by Lee Harris
—
Jack and I went outside after dinner, talking about what we would cook for Joseph, what we should show her, how we would cover the mirror in the upstairs bathroom, as Aunt Meg had covered the one in the house we now own and live in for all those years I visited once a month as a nun. We sat on the deck in the cool sea breeze and I felt very lucky that Melanie hadn’t been able to use her uncle’s house, that this enormous luxury had dropped in our laps.
It was cool this evening, cooler than it had been since our arrival, a sign of the fall to come, and there were few people below us on the beach. A couple of hours ago Tina’s body had been wheeled on a gurney to the bay, where it had been placed on a boat belonging to the sheriff’s department. Marti had come by earlier to tell us.
We had brought out a tray of coffee and cake and a glass of brandy for Jack, who was enjoying the last days of his first vacation in a long time. Monday he would head back to the Sixty-fifth Precinct in Brooklyn and resume his job as detective sergeant. And next week I also would return to my job of teaching poetry at a local college not too far from where we lived. In other words, summer would be more than officially over; it would be over in fact. I didn’t look forward to leaving Fire Island. I had never had a vacation as sumptuous and restful as this one, or as inexpensive. I was happy that Jack had been able to spend all these days with his son, to indulge himself. When he returned to work next week he would also return to law school four nights of the week. There would be no more lazy meals, late-night brandies, afternoon naps, reading for pleasure.
“I tried Dodie’s number again,” I said, as Jack poured the coffee. “No answer.”
“She went somewhere else. Or she’s not answering the phone. Looks funny either way. I’d guess Springer’11 have her car in the alarms in the morning.”
“You think Tina killed Ken Buckley?”
“I don’t know what to think. Where’s the gun?”
“She could have taken the ferry back to the mainland and tossed it during the trip. Then came back without it.”
“That’s a possibility. I think we’d’ve found it if she had it in the house.”
“Did you look in the crawl space?”
He thought about it. “I didn’t,” he said. “Maybe Springer did.”
I looked out over the beach. A dark figure with a lighted cigarette was moving towards us. “We may be getting interesting company,” I said.
The figure came closer. “Evening, folks,” a familiar voice called.
“Good evening, Chief.” I stood and went to greet him. “Will you join us for coffee?”
“Gave up coffee a long time ago.”
“Maybe brandy,” Jack said, rising. “I’m Chris’s husband, Jack Brooks.”
“Nice to meet you. You’ve got a lovely wife and a real cute little baby. Now I see who he takes after. What was that you were offering?”
“I’ve got a bottle of brandy here and some pretty good cake.”
“They both sound good.” He settled into one of the chairs. “Nice cool evening. Feels a little like autumn. Guess I’ve managed to clock another summer.”
“You’ve got a lot more, Chief,” I said. “You just took a long walk to get here.”
“I like to walk at night. The beach is empty. It’s quiet. If you haven’t seen the moon over the ocean, you haven’t lived.”
Jack came back with the bottle, a glass, and another plate and fork. He poured the brandy and the chief took a sip and closed his eyes.
“Reminds me of good times,” he said. “These are very bad times right now.”
“They are,” I agreed. “The murder was just down the street from here.”
“That was a nice young lady, a nice girl, if you’ll permit me to use an old-fashioned word.”
“She seemed very nice.”
“A quarter of my age and she’s gone. If I felt terrible when Ken died, how can I even explain how I feel now? Little more than a child and this happens to her.”
“Did you know her, sir?” Jack asked.
“I knew her. Not too well, but I knew her.” He put his glass down on the little table next to him and looked straight at me. “I lied to you, Chris,” he said. “I told you I didn’t know Tina, but I did. Knew her since July.”
I felt a tingle in my arms that was not from the cold night air. He had come to tell me what I had been trying to get out of him since Tuesday. “Will you tell me about it?” I asked.
“I’ll tell you now that it’s too late. I’ll tell you what I know but it ain’t much. She came to me one day in July, can’t tell you exactly when, a weekend probably. That’s when you see the groupers mostly. Said she was renting a big house with a group of young people but she wasn’t here for the sunshine and the beach. She was here because someone in her family disappeared a long time ago and the last time anyone knew where he was, he was supposed to be going out to Fire Island.”
“There are a lot of places on Fire Island he could have come to.”
“That’s just what I said to her, but she was sure it was Blue Harbor. Said her mother or someone in the family had heard him say where he was going. And he never came back.”
“Or if he did,” Jack said, “he didn’t let his family know.”
“That’s what I told her. We think the same way, you and me. Just because someone comes out here, doesn’t mean he didn’t go back on the ferry and then disappear.”
“When did this happen?”
“Well, she’s about twenty-three, twenty-four now. She was a little girl of eight when ‘Uncle Bill’ got lost. That’s what she called him. Uncle Bill. Last name, ‘James,’ or something like that. So that would make it—what? Fifteen years ago? That’s a long time ago to be trying to find someone.”
“Did she say what he was coming out here for? Was he visiting someone?”
“I got the feeling there was a girlfriend with him.”
