“…Annnnd my white noise machine.”
Coming back down onto the soles of my feet, I look her in the eye and take a long, grassy-tasting gulp. “Annnnnd hashtag sorry-not-sorry.”
14
Russ
I wake up to find a note tucked under my arm. Judging from the edits, it’s a modification of an earlier version:
* * *
Russ –
Had to go to work! Just walking Guppy. There’s fresh coffee, and banana bread and marmalade in the fridge. Help yourself and don’t go anywhere!
Call me (landline or Skype)!
Penny
* * *
PS: Wi-Fi info on the fridge!
Followed by her number and her Skype name. My first reaction is goddamn it I missed her, but my second thought is that she really is incredibly sweet. Kind, thoughtful, and caring. I unfold myself from the chaise lounge with a stretch and a yawn. There’s a sort of rustling over my shoulder, and I turn to look. A big flower on a vine sways, along with some leaves from a planter on top of the wall.
“Hello?” I ask.
But there’s no answer.
Inside the house, Guppy is tucked up into a huge ball in his bed, his feet jammed under his body. I decide not to wake him—only idiots wake sleeping bears—and I make my way into the kitchen. There’s warm coffee in the pot, like she said. I open up the fridge and see she’s left me two thick slices of banana bread, covered in plastic wrap. Next to that is a small jar labeled “Grandpa’s Marmalade,” and dated this month. I take it all out and put it on the counter. From the cabinet I take a mug, which looks almost handmade, and pour myself a cup of coffee. On the fridge, I see a Post-it with the Wi-Fi address MaisieIsAwesome and the password SeriouslyAwesome1.
As I take the plastic wrap off the banana bread, Guppy makes his entrance. His head is even with the countertops, and he blocks off the whole corner cabinet when he sits down. He eyes the bread and the marmalade. His weirdly human eyebrow area goes up and stays there.
“Dude, no, sorry,” I say. “But here.” I give him a treat from a glass jar. He sniffs it suspiciously, like I’m trying to poison him. So I try a different colored cookie, and a third. Finally, when I get to the dark brown one, he takes it but he looks pretty disappointed about it. You get banana bread. I get a cardboard-flavored treat. Ass.
I open up her marmalade and take a knife from the drawer. Normally, I like my toast plain, my coffee black, my eggs over easy. But it’s cute, and nice, and sure, I’ll try her marmalade. On her banana bread.
So I do.
And holy shit.
Guppy grumbles, kneading the rug with his polar bear claws, and I watch a stream of drool slide down to the floor while he watches me with his droopy, bloodshot eyes.
The banana bread is moist but slightly crunchy with walnuts, or maybe pecans. Grandpa’s Orange Marmalade is tart, and sweet, and silky, and together they’re so fucking good. I brace myself on the island, like I’ve had the wind knocked out of me.
Guppy flops down sadly on the ground, mashing his face into the gap between the cabinets and the tile. He flattens his ears and sighs.
I cram as much of the bread into my mouth as I can, folding up a corner with my finger.
Onto the second piece, which is even better because I double up the marmalade. Guppy gives me his Tony Soprano stare. When he seems reasonably resigned to the fact that the banana bread isn’t going to drop right down onto the rug, he trots over to his bed and picks up his turkey, then resumes his watch while gnawing on one of its stuffed legs. I notice that the little stars on his collar all say THERE’S A NEW SHERIFF IN TOWN. ME.
As I finish off the second piece, I open the fridge again and spot the whole loaf, sitting by the eggs. But next to that is a plastic bag full of cookies, marked on the label Oatmeal Raisin.
Christ. This woman totally has my number. I pull one from the bag and take a bite.
“Oh, fuck.”
The words I could get used to this cross my mind. I let myself think them, but I don’t let myself feel them, as much as I want to. I’m here on business. Business. I’m not here to fall for a girl who has the most delicious banana bread I’ve ever had, or who keeps a reserve stash of kryptonite in her fridge. I’m not here to get involved with a woman who gave me the best sex of my life, and who’s my every fantasy made real. Who has the same suitcase as I do, and who named her dog after a Dickens character.
