relatives, so you can understand my surprise at finding my love locked in tight embrace with Mildred Morris. Mildred was a large-boned, athletic woman, ever cheerful, as if she had just leaped the net and cried, “Well played, well played!” She was a crackerjack accountant and handled the books of several small businesses in town, including mine. I think there had once been a Mr. Morris, but I’m not sure. Mildred was friendly, but she was private.

  As Cindy patted Mildred’s back in a baby-burping fashion, I realized with surprise Mildred was crying against Cindy’s shoulder, and now felt somewhat less intrusive in joining the already-joined pair.

  “Can I be of help?”

  Cindy shot me a relieved look and replied, “Mildred has lost her cat, Hercules, and has reason to fear he . . . he may not return.”

  “Ah. Well, that’s terrible. Why are we afraid Hercules is . . . permanently missing?” I had known Hercules a large part of my life. He was a giant, muscular tomcat, white with a gray saddle, and extremely pugnacious. He hated all dogs, most cats and a fair number of humans. And only the bravest didn’t make way for his passage. He must be at least eighteen years old by now, but he had not mellowed with age. The only thing I could think of that might have managed to kill him was a semi or a nuke. Or maybe he was sick and had gone away to die, as animals sometimes will. I did hope he hadn’t suffered. He had a certain nobility.

  By now Mildred had straightened away from Cindy, blown her nose and hiccupped. “Oh, Alex, I’m sorry to cause such a scene. Cindy, dear, I’ve ruined your blouse and made a fool of myself in the middle of your bank. But you see, Hercules was all I had . . . everything to me.”

  This brought forth a new freshet of tears, and she collapsed again onto Cindy’s now sodden shoulder. By this time, I too, was patting her back and muttering, “There, there.”

  Fargo wasn’t all I had—not by a long chalk—but just the thought of losing him gave me a sharp pain in the stomach and a tightening of the chest I hoped was not a coronary. “Mildred, I’m so sorry. Is there anything we can do to help you find him, uh . . . whatever the uh, outcome?”

  She finally got herself under some control. “Thank you, I don’t think so. I’ve looked all over. Last night I let him out, and I thought I might have heard him cry out once, but I wasn’t sure. He didn’t come in all night, but that’s not unusual.” No, it wouldn’t have been. There have been many kittens in this town that bore his distinctive gray saddle as an heraldic symbol of his nightly excursions.

  “This morning,” she continued, “I looked for him again, but there’s no sign. He never misses his breakfast.”

  “Well, let’s hope for the best,” I said weakly. Mildred collected herself and went on her way. Cindy was talking to me, but I wasn’t listening. In my mind, I was seeing a pitiful old tom dangling from the jaws of a drooling alligator.

  “Are you hearing a word I said?” Cindy asked.

  “Oh, uh, no. I’m sorry, I was thinking of poor Mildred. Whom will she talk to over breakfast tomorrow?”

  Cindy’s voice changed from annoyed to concerned. “Lord, Alex, is it that bad? Has she really got no one?”

  “I kind of think so. She lives alone. I don’t think she dates. I don’t know of any family here in town.”

  “Well, we’ll have to come up with something. That’s too sad for words! Give me a day or so. What I asked you was, can you have me at the airport at seven thirty tomorrow morning? Choate Ellis is having Cassie fly us over for the seminar.”

  Choate Ellis was the bank CEO and Cindy’s boss. Cassie
was my best buddy and president of Outer Cape Charter. She was also its pilot, secretary, reservation clerk and mechanic. If she ever called and said she needed me to fly ’round the world with her, I’d grab my toothbrush and run.

  “Sure, I can do that.” I must have looked wistful.

  “Maybe you could ride over and back, so you and Cassie could play war games on the way home.”

  Now how did she know we sometimes did that? This woman consistently amazed me. “Thanks,” I replied with total cool, “But I have some stuff to catch up with in the morning. Oh, you might want to check your blouse, your shoulder is covered with makeup.” There, that would fix her.

