Goofy Foot

by David Daniel

  I trundled over to the real estate office in the center. The man with the commercial solutions, Andy Royce, was on the phone again. He got in his patented “No kidding” a few times and finally hung up. I wondered what he used for a closer. He glanced my way and drew on a blazer the color of ballpark mustard. “Did you find someplace to rent?” he asked me.

  “I’m all set, thanks.” I had a question and wasn’t sure how it would play, but a realtor’s stock-in-trade was knowing what was going on, same as mine; the difference was that in my game, tight lips were a virtue. “My neighbor is Ted Rand,” I said. “Out of curiosity: Does he own that house at the beach?”

  “He owns several houses around town. The one you’re talking, he and his wife used to live there. His mother’s in there now, I think. Ted lives on Maple Street.”

  “His wife, too?”

  “Iva? Iva bought a condo over in Hull. I want to say the Sea View … Sea Crest … Sea something. Are you interested in a condo?”

  “Not at the moment. Is Iva’s last name still Rand?”

  “As far as I know. How about a business? I was just on the phone to somebody who’s selling a Laundromat.”

  “I’m not sure that’s a solution for me,” I said. “I like to feel I’m free to move.”

  “Hmm … well, when you’re ready, you come see us first.”

  I promised I would. At the village drugstore, I used a local directory and looked up Rand. Iva was listed, with a Hull exchange. I called and got her. After taking a moment to make plain who I was, I said I’d like to speak with her. Without bothering to ask what about, she gave me directions and said to come on over. I think her voice was a little slurred.

  15

  The condominium complex where Mrs. Iva Rand lived was on Nantasket Avenue, near where the old Paragon Park had been, she had said. I cruised along the strip in afternoon traffic, looking for the address. The amusement park was long gone, the land, with its ocean proximity, having become too valuable for childish fun, though Paragon had left some of its funk behind, the way spicy food will. A stretch of pinball arcades, cheap souvenir stands, and biker bars occupied one side, and across from them was the long graceful swoop of Nantasket Beach. I braked to let a pair of round young women with a posse of small kids play through. A little farther along there was still an old merry-go-round, which gave one of the housing complexes its name. CAROUSEL CONDOMINIUMS a sign trumpeted. “Coming Soon! Luxury Units Going Fast!” But the project didn’t seem to know if it was coming or going. Judging by the unfinished construction, it looked as if it had been begun with more optimism than ready capital. There were probably prospective buyers who’d need a cemetery plot before they got their dream home.

  The complex I sought wasn’t half so fancy, but at least it existed in more than a four-color brochure. The Sea Chimes was a cluster of gray buildings fashioned at angles so as to give each small unit a view across Ocean Avenue to the seawall and the beach while restricting any glimpse into the neighbors’ lives. It couldn’t have been more than a decade old, but already it was showing signs of weather and wear. I parked in the area designated for visitors. A panel truck that said LIQUOR LOCKER on the side was idling in the shade at the front entrance. I went into the hallway and found the stairs to the upper levels. Mrs. Rand had told me 3-B.

  “Hey, ma’am?” a man’s voice was saying in the dimness at the top of the stairs. “I wouldn’t know, okay? He says no checks. I don’t make the rules. He just says have it paid next time or no merchandise.” A flushed and balding young man came out. Seeing me, he gave an exasperated look and tossed his head. “For her there should be a whiskey wagon, tinkle a little bell when it drives through the neighborhood, playing ‘One for the Road.’ Good Humor for adults, unlimited credit.” He went on down the stairs.

  I realized he belonged with the panel truck in front. I climbed to the next gray-carpeted landing. The door to 3-B stood open. “Knock, knock,” I said into the doorway.

  A woman in a gold velour sweat suit and red espadrilles with stack heels stood in the center of a white room, holding an empty glass in her hand. She was slender and middle-aged. Without looking at me she said, “You made your point. Go.”

  “I just got here,” I said.

  Now she glanced my way. Evidently seeing that I wasn’t with the Liquor Locker, she frowned. “If you’re looking for Randy, you missed him. He keeps it short these days. Ignore the pun.”

