by David Daniel
19
With daylight dwindling, I drove down the meandering Route 53. Before the highway was built, this had been the primary road to Cape Cod. Now it was a string of old and bypassed small businesses: a sail-maker’s, a dry cleaner’s, auto repair shops, a flower nursery with several old broken-paned greenhouses doing a brisk business in weeds. None of the enterprises looked very prosperous, a theme that was picked up by the Cape Way Motor Lodge. The sign had a catchy little red-and-yellow pulsing-light pattern, but there weren’t many eyes to catch. As I turned off the engine and opened my door, I felt the silence.
The motel was a long one-story unit with about twenty rooms. The stucco exterior looked mossy. I counted three cars in the lot. A short distance beyond the motel building, set back from the road, was a small house. Parked in front were a new Toyota Celica and a Dodge station wagon that could have worn an antique plate. Much farther back on the property were eight or ten tiny housekeeping cabins, no lights on in any of them. Fran Albright had made a point of my being here at nine-fifteen, and I was.
As I reached the door, I heard a jingle in the tree shadows off to my right and saw the shape as it lunged. Luckily it was on a short chain. It looked like a pit bull that was on steroids, or had eaten someone who was.
“Gruff! Get down!” a woman called from the door. It was Fran Albright, who recognized me from earlier. “Best come in quick,” she said.
“Is he hungry?”
“No, it’s the bats.” She glanced nervously over my head. “They see the light and they sometimes fly in.”
I checked my vicinity for aerial bombardment and went inside. She shut the door quickly behind me. She was still in her waitress uniform and apron, minus the oilskin hat.
“Gruff?” I asked.
“Isn’t that dumb? He came with it when my father took him in as a stray. I wanted to call him Lambert. Remember him? The sheepish lion?”
“Gruff doesn’t seem sheepish or leonine.”
Her pretty smile was tired. “Come through here.”
The room was dim, crowded almost to the ceiling with stacks of old newspapers, as if they had been saved for a Boy Scout paper drive that had never occurred. They gave the house a musty scent and me a sense of claustrophobia. I followed her through and into a small adjoining den. The wallpaper looked as old as the newspapers, and gauze curtains hung before a picture window that hadn’t seen a squeegee since Nixon, but the rich finale of sundown forgave a lot of sins.
“Please have a seat.”
I sat gingerly on an old foam-cushion davenport covered in coarse flowered-print fabric. From somewhere else in the small house I could hear radio voices. Fran untied her apron and set it aside. In the yellow light, she could have been an older version of the girl in the photos on Van Owen’s walls. She was actually the younger sister by several years, but her clock hadn’t been stopped as Ginny Carvalho’s had. Now there were time and miles and a broken marriage on her, but they gave her face character, and her kindness some meaning. She moved quietly to a doorway and drew aside a drape. “Dad, Mr. Rasmussen is here.” She glanced back at me. “Am I saying that right?”
“Perfectly.”
“One moment.” She went through the doorway. On a bookshelf below the window was a row of thick binders bearing dates on the spines, going back I saw, to the early nineties. On a lower shelf were more newspapers and some literature from right-wing groups. Fran Albright reappeared. “Come on through here.”
The inner room looked to have once been a small alcove or a breakfast nook. It was a home office now, with a desk full of drawers, a large old computer, and a world map. A thickset man sat writing on a yellow pad, his big hand crabbing along slowly. The radio I’d heard was an old Admiral on the shelf above him, and alongside it was a Bearcat police scanner.
“Dad, this is Mr. Rasmussen. My father, John Carvalho.”
“Make it Alex,” I told the man’s back.
“Dad.”
After another moment of scribbling, he turned. His face was round, with a bulb of nose and small suspicious eyes. He was in faded green twill work clothes, his thinning brown hair combed across his large head. He had a humped shoulder, and his hands were stubby and powerful and looked to be studded with warts or carbuncles. I wasn’t sorry not to shake one. He studied my investigator’s license with silent intensity. There are worse sights than the pasty flesh of a man’s leg showing at the bottom of his pant cuff, but none came immediately to mind.
