by Lee Martin
Before he can say Happy Mickey Finn, the boater drops from his hand and he clutches his chest. His head goes back, and his knees buckle, and he collapses to the floor.
ALL THE WAY HOME, I TRY TO IMAGINE TELLING THE STORY to Maddie. The story of how, after Duncan collapsed, I rushed to him. I cradled his head in my hands. I shouted, “Is there a doctor here? Is anyone a doctor or a nurse?”
“Oh, that’s a scream,” someone said. “That’s right out of a movie. Is there a doctor in the house?”
People were laughing. Later, they’d say they thought what I said was part of the script. They never for once thought that Duncan was really in trouble. They didn’t think, like I did, that his heart had seized up or a blood vessel had burst in his brain. They thought it was all part of the act, part of the story that Vera had arranged for the party.
Only Arthur took it seriously—Arthur who had watched his wife fall to the floor with an aneurysm. He knew how someone could be here one minute and then be gone in an instant.
I need to tell Maddie about the way he knelt on the floor with me and started performing CPR, the heel of his hand pumping Duncan’s chest. “There he was,” I’ll tell her, “your grandfather. Right there when he thought someone needed him.” I’ll try to explain what this should mean to her, the fact that her grandfather is someone people can depend on. Someone she can depend on. “Your grandfather,” I’ll say. “Your family.” Then I’ll let her see the truth of things. “He wants the best for you,” I’ll say. “You should give him another chance.”
At the Cabbage Rose, Duncan opened one eye. I was still cradling his head, looking down at his face, and he winked at me. I’ll have to tell Maddie that as well. I’ll have to say that Vera started laughing so hard the fringe on her flapper dress shimmied, and then Duncan was holding up his hands, and he was shaking with his own laughter, sputtering out words of protest to make Arthur stop pressing on his chest. “Enough, enough,” he said. “It’s…all…part of…the game.”
So it was. A little surprise to throw us a curve. We hadn’t gathered to solve the mystery of John Dillinger’s Disappeared Doily at all. We’d come to figure out who killed the G-Man, Melvin Purvis, and how.
“Poison,” said Nancy later. “That much is clear. Someone fed him arsenic or something.”
Vera told her she was right. “It was Happy Mickey Finn. He was the one who did it. Arsenic. Mixed it into his drink and made him go to sleep.”
“Sammy, I always wondered about you,” Nancy said very gravely, and I wondered whether she was serious or only pulling my leg.
Everyone was in high spirits the rest of the evening as the mystery unraveled. They kept repeating what I’d shouted. One of the Seasoned Chefs would get weak in the knees and clutch his heart. “Someone call nine one one,” he’d say. Then his date would put her hand on his chest or give him a kiss, and he’d say, “Oh, doctor.”
“What a hoot,” said Vera as I was getting my coat. “For a minute, ducky, even I thought Duncan was in trouble. You and Arthur. I guess you were the suckers tonight.”
I could barely look at Duncan the rest of the evening. Not only had he had a part in making a fool out of me; I was afraid he would now remember that he had something he wanted to tell me, whatever it was that had caused him to leave me that note and to mention it when I first arrived at the party.
The other thing I’ll have to tell Maddie is that Arthur wasn’t like me, wasn’t hurt or embarrassed by how he’d been duped. He thought it was a riot, the way he fell for everything. “Hooked me and reeled me in,” he kept saying with a big smile. “I guess I’m just about as dumb as they come.” He was a good sport. “You see,” I’ll tell Maddie. “He can take what life throws him and not lose his balance. He can keep sailing ahead. That’s the sort of man you want to love you. Someone steady like your grandfather.”
But what I won’t tell her is this: After I had my coat and was trying to slip out of the Cabbage Rose, I saw Duncan and Nancy on the porch. I opened the door and heard Nancy say, “I remember it was spring and the water was up.”
Right away, I knew they were talking about Dewey, and I lingered in the doorway, eavesdropping. Duncan said, “When I interviewed Mr. Brady for that It’s Us feature, it came out that you were a Finn from Rat Town, and he never said a word about being friends with Dewey.”
“That doesn’t surprise me,” Nancy said. “He’s like that.”
