by David Daniel
“Yeah. I saw Mitzi Dineen running around like crazy doing her thing. And the high school looks like it’ll have a decent football team for the first time in years.”
“How’s Fran Albright doing?”
“Fran’s good. She sold that white elephant. Somebody wanted the land. They’ll knock the buildings down. She’s going to open a little coffee nook in town.”
“As long as she charges the cops, she should do okay.”
We went on for a few minutes, but he was growing restless, with Atlantic Casualty right behind. He picked up one of my cards and put it in his pocket. “Take a bunch,” I said, “hand them out to everyone you see.”
I walked him downstairs. We stood in the shadows of buildings, amid the scurry of passersby and the noise and fumes of traffic, and he looked around, checking out my city.
“And what about Standish’s fabled surfer dude?” I asked. “Notice I saved him for last?”
“I’ll be heading west in a few days. California, for a start. I’m looking for something different.
“A beach without footprints? You’ll find it.”
He lifted his head in a silent laugh. He didn’t look so certain, but he seemed adjusted to trying. We shook hands. “If I do,” he said, “I’ll let you know; you can come visit. I’ll teach you how to hang ten.”
I couldn’t cap it and didn’t try. The image of that was too ludicrous to imagine.
August sunshine fell through the canopy of a clear afternoon sky, painting all the old buildings on Market Street in dusty hues. I stood outside the Ale House, waiting, when I saw a deep red Porsche Boxter pull up in front. Paula Jensen got out of the passenger side, and the car rumbled off. She was wearing a flower-print summer dress that showed her suntanned shoulders, and she moved with that coltish grace I’d seen the first time I’d met her. Spotting me, she smiled, and I reached to shake her hand, which she ignored and gave me a warm hug and a kiss. I think I glowed.
“Was that Ross?” I asked.
“He’s going to find a parking spot. He’ll join us.”
“New car?”
“A gift to himself. His firm won that case.” It had been in the papers, along with all the news about how Michelle Nickerson had been found safe, apparently sheltered against her will by a deluded man who’d believed her to be in danger. Part of his delusion, it was suggested, may have grown out of his loss of his own daughter in a drowning accident years ago and a misplaced desire to protect the young: “Holden Caulfield syndrome” a psychologist was quoted as saying. “Unfortunately, we can’t stay long,” Paula said. “Ross is meeting a client at the Red Sox game tonight, and I’ve got to get back for the kids.”
“How are they?”
“They’re just great.” She smiled and met my eyes with clear sincerity. We went inside and caught up quickly.
“Ross’s big case is over, thank God. I’m hoping we can do some family things. I’m sure once he relaxes …” But she wasn’t sure; I heard it in her voice now, as I had when she’d phoned to say let’s all get together for an afternoon bite.
I told the hostess our party was almost complete, and she seated us in a booth by the window overlooking the narrow cobblestoned street beyond a window box full of flowers.
“And how are you, Alex?” Paula asked.
“Curbside seats when I request them. Geraniums. I’m a king in my realm.”
“Is that all I’m going to get out of you?”
Her gaze was steady, inquiring. It was customary, in my experience, for people to forget your name when you’d finished a job for them. They came to you in a time of turmoil, when they were at their weakest, and afterward they wanted only to forget. I respected that Paula had called and insisted that we all get together, but now I almost wished she hadn’t. Or that I had begged off. “I’m okay,” I said. “Busy, too.”
She watched me, her blue eyes asparkle, examining me as if looking for something she’d misplaced or lost. Abruptly, she glanced outside, and I realized she was looking to see if her husband was coming. He was walking up the block, neat in a tan summer-weight sport coat and dark slacks. Paula reached and took my hand and gripped it. “I know I don’t need to tell you again,” she said, “but I’m so grateful for what you did. What I do want to say, or try to is that … in ways you may not know, you saved my life.”
A hundred lines rose in my mind, where I left them. I gave her hand a squeeze and then let go. In a minute Ross appeared, loping over like a big grinning schoolboy. I shook his hand, and we did the man car-talk thing for a moment. He said they could only stay for a drink because …
“I explained,” Paula said, and we all laughed, and the talk slipped back to the level where everyone operated most of the time. When our drinks arrived, Paula excused herself to go to the ladies’ room. I stood, and seeing me do it, Ross shuffled to his feet, too. When she’d gone, Ross reached into his coat pocket and took out an envelope and handed it to me. For a moment, I thought it might be Red Sox tickets, but I saw several crisp new bills with 100s on the corners. I put the envelope down.
