by David Daniel
32
Andy Royce, the real estate agent, was sitting at a desk reading a book by Tony Robbins. He hadn’t gotten very far in it yet apparently, because when he saw me he didn’t hop to his feet and gush optimism. He had already tagged me as a perpetual window-shopper. “Hi, there,” he said blandly.
“I believe you’re the man with the commercial solutions,” I said.
Now he pulled himself out of his chair and came over.
“You’re the listing agent for the old Surf ballroom at Nantasket Beach,” I said.
“Boy, you’re running on a tank of bum luck, fella.” His headshake was all sympathy. “That place was on the market two years, and I finally just moved it the day before yesterday.”
“Really? I missed again, huh? Who finally bought it?”
“Leased it, actually. Ted Rand did. He took it for twelve months.”
“Is he planning to bring back disco?”
“Down the road, who knows? He’ll make it a gold mine, whatever he does. For now he was just eager to get the keys. He said something about storage.”
I made gentle stabs with a few more questions, but he wasn’t in the know. “What can you tell me about the Cape Way Motor Lodge?” I asked.
“If you can afford better, don’t stay there. It used to be popular, oh, twenty years ago, when people liked the idea of housekeeping cottages. It had a bunch of little units folks could come and stay in for cheap. But the highway yanked most of the traffic off that old road, and when John Carvalho took it over, he let things go. He’s a bit of an odd duck, John.”
“None of the personality of Ted Rand,” I said.
“Not by a mile.” Ditto for Andy Royce’s sense of irony. “But you want to hear a funny thing? Guess who that property used to belong to.”
“Rand?”
“He let Carvalho take it cheap.” Royce grinned and shook his head in wonder. “Now there’s a man with his finger on the pulse. Point Pines is going to make him richer than God. We’ll all benefit. Property values are gonna go over the moon. Now, if you’re interested in a business opportunity in town, I’ve got a dry cleaner’s that’s coming up for sale. And a landscaping service.”
I told him I’d think about it and be in touch. “What happened to your head?” he finally asked.
“A little fender bender. No one else hurt.” Starting out, I had a thought. “Curiosity. Did Carvalho buy the motel before his daughter died?”
Andy Royce thought for a moment. “After is how I remember it.”
My headache, at least, had settled into a dull ache by the time I got out to the Cape Way Motor Lodge. The neon sign was winking away in the hot daylight like a weak pulsar in a lonely galaxy, and I understood for the first time Van Owen’s line about the place that time forgot. In back of the motel building I saw Carvalho’s old wagon, but the white Toyota was gone, as I’d hoped it would be. Fran Albright was a lovely and dutiful daughter, but overprotective of her father. A grown man had to able to make his own mistakes.
I went to the door of their small Cape and knocked. To my left, beyond a wooden fence, I saw the dog rear its head. Then, without so much as a snuffle or a bark, it lunged. I knew it was chained, but even so I took a reflexive step backward. “Down, Gruff!” I ordered, and to my surprised relief it obeyed. “Nice, Gruff,” I cooed.
I knocked again. I put my face to the door pane and peered inside. The floor-to-ceiling stacks of yellowing newspapers seemed almost to teeter inward over an angular passageway, like the stage set of a 1920s German film. I half-expected to see Conrad Veidt come somnambulating from among them wielding a hatchet.
I jumped. Carvalho was standing three feet to my right. He’d come up without a sound, astonishing for a man of his bulk. I smelled him, though: an effluence of sweat, sour clothing, and bottled fear. His small eyes looked hostile. In one hand he held a galvanized bucket full of soapy water and a scrub brush. His other hand gripped the .44 Python at his side.
“I’m just here to talk,” I said.
“Don’t have the time for it.”
“A few minutes are all I need.”
“I’ve got nothing for you.”
A droplet of sweat crawl down my temple. Around us, small dragonflies flitted in the heavy air, the thin bright blue ones that we used to call darning needles when we were kids. The story was they’d sew your lips together if you told a lie. If true, it was going to be a silent world soon; people had been telling me far too many. “Come on, John,” I said, “let’s talk.”
