“What else?”
“Nothing. It’s real short. That’s the point…You’ve never seen Celebrity Sleuth?”
“Oh sure. Hasn’t everybody?”
“How can I get in touch with you?”
“We’ll be out of town for a while.”
“Where?”
I looked left, then right, as if for eavesdroppers. “Pensacola.”
“Florida?”
“Florida, right.” Suddenly I felt sad and tired. This was bad. The stalker was common knowledge.
“Where in Pensacola?”
“I don’t have a number yet.”
Rand fumbled in his inch-thick wallet for about two days and finally came up with a card.
I snatched it. “So I gotta go. But we have a deal. You’ll hear from me.” And then I bolted down the concourse with Jellyroll on my heels.
The concourse came to an end. Our gate was near the top of the ramp, but I didn’t want to lead them right to it. I glanced back; so did Jellyroll. Rand, Tammy, and what’s-his-name were still standing together talking in a clot. I sat down. My flight would wait because Jellyroll and I were its only passengers. I picked up a discarded USA Today and pretended to read it.
Rand and his crew turned and walked off, Rand leading, the crew elbowing each other as they blatantly ridiculed him behind his back. As soon as they were out of sight, I ducked into the rest room in case they doubled back.
Except for one guy, we were alone. He was middle-aged, wearing a blue blazer, chinos, a London Fog draped over his arm. It took me a moment to notice precisely what was wrong with the picture. The guy was standing between two urinals peeing on the wall. I double-checked to see if it were some kind of optical illusion, but no, he was peeing on the wall. A trail ran between his shoes. Jellyroll and I turned on our heels and exited. There’s no telling what a wall pisser will do.
We headed for the nearest telephone. It was in a bank with about twenty other telephones. I finally found one that worked—
“Shelly, goddamnit, they all know!”
“What! What do you mean? Who?” Shelly shouted.
I told him about Rand Dewy, about Celebrity Tonight and Celebrity Sleuth.
“Okay, Artie, you got to relax. That’s the thing to do, relax. Deep breaths.” I could hear him wheezing.
“Maybe the stalker’s telling them. Maybe he’s making his own press.”
“Artie, did they know where you were going?”
“No, I tried to throw him off by giving him the scoop on the R-r-ruff business.”
“I could threaten to sue their firstborn. They fear your lawyer. They know Myron’ll have their hair on his belt, but what good would that do? It would just call attention to us, give the loonies all kinds of sick ideas they didn’t have before. Look, I’ll ask my brother-in-law how he thinks we should proceed.”
“Who?”
“The man I was telling you about before—Sid Detweiler’s his name. What, didn’t I mention he was my brother-in-law?”
“Sid Detweiler? Shelly, I don’t need a CPA.”
“CPA, your ass. This guy recently retired from the NYPD, homicide branch. You ought to hear his stories. Sid has seen the heart of darkness. Besides, he’s family. Family’s always best. Speaking of R-r-ruff, those idiots have been calling about every fifteen minutes. I’ll let ’em stew in their own juices for a while, unless you have strong feelings one way or the other.”
“I don’t.”
“Call me as soon as you get there. I’ll make some inquiries about how they all know. In the meantime, take lots of deep breaths. Oxygen does wonders.”
Then I put in a call to Poor Joe Cay in the far remotest Bahamas, a low, flat, peaceful place more of the sea than the land, to talk to my friend and bodyguard Calabash. His uncle Warren answered. Trying to sound reasonably calm, I chatted for a while with Uncle Warren before I asked for Calabash.
“He at sea.”
“At sea? When will he be ashore?”
“A hard t’ing to say about Calabash when he go to sea. He do so periodically. Get off by hisself somewhat.”
Then that crass white TV light struck us from behind, jerked our necks like a big comber at the beach.
“Gotta go, Uncle Warren. I’ll call again. Good talking with you.”
