I had dressed in red chinos, a white T-shirt, and sandals, and my first step into the garden gave me a floating sensation, a sense that life really did continue and was even worth living, despite the terrible things people did to each other. This feeling lasted about three steps, or until I saw the door of the garden shed still hanging open as it had last night when I returned from spreading Gabe’s ashes on the water. I slammed it shut and twisted the metal closure, promising myself that I would buy a good padlock later that day. You won’t need it now, I thought. Not since the bridge descended on that poor man’s head last night, assuming he was the pervert. But I would buy one anyway.
On the boardwalk, among the children, the dogs, and the Frisbees and within sight of the boats far out on the lake, I began to regain that New World at Dawn sensation, and it grew stronger when I passed the picket fence separating the Blairs’ garden from the beach. Jock Blair was bent over roses near the house, blue-grey smoke rising from his pipe. Maude sat in a chair with a kerchief around her head and her eyes hidden, as always, behind her sunglasses. Seeing me, she smiled and raised a hand in greeting. I called good morning to her, which brought a nod of her head and a wider smile.
Jock turned at the sound of my voice and smiled, although his eyes avoided mine. The complex crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes deepened and his face, already the colour of ripe watermelon, grew more crimson. He had the whitest hair I have ever seen and wore plaid cotton shirts winter and summer. He was a shy man whose demeanour appeared threatened by the glance and voice of a younger woman. He loved roses. Once, I emerged from the back door to see him tending ours, the ones near the garden shed. “Rust, lass,” he said, and he pointed to some black stems. “Best you stop it in its tracks.” When I thanked him, he nodded and blushed and hurried away, back to the boardwalk and then to his garden, where I heard Maude scold him for being so forward, telling him I was more than capable of caring for my own roses, and ordering him inside to fix some tea and eat one of the warm scones she had baked just for him, the kind he liked, with currants inside.
I wondered what it must be like to spend fifty years of your life with the same man and still take pleasure in his company. Was it truly bliss, or was it like being one of conjoined twins, a relationship you accepted because no means existed of breaking it?
I used to talk like that with Gabe, saying I was obviously not a romantic, an idea that made Gabe laugh. “Your problem,” he would say, “isn’t that you’re not a romantic. It’s that you’re too romantic, and it scares you so much you try to deny it.”
I would reply that he sounded like one of those two-bit popular psychologists on television, and if he knew so much about me, maybe he should give me a full report, which would help explain a lot of things, including why I made so many stupid mistakes in my life.
His answer would be to stretch out an arm and squeeze me. “You’ll work it out,” he would say. “You’ll work it out yourself, and then you’ll understand better than if I told you.” There are times, usually in the corner of my soul where it is always four a.m., that I wish Gabe hadn’t been so trusting of my ability to work things out and had explained some things in detail for me. Because he had been right. When I worked things out and understood what he meant, they were harder to reject than if he had told me himself.
It was half a mile to Tuffy’s. The beach and the boardwalk were crowded, as they are on every late-summer day. Walking among people and dogs, I felt safer from the creep who had appeared at my door looking for Grizz. What was behind his desperation to meet somebody named Grizz? Money? Protection? And why my house? Although I caught him sneaking a glance at other parts of my body besides my face, I didn’t consider him a real threat to drag me inside and attack me. Nor did I find him pitiful. Whatever, whoever he was, I didn’t want him back. He could find Grizz somewhere else, and I hoped he would. Somebody that desperate needed relief.
TUFFY’S ONCE HAD A SIGN mounted over the tavern door that said we were here before you were born. The sign is long gone, lost among various renovations performed by its several owners. Nobody seems to lose money running Tuffy’s, but there isn’t much to be made from it either, based on the number of people who have owned the place over the years. Each new owner changed the layout, the staff, the menu, the paint on the wooden siding, and the faded sign dangling over Beach Boulevard. Heaven help them if they ever change the name.
Tuffy’s opened in 1890 as Tiffany House, a dining spot for the wealthy summer people in their turreted cottages. When the summer residents wished to sample Tiffany’s boneless pheasant, tournedos Rossini, or whole suckling pig in the privacy of their own summer digs, Tiffany’s dispensed waiters in white tie and tails, driving an all-white carriage pulled by a team of white horses, to deliver the food and set the table for dinner or luncheon or picnic, complete with crystal stemware and British silverware. That’s how rich the people who lived on the beach strip were back then. That’s how well they lived in a place that was once a small paradise.
When the wealthy moved out and the blue-collar, sometimes-working class moved in, the immigrants and labourers melted Tiffany’s down to Tuffy’s, and it stuck. The imported claret was replaced with local beer, the British waiters with sullen students, and the white tie and tails with T-shirts and jeans. The closest the kitchen gets to pheasant these days is Buffalo-style chicken wings. Gabe told me he’d heard that an aging hooker had once worked out of an upstairs room in the back, which produced a bunch of jokes about suckling pigs, I’ll bet. Still, most people appreciate Tuffy’s for its honesty. It doesn’t try to be something it isn’t. Do not ask for a latte at Tuffy’s or expect the furniture to match. The beer is cold, the chicken wings are hot, the cheeseburgers are greasy, the walls are green, and the clientele mind their own business. I love Tuffy’s.
