I switched to the product of someone else’s pen. I picked up the Whaler and studied something other than the grocery ads for the first time in five years. God, she really was good. Her sentences were as clean and taut as an old sailor’s knots. Her skepticism was sharp, but veiled like the microscopic teeth on a scalpel. Didn’t you know? All knives have teeth. All knives. She had knives. She had teeth. She knew how to use them. Again the question came. What had she done to fall this far?
Yeah, I’d pulled Kate Barnum’s name out of my memory’s hat. Her prose, however, had not been so readily retrievable. I guess I didn’t really have much respect for tabloid journalism. To me, newspaper writing was like newspaper print; easily washed off, easily forgotten. It really was some feat, you know, my recalling her name. Considering a good part of my newspaper reading had been done between sips of burned-bitter coffee in dull, heaterless front seats during eternal nights of mostly fruitless surveillance, it’s a wonder I could remember my own name. Then another question arose. Why did I remember hers?
The phone clicked or buzzed or whatever it was that phones did now in the digital age. I let its chips exercise their synthesized lungs until another wonder of the age threw its robotic two cents in.
“Hi! I’m not in right now,” my recorded voice lied, “or I’m listening to make sure I’m in the mood to speak to you.” That was more like it. “In any case, leave your name, number and time you called. I’ll try to get back to you soon as possible.’Bye.”
“Mr. Klein, this is Kate Barnum. If you’re there, please pick up. .” she waited. I waited. “Okay, then,” she went on, “I’d like to apologize for my behavior at the bar the other night. God, I’m sounding like such a jerk.” There was real discomfort in that pronouncement and it was followed by real anger. “I hate these fucking machines. If I could go back in time, I’d go back and kill the bastard who invented them.”
“Not me,” I picked up, interrupting her vengeful ramblings. “I’d go back and kill Van McCoy.”
“Van McCoy?”
“Van McCoy. You remember. ‘Do the hustle, doo doodoo doo doo doodoo doo doo. .’ I hated fuckin’ disco music,” I was actually gritting my teeth.
“Oh, him. He’s already dead,” Barnum delivered the good news.
“Hey, the guy who invented phone machines is also probably dead,” I chimed in sarcastically.
“Yeah, it sure is a wonderful life.”
“Ain’t it grand, though,” I paused. “I know there’s a point here somewhere and don’t tell me you really called to apologize.”
“It gave me a convenient opening,” she admitted easily enough.
“To. .” I wondered.
“To invite you to dinner tonight.”
I answered with silence. The kind of silence heavier than spent uranium wrapped in lead. The kind of silence louder than sonic booms in the Grand Canyon. She understood.
“No,” she replied to the unspoken questions, “my motives aren’t purely social. And yes, I’ll probably ask about the dead woman and your lame story concerning the events surrounding her demise. Look,” she cleared her throat, “I was a bit of an ass the other night-”
“A bit,” I agreed.
“Thanks for making this so easy,” Barnum replied sarcastically.
“Think nothin’ of it.”
“Will you shut up, please!” There was strain, all right. “You know you aren’t half bad looking for a guy as gray as London in December. And if you really are the man who wrote this dark poem I just finished reading,” she ruffled some pages by her phone’s mouthpiece, “then we should be able to get through dinner without much bloodletting. Even if you don’t answer my inevitable questions. What do you say?”
“I say you’re tryin’ too hard,” I paused a few beats, “but it’s been a long time since anyone’s tried at all. So, yeah, sure. I’m game.”
“My digs. Eight, eight-thirty.”
The rest of the conversation consisted of directional babble: “Make a sharp left after the alley behind Smythe’s Antique’s. .” That sort of thing. Sound Hill didn’t really have a wrong side of the tracks, but her address was located in that part of town which came closest to qualifying.
I had neglected to ask what we were having for dinner. I guess I really wasn’t very interested. I was, however, very interested in her. I felt it in my head and in my pants. From her fall to my poetry to her apology, she had pushed every right button there was to push. I forgot about attempting to write or making long lists. What I did do was to recall, in detail, the nightmare I’d had on the evening of the yellowbird murder and to try and regain the feeling of Kate Barnum’s imagined breasts in my now curious hands.