“You’re not with the gub’ment?” he said.
“Strictly independent.”
“Who’s Eugene Horsman?”
“Who?”
He was staring at the ID. I looked above his thick thumbnail at a scribble of official signature. “You can read that?” I said.
He tried the name aloud in several variations, then turned to his keyboard and poked at it awhile. Names came on the screen, a long alphabetical list, and scrolled down. There had to be several score of names.
“There was a V. Ramsey Horzmann in the State Department,” he said. “Different spelling, but we know how they change them. Don’t forget Rosenfelt and Cantor.”
“Who?”
“Franklin D. and John F. Puppets.”
“Look, this is just a PI license. I pay the Commonwealth five hundred bucks a year for it, and they let me sit in my office and play gumshoe. I don’t think there’s any connection to—”
“That’s what they want you to think.”
His daughter turned down the radio. “Dad,” she said patiently, “I don’t think the gentleman wants to get into that. He’s here to ask about Ginny.”
“The Commission,” Carvalho went on. “They control every message on every television broadcast, Hollywood picture, and highway billboard. Let’s not even talk about the World Wide Web.”
The woman gave me a look of plea. “He listens to those radio call-in shows all the time—Lush Rimjaub and that late-night kook. All that jittery, fear-mongering … Dad’s convinced there’s a world conspiracy.”
“The Tri-Lateral Commission is a proven fact,” he said evenly. “The illuminati.”
“Well, let’s see if we can be helpful to Mr. Rasmussen, Dad.”
I was having my doubts they could be, but I explained that I was trying to get information about a young man Ginny Carvalho had gone to high school with.
“Ben Nickerson, Dad,” Fran added quickly. “I told you.”
Carvalho was silent awhile, then murmured, “Show him.”
She directed my attention to a photograph on a bookcase. It was a color-tinted portrait of the beautiful young woman I’d seen in a photograph on Red Dog Van Owen’s boat. Ginny was short and dark, in a long dress, holding a corsage. There was a rosary looped around the picture frame.
“That was her prom picture,” Fran Albright said. “She went with Teddy Rand.” Fran smiled. “They were king and queen that year. TJ was so handsome in his tuxedo. And Ginny—”
“She was our firstborn, but our baby just the same,” Carvalho said, his eyes not meeting mine. His voice sounded hoarse with old pain. “This place I bought off Mr. Rand. Before the highway went by.” And all the travelers with it, apparently. I thought he might go on, but he leaned over, peeled up a corner of the drawn shade and peered out at the twilight. “We’ve got a little window now. I want to show you something.”
I looked at Fran Albright, who shrugged. “He wants to take you on a field trip.”
“Wait here a minute.” With a grunt, Carvalho heaved himself out of his chair and went through the drape-hung door.
Fran stepped closer and whispered, “That’s about all he’ll ever say of Ginny. I honestly don’t know what to tell you about Ben Nickerson or his daughter. I certainly hope they’re okay.” She hesitated, then said, “Ginny was … adventurous. She had an idea about being a fashion model. She probably could’ve—she didn’t have the long thin body, but she was adorable, and she had plenty of spunk. It tore us up when she died. My mom’s he
art was broken in two.”
I nodded sympathetically. I wanted to ask about the story of Ginny’s being with a group of boys the night she died, but it wasn’t the moment. Carvalho reappeared holding a large handgun that gleamed with oil.
“Dad, is that necessary?”
He raised it, and she glanced at me. “He has a permit,” she said.
It was a .44 Colt Python, enough weapon to stop a water buffalo, though not my first choice against bats. He swung open the chamber and inspected the load, then snapped the weapon shut and put it into a leather holster belted on his thick waist. I looked at his daughter, who was watching him with concern, but she kept silent. He led the way back out through the roomful of stacked newspapers and outside. He unchained Gruff, who took only a passing sniff at me before lunging into the backseat of the geriatric Dodge wagon. I climbed in beside Carvalho. Out of habit I reached for a seat belt, but there was none. We drove east, toward the descending edge of night.
