Death in the Polka Dot Shoes

by Marlin Fitzwater

  Pete pulled his hat down on his forehead, stared at the deck as if pondering a serious question, then slowly looked up.

  “I don’t know anything,” he said. “No affairs that I know of. Some said Simy, maybe. But that was before he got married.”

  “Any fights?” I asked.

  “Well, let’s see,” he said. “There are always fights. But none that you’d take all the way to North Carolina. Maybe he got into something down there.”

  “The autopsy said somebody hit him,” I offered.

  “What about the tuna?” Pete asked.

  Leave it to a waterman to ask about the fish. “What do you mean?”

  “What about the fish?” Pete said. “I thought he caught the big one and it took him down.”

  “The Sheriff down there isn’t sure there was a tuna,” I said.

  I didn’t want to tell Pete what the Sheriff really felt. “He said there were some marks on Jimmy’s arms that could have come from the leader line, but he suggested that the Captain hit him, threw him overboard about a mile off shore, and that’s why the body surfaced.”

  “Do you mean the Captain killed him on shore, and took him out to sea just to make it look like an accident?” Pete suggested.

  This kind of speculation was my fear. Everybody immediately jumps to their own conclusions, their own conspiracies. I couldn’t see how to walk the conversation back, so I decided to march it forward, away from the details of the crime.

  “The key now seems to be to find that Captain,” I said. “The Sheriff is looking. But I haven’t heard anything.”

  Just as Pete was about to ask another question, Lil emerged from the Bayfront to say goodbye. She had joined Pete for an early breakfast, lingered inside while he readied the boat, and now was ready to leave. She saw us talking and gave her infectious wave with a big smile.

  She walked to the stern of the Martha Claire and asked, “How’s business?”

  “I’m starting to get the hang of this,” I said. “Haven’t made much money yet, but I can see how the water claims its victims. Crabbing is addictive.”

  “I don’t mean the crabs,” she said. “I mean the law. Are you gonna make it?”

  “That’s a little forward, isn’t it?” I said in mock shock. “Of course I’m gonna make it.”

  “That’s the right approach,” Pete chimed in. “Everybody makes it at something. It’s just that some ways are slower than others. Some of these boys go from crabs to oysters to rockfish and end up eating most of what they catch. But we all make it.”

  “Now I assume you’re talking about the water and not the law,” I said.

  “Of course,” Pete said.

  “Same is true of other businesses,” Lil said. “My dad would crab in the summer, carpenter in the fall, do a little plumbing if you needed it, and paint your house if times were tough.”

  “Yeah,” I said out of professional pride. “But law is a little different.” “Not really,” Pete said. “It’s just another service to put a few bucks on the table. Think of law as just another way to afford fishing. Hell, it doesn’t take much money for that.”

  I shuddered to think how my colleagues at Simpson, Feldstein and James would react to the firm being treated like a plumbing contractor. We had such high and mighty causes in the law firm that even defenders of killers would pose their trials in terms of high moral concepts like protecting the innocent, fairness, or everyone deserves a defense. I certainly believe those principles, and could not have defended so many scoundrels without that moral underpinning. Indeed, I assume my practice in Parkers, although now limited to buying houses, selling boats, and wills, might someday return to a criminal defense. But the reality of my practice today is mighty close to making a little money to go fishing. And remarkably, I feel rather good about it. Perhaps that’s why Pete’s insight had been so helpful with his charter boat.

  Pete Wildman’s success is largely due to the internet. He knows computers, developed his own website called Miss Lil’s Charter Fishing, and writes a weekly column that chronicles the exploits of all his clients. It has the dual objectives of advertising his prowess at fish finding, and feeding the egos of customers he hoped to lure back for repeat performances. The website had almost replaced word of mouth as his best source of customers. Pete had paper place mats printed that featured a drawing of his boat, and a caricature of Lil. It was distributed to every restaurant in Parkers, none of which had tablecloths, and all of which accepted anything free. You couldn’t sit down to lunch any place in town without reading that the best fishing in Maryland could be reviewed on www.Lil.com.

