“Great,” I say and I give him the bottle I’ve brought along. He goes into the house.
Tweenie sits down next to me. “Oh, my feeties…,” she says kicking off her shoes and peds and putting her bare feet up on the railing.
“Nice here,” I tell her.
“It is peaceful, isn’t it?” she answers. “You have been through the wringer, haven’t you?”
“What?” I say. I put a little effort into my appearance tonight and wore a black sundress, applied some under-eye concealer and everything.
She puts her feet down and leans toward me. “Don’t take this wrong now. You’re a beautiful woman.”
I don’t know what to say so I sit there.
“You are so contained, aren’t you?” she says, “just like your daddy.”
I wonder how Tweenie and my dad get along. Probably rough waters.
The sun is beginning to set and the lake is shimmering pinkly. The shade is growing more intense on the fifth green across the lake. Details seem very sharp in this afternoon light. “Oh look, someone’s putting,” I say.
She looks across the lake at a couple lining up their putts. The woman hits and I can hear the sound of the ball falling in the hole—clup. “Good shot honey,” the guy says. The sound carries so clearly that I can hear the undertone of resentment in the guy’s voice. Tweenie looks at me and smiles.
My uncle comes out and hands us both a glass of wine, then he goes back inside. Dreamer is sleeping next to Tweenie’s chair. She’s breathing deeply and contentedly. I try to breathe deeply and contentedly too. But I’m no good at stillness anymore. Maybe my friend Joanie is right. Maybe I am on the run.
My uncle Paulie comes out again with his own glass of wine. “Everything is cooking!” he announces proudly. He holds his glass up, “Here’s to my girls.” We raise our glasses. Tweenie takes a couple sips and then says she’s going to take a shower.
“How’d you get yourself involved in a murder?” Paulie asks me.
“I fell into it,” I say.
“You were always a magnet for trouble,” he says smiling. He was the one I turned to when I was an adolescent and always in trouble with my father. He was the one who laughed when I broke every rule my father set. It was just kid stuff—ignoring curfews, smoking cigarettes in the girl’s locker room, drinking in the woods. But, still, I was always grounded. My uncle never seemed to take it seriously.
In college, I straightened out my attitude. But, my father was gone by then.
I started dating bad boys and married professors then. A string of unavailable men. I seemed to always be reading books entitled something like: Why would a smart woman like you do incredibly stupid things like this?
My father was happy when I married Ed. He thought I was “settling down,” becoming normal. Or so he hoped. Well, so did I.
Except Ed turned out to be not-so-normal himself.
“I’ve been leading a totally boring life,” I tell my uncle.
“Maybe that’s changing,” he says.
“I got hired by someone to investigate this murder. Kind of hired,” I tell him.
I expect him to be shocked, but there’s no riling up my Uncle Paulie. He’s as even as they come. Plus, he always trusted in me. All he says is, “Really? Well, Squirt can help you do some background searches. You can learn a thing or two.”
I must look a little alarmed because he says, “Listen, the cops will probably have the guy who did this nailed in another day. Come on,” he pulls my arm, “I’ll show you my orchids.”
The flowers are hanging in pots from the branches of the bottle brush trees around the deck. They are purple and white and pink. “I didn’t think they were real,” I tell him. They seem waxy and mysterious and incredibly delicate.
“People handle them with kid gloves,” he says. “They sterilize scissors before they cut them and put on these plastic gloves like surgeons before they separate the roots. I just pull them apart with my hands. They like to be touched.”
I think about my marriage and how Ed got so that he wouldn’t even touch the things in his collections, how he used those plastic gloves to handle even rubber band balls. He’d tell me all the time how the human hand had oils that were damaging.
There’s a slow quiet leak out of the corner of my eyes. Tweenie comes out and we eat dinner on the deck. My Uncle Paulie and Tweenie pretend not to notice my tears. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” I say. I never cry.
My uncle hands me a tissue. Then they talk among themselves about people they know and I feel the warm bath of their conversation washing over me. I eventually stop crying.
