Fogbound

by Joseph T. Klempner

  He drove to the post office the following morning. There were a couple of bills, a solicitation from the local volunteer fire company, and half a dozen pieces of assorted junk mail - nothing he couldn’t have done without. But it was nice to see Edna Combs, just the same.

  “Yong man was here the other day,” she told him, “snooping around, looking for you.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yep. Had some letter for you. Said he had to give it to you hisself, personal delivery.”

  “Thanks,” said Jorgensen. “I got it.”

  “Musta been real important.”

  Jorgensen pretended not to have heard her. With each passing year, it was something he found he could get away with more and more.

  “Not bad news, I hope.” This time, too loudly for him to ignore.

  “No,” he assured her, “not bad news.”

  “Nothing you’d like to share, I suppose.”

  But by that time, he’d developed a sudden coughing fit that completely drowned out her voice. It subsided after a moment or two; by then, he was safely out the door.

  From the post office, he walked over to Doc Crawford’s, where he bought a few things and exchanged small talk. A brief silence followed.

  “I s’pose you’ll be wanting to use the phone,” said Doc.

  “Well,” said Jorgensen, “now that you mention it . . .”

  He removed a piece of paper from his pocket and glanced back and forth at it as he dialed the number, beginning with its 917 area code.

  Jessica Woodruff picked up her cell phone on the first ring, hoping to catch it before it woke the man lying in bed next to her.

  “Hello,” she whispered.

  “Miss Woodruff?” It sounded like an old man on the other end, an old man with a hearing problem.

  “Yes.”

  “I can barely hear you. This is August Jorgensen, down in South Carolina.”

  “Yes, hello, Judge. How are you?”

  “I’m fine, thanks.” He sounded awfully chipper for the middle of the night. But she’d heard about old people and their insomnia. She had a grandmother who claimed not to have slept a wink for the past fifteen years.

  “What time is it down there?” she asked him.

  “I don’t know, a little after nine?” It sounded as though he were guessing. She tried to place South Carolina on the map, couldn’t remember if it went above or below Georgia. But she was pretty sure they were in same time zone. She looked around for her robe, hoping to take the conversation into the next room, but it was too late: The body next to her was already stirring, and she felt an arm circle her waist.

  “What can I do for you?” she asked Jorgensen.

  “First of all,” he said, “I wanted to thank you for the letter, and assure you I’ll be up to speed by April tenth.”

  The letter, April tenth. Suddenly she remembered. Remembered, in fact, how the courier had been unable to find him and had ending up having to leave the letter on his doorstep.

  “Good,” she said, leaning her weight back against the body, allowing its arm to shift and its hand to find its way between her legs.

  “And something else,” he said. “I took a little trip.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yup. Jake and I took a ride on up to Virginia.”

  The hand was spreading her legs apart, and she was having trouble concentrating on the conversation. “Jake?” she asked.

  “You remember Jake. He’s my dog.”

  “Right,” she said, not remembering, but not caring, either. She relaxed her thighs, allowing the hand to open her, feel her wetness. “So where in vagina did you go?”

  “Virginia.”

  “Right. Virginia.”

  “We went to Roanoke.”

  Jessica sat up, nearly spraining the wrist that connected the hand to the arm. “Roanoke? What were you doing in Roanoke?”

  “Investigation.”

  The hand was trying to work its way back. Jessica pushed it away. “Investigation?” she repeated, turning it into a question.

  “Yup,” said Jorgensen.

  “So did you learn anything?”

  “I did indeed. I learned that Boyd Davies is completely innocent.”

  “You’re kidding,” said Jessica. She reached for her cigarettes on the nightstand. “That’s incredible.”

  “You want to hear about it?”

  “No,” said Jessica. “I mean, yes. But not now, not over the phone.” She lit a cigarette. “What’s today, Saturday?”

  “Yup.”

  “I can be down there tomorrow afternoon,” she said. “Monday by the latest. I want to hear everything, okay? Before you breathe a word of this to anyone else.”

  “Not to worry,” said Jorgensen. “I’ll make Jake take an oath of silence.”