Cat Sneeze
The Christmas lights were not so bright here. Residents of Dugan’s Dump were no less religious than other Sound Hillians. They just tended to be lower on the great American scale of the middle class. Besides, pronking reindeer with synchronous flashing antlers would have looked incongruous amongst the wilting wooden bungalows. Dirt was the major feature of Dugan’s Dump; dirt lawns and dirt driveways. And in every third yard the rotting hulks of lobster boats and Edsels waited patiently on cinder blocks and bent rims for the pick-axes of future archeologists. But the wanna-be artifacts that decorated this part of town had nothing to do with its appellation, at least not originally.
All of the Christmas Eve snow was gone; some back to the clouds, most back to the soil. Around here, that was trouble. And when I pulled off the pavement of Owl Lane, the reporter’s driveway started swallowing the tires on my old Volkswagen. But if fifteen-odd years of my driving hadn’t killed the clutch, this surely wouldn’t. That’s what I told myself. That’s always what I told myself.
There were no shipwrecks or encrusted cars in Kate Barnum’s front yard, just a lone dead apple tree and a corrugated garage waiting for a cat sneeze to blow it over. Her bungalow was a match for most of the others on surrounding plots; sturdy, but unspectacular. I followed the cracked flagstones to her door.
She was waiting for me in the vacated jamb, shaking her head and blowing streams of smoke through cracks in a cynical smile. The sleeves of her gray Yale jersey formed lumpy bundles above her calloused elbows. The collar of the ashen sweatshirt was slit into a V-shape and, intentionally or not, it accented the braless cleavage underneath. Her jeans were scratchy new and hid the necks of cowboy boots I’d seen once before. As I was about to take the singular step up to Kate’s pedestal, she flicked her cigarette into the night and kissed me.
It was a rough, tongueless kiss. We both kept wary eyes open and let the kiss die without any attempts to prolong it or move onto other things. I could taste her tobacco in my mouth. No bourbon, yet. It was more a message, I thought, than a kiss. I just had to learn the code.
I stepped up. She waved me in. The front door slammed. My eyes were immediately captured by the network of hand-hewn timber beams crossing above us and rising up to the roof. The walls and floors were an amalgam of broad planks, pitted, bowed and dark with years. She followed my eyes.
“I guess you didn’t know. That’s why they call this Dugan’s Dump,” my hostess explained.
“What?” I turned toward the crackling flames and disintegrating logs in the stone fireplace.
“They’re ships’ masts, carrying beams and parts of their decks and hulls. All the shacks in ‘The Dump’ are what’s left of Conrad Dugan’s whaling fleet. Here,” she threw back the frilled corner of a faded indigo rug that lay at the foot of the fireplace. Carved deeply into one of the wide floor boards were scrolled capital letters spelling, ‘THE DRAGON QUEEN.’
“Conrad Dugan,” Kate Barnum shook her head, “that stubborn old bastard. He ran Sound Hill in the whaling days. More than ten of my family manned his ships. Three drowned in the Atlantic while sailing this one,” she dragged her booted foot across the name carved into the flooring.
“How’d his ships end up out here?” I had a flare for predictable questions.
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p; “When the whaling industry started its decline, Dugan’s advisers told him to sell off his fleet. Take the money and run. But like I said, Dugan was a stubborn old coot and refused. Seems he got this idea to turn Sound Hill into a combination Coney Island/Mystic Seaport type of affair. Really ahead of his time, if you consider it,” the reporter paused and considered.
“Well, the old guy figures the tourists would get a real charge out of staying in hotels built out of his old ships. He owned all the land around here. So he had his fleet sailed into Kaitlin Cove and hauled overland the rest of the way. Kind of tough dragging ships through dense woods.”
“That’s why there’s so much dirt!” I blurted out as if I’d stumbled onto the secret of time travel. “He had all the trees chopped down.”
“Right,” she gave a condescending wink. “That old tree out front came after the slaughter.”
“Sounds like an expensive proposition, all that chopping and hauling.”
“Bankrupted the old prick,” she lit another cigarette. “Coney Whale Land never had a chance.”
