Husbands And Lap Dogs Breathe Their Last

by David Steven Rappoport

  That the auction house was physically in Chicago might be no more than a coincidence. Most auctions are now conducted online, and buyers could be anywhere. Still, who the buyers were might be of interest.

  Cummings considered ways to get Clarkson’s to divulge the confidential names and addresses of the purchasers. He set the timer on his wristwatch and brainstormed possibilities on a legal pad. When the buzzer sounded, he still had no idea which manipulation, if any, might prove most effective, but he had decided to visit Clarkson’s nonetheless. Perhaps something would occur to him spontaneously.

  Clarkson’s turned out to be a dilapidated brick warehouse in a neighborhood lately full of loft conversions and upscale chain stores. It had been refurbished to make it look like a suitable repository for the world’s artistic treasures, but paint and exuberance can accomplish only so much. The building sought to be a courtesan but remained a five-dollar hooker.

  Cummings entered the red wrought aluminum front gates flanked by reproduction Chinese lions and opened a very ordinary glass door. He proceeded to an even more ordinary reception area, staffed by a young man with elegantly cut green hair.

  Cummings hadn’t come up with a gambit that was better than weak, but human incompetence being what it is, sometimes weak is enough. He embarked with the first manipulation that came to mind.

  “I wonder if you could help me,” Cummings began. “I’m a private detective working to help a client establish the provenance of an item recently stolen from his collection. We’re trying to build a case to maximize the payment from the insurer. The item was sold here twice during the last few years ...”

  “I’m so sorry, sir,” the youth interrupted. “Requests for records must be submitted by certified mail and include photocopies of two forms of identification. Also, we’ll need a notarized statement from your client, authorizing us to release the documents to you.”

  “I see,” Cummings said. So much for human weakness.

  As he considered his next move, Cummings’s eyes drifted across the surface of the reception desk. There he saw a flyer announcing upcoming auctions. These had names like July Premiere Auction and Summer Fine Arts Auction.

  “Do you sell many occult items?” Cummings asked.

  The young man seemed confused. “Do you mean primitive art?”

  “No, I mean ...” and then Cummings realized he didn’t really know, broadly speaking, what items might qualify as occult. “I mean, for example, the Craddock Brooch. It belonged to Ida Craddock, a woman who talked to angels and wrote sex manuals or something. You sold it twice in the last five years.”

  “Jewelry,” the young man responded.

  “Possibly jewelry but with a supernatural twist.”

  “Perhaps you are referring to next week’s Fine Jewelry and Couture Auction. It includes several items that belonged to Emma Hardinge Britten, a famous nineteenth century spiritualist. I believe there is a ball gown, a pocket watch, a cameo, a cloisonné scrying dish and a lingam.”

  “Yes!” Cummings responded. “When exactly is that auction?”

  The young man provided the information, and Cummings entered it into his smartphone. It would be interesting to see who turned up to bid on these items, and perhaps he could somehow also determine who was bidding remotely.

  On the drive back he took a route that passed the Red and White, or what was left of it. The building was marked off with yellow tape, informing passersby in bold black letters that the venue was now a crime scene. There were no actual policemen guarding the site.

  Cummings parked a block away. He opened his glove compartment and took out a flashlight and latex gloves from the many just-in-case items he always kept there.

  He approached the building cautiously, looking around to ensure he wasn’t attracting attention. He bent under some police tape and entered through what had been the front window.

  The red brick structure remained intact, but the interior was littered with charred detritus: melted fixtures, burnt wood, shattered windows, blackened wiring and piping, and what remained of tables, chairs, banquettes, window treatments, cutlery, glassware and china.

  He moved carefully and slowly across the rubble toward the center of the room in a spiral pattern, in keeping with the common crime scene search method. There seemed to be little of interest to him in the room, but eventually he noticed something.

  Picking it up, he determined it was a white business size envelope, slightly damp and partially burnt, addressed to Otto Verissimo. Inside, singed but mostly intact, was a handwritten note. Cummings read it. Intrigued by the content, he put it into his pocket. Then he went home and phoned Otto.