  Lil also led Pete into a life of philanthropy. She understood instinctively that “giving” didn’t require a lot of money, or a foundation, or a press release. It just required a big heart and tons of enthusiasm, which she and Pete certainly had, not to mention the most giving of instruments, a boat.

  Lil invited me to go on their annual fundraising crab feast trip as a way to meet the other watermen, and a long list of their friends and clients from charters past. The money was to pay medical bills for Anna Mostelli, eleven-year-old daughter of an oysterman from the nearby village of Shady Side. Lil didn’t seem to know much about Anna’s disease, or how much the treatments cost, but she knew that no oysterman could ever afford his medical bills, and the Mostelli’s needed help. She also knew that every time she asked Gus Mostelli about his daughter, he cried, long silent tears that slid through the cracks in his face like the gallons of bay brine that had gone before. He didn’t even wipe them anymore; he just kept talking. It made Lil so happy to be helping that she couldn’t wait to schedule another dance at the Elks Club or a blue grass festival at the ballpark. And Pete always offered a fishing trip as grand prize in the silent auction.

  We boarded Pete’s boat on a Wednesday night, bound for Teddy’s Crabhouse on Poplar Island, about an hour’s ride across the Bay. Six other Captains had volunteered their boats to the fleet, conveying about one hundred guests at fifty bucks apiece.

  The last guests on our boat were Burlington and Marilyn Mansfield. Burl was wearing a seersucker suit of gray and white strips, a blue button down shirt, red tie, and panama hat. He could just as easily have been going to a steeplechase race. He seemed overdressed for eating crabs, a somewhat messy affair involving newspapers on the tables and rolls of paper towels for wiping the bay seasoning from your hands. This did not deter Burl, however, who had nothing to prove to anybody, and probably planned to eat raw oysters instead of crabs.

  Marilyn followed closely, dressed in chiffons and silks flowing in the breeze like fireflies in the night. As a couple, they floated where others stumbled. They stepped off the dock, toes touching the edge of the boat as someone’s outstretched hand guided them into the party.

  “Hello Ned,” Marilyn said. “So nice to see you.”

  “The news about your brother is quite alarming,” Burl said. “Any new developments?” Burl was essentially a no nonsense conversationalist. With fifteen or so people on the boat, Burl shook hands all around and returned to where Marilyn and I were discussing the weather. He edged around so he was facing me, and shielded himself from lip readers.

  “Nothing new on Jimmy,” I said. “Still looking. They’re now thinking bar fight. So who knows?”

  “I need to talk with you about the CRI,” Burl said. “You tell those boys we might go for a scaled back version of the resort. Build it as a replica of Captain Amos Song’s house so it’s consistent with our architectural history. No bricks. No neon signs. Not more than one hundred guests.”

  “Burl,” I said, throwing up my hands in exaggerated disbelief. “How can they make money? Even at seventy to eighty percent occupancy, that’s not enough to pay the mortgage, run the restaurant, and build a pool.”

  “Why do they need a pool?” Burl asked. “They have the Bay.”

  “Why do you environmentalists think you can prescribe every window and table in the place?” I said.

  “Be
cause the devil is in the details.”

  “No,” I said, “it’s because you want control. You want to tell people how to live. You want us all carrying recycling bins on our boats.”

  “No Ned,” he said, “we just don’t want your pollution.”

  “I hear you want to outlaw those little ski boats because they make too much noise,” I charged. “What’s next?”

  “Ned, my boy, you haven’t been here long enough,” Burl said. “I respect you because of your father. But don’t think just because you’re a lawyer, you can start running things in Parkers.”

  I realized it was time to lighten up. I also realized I had better get over to Burl’s house some afternoon soon and pour a new foundation for our relationship. I wanted his friendship and I enjoyed the country gentleman nature of his home. Burl had a tobacco barn which anchored sixteen acres of waterfront on the West River, with four hundred feet of bulkhead built by R.T. Smith, the oldest and best pier builder in Jenkins County. R.T. charged a hundred dollars per running foot for a new dock and bulkhead, with pilings topped with copper that glistened brown when installed and turned green with age. Apparently Burl was ignoring the environmentalists who claimed that pretreated pilings killed the fish and led to depletion of the oyster beds as well.