“Tight-lipped?” Duncan asked.
Nancy set her jaw. “Tight-lipped with reason,” she said, leaving me to wonder exactly what she meant.
Arthur came up behind me. “We really fell for it, didn’t we, Sammy?”
At the sound of his voice, Nancy stopped talking. She and Duncan turned to look at us there in the doorway. I had no choice, then, but to step out onto the porch.
“You were quick on the trigger tonight, Mr. Brady,” Duncan said. “If I’m ever really in trouble, I hope you’re somewhere nearby.”
“Arthur’s the one who knew what to do,” I said.
“Aren’t you going to stick around until midnight?” Arthur asked me. “Pop the cork? Drink some bubbly?”
“No, I need to get home. It’s late for an old dog like me.”
I went down the steps, shrinking from the glow of the Cabbage Rose’s lights, as I slipped farther into the darkness.
Arthur called after me. “Tell Maddie I said Happy New Year. Tell her I’ll see her tomorrow.”
“Happy New Year,” Nancy said.
“And to you,” I said.
I won’t tell Maddie what Nancy said to Duncan—tight-lipped with reason. That’s mine to mull over.
Duncan said, “Mr. Brady, wait.” He came down the steps to where I was standing. “I want you to know something.” He glanced back over his shoulder to where Nancy and Arthur stood on the porch. Nancy shaded her eyes with her hand and leaned forward, trying her best, I imagined, to see us there in the dark. Duncan said, “I got to looking at those clothes again, those clothes of Dewey’s.” He closed his hand around my bicep as if he sensed how close I was to drawing away from him and wanted to keep me right where I was long enough to say the thing he’d come to say. “That belt, one piece of it with a ragged edge. That belt wasn’t cut like we thought, Mr. Brady. An edge like that. It was torn away.” He squeezed my arm with more pressure. He turned to look at Nancy, who was still on the porch, chatting with Arthur. “Do you know what it’s done to my grandmother to think all these years that Dewey was so miserable he went off and killed himself? I’ll do anything to prove that’s not what happened. I’ll do that so she can have some peace.”
So I decided to tell him, then, about the night in front of the pool hall when I said what I did about Dewey, and Arthur and his friends picked up on it. I told Duncan I’d always wondered what harm I might have brought Dewey because of what I said.
“Mr. Pope?” Duncan said, and I knew he was trying to put two and two together. “Do you think…?”
I interrupted him. “I’m just telling you a story. That’s all. A story about what I said that night when Arthur could hear it. Maybe you should talk to him.”
“Why would you say it, Mr. Brady? I thought Dewey was your friend.”
“We were on the outs,” I said, and then, before the silence demanded I say more, Nancy came down the steps, calling my name.
“Sammy,” she said, “don’t go just yet.” Duncan let go of my arm, and we both dummied up, waiting for her to join us. She opened her handbag and took out a notepad and a pen. “I want to give you my address in Evansville,” she said. “In case you’re ever down that way. Maybe you could drop by, and we could chat.” She scribbled something on the notepad, tore off a small sheet, and pressed it into my hand. “Will you do that, Sammy? Please? We could catch up on old times.”
There was a little light from the porch spilling out onto the walk, just enough for me to make out the address she’d written: 5214 Larkspur Lane, Evansville, IN. The address, the same one I’d
seen written on the back of that map of Chicago. The place Cal had said he’d go to take care of things if trouble found him.
15
I HURRY HOME, KEYED UP, BECAUSE SURELY THE REASON Cal has Nancy Finn’s address is because he means to make good on his word, to stand up and tell her the truth about Dewey, the truth I wish we’d told the night he died. I pull into my driveway and before I open my garage door, I close my eyes and listen to the courthouse clock uptown, chiming twelve. Then the chiming stops, and I open my eyes to the New Year. The first thing I see is the gate to my side yard wide open, and in my house, all the lights ablaze.
I get out of my Jeep and make time as quick as I can into the yard. When I come up my back steps, I see that the storm door is standing open, cockeyed on its hinges, the pneumatic closer that allows it to open and close easily broken away from the frame. Whoever came through that door last, opened it with force. I can see that for sure, and right away I’m thinking that it’s finally happened, that just like Cal feared, Herbert Zwilling has found him and taken him away despite his best efforts to resist. Then, a second, more urgent thought comes to me—Maddie—and I hurry into my house.