Tweenie and I clear the dishes, and I say I should go, but they want me to stay in their guest room. My uncle hugs me and his shirt smells like laundry soap. Tweenie turns my bed down. She plumps up my pillow. My uncle says he’ll take Dreamer down the street a bit before he turns in if I don’t mind. He likes a little walk before bed. He pauses by the door as he’s going out. “I love you honey,” he says.
“Mmmflvetoo,” I kind of say. I lay down in this strange bed exhausted from all this tenderness.
Chapter 13
The first thing I notice as I pull into Alligator Estates is that all of Marie and Ernie’s whirligigs are gone. It’s still really early, almost dark, but their absence is tangible. I stop the car. I look. I get out. It’s very quiet where there should be whirligigging. Dreamer pokes her nose out the window and sniffs. We left Paulie’s before anyone was up, and I scurried her into the car without even giving her a chance to pee. I have this go-go-go thing that clicks in sometimes: Post Emotional Stress Syndrome, I call it. It’s really just more running, I suppose.
Maybe Marie just got sick of the whirligigs, I think. Maybe they reminded her too much of Ernie. Nah, I think, she would have done it more neatly. Someone stole them. It has the look of a crime scene. There’s something violent in the holes left in the ground.
I get back in my car. “The great whirligig caper,” I tell Dreamer. We drive on to my still slanted trailer.
I’m just getting out of the shower when there’s a knock on my door. The trailer shakes. I see a big blue shirt through my front door window. “Hold on,” I yell and throw on some clothes.
“Ma’am,” the detective says when I open the door a minute later.
“What?” I say. My hair is dripping and I’ve got a robe on that really is a beach cover-up and my eyes are all puffy and red. This is so unfair. He looks like he’s been up for hours, running and eating egg whites and combing his chest hair.
“Can I come in?”
I almost say, “If you can fit…” but I don’t. He does essentially fill up the trailer. And there’s nowhere to sit unless you consider the cot or the cardboard chair. So we stand there. “Marie Ellis reported all her whirligigs stolen and said that she saw you leaving the scene of the crime.”
I look at him. Dreamer comes up to him wagging her tail happily.
“I was just looking,” I tell him. He pats Dreamer’s head a couple times. Then he takes out his notebook.
“I stopped the car to look,” I insist.
“What were you doing driving around at that time?” he asks.
“I slept over at my uncle’s. They, um, pity me.” I gesture vaguely at my living area. We both look around at my anemic home.
“Why would I steal whirligigs?” I ask him.
He doesn’t say anything.
“This makes no sense. Was there something inside of the whirligigs?” I ask.
He shakes his head. I can tell he feels like he screwed up, like he should have searched them himself.
“I heard Ernie was a blackmailer. Maybe he kept his blackmail evidence in the whirligigs,” I say. “Or his blackmail money. Joe told me that Marie cleaned so much that there wouldn’t have been any place safe to hide anything in that little trailer.
“Did you find anything in Ernie’s room when you searched?”
He shakes his head. “What else do you kno
w about this?” he asks me.
I clam up. There’s one thing I know. I’m not giving him any more information. It only gets me deeper in trouble.
“I don’t really know anything,” I say, “but you’re really starting to bother me.”
“Bother you?”
I say, “There’s a real murderer walking around, and you’re wasting your time on me.”
His eyes look away.
“So focus your attention on someone else,” I tell him.
Maybe it’s my imagination, but he almost looks wounded.
Chapter 14
Eight a.m.: There’s a knock on my door. It’s Joe. “Oh good,” he says when he opens the door, “I thought you might already be in jail.”
“What?”
“I heard the cops came to get you this morning.”
“Who said that?”
“It was probably just a rumor.”
“Sheesh,” I say.
“You didn’t steal the whirligigs, did you?” he looks behind me into my trailer as if there’d be a whole pile of them on my cot.
I step aside. “You want to search?”
“Nah,” he says.
“What’s that?” I say. He’s holding a laptop under his arm.