“You guys paid me already.”
“Take it.” He pushed it toward me. “From me.”
“No, I can’t. You’ve already been generous.”
“You got answers. Call it a bonus. I got a little windfall myself.”
I smiled; I liked an understatement, too. “Thank you, Ross, but it’s not necessary.”
“Give it to a charity, then.” His tone was insistent. When I didn’t take it, his eyes narrowed. “What’s your problem?”
I tried to lighten it with a little laugh. “Maybe we should be drinking Fog Cutters. Paula sent me a check. It cleared. It’s in my bank account already. I’m satisfied.”
“Are you?”
“I don’t follow you,” I said.
“I doubt she really knows what you accomplished. I have a better appreciation of these things.”
“Because you’re a man? And she’s only a woman?”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“No, what did you mean? What’s going on?”
Stow it, Rasmussen, I told myself, or you’re going to regret it. Be graceful, take the money; pay off your old parking tickets with it. But I didn’t listen. I reached into my inside jacket pocket and took out the photograph, the one that Grady Stinson had given me, and handed it over. Ross looked at it a moment, and I had the thought that I’d been wrong, that he would ask me who the woman was and where I got the photo. But then I saw him redden slightly. He ripped it in half and then again and put the pieces into his pocket. “That’s over,” he said. “It has been for a while. It was a mistake.”
He puffed a breath and sat back, his gaze drifting away to something only he saw. I glanced outside. The Porsche was parked a little way down, in a no-standing zone, as bright as a fire truck, not a cop in sight. Neither of us spoke for a sluggish moment. Then he asked, “Did Paula give you that?”
“No. As far as I know she never saw it.” He went on staring at me. I said, “What’s the point?”
“What?”
“The object, the goal—the raison d’être?”
“You mind telling me what the hell you’re talking about?”
“Is it to become a partner in the firm? Blankety Blank and Jensen.”
“You think that’s small change?”
“No, but in the end, what’ve you got? A win-loss record? A tally of how much money you’ve made for your clients, for the firm? What’s the net? How much you jack up the other guy?”
His hand clenched. “You put a sock in it right now, pal! Or I will!”
I was holding my beer glass way too tight. “I’m saying that when they log your name in the book of hours, the only testament you, or anyone, has got is the pride and the passion in what you’ve left behind. Doesn’t matter if it’s the azaleas, or wooden decoys you carved, or the afghan you knitted. It can be a book of poems, or your own good name. But it can’t be just about money, or sitting
in the best seats.” He’d started to draw away; I actually reached and clasped his coat sleeve. “You won’t miss anything. I sat at Fenway that October night in ’75—along with the two million other folks who swear they were there—when Carlton Fisk danced his clout fair in the twelfth, and the miracle kids took Cincinnati to game seven.”
He pulled his arm free. His face looked as hot as his new car. “Your alleged point being?”
“If I’d never seen another game, I wouldn’t have missed a thing. The Sox will take you close but will always trounce your heart, because they know your love’s unconditional. But who cares? Good arms give out, toys break. The river flows, as a philosopher bartender I know might say. Your girls won’t be eight and sixteen forever.”
Jensen’s lean jaw locked. His hand on the table was a fist. If he was going to hit me, this was the moment. I waited. He didn’t swing. “What the hell do you know about it?” he hissed. “Have you got children? Huh? You don’t even have a wife anymore, do you.”
I glanced outside and felt the last of my anger cooking away, and realized that the one I was angry at most was me. I lifted my glass and took a drink and set the glass down carefully in the wet ring it had made on the plank table. “You’re right,” I said. “Forget it.”
44
“Did you see it yet?”
Fred Meecham stood in my office doorway, waving the mail, including the day’s edition of the Sun. “Page nine,” he said.
I’d expected page one. “Local PI Is Hero” or some such. News had come through that a body found on a Cape Cod beach had proved to be Ted Rand’s. But I looked at where Meecham was pointing, and there was my paid ad, “Alex Rasmussen Investigations,” right under an ad that read “Say Good-Bye to Unwanted Hair Forever.”