  She hung up and snapped her cell phone closed. “That was Judge Jorgensen,” she said, rising and beginning to pace the bedroom, momentarily forgetting her nakedness. “He’s been doing investigation. He thinks he’s got it figured out that Wesley Boyd Davies is innocent. I told him to keep a lid on it, that I’d fly down and talk to him in a day or two.”

  The man shifted his weight to one elbow, using his recently rejected hand for a headrest. God, he’s one good-looking man, thought Jessica, even at nine o’clock on a Saturday morning. She suddenly became self-conscious, turned her back to him. He’d often made a point of telling her it was her best side, anyway.

  “Why don’t you take Duke Schneider with you?” he said.

  “Duke Schneider? Wasn’t he a football player?”

  “Something like that,” he said. “The guy I’m talking about is Mickey Schneider. But everyone calls him the Duke.”

  “I was going to take someone from video with me. You know, to shoot some footage of Jorgensen in his lighthouse or against the ocean, for a ‘Retired-Judge-Comes-out-of-Seclusion-to-Argue-a-Death-Penalty-Case’ bit. Why should I take this Duke guy along?”

  “He’s from our security department. They do investigations. It sounds like this thing is rapidly turning into one, right? I just heard you say so yourself.”

  “I guess so,” said Jessica, exhaling smoke. “Anyway, you’re the boss. Whatever you say.”

  “I say get that cute little ass of yours back over here where it belongs,” said Brandon Davidson.

  Jorgensen paid Doc Crawford for the call, thanked him, and headed to his truck. He felt good about his conversation with Jessica Woodruff. He’d half expected her to react with skepticism to his claim about Boyd Davies being innocent, to demand to know what proof he had. And, of course, he had none.

  But instead, she’d seemed to have taken him seriously - so seriously, in fact, that she wanted to come down and talk about it. And not next month or in a couple of weeks, but right away - tomorrow or Monday.

  He was nothing but an old man, an old man who hadn’t been smart enough to think of bringing along a tape recorder when he’d gone to talk with Kurt Meisner. But Trial TV? They had to be a huge outfit, he was quite sure, with all sorts of money and employees and technical equipment at their disposal. Someone there would be clever enough to figure out how to finish the job he’d started, and how to do it right.

  Jorgensen knew one thing: He was going to sleep well that night, confident in the knowledge that he’d set things in motion that, one way or another, were going to lead to Boyd Davies not only avoiding execution, but being completely exonerated and freed.

  God, Marge would have been proud of me, he thought, as he climbed into his truck, fired it up, and pulled out onto the road. As soon as they were up to speed - which in this case meant doing a shade under the posted twenty-mile-per-hour limit - he turned to Jake and began booming, “Free at last! Free at last!” in the deepest, most resonating baritone he could summon. “Thank God almighty, he’ll be free at last!”

  The dog promptly turned his back, stuck his face out the far window, closed his eyes, and opened his mouth wide, to drink in the salt air. Or perhaps to yawn.
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  Jessica Woodruff didn’t show up until Tuesday afternoon, and when she did, she had two men with her again, although different ones from before. One was a cameraman (or, as Jessica referred to him, a video technician). Although Jorgensen kept telling Jessica he had important stuff to share with her, she was insistent that it wait until they’d shot some footage. The cameraman was a nice young fellow who, at Jessica’s direction, aimed his camera at Jorgensen - first standing in front of his lighthouse, then walking along the beach with Jake, and finally explaining (to a microphone attached to the camera) why he’d been willing to come out of exile to argue Wesley Boyd Davies’s case. Then the young man took footage of Jessica asking questions, but only after making sure to get the sun lighting her face and the breeze blowing her blonde hair just the right way.

  “Back at the studio, we’ll splice everything together,” the cameraman explained. “That way it’ll look like she’s asking the questions in front of one camera, and you’re answering them in front of another. Neat, huh?”

  “Neat,” Jorgensen agreed. Although he’d always thought the word neat was reserved for either orderly or without ice, he figured it was never too late to learn.