FIVE
The adrenaline surged again, the same blast as in Riverside Park, the sort that takes years off your life. It would be tough to maintain the deadpan. Jellyroll was peering up into my eyes. I scared him. He knew every nuance of my mood, and he didn’t like it. I turned to face the wattage—
It wasn’t for him! The cameras weren’t even pointed at us. They were aiming at someone else, apparently a notable or a group of notables deplaning in an entourage, and we were being hit by the light spill. The camera crews bustled about the edges of the entourage, poking into gaps to get a look at the object of all this fuss. I was curious. Who needed fifty people to carry his luggage? This entourage, made up of some very tough customers with stern faces and darting eyes, moved like a phalanx that parted the ways for the honcho inside. I liked the concept.
“That’s His Excellency,” said a thin man with a pencil moustache and a black suit standing nearby. He was obviously an admirer of His Excellency. He was bobbing his head with obeisance even as he mentioned Him. “This is His Excellency’s first trip to the Apple. He is very pleased. He has tickets to Les Miz.”
“Well, I hope he has a grand time,” I said. I was panting with relief. It was clearly time to get out of town, get way out of town.
All my major joints had turned runny by the time we took our seats on the airplane. But now we could relax. We didn’t even have fellow passengers to engage, because I had chartered the whole airplane. The world is not a fair place that I should have the wherewithal to hire a twin-engine aircraft while others must crawl, but there it is. We were aboard an Airstream by British Aerospace, I think, the one with the big wing strut running across the aisle. It was meant for about fifteen passengers. I hadn’t asked for such a big airplane.
The pilots turned in their seats, head to head, to wave at us. They wore starched white shirts with crisp epaulets. The pilot was dark, the copilot fair, but both had rugged outdoors faces. They were probably based in Crested Butte, Colorado, and Big Sky, Montana, respectively, where they liked to ski with their well-adjusted, tight-bodied wives. I’d like to have been a pilot of some kind, even though I don’t look the part. I look more like the navigator.
“Welcome aboard, Mr. Deemer. I’m Ron,” said the captain. “And this is Dave.”
“Call me Artie.”
“Well, it’s good to know you, Artie. We’ll be getting airborne right away, but before we fire ’em up, the FAA wants us to tell you a few things you probably already know.” Ron had fine pearly teeth.
Meanwhile, Jellyroll investigated the passenger compartment, sniffed everything as if he were considering acquiring the airline.
Ron recited from a plastic card, and I felt safe for the first time in days. I like airplanes. My father got killed in one before I was born. I used to read books about angles of attack, lift, drag, inertia, and thrust, but I don’t anymore. Nor do I read about air combat anymore. Maybe I’ve buried my father; though literally, there probably wasn’t much to bury, a smoking boot, perhaps. Had he lived, he might have looked something like Ron and Dave, tall, slim, stalwart, cool, sunglasses rakishly worn up on the forehead. At least that’s how he looked in the old photographs.
They started the engine on the left side, and the plane began to vibrate, then the right, but the noise was surprisingly light. I motioned Jellyroll to jump up on my lap for takeoff. I hugged him tightly against my chest. I’ve never been able to think of a better way. Seat belts just don’t work for dogs. He licked my ear as our wheels left the New York metropolitan area.
After we leveled off at about ten thousand feet, Captain Ron asked what my ultimate destination was—after we landed in Oglevie.
I felt a stab of
suspicion. “Why, Ron?”
“Up north where you’re going, there aren’t many rules. We got some flexibility with regard to flight plan. Sometimes people like to overfly their cabin or whatever.”
“Oh, I see. I’d like that. It’s tiny, I hear. A place called Kempshall Island. Near a town called Micmac.”
“Let me see if I got the charts.”
“Okay.”
A door latch opened behind me. There wasn’t supposed to be anyone else aboard, yet someone was coming out of the lavatory— Christ, it was Barry from the thirty-fifth floor!
“Barry, what are—” Then I saw that Barry had an ax in his hands, a big two-blade Paul Bunyan ax.
“Look, Artie, I don’t want to do this, but the board insisted. I tried to talk them out of it. I got two daughters in the Ivy League. Do you know how much that costs?” Barry was advancing on us down the short aisle. “I’m going to have to kill him for family values.”
“Don’t kill him, Barry. You said yourself it wasn’t him, it was me they object to. Kill me.”
