by Jon Loomis
“But when the shoe was on the other foot?” Coffin said.
“I picked Kenji,” Carswell said. “Am I a genius at relationships, or what?” The little dog licked Carswell’s face, and Carswell pushed it off his lap.
“When was the last time you saw Kenji, Mr. Carswell?” Lola said.
“Jesus,” Carswell said, eyes widening. “I’m a suspect.”
“Nobody’s a suspect yet,” Lola said. “We still have a lot of people to talk to.”
“I saw her a couple of days ago. She came by my office. I told her I wanted to break up with her.”
“I thought you were in love,” Coffin said.
“I was, but she was making me crazy. I couldn’t take it anymore.”
“So what did she say when you tried to break up with her?”
Carswell grimaced. “She talked me out of it.”
“How?”
“How do you think?”
Lola tapped her notebook with her pen. “You mean she had sex with you? In your office?”
Carswell nodded and poked at Winkin glumly with his toe. “She liked to do things that were a little risky,” he said. “For me, I mean. I think it was a control issue for her.”
“Where were you last night, around eleven o’clock?” Coffin said.
“At the Captain Alden,” Carswell said. “Getting shitfaced. It was drag karaoke night. I made a complete fool of myself.”
“Did you perform?” Coffin said.
“To the best of my recollection, yes,” Carswell said. “I sang ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ in a chartreuse wig, with a pair of fake boobs under my T-shirt.”
“You keep that kind of gear around the house?” Coffin said.
“Sure,” Carswell said. “Doesn’t everyone?”
“He may not have a wife, kids, or any furniture,” Coffin said, sitting in Lola’s black Camaro, “but the man’s got a great alibi.”
“That’s always something to be proud of,” Lola said. She slowed, then stopped in the middle of Bradford Street. “Check it out.”
Two fat skunks were mating in the middle of the road. The male, hips pumping furiously, turned and looked over his shoulder, amber eyes blazing in the headlights’ bright cone.
“Wow,” Coffin said. “Pretty brazen. Must be mating season.”
“Kind of late in the year for that,” Lola said. “Maybe the cold spring slowed them down.”
“Whatever you say, Professor.”
The skunks, presumably satisfied, waddled off the blacktop and disappeared into the darkness.
“Where to?” Lola said, dropping the Camaro into gear. “Should we go talk to Tommy McCurry?”
“No,” Coffin said, turning in his seat, hoping for a last glimpse of the skunks as Lola accelerated down Bradford. “It’s too late. We’ll get him first thing in the morning. Let’s go to the Shack and have a drink.”
“I’ll drop you,” Lola said, “but I’m not going in. That place gives me the willies.”
“Me, too,” Coffin said. “I have this recurring nightmare where I’m sitting at the bar and the parking lot cracks open and out pops Billy. He’s all scorched, and when he opens his mouth, smoke rings come out.”
“Jesus, really?” Lola said.
Coffin nodded. “I figure it’s a metaphor. My subconscious thinks that Billy’s leaving the place to me in his will was really his curse from the grave.”
In fact, the Oyster Shack was a curse—a financial albatross of the first order. The property taxes were staggering, the building was slowly disintegrating, the liquor, beer, and food bills were all overdue, and Coffin was behind on payroll eight days and counting. He would have to sell the place—and soon—before it dragged him with it into bankruptcy, yet he found himself hesitating. He hated the thought of what it would inevitably become: luxury condos, maybe, or a mini strip mall crammed with T-shirt-and-taffy shops, or yet another upscale restaurant—small food on big plates—catering to the Mercedes SUV crowd.
Lola laughed. “You don’t exactly seem like the business type.”
“You’re telling me. C’mon—drinks are on the house. The worst thing that can happen is you’ll get a bad clam.”
“That’s what they all say.” Lola flipped on the turn signal and swung the Camaro onto Shank Painter Road. “Anyway, I can’t. I’ve got a date.”
“A date?” Coffin said. “This time of night? Since when? With who?”
“Easy, Dad,” Lola said.
“Sorry,” Coffin said. “It just kind of took me by surprise.”
Lola pulled into the Oyster Shack’s potholed lot. “Me, too,” she said. “It probably won’t amount to anything. We’re just meeting for a drink.”