“It’s Ernie’s computer. I knew he had one. It was Ted and Fritzie’s. He bought it after Ted and Fritzie died and there was a yard sale. Marie kept it in her bread bin. She said she forgot about it. After I asked her about it, she found it. Then she called the detective and he’s coming to get it later, but she let me take it home first. I’m heading there now. I figure we have about a half an hour to look at it.”
“I’ll be right out,” I say.
He smiles. “This is a lot better than being retired,” he says.
When we get to his trailer, Joe sits down and opens it up. I stand over his shoulder. We check to see if Ernie had email. Nothing. Very lonely. We check files to see what he stored. Nothing.
We check his history. There’s a couple recipe sites that Marie’s been on. There are a couple of porn sites too: bigtits.com. That kind of thing.
“We have to look at these,” Joe tells me earnestly, “in the interest of being thorough.”
He’s right, but it’s hard to stand there while he clicks on topless women on bicycles and topless women on the beach. The women are frozen in still photography but their boobs are digitally mastered to bounce up and down. “Enough already,” I say. The top of Joe’s head is turning pink.
“Well, now we know what Ernie liked,” he says. “He wasn’t gay, that’s for sure.”
But the next site is a gay site. “How do you know?” I ask him.
“It’s blue. That’s a gay code thing. It was probably Ted and Fritzie’s,” he says. “Look at this.” He points. “That’s strange. It’s not a pornography site.”
It’s called bluevisitorsguidetoftpalms.com. It’s a hokey kind of retro site, one powder blue page—A picture of a blue sunset and a highway, and a picture of blue-ish 50’s guys in swimwear standing next to a surfboard, one of blue-ish men making muscles for the camera. The text appears to be a kind of travel guide to Ft. Palms—what to visit, what to do. Joe jots down a copy of it on a little pad.
“I think it just leads gay people to like-minded souls,” Joe says reading it. “See here, ‘The Blue Parrot.’ That’s a bar down on Wycomb St. It’s a gay bar.”
“I guess Ted and Fritzie visited it,” I say.
“But look,” Joe says, clicking away. “It was visited just a week ago. And here’s the history. It was visited several times in recent weeks. And they’ve been dead for three months.”
“Oh yeah,” I say. “Let’s keep looking.”
But there’s nothing else.
“There’s something to this,” Joe says waving his pad at me.
“Maybe,” I say.
“We should find out what,” he says.
He almost shaking, he’s so excited. But he suddenly looks frail to me. I wonder how old he is really, late 70’s? A vein is throbbing in his temple. I wonder how his daughter would feel knowing her father is involved in a murder investigation. “Remember how Ernie ended up with a golf club in his head?” I ask Joe.
“I’ll keep that in mind,” he tells me.
“I’m not kidding,” I say
I look around. Joe’s trailer is tidy. Shelves are filled with books and pictures and plants. “Is this your wife?” I ask picking up a picture on the desk.
He smiles up at me, “She was the love of my life.”
I look at him. It’s amazing to me how people go on after sadness.
I walk with Joe back to Marie’s trailer. She makes us take our shoes off at the door. Her place is very puffy and floral. There’s not even a dust speck floating in the stream of light filtering through her curtains. Joe puts down the laptop on the kitchen table.
“Can we take a look in Ernie’s room?” he asks Marie.
“The police put tape up,” she says. Joe and I look at each other. He peeks down the hallway. “Maybe you shouldn’t,” Marie says.
“It’s okay,” Joe says. We duck down the hallway and under the tape.
Ernie’s room looks like a guest room. The twin bed’s got a blue and yellow floral coverlet, the wallpaper is striped blue and white; there’s a flounce on the bottom of the white curtains. Marie peers in at us from behind the tape, “I did this kind of French provincial,” she tells us. There’s a picture of the Eiffel Tower on one wall.
“He didn’t bring much,” Marie says. There’s a neat row of clothes in the closet, a dresser with balls of socks and folded underwear.
