High Season

by Jon Loomis

  “Wussies?” Lola said. “Wussies? What is this, seventh grade?” She lifted an oyster from its shell with the little fork, dunked it in cocktail sauce, and put it in her mouth.

  “Well?” Coffin said, watching her face.

  “Not bad,” Lola said through the mouthful of oyster. She swallowed, then washed the oyster down with two large slurps of martini. “Reminds me of someone I used to date.”

  “You’re very brave,” Cal said, making a face.

  “Thanks,” Lola said. She drank more of the martini, then pulled the picture of Merkin out of her briefcase. “We actually came here for a reason. Was this guy here on Friday night? Doing what my esteemed colleague is doing?”

  Cal held the snapshot at arm’s length, then took a pair of reading glasses out of his pocket and held the picture under his nose, shooting an I dare you look at Lola.

  “Ha!” Cal said. “Reverend Rhonda. I almost called you guys on Sunday, when I heard he was dead.”

  “He was here?” Coffin said. “Are you sure?”

  “Sure I’m sure. We get some big uglies in here, but not many as big and ugly as him. Besides, I’d recognize that wig anywhere—the man’s wearing a spaniel on his head.”

  “Was he with anyone?” Lola said. “Or by himself?”

  Cal leaned toward them. “Funny you should ask,” he said. “With someone. A woman.”

  Lola looked at Coffin. “The wife?”

  “Short brunette?” Coffin asked. “Big head, eighties mall hair, diamond the size of a horse suppository?”

  “Not even close,” Cal said. “Skinny blond in a black Armani suit. No makeup. No idea what to do with her hair.”

  “Who paid?”

  “She did,” Cal said. “It was funny, so it stuck in my head. The power dyke and the tall ship, out on the town.”

  “Credit card?” Coffin asked.

  Cal nodded. “Super duper titanium. And very particular about the receipt.”

  “Remember the name?”

  Cal thought for a second, then tapped the side of his head with his index finger. “Early Alzheimer’s. Weird name—it’s on the tip of my brain.”

  “Could you go through Friday’s receipts and see if anything rings a bell?”

  “Sure. As soon as we close, I’ll get the boss to dig them up.”

  Coffin climbed the two steep flights of wooden stairs to Jamie’s apartment slowly. He was tired and half drunk; he felt old.

  Jamie’s lights were on, and sitar music was playing softly inside. Coffin thought he could hear the shower running. He knocked and nothing happened. He tried the door; it was locked, which was unusual. Coffin leaned against the rail of the long wooden balcony and lit a cigarette. The deep indigo sky and the moon and the silhouette of the Pilgrim Monument looked like a painted backdrop. Coffin’s cigarette tasted bad, so he flipped it over the rail into the bushes, its orange coal streaking downward like a little meteor.

  When he heard the shower stop, he knocked again, and in a minute Jamie came to the door wearing the big terrycloth bathrobe he’d given her. She’d wrapped a towel around her head like a turban. A trail of wet footprints led down the hall to the bathroom.

  “Been here long?” she said, leaning against the door frame.

  “Just a minute or two.”

  “I was in the shower,” she said.

  “I can see that.”

  The robe had slipped open an inch or two; Jamie pulled it together with one hand. “Well, don’t just stand there, Detective. Come on in.” She turned and padded into the living room.

  “Your door was locked,” Coffin said. He followed her down the short hallway, liking the way her hips moved under the bulky robe, her slow, fluid walk. “That’s good.”

  “I guess I’m a little spooked,” Jamie said. The apartment smelled like hot water and Jamie’s grapefruit shower gel.

  Coffin perched on the big, lumpy sofa while Jamie opened the fridge, then came back with two bottles of beer. She sat in a green vinyl armchair, left foot tucked under her right thigh. Coffin twisted off the bottle caps and handed one of the beers to Jamie.

  “The killings,” Coffin said, “have spooked a lot of people.”

  “There’s definitely that,” Jamie said, “and something weird happened yesterday. Like really kind of creepy. I wasn’t going to bother you with it, but it’s sort of freaking me out.” The white envelope was on the end table. She handed it to Coffin. “I found this on my doorstep yesterday morning.”