  I ignored. “If you’re Mrs. Rand, I’m looking for you. I’m Rasmussen.”

  “Oh, you.” Her enthusiasm lacked a lot. She waved me in. Her long reddish-gold hair was held back with a green silk scarf. She was attractive, and once had been very attractive. Her eyebrows were plucked as thin as razor cuts. She had small whiskey welts under her eyes; her voice was Lauren Bacall without the purr. “I thought you wanted Mr. Big Shot.”

  “Rand? I understood he lives in Standish.”

  “He deigns to visit me here from time to time. Usually when he wants something, or when it’s convenient, like today. He was going to check out the Surf.”

  Rand was a surfer, too? It seemed to be a cult down here.

  “Do you want a drink?” she asked.

  “No, thanks. I just wanted—”

  “Well, I sure wouldn’t mind a splash.”

  I glanced around, half-anticipating a cash bar where I was expected to buy her a highball, but she managed it by herself. I had imagined the man I’d seen departing had shut off the tap somehow, but on an ornate sideboard there was a set of crystal decanters: drinks for all occasions. Iva Rand didn’t bother with any of them; she poured straight from a fifth of J & B. I hadn’t imagined the slight slurring in her voice on the telephone.

  “You have a nice place here,” I said. Despite its limited space, the condo was tastefully and expensively furnished, with cream-colored rugs, bright acrylic abstract paintings, and antique furniture. There was a balcony where two people could dine if they ate standing up. The wall facing the balcony, with the beach beyond, was a mirror, giving the room a moving seascape and an illusory expansiveness.

  “Built on the bones of Paragon Park,” she said. “You’re old enough to remember the park.”

  “I made the trip from Lowell on several occasions to ride the roller coaster.”

  “Lowell? Is that where you live now? No wonder you look pasty. You need to get some sun. What’s your name again?”

  I told her.

  “And you’re here why?”

  I told her that again, too, but she seemed no more curious than she had been on the phone. “When they demolished the park,” she went on, “right near the exit from the Tunnel of Love, workers uncovered an old dry well. Guess what it was full of?”

  “I don’t know—broken hearts?”

  “Wallets. I love it. Wallets from the nineteen forties and fifties, not a lousy dime in any of them. What the police think, they think it was from pickpockets working the crowds.” She gave a bray of laughter. “Randy and I used to come here from Boston when we first met. We’d make out on the beach at night. Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr had nothing on us. God, that was ages ago. We haven’t seen moonlight and love songs around here in a long time.”

  “Are you and your husband divorced?”

  “Nosy, aren’t you.”

  “I guess so,” I said. “Though I like to think of myself as a skilled conversationalist with a robust curiosity.”

  She frowned and took a drink. We were still standing in the living room. “I don’t live there in Standish because the house gets a little too tight, thank you. Not to mention the town. Since you’re some kind of private snoop, you’ve probably noticed that my husband owns Standish.”

  “Owns?”

  “Owns. Understand English? He owns people and places and things. He paying you?”

  “No.”

  She didn’t look as if she quite believed me, or cared especially, either, but she did wave me to a chair and I took it. She went on standing.

&
nbsp; “What people and places does he own?” I asked.

  “Let’s just say that Standish is being shaped in Ted Rand’s image and leave it at that.”

  I was suddenly thinking about what Rand had told me on the beach last night, about having a vision and making things happen. Carrying her drink, Iva Rand stepped before the mirrored wall, put one hand on her waist and flounced a hip to one side. “I was a real piece,” she said to her full-length image. The sweat suit hid her figure, so I couldn’t make any judgment there, but facially she had been a beauty. I wasn’t thinking of Deborah Kerr so much, though, as Geraldine Page’s character in Sweet Bird of Youth. “Randy robbed the cradle with me. You should’ve seen me in Capri pants.”

  “I believe it.” I could still see her beauty there underneath the adipose tissue, like an artifact poking through the desolations of time.

