Beach Strip

by John Lawrence Reynolds

  “It’s lovely. When did he give you that?”

  “Two, three months ago.” She was fingering the brooch. “I never told Dougal that he gave it to me. I said I bought it for a couple of dollars at a garage sale and that it was just a cheap piece of junk. Dougal never knew nothin’ about jewellery. He bought my wedding ring when we got married and that’s all, so he didn’t know this is real gold and has a real emerald.” She looked up. “It is. I went into the city and had a jeweller look at it, and he said it’s a real emerald and real white gold. Said it’s worth a lot of money.”

  “Mr. Honeysett must have liked you very much.”

  “He liked women. He always did. He liked women to like him. It wasn’t even about sex, I think. I mean, I don’t know for sure. But he would give you gifts if you were a girl, a pretty girl. I knew him when we were kids, and he was always like that. I think Wayne became a jeweller so he could make things for women. Men, too. But he loved making things for women, brooches and earrings and stuff.”

  She looked out the window, remembering. “We both grew up here on the strip. He was kind of sweet on me when we were fourteen, fifteen years old. I married Dougal and he married Florie, whose family had the money to get him started in business. The jewellery business.” She looked away from the window and, with her head down, said, “I should have gone to his funeral, Wayne’s, I guess. I thought about it, but I don’t like going too far from home nowadays. People talk.”

  “Mr. Honeysett had his problems, I understand.”

  She looked up and nodded. “Only after Florie died. Poor Wayne. People said terrible things about him, or said he was doing terrible things. Bad things. I don’t know if any were true. We’ve all done bad things in our lives, I guess. Most of us, anyway. I just know he was nice to me and some other people, I hear.”

  “When did you see him last?”

  “Two, three weeks ago. He stopped me when I was walking on the beach strip. He wanted to know how much I liked the peacock pin. He was always asking me that. Whenever we met after he gave me the brooch, he wanted to know if I still liked it, and if I still liked him, I guess. I told him it was just about the most beautiful thing I’d ever owned, which was the truth. That seemed to make him happy.” She shook her head and smiled. “Some men are strange that way. They like to make women happy because that’s what makes them happy. The men, I mean.”

  “Some women are like that,” I said. “About men.”

  She nodded and stared out the window again, across the strip and toward the lake.

  We sat in silence as the cat returned, passing within reach of me without looking in my direction. Out of respect, I waited until it was settled in the same corner of the room it had occupied when I arrived. Then I said, “I need to know why you think my husband was involved in your husband’s death.”

  “Mike Pilato told me.”

  “When did he tell you that?”

  “At Dougal’s funeral.” She closed her cardigan, hiding the peacock from view. “He paid for it, Mike did. The funeral.”

  “Why?”

  She shrugged. “Dougal did some work for Mike. Mike’s a nice guy, no matter what a lot of people say. I mean, he’s, you know, he does a lot of stuff, but listen, Mike didn’t do nothin’ bad to us, Dougal and me. He did some good things for us. We helped each other out, Mike and Dougal and me.” She looked at a picture on the wall. “We helped each other out.”

  “What kind of work did your husband do for him? For Mike Pilato?”

  “None of your business. None of anybody’s business.” Her eyes were still on the picture.

  “Do you think Mike Pilato would talk to me?”

  She looked across and smiled. “Sure,” she said. “You’re pretty. Mike always talks to pretty women.”

  “Thanks.” I stood up. “What do you know about this man called Grizz? Have you really never heard of him?”

  “No.” Her smile was gone. “You in cahoots with him or something?”

  “With Grizz?”

  “With that son of a bitch who keeps coming here asking for him. He’s crazy.” She pulled back into herself, hugging her chest with her arms and pulling her legs onto the chair, avoiding my eyes again, withdrawing into her madness. “He comes here again, I’ll kill him. You tell him that. He comes here again, I’ll get a knife and I’ll kill the son of a bitch.”

  She was shaking with fear or anger, or perhaps both.

