Goofy Foot

by David Daniel

  I hauled open a window and emancipated several days’ worth of trapped heat and an exasperated bluebottle, which bumbled out into the city day. St. Onge peeled off his sport coat and tossed it on the chair. “You ought to take a vacation from this,” he said.

  “Are you paying? Didn’t think so. Anyway, on Hollywood Squares, they asked, ‘What goes down after a two-week vacation?’ Know the answer?”

  “Goes down?”

  “Gets lower, yeah. Guess.”

  “Bank account? I don’t know. Blood pressure?”

  “IQ. People come back dumber than they went.”

  He frowned. “But it comes back, right? Once the challenges of the job return?”

  “This was Hollywood Squares, not Nova. The point is I’m a one-man think tank. I can’t afford the brain drain. Take a seat,” I said. “Something cold to drink?”

  He took neither. He gestured at the manila folder he’d given me in the lobby. “The kid you asked about is Ross Jensen’s stepdaughter.”

  “I know.”

  “Then why the hell—?”

  I was surprised, too. “You know Jensen?”

  “You could say that. He cost you and me tax dollars, and Grady Stinson his badge.”

  I sat down. Stinson was a patrolman who’d been suspended after a complaint from someone who said the cop broke his arm during a traffic stop. “Jensen brought that case?”

  “His firm.”

  “Randolph, Blinkman and Bearse.”

  St. Onge sat, too, and gauged me a moment, probably trying to see what else I was holding from him. The truth is, I hadn’t known who had represented the plaintiff, but it came to me now. It wasn’t the first complaint in Grady Stinson’s file. “The city settled out of court,” Ed said. “I heard one-point-something. Stinson’s still on suspension pending a job hearing.” St. Onge shook his head. “Between us, it isn’t going to happen for him. He was walking toward a deep hole for a long time. I’ve got no tears. But I hate to see the dirt thrown onto good cops, and I don’t like seeing the city bleed bucks it needs for important things because some gang of pinstripes gets greedy.”

  “I’m just looking into a missing kid, Ed.”

  St. Onge grunted. “Jensen’s?”

  “Off the record. His stepdaughter.”

  Ed ran a hand over his graying mustache. “I didn’t hear about it.”

  “That’s how the family has wanted it.”

  “Domestic?”

  “It may be. She was on vacation with her father. I’ve been down on the South Shore, trying to backtrack them.”

  He nodded. “Cops down there in—where the hell is it?”

  “Standish.”

  “—they doing anything?”

  I told him how it stood with Chief Delcastro and his crew. He listened and made sounds of empathy and wished me luck. As he started out, he paused and frowned at the water-stained ceiling above the door. “Won’t the landlord fix the roof?”

  “Right after the elevator and the AC. I give Rorschach tests in my spare time.”

  “Keep wisecracking, one of these days the tiles will start dropping on your head.”

  “The whole universe is in entropy, Ed. Why should I expect special treatment?” I picked up the manila folder. “Thanks for this.”

  “What the hell, if it’ll help you find the kid. Plus taking some of Ross Jensen’s money can never be a bad thing.”

  I gave my morning’s mail the five seconds it deserved, put my attorney neighbor’s batch in a separate pile and made coffee. I went through the file Ed St. Onge had left. It was the police report for the night that Michelle Nickerson and three other juveniles and one eighteen-year-old were picked up after a concert at the Auditorium. There was also the case’s disposition. Beyond a loitering charge for the adult, later dismissed, no charges were filed.

  In this business, when leads are scarce, you give up or you keep scraping the pan. I called Bob Whitaker across the street at the Sun and laid out what I was after. He said he might have something, why didn’t I drop by in an hour when he took his break. I told him I’d bring lunch.

  I tracked an address and phone number for Grady Stinson. As with too many cops, his domestic situation and his home address were subject to change. He was currently rooming in a place over in the Lower Highlands. I dialed it and got a man with a voice like a rusty damper grating in a chimney.

  “Stinson?”

  “Who’s this?”

  I told him and mentioned that we’d overlapped on the LPD for a few years. “Oh,” he said. “Yeah.”

  I told him what I was after.

  “Can’t yap right now, bud. I’m on my way to the golf tourney.”