“But there was all this cleared land and the vessels were already on site.”
“Right again, Klein,” she flicked ashes into the fire. “The town fathers, in conjunction with Dugan’s creditors, had a mini Oklahoma land rush of sorts. For a fifty-dollar fee, any Dugan employee could receive a plot of land out here. The only condition was that the employee had to build a substantial dwelling on the land within two months.”
“Hence, Dugan’s Dump.” Satisfied with my inductive powers, I threw my flat ass onto a wicker sofa.
“Don’t get so cozy,” Barnum admonished. “We’ve got to go pick up dinner. I hope you like pizza.”
“Haven’t found any out here that compares with the city.”
“Yeah, I know, but you’ll like it better than my cooking. Come on,” she pulled me up and threw on that unclean ski jacket. “This place in Floyd’s Bend is pretty good. Besides, the walk will build up your appetite.”
“Walk!” I stepped back. “My appetite’s just fine. Floyd’s Bend is five miles from-”
“Two miles and I know a shortcut. Please.”
“Fine. Fine,” I relented grudgingly.
She kissed me again. This time it was soft and close-eyed and encouraging. “Thanks, Klein,” she opened the door. “Walking helps curb my thirst and I don’t want to drink around you. Not tonight, anyhow.”
The walking wasn’t bad, especially when we stuck to the blacktop. Kate Barnum surprised me with her relative silence. Oh, every now and then my guide would point out odd features of “The Dump.” There were the vaguely visible ruts the wheels of ship transports had left. She showed me where two of the bungalows had ship names still showing on outer walls. We even passed a shack Jackson Pollack had rented for awhile before heading farther east.
“Swede Thorson, the landlord, tossed Pollack out on his ass for ruining the floors. Dumb schmuck had the floors sanded and refinished,” Barnum put on a face of sad resignation and shook it. “Not much good comes out of ‘The Dump’ and stays out. Any good gets sucked right back in. It’s like our own little Dain Curse.”
I took that last bit of proud self-pity as a reference to her fall. I’d have to ask her about that fall. And speaking of asking; she wasn’t doing any. That didn’t fit. I’d pretty much figured this little trek of ours was a ploy on her part to get me alone, off balance and on unfamiliar ground. Lord knows, when we finally turned off the paved portion of our route, the ground became very unfamiliar. I waited for questions about the Christmas killing, about what had really been spoken between the dead Jane Doe and myself. My wait was in vain.
We were almost out of Dugan’s Dump, some fifty yards from the tree line that marked the edges of Floyd’s Bend when my guide took another fall.
“Shit!” she propped herself up, wiping her muddied palms against one another. “Goddamit,” she scowled back at the stone or wind-blown tree limb that had tripped her.
It was a limb, all right; a human limb. Like a deformed sapling, a very wet, very stiff, very dead man’s hand thrust itself up through the moist soil at the outskirts of Dugan’s Dump. Even in the dark night we could make out the form of the sapling’s hastily buried roots. I couldn’t help thinking of the dead apple tree in Kate Barnum’s yard.
The reporter’s momentum had snapped the hairy, white hand back at the wrist. It hung palm up now, fingers clamped as if to grasp. But all it held were some crumbs of mud and some cool air. One of the dead sapling’s branches wore a gold and onyx pinky ring. Already I didn’t like him.
“The shooter,” Barnum and I spoke simultaneously.
“Yeah, I bet there’s a gun buried around here too.”
She shook her head in agreement: “And I bet you it matches the one that killed your mink-coated lady friend with the mouth full of feathers.”
“Let’s get to a phone,” I started back to the landlocked Dragon Queen.
“No!” she nearly tackled me. ‘We can’t call this in.”
“Maybe we can’t,” I shrugged off her considerable grip, “but I sure as hell can.”
“Wait, goddamit. Just hear me out.”
I kept walking. She ran past me. Stopped. Grabbed my coat collar, tangled her arms with mine and spun her buttocks into my lower groin. I was up over her back, then in the air, then on my back in the mud. I didn’t slap the ground in time to break my fall and my sore, deflated lungs punished me for that sin.