  Chapter Seven

  Most visitors to Maine see only its relaxed July face: lighthouses and sea breezes, scrubbed villages and roughhewn gentility. In the main, the state is not July but December: spectacular but remote wilderness, dented double-wide mobile homes, xenophobic villages with irresolvable class divisions, long winters knocking back Allen’s Coffee Brandy in shabby ice fishing shacks and tribal reservations where the average life expectancy is less than fifty.

  Still, Maine, like many beautiful and complicated places, evokes a strong love of place that cannot be easily explained. Some are born in the state and stay because it’s comfortable or because it’s uncomfortable but it’s home or because they can’t afford to leave; some move to Maine by choice, discover it’s not their summer fantasy and learn to accept it for what it is. As for the rest, they drink or they go.

  Arriving at the Portland Jetport for Chess’s funeral, Cummings picked up a rental car and headed north toward Horeb.

  While he was driving the forty or so miles between the airport and the village, his cell phone rang.

  “Hi, Dad. What’s up?”

  “I am perplexed,Son. I am working a crossword. The word I need is nine letters. The clue is in the form of a question, ‘Vatican rhythm?’“

  “Conundrum,” Cummings replied without hesitation.

  “You always know the answers, Son,” George responded. His tone was factual rather than flattering.

  “How are you, Dad?” Cummings asked, then added, “And how is Orchid?” referring to his stepmother.

  “I am cryptic. She is beauteous. Where are you?”

  “I’m in Maine, actually. I just flew in. I’m attending a funeral. I was going to call you to say hello.”

  “Who died?”

  “Nobody you know.”

  George and Orchid lived in Maine. Orchid had always lived there. After a life in New York City, George had moved to Maine from his Florida retirement after meeting Orchid.

  “That is confounding,” George responded. “We are in Baltimore at a Scrabble tournament. Did you know the world’s first dental school was founded in Baltimore in 1840?”

  “No, I didn’t, Dad.” Cummings was relieved that he wouldn’t have to see them. His feelings toward his father were driven by duty rather than affection. As to his stepmother, the truth was that he didn’t like her much. “Have fun. Say hello to Orchid. I’ll see you on another trip.”

  “When you come, Orchid will bake a chicken, and we’ll do crossword puzzles.”

  “What did you mean when you said you were cryptic?” Cummings asked.

  “‘Mysterious or obscure.’“

  “I know what the word means. I mean, how does it apply to you?”

  “I have sixteen new puzzle books. Sometimes the clues are difficult.”

  “I see,” he said, although he really didn’t. “Okay, Dad. I’ll talk to you soon.”

  They disconnected.

  Cummings’s father was, and his mother had been, decidedly unusual. Many years earlier, at that stage of early adulthood in which some objectivity about one’s family sets in, Cummings had realized they both might have some form of undiagnosed autism. This was some intellectual comfort to him but didn’t retroactively alter the limitations of his childhood. He had concluded early that his was not the usual child-parent relationship.
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  “I got beat up,” Cummings remembered sobbing to George when he came home one afternoon at the age of seven. He tried to climb into George’s lap for comfort, but George pushed him away.

  “Son,” George said, “can you think of a seven-letter word that starts with N? It means horsey.”

  Cummings looked at George.

  “I got beat up,” Cummings repeated. George looked back, confused. Looking at George’s baffled expression, Cummings suddenly understood: There would be no comfort in this childhood. “Neighed,” he responded.

  “Very good, Son! Very good!”

  Cummings nodded and then walked to the bathroom to tend to his bruises himself.

  Matilda, Cummings’s mother, was much older than her husband. She was already in her forties when Cummings, her only child, was born. Her torso was as square and dense as a fire hydrant, and she was barely taller than one. Her arms and legs were stubby but strong. She was unimaginative and inarticulate, and she had no interest in good works, housekeeping, nutrition, fashion or child rearing, nor any interest in pretending she did.