  She looked down. “Oh, my God, I’ll have to go and try to wash it off. Dammit! I’ll see you at the house for dinner, right?”

  “Right.” I angled off toward a teller to get some cash.

  It was an evening of sixes and sevens.

  Cindy swore she’d told me to pick up something to make for dinner. I swore she hadn’t. I offered to go get something. She said she didn’t feel like cooking. I suggested we order take-out. She said it was fattening. Finally, I made my famous ham and cheese omelets and a salad. The omelets were a little brown on the bottom, but I thought they tasted fine. In fact, I surreptitiously finished hers when I cleared the table. I wasn’t very full. I guess she was.

  I said I’d clean up, while Cindy packed. As she dragged a suitcase from the closet, Fargo began to pace and keen. He hates suitcases, knowing full well they mean someone he loves is going away, and he’s probably not going with them. There was no shutting him up. I retired to the kitchen and picked up one of the scandal sheets Cindy consistently brings home and swears she never reads.

  It was the usual intellectually challenging stuff. Several famous women were pregnant, apparently by all the wrong men. A Mississippi man had spontaneously combusted at a tent revival while speaking in tongues, and neither firemen nor doctors could explain the phenomenon. A woman in Germany had gotten locked in a restaurant freezer for two days, but survived. Doctors could not explain that, either. A dog in China had given birth to a litter consisting of four puppies and two piglets. I always wondered why these incidents always seemed to be in faraway countries, or perhaps Mississippi or West Virginia.

  One feature caught my attention because of the photos. Dress and hairstyles indicated they had been taken a number of years ago. They showed a woman, standing in a courtroom as a jury foreman read out the verdict. She was stunning, obviously tall, and slender, with a regally long neck and well-defined features, dark hair slightly waved . . . and a totally blank expression. There were also insets, apparently school photos, of two children, a rather plain girl of perhaps eleven, and an absolutely beautiful little boy about seven.

  The headline read: Woodchopper Killer Dies After 30 Years in Mass. Mental Hospital. The story, if you took away most of the adjectives, said that the woman discovered, or thought she discovered, her husband had been sexually abusing her son and possibly her daughter. The wife was in the backyard feeding her husband’s various body parts into the woodchopper, when the two kids returned home from a neighbor’s birthday party. They naturally followed the noise into the backyard, and rapidly went running back up the street, screaming hysterically.

  Interestingly, the woman had not pled insanity, but instead had insisted on pleading self-defense, in that she was defending her two children, who were too young to defend themselves. It didn’t work. They found her insane anyway, and gave her a life sentence at a state mental facility. Thirty years. My God, it must have seemed like an eternity!

  By now Fargo had moved his own little anxiety attack to the kitchen, resting his head on my leg and emitting soft whimpers. I stroked his back. “Okay, okay.” I raised my voice. “Honey, I’m going to take him outside for a minute before he has a nervous breakdown.”

  “Or gives me one,” came sharply back.

  By the time we returned Cindy was in the kitchen, having poured herself a glass of wine and made me a bourbon highball. Quickly, she pushed the scandal sheet aside. “I don’t know why I buy those things, I never read them.”

  “I know.” I sipped my drink. “What did you think of the guy down south who spontaneously combusted?”

  “It grossed me out! Oops, you caught me.” She gave me that smile that always makes me just a little short of breath.

  I grinned back. “Feeling better?”

  “I think you’ve caught me there, too. I can’t seem to help it. I just get a little batty whenever one of us has to travel. It’s so strange.” She reached for a cigarette, something she does about once a month. She would smoke only that one. I don’t know how she does it.

  “Are you worried about an accident, or a bomb or something?” I asked.

  “Oh, to a degree, sure, but that’s not it. And it’s not that I think either one of us is going to stray, although sometimes it sounds that way.” She moved her wineglass around in a little circle.

  “What’s left?” I wasn’t following too well here.

  “I’m afraid when I come home, or you come home, one of us will be completely changed. One of us won’t be the same at all . . . completely different. Our attitudes, feelings, needs . . . everything will have changed. One of us will be a stranger.” Her eyes began to fill.

