Twisting the Rope

by MacAvoy, R. A. ;

  For a moment she looked relieved. “What will you do if you find him, dear? If he’s loopy on drugs or sick…”

  “I have no idea, Martha. What did you intend to do?”

  She shrugged. “No idea. So you’re as well off.

  “Home safe,” she called to the closing door.

  Martha was putting on her nightgown when Marty went into the toilet in the other room. As there was a small-seat on the pot, and as Marty was quite proficient in her bathroom skills, there was no need for her grandmother to interrupt her own activity. Martha arranged her tousled hair in the mirror, wishing for the twentieth time that she had not had it cut short, and she heard the flush and then two doors closing. For five seconds more she played with uneven curls at her forehead and then her eyes widened and she made a dash into the outer hall.

  “Marty! Where are you going?”

  Marty’s naked form disappeared around the turn of the hall and into the empty motel lobby. Martha scooped her up a few steps after and withdrew her own cotton-flanneled body as quickly as she could into her room. She slapped her granddaughter down on the bed. It was a strained, preoccupied little face that met hers. “Where were you going, Martha Frisch-Macnamara, at this hour of the night?” Martha asked her.

  The answer was slow. “To find Judy. Judy’s lost and crying.”

  Martha took a breath. “Who is Judy, Marty?”

  Marty frowned more deeply at adult obtuseness. “Judy’s a kid, of course.”

  “Crying now? Is she crying now? Do you hear somebody crying at this minute?”

  Marty closed her eyes, as though listening. Martha, too, listened, for she was not entirely convinced, as Elizabeth was, that this needy friend of the child’s was made up. After thirty seconds of sifting through the noises of the lavatory and distant voices coming from another part of the motel, she was still not sure whether there was the sound of a child crying or not. She looked to Marty for verification and found the girl sleeping, limp as seaweed.

  Martha got up, went into the bathroom, and washed her face in cold water.

  It was four or slightly after when Long returned, and he found Martha curled in an armchair, as sound asleep as her granddaughter. All her gray curls had slid to one side of her head and her neck was so crimped by the chairback that she was snoring quietly. He considered picking her up as he might Marty and depositing her on the bed, but the lèse majesté proved too much for him and he woke her instead.

  “Martha? I have had as bad a luck as any feng shui can offer. It does not seem our wandering piper is to be found.”

  Martha stared up at him with the intensity of a person who is not quite awake. He was back-lit by the bureau lamp and looked impossibly slender. “Oh. What time…? Maybe Elen or Teddy…?”

  “Perhaps.” Long walked to the bedside table, took a fresh Kleenex, and blew his nose. “I presume they’re out looking also, as they’re equally undiscoverable. Pádraig I have found, strangely enough.” Taking off his jacket and his shoes, he sat down on one of the beds, took one of his stockinged feet in either hand, and massaged it.

  Martha whipped her brain awake. “Why strangely? His room is two from ours.”

  He made a half-circle out of his back and stretched left and right in a sort of unconscious yoga. “Certainly, my dear. But I didn’t find him there, but instead on the boardwalk. In the Riva bar.”

  Martha sat upright. “Drinking? Our Pádraig? That’s twice tonight, I’m not really supposed to encourage that, you know. I promised his mother.”

  “Enmeshed in conversation piscatorial—and drinking like a fish all the while.”

  She snorted. “What a line! Did you rehearse it?”

  His yellow eyes seemed to glow for a moment. “Yes, I did. I’m not very original, you know, and so I have to cherish whatever comes to me. Can you guess what young Ó Súilleabháin drinks, when he’s out for sport?”

  Martha got up on legs filled with pins and needles. “Michelob?”

  Long glanced at her, torn between amazement and disappointment. “Exactly. How?”

  “It’s the cheapest thing you can get, at the Riva bar,” she said, limping into the bathroom. “I’ve been there.” She put her head out the door again. “You mean he’s not with Elen?”

  “Not when I saw him,” he replied.

  “I thought they were a thing,” she said, and her face looked troubled. “Just as well. Very strange pairing, those two,” She closed the door again.