  But as much as he liked the cameraman, it was the second man who interested Jorgensen. He was a beefy guy with a pasty complexion, a droopy mustache, and a green-checked sport jacket. Jorgensen didn’t quite catch his last name, but as the day wore on, he gathered that the guy was a private investigator of some sort, and answered variously to “Mickey,” “Duke,” or even “the Duke.”

  It was warm outside, and while the cameraman went off to take a long walk on the beach - Jorgensen had the distinct feeling that the idea hadn’t been his own - the rest of them sat down on an old park bench Jorgensen had scavenged from the town dump some years back. He finally got a chance to show them Boyd Davies’s drawing of the three-fingered man (by this time it was well worn and faded), and tell them about his trip in search of him, and how it had led him to a seniors’ residence in Roanoke. He described his meetings with Kurt Meisner, including Meisner’s confession that he’d been the one who’d dug most of Ilsa’s grave, and that Boyd had only happened along and helped out - because to Boyd, helping out meant arranging and rearranging big piles of smooth stones.

  “So you think Meisner killed his own daughter?” Jessica asked him.

  “No,” said Jorgensen, “but his son did.” He told them about the work glove Meisner had found near the body, and how he’d known for certain whose it was, and about young Kurt’s reaction when his father returned it to him later that afternoon. He spoke for nearly half an hour, Jorgensen did, his voice growing scratchy from the effort, but his eyes alive with excitement.

  “But the shovel,” said Jessica. “How was it Boyd was able to lead them to the shovel? It was found quite a distance from the grave, as I recall.”

  “Meisner hid it,” Jorgensen explained. “Boyd just happened to follow him, and saw where he put it. Later on, he remembered what the place looked like.”

  “Wow,” said Jessica, sitting back on the bench. “That’s quite a story.”

  “Did you get any of it on tape?” asked the Duke.

  “No,” said Jorgensen. “And now I’m afraid Meisner won’t talk to me anymore.”

  “Did you get him to sign an affidavit?”

  “No.”

  “A statement of any kind?”

  “No,” Jorgensen admitted. He hadn’t even thought of doing anything like that. The man had been so cooperative, so-

  “Did you take notes?”

  “No.”

  Jorgensen felt more inept than ever.

  Jessica wanted to know if he’d told anyone else about Meisner’s account. Jorgensen said he hadn’t.

  “Well,” she said, “this is huge. This is absolutely huge.”

  The Duke nodded solemnly in agreement.

  It struck Jorgensen that neither of them had taken notes during their conversation with him. But he let it pass; he didn’t want to seem overly defensive. Instead, he asked, “So what do we do now?”

  “Well,” said Jessica, “for starters, as soon as we leave here we’re going to fly right up to Roanoke, see if we can’t get Mr. Meisner to talk to us.”

  “Want me to come along?” Jorgensen asked. “I can-”

  “No,” they replied in unison.

  “What makes you think,” Jorgensen wondered aloud, “that he’ll talk to you?”

  “Oh, dontcha worry,” the Duke assured him. “He’ll talk to us.”

  Jorgensen had forgotten that they’d never seen Meisner. No doubt they pictured him as a healthy, robust man in his mid-fifties, someone with normal fears, whom the Duke could always rough up a bit, if it came down to that. He found himself wondering about why the guy had kept his sport jackct on, when it had to be close to 90 degrees in the sun. Maybe it was to conceal a gun. He imagined a shoulder holster, containing a nine millimeter, or a .357 magnum, or maybe a small rocket launcher. The guy was so beefy, there could have been just about anything under there.

  “Lissen,” the Duke was saying now. “Zit okay fwee take that pitcher with us?”

  Jorgensen looked around for a pitcher, failed to spot one.

  “That one there,” said the Duke, pointing at Boyd’s drawing of Meisner. “It could help us to get the guy to tawk to us, fya know what I mean.”

  “Sure,” said Jorgensen, handing over the drawing. As far as he was concerned, it had already served its purpose for him. If it helped them, fine. “So what do we tell the Supreme Court in the meantime?” he asked. “Do we make an application to have the argument postponed to a later term, because we’re considering going back into state court and filing a motion for a new trial? And don’t you think we should be sending a letter to the Virginia Attorney General’s Office, letting them know we’ve got newly discovered evidence? You know, so later on they can’t claim any lack of due diligence on our part?”