No. I’m here to do a job. So I finish the cookie and unzip my bag. I pull out a fresh shirt and pants, and grab my Dopp kit. In the bathroom, her drying rack is out of the tub now, pushed up against the wall. I turn on the hot water, and as the steam fills the room I see she’s left me a note on the mirror, written with her fingertip on the glass. Good morning, handsome!
On the bathmat are her wet footprints. I put my feet over them and they disappear completely.
I’m not here to stay. I’m not.
15
Russ
After going half an hour north on the highway, I arrive at a nondescript office park, the sort of place that looks like it could be home to a cut-rate insurance company, or a shady pharmaceuticals firm. In the first parking space is an ’80s Cadillac, with a small crack in the windshield. It’s white with a tan fake convertible roof. Caught in shitty car limbo forever, it’s too common to be a collector’s item and too ugly to be collectible anyway. The worst.
Over the revolving doors to the building are the words A. R. DICKERSON GOLF INTERNATIONAL. Inside the letters, about half a dozen seagulls have built nests out of plastic bags and fishing nets, and under each bolt is a splotch of rust, like bloodstains.
The place inside is equally grim, with dusty fake office plants and sun-faded tropical wallpaper. A security guard doesn’t look up from his game of Bejeweled on his phone. I get into the elevator and press the button for the top floor.
I take a left out of the elevator and head down the hallway, toward a set of glass doors that are smudged with Windex streaks from a half-interested janitor. There’s a secretary behind the desk saying, “I understand that, yes, but we won’t reimburse you for balls lost in water hazards. That’s not how golf works.” She lets her face fall into her open hand. “Sir! It’s not a scam!”
Tugging on her jaw with her palm, she looks up at me blankly, and I flash my business card. She squints and pulls her head back, nearsighted by a mile. “He’s in there,” she mouths, and points toward the back of the office. I make my way past the veneered cubicles toward the corner office. I’ve been in a thousand places like this one. Places like this are my meat and potatoes. Places like this have made my career. But fuck me if they aren’t the most depressing places on the planet.
The corner office has its door shut, and so I knock on the nameplate that says, ADOLF RICHARD “DICK” DICKERSON. CEO, CFO, COO, OWNER.
With a name like that, no wonder he goes by Dick.
“Come in!” booms a voice from behind the door, and then even louder, “Son of a bitch! In the ass again! You bastard!”
Christ. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in this job, it’s that you don’t believe anything you hear from behind a closed door. So I brace myself for anything and open it.
Dickerson’s office looks like a preserved set from Miami Vice. It’s like a fucking time warp. Everything—from the black leather furniture to the tan carpet—is vintage. There’s a calculator with a roll of paper tape on the desk, and on the wall is a big, yellowed plaque proclaiming A.R. Dickerson, Man of the Year, South Florida Better Business Bureau, 1986.
But Dickerson himself, most of all, is straight out of the ’80s. A feathery mullet with a comb-over, and a handlebar mustache. He’s holding a putter, and standing on a fake putting green in front of a large cherry desk. He rubs his ass and glares at a man kneeled on the floor beside him.
“Sorry, sir, but if you’d just hold still…” says the guy on the ground. He knee-walks along on the Astroturf, trying to mark a line on a Dickerson’s brown pol
yester pants. Around his neck like a scarf is a tape measure, and in place of a watch he wears a pincushion.
Dickerson blows out a breath and scratches his nose, which is red and bulbous. It’s a drinker’s nose, veined and too big.
“Who the hell are you?” Dickerson asks me, gripping his putter a little more aggressively, using both hands to hold it halfway down the shaft.
“Russ Macklin.”
“Well it’s about goddamned time.” Dickerson strides off the raised platform as the tailor flails around, trying to mark the hem. “I was expecting you yesterday afternoon. What the hell happened? And don’t tell me it was a woman.” He swings his putter through the air like a baseball bat. “Nothing but trouble, women.”
A woman. Not just a woman. The woman. “Had a little trouble with my luggage.”
