Still restless at four, she ate a cup of yogurt, changed clothes and drove to the beach.
She parked in the lot at Twelfth Avenue and crossed Gulf Coast Boulevard. Ahead, the Naples Pier receded in perspective, out into the Gulf. She passed under trees she couldn’t name, then through a group of tourists speaking French. On the pier, fishermen were using jigs or live bait. At their sides stood shopping carts rigged with PVC pipe to hold their fishing rods upright. It was easy to think of Charlie with such a rig. He would be patient. Take his time and learn the ropes of Florida fishing from the regulars. She imagined him deeply tanned, standing at the railing.
She walked back, but at the stairs to the beach, Brenda slipped off her boat shoes and stepped down. Carrying the shoes, walking amid sunbathers and children, she thought of Charlie in his Minnesota cabin. A wasteland, she thought. The Boundary Waters in February. It made her ache to think of him there alone. She shook her head, facing the Gulf of Mexico’s improbable emerald-green water.
In South Truro, on Cape Cod, the beach sand felt the very same underfoot. But the water there was deep blue. Black at night. It had been black and choppy under moonlight the night her father died. Those moments had grown familiar to her over the years, seeing his death. How many times had she knelt beside him and touched his hand, tapped it as though trying to get his attention, then stood and run, scared but feeling an odd sensation as her legs pumped, cool air on her inner thighs, looking down as she ran, seeing blood—
She scuffed her way back to the pier. Near the steps, children were playing with inflatable toys—sharks, a turtle, a dolphin. Toys like those set out with Patrick Sweeney’s trash.
When she looked up, a pelican offshore was just then banking in flight. Now it dropped, a dead weight, like a plane in free fall. It struck the water, and for a second the bird looked broken and dismembered. But now it gathered itself back into recognizable shape.
Patrick Sweeney was next to her on the plane. He was leaning against her shoulder, smiling, talking. And all the while in his own wasteland.
No lights were on in his front windows. Brenda crossed the lawn and moved between the houses. At the back, she stepped to the pool cage. Inside, two pairs of sliders stood open.
“Anybody home?”
The house had been closed for months, and Sweeney was airing it out. He was off running an errand, eating somewhere. Feeling relieved, Brenda turned away.
“Just a minute,” he called.
She shuffled her thoughts for a reason to be here. Let me pick your brains for my article. I’ll buy you dinner and tell you about James Rivera—
Movement inside. As a third glass slider rumbled open, Brenda readied herself. Sweeney now stood in the opening, hands in his pockets. He was still in his white business shirt from Friday, the sleeves rolled up.
“I should have called first,” she said.
“It’s all right, I’m done for the day. I was out in the garage.” He turned on a light and stepped down. His place was bigger than Mrs. Krause’s, a single-family house. As Sweeney came forward, she saw his swimming pool was half empty. A garden hose hung over the side.
“Did you walk across the course?” he asked.
“I drove.”
“A typical Detroiter. No one ever walks there.” He unlatched the screen door.
“I was going to grill something for myself and invite you to dinner,” she said. “But I decided that wouldn’t be in your best interest.”
She stepped in, and Sweeney closed the door. On the plane, he would not have wasted a chance to joke about her cooking. She pointed to the hose. “Do you have a leak?”
Hands back in his pockets, Sweeney turned to look. “I let the pool service lapse,” he said. “The club called just before I booked my flight. Someone complained it smelled. I had them pump it and scrub it out this morning.”
He was distracted. Forgetting things. His patio furniture was still covered with tarps. “What’s that?” She pointed. A horizontal blue cylinder rested at the far end, looking like a giant rolling pin.
“That’s called a pool blanket,” he said. “You roll it over the water at night.”
“To keep it clean?”
“To avoid depression and poverty,” Sweeney said. “Depression when you see the heat floating up at night, poverty when Florida Power and Light sends you the bill.”
That was more like him. “Well,” she said, “in the absence of salmonella poisoning at my place, perhaps you can suggest a restaurant.”
“I wouldn’t be good company.”