I noted that he had a police scanner here, too. With its volume down I could hear only the faint garble of voices. His preference for sound was the dashboard radio tuned to some syndicated AM talk guy, with open lines to the heartland crazies. Host and callers shared that odd combination of ultra right-wing, libertarian and white male paranoia, and spun out history about as accurate as a drive-by shooting. Listening to them was the aural equivalent of boils being lanced. “Can we lose that?” I said. Carvalho winced, as if I’d asked him to sever an artery, but he turned the volume lower, at least, to where it blended with the scanner in an unintelligible mutter. “Where are we going?” I asked.
“Shh.”
I brought up TJ Rand and Ben Nickerson, but I got even less response, so I clammed up. In the years since the Dodge had rolled off the assembly line, Detroit had gone to building them small enough to fit three in this baby’s spare-tire well, and then to building them a ton heavier than this and three feet taller. This represented some kind of a mean between extremes. It had its shifter on the column and a dimmer switch on the floor, where Carvalho would click it with his toe, the high beams tunneling the dusk on the narrow winding road until he would kill them at the approach of an occasional oncoming car. He didn’t have to do it often. We drove for about three miles, the land opening up in a coastal plain, with salt marsh astir in the soft wind and tidal streams gleaming like copper snakes in the fast-fading light, and then Carvalho slowed and turned onto an unpaved road. He babied the car over the rutted dirt, but even so the shocks clunked and my teeth rattled. When we came upon a weathered barn, he drew into the yard and shut off the motor.
“Bring these.” He handed me a pair of binoculars. He opened his door and got out. I did, too. I slung the binoculars around my neck. I wasn’t sure what to make of Carvalho’s carrying a weapon, but I wanted to keep my hands free, at least. He left Gruff in the car with the windows partway down. The dog seemed to know the drill. It leaped into the front seat and sat alertly by the steering wheel and didn’t so much as twitch as Carvalho started off on foot.
The barn was straight from Charles Addams, with a tilted cupola and a weather vane. Swallows swooped in the dusk. Beyond, at some distance, in deep grass, a large boat sat on a wooden cradle. The boat hadn’t seen paint or varnish—or the ocean, for that matter—in a long time. There was a suggestion of a pathway through the grass. I remembered the Lyme disease alert I’d seen in the town hall, but Carvalho didn’t seem concerned, so I pushed my worry aside and kept my attention on his broad, slightly humped form. After a few minutes, the path joined an unpaved road. It was soft sand, deeply rutted on both sides by the passage of four-wheel-drive vehicles. Just ahead of us, a cable, slung between two posts, blocked the road. Carvalho stopped. From the cable hung a sign, whose dark words I could just make out against the pale background: KEEP OUT per order SELECTMEN TOWN OF STANDISH.
Carvalho drew his watch close to his face. “I wait till now,” he said, his breathing labored from walking. “It fouls their cameras.”
“The selectmen?”
“But it’s not dark enough yet for them to use the night scopes. Satellites, there’s nothing for that but timing.”
I looked around, wondering who they were. He stepped over the cable and started along a faint path through the high grass. I trailed him up a dune. From the top, where it sloped down to a stretch of beach, he pointed. Across the water lay a dusky strip of land and the silhouettes of several buildings, including a mound-shaped one with lights winking along the top.
“They almost got us on that one. Use the binoculars.”
I did. I realized I was looking at the Pilgrim nuclear plant.
“Notice the lights?” he said.
“To warn off planes.”
“Look again. See the pattern? Imagine an eye on top.”
“An eye.”
“The pyramid on a dollar bill? The illuminati?” The Commission again. I let the binoculars dangle. “They’re messing with my mind,” he said. “Because I know.”
“What is it that you know?”
He peered again at his watch. His fear seemed to be intensifying. He kept looking around, like a skittish hound. I wasn’t crazy about the thought of him packing the loaded Python. I pointed to a jut of land off to the right. “What’s that?”