  Coffin looked inside. “Jesus,” he said. “That’s pretty fucking creepy, all right.” He unfolded the sheet of paper. “Twayi snihyaami?” he said, haltingly.

  “It’s Sanskrit. I learned some when I was studying in India. It means ‘I love you.’ ”

  Coffin dumped the razor blades out on the coffee table and looked at Jamie. “Hell of a way of showing it,” he said. “Any idea who the creep in question might be?”

  “Remember the other day, when I said Duffy Plotz had been asking me out?”

  Coffin nodded. “Maybe he’s not so good at taking no for an answer,” he said. “I’ll have a talk with our friend Plotz, first thing tomorrow. He needs to know this is totally over the line.”

  Jamie clasped her hands together and grinned. “What a man!” she said in her best South Carolina drawl.

  Coffin grunted, caveman style. Then he leaned back and sipped his beer. “I’ve been thinking about the baby thing,” he said.

  “Me, too.”

  Coffin set his beer on the coffee table, next to a greenish bronze statuette of an Indian god. The god had a human body and an elephant’s head—a long, elegant trunk snaked over its belly. “I don’t think I’m ready,” he said.

  Jamie smiled and leaned back in the big chair. “Well, you better get ready,” she said. “Today was my last birth control pill.”

  Coffin picked up the bronze figurine; it was heavier than it looked. It wore a crown, like Babar. He set it back down. “Jamie,” he said. “I can’t. Not now.”

  “You most certainly can,” Jamie said. “Unless there’s a vasectomy you haven’t told me about.”

  “No vasectomy.”

  “Car wreck? Football injury? Tight shorts? Bicycle balls?”

  “No. It’s nothing physical. That’s all fine, as far as I know.”

  Jamie pursed her lips. “Well, what, then, Frank? What is it?”

  “I tried to tell you, night before last.”

  Jamie frowned, thought for a minute. “You’re afraid something will happen? To the baby?”

  Coffin nodded. “I know it sounds crazy.”

  “A little, yeah.”

  Coffin took a sip of beer, then pressed the cool, moist bottle against his forehead. “I saw a lot of stuff, working homicide. Things people had done to each other, to women and children.” He shook his head. “Horrible things.”

  “That would be hard to walk around with,” Jamie said. She touched his hand.

  Coffin shook his head. “I’m just saying—if anything really bad like that happened to my kid, I couldn’t handle it.”

  “It won’t, Frank.”

  “Probably not. But it could. It does.”

  Jamie shifted in the green chair, tucking her legs up under the bathrobe. “I had a friend in college whose parents were both doctors,” she said. “They were always making her get all these tests. Every time she got an ache or pain, they had her tested for cancer or MS or whatever. Now she’s the biggest hypochondriac who ever lived.”

  “Too much information,” Coffin said. “Fucks with your head.”

  “You did counseling, right?”

  “A year and a half. It helped. I’m working. I’m more or less functional—although these two murders have been kind of a nasty déjà vu.”

  Jamie moved to the couch, leaned close. “I don’t know how you do it,” she said. “I think you’re incredibly brave. I’d be a whimpering pool of jelly if I were you.”

  Coffin’s eyes hurt. He closed them and rub
bed the lids lightly with his fingertips. “I’d like to say that when things calm down a little, I won’t be such a freak, but I’m not sure that’s true.”

  “How do we find out?” Jamie said.

  “I don’t know. Wait a little, maybe.”

  Jamie leaned back and pulled the hem of the robe down over her feet. “Okay. How long’s a little, do you think?”

  “Assuming no more dead people show up,” Coffin said, “a week or two. Boyle and Louie will lose interest; the town will return to business as usual. The state police will arrest the most likely suspect or give up and go home. I’ll go back to investigating bad checks and break-ins.”

  “Look, Frank,” she said, draping her arm around his shoulders. “We’re all spooked. These murders have got the whole town looking over its shoulder, but it won’t always be like this. At some point you have to choose your life story, you know what I mean?”

  “I think so.”

  Jamie looked into Coffin’s eyes. “I know what I’m proposing is radical,” she said with a half-smile, “but it’s basically a simple choice. You can have a rich and rewarding life with me, or you can end up like your friend Kotowski—cranky, smelly, and peculiar.”