In Tuffy’s, a woman can order a beer without stirring fantasies among the men shooting pool or watching the SportsChannel on television screens hanging from the ceiling. When I walked into Tuffy’s, the pool players, the beer drinkers and the TV watchers looked up, then away. Guys who are basic and direct, like the men who favour Tuffy’s, recognize body language when they see it. Mine said Leave Me Alone. And they did. I chose a table as far from the bar as possible and ordered coffee.
Mel came through the door about ten minutes later, wearing a light grey windbreaker over a blue T-shirt and jeans, the line of his shoulder holster visible beneath the jacket. Pausing near the bar, he removed his sunglasses and stood waiting for his eyes to grow accustomed to the light. By the time Mel spotted me and walked to my table in the far corner, near a window giving onto the beach, every guy in the place had identified him as a cop.
“You look good,” Mel said when he sat down.
“You look like a cop,” I said. “They all made you as one. In case you care.”
“That’s why I can’t do undercover anymore.” He swivelled in his chair and signalled the guy behind the bar that he wanted a Coke, then turned back to me. “You all right?”
“You always ask me that when you know I’m not,” I said.
Mel sat silent for a moment. “What was it like there, last night?”
“It was horrible. What I saw was horrible.”
“What the hell were you doing there, anyway?”
“Spreading Gabe’s ashes. I wanted to spread them in the lake, but there was an onshore breeze … never mind.”
“But what made you go under the bridge? Hayashida said you went down there with the bridge operator.”
“He said something to me.”
“Who? The bridge operator?”
“No. The man whose … the man who was killed. At least, I think it was him. The bridge operator said he’d been living under there for days. He told me he had seen something.” No, that wasn’t right. I closed my eyes, remembering his words. “He said that he knew what happened.”
“What was he talking about?”
“Gabe’s death.”
“Did he say that?�
�
No, I realized. He hadn’t. I shook my head. The waiter arrived with Mel’s Coke, and I waited for him to leave before asking, “Is it in the papers today?” I hadn’t seen a newspaper, hadn’t turned on the radio or television. “It must be all through the press.”
“No details,” Mel said. “Just that a man was found dead under the bridge. That’s all.”
“Nothing about how he died?”
“Not if we can help it.” He leaned toward me. “You don’t want this kind of stuff out. Suicide stuff.”
“Why not?”
“Copycats. It gives them ideas. Depressed people can walk around for weeks thinking about killing themselves and never do anything about it. Then somebody commits suicide in some spectacular way, and it’s as though the other people get permission to do the same thing. So they don’t give out that kind of information unless there’s a reason for it.”
“How about murder?”
“What’re you talking about?”
“This guy … what’s his name again? He knew me. I’m sure it was him. He called me Mrs. Marshall. They told me his name but I forget.”
“I saw the report this morning. His name was Honeysett. Wayne Honeysett. He was a nutcase.” He lowered his voice. “He was also a peeper.”
He waited for that to sink in. A peeper? What, a little bird that shows up on your windowsill in winter? “A pervert?”
Mel nodded.
“My pervert?”
“Pretty sure of it. They’re doing DNA testing now on what we scraped off the floor of the shed, comparing it to his.”
“Are all perverts nutcases? I mean, I guess there’s a connection, but some of the perverts I’ve met in my day seemed like pretty sane men on the surface.”
“Honeysett was certifiable. He used to be a jeweller. Had a store on Barton Street—”
“Honeysett’s,” I said. “That’s where I’ve heard the name before. That’s him?” Radio stations in the city once carried commercials for Honeysett’s Credit Jewellers. I remembered the white marble storefront, the big neon sign, the inane jingle—Honeysett’s has the diamond for your honey … for even less money … than you think. I hadn’t heard it for years. “Does he still have the store?”
Mel shook his head. “Couple of saleswomen said he assaulted them in the backroom. Nothing serious, just copping a feel. He tried to keep it quiet, but they started to press charges, took civil action, and he had to close the business. He moved …” He angled his head toward the front door of Tuffy’s. “You know that old place up the way, next to the empty church? Big round turret, painted dark red?”
I pictured the house. The blinds were always lowered, the grass uncut, the roof sagging. “I thought it was abandoned.”
“Honeysett moved there, alone. His wife died a couple of years before the thing with the saleswomen, and he bounced around in that old place, finally moved into the basement. We’d catch him now and then, outside houses on the beach strip at night, hiding in bushes near windows—”
“Or in garden sheds?”
Mel nodded. “He seemed harmless. He’d get a warning, his family would ask that we give him a break, let him stay with them, and the judge would agree. Then, a couple of months later he’d be up to his old tricks. Getting nuttier all the time. Last month, the city seized the old house for back taxes. He moved out. We didn’t know to where, but apparently he was sleeping under the lift bridge. Which just proves how nuts he was.”
“That doesn’t mean he was suicidal.”
Mel looked annoyed with me. “You an expert now?”
“I’m getting to be. Hayashida tells me you’re becoming sceptical about Gabe shooting himself, right?”
