Goofy Foot

by David Daniel

  At the time, my course had seemed clear enough. I was Gary Cooper in The Fountainhead: Stand on principle, don’t waver, and in the final reel you’re awarded the skyscraper contract and you get Patricia Neal. Alas, the badge was history, and so was Lauren. I put the envelope away but not the bottle.

  Two more fingers, one more swallow.

  The Lowell police blotter for the night of August 12, 1968, shows that Jack Kerouac was arrested for being publicly inebriated. In the line for occupation, the booking officer had jotted “writer.” I thought about the city’s pull on Jack. He’d gone elsewhere and had been lionized, but periodically he came home, and the past caught up with him. Just over a year after that bust he was dead.

  I was thinking about Lauren and about why she had left me, and I realized the fault was my own. She’d have stayed if we could have gone away and started anew someplace else, but I wouldn’t leave. Somehow time had a hold on me. It occurred to me now that in her leaving, in going to Florida after her own plans to remarry had fallen apart with the death of Joel Castle, she had taken a risk. I hadn’t. I’d stuck. For the first time, I saw clearly that fear had stymied me. I could rationalize all day, all week, forever, that a fisherman needed to know his water to work it with any success. But where was it written I had to stay in the PI business, noble seeker of truth? I could have become a dozen other things (don’t ask me to name them), but I hadn’t. Could I still?

  I knew she wasn’t remarried. And she’d kept my name.

  I began to feel better. I poured another knock of bourbon. I could call her, see where things stood. Then I could, if I wanted, announce my retirement, undergo the ticker-tape farewell that the city would insist upon, get on a plane and go to her if she’d still take me. Hell, I’d beg. Forget what Charley Moscowitz said about the Sunshine State; I could learn to love it. Jack Kerouac’s name was on a highway sign finally, and he was in line for having his handsome Canuck face on a postage stamp; I could get my ex-wife back. I rolled over my Selectric and was typing my report when the phone rang.

  “Alex?” Paula Jensen sounded a little breathless. “I’m glad you’re there. Ross called me after you two met.”

  “Do you prefer the functional résumé or the results résumé? Or should I post it on Monster-dot-com?” At her silence, I gave up the routine. “I’m preparing my report. I’ll have it to you in the morn—”

  “Oh, Alex, I’m sorry. I think he felt he had to do it. I think he felt pressured.”

  The hum of the typewriter was distracting me. I snapped it off. “By whom?”

  “It’s just a wife’s intuition. I told you, I get these inklings.”

  “Pressured by his firm?”

  “I don’t know. Someone powerful.”

  I gave it a beat. “Does Ross know Senator Cavanaugh?”

  “Personally? I don’t think so. Ross is Republican.”

  “What about a former judge who practices law now?”

  “I don’t know. I only know that I had my dream again, the one where I wake up and feel someone is dead—and I still don’t know who it is. I do know that Chief Delcastro has prom——to make a real eff——to locate Shelly. I’m sorry, Al, I tried to make a br——” She was on a car phone. “ … wanted to personal——thank—” The signal was breaking up like old ceramic tile, taking her away.

  What did you say to that? I said, “You’re welcome,” and hoped she got it.

  I cradled the phone and looked at Jensen’s check. It wasn’t chicken feed. I could still get to the bank before it closed and nest the money in my account, but I didn’t move. I was feeling instinctively that there was some underlying organization to everything. Okay, it was concocted of gut feelings and fragments of what I’d been learning in my seemingly scattershot approach to the whole investigation—and maybe toss in a jigger of Wild Turkey for inspiration, and a whisper of fear—but it was there. I couldn’t escape the feeling that somebody—Jensen?—had straight-armed me. Which was Jensen’s call, if he was the one; he was paying me. And Delcastro wore the badge and was sworn to uphold the law in Standish; he could push me out to the fringes of the case and take over the center. But I also couldn’t shake the nagging idea that the fringes were all there would ever be, that the heart would go unprobed because he had too many other things to do.