  Long lay down on the bed, idly considering Martha’s last words, until he began to laugh. “I can name you a stranger one,” he called aloud at the bathroom door.

  Had the land behind the Santa Cruz boardwalk been flat, the sun would have been over the horizon by now. But Santa Cruz was backed by little mountains, stamped black against the eastern sky, and the circus colors of dawn shone only on the wavelets far out in the bay.

  The fishing boats were in and the cool air was pungent. Behind the counters of the open-air seafood vendors, a few men were moving back and forth in bloody aprons.

  The patrol car drove the length of the pier very slowly, like a basking fish. The vendors waved to the clean young man behind the wheel with a great show of friendliness. Forcing a smile, he waved back.

  There was nobody here yet except those who had to be here. The night shift had already ticketed the three cars left parked along the pier (one for the second night) and there was nothing to do. Officer Scherer parked at the end of the pier and got out.

  How pink and coral and sky-blue the water was out there. Like Indian jewelry. It made him think of deserts. And how black straight down here, by the palings. The snarled lines of nylon left by the day fishermen made cobweb shapes. It was damn cold to be out in a cotton shirt.

  Scherer would have liked a cup of coffee. If he asked at any of these places, one would be presented to him in a hurry. He didn’t like to do that; it made him self-conscious. Officer Scherer had only been on the force for a few months, and was painfully aware of his uniform. Still, if he had a cup of coffee, he’d be in better shape to watch the sun colors spread from west to east, across the water. He walked slowly over the gray pavement, like a man with heavy issues on his mind. He was so tall that his poor posture could not diminish him. He passed between faded wooden tables and around the railed holes in the pier where people fed the seals. No seals at the moment.

  He found something faintly interesting: a rope tied onto one of the uprights of the rails. A crabbing net. Such a thing shouldn’t be there, down among the palings like that, and it shouldn’t have been left overnight. It wasn’t the concern of the Santa Cruz police to enforce the fishing regulations, but Scherer was a young officer and crabbing was a lot of fun. You never knew what you might find. He leaned over to haul the net in.

  Funny, brittle sort of rope, and firmly snagged on something. As he hauled there would be give for a couple feet and then no more. Yet it wasn’t the palings that had snagged the rope, for the feel swelled and ebbed with the water. Holding the rope in one hand, Scherer crouched down and pulled his flashlight out of his belt.

  It was a very strange thing at the end of the rope, floating in the water of high tide. It was not like a log, nor yet like a large dogfish, both of which were occasionally washed under the pier.

  A dead seal. A seal caught in the crab net and drowned. Scherer, policeman though he was, felt the Ecotopian’s surge of fury at the death of any sea mammal by the hand of man. He shone the flashlight at the place where the rope had caught it.

  He started twice, and losing the rope and the flashlight, fell flat onto his back. Officer Scherer made a shrill sound and the fish vendors came running.

  “It’s horrible! Horrible,” he said, his deep voice cracking. “Christ! And all blue!”

  Hesitantly, they all stepped over to the hole.

  It was nine o’clock and past time to be starting, but no one had begun loading the van. Neither George St. Ives nor Elizabeth Macnamara had shown. The California sun had tou
ched the window only five minutes ago and was now crawling over the carpet to the bed where Elen Evans had put herself. The dark woman gave it no mind: she lay as though waiting for the funeral flowers to surround her and her motionless eyes were fixed on the ceiling.

  Pádraig Ó Súilleabháin was in a chair, but hardly sitting. His legs were splayed out with the flexibility of an adolescent’s and his arms dangled to the floor. His eyes were very red, as though he had been crying. Or had a hangover.

  Across the tiny round table sat Mayland Long, his mug in his hand and the perforated tea-strainer spoon still in it. He was, if possible, more devastated by his cold than he had been the day before, but he sat straight, mindful of his spine. On the hard green carpet before the two Marty Frisch-Macnamara was covering the motel stationery with crayon marks. She favored purple over all other colors. The sun touched her fingers and she took note of it. She put her purple crayon down in the sun and stared at it.