  “Then I got too old for him.” She gave the word a sour emphasis, still studying some image cast there in the reflecting glass. “I’m ten years younger than he is, and I’m too old. That hypocrite. But he’ll come around.” She made a pursed-lips expression in the mirror. “I’m getting it all back.” She made a vague gesture toward some stainless-steel dumbbells piled on the edge of the carpet in a corner. “He’ll see what he’s got here. If I take him back.” She shot me a firm expression to leave no doubt as to who was in charge, then turned away from the inspection and went and refreshed her drink. I didn’t ask her if she was going to Rand’s soiree that evening. Intuition told me she didn’t even know about it. Carrying her drink, she came back over. “What do you want?”

  “A glass of water would be fine.”

  “With me,” she said querulously. “Why are you here?”

  “As I mentioned on the phone, I’m trying to find some people.”

  “They live here?”

  “One of them used to live in Standish. Do you know Ben Nickerson?”

  “What about him?”

  “I’m trying to locate him. He came back to Standish with his daughter several days ago for a vacation. I’m looking for anyone who may have seen them.”

  “You think I did?”

  “Someone told me he was a friend of your son’s.”

  Her face looked as if someone had given it a sudden twist from behind. It tightened and clenched in an unattractive way for a moment, then let go. “Yeah?” She came nearer. “For your information, Ben Nickerson was a very socially misfit young man. You can ask anyone. Inept. He has children?”

  “A teenage daughter.”

  “Well … Anyhow.” She got me a glass of water. “Teddy didn’t care about things like the high school caste system—and he would’ve been at the top of it. My Teddy was a remarkable boy. Generous and trusting. Gifted. He had a talent for making friends. Unfortunately, his choices of people weren’t always wise.”

  “Meaning Nickerson?”

  She waved an impatient hand. “He wasn’t important. I mean that devious bastard who pretended to be his friend all those years and in the end just destroyed him.” Her words dripped acid. As if to wash away the taste, she drained her glass. I waited for her to resume, but she didn’t. She poured more whiskey and went into the adjoining kitchenette. I followed. She broke several cubes loose from an ice tray and dropped them into the glass. A section of counter was cluttered with bottles of vitamins and herbal concoctions, potions and emollients and other things promising long life and beauty. She saw me looking. “I’m a health nut,” she said a little giddily. She raised her glass. “To yours.” She took a drink.

  “Who were you referring to before?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “Someone pretending to be your son’s friend.”

  “I won’t have his name uttered in this house.”

  “Was it Chet Van Owen?”

  “That’s enough!”

  In the abrupt silence, the ice cubes crackled. Her eyes were getting glassy. I trailed her back into the living room, wanting to ask my questions while I could still understand the responses. “Have you heard of a young woman named Michelle Nickerson? She’s sometimes called Shel or Shelly?”

  “Am I s’posed to have? Look, why don’t you go ask Randy about all this? You can probably still catch him at the Surf.”

  “Is he a surfer?”

  “Huh?” She stepped back, her gaze narrowed in foggy comprehension. “The Surf ballroom. It’s for sale. He buys things. People and things.” She gave an exaggerated sigh. “You don’t really know what you’re talking about. You can’t possibly. Do y’self a favor. Forget the beach. They got crème tanners you can use. Go back to … wh’rever you’re from.” She shook her head in dismissal, and I saw her take a quick sidewise step to keep from stumbling. Even so, a couple of ice cubes tipped from her glass and wobbled across the carpet like a pair of misshapen dice. I moved toward her, but she held up a hand in a “stop” sign. “Oh, my husband has done good things, and bad things. But there’s one thing that was unforgivable.”

  “Why don’t you sit down, Mrs. Rand—”

  “Like hell.” She gave me a blurred look. “Next you’ll want me to lie down. What kind of wife you think I am? Huh? Pumping me. And where d’you get off comin’ around ingratiating yourself, pretendin’ you’re better’n me, not drinkin’ my whiskey.” Her husky voice rose. “I was one hot babe! You hear me?” She stumbled and a slosh of booze slurped over the rim of her glass. “You think I’d tell you a goddamn thing, you goddamn snoop! Get out!”