She’s there—thank God—curled up on the couch, crying.
I kneel on the floor beside her. “Maddie,” I say, and she throws her arms around my neck and clings to me. “Maddie,” I say again. “What’s happened? Are you all right?”
She’s trying to tell me, but her face is pressed into my neck and she’s sobbing, so all I can make out at first is, “He’s gone.”
I ease her away from me. “Did Cal say where he was going?”
“Not Cal,” she says with a wail. “Stump.”
At first, the news doesn’t sink in. Stump gone. Those two words. What can they mean?
“Where’s Cal?” I ask.
“Gone to look for him,” she says, and then I know this is really happening.
It was her fault, she tells me, when she’s finally calm enough to give me the whole story. She went over to Arthur’s house just a few minutes before eleven because she wanted to watch the ball drop at midnight in Times Square and Cal didn’t want her to have the television on. In fact, he wanted all the lights out, too, so it’d look like no one was home. “He was acting funny like that,” she says. “He kept peeking out the curtains, and when I asked him what was going on, he just told me to never mind.”
So she went over to Arthur’s, and Stump whined to go with her. She let him out into the side yard, thinking he could nose around out there awhile, maybe cozy up in his ship, and then she’d collect him when she came back.
“I guess I didn’t get the gate latched,” she says. “When I came back, it was wide open, and Stump was nowhere to be seen.”
The confession starts her bawling again, and now I don’t have the patience to comfort her. I grab a flashlight and start for the back door.
Before I can step outside, I hear a phone ring, but it’s not the old-time jangle of the dial phone on my kitchen wall. It’s a musical series of electronic beeps, and I realize it’s coming from Cal’s cell phone, which, in his haste to find Stump, he’s left on the kitchen counter.
My first thought is to ignore it, but then I wonder if it might be Cal calling from a pay phone, calling to say he’s found Stump.
I pick up the cell phone and take it to Maddie. “Quick,” I say, “how do I answer this?”
She flips it open, punches a button, and reaches the phone out to me. I put it to my ear and before I can say a word, a voice is speaking to me. A woman’s voice, and I know it’s Mora Grove. “Cal, it’s me. Listen…”
I interrupt her. “This isn’t Cal. It’s his brother.”
“Jesus,” Mora Grove says. Then there’s a long silence. “Where’s Cal? Where is he?”
“Out,” I say. “I don’t know where.”
“Listen.” Her voice is sharper now. “You find him. You find him quick, and you tell him it’s time.”
Then the line goes dead.
OUTSIDE, I STOP AT THE GATE AND SHINE THE FLASHLIGHT on the tracks in the snow—Stump’s tracks. They trail out into the driveway, across the corner of Arthur’s yard, and down the sidewalk farther than my flashlight beam can stretch. Out there, is all I can think. Maddie left the gate open, and now Stump is wandering somewhere, following a scent the way basset hounds will do, noses to the ground, any thought of distance and effort covered over with the desire to keep moving, to find out what this and that is until they’re exhausted, in need of food and water, so far from home there’s no way for them to ever get back.
I hear the door close behind me, and here’s Maddie coming toward me, buttoning her coat.
“Is Cal on foot?” I ask her.
“No, he took his truck.”
Better to be on foot, I think, to follow Stump’s tracks, but I’d have a better chance of finding Cal if I took my Jeep. “When did you say you left the gate open?”
“A little before eleven.”
Over an hour. An hour for Stump to sniff after whatever scent he took a fancy to.
“Here’s his tracks,” I say.
Maddie nods. “I’m coming with you.”
As angry as I am, at least I can allow her this chance to stand with me and face her mistake.
“All right,” I say, and then we set out.