  Suspension with pay was good work if you could get it. “How about later? Have you got any openings?”

  “Come three o’clock I always get thirsty. Know where the Mill Stone is? On Decatur, off Moody?”

  I said I thought I could find it.

  Remembering a mental note, I opened my closet and retrieved the old sawed-off twelve-gauge I’d inherited. It didn’t seem quite so ugly as it had the day before yesterday, maybe because it wasn’t pointed at me. Mostly, it just looked grimly efficient. I took a pair of running shoes and sweats out of a gym bag and put the shotgun inside and zipped the bag up. It could pass for a fungo bat. I took it down to the parking lot behind the building and locked it in the trunk of my car, then went around the corner to the pizzeria.

  “Ehh, my friend!” Vito called out when he saw me. We shook hands and I told him my visit was strictly food-related. I ordered a pair of sandwiches for take-out. In the Sun I checked the box scores for the Spinners, the Red Sox farm club that the city was crazy about. When Vito brought over the sandwiches, wrapped to go, along with a large antipasto salad I hadn’t ordered, he waved away payment. “Just to tell you, I’m going to have a dealer look at—” I mimed pulling a trigger. “If it’s worth anything, I’ll let you know.”

  “Whatever you say, Mr. Rasmussen, it’s good with me.”

  I walked over to the Sun, whose headquarters building faced mine in a flatiron across Kearney Square. I had told Bob Whitaker about Michelle Nickerson’s having been picked up with some other kids in February for loitering. At his desk in the newsroom he opened an envelope and took out an eight-by-ten photo. It was of Michelle Nickerson, playing field hockey.

  “The name rang a bell when you told me, so I checked my shoot notes and realized I’d taken some team stuff at a game in Apple Valley last year.”

  She had her mother’s looks: delicate features and shining hair, a little defiance in the mouth, a lot of uncertainty in the eyes, which, though the black-and-white didn’t show me, I knew would be pale blue. Maybe Red Dog Van Owen could tell if she was a natural athlete from a photo, but I couldn’t. “Would you have anything from the police roust?”

  “Only a mental image. I recognized her as the same kid. I didn’t shoot anything that night—hell, they were children. If they keep coming back for more, my heart quits bleeding, but what kid doesn’t make a mistake? Her father’s Ross Jensen, no?”

  “Stepfather.”

  “I happened to be at the cop shop that night when he came in to get her. He was doing a controlled burn, one of those things when the mouth goes a little wobbly and the ears get red from the pressure inside, but the words and the mannerisms are all checked and civil. When do guys like that blow off steam? Clapping at a polo match?”

  “Do you recall what she looked like that night?”

  He nodded at the field-hockey shot. “Different from that. Hair as flat black as auto primer, whitish skin, ring in her eyebrow—you know the look. Goth. Black T-shirt and skirt, black tights, a pair of Docs.”

  “Docksiders with black tights?”

  “Martens.”

  “Right.”

  “I could hear the ‘That does it, young lady’ talk coming, but she seemed as if she knew it, too. I liked her spunk. Hang on to that if you want.”

  I slipped the p
rint back into the envelope. It filled a gap between what the Jensens had given me and the Polaroid Red Dog Van Owen had supplied. I was assembling a gallery of photographs, but I wanted to find the girl.

  Back across the square, I paused before the window of World Wide pawnshop. I wondered if the shotgun would yield a few dollars, but I didn’t go in to find out. I peered in at the cheap wristwatches and fourteen-karat jewelry, beat guitars that hadn’t seen action since Gerry and the Pacemakers, jackknives, hot plates and bowling trophies. It was the detritus of troubled lives. In Ross Jensen’s world, stuff merely collected in garages and basements; here it was turned to meager cash to pay the rent, to buy a drink, or a bus ticket out of town. And yet trouble had invaded the Jensens’ world, too. No one was immune. I still had a couple hours before I saw Grady Stinson. I got my car and drove over to south Lowell.