“I don’t suppose she told you who that was.”
“I don’t know if she knew,” the old man said. “The first thing the family thought was that he’d drowned. It happens. It’s happened here. Not this year, not last year, but we’ve had our troubles. She thought maybe he swam out too far or went swimming at night and got swept away.”
“Did he know how to swim?”
“She said he was a good swimmer. Bein’ a good swimmer never stopped anybody from drowning.”
I told him I agreed with him. It was the people I knew who were good swimmers who sometimes took chances because of their belief in their own ability to cope with high waves and possible undertows. The less able were often less secure and took fewer chances. “Were there any bodies washed ashore fifteen years ago?”
“Not in my memory and not in the police files. Course, not every body washes ashore.”
“Did she check with Chief Springer?”
“It was before his time. I checked the files, what there was of them. Nothing that year, nothing the year before, nothing the year after. So,” he said, anticipating my next question, “I called up my old buddy Jerry O’Donnell, the last police chief before young Curt. He didn’t remember anything about a drowning or a body swept ashore or anybody missing in his last coupla years as chief. One big, fat dead end.”
“Did she look into anything else? A fight, maybe?”
“Well, I went through those police records myself and I couldn’t find anything. There are always fights, especially in summer, young fellas boozin’ it up, don’t know when to stop. I couldn’t find a Bill or a William who got himself in trouble those years. So what do you think?”
I knew what I thought. I just wasn’t sure whether I should say it. “I think she started thinking about fires and she went to see Ken Buckley.”
“Now that’s good thinkin’,” the chief said. “Because she asked me about fires. There was that big one I told you about, but no one was hurt in that one. There were a few smaller ones, but no one got hurt in those either. So who knows?”
“Did she tal
k to Ken?” I asked.
“I can’t say for a fact that she did. She asked me who the chief was and where the firehouse was and where he lived. But she never came out and said she’d talked to him.”
“There’s some speculation she killed Ken,” I said.
“Well, that’s just dumb. She had a gun and she went over and shot him? And then what? Set the house on fire? You really think somethin’ like that happened?”
“It’s what people are saying,” Jack said. “Chris and I think there’s more to it. Is there anything else you know that could help us?”
“She thought she was getting close,” the chief said, looking beyond both of us. “But that’s all I know.”
“Chief, I did see Tina at the Buckley house fire. And she saw me, although she denied it later. She had a fireman’s coat over her back and head. Jack and Curt Springer searched the house she was living in and the jacket wasn’t there. Did she leave it at your house?”
I sensed he didn’t want to answer that, but I thought he would. He had come here to tell us what he knew. Finally he said, “Yeah. She gave it to me to hold for her.”
“When?”
“Must’ve been Monday night. Labor Day.”
So it was already gone when Curt Springer and Jack went through the house. “Is it your coat, Chief?”
“No sir, not mine. Never saw it before.”
“Don’t they have names in them? So the firemen take the right one?”
“We do that ourselves here in Blue Harbor, write our names somewhere in that indelible black ink. This one—well, someone had inked over the name good and heavy. I couldn’t tell you whose it was. But it wasn’t mine, I promise you that.”
“Maybe she grabbed it off the truck,” Jack said.
“Truck wasn’t nowheres near the house. It was on the beach. They run the hose from the pumper truck but that truck’s too wide to go through any street except Main Street. You didn’t see a truck there, did you?”
“Now that I think of it, I didn’t.”
“So Tina went to the Buckley house with someone’s jacket, or she found one at the Buckleys’ and grabbed it. When she got home, she inked out the name inside because she knew I’d seen her and she’d have to get rid of it.”
“That’s good thinkin’,” the chief said. “Glad to see young folks with a brain. You hear some a that stuff they call music nowadays, you wonder if they got anything up there.”
“It’s funny,” I said, more to Jack than to the chief. “If you have a gun, you can toss it overboard from a boat, but if you have a thick coat stuffed with puffy, heat-resistant material, it’s not easy to get rid of it in the water. And you can’t dig a hole in Blue Harbor to bury it without hitting water pretty quick.”
“Makes it hard to get rid of a body, too,” the chief said, “just in case you were thinking of burying one.”
“That should keep the murder rate down on this island, but right now it isn’t working. Do you still have the coat?”
“I got it.”
“I think you ought to give it to Chief Springer. It may be evidence in a homicide.”
“I guess you’re right. But it won’t bring that poor little girl back, will it?”
Jack insisted on walking the chief home, and, after his brandy was topped off, the chief relented. I cleared the dishes and went inside as the men started off along the dark beach.
16
“That was a crock of bull,” Jack said, with more vehemence than he usually expressed. He had walked in the front door from the beach while I was picking up the living room in anticipation of tomorrow’s guest.
“You think he was lying?”
“I think Tina’s story about ‘Uncle Bill’ was a fairy tale. She was looking for something all right, but it wasn’t ‘Uncle Bill.’ ”
“It didn’t even have to be a man,” I said. “If a body had been washed up on the beach at the right time, she would have known it was the person she was looking for. But there’s no record of a drowning.”
