by Brad Smith
… Gauguin then struck up a friendship with Vincent van Gogh, with whom he shared more than just a talent for painting. Both men suffered at times from debilitating bouts of depression …
Dusty turned to look through the window into Travis’ bedroom. He was sound asleep, his face angelic beneath his curly hair. He was not all that angelic when he was awake, but he was a good kid. Dusty had managed to keep him on a straight path. So far anyway. It would get harder as he got older.
She looked again at the city. She’d come a long way from her days in the park, but she knew she hadn’t come far enough. Today had shown her that. It was bad enough that her six-year-old son was stepping over dead bodies outside his day camp. It was worse that Parson had shown up, dragging her past with him. Dusty didn’t need to hear about the goddamn cylinder after all this time. And she certainly didn’t need to hear that the thing could still be connected to her. She didn’t know if that was true, or just more of Parson’s intrigue. But she did know, if it was true, that she would stand to lose her freedom. When that happened, she would lose her son.
And that was the one thing that couldn’t happen.
* * *
Parson had dinner on the street level patio of a seafood place on Broadway and afterward he sat there watching pedestrians walk by as he drank cognac and smoked a cigar. He had left Cherry a voice message after his conversation with Dusty and he was waiting for him to call back.
His thoughts drifted to the Ford cabriolet in Argentina and when he was on his second brandy he called the dealer in Buenos Aires and offered him eight grand for the car. The dealer’s English was not great, but it was good enough for him to convey to Parson how deeply insulted he was at the lowball offer.
“You show to me disrespect,” the man said over the phone.
The conversation ended there, but Parson called back a half hour later and made an only slightly more respectful offer of eight-five hundred. One more phone call and they settled at nine thousand, a figure that still had the dealer whining as if he’d been held up at gunpoint, even though Parson suspected that the man had probably found the car in some backwater halfway up in the Andes, and paid whatever dumb goat farmer who owned it a hundred pesos to take it off his hands.
Parson was still thinking about routing the car through Colombia and using it as a mule, but it was a tricky proposition. Security was tighter than ever these days, and even an antique car from South America was bound to get a pretty thorough going-over. The days were gone when a man could stuff one of the tires with product and mount it back on the rim and run it through. Not only that, but if Parson loaded the car with dope, he’d be obliged to send it to someone else here at home. For a time he’d registered everything coming through customs in Jenny’s name but Jenny had been gone now for over a year, having left at Parson’s suggestion after he’d discovered her birth control pills hidden among her dozens of pairs of shoes in the walk-in closet. The discovery had convinced Parson that their differences were insurmountable—he had wanted a kid while she had been content to lie around the pool all day as high as a kite. She had gone to a lawyer who had made a lot of noise about Parson paying Jenny an exorbitant amount of money for their three years together. Parson had sent Cherry to discuss the matter with Jenny one night and he never heard another word from her or the lawyer.
His cell rang and he saw it was Cherry.
“Hey,” Parson said. “Where are you?”
“McMahon’s.”
“I’ll come there.”
McMahon’s was an upscale place up on Western Avenue, known for its steaks and its wine cellar. Cherry was sitting at the bar with a brunette wearing a tight blue dress. The woman was no more than twenty-five, Parson guessed, but then that was right in Cherry’s wheelhouse. He was forty-six or forty-seven now, but Parson had never seen him with a woman over the age of thirty. He wasn’t sure if women of that vintage were too old for Cherry or if they were too smart for him. Of course, women in their twenties could be just as smart, but then Parson had never seen any of those women on Cherry’s arm. He would be surprised if the brunette in the blue dress proved to be the exception.
Cherry had a pathological obsession with his looks. He colored his hair an unnatural black and he was constantly checking it in any available mirror when he thought nobody was watching, as if a single gray strand might reveal to the world what the world already knew. He’d already had a couple of cosmetic surgeries, although he would never admit to them. But Parson knew that he’d had his eyes done and his chin tightened. Cherry spent time in his own gym every day, working out with the ball players and the pretty-boy cops and firemen, and he liked to brag that his regimen kept him looking young. At times Parson was tempted to ask him which workout it was that had removed the lines from around his eyes.
Cherry was drinking bourbon on the rocks and the twinkie in the tight dress was sipping some frothy concoction with what appeared to be chunks of fruit floating in it. Parson sat and ordered a brandy. Cherry introduced the woman as Zelda. While Parson waited for his drink he asked Zelda what she did and she said she was going back to secretarial school that fall, her tone suggesting she’d taken time off from her studies to find herself. A few moments after that she excused herself to go to the ladies’ room. Parson suspected that Cherry had arranged for her to leave when he showed up.
“You talk to her?” Cherry asked, watching Zelda walk away, something Zelda did very well.
“Yeah.”
“And?”
“She told me to fuck off.”
“Sounds like her.”
Parson’s drink arrived and Cherry told the bartender to put it on his tab. “I’ll bet she was surprised when you told her they found it,” Cherry said.
“About the same as me,” Parson said. He took a drink. “She’s kind of bitter.”
“Don’t tell me that part surprised you.”
