Turning the Tables: An Alex Peres Mystery

by Jessica Thomas

  He nodded and handed me a folder. “I can’t see how you could do it any faster. That’s about what I had figured. Here’s the pertinent information on the three of them. Take a look at it and call me at home this weekend if you foresee a problem. Otherwise, we’ll hear from you in about a week.” He stood and I followed suit. “Oh,” he added, “don’t bother getting deep into their personal finances. I do believe we may be slightly better equipped for that than you, heh-heh.”

  Obviously he expected a return laugh, so I lobbed one over his desk and said good-bye. “Thank you again, Mr. Ellis, for everything. I’ll be in touch.”

  Fargo woke up and yawned as I approached the car. I let him out to stretch his legs, and he stood a moment, undecided. Then he trotted to a nearby tree and took care of fluid output. Next he walked over to the fountain’s pool for a gulp of fluid input. I called him back to the car and put him in.

  I tousled his marvelous big wide head. “Fargo, my angel dog, we may not be among the rich and famous, but we are definitely among the solvent and may even become locally renown! If you will let me have a beer at that classy spa, the Wharf Rat Bar, I promise you your very own hamburger for dinner!”

  He sealed the pact with a great slurp of my face and we drove away. If there were clouds in the sky you couldn’t prove it by me. I couldn’t stop grinning. And I had totally forgotten any medieval Halloween warnings. As it would turn out, neither Fargo nor I would encounter a single ghostie or ghoulie over Halloween weekend. As for long leggity beasties, my good friend Cassie was definitely long-legged, and God knows she was in a beastly mood by Saturday night’s end, if that counts. Not a single thing, however, would go boomp in the night within my hearing.

  On the other hand, we would have a few unusual occurrences. Peter Pan would fly into a rosebush. A good-looking blonde would have me using the guid Lord’s name in resounding tones. Judy Garland would sing again. I would receive a witch’s curse. And the entire town, especially the gay community, would wince over a particularly brutal murder that looked as if it had been committed by one of our own.

  Chapter 2

  I leaned on the bar and waited for Joe to see me. He straightened and spun a beer down the gleaming mahogany with a “Hi, Alex. This Bud’s for you!”

  I caught it with a grin, replying, “You’re three m.p.h. under your usual speed, my man.” Great barroom wit taken care of by both parties, I had put money on the bar and begun to climb onto a stool when I noticed my brother sitting at a back table with a pile of colorful brochures spread out in front of him like a giant game of solitaire. I walked back for a closer look.

  Sonny, a.k.a. Lieutenant Edward J. Peres, pride of the Provincetown Police Department, glanced up from his travel flyers and smiled. “It’s the decisions that kill you.”

  “Every time,” I agreed. “La Costa del Sol? Montmartre? The Lido? Buckingham Palace? Whither goest?”

  “Gatlinburg, Tennessee.”

  “Oh, of course. Where else? Are you serious?”

  “I didn’t collect all these for my scrapbook. Of course I’m serious. Paula and I are going down in a couple of weeks. I’m just picking out where to stay, and I’ve about settled on this one. What do you think?” He passed me a folder.

  The picture was of a large attractive building called the Riverside Crest. As I opened the folder and glanced at the photos and text, I thought about my brother. Sonny was bright, ambitious, well trained in his profession, an excellent cop, generally a nice guy and—in a small town—regarded as quite successful. That is, until it came to women. There, he was an unmitigated idiot. In his still-young life, he had managed to become involved with an older woman, a married woman and numerous young single women— from which pool he had acquired two ex-wives, each now rearing one of his children at his expense and with as much time as he could give them.

  At the moment, he lived at home with Mom, that being about what he could afford under the circumstances. The arrangement also included great meals, laundry, housekeeping and no questions asked about his weird hours—which were usually, but not always— a part of his job. Now, it seemed, he was involved with Boston-based Paula Wagner. She was—according to Sonny—beautiful, gracious, charming, great fun, uh-sexy, smart, friendly and good humored. And probably, I thought, had praying mantis tattooed on her forehead for all but Sonny to see. Sonny was looking at me expectantly.