  “Surely we can survive one more day at this,” offered Long. He was wondering whether perhaps Pádraig and Elen had had a falling-out. Unless they began talking, he might never know. That would be, for a creature of his curiosity, intolerable.

  Elen turned a glowering face to him. “What do you mean, ‘we,’ white man? It isn’t you going out there…”

  Long’s smile lit up his face? “White man? Inapposite, even as an insult.” But her remorse outpaced his response. “Oh, God! I’m sorry, Mayland. It isn’t true, either. You’ve had just as much misery on this tour as any of us, and you don’t even need the money. I don’t know why you didn’t just go home three weeks ago.”

  The ghost of a teasing smile passed over Pádraig’s face and was gone. “I know why he didn’t. His girlfriend wouldn’t let him!”

  Long’s fingers wrapped more tightly around the mug, showing he was not impervious to such remarks, but before he could open his mouth there came a knock on the door, and Teddy Poznan’s voice saying something which was, garbled by Marty’s shout of “Teddy! Let Teddy come in.”

  Long stood and stared, his yellow eyes sharp. It was as though he would deny Marty’s request, but after a moment he called, “The door is open. Come in.” When the policeman came in with Ted, he alone in the room did not seem surprised.

  “Mr. Stoughie sent you, I presume?” Still gripping his mug, Long advanced to meet them. The officer, a sandy-haired and very clean young man, merely blinked at the sight of a man with negroid complexion and mongoloid features, dressed in the height of tropical fashion and glaring at him with yellow eyes.

  “I brought them,” mumbled Teddy, rubbing his ugly-nailed right hand through his beard. And then the man with the handlebar moustache—the one whose attentions toward Martha Macnamara had been in Long’s mind excessive only the evening before—walked into the motel room as though he owned it.

  “George is dead,” said Teddy, and he met Long’s eyes. “He’s dead: he died last night while we were all looking for him.”

  The room rang with silence.

  After five seconds the man with the handlebar moustache spoke. “We can’t exactly say when, Mr. Poznan.” He had a very soothing voice.

  Elen had sat up on the bed as soon as the policeman entered. Now she said, “No.” Pádraig said nothing and he did not move in his seat, but the eyes of both, the brown eyes and the blue eyes, bore the identical blankness of shock.

  “I’m sorry,” continued the stranger. “I’m Detective-Sergeant Anderson. There is no good way to tell that news to people.” He waited a respectful while, watching. It seemed to him that they were behaving in typical form for having just heard about a death that concerns them, but doesn’t concern them too closely. The girl (for Detective Anderson was fifty-five and to him Elen Evans was a girl) stared at the wall and she shuddered once. The boy that he remembered to have an accent had now begun to shake his head.

  The black or Oriental man standing in front of him, though…. Who had sat at the back of the stage and played the piano…. One got no change out of him. He had had an uncommunicative face last night and it was no different now, except that he stared at Anderson himself with a peculiar intensity. It was as though he were trying to learn something important from the policeman’s reactions, instead of the other way around.

  “How did he die?” Long asked, very, collectedly.

  “They found him—” Teddy began, but a hard hand on his shoulder silenced him. The guitarist widened his eyes and the blond part of his hair fell in his face.

  “I’d like to be able to tell it once, with everyone together,” said Anderson apologetically. “And I believe there’s one of your band that isn’t here.”

  Long smiled grimly. “You know quite well that there is. The leader. Mrs. Macnamara is sitting zazen in the next room.

  Anderson had thinning hair and a tan on the top of his head that was darker than that on his face. His gray eyes crinkled. “That so? How interesting. Not quite the usual thing, is she?”

  Long did not reply.

  “I’d still like to see her,” continued Anderson. “It’s really quite important.”

  The connecting door opened, causing everyone to start.

  Martha Macnamara was cool in a blue print dress which matched her eyes and set off the pink of her complexion. Her gray hair shone silver in the window light. “Zazen is no kind of trance,” she said quietly. “I can both see and hear things. Please sit down, Sergeant, and tell me how George died.”