  So, why should I care? I’d been paid; I was well out of it. I didn’t need pushy attorneys or small-town cops. I didn’t need ghosts, from my own or anyone else’s past. I didn’t need a suntan for that matter, either. Or an attractive suburban woman friend who seemed to have everything but was starting to wonder why it wasn’t enough.

  But what about a sixteen-year-old girl who had vanished?

  That was the whisper of fear, and the thing I couldn’t argue myself out of, and waking up tomorrow with a hangover the size of Tewksbury wasn’t going to help. Suppose one day I picked up a milk carton and saw Michelle Nickerson staring at me and realized that, way back, when I might’ve had a chance to help her, I’d salved my conscience with money and let myself be scared away? I buried the bottle.

  I was pulling on my jacket when the phone rang. It would be Paula, calling back to say that Delcastro had found Michelle, or that Jensen had come to his senses and wanted me back on the job, or that she’d come to hers and she loved him with all her heart.

  The voice was a child’s. “Mister?” it said.

  “Hi. Who is this?”

  “You helped me fix my bike.”

  “Katie?” A shimmer of unease went from her voice and down my spine.

  “Can you fix something else?”

  I was gripping the phone too tight. “Katie, what’s wrong?”

  “I just got home from camp, and my mom’s not—” She broke off. “She’s pulling into the driveway now, but I just got a phone call. It was only for like a few seconds, but I know who it was. It was my sister.”

  25

  I got back to Standish in an hour, which is a lot easier to say than to do. The whole way, I was thinking about my thirty-second phone conversation with Katie Jensen telling me of her even shorter call from her stepsister and what Katie had asked me: “Can you fix something else?” Her mom had come on the phone in a moment, and with Paula serving as intermediary, we learned that the call had come in around seven-thirty. It had been brief—as though Michelle hadn’t had much time to talk, Katie thought. She’d asked for Paula or Ross, but neither was there at the moment, so she’d spoken with her kid sister. “She said she was okay,” Katie reported, “but she sounded like … scared. She didn’t say it, but I heard it.”

  When I pressed, Katie revealed that Michelle might’ve been on drugs or drunk. I was still holding the phone in a white-knuckled clutch. “Do you have any idea where she was?”

  “Uh-uh. But I kept hearing something in the background.”

  “What was it?”

  “Now I know,” the eight-year-old said. “Waves. I was hearing the sea.”

  “Good. Now, Katie, this part’s important. Did she hang up or did someone else hang up the phone?”

  “No … I think the signal faded. That makes a difference, doesn’t it?”

  I told Paula I was on my way to Standish. Neither of us mentioned that I was no longer working for the Jensens.

  Before I left, I slid open the bottom drawer where I kept the Smith & Wesson K38 Masterpiece. It was the off-duty rod I’d had when I was with the cops. I hadn’t upgraded when everyone else went to Glocks, because by then I no longer had a city’s budget cushioning the expense. Eight hundred bucks for a handgun was too rich for me. As the sign said, always out-manned, always outgunned. Which is why I left the .38 where it was whenever I could, which was most of the time—pecking into property-tax rolls didn’t require much firepower beyond Tums and Preparation-H. I took the gun out, along with a belt holster and some extra rounds, and stashed everything in my car trunk.

  It was dusk when I got to the Standish police station and found Delcastro waiting. Paula Jensen had called and
told him about the phone call and said that I was on the way.

  “This is strictly a police matter,” he said, “I hope you’ve got that straight. I’ve got officers combing the town, especially areas along the beach.”

  “What about the call itself? Can it be traced?”

  “Doubtful. Mrs. Jensen said it was from out of her area, according to her caller ID. It could’ve been anywhere. She could be on the road west. Isn’t that where Nickerson’s from now?”

  “I don’t believe the sea sounds were the Pacific.”

  “If it was sea sounds. We’re going on the suppositions of an eight-year-old.”

  “Who devours word sandwiches.”

  “What?”

  “I trust her,” I said. “And why go looking for another ocean when you’ve got all this ocean here?” I sighed. He sensed my frustration. He sounded confident, and I had no choice but to go along. “The other day you told me that Nickerson had once been arrested here,” I said. “What was the story?”

