by David Daniel
“Pardon me,” I called, “did that used to be the old Surf ballroom?”
He looked where I was pointing. “Yes, sir, that was it. Long ago. My grandfather used to go there.”
“Yeah, so did mine,” I said, trying to stanch the bleeding.
The 1970s were long ago, as nightclubs went; most of them seemed to change style and theme before you’d fairly learned the dances of the current scene or the names of the mind candy of choice. The original deco sign was history, as no doubt the signs of half a dozen other enterprises gone from the site were, replaced now with a realtor’s placard, but I knew this was the spot. The Surf ballroom had rung to its last line dance around the time Travolta’s white suit began to show marinara stains. The pale stucco, which had once been pink, had faded and was cracked, and the big windows were covered with plywood. It was a far sad cry from the club I’d come to two or three times with Lauren when we were courting. Who knew, though? Where I saw desolation, maybe a shrewder eye saw opportunity. Wasn’t that Ted Rand’s specialty?
I walked down the beach to the seaward front of the building, hoping to get a look inside, but only got my shoes full of sand for my trouble. I stayed clear of an area of old paving where seagulls were smart-bombing with surf clams, eager to crack the thick shells and get at the tasty morsels inside. The gulls in Lowell wouldn’t know a clam if it waved at them; their lunch du jour came off the city landfill. I watched a rat the size of a bread box scurry to cover beneath the eroded concrete steps. I looked for the ghosts of a young couple stepping out onto the runway for a cigarette and a kiss as the sea foamed in hissing white lines in a summer dusk. I looked and listened in vain. The sun shone bright, and the ocean was as flat as last week’s beer. Heading back to my car, I glanced at the realtor’s sign. Small world. It was the Standish agency, along with the name and phone number of the contact agent. Andy Royce. No kidding.
On the way back to Standish, I dialed Red Dog Van Owen’s number. He picked up, sounding as if he’d been asleep. “Not out hanging ten?” I said.
“At dawn I was. Who’s this?”
I told him.
“I should’ve known. Where’d you pick up the lingo? Off a Jan and Dean album from thirty years ago?”
“Probably, yeah. Look, I find myself going around asking the wrong questions to the wrong people. Now I’m thinking maybe it’s you I should be talking to.”
“What’s your curiosity? Nickerson still?”
“Right, but hang on to your huaraches, there’s more. Are you awake enough for a late lunch? My treat?”
“I’ve got some things to do.”
“I’m easy, you say when.”
I heard him drag on a cigarette, or sigh. “Why don’t you fall by my place around six? Keep your appetite; you can share my humble meal.” He gave me directions.
“Harwell’s Cove,” I repeated. “Is that a street?”
“What street? It’s water, man.”
I hadn’t let go of the idea of checking Jillian Kearns’s background. Maybe one of her neighbors had something. I made a stop at a 7-Eleven and then drove over to her apartment building. A town cruiser was parked in the side lot. The small number “1” on the side panel told me whose it was. In the foyer I pressed the bell for Jillian’s unit. I expected to be challenged over the intercom, but a buzzer sounded and the outer latch clicked and I was in. The carpeted stairs creaked as I climbed to the second floor. The door to apartment 5 was open. I approached it carefully, looked in and saw Delcastro. He stood in the front room, waiting. “What the hell are you doing here?” he demanded.
“Great minds,” I said, “and all that. Boy, that was a nice little move, letting the mystery caller in without a challenge—looking to see who might turn up.”
“Relax, this isn’t a crime scene.”
“That’s what I figured. May I come in?”
“What for?”
“A look.” I held up the bag of Little Whiskers I’d just bought and gave it a jiggle. He paid no attention to it. I said, “She may have been the last person around here who actually saw and talked to Ben Nickerson.”
“That again.”
“You know how it is. Sometimes you have to make a stretch when you’re looking for connections.” He didn’t bite. I shrugged. “Was my guess that she had a cat faulty?”