  Jessica raised both hands, then lowered them several times, palms down, the way a third-base coach might signal a runner to slide. “Slow down,” she said, “slow down. We don’t do a thing until we’ve nailed down Kurt Meisner’s story-”

  “On tape,” added the Duke.

  “-so that nobody else can get to him first, and talk him into changing it.”

  “Or clammin’ up alltagedda,” was the Duke’s contribution.

  Jorgensen had never been to Brooklyn, but he imagined that’s where the Duke had to be from. Not just New York, but Brooklyn. Who else used expressions like dontcha worry, clammin’ up, and alltagedda? But what did it matter? The important thing was that they hear Kurt Meisner’s story firsthand, believe it, and memorialized it - preserve it in some form that could be used to get them a hearing on Boyd Davies’s innocence. Something that August Jorgensen himself had conspicuously failed to do.

  They left just before dark, turning down an invitation to stay for dinner and spend the night. Had the weather been bad and the fog rolling in, Jorgensen would have insisted. But a nearly full moon was already visible, and he figured they’d have enough light to navigate the road back to the mainland. Besides, he liked the idea that they seemed in a hurry to get on with what they had to do next.

  “Time is of the essence,” explained Jessica.

  “When da goyne gets tough, da tough get goyne,” is how the Duke phrased it.

  It was only after the cameraman had returned from his walk and the three of them had driven off that Jorgensen realized that, in their haste, they’d forgotten to ask him the name or address of the seniors’ residence in Roanoke where Kurt Meisner was living. Well, Jorgensen figured, if he’d managed to find the place, so would they.

  For a week, Jorgensen busied himself with chores in and around the lighthouse. Spring was in full cry, and he took advantage of the longer, warmer days to do some caulking and painting, and some pointing around the brickwork. He washed those portholes he could reach, leaving the upper ones for the weather to take care of. He repai
red a wooden fence that had taken a beating over the winter, and pulled some weeds from a patch where wildflowers had begun to bloom. And while it was still a few weeks too soon to put the boat in the water, there was plenty to do to get her ready. He removed the tarps from her, and gave her hull and keel (from which he’d scraped the barnacles before he’d wrapped her up at the end of last season) a good sanding. This he did by hand; at the boatyards, he knew, they had these huge electric sanders to do the job. But August Jorgensen had never been much of a believer in power tools. They worked much faster, to be sure, but time was one thing he had an abundance of. Besides which, hand-sanding not only took less of the precious wood off the surface; in the end it left her smoother to the touch - so smooth he could run the palm of his hand across her without picking up a single splinter.

  When he’d finished sanding her, he washed her down real well, to make sure he got all of the sawdust off. Then, after she’d dried overnight, he applied a coat of antifouling paint. Once the boat was in the water, the paint would serve to inhibit the growth of barnacles, snails, algae, and other marine hitchhikers, so as to reduce drag and let her slip more easily through the water.

  Each day he waited for news from Jessica Woodruff. He assumed from her silence that she and the Duke had had no trouble finding Kurt Meisner; otherwise they would have contacted him, for sure. But had Meisner been willing to talk to them? Had he clammed up only when it came to Jorgensen, or did his sudden silence extend to others, as well? He cursed himself for not having a phone, then reminded himself that they knew how to contact him when they needed to.

  It had long been Jorgensen’s routine to drive to the mainland every several days, stopping at Doc Crawford’s general store to pick up a paper and whatever he needed in the way of groceries. From there, he’d walk over to the post office, to see if Edna Coombs had any mail for him. Now he made the trip each morning, using Doc’s phone to call Jessica Woodruff. But each time, he’d succeed only in reaching her answering machine. “Please leave your name and number,” her voice told him, “and I’ll get right back to you.” But, of course, he had no number to leave - except for Doc’s, which finally he asked her to call and leave some word for him about what was going on. But she hadn’t even done that. Not yet, at least.