  “I told you that?”

  “First time we met.”

  He scratched at the blue shadow of his whiskers. “It goes back. There was a call; someone was trespassing over on Shawmut. Turned out it was Nickerson. He was poking around in a tide pool that was on private property. He didn’t want to leave. He would’ve got off with a warning, but it was a complaint call, and he seemed pretty keyed up. I think we held him overnight.”

  “Keyed up how?”

  “I don’t know. Boozed, maybe.”

  “Who lodged the complaint?”

  “For Christ’s sake, it was a long time ago. Details are fuzzy.”

  “Could it have been Ted Rand? He had a place out there, didn’t he?”

  Delcastro looked to be trying to remember but shook his head. “I couldn’t even tell you if it was. It’s unlikely. Anyway, charges were dropped next day. So if you’re thinking that Nickerson has a criminal past here, I didn’t mean to imply it. Now, so there’s no further misunderstanding, this is a police matter. If we get to where we need help with a search party, you’re welcome to join—as a volunteer. Meanwhile, the best way you can help is to stand back and let us do what we’re paid to do.”

  I saw no reason to reopen a turf war with him. He had his way of doing things, and I wasn’t going to get anywhere locking horns with him. He certainly knew the town better than I ever would. I told him how he could reach me if he had to and said I’d stay in touch.

  I drove out to the marina where Van Owen kept his boat. I saw lights aboard the Goofy Foot as I parked, and I could hear music coming from the cabin; it had a sixties sound, but I couldn’t name it. I hailed him from the slip, and after a moment the volume went down and he appeared in the hatchway, dressed in bathing trunks and a T-shirt. “What’s going on?” he asked when he identified me.

  “We need to talk.”

  He appeared to think about it, then invited me aboard. From the cabin came a drift of marijuana smoke. “I’m kind of busy at the moment,” he said.

  “I can smell.”

  He turned down the music. “So what is it?”

  “I have to know more.”

  “You know everything you’ve got a need to know. Trust me, there’s nothing else that’s related to what you’re doing.”

  “That seems to be everyone’s line.” I told him about my conversations with Ross Jensen and with Delcastro, holding off on Michelle’s phone call for now.

  “Well, there you go, then. There’s nothing you have to do but wait. Drink?” I declined. “You’ll forgive me if I have one.”

  I followed him into the cabin. He went forward into the tiny galley. I looked again at the photograph of him and Teddy Rand and Ginny Carvalho in her cheerleader uniform. He returned with a can of beer. “Tell me, the time you spoke to Nickerson on the phone,” I said, “did he say anything about his business? Or about his daughter?”

  “You’re not on the case anymore, remember? Nickerson said he wanted a surfboard. He said that he’d be here this month. That was it, period.”

  “Did he give you any reason for his visit after all these years?”

  “We didn’t swap nostalgic tales of yore or impart the secrets of our respective successes in life. Sure you don’t want a pop?”

  “Could he have come back to square something, set some old misstep to right?”

  “Man, you’re like a bulldog with a rag. I’ll settle for his squaring with me for the board, though what the hell? It won’t go to waste. Now, how about something a little mellower.” He set his beer can down and started to shuffle through a stack of CDs.

  I was getting no place with him. I picked up the photo of him on the big wave in Fiji, examined it a moment, then held it up for his view. “What do you see?” I asked.

  He took the photo from me and set it back on the table with an exaggerated patience, and went back to his music search. I said, “I’m glad you asked. It’s a subtle and penetrating question, Rasmussen, suggestive of a quick mind. I see a guy still doing it—not enjoying the ride much, but—”

  “Knock it off.”

  “—too scared to get off. Too beaten down by—”

  He turned fast, upsetting the beer can, which fell to the carpet and started to foam. “Shut up! You think you can come in here, a place you don’t know squat about, and start waltzing around stirring things up?”

  “Waltzing makes me sound a lot more graceful than I am.”

  “Well, people have got to live here, man. I’ve got to live here.” He slammed a fist onto the table so hard, the photograph flipped off and the glass cracked. “So why don’t you go the hell back where you’re from, before I make you!”