  What she did have was extraordinary physical precision. As a girl she had been the New Jersey women’s fencing champion, junior division. Cummings sometimes came home from kindergarten to discover her parrying with her friend, Beatrice. Typically they did this in their bras and slips after a few midafternoon martinis with the black-and-white television tuned to The Guiding Light.

  But fencing was not Matilda’s only passion, even though she had given Cummings his middle name, Flynn, after Errol. She loved all contact sports, and the more contact, the better.

  For two years she’d been in the roller derby. In March of 1937 she was part of a group of skaters on their way from Saint Louis to Cincinnati. Their bus blew a tire, collided with a bridge, rolled over and burst into flames. Although she was one of only three passengers who escaped alive, her legs were seriously burned. It was the end of her sporting career, but her interest in athletics continued.

  George and Matilda interacted little. Cummings and Matilda interacted less.

  “Learn anything good in school today?” she would sometimes ask when Cummings arrived home.

  Unsure what reply she was looking for, he would generally answer, “Hard to tell.”

  She would nod and say, “School bored the crap out of me.”

  He would nod back.

  When he was ten, she taught Cummings to box, or at least tried to. He wasn’t good at it, and he knew she was disappointed. Still, he made a Herculean effort, which may be why she never knocked him out. It was bonding of a sort.

  They had only one other notable conversation, on the morning of Cummings’s thirteenth birthday. Matilda came into Cummings room and said, “Ask your father about your dick.”

  He nodded. That was it.

  When Cummings was thirty-seven, a bus hit and killed Matilda in front of a Boston hotel. She had gone to Boston to see a hockey game.

  Some years after her death George met Orchid while visiting Cummings, who was living in Maine at the time. Cummings considered her an emotionally vacant know-it-all, but she was a good match for George. They both lived in a universe in which the human body ended below the brain. Cummings kept in touch, which mostly meant responding to his father’s incessant requests for assistance with word puzzles. Beyond this, he visited when he could.

  Horeb, founded 1762, current population 2,612, was never a particularly fortunate place. The village on Merrymeeting Bay has grown in the last twenty years. It recently exceeded its previous population peak — 2,382 — achieved in 1850 as a result of Maine’s then-thriving seafaring economy.

  The Civil War, in which two hundred thirty-seven Horeb men served and more than thirty died, as well as changes in the shipping industry, eroded the town’s fortunes. During the latter part of the nineteenth century, the town became again what it was originally, a small, agricultural community. It lost more than a third of its population by 1900. Major fires in 1902 and 1904 destroyed what was left of Horeb’s two blocks of downtown.

  In 1910, with local dignitaries, one of Maine’s U.S. senators and the marching band from the Maine Maritime Academy in attendance, the final ship built in Horeb was launched. As the procession moved toward the water, the ship fell off of its launching platform, skidded down Massachusetts Street and broke in half on the banks of the Carlisle River.

  In the 1960s Horeb changed from a stolid farming community to a hippie carnival. In the years since the town had regained balance. Still, Horeb continued to be a rather eccentric place. It was now home to an array of cottage industries: weaving, soap making, organic lamb, pottery, heirloom vegetables and handmade Windsor chairs. There was a town arts center that held exhibits of local painters and sculptors and housed an avant-garde theater company. Next to it was an even more renegade establishment, the Maine Ephemera Museum. The Museum sponsored periodic exhibits of toothbrushes, paper clips, painted flowerpots and other detritus, and it had a permanent collection of umbrella covers from around the world.

  The town’s location at the approximate midpoint between three prominent towns — Augusta, Maine’s capital; Portland, the state’s largest city; and Lewiston-Auburn, the state’s second largest urban area, known with geographic hubris as L.A.) — helped Horeb to reinvent itself as a small bedroom community. Horeb’s residents were dispersed among thirty-four square miles of woods and farms, and former woods and farms, inland from the village proper. The population of the village itself was about two hundred fifty. Its main road, Massachusetts Street, ran about two miles from the Horeb exit on I-295 until it dead-ended into Water Road, otherwise known as Route 240, a small state highway. In between there were a handful of streets that ran perpendicular or parallel to Massachusetts. There were perhaps six streets in all. Horeb had one traffic light — flashing yellow only — a gas station, a diner and a small market.