“Or a fight, or a fatal fire. Maybe her father was cheating on her mother and he came out here and was never seen again.”
“Maybe it was her mother. We don’t know anything about her family.”
“Whatever else she lied about, I have to believe the time element was true. She wouldn’t say something happened fifteen years ago if it happened five years ago. So we have to start with that. What was Ken Buckley doing fifteen years ago, and how is he tied into this?”
“He wasn’t fire chief then, I’m sure of that. But he was a fireman.”
“And he was here in Blue Harbor so he was a better source of information for Tina than Springer. And the older firemen, like the two guys we talked to yesterday afternoon. We don’t have much time, Chris. This is Thursday night.”
“I haven’t wanted to think about that. These two weeks have just flown.”
“Well, Eddie’s become a swimmer. That’s something.”
“It is something. Jack, do you suppose they have records of old fires at the firehouse?”
“They have to be somewhere, either there or at the municipal building next door. What time is Sister Joseph coming?”
“When she gets here. She’ll call before she gets on the ferry.”
“That’ll give us half an hour’s warning. But one of us’ll have to stay home.”
I smiled. “We’ll flip a coin in the morning.”
“Sounds like equal opportunity to me.”
—
I’m not sure who won the toss, but at nine the next morning I dashed over to the firehouse. Firemen of all ages and their wives were assembling in preparation for a march to the ferry. The man named Fred had settled into a card game with another man I hadn’t met.
“Chris Brooks, right?” Fred said, as I walked over.
“You have a good memory. I need some help I’m sure you can give me.” I felt embarrassed flattering him so openly, but he gave me a big smile.
“At your service.” He put his cards down on the table and got up, introduced me to Mike, who put his cards down, too, and rose just far enough to shake my hand. Both men were wearing black ties and black armbands.
“Have there been any fatal fires in Blue Harbor as long as you’ve been here?”
“Never had one in the history of the town,” Mike called from the table, where he had lit a cigar.
“Any fires where people required hospitalization?”
Fred said there hadn’t been. Once someone had burned a hand badly enough to require medical attention, but that was the worst he could remember.
“Are there records of the fires you’ve been called out on?”
“In the chief’s office. Very good records. Want to see them? They’re open to the public. We’ve got nothing to hide.”
We went into a small office, and I remembered that when we first came to the firehouse with Eddie and met Buckley, he had walked out of that room. There were file cabinets, a desk, a telephone, and some shelves built into the wall that displayed models of old fire engines and little lead firemen in uniforms from long ago.
On the walls were photographs of Ken Buckley with various well-known people, including former Governor Cuomo of New York and former Mayor Koch of New York City. Arranged along one wall were framed pictures of former fire chiefs in Blue Harbor, including a couple of pictures of Chief La Coste. There were also pictures dating back to before the Second World War of the Blue Harbor Fire Department members standing in front of their trucks.
“Like a museum, isn’t it?” Fred said.
“I’m very impressed. You must be a great bunch of people. Do the models belong to the fire department or to Ken Buckley?”
“A little of both. He said he’d leave them all to us in his will. But who knows if he got to put it in? A man doesn’t expect to die at such a young age.”
I agreed with him and asked him to show me the records of past fires. There weren’t many, even small ones. If the fire department had disappe
ared for weeks on end, no one would have noticed. I found the fire where the man needed medical attention for his hand. That was the only fire that year.
I went back in time, glancing at the records. It took no time to reach the Great Fire of Blue Harbor. At that point, I took out my notebook and wrote down everything that seemed relevant, including the names of the homeowners, the addresses, the descriptions of the damage.
“Were you involved in the big fire fifteen years ago?” I asked Fred.
“Oh, yeah. Never forget that. It was the end of the summer. We got the call and we ran. By the time we got there, I could see there wasn’t much we could save. It was a one-story frame and it was a real worker. We hadda wet down the houses on either side to make sure the fire didn’t spread. I been a summer fireman for twenty-five years and nothing ever came close to that in my experience.”
“Was anyone hurt?”
“Thank God, everyone got outta there safe and sound.” He rapped his knuckles on the wooden desk.
“What happened to the people who lived there?”
“Oh, they moved.”
“Where?”
He frowned. “I don’t remember, but west of here, one of the bigger towns. You’ll find them in the book. But they can’t tell you nothin’. They weren’t there.”
“If they weren’t there, how did the fire start?”
He shrugged. “Read what it says. That file’s got all your answers.”
“You must have had help from the towns east and west of here.”
“We did. A fire like that, one company can’t handle it. Like with the Buckley house. All the towns around here, we have mutual-aid agreements with all the other towns. We get a big one, we call a multiple alarm and the other companies respond. And we go if they call. You can’t ever have too many firefighters at the scene of a real working fire.”
“Was Chief La Coste at that fire?”
“Bernie? You know how old he was fifteen years ago? Seventy-seven. He’s been inactive longer’n I’ve been here.”
“But I bet he came to see it.”
“Bernie wouldn’t miss a fire. But I was too busy fighting that fire to see who was there.”