  This was the plug-ugly side of the city, with its rusty rail yards, soot-stained warehouses, boiler works, steam plants, stagnant canals, and, a little farther out, more graveyards than in Transylvania. The brick buildings all had a glum air of entrenchment, and the horizon was pricked by tall stacks that had last blown smoke when Reagan had, in his cowboy getup, shilling for cancer sticks in Collier’s. Students from the U. sometimes trekked over with notebooks and mini tape recorders to sample real life and write papers for Sociology 101. If Bukowski were still kicking, he’d make a poem of it, but he wasn’t and it wasn’t—a poem, that is. It was blackened structures, and vacant lots with last-month’s news yellowing crisp in the high weeds, and crapped-out lottery tickets, like the windblown hopes of life’s original survivors, the losers. It was a district of gang graffiti and vicious dogs caged behind chain-link, some with four legs. My car stood out by having tires. Somewhere, a pile driver was hammering, shaking my fillings as I got out, and the wind blew cold, even in July.

  Some things in life don’t change. Charley Moscowitz, for one. He was the son of a Lowell Greek who’d married a Lowell Jew. In the backyard, beyond a corrugated sheet-metal fence, rose a ziggurat of cubed rust. Moscowitz’s living was scrap metal; his passion was guns. He operated out of a Quonset hut with tin signs for makes of car that hadn’t rolled off assembly lines since Iacocca was in knickerbockers. Charley was out back, lying in a nylon-mesh chaise, holding one of those winged aluminum reflectors under his chin, so that his face glowed with otherworldly light. “You take that thing in trade?” I greeted.

  He lowered the contraption and sat up, squinting as his eyes focused. “Somebody pinch me. Can it be? Lowell’s finest.”

  “I don’t carry a badge anymore.”

  “That’s what I’m saying.” He sprang out of the chair more spryly than his sixty-odd years ought to allow and took my hand in a vise grip. “Sunlight’s good for you,” he said.

  “On Neptune, maybe. Here it causes cancer—they just found that out about twenty years ago.”

  His dark hair was combed in a pompadour you could have surfed on and was only faintly threaded with gray—and he did have a hell of a tan, I had to give him that. “Come on inside.”

  The building was equipped with rebar over the windows and an alarm system. FORGET THE DOG: BEWARE OF OWNER, read one sign and, to show he was full of good humor, PREMISES GUARDED BY—and a taped-on picture of Woody Allen from Take the Money and Run, holding a gun carved from soap.

  “Lowell’s finest PI,” he said when we were in, as if he were trying to immortalize it. “I tell you, I sleep better knowing you’re out there, Rasmussen.”

  “Me and Woody.”

  “I’m not just talking this neighborhood. Crime keeps getting uglier all over.”

  “I hear retirement in Florida is still a good value.”

  He scowled. “What do I need Florida? I dig it here. I was brought up in this neighborhood all my life.”

  “I like it that I don’t have to keep pulling your card off my Rolodex and throwing it away.”

  “Sunshine. You could use some, brother. You’re light. Okay, we kibitzed enough. What brings you? I know you ain’t got old jockstraps in that canvas sack.”

  I set the gym bag on a long worktable, unzipped it and drew out the sawed-off shotgun. “I came into possession of this recently.”

  He licked his lips and ran a hand across them a few times, but he didn’t reach.

  “Is it any good?” I asked.

  “Not to win beauty contests, it ain’t. Set it down there a minute.” He stepped over to an oak rolltop desk and pulled up the top with a clatter. Inside he found a visor with a magnifying lens built in, the kind that aging dentists wear, and he put it on. He drew on white cotton gloves. Now he did pick up the shotgun, handling it with care, turning it over, microscoping it with his eyes, which had become the size of beer coasters. He didn’t say anything for a few minutes, and I let him look. I looked.

  The office was vintage, from the rolltop and the black rotary-dial telephone to the big water carboy in the corner with the pointed paper cones. Even the pinup calendar on the wall looked quaint, July’s buxom nudie discreetly wrapped in a ribbon of Old Glory. The hat rack was home to a solitary pearl-gray fedora with dust in its crease. Add a brass spitoon and the place could be closed off with a velvet rope: “American Office, circa 1935.” The desk had a warren of little cubbyholes that I’d have bet were stuffed full of old shipping tags and yellowing bills of lading for cargoes that had reached their destinations lifetimes ago. In some drawer, perhaps, secured with a crisp rubber band, was a stack of faded index cards that, if you could shuffle them in just the right order, might solve all our enigmas. Behind the wainscoting, mice nibbled the cheese of time. I felt as if I was slumming in an earlier decade. It was nice, but the present was calling me back.