  “Is this man about thirty, bearded, dresses like a bum?”

  “You tell him,” she said, pressing her face into the back of the chair. “You tell him I don’t know nothin’. I just want people to leave me alone.”

  “Mrs. Dalgetty,” I began. “Glynnis. He’s been to my place as well. I have no idea who he is, honest.”

  She remained enveloped within the chair, seeming to will it to embrace and hide her.

  I thanked her and walked down the stairs and out into the sunshine, where I stood thinking about all she had said and listening to a tap-tap from within the upholstery shop. It was open, after all. Someone was inside, driving tacks into wood.

  20.

  Power is different depending on who has it and uses it. You talk power to a man and he thinks about a football team or a truck engine, the kind of power that’s dynamic, in motion, like a railway locomotive. Or maybe political power to get other people to do what you want or not do what you don’t want. Or the power of money, which is nearly the same thing.

  Talk power with a woman, especially a woman who knows her way among men or even around just one man, and her idea is different. It’s not dynamic. It’s subtle. All right, it’s sexual.

  I remember my first husband, the good years with him, the early years when we were both working and struggling. We had an old car that wouldn’t start in the rain or if it was too cold, and we lived in a small apartment where we were trying to save money for a down payment on a suburban split-level.

  Anyway, we had a fight about something. It must have been substantial, and I know it was at the dining-room table, because my clearest memory of the fight is tossing my dinner plate at him, and it missed and splattered against the wall. The point of the fight is long forgotten, but I recall the broken china and mashed potatoes and canned peas all over the floor and my husband fleeing the house because he was either frightened that my aim might improve or concerned that he might kill me.

  I knew he would be back. So I cleaned up the broken china, did the dishes, and told myself I needed to do something in my power to get past this, and I did. I fixed my face, slipped into a pair of lace stockings, and put on a black negligee I hadn’t worn since our honeymoon. Then I sat in a chair in the corner, with all the lights out and waited for him to return.

  He said nothing when he came home, turned on the lights, and saw me there. Just looked away, trying to keep from smiling, I’ll bet. Kept that grim face on while I rose from the chair and tippy-toed across the room, put my arms around his neck, and said that I was sorry and that the things he wanted me to do and I didn’t, well, I would do them all night if he wanted, just to prove how sorry I was.

  You can’t pull freight trains across the country or win a Super Bowl with that kind of power. But it works for other things. Especially when you’re female and young. At this point in my life, I could forget young. Younger would have to do. Younger than Mike Pilato, anyway. I chose the black pencil skirt, this time with a black sweater that was just a little too small and the pumps from Saks.

  It was mid-afternoon by the time I located Mike Pilato’s offices. He was in the hardware business, officially anyway, in an old residential area of the city that ended at Pilato Park on the shore of the bay, west of the mills and factories. The two-storey brick building across the street from the park was neat but otherwise unimpressive, surrounded by a high wire fence. A worn sign on the roof announced it was the site of White Star Hardware Distributors. Business did not appear to be very good at White Star. In fact, it was non-existent. Two large doors at one sid
e of the building, one marked shipping and the other receiving, were closed. Dusty blinds covered the windows on both levels. No vehicles sat in the parking lot, and the only truck I saw was a plumber’s van parked across the street in front of a crumbling brick cottage where, I assumed, someone’s toilet was backing up.

  A man wearing coveralls and a battered fedora was sweeping the wide sidewalk leading from the door marked office, moving a broom back and forth with little enthusiasm.

  I drove past the building, parked the Honda, and walked back to White Star, reputedly the headquarters of the most powerful crime boss in the city. The man stopped sweeping and leaned on the broom, watching as I approached. I asked him if Mr. Pilato was inside.

  “He’s a-busy,” the man said. He was sixty, perhaps seventy years old.

  “I’d like to talk to him,” I said, wondering if he could be carrying a weapon under those coveralls.