“You never know,” Coffin said, unfolding himself from the passenger seat. “She could be the love of your life.”
“She could,” Lola said, “but I’m not holding my breath.”
______
The Oyster Shack was quiet; the only customers were a discouraged-looking fisherman and an old woman whose false teeth sat on the bar next to her glass of Chivas Regal. Squid stood next to the beer taps, his back to the door, flipping channels on the crotchety Zenith that flickered behind the bar. Coffin’s parrot, Captain Nickerson, climbed the bars of his cage.
“’Sup, Frank?” Squid said, without turning around. He was tall and lanky, with sloped shoulders and enormous hands. His fingers were long, the fingertips oddly flattened, like suction cups.
“How’d you know it was me?” Coffin said.
“I can see your reflection in the TV screen,” Squid said, pointing at the Zenith with one of his tentacle-y fingers. “It’s all warped and freaky, but I can tell it’s you.” Squid turned, and touched his spatulate fingertips to his hair. It was dyed blue and gelled up into a faux-hawk.
“Join me in a drink?” Coffin said.
“Think we’ll both fit?”
“Let’s do the Talisker twenty-year-old,” Coffin said. “A little water in mine. And let’s have a dozen on the half-shell.”
Squid poured the drinks, and Coffin sipped his meditatively: It tasted like peat smoke and old leather, a salty touch of seaweed on the tip of the tongue. On the Zenith, the Bruins were doing their best to lose to Atlanta. The ice appeared to have been painted a lurid green. The picture flickered and warped.
“Jesus Christ,” said the fisherman. “When are you going to pop for a new TV? Why am I trying to watch a freakin’ hockey game on this piece of shit?”
“Eat me!” said Captain Nickerson, bobbing his head.
“That TV is not a piece of shit,” Coffin said. “It’s vintage. It’s part of our funky seaside ambience.”
“Ha,” said the fisherman, sipping his beer. “If I want funky seaside ambience, I’ll go down to my boat and slide around in the fish slime.”
Captain Nickerson bobbed his head. “Eat me! Eat me!”
“You tell ’em, Cap’n,” Squid said. He shucked a dozen oysters in just under three minutes and set them in front of Coffin on their paper plate.
They’d been delivered that morning, Coffin knew, fresh from Wellfleet. He squeezed a lemon wedge over the plate and could almost see the oysters cringing away from the juice’s acid sting. Then he raised one of the gnarled shells to his lips, sucked the oyster into his mouth, and chewed it slowly.
“Happy, boss?” said Squid, pouring Coffin a beer.
“Very,” Coffin said.
The door opened, and Kotowski walked in. He wore the same paint-spattered T-shirt, brown corduroys with holes in the knees, and green rubber flipflops he’d had on earlier in the day.
“You’d think a guy with all your money could at least try not to look like a bum,” Coffin said, when Kotowski sat down on the stool next to his.
“It’s my nature to look like a bum,” Kotowski said. “Any word from your mother?” When Squid took his order, he asked for a Newcastle.
“Safe and sound,” Coffin said. “You dress like a bum but suddenly you’re drinking imported
beer? What’s the matter, Rolling Rock not good enough for you anymore?”
“They stopped making it in the glass-lined tanks of Old Latrobe,” Kotowski said. “Before they sold the brand, every time I drank one I’d picture those funky-ass glass-lined tanks—you know, full of moss and drowned mice. It added a certain je ne sais quoi to the experience. Now they make it in some sterile factory in St. Louis. It’s not the same.”
“How’s the work?”
“Terrible. I’m completely blocked. Haven’t painted anything in days.”
“Your mysterious collector isn’t going to be happy about that. Or your gallery owner.”
“That’s the problem,” Kotowski said. “It’s like I’ve got this fucking collector guy, whoever he is, looking over my shoulder every time I pick up a paintbrush. It’s making me homicidal.”
“How much did the last one sell for? The Sarah Palin one.”
“You mean Moose Hunt?”
Coffin nodded. Moose Hunt was a large painting of Sarah Palin dressed in dominatrix gear and brandishing a shotgun. She appeared to be about to shoot a man in a moose suit at very close range. Coffin had seen the painting several times, in various stages of completion. The moose suit was clownish, oversized and seedy-looking, complete with floppy antlers. The man inside it cringed in fear; he looked a great deal like John McCain.