He didn’t oblige as his dog had. He studied me, his round heavy face impassive, small eyes dull. It was an ugly stone of a face. It was hard for me to imagine how he’d ever made pretty daughters. But he had.
“I can call the police,” he mumbled.
“I don’t think you’d bother. I don’t imagine you’re a big fan of Vin Delcastro’s.”
Sometimes a key goes into a lock and nothing happens, and you realize you’ve made a mistake. But sometimes the lock is old, and the key hasn’t been in it for so long it takes time to find the tumblers. Carvalho was silent for a full minute. Longer. He set the bucket down. He didn’t put the gun away, but at last he grunted for me to come in. I mopped my face and followed him.
The place was as dim and claustrophobic as the first time I’d been there, shadowed at the margins by the great heaps of newspapers, as if time had been stored there, walled in and completely forgotten. I realized I needed to get him back there. Opting to believe that he wasn’t going to shoot me in his own home, I walked ahead and into the nook he used as his headquarters, with its maps and pyramid eyes, its radio and police scanner, and the big cubby-holed desk—a haven for lonely believers. “Just so you know,” I said, “I’m carrying.” I drew aside my coat to reveal the butt of the Smith in my belt holster, then covered it again. I pulled over a chair and sat. Hesitating at my show of stubbornness, or foolhardiness, he settled heavily into his own chair.
“Talk about what?” he asked, only the faintest spark of curiosity in his eyes.
“Before your daughter drowned in September that year, what was she like?”
His carbuncled face seemed to strain with incredulity. “What does that mean—‘what was she like?’ What the hell are you sayin’?”
“Had anything changed? Different habits, new friends?”
“I don’t know what you’re after.”
I didn’t know either. I was free-falling, totally unsure of where I would land. “Had she gained weight? Lost weight?”
“She took to swimming.”
“Swimming?”
“For exercise. She’d taken this notion of being a fashion model. My wife told her she wasn’t built for it. She wasn’t one of those bony wisps you see in the ads. She was a healthy-sized girl. Athletic and sturdy. She took to swimming and eating healthy.”
“And she was swimming the night she drowned,” I said.
His face wrinkled like an old tarpaulin. “What else?”
An alternative was that she was partying with a bunch of high school guys, as one story had it. Or was there another alternative?
“Vin Delcastro found her early next morning, didn’t he?” I said, going through the details that were still fresh in my mind. Carvalho nodded. “It was after Labor Day,” I went on, “when the force would be small, so a young patrolman would’ve handled everything, right? Including the follow-up investigation.”
“So?”
“Was there an inquest?”
“You mean … ?”
“For an accidental drowning, wouldn’t there have been an autopsy?”
He drew his mouth down in a thin, surprised line. “If so, I never heard.”
“You never asked?” The sharpness of my words made him flinch. More gently, I added, “No one ever explained?”
His eyes were pained and vulnerable, and water glistened in the corners. “I was a teacher in the junior high school, part of the community … It’s hard to speak up, maybe make trouble …”
“What kind of trouble? For whom?”
“For me … for anyone. I only wanted my girl back.” I felt sorrow coming from him, leaking from his pores with his sweat. “She’s in the graveyard, and her mother beside her.”
I glanced around the cramped space: at the desk with its many drawers, at his filing cabinets. “Would you still have a newspaper that carried the story?”
He shook his head. “I don’t want to remember that.”
“It might help to.”
“No. I don’t have anything like that.”
And yet he could document each column inch of every crackpot idea ever hatched by the nutboxes who dreamed up the worldwide plot to control us all. I thanked him and rose to go, then realized I still had one question. He listened and frowned. “Ginny never mentioned any Nickerson. Only one she ever talked about was Rand’s boy. Seemed like no one existed for her but him. It gave her heartaches when he left town for the service.”