She saw he meant it. He was back here for the first time alone, burdened by memory. But Brenda felt a half-selfish, half-generous wish to comfort and be comforted. “Come on,” she said. “You told me I have to eat stone crab and key lime pie down here. You have a responsibility.”
He smiled at her, tired in his dirty white shirt. “Working all day?” she asked.
“Pretty much. Let’s have a drink, I’ll tell you all about it.”
She followed him up the center step, into a spacious, carpeted living room. Sweeney turned right and snapped on a light. Brenda followed him into a large kitchen. As he knelt at the far end and opened a cupboard, she looked around. What was it that kept putting her in dead wives’ houses? Brenda admired beautiful cherry wood cabinets, the rich green granite countertop. Charlie’s house always intimidated her. It spoke of his wife’s refined good taste, her confidence. It reflected the unity and coherence of someone naturally given to knowing her own mind.
“There—” She looked over. A small crowd of bottles stood on the counter. “Pick your poison,” Sweeney said. “Glasses here, ice in the fridge door. I need a clean shirt.”
He left through the front entry, and she went to the counter. He had Campari. She got down glasses and carried them to the refrigerator. As she filled a glass with ice, Brenda smiled. Colorful giant ladybugs clung to the door, magnets to hold notes. You have no fridge magnets, she thought as ice rattled into the second glass. No photos or to-do lists. She returned to the counter and poured Dewar’s for him, then the Campari. She found club soda and topped off her drink. With a glass in each hand, she moved back toward the living room.
But stopped. Spread out on the kitchen table were photos of children. From the fridge door, she thought. His grandchildren. In his pool, on Naples beach. Two snapshots had been taken on a ski slope. In one, the children appeared with their parents. In the second, the two stood before Sweeney and his wife.
There she was, Teresa Sweeney in ski pants and a turtleneck sweater. She had arched eyebrows and a very Irish, coming-at-you directness. She was slender, with short, dark red hair. In another photo she had been captured with one grandchild on her lap, the second child curled under her arm. She was reading to them, looking earnest and unaware of the camera. The children appeared to be utterly absorbed.
How could she do it? Brenda thought. To Sweeney and to them? Next to the photos lay an open spiral notebook with male handwriting. She listened for sounds before leaning to look. A list. UP cottage, Midland house, Florida house, 401K, equity portfolio, cars, a sailboat, a runabout. Sweeney’s worldly possessions. Each item was linked by a line to a name or charity on the right.
A door closed. She moved quickly with the drinks into the living room. He had turned on lamps, and she spotted a stack of coasters on the coffee table in front of the couch. She stepped to the table, set the glasses on a stack of magazines, got two coasters and set the drinks on them, then looked around for something to comment on. Feminine taste was evident in the wrought-iron coffee table, the lamps and paintings. But the room was also masculine—a saddle leather couch and matching club chairs. She sat in one of the chairs as Sweeney came from the front.
He had put on a black camp shirt, striking in contrast to his white hair and ruddy color. He stepped between the couch and low table, took up his glass and drank. Sweeney carried the drink to the open door wall and looked out.
“Yes, I’ve been on the case
here today,” he said. “Cleaning up and throwing out. I filled four trash can liners. Stuff accumulates at an amazing rate.”
“I wish I could say the same.” He turned and looked at her. “Some have the problem of debris,” Brenda said. “Others have the problem of apathy. With apathy, people are always going to make a house a home. I think that’s how Edgar Guest put it.”
“You’re too young to know who Edgar Guest was.”
“My father,” she said. “One of his guilty pleasures was bad poetry.”
“He sounds like an interesting man.”
“He was.”
“I notice you’re not an ‘I go, she goes, I’m like, he’s like’ person,” Sweeney said. “That’s unusual for your age. Even for a journalist.”
“That’s my father again. By the time I was ten, he’d ruined me for slang. He mocked it so well, I couldn’t say ‘awesome’ or ‘cool’ without cringing. It’s still true.”