Carvalho shuddered, as if with cold, or revulsion. “We’d better get back.”
“Is that Shawmut Point?” I pressed.
He glanced skyward, his brow clenched. He looked like one of the hunching figures in Picasso’s Guernica. “Satellite will go over in three minutes.”
I glanced at the sky, too; I was getting a contact scare being with him. I did see a small bat fluttering past, but I didn’t fear it. Taking a chance, I said, “Isn’t that where your daughter was found?”
His small eyes seemed bright with emotion. For a moment, the paranoia, the gun, the big dog faded away. He was just an old man, still in pain over a lost child. “We need to be moving,” he murmured.
I took a few steps closer to him. “Do you know where your daughter was swimming when she drowned?”
“Drowned. Yeah, that’s the way they put it.”
“Wait—who? The high school kids?”
He slanted a look at me: disappointment or anger—or both. “That was disinformation. The ones who killed her planted that. Come on.”
My heartbeat quickened. “What people?”
He was growing frightened, a sensation that was spreading to me. “Mr. Carvalho, are you saying someone murdered your daughter?”
“We’re almost out of time. We’ve got to go.” He looked skyward again. His broad dome of forehead was slick with sweat. Wind stirred the brittle dune grasses. “They’ll be switching to infrared.” I heard a chord of true panic in his voice.
“Please, what did you mean?”
But he was moved by other terrors now. He pushed bluntly past me, his thick legs churning through the sand, back toward the high grass. “Come on!” he cried.
He drove in taut silence, his eyes scanning his mirrors. Warm from exertion, I loosened my tie. I had sand in my shoes. I turned the little handle of the vent window and pushed it out and let the night air stream in at me. Once a car approached and Carvalho clicked off his high beams; when it passed, he stomped the floor button again as if he were firing a salvo of heat-seeking missiles at an unseen enemy, and the beams stabbed the night again.
The Cape Way’s VACANCY sign looked hopeful, but it was a fading hope. The only living things drawn to it were moths, and maybe the occasional bat; the rest seemed all about ghosts. The parking lot was mostly empty. The forlorn cottages loomed palely at the edge of the woods in the back a moment before Carvalho turned off the car’s lights. He put his dog into its pen. “Good-bye,” he said emphatically, letting me know my questions would go unanswered. “Word of advice,” he added from his doorstep. “You ought to get another car.”
“One of these days. Where I’m from, though, I’m still ahead of the curve.”
I
n the pulsing red-and-yellow light, he looked shocked. “I mean older. You don’t know about that? Everything built from ’87 on, the government installed a chip. In case they want to mobilize. Never mind the fact that Arabs will soon control every gas pump in the country, that’s irrelevant. One central switch someplace in a cave in Utah—they hit it, and bango. The highways are full of dead machines and helpless citizens, and the black helicopters come. Sitting ducks.”
“Been on the X-way lately?” I said.
“Eternal vigilance, Mr. Rasmussen.”
20
It was going on ten o’clock when I found Maple Street, a tree-lined road west of the town center. Part of me wanted only to go to the beach house and sleep; another part wanted to get back to Apple Valley and speak with the Jensens; but I was curious, too. Ted Rand had said there’d be an assortment of outsiders and locals at his soiree; maybe I could find some answers to my growing list of questions. I knew which house was Rand’s by the way a kid in chinos and a teal Izod shirt came jogging out and practically wrestled the wheel from the driver of the BMW ahead of me. A second kid, same uniform, was slower getting to me. I climbed out and let him take it. “Nice ride,” he said under his breath, but he seemed ready to forgive me when he caught sight of the 8-ball shift knob. He whacked it into gear and wheeled the Ford away in the Beemer’s dust.
The house was an old colonial, agleam with floodlights that lit its white brick facade. There was a modern addition blended to the main house with such inspiration and skill, it was hard to tell it hadn’t been part of the original structure. A pretty woman in a soft green summer dress greeted me at the door. I gave her my name. “Ah, y’all are the detective!”
“Look who’s talking.”