“Mmmm,” Dickerson says, rubbing his huge nose with his plump hand, making it even redder on the end. He props his putter against his desk. “Have a seat.” He points to an uncomfortable-looking chair in front of his desk. This guy might be king of his own little golf empire, but no way am I letting him tell me where to sit. So I take a seat in a different chair and open up my bag. He’s about to sit down himself—knees bent, one second away from flopping back in the ancient office chair—when the tailor gasps, “Sir! The pins!”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Dickerson roars, coming back up to standing and sending his office chair spiraling. “Take your measurements and skedaddle. Mr. Macklin and I have secret shit to discuss.”
* * *
Once we’re alone in the office—and after Dickerson has changed from his unhemmed brown polyesters into a pair of ancient pleated khakis—he stabs a button on the old phone on his desk. “Kathleen! Hold my calls.”
From the hallway, completely bypassing the intercom, Kathleen hollers, “All right!”
He pokes a few more times at the keypad, his first finger extended and pecking at the buttons in a random frenzy. One of them lights up and he yells at the phone, “And call that goddamned auto glass place to come fix my windshield!”
Again from the hallway, the secretary answers, “Okay!”
The guy clearly has a history with the intercom system, because he’s looking at the phone like he’s this close to ripping it off its cord and flinging it through the window. The corner of the phone has a white smudge, and I notice a matching ding in the drywall on the wall to my left. He yanks open his top drawer and takes out a squishy stress ball shaped like a clown’s head. He squeezes it hard, and its nose balloons out. “Now,” says Dickerson, clearly trying to keep his temper in check, “Mr. Macklin. Let me show you the lay of the land.”
From the top drawer of his desk he produces a map, an actual paper AAA map, folded up into a tidy rectangle. As he unfurls it, he sends pens, pencils, and a box of paperclips flying. He tosses the therapeutic clown head aside. “This is Port Flamingo.” He pokes the center of the map with his sausage finger.
Clearly. “I’m with you.”
“This area here…”—he takes a highlighter from his desk drawer, biting off the lid, and then circling a big area to the north of town—“…is where I want to put the next Dickerson Golf Resort. Gonna be great,” he says, around the top of the highlighter, giving the same effect as if he had a cigar between his teeth. He looks off at something behind my shoulder, and I take a look behind me. There, on a table, is a scale model of the course, complete with tiny flags and trees. “Eighteen holes, PGA-approved. Five-star hotel with a spa. Hot rocks, Thai massage, all that fancy schmancy shit. And,” he adds wistfully, “a real hibachi restaurant, like where the chefs will flip food into your mouth while you drink your Mai Tai, you feel me?”
As long as it isn’t calamari. “So far.”
He drops the highlighter cap from his mouth, and it lands in the Gulf. “However, the mayor of this town is as crooked as an 80-year-old woman’s front bumper. I can’t get anything at all done with him standing in my way.”
I lean back in my chair. It’s not exactly corporate espionage, but I guess variety is the spice of life. “Could always wait for him to get voted out.”
“We’re not in the land of term limits, son. Even if I do wait four goddamned years, do you know how nuts you’d have to be to run for mayor of this place? Are you familiar with their history? With those goddamned jellyfish?”
I am now, thanks to Penny. My inside source.
Inside.
Fuck.
But I’m not about to let Dickerson see me get lost in a goddamned erotic daydream, so I stay the course. “Just so we’re clear, you’re willing to pay me my flat fee with overtime to look up dirt on this guy? On the mayor of this tiny town?” I cross my arms and watch his every move. “I don’t come cheap, Dickerson.”
“I’m ready to pay, son! I've got ready cash coming out of my goddamned eyeballs. Mayor Jeffers is the only thing standing between me and 18 holes of profit. But he’s got his fingers in all of Port Flamingo’s pies.” He stabs the center of the pink circle with the highlighter, puncturing the map clean through. “Right here, in the middle of my back nine, is his unlicensed llama farm.” He draws a line next to the coast, and adds, “And over here is the boardwalk, which he owns too.”
“And?”