“He died when you were young?” Brenda nodded. “That may be why we have something to say to each other,” Sweeney said.
“Because you remind me of my father?”
Sweeney waved this away. “I don’t know anything about Freud,” he said. “I just know members of the gabby classes seek out each other. Your father must be the one who got you interested in words.”
It was true. Hand in his pocket, Sweeney drank. He looked like Florida now. Laid back, at ease. But he abruptly turned from the opening. He stepped between the coffee table and couch, set his drink on the coaster, and sat. “All right, you’re wondering,” he said. “It’s none of your business, but you’re a journalist, it’s what you do. Besides, how is suicide anyone’s ‘business?’ Go ahead, ask away.”
He knows you know, Brenda thought.
“Mrs. Krause’s villa,” he said. “Rayette Peticore lives next door. She must have rolled the welcome wagon over.” Brenda nodded. “She’s a decent person,” he said. “She and Terri played golf a few times. This isn’t a very friendly place, but like every other golf community, it runs on gossip.”
Feeling relieved, Brenda got her drink. Sweeney sat back in the couch. For a long moment he stared up. “High hats.” He pointed to the ceiling. “You need a special pole just to change the light bulbs.”
“Or All Hands on Deck,” she said, feeling relieved and also grateful for any topic that would lead them away from Sweeney’s loss. “While you were throwing out and sorting yesterday, I drove James’s cousin to Immokalee.” Brenda told him about the keys locked in Ray Colon’s van.
“I bet it surprised him,” Sweeney said. “A female Anglo stranger offering to drive him all the way out there.”
“I explained how his cousin picked us up. James also asked a friend to show me around Naples. A realtor. She said he sends her a lot—”
“I know why Terri killed herself, but I won’t tell you.”
Sweeney was staring into his drink, rolling the glass between his palms. Brenda felt herself blush. You coward, she thought. A man starts talking about his wife’s suicide, and you change the subject.
“But I will tell you this.” Sweeney looked up. “It wasn’t because of me.” He looked back down at his drink. “There’s no reason to justify myself to you, is there?”
“None, Patrick. I’m sorry, we don’t—”
“I suppose it’s because I haven’t flown lately. I forgot how I come on to seatmates. Especially women. I do my lobbyist’s snappy-patter routine to pass the time. I think you know it means nothing.”
“Yes, I know.”
He put his glass down and looked straight at her. “I was unfaithful to my wife twice,” he said. “The first time a year after we married. A woman I knew in college, a lobbyist for some citizen’s awareness group. I just felt like doing it. I’m married but I’m not shackled, that kind of thing. Two years later, Terri and I separated for six months. To see if we made a mistake. Well, if you’re seeing if you made a mistake, that’s what you do. You ‘date’ someone else. Terri did, too. They were people we knew from work, but that ended the consumer testing. By then, we knew the real mistake would be to split up.”
He got his drink and took a sip. “After that, it was everybody’s ups and downs, but it was good,” he said. “We couldn’t conceive, so we adopted. It was good between us, I know that’s true. But sometimes ‘good’ isn’t enough.” Again, cupping his glass, Sweeney stared at the coffee table. “In the next twenty-eight years I never cheated. I had lots of opportunities, but I was happy. As far as I know, so was Terri.”
What could she say? To this good guy, this keeper, back for the first time to a house he had shared with someone who left him that way?
“There was love, then,” Brenda said. “That’s something to be grateful for.”
“Lots of it, and I am grateful,” Sweeney said. “There were times we were going through the motions, but that’s marriage. When you live together all your adult life, you have to understand that. But our marriage was not loveless, it was no deception.”
She was crying now, angry with herself but unable to stop. Sweeney reached out with his handkerchief. She took it and pressed her eyes, feeling ridiculous. She was exploiting someone else’s misery to feel sorry for herself, like a character in a Turner Classic Movie, where the man hands the crying woman his handkerchief.
But at least be honest, Brenda thought. “I’m not crying because of you,” she said, and blotted again. She sat back. “Last year I killed someone.”