  “Well,” I enthused, “this looks just great! Private decks overlooking the Little Pigeon River—sounds like a fresh, bubbly mountain stream! And rooms with real fireplaces. You’ll love that, I’ll bet. Dining and dancing, how elegant! Unless of course, it’s square dancing. Uh, but tell me, Sonny, why Gatlinburg?”

  “It’s the heart of the Great Smoky Mountains,” he poeticized. “Everywhere you look it has beautiful mountain peaks and crags, with all the leaves turning this time of year. They have all sorts of great old mountaineer and Cherokee Indian craft places, and horses to ride and hiking trails and trout fishing out of this world and helicopter rides and a golf course and—”

  “You don’t play golf,” I pointed out.

  “Paula does. I imagine we can rent some clubs. Hey, I can bat a ball around, it can’t be that hard.”

  “No, I imagine Tiger Woods picked it up in no time.”

  “Oh, you know what I . . . Anyway, we’re not going all the way down there just to play golf.”

  “I’m sure you’re not,” I smirked over my glass of beer. Sonny blushed, much to my sisterly satisfaction.

  “Dammit, Alex, you know full well—”

  “Sonny!” A breathless, raspy, beer-and-garlic-tainted voice floated between us. It was Harmon, uncontested winner for the title of Town Character. He drove a battered red-turning-pink pickup truck, somehow supported himself doing odd jobs, occasionally helped out on a fishing boat and had cast himself as a grizzled, overall-clad Hercule Poirot in an ongoing crusade against drug dealers.

  “Sonny, I’m glad I found you! There’s a boat down to the docks you’d better go see. It’s one of them cigarette boats, looks like she could go a hundred miles an hour! All painted black with lotsa brass all over. Now don’t that tell you something?”

  Sonny deliberately misunderstood, hoping to turn off the fountain. “Sure sounds like a beauty! Thanks, Harmon, I’ll try to get a look at her.”

  “No, Sonny, that ain’t it. These two fellas got off her, along with two women—all dressed fancy. They’re gonna freeze later. And the men was wearin’ them blazers with gold buttons and shirts with them ashcats tucked in the collar . . .”

  I managed not to laugh but didn’t dare look at Sonny, who erupted with a sort of gargle. “You’re getting to be a regular fashion expert, Harmon. Are you going somewhere with this style show?”

  “Yeah. See, I knew right off they was suspicious characters, so I walked straight up and asked real casual-like where was they from and why was they here. The one guy points at the boat’s transom and says, ‘Taking a ride in the Black Duck out of Boston.’ ‘She’s a beaut,’ I say, to take him off guard. And he says, ‘Yep. She’s a repallecate of my great-grandfather’s boat by the same name, which was a famous rum-runner back in the twenties.’ There it is, Sonny.”

  “There is what?”

  “Why, there ain’t any need of rum-running these days, but there’s other kinds of running. The boat’s even named after a runner, and it’s a family business! So then I asked them if they was leaving soon. The older man, he says, no, they aim to walk around some and then have dinner—I reckon just killing time till they rendezvous with the mother ship and pick up the drugs—and was there anything else I wanted to know. One of the women, she giggles and says maybe I’d like her mother’s maiden name. But I figured you could find that out easy enough, so I just said I hoped they had a nice evening in our lovely town . . . so as not to make ’em suspicious, you know, and I came looking for you.”

  “Okay, Harmon, thanks. I’ll look into it.” Sonny had his head bowed over the brochures. �
�You run along and don’t worry about it.” Harmon left to join his cohorts at the front table, and Sonny shook his head. “Not make them suspicious! ‘In our lovely town!’ God, if they’ve even got an unpaid parking ticket, they’re headed full-throttle to Bermuda by now! But you know, truth to tell, I’d kind of miss Harmon if I left.”

  His statement startled me. “I hope you’re not planning on leaving,” I said. “I might even miss you.”

  “Well, you know, my paycheck is pretty well gone before I even see it, between taxes and child support. And college—the thought of college for two kids is a nightmare. With the way things are now, anybody with fairly good police experience can do pretty well in the security business.”

  “Sonny, I can’t see you guarding a parking lot or pacing hotel halls.” I made a circle of my thumb and finger and pretended to peer through a keyhole.