  Tobacco barns dotted Southern Maryland, remnants of a vibrant past. The agriculture that had flourished for two hundred years, fed generations, and spawned a reliance on slavery and cheap labor, was passing. In 2002, the State adopted a buyout program that paid farmers not to grow tobacco, and the auction houses closed for good. Some of the older farmers grew small patches of tobacco, just for a little cash and a good memory, but they had to truck it nearly a hundred miles to St. Mary’s county to sell. That practice would not survive long.

  The tobacco barns were bought by developers, moved to new home sites, and considered ambience for gated communities called Plantation Village or Tara. They were never called Tobacco Way, however, because public attitudes toward smoking were the executioner that eliminated tobacco in the first place. People want to be reminded of the bucolic joys of plantation life without the painful side effects of smoking, cheap labor, and segregation. The innocence of a tobacco barn was the perfect symbol for a twenty first century Levit-town featuring five-acre home sites and white fences that set off a riding ring or a three stall horse barn.

  Burl’s barn at least was not an ornament. A thriving farm had once flourished on the banks of the river before it was broken into irregular parcels of fifteen or twenty acres back in the nineteen thirties. Tobacco barns were open just above the foundation, by perhaps a foot or two, to allow a free flow of air to dry the leaves. Similarly, the side boards were loosely fitted, so large cracks allowed air from all directions. Only the roofs, usually tin, were built to keep out the elements. Even when they became rusted and twisted, they kept the barn dry as a bone. Burl renovated one corner of the structure to serve as a tool shed and carpentry shop. No more moisture. He wouldn’t have rusty tools, and kept his wood chisels clean. He even polished his favorites. In the main part of the barn he had built the Lady Marilyn, a thirty-four-foot skipjack that now rolled in the soft eddy of waves at his dock.

  I was a little surprised that Burl was so worked up about the Resort project, but this didn’t seem like the moment to further explore his attitude. Indeed, he had given me a message to deliver to my new client, thus making me a player in the game. If the SARP (Stop All Resorts Please) people had decided to use me as a conduit to Chesapeake Resorts International, so much the better. I probably owed Burl something for my new stature. Maybe I could give him a break on his will, although that couldn’t be much. In any case, I was in the loop, and that felt good.

  Teddy Harvest was a legendary waterman who ran his crab house and inn as a way station for politicians searching the eastern shore of the Bay for votes, and for corporate giants and movie stars who showed up for the duck hunting season. Pictures of Teddy with all the governors of Maryland, even the ones who went to jail or left in disgrace, adorned the walls. Teddy knew how to take care of his guests, and he had six slips vacant for Captain Pete and his fellow Captains.

  I stepped off our boat as it edged toward the dock, grabbed the stern lines thrown by Lil, and tied them to the dock cleats. I was about to help Lady Marilyn off when somebody tapped me on the shoulder. I turned and was more than surprised to see the Blenny Man. My initial fear was that I couldn’t remember his name, and it seemed unlikely that he preferred being called Blenny Man.

  “Hello Ray,” I said. “Let me help these folks onto the dock.” I set about the task while Ray Herbst waited. When the last guest was off the boat and walking up the dock toward Teddy’s, Ray began again.

  “Nice to see you again, Mr. Shannon,” he said. “I hope to see you inside.” As he turned to follow the others, I noticed he was wearing black dress shoes with his khaki’s. Somehow this man never quite fit in. He clearly wanted to, with his Caterpillar cap and dark green knit shirt with red letters that said, “Fishermen Get Caught At The Bayfront.” But the black shoes were a giveaway. I kept thinking someone should take his shoeprints, just in case a serious crime was ever committed in South County.

  Later I found Ray at the bar, eating raw oysters on the half shell, smothered in ketchup. The oysters were magazine quality, presented on a large plate shaped like an oyster shell, and in enough quantity to suggest he was determined to get his money’s worth. The oyster take from the Bay was down this year, but still it seemed unlikely Teddy would run out before the Blenny Man could get his fill.