  “What about, eh?” He was studying me. “You wanta buy hardware? I don’t think you wanta buy da hardware.”

  “I need to talk to him about my husband.”

  “Mr. Pilato, he knows you husband?”

  I was becoming tired of this routine. What was I doing, talking to a guy sweeping the sidewalk who could barely speak English? I turned to walk toward the door again, but his broom swung up to block my way.

  “What’s you name?” the old man asked.

  “Josie Marshall. My husband’s name was Gabe Marshall. He was a policeman, and he died about two weeks ago. He was shot to death.”

  “You tink Mr. Pilato have something to do with it, eh?”

  “I don’t know.” I should go back to my car, I began telling myself. Get in it, sit down, and drive away. “I don’t believe what everybody is telling me about my husband and why he died. How he died. That’s all. Somebody said Mr. Pilato may know what happened. That’s why I’m here. In case he knows.”

  The man’s face softened. As did mine. Every time I talked about Gabe something within me began to melt. There is a limit to power of any kind.

  “Wait a-here,” the man said, and he walked through the office door, which was metal with a small, barred window, closing it behind him. After about thirty seconds, the door opened again and he emerged and stood to one side, beckoning me in, and I entered a small, empty foyer leading to a heavy oak door that swung open as I approached and closed after I passed through it.

  From the outside, White Star Hardware Distributors may have appeared to be struggling, but Mike Pilato’s office looked like a Wall Street success. The room was large and substantial, with oak-panelled walls, silk carpets on a polished slate floor, draperies that had never come within shipping distance of a Walmart, and nicely framed oil paintings on the wall.

  At one end of the room, an oak desk resembling one I had seen in pictures of the Oval Office sat on a riser. Behind it was a large leather chair that held … nobody. I sat facing the empty desk, the empty chair, and the bookshelves covering the wall behind them, the shelves overflowing with hardcover books whose perfect spines indicated they had probably never been read.

  The door behind me opened and closed, and footsteps approached. A man stepped onto the riser with some agility, considering that his stomach was prominent and his white hair flowed down to his shirt collar. He wore heavy black-framed glasses, a black and gold silk shirt stretched over his paunch, and black pleated trousers. I noticed the details of his clothing because I preferred them to his face, which was round and scowling. His eyes never left me while he found his chair and settled into it. For a moment I flattered myself that he liked what he saw, but then I realized he was watching to see if I might pull a gun or a hatchet out of my purse.

  “What can I do for you?” he asked. His eyes shifted away from me for short instants, glancing around the room as though confirming that everything was in place, then returning to me. His voice was deep, the words delivered with neither warmth nor threat.

  What the heck am I doing here? I thought. Then, He’s a man, older than you. Maybe he’s killed a guy or two, but he’s still a man, and you know about men. “First of all, thanks for seeing me—” I began.

  He waved my words away. “What do you want?” he said in the same flat delivery.

  “I’m a little nervous,” I started to explain.

  “You think I might hurt you?”

  “Well—”

  “Relax. The plumbers know you’re here.”

  “Plumbers?”

  “In the truck. Outside. Three, four guys from downtown. They took your picture. They take everybody’s picture. So you’re safe.” He actually permitted himself to smile briefly. “Pretty safe.”

  “My name is Josie Marshall,” I said in my best headmistress voice, “and I came here, Mr. Pilato, on a serious matter. My husband is dead. I believe someone killed him. I was told perhaps you would know something about it.”

  He acted as though I had insulted him. Perhaps I had. His head jerked back and his chin rose so he was looking down the length of his nose at me. “Do you think,” he said, and I felt an edge to his words like the feeling you get when you press a thumb against the sharp side of a carving knife, “that every time somebody gets killed in this city, it’s because of me? Is that what people like you think?”

  “No, of course not,” I said. It was the beginning of a lie. Maybe not everybody.

  “What do you need to know that’s so important you think I know it and other people don’t?” He spoke precisely, each consonant bitten off. “You tell me that, okay? Tell me now.”