“Well?” he said, grinning expectantly.
“Some people want hair. Couldn’t it be put up for adoption or something?”
“And with the press you’ve gotten for closing that missing kid case?” he went on, jived on his own excitement. “You got the answers you needed. Your capital will definitely rise.” He laid the paper on my desk, along with the junk mail, and split, leaving me to my joy.
I didn’t have to tell him that every answer raised new questions. Okay, Ted Rand had become lower man on the food chain and had gone to his separate doom, but how was Iva Rand? And TJ? Would they be all right? I didn’t know. I did know that Nickerson’s company had been sold to pay off his debts, and that Rand’s had gone into receivership, its large assets frozen. I guess I was rich in comparison. I knew that Point Pines was on indefinite hold, the legal and real estate wrangling likely to take years to sort out as the lawyers pulled sad, serious faces and shouldered the burden. I knew that at the state house, bugs would be scurrying, as they always will when someone rolls over a rotten log and lets the blaze of daylight in, and some of them would be looking for work come November, but others, the quickest, would squirm to cover and live and breed for another time.
What would happen to Michelle Nickerson and to Fran Albright and to Officer Ferry? I didn’t know that either. I did know that there are monsters in the world. I knew that all of us are sometimes fated to go around the wheel for another turn or two, hoping to get something right that so far we’d only gotten wrong. I was on that line, ahead of quite a few others. But that was metaphysics, not anything you could take to the bank. I was tired. I’d been beaten, chased, shot at, damn near drowned. I’d come within a whisker of losing my life, my license, and my self-respect. I was sore. I needed a rest. I went through the mail: the same stuff that turns up in your mailbox and that gets the same response. There was a flyer from a writing/correspondence school that wanted me to tell children’s stories for lucrative markets. Would anyone be interested in the tale of a sixteen-year-old child whom a bunch of grown-ups had very nearly lost. I balled up that idea and tossed it away fast. The letter I was waiting for, the one granting me immunity from financial worries and future woe wasn’t there. There was a postcard from Vancouver.
“Dear Alex,” Paula had written, “Canada is friendly and beautiful. We may drive down the coast to San Francisco. Ross has extended his vacation. Can you believe it? Kids are great. Happy August. Fondly, Paula, Ross, Michelle and Katie.” A PS in another handwriting, which I recognized as Ross Jensen’s, read “Dawn rising slowly over Marble Head. Thanks.”
Seemed everyone was going someplace, I thought as I locked up the office at lunchtime. Maybe that’s what I needed to do: take a vacation. Yeah, maybe that’s just what I’d do. I went by Tony’s Pizza, but the sign on the door read “See You in September,” so I went down the block to a sandwich counter. I sat on a stool in the window and watched the traffic passing and people walking by. I gazed at the sunlight on old brick, which was like beauty itself. But underneath the surface, I knew, there were people in bad trouble who didn’t always know where to turn. I’d hold off on the vacation for now. Maybe when the leaves flew or when the frost came …
For Rand, all had become spoiled, because he’d been the spoiler. No amount of money could ever change that. Sure, there was ample cause to grow weary of the stupid violence, the frauds and the tricksters and the bent men, the lost women, the sad, tired streets, and the bitter aftertaste of human travail, but still and all, it was a pretty good old world, no denying, where sometimes dreams came true. I had another cup of coffee, and when I figured I’d given enough time for folks to read the newspaper and see my ad, I went back. The lobby of my building was musty and welcoming.
Other Books in the Alex Rasmussen Series
The Heaven Stone
The Skelly Man
Other Books by David Daniel
Ark
The Tuesday Man
Murder at the Baseball Hall of Fame (with Chris Carpenter)
White Rabbit
GOOFY FOOT. Copyright © 2003 by David Daniel. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
Thomas Dunne Books.
An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.
www.minotaurbooks.com
eISBN 9781466822054
First eBook Edition : May 2012
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Daniel, David.
Goofy foot : an Alex Rasmussen mystery / David Daniel.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-312-32349-2
1. Rasmussen, Alex (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Private investigators—Massachusetts—Lowell—Fiction. 3. Lowell
(Mass.)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3554.A5383G66 2004
813’.54—dc22
2003058550
First Edition: February 2004