He relented. “In there.” He nodded toward a door. If he was curious as to how I’d known, he didn’t ask; maybe he’d scanned the magazines in the foyer, too. He said, “We don’t have experienced investigators on the force—we don’t have the need—but I like to check things out, just to be thorough.”
“Anything?”
He gauged me. “Nothing to say her dying wasn’t an accident.”
I opened the door and looked into a bedroom. A cat peered out from under a pink dust ruffle and stared at me with green-eyed alarm. I rattled the goodies again, but got even less reaction than Delcastro had shown. I found the cat’s double bowl in the kitchenette, put in fresh water and some of the food, and set it on the floor. Delcastro said, “I know a retired couple who live in the building. I’ll ask them to look after the cat for the time being, or call the MSPCA.”
We wandered around the small apartment together. It was what I had envisioned, from the hand-me-down furniture to the dime-store painting over the couch. The most costly possessions were the TV set and DVD player in the bedroom. Her film tastes ran to tearjerkers with Julia Roberts in them. On her dresser sat a fishbowl-sized snifter half-full of matchbooks. I scooped out a handful. They were from clubs and bars around greater Boston. She got around, looking for love in all kinds of places. I upped my rating of the yin/ yang barman. “Did you find out her blood alcohol level?”
Delcastro scoped me. “Why?”
I dropped the matchbooks back. “Come on, I can read it in the newspaper.”
He frowned. “She was well below the limit. But accidents happen anyway.”
“True. So does crime.”
He turned to face me squarely. “What are you driving at, Rasmussen? Are you sniffing around here after something I should know about?”
“No, just what I’ve already told you.”
“That she partied with Ben Nickerson, and about the van at the lighthouse. Well, we’ve checked, believe it or not, and you seem to be the only one who saw anything.”
That quieted me. At least he’d checked. He struck me as an efficient cop, if not an overly friendly one, and I was mostly satisfied. But he seemed to have drawn a bead on me. “Don’t hold your breath that the presses are grinding out a late edition with all the gory details,” he said. “This isn’t one of those creepy little Edens they love on nighttime TV, with evil lurking behind the picket fences and monsters by the school yard.”
“Never said it was, Chief.”
“But I’ll tell you,” he went on, pointing a finger my way, “if a crime has been committed, I’ll nail the dumb bastard who did it. Thanks for your big-city efforts to help us poor country cops, it’s right nice of you. But we’ll struggle along without it. Let’s go.” He jerked his chin at the door. “The ghoul tour is over.”
17
If I’d been right in envisioning Jillian Kearns’s apartment, I missed Harwell’s Cove Marina by a nautical mile. What I’d pictured as a posh yacht club proved to be a meager assortment of small sailboats and stubby cabin cruisers tied to a sagging wooden dock in an inlet that appeared as though it would maintain just enough water at low tide to float them off the mud. Seagulls and terns wheeled above the marsh grasses, and a white egret fished the banks. None of the boats looked fancy enough to require a security gate to keep the curious away, which probably explained why the marina didn’t have one. I tromped right onto the dock.
Van Owen’s home was a Chris Craft, old but reasonably well-kept, though time and the elements were exacting a toll. Lettered in white script across the mahogany transom was the name Goofy Foot. Van Owen met me, looking sun-browned and salted, his hair still damp. I handed him a b
ottle of Chianti, and he waved me aboard. He had on cutoffs and a faded red, yellow and green island shirt. “Hope you like flounder, caught today.”
“Which makes it about a week fresher than what I’m used to. Love it.”
A hibachi was heating on the cabin roof. On one side of the deck—starboard, if it matters—three surfboards lay stacked together. Forward was a small vinyl table and two canvas chairs. At the stern, on a square of all-weather carpet, stood a weight bench and a set of rusty barbells. I followed Van Owen below.