We make it to the corner, and in the streetlight’s glow, I can see that Stump’s tracks circle the street sign pole and then head east toward Cherry Blossom. So far, we’re lucky. He’s stayed off the cleared sidewalk where he’d leave no prints and stuck to the snow-covered grass. But now the wind’s up, blowing north to south, and soon those tracks will cover over and Stump will be out there in the night and I’ll have no way to find him. I tell Maddie as much, and that sets her to crying again. She does her best to hide it, but I can hear her sniffles, and the catch in her breathing. Then she gets the hiccups. Everything’s a mess: Maddie crying, the wind scattering snow, and Stump gone, his tracks petering out here where Cherry Blossom intersects with East Street, the main north-south artery on this side of town. The stoplights are blinking—red for the traffic headed east and west, yellow for the northbound and southbound lanes—and though there’s no cars in sight (Mt. Gilead is mostly quiet as the New Year begins, only a few firecrackers going off somewhere in the distance), I can’t help but imagine Stump sauntering out into the path of some New Year’s party hound, too drunk to find the brakes in time.
Maddie starts to step off the curb to cross East Street, but I grab her by her sleeve and hold her back.
“It’s no good,” I say. “The tracks are gone.”
The wind is even stronger now; the street signs shake. “It’s all my fault.” Maddie bangs her fists against her thighs. “I should have made sure that gate was latched.”
She’s sobbing now, great choking sobs that remind me of the noise Nancy Finn made when she sat in the muddy yard crying on the night she found out Dewey was dead. Then, I had no idea of anything I could do to comfort her, but on this night I don’t even have to think about it. Sad as I am that Stump is gone, and worried as I am about Cal and the call that’s come, I can’t bear standing witness to Maddie’s misery. I put my arms around her and pull her to me. She wraps her slender arms around my waist, and we stand here, holding on.
What can I tell her about mistakes, about the things we shouldn’t have done? They’re ours forever. We carry them just under our skin, the scars of our living.
“Let’s go back home,” I say to Maddie because where else is there to go when trouble comes but to the place where night after night you lay your head? “Stop that crying,” I tell her. “We’ll go home.”
Then, as if we’ve sent a prayer to heaven, a truck comes from the east. The headlights catch us in their glare, and I have to shield my eyes with my arm. The truck, Cal’s Explorer, slows. The window goes down, and I can see, on the other side of Cal, Stump sitting on the passenger seat, his muzzle lifted a bit as if he’s the navigator, keeping cl
ose watch on the road ahead.
“I found him,” Cal says. “Thank God. I found him.”
I take Maddie’s hand, and we step out into the street, meaning to go to Cal and get into the Explorer, relieved, and go home. In some better world, this is what would happen.
But then I hear another car, and I see it coming from the east. Cal must hear it, too. He pokes his head out the window to get a peek at the car coming up behind him. Then he looks at me, and I can see the fear in his eyes. He’s told me that, when it happens—when Herbert Zwilling comes for him—it will happen in an instant. The look in his eyes tells me that he’s afraid it’s come to this now, the car closing ground behind him. He keeps looking at me, and I get this odd feeling that he’s waiting for me to tell him yes, it’s all right, go.
“It’s time,” I shout, as if I’ve spent all my life preparing for this moment I didn’t even know would come. If I could say more, I’d tell Cal that Mora Grove called. She said, “Find him quick.” But I sense that Cal understands all this. He does a quick, frantic search of his coat pockets, and I know he’s looking for the cell phone he left on the kitchen counter. I can’t give it to him. It’s in my house, on the coffee table where I left it. I can’t give him his phone, and I don’t even have time to fetch Stump from the Explorer. It’s speeding away now, Cal desperate to get to safety.
My throat closes with the cold and the knowledge that nearly drives me to my knees. I know this may very well be the last I’ll see of Stump, who is with Cal now, for better or worse, the two of them on the run.
Red at night, I think, as I watch the Explorer’s taillights disappear. Be well, my sailing friend.
The car coming from the east slows and stops in the street. It’s one of those little boxy cars that’s popular these days, one of those toy cars you expect a load of clowns to get out of. This one’s a Scion, I see, made by Toyota if I remember the correct commercials, a Toyota Scion the color of a black cherry. The window goes down and I see that it’s only Duncan Hines driving the car and that Nancy Finn is with him. My legs tense. I take a few steps toward the west, toward Cal and Stump, wanting to cry out, wait, wait, but it’s too late. They’re gone, gone, gone.