“No,” Parson said. “But she needs to learn how to move on. We did have some fun together. She still looks good too. Her body is tight as a dancer’s, must be all that construction. Got me thinking about the good old days.” He laughed. “I’m pretty sure Dusty wasn’t thinking about the good old days.”
“Well, she did go to prison,” Cherry said.
“Am I supposed to feel guilty about it? What was I supposed to do?”
“Nothing,” Cherry said. “Bad luck all around.” He finished his drink and signaled to the bartender for another. “So what happens now? You want me to try to find the thing?”
“No. We’ll let her do it.”
Cherry turned. “I thought you said she told you to fuck off.”
“She did,” Parson said. “But when she was leaving I told her that the dope could still be considered hers. The boat was in her name. Which means if it happens to fall into the hands of the authorities, she’s in deep shit. Deeper than before, maybe ten years deeper.”
“You tell her about Hoffman?”
“No. First of all, I don’t know for a fact that Hoffman has it. I got his word on it and his word isn’t worth shit. But if he doesn’t have it, he knows who does. And if a dumb fuck like Hoffman can figure out who found it, a smart girl like Dusty will too.”
“You think she’s going to tell you if she does?”
“No, I don’t. But you’re going to keep tabs on her, Cherry. You know where she lives and you know where she works. She’ll lead you to it. Remember, there’s one thing we have in common, her and I. Neither one of us wants the cops to get their hands on it.”
The fresh bourbon arrived and Cherry rattled the ice in the glass before taking a drink. He swallowed and nodded in agreement.
“One more thing,” Parson said. “Does Dusty have a kid?”
“A kid?” Cherry asked. “I don’t know. I just found her yesterday. Who knows? Maybe she got married.”
“No ring.”
“Why do you think she has a kid?”
Parson shrugged and let it go, as if he didn’t care one way or the other.
He looked past Cherry and saw Zelda in the blue dress coming down the hallway. “So, you putting Zelda through secretarial school come fall, Cherry?”
“Like I’m even going to know Zelda come fall.”
TEN
Kimball’s Point hadn’t changed much in the seven years since she’d been there, although there were a couple of new malls off the thruway driving in, with the standard box stores—a Walmart, Best Buy, Pete’s. The downtown area still looked prosperous though, despite the presence of the big chains. But then Kimball’s Point had a bit of a reputation as an artsy community, and that would account for that. There were craft stores, and cafés, and a number of galleries and antique dealers.
Pulling into town, Dusty had no idea where to begin, so she drove up and down the main drag a couple of times, and then just naturally was drawn to Fletcher’s Cove, back to where she’d started ten years earlier. She found Big Jim Cunningham on a trawler in his boatyard, tinkering with a sonar scanner. Dusty didn’t know how she would be greeted and she was happy to see the broad red face break into a smile.
“Aren’t you the stranger?” Big Jim asked. He was larger than ever, it seemed, his stomach straining the suspenders he favored, and since Dusty had last seen him he’d cultivated bushy red sideburns that made him look like a lumberjack in a television commercial.
“Hey, Jim,” she said, and allowed him to clasp her in a bear hug.
They had coffee in the wheelhouse of the trawler, a forty-seven-footer Big Jim had built himself decades earlier. Big Jim sat at the console and removed his cloth cap, revealing his bald head beneath, a wide expanse of pink, freckled skin that never saw the sun.
“The cost of fuel is the big thing,” Big Jim told her when she asked about the business. “You want to get rich, build a hybrid barge.”
Dusty smiled and took a tentative sip of the murky coffee. She was pretty sure that Big Jim hadn’t cleaned his coffeemaker since the last time she’d sat in the wheelhouse.
“So what are you doing, Dusty?”
“Working as a framing carpenter. Subdivisions, renovations. Shit like that.”
“I’m gonna take credit for that. I put that building bug in you.” Big Jim sat back in the captain’s chair and balanced his coffee cup on his ample stomach. “You like it?”
“I like it more than prison, but less than building boats.”
“Why don’t you come back?”
“I don’t know about that. I’m guessing my reputation is a little tarnished around here.”
Big Jim had a drink of the bad coffee; he seemed blissfully unaware of its vile nature. “People know you got screwed, Dusty. I don’t think anybody ever heard all the details, but nobody thinks you were alone on that boat that night.”
Dusty nodded. “Well, if I told you I wasn’t all that guilty, I’d have to tell you I wasn’t all that innocent either. So I’m not looking for the sympathy vote. I’m doing all right. Construction is … well, it’s constructive. You know?”
She gave the coffee one more chance before setting it discreetly aside as she stood and looked out the wheelhouse window. Big Jim’s yard was at the end of the cove and all along the recess boats were docked. Fishing boats, sloops, old tugs of indeterminate years. She sensed him watching her. He was a good man, a little on the square side, and he had always treated her well when she worked for him. He’d never had kids of his own and maybe that was a factor.
“So you just out visiting?” he asked.
“Yeah. You know me—I’m a people person.”
Big Jim laughed at that.
She turned. “You hear anything about some fisherman around here landing a steel cylinder?”
Big Jim took a moment, his eyes wary. “No. I haven’t heard about anybody finding anything like that. What’s this about?”