Mel took a long swallow of Coke and set it down. “But not Honeysett. That’s suicide, not murder.”
“Why not?”
“You don’t kill somebody by holding his head on a piece of concrete while a bridge comes down on it.” He frowned and looked down at the table, as though blocking the picture from his imagination.
“Then how insane do you have to be to climb up there and do it yourself?”
“People can be that crazy, Josie. People can be that desperate.”
Perhaps they can. But I could not believe anyone would be capable of either act. So I stopped trying, and said, “Who’s Grizz?”
Mel breathed twice—I counted them—before answering. “You don’t need to know.”
“Yes, I do. You said you’d tell me. So tell me.”
“We think he’s a dealer.”
“Drugs.”
Mel nodded. “We just know his name. Gabe and I. We knew his name.”
“You guys aren’t even on the drug squad. How do you know about him?”
Mel looked back toward the bar and the pool tables, where everybody had resumed their games and conversations. “They found a body a month or so ago, in an alley off Barton Street. Gabe and I, we were called in on it. It looked like a hit, an execution.” Mel raised his right hand, the index finger extended, and touched his head just above his ear. “One shot, here.” He brought his hands together and stared out the window as he spoke. “We asked around, the usual people on the street, and they were scared. These guys, they’re usually pretty tough, but this time they weren’t acting that way for a change. Somebody told us a guy named Grizz did it. That’s all we had, his supposed name, his street name. Plus that he’s a dealer, and he scares the hell out of a lot of people who don’t scare easily. Gabe was doing some stuff on his own, checking out the guy in the alley, looking for some connection we could use. I told you I can’t do undercover anymore, but Gabe did. He made some contacts on the street, working on his own.”
“So why was this creep at my door this morning asking about Grizz? If this Grizz scares people so much, why is this guy looking for him?”
“What did he look like, the man asking for Grizz?”
“Asking? He was demanding. He was something else too.”
“Desperate?” Mel said.
That wasn’t the word I was looking for. I pictured him again, unwashed, bearded, dressed like a street bum, pushing against the door, more frantic than intimidating, more pleading than threatening. I recalled his face, and how he didn’t get angry when I refused to let him in or when I told him I didn’t know anybody named Grizz. Did he know Gabe? Did Gabe call himself Grizz? Boy, that hardly made any sense, but …
“Hey.” It was Mel.
“What?”
“I asked you twice.”
“Asked me what?”
“How old this guy was, the one looking for Grizz. Where were you just now?”
“Thinking.”
Mel’s eyes softened and he lowered his voice. “About Gabe?”
I nodded. I was always thinking about Gabe.
Mel sat back. “We can talk about this some other time, okay?” He looked around and leaned toward me again.
“Sure.” Now I couldn’t stop thinking about Gabe, and about something Mel had just said. “This guy, Grizz.”
“What about him?”
“Where was he shot?”
“Where was who shot?”
“The guy you think was killed by Grizz.”
“I told you. In an alley.”
“Not there. Where did the bullet go?”
Mel looked at me as though I had just asked what brand of underwear he wore, before raising his finger and touching his temple again. “Like I said. Here. Why?”
“That’s the same place Gabe was shot, isn’t it?”
“Well, sure, but—”
“That’s what you said. Gabe was shot once the same way, wasn’t he?”
“Josie, what the hell are you getting at?”
I didn’t know. That’s what I told Mel. I didn’t know. I only knew, and I was more certain of this than ever, that my husband had not killed himself, that he had been executed while kneeling naked on a blanket, waiting for me to arrive and love him.
I finished the coffee, told Mel to ta
ke care of himself, and asked him to wait until I left. I didn’t want anybody at Tuffy’s to see me leave with a man. I especially didn’t want them to see me leave with a cop.
14.
I had avoided reading newspapers since Gabe’s death, but over the next three days I scanned them for news about Wayne Weaver Honeysett. The first day’s coverage reported that a man’s body had been found beneath the lift bridge and police were investigating it as either a suicide or homicide. What was the other option? Natural causes? The victim’s identity would not be released until his next of kin had been notified, but he was believed to have been a resident of the beach strip.
The following day, the newspaper carried a much smaller story, saying only that the police were investigating the possibility of foul play in the death of the man found beneath the lift bridge on the beach strip. “Foul play”? It sounded like something an announcer might say when covering a baseball game on television. Crushing a man’s head to the thickness of a sheet of paper was well beyond “foul,” no matter how it happened.
That evening, it rained in the manner that told me summer was on its way back home to Florida. It wasn’t the soft, warm rain of an August afternoon, but the hard, cold rain of a September night, arriving early and unwelcomed.
The rain and cool weather made me feel desperate enough to call Tina. Her husband, Andrew, answered. Most men named Andrew are called, at some point in their lives, Andy or perhaps Drew. Andrew is always called Andrew, except, I assume, when he is called Dr. Golden.
Andrew informed me that Tina was either shopping or visiting the anthropology museum, and he said it with a total absence of irony in his voice. These two activities, after all, bookended the values of Tina’s life: either filling her head with things to talk about at bridge parties or filling her closet with Prada to wear to the bridge parties.
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