  “How’d you say you got this?” Charley Moscowitz asked.

  I hadn’t, but I told him now. I knew that neither the story nor the gun would end up anywhere it wasn’t supposed to. “A cop friend said it hasn’t been flagged in any crimes. Nothing recent, anyway.”

  “Entirely likely. Some of those downtown shops look the way they did during Prohibition. Proprietors used to keep their own peacemakers against the strong-arm that went down—and I’m not just talking crooks. There were bulls on the force you wouldn’t bring home to Mother, unless she was Ma Barker.” He looked at the shotgun again. “Decent workmanship went into this. Some sawed-offs there are steel filings all over ’em, and you just know the missing barrel’s still clamped in the owner’s basement vise, waiting for the cops. Even Mark Fuhrman could make that case.”

  Charley ran a white-gloved hand over the shortened double barrels, and, aside from some rust, it came away clean. Likewise with the breech. “I’d venture to say it’s never been fired.” He took off the gloves and scratched some of the corrosion off with his thumbnail. “Did you see this?”

  I squinted and made out a year etched into the metal: 1928.

  “Parker Brothers was out of Connecticut,” he said. “They produced a line of sporting arms, then, the early thirties or thereabouts, they quit. I think Remington took them over. A good firearm is like a good violin.”

  “And plenty have been carried in a violin case.”

  “If it’s cared for, it keeps making music.”

  “Is that a good one?”

  “It’s no Stradivarius, and it’s chopped, but, yeah, it was good. Cleaned up, it’ll work fine.” He took off the visor and turned his normal-sized eyes on me. “You want it should work?”

  “I’d like to have it cleaned.”

  “Who you planning to shoot?”

  “The wolf at my door. Would a gun collector be interested?”

  “There are some. People are into quirky things. Restored, you’re looking at maybe a grand.”

  I whistled. “For a sawed-off?”

  “If it’s had a colorful life, maybe more. Bad guns, like bad girls, have a following.”

  “How much to restore it?”

  “Let me do the work first. Later we’ll talk.”

  It s
ounded okay to me. If it sold, I told him I’d go threes with him and with Vito at the pizza shop. “You want a down payment?” I asked.

  “What down payment? I’ve got the gun, don’t I?”

  He walked me out, taking his sun reflector with him to go back to work on his George Hamilton tan, but the sky had grayed. He glowered up at it. “Figures.”

  From my car I pointed at the sign with Woody Allen on it. “You should get Chuck Heston.”

  “Nah. That name makes a dirty pun in Greek, you know.”

  “Heston?”

  “Very dirty.”

  I didn’t know, and I didn’t ask to be let in.

  23

  You can live in Lowell a long time and never know all the barrooms, and if you tried, you wouldn’t live a long time. There’s logic there; I just can’t express it right. The Mill Stone was a rat hole on Decatur, between a twenty-four-hour Asian market and a rooming house with an improbable striped canvas awning over the door. More improbable was the name—the Ritz Manor—but the ersatz dignity didn’t hide the laundry blowing from clotheslines on the side porches of the triple-decker. A neon sign in the bar window gleamed on the shadowed sidewalk and said FINE FOOD & CHOICE LIQUORS. A little past three o’clock I stepped inside and waited as my sudden blindness faded.

  Half a dozen souls were arrayed along the bar. Off to one side were a Keno screen and an Instant Action lottery machine, both unoccupied for the moment. Grady Stinson sat alone in a booth, wreathed in cigarette smoke. My notion was that perhaps Stinson might have a motive to come back at the lawyer who’d kept him out of uniform. I started having doubts as soon as I started over. Though only five or so years older than I, he had the potty physique of a man who takes his exercise on a barstool. There were patches of stubble on his sunburned cheeks and scabs on his nose and chin, as if someone had taken out divots at Pleasant Valley that afternoon. I x’d him off my possible suspects list. He’d have been no match for a feisty sixteen-year-old. He took a deep drag on the butt and squashed it in a foil ashtray.