“Are you okay?” my judo instructor, kneeling over me, was keen to know.
“Fuck you,” I wheezed out without much force, but lots of conviction.
“I had to get you to listen before you did anything we both might regret.” She propped me up.
“Look lady,” I was almost breathing now, “I don’t exactly know what your game is, but I’m not as dumb as I must seem.” I tried to stand and quickly stopped trying. “You wanted me to find that stiff.” I pointed at the petrified hand. “You knew right where it was.”
“I did,” Barnum admitted matter-of-factly. “I found it yesterday, Christmas Day.”
“And you didn’t call the cops?”
“Hey, if they were too lazy to look, why should I help’em?” she answered unconvincingly. “The cops should have been all over this place like stink on shit.”
“Nice turn of a phrase,” I got up and stayed up. “But the law’s laissez-faire attitude doesn’t explain away your curious, not to mention, illegal behavior.”
“Look at me, Klein,” she screamed, pulling my face to hers. “Take a close look. I’m a forty-one-year-old alcoholic. I’ve got no kids. I’ve got two broken marriages and a broken career to my credit. I don’t know if I can stop drinking. I’m not getting any younger, so kids are out. Which is bully for them. One of my marriages turned out to be six months of mutual disdain and the other ended in suicide. The only thing I’ve got that’s fixable, that’s worth fixing, that I need to fix, is my career,” Kate Barnum was crying mascara-black tears.
“Yeah, and so. .” I dropped off, not understanding the connection between her misfortune and failure to alert the local constabulary.
“God, Klein,” she wiped her ebony tear tracks, smearing them and adding forgotten mud. “Maybe you are that dumb. If I called in the law, I’d be out. You can’t write the story and be part of it. Even little town newspapers have their ethical standards.” Those last two words stuck in her throat like an open tube of Krazy Glue. “Exiled out here, I’m not going to get too many stories that can help salvage my career. I’ve got to have this story.”
“All right, I’ve been in tight spots. I’ll call it in and keep your name out of it.”
“Do you think I went through all the machinations of getting you out here just so you could do something I could’ve done anonymously twenty-four hours ago?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “No sir. I’ve got a connection at Newsday who’s willing to take a chance on me if I can deliver a special story all wrapped up like a Christ
mas present. This is the story. You’re going to solve it. I’m going to write it. And then I am going back to the top.”
“Lady, I’m not solving anything and the only place you’re goin’ is to Pilgrim State Psychiatric. Maybe I buy your hearts and flowers about how your life’s been a big bag of shit lately, but don’t try to bury me in it. Like I said, I’ll keep your name out of it.” I was walking again. She did not follow.
“Johnny MacClough,” she whispered at my back.
My spine went suddenly cold. The cold slowed me down, made me hesitate. She was bluffing again, grasping at straws. But was she? I stopped.
“Yeah,” I turned around, “what about him?”
“Johnny MacClough,” louder this time, “Johnny MacClough,” louder, “Johnny MacClough,” louder still. She cackled like a B-movie witch pleased by the results of her incantations.
“Look,” I grabbed her shoulders and shook, “this ain’t Shakespeare, baby. This is murder. So fuck you and fuck your precious career.” I collected her colorless hair in my left hand and yanked her head back. “Stop trying to throw parties for people who aren’t interested in coming. Leave Johnny out of this.”
“Too late,” Barnum smiled up at me, shaking her hair out of my loosened grip. “He’s already in it. He’s in deeper than Mr. Pinky Ring.”
“How?”
“No, Klein,” she stepped back, rubbing her shoulders. “I don’t think so.”
“Ah,” I shook my spinning head at her, “you’re bluffing!”
“Am I? Then go call the law,” she flapped her hands at me as if shooing off an annoying fly. “Go call the cops. He’s your friend, baby,” she mocked me, “not mine.”
I left her, but the chill followed. She had my attention and she knew it. I wasn’t about to call the cops until I did some checking of my own. She was right. Johnny was my friend, maybe the best I ever had. I told myself he had no part in this, that she was throwing his name out in desperation. But the knot in my guts called me a liar. Johnny was involved. I knew it. No, I felt it.
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