“Not that much. One-thirty.”
“Something tells me you’ll snap out of your painter’s block before too long.”
Kotowski shrugged, sipped his beer. “Hey, I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t actually deserve to be making this kind of money. I think the guy’s crazy, whoever he is.”
“You’ve sold your soul,” Coffin said.
Kotowski nodded. “Absolutely,” he said. “I’m the socialist Taoist homosexual surrealist Thomas Kinkade. Next thing you know I’ll be selling figurines.”
“Thar she blows!” said Captain Nickerson.
They sat in silence for a few minutes. Outside, under the streetlight, a white plastic grocery bag blew across the parking lot, tumbling slowly like some primitive sea creature moving across the ocean floor.
“I hear you’re investigating the Kenji Sole thing,” Kotowski said, peeling the label off his beer.
“Lucky me,” Coffin said.
“She was an interesting woman,” Kotowski said. “Not altogether stupid. I actually kind of liked her.”
Coffin sipped his beer. “I didn’t know you knew her.”
“I didn’t know her, really,” Kotowski said. “I probably had a total of three conversations with her. She liked art—went to a lot of gallery openings. Decent taste; knew the difference between a good painting and the dune-and-sunset crap in the tourist galleries. She came over to the house once to look at some work. This was about a year ago.”
“She buy anything?”
Kotowski pursed his lips and shook his head. “No, but she put me in touch with my current dealer.”
“No wonder you liked her.”
They sat quietly for a few minutes, watching the Bruins glide over throbbing green ice.
“So,” Kotowski said finally. “Any leads?”
Coffin grimaced. “Too many. I’m apparently the only straight guy in town that wasn’t sleeping with her.”
“I wasn’t,” Squid said.
“You’re straight?” the old woman said. A lit cigarette was clamped in the set of dentures at her elbow. “Goddamn, I’m losin’ my gaydar. I thought you was definitely a queer.”
“Show us your tits!” said Captain Nickerson.
“You wouldn’t have been her type, Squid,” Coffin said.
“I wasn’t boinkin’ her, either,” said the fisherman, “but Cap’n Rory was.”
“Cap’n Rory?” Coffin said. “The guy that runs the sunset tours off MacMillan Pier?”
“Yup. She’d come down to his sloop there and off they’d go for a little sail. I seen him this mornin’ when we come in—he was wicked nervous. It surprised me, how shook up he was.”
“When was the last time you saw them together?” Coffin said.
“I don’t know,” the fisherman said. He took off his ballcap and scratched his head. He was bald on top, with a long ponytail in back. “We been out fishin’ the last five days. Before that. Last week sometime. But they could have been together last night, for all I know. I’m tellin’ you—Cap’n Rory was sweatin’ fuckin’ bullets when I seen him this morning. Like a freakin’ hen on a hot plate, that guy.”
The phone rang behind the bar. Squid answered it.
“Telephone,” said Captain Nickerson.
“Hang on,” Squid said into the phone. “He’s right here.” He held the receiver out to Coffin. “For you. Outer Cape Shellfish. They been tryin’ to reach you all day.”
“Shit.” Coffin took the phone from Squid. “Coffin.”
“Frankie? Johnny Guillemette here. I hate to be a pain in the ass, buddy, but we gotta get paid. You guys are, like, a month overdue.”
“I’ll have a check for you first thing tomorrow,” Coffin said.
“Great,” said Guillemette. “Hopefully things’ll pick up for you once the season starts.”
“Yeah,” Coffin said. “Hopefully.” He handed the phone back to Squid.
Kotowski raised an eyebrow. “Trouble, Lassie?”
“It’s only impending bankruptcy,” Coffin said. “No big deal.”
“Oh, stop whining.” Kotowski took a sip of beer. “Any idiot can run a bar. Your problem is you’ve got no idea how to market the place. That’s why you don’t have any customers.”
“I hate customers,” Coffin said.
“Of course you do. Customers suck,” Kotowski said. “That’s not the point.”
Coffin ate his last oyster. “Next time some sleazeball real estate developer offers me a pile of money for this dump, I’m taking it.”