  There were no commercial lodgings in Horeb, though there were bed-and-breakfasts in several nearby villages. Cummings had an open invitation to stay with Ernestine.

  As he drove into the village, Cummings was surprised to discover that he felt a certain odd attachment to the place. He assumed this reflected his feelings for Ernestine rather than his love for Horeb.

  Ernestine lived in a Greek Revival house built in 1835. It had four Doric columns, double-hung, twelve-sash windows, and square openings for windows and doors adorned with acanthus medallions. The house had been tastefully updated with modern technologies, but it was architecturally intact down to its still-functional beehive oven and a hidden room to hide slaves escaping on the Underground Railroad. Ernestine kept it painted it a historically incorrect gray (instead of white) with lavender shutters (rather than black). Cummings wondered if the house reflected both Ernestine’s attachment to, and rebellion against, her lineage.

  Ernestine was of medium height and always had her white hair pulled back in a simple bun. Though her choice of words often seemed anachronistic, and her expansive, eighteenth-century home could have been a museum, her dress was modern and casual. She dressed simply and comfortably, usually in a flannel shirt, jeans and boots from L.L. Bean.

  Ernestine’s housekeeper, Rebecca — a pleasant, stout older woman who spoke in a Downeast accent even more pronounced than Ernestine’s — helped Cummings put his suitcases into one of Ernestine’s guest rooms. Then she made a pot of tea, and Ernestine and Cummings sat down to talk.

  “She’s such a dear,” Ernestine said, referring to Rebecca. “I didn’t know what I’d do when Becky left last year to live with her sons in Tallahassee. You remember Becky?”

  Cummings nodded. He’d been fond of Ernestine’s former housekeeper.

  “It was good of you to come,” Ernestine said, changing the subject to the reason for Cummings’s trip.

  “I liked Chess. He was very eccentric, but so many people in Maine are.”

  “Is Maine so different from other places?” Ernestine countered. “Life makes many folks half mad in one w
ay or another, sometimes three-quarters.”

  “That’s true,” Cummings conceded. “Anyway, the trip gives me a chance to see you.”

  Ernestine dismissed the implied affection with a half-smile and a slight shake of her head. “But mostly to investigate,” she said.

  “Was there anything of note you didn’t tell me on the phone? Anything you might have observed when you saw the body?”

  “No, I don’t believe so.”

  “What about Chess’s life? Anything notable there?”

  “You do know his business rose like a rocket a few years back?”

  “What business? Do you mean the orgone boxes?”

  “Yes, indeed. You remember that his previous business ventures failed? For instance, there was the time he came back from a trip to the South Seas and started manufacturing Polynesian clothes. It was a disaster. As one local wag said, ‘puce sarongs do not make a right.’ Anyway, Chess put those orgone boxes on the computer, and orders began coming from all over, not just the United States but Europe, Asia, South America. He had to move the manufacturing out of his garage and into that old building by the river that nobody’s used since Sally Fishmeyer made Ho Chi Minh T-shirts during the Vietnam War. Fixing up that building and paying rent to the Village, as well as creating a bunch of new jobs, made him wicked popular. I cannot imagine anybody would want to kill him. I cannot imagine it.”

  The next day, Cummings, in a dark suit and tie, and Ernestine, in her grandmother’s wedding dress which she’d had dyed black many years earlier for just such occasions, drove the ten miles to the First Congregational Church in Samaria. There, a properly somber service was held, followed by an interment in the churchyard and a reception in the church basement.

  Like most Congregational churches in Maine — indeed, like Maine itself — the building was Federal and stolid. Its weathered clapboards reminded one that Maine existed in a long trajectory of time. Everything had been seen before.