The cabin was tight but cozy. There were two chairs and a reading lamp. On built-in shelves was a Bang & Olufsen stereo setup—like the boat, old but top quality. The paneled walls held a collage of framed pictures. Van Owen reached into a small drawer and held up a baggie of weed. “Want to burn one for appetite?”
“Everyone else seems to think I should burn my skin. I’m starting to feel like Moby Dick.”
“Doesn’t the sun shine up there in Lowell?”
“Not at night.”
“Is that a ‘no’ to the weed?”
“If it cleanses your doors of perception, go for it. It never did for mine.”
“And booze does?”
“Hey, that’s a nine-dollar bottle of grape—it bruises easily.”
He put away the weed and stepped into the little galley. “I’ll save the wine for the chow. Gin okay?” I said it was. Ice cubes plinked into glasses. When he’d handed me a drink, he put on a CD. Following a bluesy piano intro, a wonderful voice came from the speakers. I listened a moment. “Dinah Washington?”
“You were figuring Dick Dale and the Del-Tones.”
“It was one of my suspicions.” I clinked his glass with mine. “To stereotypes.”
He got the fish started on the hibachi, then brought out a basket of bread sticks and we took our drinks onto the deck, where the music reached softly. The tidal river was rising, and grasses shimmered green in the golden light of late afternoon. “This is nice,” I said.
“It’s the low-rent district, but it suits me. There’s a whole series of little brooks that snake up through salt marshes and feed into the North River. In the seventeen hundreds there was more tonnage launched on the river than anyplace else in America.” Between sips of our drinks he told it, how the boatyards were well protected, had a ready supply of trees for hulls and masts. Eventually, the trade went to bigger ships, with deeper drafts, then steel hulls, and the local trade was done. “Now Standish has got plans to reinvent itself.”
“You sound like Boston magazine.”
He pointed in the other direction, toward a jut of land, the wooded top of it just visible above the low trees flanking the river. “That’s going to be the fat-cat district, with an eighteen-hole private golf course and private moorings.”
Ted Rand’s project—Point Pines—I realized but I wasn’t here for the heritage tour. “I looked you up in Ben Nickerson’s yearbook,” I said.
“Really? That must’ve been good for a laugh.”
“Career ambition—‘chase waves’?”
He shrugged. “You had to say something. I could’ve said stockbroker or brain surgeon, but frankly no one would’ve believed it.”
“It seems like you’ve done what you set out to do. I wonder how many of your classmates can say the same?”
“Nickerson, for instance? To tell you the truth, I don’t know what he does. He never said.”
“He catches things.” I told him what I knew of Ben Nickerson’s marine biological supply business. He said it made sense.
“I thought more about what we talked about,” Van Owen offered. “About how he seemed the other day when I ran into him. Sometimes, sitting on a board, you can see right through the surfaces, through ten feet of water, and you see rockweed on the bottom, or the way a sandbar shoals, a crab scuttling along. You can see like that into people sometimes, past the social smoke screen, straight to the core. It’s …” He waved a hand, looking for words—“Goofy foot.”
“The name of your boat?”
He frowned a moment, then seemed to find inspiration. He rose and pointed to the deck. “That’s a surfboard. How would you stand on it?”
Feeling I was humoring him, I stood. I set one foot ahead of the other on the floor. He nodded. “Right foot forward. It’s the surf equivalent of being left-handed. Goofy foot. The term also means how you sometimes get the intuitive stuff … inklings.”
I was thinking of Paula Jensen just then, of her dream.
“With Nickerson it was often like that.”
“Someone who could see beyond the superficial?”
“No, no, I mean somebody who could be seen into. Transparent.”
“And what did you see in his core?”
He grabbed at the hair on the back of his head, as if trying to pull loose a reluctant thought. “I saw it again the other day when I ran into him. He was very nervous.”
I was alert, as if the alcohol had sharpened my brain.
“I mean, he always was, but more now. He seemed … I don’t know. Just funny. Like maybe he’d stepped in some quicksand and knew it, only he didn’t realize how deep yet.”