Kotowski sat up straight and scowled at Coffin. “Don’t even kid about selling this place to developers,” he said.
“I’m not kidding,” Coffin said. “I’d sell it in a heartbeat.”
“Billy’s is a landmark,” Kotowski said. “It’s the last real thing in Provincetown. You’re not allowed to sell it.”
Coffin poked Kotowski in the bicep with his index finger. “You’re rich now—why don’t you buy it? Imagine the fun you could have, dealing with the beer distributors and the dry rot.”
“Eat me!” said Captain Nickerson.
“What you need is a bar manager,” Kotowski said. “I figure pretty much any dumb-ass off the street could do a better job than you.”
“Hey, Squid,” Coffin said. “How’d you like to be bar manager?”
“Of this place?” Squid said. “Uh, no thanks.”
Coffin turned to the fisherman at the end of the bar. “How about you, Teddy? Want a job as bar manager?”
“Yeah, right,” Teddy said. “That’s like asking a guy if he wants to be captain of a sinking ship.”
Coffin clapped Kotowski on the back. “Congratulations,” he said. “You’re just the dumb-ass for the job.”
Captain Nickerson bobbed his head and swung frantically on his little swing. “Last call!” he shrieked.
“Hey, sweetheart,” the old woman said, waving a ten-dollar bill at Squid. “You know how to make a Adios Motherfucker?”
“A what?” Squid said, sipping his scotch.
“Adios Motherfucker. It’s a drink.”
“If you can tell me what’s in it, I can make it,” Squid said.
“A shot each of vodka, rum, tequila, gin, and that blue stuff—what’s it called . . .”
“Blue curaçao?”
“Yeah—curaçao. Plus some of that sour mix goo, and a squirt of 7-Up.” She took the cigarette from between her dentures and sucked a long drag. “Chop chop, sweet cheeks. Tall glass, plenty of ice.”
Squid frowned. “You really want that?”
“Damn straight,” the old woman said, “and don’t skimp on the booze.�
��
Squid looked at Coffin, who shrugged.
“Okay, Pat,” Squid said, “but don’t blame me if you spend the night huggin’ porcelain.” He made the drink and set it in front of the old woman. It was bright blue, the color of Windex.
The old woman raised the glass in a mock toast and winked at Coffin. “Adios, motherfucker,” she said.
Outside, the wind was picking up; the clouds raced overhead, back-lit by the moon, glowing silver against the black night sky. Three gulls shrieked and fought over some bit of trash they’d pulled from the Dumpster. Coffin patted his pockets, then held up two fingers. “Got a smoke, buddy?”
Kotowski fished a half pack of Camel unfiltered regulars from his pocket and tapped one out. “Why not just ask me for a quarter?” he said.
“Can’t smoke a quarter,” Coffin said, cigarette dangling from his lip. “Got a light?”
“Need anything else?” Kotowski said. “A kick in the ass to get your lungs going?” He lit Coffin’s cigarette with a battered Zippo, then lit one for himself. For a moment, the mingled smells of lighter fluid and smoke hung in the air between them.
“So,” Kotowski said, puffing contentedly. “How’s the spawning coming along? Not that it’s any of my business.”
“You’re right,” Coffin said. “It’s not.”
Kotowski turned and regarded Coffin for a long moment. “That bad, eh?”
“Terrible,” Coffin said. He shrugged. “I don’t know—maybe terrible’s too strong, but ever since the miscarriage the whole thing’s had this edge of desperation. It’s like we’re trying to prove something now.”
“That you’re competent breeders, you mean.”
“Something like that.”
“I tried to warn you,” Kotowski said, lifting a battered football helmet from the seat of his motorcycle and strapping it onto his head. “It’s a total scam, all this fertility business. They rope you in. They make people think it’s their right to reproduce—that they’re entitled to it, and that nature’s just being an asshole by getting in the way. Try these pills! That didn’t work? How about a few shots? Once you start down the slippery slope there’s no escape. Next thing you know you’ll be whacking off into a cup in some clinic bathroom, staring at old copies of Penthouse, for God’s sake—and paying thousands of dollars for the privilege. I can’t think of anything more pathetic.”