“I’m sorry, Artie, but I have no choice in this thing—”
“Haw!”
The copilot—what was his name?—was tapping my forearm. “I’m sorry, Artie, I guess you were dreaming.”
“Yeah, I guess I was.”
“Ron found Kempshall Island. Wondered if you’d like to see it from forward.”
“Oh, great. Thanks a lot.”
“I’ll sit back here and pet the star dog, if that’s okay with you.”
“You stay, pal.” He hated those words, and he gave me the stink eye, but sometimes he has to stay.
I slid over the throttles and into the right-hand seat without kicking anything vital to level flight.
The azure ocean was spattered with green islands. The largest were about the size of a New York City block, and the smallest nothing more than barren rock piles and exposed ledges around which waves broiled. Humans played no part here, only the long slog of geologic time. Even the verdant, forested islands looked forbidding. Few had protected coves, none had anything like a natural harbor. The ocean clawed constantly at them. Maybe the ledges and rock piles had once been islands, but the elements had reduced them to their essence—rock.
“There it is,” said Ron.
At this speed, geography took form quickly and flitted away under our wings even faster. “Where?”
“The nose is on it…now.”
Two domes formed Kempshall Island. Both were wooded on their flanks, bald on the very top. The naked rock had a pinkish hue that glinted in the sun. The domes were soft and, compared to the other craggy and truncated islands we’d flown over, sensual, almost gentle. And then it was gone.
“No roads. You notice that?” said Captain Ron.
I hadn’t, no. How does the islander move about a roadless island? By boat, I guessed. Or he just stayed put. I liked that prospect. “Could we go around again, Captain?”
“Sure.” He called back to Dave, “Hang on, we’re going around again.”
“Okay,” called Dave. Then Dave told Jellyroll that we were going around again.
From the new angle, I saw that one of the domes had twin peaks with a low saddle joining them. In fact, the island was made up of three, not two, domes, the sides of which plunged almost vertically into the surf.
“Look at that!” said Ron as we completed the turn.
It was a huge crack. Something had cracked Kempshall nearly in half. One dome lay to the south, the twin peaks to the north. What can crack a solid rock island? Volcanos? Time? The rift cut deeply enough into the island to form a long, narrow harbor. There were a few boats and docks inside. I could see stairways zigzagging down the rock face to the docks. And then Kempshall Island ducked under the nose. There were no more islands ahead.
We were over open water for about ten minutes before the mainland came into sight. I mused on isolation and solitude. Life out there on the island would be very different from that on the island Manhattan. There would be nothing on the islands to distract one from the inner life. You would need a well of inner resources to tolerate yourself in such solitude. You’d need something other than controlled substances to fall back on. Part of me wanted to retire Jellyroll, chuck in the whole career and make do with things as they are, tinker, plant, observe nature’s ways. Jellyroll would dig it, but would I turn sullen, distant, angry in the solitude, given to weird eccentricities and sudden psychotic outbursts? I didn’t know.
The mainland was equally unpopulated, evergreen forests right down to the black rocks and the white surf. Somewhere around here was a town called Micmac from which I was to catch a boat to Kempshall Island, but I didn’t see a single roof or road as we crossed the coast.
Captain Ron was talking about a summer camp he’d attended as a boy in this area. Apparently there were a lot of mosquitoes and bullies, but I couldn’t really hear. I nodded and grinned and longed for Crystal. The sun was going down, and I would be dependent on my own inner resources in the dark.
SIX
Now, in the falling light, I would try out the Jellyroll disguise. It wasn’t originally a disguise; it was a costume. A friend of his made it for Halloween out of fake fur left over from her production of Cymbeline. I think it was Cymbeline. Anyway, we went to the party as a couple of pagan village-sack-ers from the Sagas. It’s a tufted cape that fits over his back and shoulders and fastens around his chest and belly with elastic hasps. He didn’t like it then, and he wouldn’t like it now, but he’d comply. I asked him to stand up for a fitting. He did, but he was going to make me feel like shit about it. I held it for him to examine. There was a two-year, closed-closet whiff to it, but not bad enough to clear a room. At least not to the human nose. He looked up at me. “After years of loyalty, this is what I get from you, a stinking Shakespearean remnant?”