“Folded,” I say. “That’s impressive.”
There’s an old squat box of a TV. Dustless. A digital clock. There’s a white wooden desk with gold drawer pulls. Joe looks at Marie, then slides open the top drawer. There’s a checkbook. I look over Joe’s shoulder. The handwriting is neat and fits tightly between the lines. There are deposits for social security checks and paychecks. There’s $3800 in his account. There are no checks written out to his sister or an electric company or cash. There are no checks written out period. It’s weird. “Did he help you with expenses?” I ask her.
“Half the property fees,” she says. “He gave me cash every month. Also for the electric bill.”
“Cash?” Joe says.
Marie nods.
“Didn’t Ernie have a camera?” Joe asks.
Marie says, “I don’t know where it is.”
“Did he have a cell phone?”
“He didn’t believe in them. I think he just didn’t like to talk.” Marie says.
“He didn’t have a car?” I ask.
“He travelled here on the bus. His wife kept the car. He shared mine when he needed to go anywhere.”
I look under the bed. There are weights under there, a barbell. There’s a suitcase. I pull out the suitcase. It’s empty.
There’s nothing else. It’s more like a hotel room than an actual room. We go back to Marie’s kitchen.
“They’re going to release his body today,” Marie tells us.
“That was fast,” I say.
“They just called. I can bury him now. His instructions on his will say, cremation and no service, but I don’t like that idea, do you?”
I say, “Um.”
“I think death is really for the living, don’t you?”
I understand what she’s getting at. Still…
“I figure a compromise is always best. He can have the cremation, but I’m going to have a service—no church, just a small non-denominational ceremony in the clubhouse.”
“In the clubhouse?” I ask. I can’t help it.
“I think he would have wanted that,” she says. “Sal has a friend who’s a pastor, and said he’d do it for us day after tomorrow. Then we’ll have one of those long subway sandwiches. Ten feet, you think will be enough? Twelve feet? Ernie loved Subway. You have to order by the foot.”
I shrug.
“And I
’ll make my punch. You float sherbet scoops on the top, that’s the secret.”
“Did you hear anything last night when someone was taking the whirligigs?” Joe asks
“See, I thought I heard something. But I had the air on last night. I took two of those Sleep-Eze because I haven’t been sleeping, and so it was like I was underwater. I heard something I think, but I couldn’t move.”
“Was there something inside of those whirligigs?” he asks.
“I don’t know. The houses had little doors that worked, so maybe. I never looked before. The yard was Ernie’s realm. He was always fiddling with them.”
“Did Ernie hide things away in them?” Joe asks.
“He was very private. He didn’t like it when I touched his things. I like to clean,” she kind of apologizes.
“He had to have somewhere that he kept his cash,” Joe says. “What was Ernie’s last day like?” he asks. He pulls out his pad and a pen from his back pocket.
“He woke up… at 6:00. He had cornflakes at 6:15. He showered.”
Joe writes it all down neatly on a pad.
“What are you doing?” I ask him.
“Checking for gaps,” he says. “It’s what detectives do.”
“I’m supposed to be the detective,” I say to him. “How do you remember this?” I ask Marie.
“He always did the same thing every day. He went to work at 7:00. Sal liked him to work early at the pool so he got things done before people started coming around. He cleaned the pool and did the chemicals, swept up around the pool area, straightened the chairs and wiped them down. Then he came home for lunch. Lunch is from 12:00 to 1:00.”
“Did he say he saw anyone or talked to anyone?” Joe asks.
“Just Sal. It was an ordinary day.”
Marie’s face is flat and a little moon-ish. Her eyes look tired. “Ernie told me he had an appointment in Palm Villages at some accountants at 2:00, so he changed and then he took the car to go to the accountant. That was about 1:30. It takes a half hour to get there.”
“Why did he go to see an accountant?” Joe asks.
“He said something about some complication.”
“Did he HAVE an accountant?”
“No. Last year, we did our taxes at the clubhouse. They brought in volunteers to help us fill out the forms.”
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