  “Me neither,” he laughed. “No, Paula and I have talked about it. Her father and his partners own some big condo complexes and office buildings around Boston. There could be a job coordinating all the security departments. A good job . . . three or four times what I’d ever make here. And you know, I’m pretty well equipped to do it. I’ve gone to every police seminar the state gives. I’ve taken courses in criminal law and psychology, disaster response, etc. I’m not entirely the dumb village cop.”

  “Far from it.” I smiled. “That’s what worries me. Well, just make sure you’ll be happy wearing a double-breasted suit every day.” Sonny’s job did not require that he wear a uniform all the time, nor suits and ties. Today, he had on tan slacks, a forest turtleneck and a tweed blazer, looking more like a young professor than a cop. Only the spit-shined low boots gave a clue to the cowboy who lurked inside. The colors looked good on him. He took after our Portuguese father in coloring, with a complexion that always looked just slightly tanned plus dark, wavy hair and big brown eyes to kill for.

  “By the way, how old is Paula?” I asked innocently.

  “Around your age, give or take.”

  That put her in her early thirties. Very definitely time to be getting married, if that was her game plan. Paula began to sound like a wealthy young woman who wanted/needed a husband but couldn’t possibly marry a small-town cop and move to the boonies. She could, however, move the husband to the big city, get him a cushy job with Daddy and ease him gently into the country club set—where he might or might not be happy. Of course, I had never met this paragon. Maybe she was all Sonny thought her to be. But I doubted it.

  Sonny and I had an agreement between us that was etched in steel, although we never discussed it: Thou shalt not comment upon any of my romantic partners. It was the only way we could remain friends, as well as relatives. Neither of us had a track record to brag about. I had about the same luck with women as Sonny, and the last thing either of us wanted was advice to the lovelorn from the other.

  Of course, Sonny had bent that rule rather sharply last year when he rescued me from being shot when my lover turned homicidal, but I forgave him that trespass, since it had saved my life. I remained neutral and said merely, “You’d miss the kids if you moved.”

  “Yes,” he admitted, “That’s a definite. But, remember, my time would be pretty much my own, barring emergencies. I could come over any time, and they could come to visit me . . . us. Paula says she knows she’ll love them.”

  I didn’t even try to field that one. I just said, truthfully, “I’d love to meet her.”

  “You will. She’s coming down tomorrow. We’ll have lunch or something. I’ll call you.” He stuck a pencil in his mouth and wiggled his eyebrows like Groucho Marx. “You look kind of dressed up. Something I don’t know about?”

  “Not that kind of something, unfortunately. But, yes.” I told him of my visit with Mr. Ellis and he was genuinely pleased for me, especially about the photographs.

  Sonny had always supported my efforts in that field and treasured one particular photo I had given him of Fargo, front legs stretched to full height against a scrub pine and laughing at a squirrel, who was poised head down, two inches above Fargo’s nose and laughing back.

  “I have to go,” he added and began scooping brochures into a large envelope. “Got to see about reservations and plane tickets. But if you like, we can run your three job applicants through the computer for you. Probably clean as a whistle, but you never can tell. Call Nacho tomorrow. I’ll tell her it’s okay.”

  “Thanks, I was going to ask you about that.” Sonny nodded, gave a half-wave and walked out. I heard Fargo give a joyous bark of greeting and knew they’d be communing for a while. One more beer, I thought, would make the afternoon perfect.

  I drank the beer and idly listened to the fishermen at the front table, conjecturing over who the people from the cigarette boat might be. Opinion was about equally divided between bored over-rich or drug dealers who felt fancy clothes cloaked them in respectability. I tuned out and thought about photos for the bank’s walls.

  The increased noise level broke into my daydreaming. Four tourists had taken a table nearby. A cell phone rang and all four of them immediately reached for pocket or purse. Actually, the call was for a man sitting at the bar. I looked more closely at the tourists—two couples about my age—and wondered why on earth they bothered with cell phones on vacation.