  Anderson did sit down, on the chair that had been occupied by Long. Martha sat on the bed across from him and Elen came over and sat beside her, touching. Pádraig had not moved from his sprawl in the chair across the table from Anderson, though he withdrew to the far side of the seat. Long remained standing beside Teddy (who bit the nails of his left hand nervously), and the uniformed policeman, who seemed a bit nervous himself.

  “We can’t be too exact about either the time or the… cause of death at this time,” Anderson said, glancing from one face to the other. Ted Poznan muffled a harsh cry that was like a laugh but not really a laugh at all. “All I can say to you is that be was found by Officer Scherer here at the pier at six this morning. It appears”—Anderson put emphasis on this word—that he was—”

  “Drowned?” It was Elen who blurted what was on almost everyone’s tongue.

  “Hung.”

  Elen gasped. Everyone stared.

  “He was found hanging down from one of the openings in the concrete of the pier. Where people feed the seals, you know.”

  Pádraig Ó Súilleabháin made a muffled noise. His hand hit the table, hard. Now it was Martha’s turn to shake her head. “Oh, how terrible! How terrible,” she whispered into her cupped hand. “Where we fed…”

  “It was a very unusual rope,” continued Anderson, even more diffidently than before. “It didn’t look capable of holding his weight. I cut a piece of it, but it immediately began to come apart. See?” And he offered for their inspection a length of twisted dry grass, with a loop at one end, very familiar to all.

  “Súgán,” stated Pádraig Ó Súilleabháin. “Hay rope. Grass, in this one.”

  “That’s what I thought.” The policeman nodded, “As you described in the concert last night? ‘Twisting the Rope’?”

  Parting Glass

  It was Martha who broke the silence. “Yes, exactly. And it’s our own rope, of course. You must have seen it coiled over the microphone last night at the concert.”

  Anderson’s receding hairline made his forehead took very high, and his eyebrows ascended into it. “So you remember me? I’m flattered, Mrs. Macnamara. But no, I don’t remember the rope. There are so many wires and cables—”

  “It wasn’t there, Martha.” Pádraig spoke up. “That was the night before last we put it up. Last night it was… I don’t know. In the cellar room, maybe.” He turned to the detective, sullenly. “It is not our rope. It is my own. I made it out of the dry grass behind the hall, the day before yesterday. But not to hang George St. Ives. Yo
u are right; it is not strong enough for that.”

  Anderson’s forehead reached halfway back his head when he widened his eyes. “I hadn’t suggested that it was made for that purpose, Mr. Su-ill… Sull—”

  “Patrick Sullivan, in English.”

  There was a stir among the musicians. “But that really isn’t your name,” said Teddy. “Martha told us to be careful…”

  Pádraig waved the matter away with both hands. “That was my mother’s idea. She is very big on Gaelic culture.” He glanced back at the sergeant. “We are Irish speakers.

  “Sometimes.” He gave a rueful chuckle.

  Anderson looked surprised. “Forgive me. But you mustn’t, Mr. Sue-lowin, go racing ahead of me, or you’ll come to grief over it. It’s early days yet to talk about homocide. Let me ask my questions in their proper order.

  “First, let’s finish with this rope. The knot, you see, is not the most common thing. It looks like it was made by someone who knew what they were doing.”

  “It’s a simple lark’s head,” replied Pádraig readily. “A knot you use to tie up to a stanchion.”

  “A sailor’s knot?” asked the detective.

  “All knots are sailor’s knots,” he replied.

  Anderson nodded. “And I’m to understand that you’re a sailor?”

  There was an unsettled pause, as Pádraig stared at the detective. “You can understand that.”

  Anderson seemed not to take this admission, or brag, for more than its face value. “And was Mr. St. Ives a sailor also?”

  Pádraig shifted in his seat. His knee fell loosely out against the chair arm. “He was from Cape Breton. Everyone knows that. But I think there’s more than birth to being a sailor.”

  Again the detective nodded. “Was that ‘lark’ as in the bird? About the knot, I mean.” He wrote in his little notebook with a ball-point pen.

  “Okay for that. Now comes the great routine….”

  There was a rustle as Anderson’s listeners either relaxed or straightened themselves at this news, depending on individual temperament. Long did neither one.