Van Owen went into the cabin. I sat there wondering: Did I really credit his perception? Was he a person of genuine insight or merely one who believed he was? He brought out plates, utensils and a salad as I uncorked the wine. No more was said about Ben Nickerson. I discovered that the aromas and the fresh air had given me a serious appetite. I had more questions, but they could wait. We ate and then ate some more. Everyone has his own tempo for eating: Red Dog put his food away fast; I took it more slowly. We matched each other on the Chianti. For dessert there was store-bought blueberry pie that tasted great, the way store-bought hot dogs do at the ballpark. Someone had rung a dinner bell for the mosquitoes, too. Knowing that I’d better move or I was going to be in the same spot come morning, I stood and began carrying things back inside. As Van Owen washed dishes in his small galley, I put on a lamp and perused the photos on the walls of the cabin. Most of them were pretty old, the people in them young. One in particular caught my eye. “Is this Teddy Rand?” I called to him.
He turned, wiping his hands on a towel. “It’s TJ, yeah.”
Another shot included a girl with dark hair and a nice smile and wearing a cheerleader’s sweater. She had sturdy legs, tanned against the short white pleated skirt and the bobby socks and tennis sneakers. She was standing between Van Owen and TJ Rand, who were in their football uniforms, grass-stained and disheveled in that flush of glad exertion that is the sole property of the young. Did kids still feel that exuberance? I thought of the dour posse on the town common. Did Michelle Nickerson feel it? “Who’s she?” I asked.
“Ginny Carvalho.”
“You gotta be a football hero to fall in love with the beautiful girl.”
“She was that. So who got her, do you think?”
She was with them both, proud of the fact, and of them, but her head was canted ever so slightly toward Teddy Rand’s shoulder. “Not you.”
“They went together our last two years of school.”
I looked at the trio again, drawn to them. There was a quality in them—the men broad-shouldered, the woman slim-waisted, perky—a total physical confidence that comes with doing something well and for the pure joy of it. Ginny Carvalho’s stare was direct and challenging—possessed, I thought, of a hint of defiance. “Why does she look familiar?”
He glanced at me.
“I feel like I’ve seen her somewhere.”
“Have you been in the Storm Warning?”
“The waitress—Fran something.”
“Fran Albright. That’s her sister.”
“Fran doesn’t look this confident, though.”
“Fran always seems eager to please others and is never quite sure if it’s working. She went out to Colorado and had a marriage for a while, but it didn’t take any better than mine. She moved back a few years ago; now she and her old man struggle to make a
motel break even.”
“I thought her father was a teacher?”
“Used to be. He got out. He owns a motel out on the Old Cape Road. The place that time forgot.”
“The motel or the road?”
“Both.”
“Is Ginny still around? I’d like to talk to her.”
Van Owen was still for a moment. “You’d look a long time. She died—three or four years after that was taken.”
I studied the photograph again, as if trying to fix her in life. Her vitality in the image seemed to be the very denial of death. Outside, a fender creaked as the boat shifted slightly with the running tide. “What happened?”
“She’d been drinking and skinny-dipping one night. She washed in on Shawmut Point next morning. It was briefly investigated, ruled accidental. Her folks never really recovered from it. Her mom died a year or so later.”
“Was she swimming with other people?”
“Alone—according to one story, after gangbanging a carload of high school kids. I don’t know, though. No one ever came forward, naturally. Ginny’s drowning became one of those tales a town tells itself.”
“The evils of wanton behavior?”
“I guess so.”
“But?”
“But what?”
“I thought your tone left it open a crack.”
“Wrong. You’ve got to quit being a detective sometimes. She was a beautiful girl. We all had some fun times together. I’m sorry she went. End of story.”
There were other photos, other stories: old chestnuts of high school heroics, some shots of people riding waves. In one of these, the rider was in a crouch, just emerging from the large curling wave, his arms spread in a balancing act. “You?” I asked.