  I got.

  16

  Pressured by my sense that I needed to be doing something to locate the Nickersons, I drove through the heat shimmer of the busy strip along Nantasket Beach. In midafternoon traffic I passed Skee Ball arcades, T-shirt emporiums, shop fronts selling fried seafood, frozen custard, caramel popcorn, and postcards of young women in bathing suits that you never saw here—neither the bathing suits nor the women. Music came from a dozen sources in an aural collage that canceled out any particular song and formed a generalized sound track of noise for the roving masses of sun worshipers and beachniks. I suppose there was a honky-tonk charm to it all, but I was preoccupied. And then I saw what I was looking for and parked.

  The Sand Bar had a dim, underwater feel, like any barroom on a sunny day, but here the effect was heightened by the room’s narrowness and low ceiling, and a funky decor of fishnets with rubber lobsters and starfish woven into the strands, and big worn tables that might once have been the dragger doors of a trawler, glossy now under coats of polyurethane. I didn’t check, but even money said the bathroom doors were labeled “Gulls” and “Buoys.” The barman, at least, looked like a landlubber: a longhair clad in painter’s pants and a tank top with a faded yin/yang symbol that rounded over his potbelly. Behind him, intermixed with the bottled paraphernalia of his trade, was an array of sports trophies and team photos. I wasn’t the sole patron of the establishment, but near enough. I sat and ordered a draft.

  Since this was the place where Jillian Kearns said she’d met Ben Nickerson, I improvised, and when the brew came, I said, “I met a young woman in here a while back. Jillian something. Cute, with a lot of hair? I heard she was in a car crash.”

  He drew hair away from his round face. “It’s a drag, man. Jilly used to come in and brighten up this sad scene. She went off the Coast Road in fog. I overheard somebody saying the cops think she’d been drinking, but that’s a crock. The only thing I ever knew her to drink was maybe one Pink Slipper.”

  “You know how to make one?”

  “Me and Olde Mr. Boston.” We exchanged a smile, and then he grew glum again. “I’ve got a theory,” he said.

  I was careful not to appear anything more than polite.

  “She seemed like a lonely kid,” he expanded. “Looking for love. Sure, she often seemed to be with some new guy, full of eager hope, but what it was, deep down, she was … bereft. My take is she never had a relationship with her father, so she was seeking it in the men she met.”

  Pay the barstool philosoph
er a little court, and he’s yours. “That’s kind of deep.”

  “She wanted the missing piece. Completion. The yin.”

  “Definitely deep,” I said. “What about the man she was with the last time you saw her—who was he?”

  He gave me a closer inspection. “What, you carrying a torch for her, brother?”

  I shrugged. “I thought maybe I’d see her again.”

  “Goes to show. We never know. That guy? I don’t care who he was. He was wrong for her, I’ll tell you that.”

  “Wrong how?”

  “Something about him just looked kind of … mean.”

  It was a new word for Nickerson. I wished I had the high school yearbook to show him Nickerson’s mug, but I tried describing him. Dark hair, yeah, that sounded right, but the bartender didn’t seem quite sure about the rest. The joint had been hopping that night, so he couldn’t be certain. “Why?”

  I lifted a shoulder and drank ale. He leaned close to me. “Want some free advice? Pay your respects and move on. Ashes to ashes. Our days keep sailing over the horizon, friend.”

  “I’m not a flat-earther.”

  “Well, that’s when it’s tough.”

  I put down money for the beer and a tip. “Thanks for the existentialism.”

  “We’re all just God’s laundry, blowing in the breeze.”

  A half mile down, the commercial area thinned, giving way to apartments and vacant lots. Then, there it was. I’d heard Iva Rand say it, but I hadn’t really imagined she meant the same place. I drew off the road onto the cracked pavement of a parking lot, shut off the car and got out. There was another AT&T truck parked nearby, and a young man getting ready to climb. My secret eyes and ears. I wondered if Ma was quietly trying to hook things up and put it all back the way it was before de-reg. Part of me wished she would.