Nonetheless, I was committed to the disguise. He watched it go on, feeling sorry for himself. He blew out his cheeks in protest. I stepped back. Not terrible. I told him how pretty he looked, but he didn’t buy it. Sometimes I think he doesn’t respect me.
The copilot called back for us to take our seats and buckle up. We were landing. But where? I couldn’t see a single sign of civilization, not even a headlight. We were flying over wilderness. Suddenly a dim macadam strip popped from under the wing, and the pilots put us down with barely a jolt.
We turned at the end of the runway near the forest wall, taxied back past parked single-engine puddle jumpers and a lovingly restored DC-3 to a new, square, cinder-block terminal building, where we stopped. OGLEVIE it said in spiffy aluminum letters, “Gateway to the North.” I couldn’t see anybody inside the terminal, and there was no activity out here, no fuel-truck drivers, baggage handlers, or small aircraft aficionados hanging around. To urbanites, absence of activity always seems menacing. But that’s exactly what Clayton told me to expect in Cabot County, exactly what I wanted.
The pilots opened the door. I thanked them very much. They said it was their pleasure, and they leaned down to pet Jellyroll— until, simultaneously, they noticed the ratty fake pelt on his back and they froze.
“He gets cold,” I said.
They nodded and went about petting him places the pelt didn’t cover. He licked their hands.
“Do you have children?” I asked.
Naturally, they both did. Daughters.
“Maybe they’d like a photograph.” I have glossies taken by a late girlfriend of mine. Jellyroll’s head is cocked to the side inquisitively, eyes alert and glistening at her behind the camera. It makes me sad to look at the picture, so I don’t. I gave them each one, shook their hands and deplaned.
The linoleum-and-fluorescent waiting room was abandoned, except for a guy manning the rent-a-car booth. Flesh spilled over the top of his starched collar, and the brown company blazer caught him way up the arm. Nonetheless, I’d try the Jellyroll disguise out on him. We were pretty conspicuous. How could you miss us?
But the rent-a-car guy did not
bat an eye. Maybe he never batted an eye. He stood behind the counter staring forlornly at the opposite wall. His eyes were fish flat. Life hadn’t rewarded his hopes and dreams. He wasn’t alone in that, of course, but he seemed to be taking it particularly hard. Maybe nobody ever rented a car around here. I thought about renting one just to lend his evening some meaning, but there were no roads where I was going. Directly outside the glass door, twenty feet away, the Airstream’s engines revved hard. The windows trembled, but he still didn’t bat an eye. He was not a good test of Jellyroll’s disguise.
I left our gear and took Jellyroll out front for a pee. It was chilly.
“Mr. Deemer?”
I spun—
“I’m Dwight.”
Clayton had arranged for Dwight to pick us up. He might have been seventy, but he could have been much younger. His face looked like a piece of old unraveled hemp. His massive shoulders strained the buttons of his flannel shirt, leaving vents. The hand he shook mine in was the size of a dinner plate.
“Call me Artie.”
Here was a man of the sea. You could almost smell the salt breeze and the fish gurry. I wish I were a man of the sea. I would like to look like Dwight when I grow old, weather-beaten, tough, yet somehow gentle, humble for having witnessed nature in the raw, but of course you can’t look like that unless you live the life. “This is the dog himself, huh?” Dwight leaned down to show Jellyroll his enormous hand. Jellyroll licked it.
“He likes you.”
“He does?”
“Oh yes, I can tell.”
“I wish the wife could see. She tapes his R-r-ruff Dog commercials, plays them back with no sound. I think he’s even cuter in real.” Dwight straightened, towered over me, and said, “Clayton told me I wasn’t to tell anybody this dog was coming to town, and I haven’t.”
“Thank you, Dwight.” I had the impulse to tell him about the stalker right then and there, he being so solid and dependable, but I resisted the temptation. A conical sign on the roof of his old station wagon said TAXI? CALL CAPTAIN DWIGHT.
Don't Explain: An Artie Deemer Mystery Page 4