Dusty shook her head, as if to tell him she didn’t want to burden him with the truth.
“Last time I heard anything about a cylinder like that was seven years ago, and at that time there was a bunch of police divers looking for it,” Big Jim said, his eyes still on her. “You’re not looking for trouble, are you, Dusty?”
She walked over and kissed him on his pink head. “Funny thing about trouble. You really don’t have to go looking for it. You need a new coffeemaker, dude.”
After that she hit the marinas and the launches in the area, one by one, driving south along the river and then retracing her steps and heading north. It was a small community, and the boating world in and around it smaller yet. It was hard to believe that the cylinder wouldn’t be a topic of conversation. Of course, Dusty was fumbling in the dark here. She knew nothing of the circumstances surrounding the thing, the who and what and where of it all. Maybe it hadn’t surfaced near Kimball’s Point at all. It was at least a couple of miles from where Parson had tossed it.
And maybe it hadn’t been found at all. She had only Parson’s word on that, and Dusty wouldn’t trade Big Jim’s coffeemaker for Parson’s word. All she kept getting were blank looks when she asked about the cylinder, from boaters and bartenders and sunbathers and swimmers. Maybe it was just another one of Parson’s games, a way to creep back into her head. She still didn’t know how he’d tracked her down.
Midafternoon she found herself just north of the town. There was a small carnival setting up in the old fairgrounds across the road from the river. Just past the grounds, to the right, she saw a sign that said Brownie’s Marina and she took the turnoff.
Driving into the parking lot, she remembered the place, although it had been called something other than Brownie’s back in the day. She remembered the bar Scallywags too; its name hadn’t changed. She was pretty sure she’d gotten drunk there one or twice. She might even have been there with Parson.
She did a loop around the lot and parked. She sat in her truck, watching the tackle shop and the restaurant. She hoped she’d see an angler coming in off the river, but there were none. It was overcast and windy and the river was rough; there were whitecaps out beyond the pier.
There was a compound, enclosed with a chain-link fence, off to the right where a number of boats were dry-docked, a lot of them basket cases. The gate was open and near the entrance a man in a dirty captain’s cap was hunched over an old Mercury outboard, the motor hanging from the back of an aluminum punt.
The man gave Dusty a very thorough and somewhat lascivious once-over when she walked up to say hello. She was wearing jeans and a wifebeater and didn’t feel much like an object of anyone’s desire, but maybe the man’s contact with the opposite sex was rare. Even from twenty feet away he was pretty ripe, which would have contributed to that.
“Getting ready to go out?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he replied. “I get this damn old Merc to start.”
The man had the spark plug out of the motor and he’d been vigorously cleaning the electrodes with a wire brush when Dusty approached.
“You got spark?”
“Sure I got spark,” the man said. He screwed the plug back into the block and tightened it down. “Um … how can you tell?”
Dusty stepped forward and grabbed the starter cord in one hand and the loose plug wire in the other. She pulled the cord several times, felt nothing from the wire.
“Dead,” she told the man. “How long since this thing ran?”
“Last year.”
“Probably a dirty magneto,” Dusty said.
“That’s what I was thinking,” the man said.
Dusty knew it would be Labor Day before the guy found the magneto. She flipped open the clips on the motor’s cover and removed it.
“You fish around here?” she asked.
“All the time.”
“What’s your name?”
“Wally,” the man said.
ELEVEN
After Virgil did the morning chores he walked out into the wheat field north of the barn. The night before had been clear, leaving a heavy dew, and the heads of wheat were thoroughly soaked. It would be at least noon before the f
ield was dry enough to combine.
Virgil walked back to the house and changed his clothes and drove into the city. First he stopped at the DMV, then drove to the police station on Arch Street. He parked again in the lot a couple of blocks from the station, the lot where he had encountered Buddy Townes on his last visit. He didn’t see Buddy this time but, approaching the station along the street, he did see a man who looked very familiar scurrying out the front door. Virgil couldn’t make out the face but there was something about the body language that resonated. The guy was short and squat and as he hurried across the street, he put a cigarette in his mouth and tossed the empty pack to the pavement. He got into a brown sedan and drove away, but as he pulled into traffic he turned and looked directly back at Virgil.
And then it came to Virgil. The guy littering the street looked a lot like the guy who had stolen his boat. He might even have been wearing the same suit.
And he was coming out of the metro police station.
Virgil went inside and approached the front desk. The place was busy, unlike the last time he’d been there, and he had to wait ten minutes before he could talk to one of the two cops who were handling things. The officer he drew was large, red-faced with heavy jowls and wispy blond hair, which he combed straight forward from the back to cover a balding crown.
“Can I do for you?”
“I want to talk to Detective Malero,” Virgil said. “But I have a question first. You notice a guy in a brown suit, just left here a few minutes ago?”
“Did I notice a guy?” the red-faced cop asked.
“Stubby little guy in a brown suit. He just walked out.”
“I don’t know, pal,” the cop said. “I’m up to my ears. What about him?”
Virgil turned to the other cop at the desk, a woman with short dark hair. She was the one who had taken Virgil’s story the first time. She was writing something on a pad but she had clearly been listening.