Carrying the Python, he trailed me back out through the labyrinth of old paper. I opened the door and stepped out, and nearly kicked over the bucket. Soapy water sloshed over the rim. He drew the screen door closed between us. I said, “I’m sorry I had to bring all this up.”
“You’d do well not to come out here again. It’s not safe.”
“Because?”
“The bigger battle goes on.”
Wheels within wheels: the man’s circling mind kept returning with paranoid fascination to his hunt for the grand theory that would explain it all. Crazy, I knew, and yet, as I drove away, I couldn’t let go of the growing feeling that there was another kind of conspiracy going on right here in this beach town. Seeing the old man hadn’t cleared up any mystery, nor told me where Michelle Nickerson was, but it had given me an idea.
33
I stopped at the police station. The missing girl was still my reason for being. Delcastro was off duty, but Ferry was there, crisp and intent despite his long hours. He got up and came to the counter. He had found the arrest report on Ben Nickerson that I’d asked for. “You were right about the time frame. It was nineteen years ago—and it was for trespassing. He was above mean high tide. Landowners are allowed to own down to the high water mark, below that is public land. If he was arrested, it means he was higher up the beach. He insisted he was looking for seashells and marine life. He was held overnight, and then charges were dropped. It seems a bigger case came along, a drowning.”
“Who was Nickerson’s arresting officer?”
Ferry grinned. “Patrolman Delcastro.”
“He was a busy man.”
“He certainly was. He was destined to make chief.”
I was wasting irony again. I didn’t tell him about the dates. Had Nickerson been looking for specimens and found something else? A tentacle of something cold coiled up from my belly. “Was the drowning victim named Ginny Carvalho?”
Ferry looked surprised. “How’d you know that?”
“Was there a coroner’s inquest?”
“If so, there’s no indication of it here.”
“But wouldn’t there have been? An accidental death? The state requires it.” I tried to remember if that had been true twenty years ago.
“I’m not sure. It seems likely.”
“Could you check for me?”
“I should clear it with the chief.”
Who would pour cold water on it—or a bucket of smoke. Ferry spread his hands on the counter. “What’s this all about, Mr. Rasmussen?”
I hesitated. “In your law enforcement courses, is it all straightforward? Procedures, law, science?”
“Mostly that. I’m taking statistical analysis next term.”
“Do any of your instructors ever talk about gut feelings, instincts?”
“Well … yeah, sometimes. One of them used to be a Boston PD detective.”
I nodded. “In answer to your question, I’m not really sure what this is about. But again, could you check on the autopsy for me?”
He hesitated, fingered his sparse blond mustache, and then went over to a filing cabinet. He looked for a few moments, opening several drawers. He stepped back shaking his head. “There’s no trace of it here. In fact, there’s nothing on that drowning incident at all.”
Paula was at the beach house. I told her that I needed to go to Lowell, and she asked to go along if I could drop her at her home. I made a quick phone call, then we locked up and left. It was just after 1 P.M. On the ride, I filled her in on some of what I’d been doing; I didn’t trouble her with all the stuff that seemed extraneous to finding Michelle. When we got to Apple Valley, she said she could arrange to use Ross’s car, and told me to hang on to the Blazer for as long as I needed it. Before she got out, she hesitated a moment, then gave me a hug. I hugged her back. It seemed to be something we both needed. On the way over to the city, I got Ed St. Onge on my cell phone.
“What’s going on down there in Quaintville?” he asked.
I didn’t have the inclination to tell it all, or the luxury of time. Maybe some of the Ted Rand shorthand was in order. “Do you know John Milton’s Paradise Lost—the part about man’s fall from grace?”
He grumbled. “You know I don’t, for Christ’s sake. John Milton.” I could tell the taste of the words was making his face pucker. “You sound like one of those phony library-shelf detectives, where the guy’s a working stiff who goes around quoting Shakespeare and all these literary illusions.”
“Allusions,” I said.