  “I’m already cranky, smelly, and peculiar.”

  Jamie kicked him in the shin with her bare foot. “Smellier,” she said.

  “Ow,” Coffin said, rubbing his leg.

  “You’re tired,” Jamie said. “Look at you.”

  He nodded.

  “I know you’ll say no, but do you want to stay over?”

  “Yes,” Coffin said. “But I have an early morning tomorrow. I should go home.” He plucked a cigarette from Jamie’s pack and lit it with her plastic lighter. His vision tilted and warped a little as he stood up.

  Jamie stood, too, and put her hands on his shoulders. The bathrobe slipped open. She pressed her body tight against him, her skin still sheened with moisturizer. “You’re a complicated package, Coffin,” she said. She tilted his head a bit with her hands and lightly bit his neck. “Sure you won’t stay?”

  “That’s not fair,” Coffin said. “My whole body is one big goose bump now.”

  “What’s fair got to do with it?”

  They kissed good night on the balcony, in the yellow glow of the porch light. It was a long kiss. Jamie’s bathrobe fell open again and Coffin cupped her breast, gently pinching the nipple between his thumb and forefinger. She groaned a little, took Coffin’s hand, and placed it between her legs. She was very wet; he pushed a finger inside her.

  “Now who’s not being fair?” she said into his ear.

  “Sorry,” Coffin said.

  “I’m not,” Jamie said. She grabbed his sleeve and pulled him inside.

  Chapter 14

  Windless dawn, the sun coming up red behind the Pilgrim Monument. Kotowski sat on his sagging deck, staring out at the harbor through a pair of army surplus binoculars. The Jet-Skier made a big, looping circle on the still water, throwing up a curtain of spray, then zoomed off in the direction of the sunrise, thwomping hard across his wake. Zooming and thwomping seemed to be the whole point of a Jet Ski—that and the noise. The noise! It was unbearable, like a herd of chain saws all running at once, shattering the morning silence, rendering sleep or thought or stillness of any kind impossible.

  As usual, the Board of Corruptmen was responsible. The town had resisted the overtures of a number of Jet Ski rental franchises over the years, had even at one point banned the damned things from the harbor. Three months ago Louie Silva had changed all that, claiming that the town’s lawyer believed the ban to be unconstitutional. Silva had pushed through new rules in a closed door meeting of the board, with no input from the community. Kotowski and a few others had raised a stink, and Silva and the board had promised to review the new policy at the end of the summer. The corruptmen had won, Kotowski knew, without a fight. Most of the harborside properties were owned by absentees who rented them out for astronomical sums; they couldn’t care less. What mattered was the money. That’s what New Improved Provincetown was all about.

  The Jet-Skier looped again, throttle wide open. He was heading straight for Kotowski’s house and would have to turn soon to avoid the breakwater. Kotowski put the binoculars down and picked up his rifle, an old .30-06 he’d bought years ago at a yard sale. The gun had a pretty good scope, and Kotowski fixed the crosshairs on the Jet-Skier’s head.

  “Bang,” Kotowski said under his breath. “Gotcha, you son of a bitch.”

  Coffin woke up early in his own bed, showered and dressed, and drove three blocks to the Yankee Mart for a cup of coffee. He was tired and a little hungover. Town was busier than ever: Bradford Street was a slow bumper-to-bumper. The inside of the Dodge smelled like something aquatic and dead. He left it idling in the parking lot, afraid if he shut the engine off it might not start again.

  Inside, Cassie Ramos was just starting her shift. Coffin had gone to high school with her father; Cassie, he knew, was short for Cassiopeia. She was a slim, olive-skinned girl the age his own kids might be, if he’d had them, if things had worked out differently. She had a slight, heartbreaking mustache; every time Coffin saw her, he fell hopelessly in love with the faint strip of down on her upper lip. Sooner or later, he knew, Cassie would move to Boston or New York—all the smart, pretty girls did; why would they stay here?—and the mustache would be history. She’d wax it at home in her bathroom or pay a lot of money for electrolysis, but either way it was a goner, like everything human that was real and unself-conscious. He squirted coffee from the chrome air pot into a tall paperboard cup.