Dickerson huffs. “Mayor Jack Jeffers couldn’t invest in a rigged slot machine and make a profit. Couldn’t rub two dimes together without losing a nickel. Couldn’t…”
“I’m with you.”
He grunts. “Right. And I won’t stand for it anymore, son. I won’t watch that man make a mess of this town.” He skewers the map five more times with the highlighter, so it’s like it’s been battered with fluorescent buckshot. “It’s a nice place with nice people, and I won’t stand by and watch it go under.”
As motives for hiring a PI go, it’s pretty much par for the course, no pun intended. A financial motive disguised as a decent one. Situation normal in this line of work. I look more closely at the map. Dickerson can’t build north, because there’s a green patch there, signaling a national park. Small, bold print defines it as the GREAT SODA LAKE. Down below, the ocean. To the left is East Beach Point Drive.
Where there’s a drying rack loaded with perfect lingerie, and a woman named after a fucking goddess.
I push the thoughts away. “I’m assuming you’ve tried to purchase these properties from him.”
“Goddamn it, of course I have. Lowballed him, highballed him, everything. Do I look like an amateur to you, Mr. Macklin?”
What he looks like, I realize, is a guy one cotton-ball beard away from being able to find holiday work at any failing shopping mall on the planet. The nose, the gut, the mullet of white hair. He’s like Santa wearing second-hand dad pants. “Let’s get something straight, Mr. Dickerson. I can dig up dirt on anybody, but I can only find it if it’s already there. You want someone to fabricate your leverage, I’m not your guy.”
Dickerson nods and fumbles for the highlighter lid. He misses the first time and makes a pink splotch on his finger. Rather than trying a second time, he tosses the highlighter aside and it lands next to the clown ball. Then he sits down, takes a letter opener out of his desk, and starts cleaning his ear with it. “Understood, son. I don’t want to make trouble, I want to save this town. We have a deal?” He looks at the wax on the tip of the opener and then back to me.
Christ almighty.
What I should tell him is an unequivocal no. Saving tiny rural towns from possibly crooked mayors isn’t exactly one of my standard services. And yet, this might be my last job as a PI; while it’s not exactly earth-shattering, it’s an easy one. I glance outside at the gently swaying palm trees. Back in Boston, it’s snowing so hard the plows can’t stay ahead of it. Here I am, in paradise. For a week. With her. “Yeah, you’ve got a deal.”
He begins folding up the map the wrong way and sticks with it. When he’s done, it’s all misshapen and about three times thicker than it was when he started. He hands it over. “Good. Keep me posted as to
developments, son.” He picks up his putter again. From his pocket, he produces an unlit cigar and jams it into his mouth, exactly like he bit the highlighter.
He squares up in front of the hole. “I had my secretary make you an appointment with him, covert-like. Lunchtime, today. Sunkissed Diner. Give him any cover story you want, Mr. Macklin,” he says, and sinks the two-inch putt, “but don’t let him know I’m backing this scheme.”
* * *
Back in Port Flamingo, I pull up in front of my Aunt Sharon’s bungalow. Wafting in through the AC on the dash is the very distinctive smell that will always belong to her, no matter where I smell it. Doesn’t matter if it was at some party in college, or on some street corner in Southie. That smell, it’s hers.
Weed.
Her head pops up from the rows of beans and “tomatoes,” which only look like tomato plants if you’ve never seen a tomato plant. She’s got a joint in one hand and pruning shears in the other. Before I can open my door, she takes off through the leafy green rows. She hustles into her small greenhouse and slams the door behind her. The five-pointed leaves rustle in the breeze.
As I open my door, I hear her holler, “You’re not touching my tomatoes without a warrant, sir.”
It’s not exactly the welcome back, Russ! that I was expecting.
“I know my rights!” Her voice is weirdly magnified, and yet somehow muted, by the greenhouse effect. “You think I got to be this old without knowing my amendments, Agent Whoever You Are?”
Agent. Holy shit. I realize what she must be thinking as I look down at myself, putting what I see through both the foggy windows of the greenhouse and the mind-bending effects of organically grown weed. The black Suburban with the tinted windows. The dress pants, the shirt. The standard-issue haircut.
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