  Blenny had another unusual quirk. Instead of using a fork to lift the oysters, or throwing his head back and sliding them down his throat the way some oyster eaters do, he slurped them into his mouth like an anteater. I watched closely for several minutes in order to time my arrival when his tongue might be approaching a rest stop.

  “Ray,” I said gingerly, pushing myself onto the stool next to him, “I trust your boat is running smoothly. I don’t remember it too well from that afternoon we found you in the water, but it seemed like a nice boat.”

  “It’s a dandy,” he said. “Did you notice that day how it kept a perfect circle? Newest thing. Newest thing. Like an automatic pilot.”

  “Well, I’m glad we were there,” I said, trying to turn the conversation. He didn’t seem too comfortable with the possibility he might have to explain how he fell overboard.

  “I saw you at the public meeting on the new Resort the other night,” I said. “But I didn’t hear you testify. Do you have an interest?”

  Actually, I knew which side he was on, the environmentalists. But I didn’t know why. He was a developer, a builder who had locked horns with the environmentalists in the past, and a man who had fought tooth and nail over county permits to tear down a tree. Suddenly, on the biggest land use fight to ever hit Jenkins County, he becomes a tree hugger. I made a note to find out if he had contributed to the cause, and how much.

  “I just think this resort is too big for Parkers,” he said. “We’ll lose our village atmosphere. We’ll have to build houses and schools and sewers everywhere.”

  I think when he said those words, he instantly realized they were arguments for a quality of life that he’d been arguing against for years, and probably seemed strange even to a newcomer like me.

  “I know that may seem strange, coming from me,” he said, “but it’s all a matter of scale. We have to keep things in proportion.”

  This all seemed a little glib to me, and totally unnecessary to have to listen to at a waterman’s charity event. I edged off the seat to leave.

  “Wait Ned,” he said, adopting the more familiar term. No more Mr. Shannon. “I just want you to know I appreciate your pulling me out of the drink the other day. Also, I’m glad you represent CRI. Maybe we can work together some day.”

  “Thanks Ray,” I said. “I’ll see you later.” And moved away from the bar, wondering what in the world that conversation was all about. I started
it, but whose side was he on in this fight?

  The return trip to the Bayfront was mainly a matter of keeping warm. The dark settles into the Bay like an ice cube in a glass of tea, and suddenly the world is cold. The spray from the hull brushed over the gunnels and soaked those standing too close. It sent shivers that never stopped. Pete was heading for the barn and must have jacked up his engine to full cruising speed. It was a rough ride as the Lil slammed against some of the waves, not enough to be dangerous but enough to throw the passengers off balance and leave our legs tense and tired.

  Tying up at the Bayfront was like the end of most trips, boring and unremarkable. The guests exited rapidly, just wanting to get home and shower the smell of Old Bay crab seasoning from their hands and face. I hung back, mainly to help Pete clean up his boat. He shut her down pretty quickly. Without fish to clean or rods and reel to refit, a quick spray of the deck by the first mate was all it took.

  I stopped by the Martha Claire for a routine check of the bilge pump, locked the cabin door, and started for my car. Pete and Lil had already left. I noticed that the Bayfront was still open, although Simy was turning out the lights. I figured I could use one quick drink to take the edge off before going to bed.

  I pulled the front door open and its hinges squeaked. It had a brass handle with large splotches of brown tarnish, but no brass toe plate across the bottom. The wood had splintered from water exposure and the corners had rounded from being kicked or slammed. The grease from working fingers of plumbers, electricians, boat mechanics and every other tradesman in the county left large stains you could see in the shadows. As I opened the door, the single light bulb overhead danced the shadows so it was hard to tell the dirt from the light. This was significant only because washing your hands in the Bayfront forced you to confront the dingy bathrooms with sinks that carried the fingerprints of earlier patrons, especially at the end of the day. I had washed my hands on the boat so I gingerly pulled the door open.