“Who cares? The world doesn’t run because of people like that. It runs because people in crummy offices, with tired feet and driving cheap cars, go out and find answers that add up, and are ready to do something about them.” He sputtered to silence. After a tentative pause, he said, “What about Milton?”
So much for shorthand. “Who?” I told him I might need another favor.
“I’m in the market for a few myself.”
“I know,” I said. “I owe you.”
“That’s money in the bank.”
“If I need you to, I want you to call the police chief in Standish and vouch for me.”
“And say what?”
“You’ll know.”
“And if he asks how you left the job?”
“Talk to him cop to cop.”
“You overestimate this fraternal network idea. Assuming I was disposed to say a good word, what makes you think people in one jurisdiction talk to people in another any more than sanitation workers do? Or school secretaries?”
“I guess it’s the existential nature of the work. Riding out there on point all the time does things to people, bonds their souls.”
“You’ve got to quit watching TV cop shows.”
“I just need him to believe I’m not some flake. Maybe it’ll keep him from arresting me before I can put this all together.”
“And I’m your spokesman?”
Ed St. Onge, who could spot an out-of-date registration on a license tag at forty yards on a rainy night but missed the bigger meanings of life. He grunted but said he’d make the call if I needed it—but it would have to be soon; he and his wife were leaving tomorrow to visit their daughter in New Mexico. I gave him the Standish PD number in the event. Before I could end the call, he asked, “You know the one about the raccoon that got across both sides of a divided highway?”
“What?”
“True story. This raccoon managed to scamper across both sides, eight lanes. Only, on the far side was a chain-link fence. And that’s where he ended up, dead.”
“Is that a homily of some sort?” I asked.
“Hardly. You’ve got to watch that last fence.”
Woody Allen kept me covered with his carved-soap gun. Beyond the door I heard the scrape of a police lock being dragged aside, a fitting noise amid the wrecking yards and the restless prowling of mean dogs. Charley Moscowitz opened the door, finger-combing his damp pompadour. He was dressed in fresh jeans and a white shirt. “What happened to you?”
I realized he meant my face, more than my being late. “Genetics, environment, I’m not sure.”
He didn’t chase it. He shut and locked the door behind me. “I was expecting you earlier. I’ve got a date.”
“Sorry, I was an hour away when I called you, not counting a few detours.”
“When Hitchcock was making Lifeboat, he told Max Steiner he didn’t want music. ‘They’re in a lifeboat,’ Hitchcock said, ‘where’s the music coming from?’ Steiner says, ‘You tell me where the cameras are coming from, I’ll tell you where the music is coming from.’” Everyone had stories for me today. I didn’t press him on his point.
“Okay,” he went on, “I called some people I know on the South Shore, and one told me a guy came in yesterday and tried to sell him a dark blue Grand Cherokee. No name given, naturally. Anyway, this isn’t my thing. You can try yourself. The place is Mandino’s, in Scituate.” It was the town next to Standish. “Ask for Waxy. Now, this other …” He waved me in back and unlocked one of the old cabinets and brought out a shotgun. For a moment I thought he’d fetched the wrong one—the barrel glowed with blueing and the wood shone—but it was the same. He’d rasped away the worm-eaten portions and oiled it, replaced some screws, but the shotgun looked like a genuine antique.
“It’ll shoot?” I asked.
“And it won’t kick like an Arkansas mule—as long as it’s hanging over the fireplace, next to your rocking chair,” he added with heavy emphasis. “You getting this?”
“Wouldn’t miss it. Got any shells?”
“Serves me right for waxing sentimental.” He got a box of twelve-gauge double-O buckshot shells and clumped it on the desk. “How many you want?”
I scooped the box into my jacket pocket, which sank the hem on that side practically to my knees. He gave me a scrutinizing frown. “You know what you’re doing, right?”
“Yeah,” I lied.
“You got about five yards.”
“Come again.”
“To take a man down. Anything beyond that, you’re out of luck.”