Sweeney put his drink on the table. He leaned back and folded his arms. “Is that why you broke up with your guy?” he asked. “The one you told me about?”
“Yes, but not really. He wanted to take the blame. He was going to tell the local sheriff he did it, but I wouldn’t let him. I shamed him, I blackmailed him—”
As he had on the plane, Sweeney waited. A witness, a good listener.
“I said if we didn’t cover it up, everyone else would go through hell. I convinced him he was being a Boy Scout. I told him he had an obligation to the rest of us.”
“Was that true?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Of course it matters.”
“No, it doesn’t. I pushed every button, I used every gimmick to make him keep silent. But it had nothing to do with caring about ‘everyone else.’ I did it for me. Because I had a strong feeling for him. I wanted him to be with me, not in jail.”
Again Sweeney waited. She looked away, through the hall to the front of the house. “It’s sordid,” she said. “I’m afraid of him because he thinks I’m a ‘good person.’ But I’m not. I wanted him, that’s all. We’d just met. I knew nothing about him, but so what?”
When she finally looked from the hall, Sweeney was again staring up at the recessed high hat lights. “Well,” he said, “what about the other man?”
“He killed his girlfriend, he killed a man who just happened to show up at the wrong time. He killed Marion Ross’s college classmate, her housekeeper—”
“You don’t have to convince me,” Sweeney said.
She stared at him. Flat-faced and done with crying, she now told the story as straight news—who, what, where, when, why. It was easier that way, being objective, impersonal. She left nothing out—how Jerry Lomak had thrown Heather Reese to her death, how Marion Ross had swung the rope with the sharp drag anchor and lodged it in his back. But Jerry Lomak had not been dead, and Brenda had decided he should be.
“I forced Charlie to go along,” she said. “The local sheriff interviewed us, and I made Charlie lie.”
Sweeney took a drink. He put the glass down and folded his hands. “Could this Lomak talk? Did he say anything?”
“That’s why it’s murder. He was still alive. He joked about it, he cursed Marion. He said he’d write a book in prison. I won a Pulitzer, and Marion’s a high-profile lawyer. I knew what he was saying could actually happen. Maybe he wasn’t even all that wounded. Either way, it’s murder. Second degree, but murder. Second degree gets yo
u twelve to fifteen. With a first offender, you get time off for good behavior. Charlie or me is out in seven or eight years. That puts me at forty-one, him at sixty-three. But I wasn’t thinking anything like that. All I knew was, it would ruin our chances. That’s all I cared about.”
“Did this man ever talk to Charlie?”
“No.”
“What does Charlie think?”
“We never discuss it.”
Never, Brenda thought. Without words, they had both come to the same conclusion. Any mention of Kettle Falls would ruin the future.
“Your intestines are thirty or forty feet long,” Stuckey said.
“I didn’t know that.”
“Like flexible tubing, back and forth.” He looked at Rivera and back to the elevator door.
“You’re just afraid you won’t catch it,” Rivera said.
“It’s the back and forth, okay? All packed in there. What if it gets hung up?” Stuckey shook his head. “If that watch was aluminum or nickel? No way would I eat it,” he said. “That shit’s poison. All this Alzheimer’s? That’s aluminum, absolutely.”
“All right, Dennis.”
Stuckey the tonto, Rivera thought. The payaso. But Stuckey had come to Naples at the perfect time. Things happened for a reason, everything added up. “Bad patches” was what Kleinman called times like this. Times when nothing seemed to work. But that’s when you couldn’t blink. It’s like those birds that clean the crocodile’s teeth. When you see it, you think “Goodbye, birdie.” Not so, Jimmy. That bird is living off another animal but serving a purpose. The crocodile does all the hard work, but the bird takes care of the dental.
The doors opened, and they stepped out into Burlson’s reception room. All afternoon, Rivera had channeled his anger to map a plan. Dennis Stuckey would be his crocodile bird.
“Hold it a minute.” He waited for Stuckey to shuffle back. “We can’t have another Ivy. Not with Mrs. Fenton.”
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