  “Sweetheart! Please don’t cry.” I straightened in alarm. “You know I don’t do well when you cry!” In fact I was frantic at the first tear. “We aren’t going to change! Never! I’m Alex. What you see is what you got. It may not be great, but it’s me . . . and always will be. And you could never be less than what you are. Never!” I reached across the table for her hand, but it was not enough. I went around the table to hold her, and she rose to meet me. I held her painfully tight. I could not lose her.

  She took a shaky breath. “You don’t think I’m nuts? Maybe I need a shrink.”

  “Maybe you just need a drink, and since it’s out in the open and you’ve talked about it, it won’t bother you so much. If it does, you can always see a shrink if you want. Or if you want to talk to me, love, I’m here. I’m always here. I love you, batty or not.” I looked at her, and she nodded, and with one accord we drifted toward the bedroom.

  And we talked, and we touched and then we slowly reached that ultima Thule that comes so rarely and so perfectly, when all things disappear into unbearable and absolute pleasure.

  Chapter 4

  Cindy looked very attractive and professional in her “Boston” clothes. I noted that both Choate Ellis and Cassie gave her an appreciative once-over as we walked toward the plane. It made me feel like I was escorting a movie star. We gave each other a light, and decorous cheek-to-cheek hug, and she climbed into the cabin with a gallant assist from Cassie.

  “Safe trip,” I said to no one in particular.

  I watched as Cassie fired up the starboard engine and then the port and taxied to the runway’s end. The small plane hurtled back toward me along the runway and cleared the ground just as it passed in front of me. Gaining altitude, Cassie waved and began a slow turn back over the bay to aim them toward Boston’s Logan Airport.

  Sighing, I walked to my car. “Fargo, why were we not born rich? Or at least rich enough to fly a plane like that all over the place?” He shrugged and sat down in the passenger’s seat, ready to leave. I think he considered airplanes strange noisy cars that were best avoided.

  I decided to stop by on the way home and see what Mom was up to on this nice morning.

  I found her lopping branches off an old forsythia that bloomed magnificently every spring and then grew wild every summer.

  She straightened up and eyed the shrub warily. “One of these days it’s going to reach out and get me. Hello, my darlings.” She kissed me as she petted Fargo. “And how are we this morning?”

  “Well, we just saw Cindy and Choate Ellis off to Boston on Cassie’s magic carpet.”

  She gave me a mother’s look. “So you are on your own for a few days.”

&nb
sp; “Yeah.” I started picking up forsythia clippings and shoving them in the plastic bag nearby. I thought about my conversation last night with Cindy. I was delighted she’d “confessed” and thought it boded well for anytime one of us had to be away in the future. I thought about my own chimera and wondered if I could muster up the courage ever to discuss it. The thought of that conversation was really beginning to bug me.

  Mom stopped work, laid the clippers on the wall and then sat down beside them.

  “You seem a bit quiet this morning, Alex. Everything all right?”

  “Oh, absolutely, thanks. Yes, I’m fine. I was just thinking. Apparently, Cindy’s had this little bugbear that has been chasing her around. Last night she told me about it. She felt greatly relieved afterward and was glad to realize what it was. Just silliness, really, but something that got bigger and bigger in her mind. It wasn’t really a problem, you know, but I think we’ll both be easier, now it’s in the open. She had this nutty hang-up anytime either of us traveled.”

  Mom patted the wall beside her, inviting me to sit down.

  “And you have a little bugbear chasing you around, but you can’t talk about it?”

  My mother knew her child.

  “Well, yes.” I told her of my fear that I would disappear as an individual if Cindy and I lived together. In the bright morning sun, it sounded a helluva lot sillier than Cindy’s problem, which I had treated rather lightly.

  Mom was silent a moment and then said, “I don’t know that I’m the right person to talk to. I know that for years I felt I had gone from being my parents’ daughter, to being my husband’s wife and then my children’s mother. My marriage was not a glowing success, as you know and frankly, I never really felt like ‘Jeanne the Person’ until after your father’s death.”