  I hated the tyranny a cell phone tried to impose. It attempted to invade my privacy anytime, anyplace, and completely forgot that its place was to be used for my convenience. In fact, mine spent most of its life safely locked in my glove compartment where it could ring its little head off—instead of my wringing its little head off. Sonny swore someday I’d be trapped in a cabin with a bear coming through a window, and I’d wish to hell I had my cell phone. I told him when the bear came in one window, I’d just go out the other.

  I became aware of three young men at the bar, giggling and punching each other as young men will. One of them seemed to have a small photo which was the cause of the merriment. He was a tall, nice-looking redhead, and I thought he was a houseboy at the Old Boat Dock, a motel on the bayside catering mainly to gay men. In all probability his services there went far beyond that of sheet-shaker, and for which services he would receive sizable tips. I doubted the snapshot was of his mother. I didn’t know the other two but assumed they held similar jobs.

  At the other end of the bar was retired police chief Jared Mather. He was rumored to be a descendant of Cotton Mather and I saw no reason to doubt it. He was a spare, upright man with gray hair and eyebrows and deep-set unreadable eyes above a firm and humorless mouth. It was not hard to imagine him delivering a three-hour sermon of eternal hellfire and placing someone in stocks for mild blasphemy. He came in every late afternoon and had two scotch and sodas—never more, never less—and left. That told me he watched his drinking very carefully. Most people would occasionally go for three or be happy with one. He rarely conversed with anyone except to order his drinks. Smiles were even more rare, and I wondered why he came.

  I’d known Jared Mather forever. He’d been a good friend of my Aunt Mae and Uncle Frank, and I think she may even have dated Mather a few times after Uncle Frank died. He’d also been a good friend to Sonny. After graduating high school, Sonny had seemed at loose ends, drifting from one no-go job to another. With both our father and Uncle Frank dead, he’d had no male figure in his life, until Mather stepped in to fill the vacuum. He got Sonny into the army and, when his enlistment ended, into the Provincetown Police. There, Mather had proved a good mentor, making sure Sonny took advantage of all special training available, providing guidance on how to handle the people he encountered on his job, turning him into more than just a good cop . . . into a professional who took pride in his work and in himself. I think the two were very good for each other.

  Yet my feelings about the chief were ambivalent. I greatly appreciated what he had done for my brother. I did not appreciate his feelings toward gays. The chief was deeply involved with some hard-nosed religious sect down in Eastham, and the wor
d gay to him was the proverbial red flag to the bull. He felt that homosexuality was an egregious sin against God, that being gay was a first-class ticket to literal hellfire and damnation, and that homosexuals should at the least wear a brand to warn off innocent potential victims from their seduction.

  That said, he never took his prejudices to work with him. I never heard even a rumor that he ever mistreated a homosexual in any way. I never heard any gays complaining that Mather had roughed them up, “framed” them, abused them vocally or even been impolite. If you found yourself in his custody you were treated by the book, whether you were a boxer from Buffalo or a hairdresser from Harlem. I didn’t like him, but I respected him.

  After his retirement, when various gays had by then been elected to the Town Council, the Zoning Board and even the School Board, Mather ran for selectmen on a “Take Back Our Town” ticket, against a young gay lawyer. Even the town’s most conservative citizens preferred the lawyer to the ex-chief and Mather had received a humiliating paucity of votes. Now he lived quietly in his small house out near my Aunt Mae. He made wonderfully crafted wood furniture and occasional truly striking carvings that found their way to some of our better galleries. It was amazing to me that such a bitter man could produce such beauty.

  Before long my stomach told me it was about time to live up to my promise to Fargo. I collected him and we headed for the drive-in where I ordered a double bacon cheeseburger for him and a lobster roll, fries and coleslaw for me. We took them home where I changed clothes while Fargo guarded the kitchen counter. I cut his burger into bites and put it into his dish, whence it disappeared with amazing speed, and took my own dinner into the living room to watch the news.

  After I ate, I realized that I must have been more keyed up about my interview than I had thought. I felt that almost overwhelming fatigue that comes with the letdown from stress. I clicked over to the History channel and propped my feet up on the coffee table. I would have sworn I was watching a program about the development of modern battleships, but suddenly I was looking at the pyramids instead. I had just settled into learning whether or not they had been built by aliens, when I woke to find myself in the midst of men marching toward the battle of Trenton.