  A picture appeared in my mind. It was a picture of a terribly foolish woman wearing a skirt that was a little too tight and a little too short, under a cotton sweater as form-fitting as she would ever want to wear in public, and she was sitting alone in an office with a man who had a reputation for reassembling other peoples’ brains with a baseball bat.

  I’m usually good at being cool under pressure. Okay, I wasn’t cool when Gabe’s body was found. This was different. I folded my hands in my lap and looked directly at Mike Pilato. “I am not making accusations,” I said, trying to match Pilato’s precise enunciation. “I would never do such a thing. I’m not a police officer, I’m not a lawyer, I’m nobody except a woman who loved her husband and wants the truth of his death to come out, whatever it might be.”

  Pilato leaned back in his chair. “Nice speech,” he said.

  What the hell. “It was no damn speech,” I said, tossing aside any concern about consonants or my safety. “It’s what I need to do. Somebody said you knew my husband. If you say you didn’t know Gabe, fine, I’m gone. If you knew him, please help me. That’s all I ask.”

  He nodded. “Better speech.” Before I could tell him to go to hell, which I figured would either make him kiss me or shoot me, he said, “Ask anything you want. I’ll answer it, if it doesn’t incriminate me.”

  I asked if he had ever met Gabe.

  He placed his hands on the desk in front of him. “Yes,” he said. “I have met most detectives in this city. Sometimes we’re in the same business. Different sides, same business.”

  “When did you speak to him last?”

  “Maybe two weeks ago.”

  “Where?”

  “In a bar down the street. Place called Mahady’s.” A glance at me, so he could watch my reaction. “I own it.”

  “What did you talk about?”

  “Not what. Who. We were talking about someone. Your husband wanted to know what I knew about this person.”

  “What was the name of this person, the one my husband asked about?”

  Some successful people are actors when it comes to getting others to do things, or to hear things in a certain way. It’s timing, it’s the delivery, it’s the expression, it’s the voice. It’s acting. Pilato was an actor. He paused and watched me, building suspense. Then he said, “Eugene Griswold.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Was,” Pilato said, his eyebrows back in place. “Who was he.”

  M
y god. Another murder victim. “What happened to him?”

  A shrug. “He died.”

  “From what?”

  “Probably old age.” He leaned forward, his eyes on mine. “Some manichino named Eugene Griswold, the only guy with that name I found, or had people find for me, opened a place in Connecticut, I don’t know, somewhere around 1776. An inn, a hotel, whatever you want to call it. Opened it with his brothers. They ran it, the three of them. Partners. It’s still there, the inn. You can look it up. The Griswold Inn, someplace in Connecticut. Might go there someday and look at it.” One more smile, quick and cold. “Maybe you come with me, eh? Have a dirty weekend together?” Instead of fading this time, the smile widened into a grin. His teeth were too porcelain-perfect to be real.

  When I didn’t respond, he leaned back in his chair. “That’s the only Eugene Griswold I know about. It’s the only Eugene Griswold anybody knows about. I had never heard that name before your husband met me at Mahady’s and asked if I knew him. ‘Who’s Eugene Griswold?’ your husband says, and I say, ‘I don’t know, should I?’ and your husband tells me Griswold is some big shot, some new capo in town, and maybe I should look him up. So I do. I have somebody look him up, this Griswold. Nobody knows him. Somebody, you don’t have to know who, it’s none of your business, gets on a computer and finds out about this guy in Connecticut, started a bar two hundred years ago. That’s all I know about a Eugene Griswold. That’s all anybody knows about him. Probably more than your husband knew. Your husband thought he was local, some new local guy. Your husband was wrong.”

  “I was told,” I began. I swallowed, closed my eyes, and began again. “I was told that this man, this person worked for you—”

  “Do I look that old?” He grinned.

  “—and his street name was Grizz.”

  “I was told that too.”

  “And you never heard of anyone by that name?”

  “Never.”