  “Everyone goes to Milton’s for lattes now,” Cassie said from behind the cash register. “Four dollars for coffee and steamed milk. There’s even a name for the person who makes them. Know what it is?”

  “Milton?” Coffin asked.

  Cassie laughed, which made Coffin happy. “A barista. I think it’s Italian.”

  “You can’t just drink coffee anymore,” Coffin said. “Coffee’s for rubes. You have to drink chai while doing Pilates and listening to your iPod.”

  Cassie laughed again. “Dude,” she said, “you’re so, like, 2003.”

  Coffin felt good until he walked out to the parking lot: The Dodge had stalled. A ribbon of white smoke drifted from under the hood.

  Duffy Plotz ran the dump that served Provincetown and Truro. It was off Route 6 at the end of a short, unpaved service road. The landfill itself had been closed years before, but there was still a large corrugated-steel shed where residents could drop off trash in Dumpsters and recycling in neatly labeled barrels. There was also a low, rambling thrift store stocked with donated and discarded items—everything from secondhand baby clothes to used mattresses, old books, and vinyl LPs—which was open only on Saturdays. Plotz’s office was a small Airstream trailer beside the recycling shed; a used air conditioner wheezed in its front window. A TV antenna and a galvanized stovepipe sprouted from its roof.

  Coffin climbed out of the Dodge and knocked on the door. The curtains moved beside the window; then the door swung open.

  “Well, well—Officer Coffin,” Plotz said, his tall frame stooped in the doorway. “Kind of unusual, seeing you out here.”

  “Is this a good place to talk?” Coffin said. “Or should we go somewhere a little more private?”

  Plotz looked at his watch. “I’m kind of working,” he said. “What are we talking about, exactly?”

  Coffin pulled the envelope out of his shirt pocket. “You left this on Jamie’s doorstep, Duffy. That was a highly inappropriate thing to do.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Plotz said. “I didn’t leave any envelope on anybody’s doorstep.”

  “I’m going to give you one warning, Duffy.” Coffin waved the envelope under Plotz’s nose. “No more of this creepy shit. You’re messing with the wrong people, and if you do it again you’re going to be very fucking sorry. Do you understand me?”

  Plotz was two or three inche
s taller than Coffin and a decade younger. He was lean and sinewy from years of advanced yoga classes. “Are you threatening me as a private citizen,” he said, stepping out of the trailer and down its two wooden stairs, “or as a public official?”

  He does look like an ostrich, Coffin thought. A big, pissed-off one. He hadn’t been in a physical fight in twenty years, but he still remembered his training. He stamped hard on Plotz’s instep with the heel of his boot. Plotz yelped, half-doubled in pain, and Coffin clipped him on the point of the chin with his elbow. Plotz sat down abruptly, banging his head on the side of the trailer.

  “Both,” Coffin said. He climbed into the sagging Dodge and turned the key. Mercifully, for once, it started on the first try.

  _______

  At his office, Coffin sipped cold coffee from his paper cup. “That the Duarte autopsy report?”

  “Hot off the fax machine,” Lola said.

  “Any surprises?”

  “Well, it’s definitely him—extensive bridgework perfectly matches Duarte’s dental records. But the autopsy still raises a couple of questions. He had enough heroin in his blood to kill a mule.”

  “So he OD’d?”

  Lola pushed the report across the desk toward Coffin. “No. But he would’ve, if the smoke hadn’t killed him first. Which it did—lots of particulate in the lungs.”

  “So,” Coffin said, flipping through the pages. “Somebody injected him with an overdose of smack and then set the house on fire?”

  “Maybe he did the injecting himself. No shortage of junkies in P’town.”

  “Could he have set the house on fire, too?”

  Lola’s brow furrowed. “Maybe before he shot up. But wouldn’t that be like drinking poison and then shooting yourself? Kind of overkill?”

  “Since when are suicides rational?”

  They sat in silence for a long moment. “You think he committed suicide?” Lola said.

  “No. Wishful thinking.”

  Lola reached up with both hands and fiddled with her ponytail. Coffin couldn’t help observing the round swell of her breasts through her silk blouse.