  “I’ve got things to do first,” I said.

  “You’re not listening. You’re not going to do anything, except haul ass.” With the heat and the sour air and my baiting, I should’ve seen it coming. I didn’t. His body hit me with the force of a sleep sofa. I had an instant’s understanding of how he’d come by his nickname, and then I was down and he was atop me.

  Standing, I’d have been a match for him; down here, though, I could barely move to free my arms. He punched me, but we were so close, the blow had little force. Even so, it sparked stars in my head. I couldn’t lie there and wait for a light show. Jamming my heels against the wall, I hipped hard and rolled him off. He crashed against the chair, and it was my turn now. I hit him twice in his stomach. It was like hitting a padded safe door. He grabbed a fistful of my shirt and shoved me.

  We battled this way for another minute, too close to be doing real damage, wearing each other down. Finally, we silently seemed to agree to a truce. We rose and sank into the facing chairs, breathing hard.

  “What the hell was that?” he said.

  “An advertisement for why women should be running things. Is that offer of a beer still good?”

  He roused himself and fetched a couple of cans. I drank half mine in a swallow and let out a belch. It seemed fitting after all that machismo. We scratched our armpits in silence a moment. “Tell me, you didn’t talk to anyone about getting me off the case, did you?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “Okay. I didn’t think so.”

  I filled him in on the phone call from Michelle, which had brought me back to Standish. “So she may be here,” he said.

  “The police are out looking.

  “And Ben Nickerson?”

  “I don’t know. There’s something going on in this town that I haven’t got a good feeling about. But I don’t know enough about the place.”

  He pondered this a moment, then drained his beer can. “Okay, Rasmussen. You don’t learn the easy way.” He ducked into a little forward berth and came back and tossed me a pair of swim trunks. “Those’ll fit. I’ll get my truck and meet you on the pier in a few minutes.”

  26

  I offered to drive, but he insisted. I wasn’t sure about his mental clarity, or my own, for that matter, but at least it was my own, more than I could say about
the swim trunks that fit me like a pup tent. I’d kept my shirt on for some dignity. We rode in silence for a time, before he drew into a rocky area amid some low dunes. Ahead was a fence with a locked gate and a sign like one I’d seen last night when I’d been with John Carvalho.

  KEEP OUT

  per order

  SELECTMEN TOWN OF STANDISH

  Time and weather, however, had effaced a couple of letters, so the bottom line now read ELECTMEN OWN STANDISH. Van Owen kicked sand at the sign. “A bit of truth in that.”

  I followed him up a low dune to where we could see land and water beyond. “Out there’s Shawmut Point—the place I told you about, where TJ and I drank Scotch one winter night and contemplated our futures. It used to be a summer colony, old wood-frame places.”

  A thought came to me. “Could that be were Michelle Nickerson called from?”

  “Unlikely—there isn’t much out there anymore. The old houses were grandfathered in, but restrictions on waterfront building made it near to impossible to upgrade them. After a while, it was too much hassle to own a house here. The big motivator though was the nuke plant across the water—you can just make out the top of it there. One by one, a bank acting for a conservation trust bought up the houses and bulldozed them. There were a few holdouts, old-money families that hadn’t used the places in decades but who went on paying taxes—you get old Yankees’ backs up, they dig in like surf clams and can’t be moved.”

  “So what happened?” I asked, getting a sudden inkling of meaning that stretched beyond what I knew.

  “If memory serves—which, by all rights, it should not—one place was trashed by unknown parties, another caught fire. Owners got the idea and eventually sold, and before you could say ‘property rights,’ it was illegal to be out here. Delcastro will likely check it out, but it takes a four-wheel drive and deflated tires to get anywhere.”

  I thought of Iva Rand’s remarking that her husband owned Standish. “Was either the bank or the trust named Ted Rand?”

  He looked at me. “In some form or other. Now he’s gotten around DEQE regs and is building an exclusive compound of homes, along with a seven-hundred-acre golf course. I’m told that’s sizable. I know golf like you know surfing.”