The Dead Cat Bounce

by Sarah Graves

  “Alvin,” I shouted, “Alvin, it’s me! Open up!”

  The door opened and he yanked me inside before slamming it shut again on a babble of shouted questions. From this angle the camera lenses looked like alien feeding apparatus.

  “My god,” Alvin panted, his eyes huge and his bow tie hanging askew. He peered out the window. “My god, my god.”

  He seemed to be in shock. “They’ve taken Ellie. Did you see them?” he demanded insistently. “Did you?”

  This was not a good sign. “Alvin, look at me.” I seized his shoulder. “Look at me, Alvin. It’s me, Jacobia. Hey, buddy, get a grip, now. Ellie needs you to be all right.”

  It was the last bit that did the trick. He stopped suddenly and a shudder went through him, as if he were shaking off some awful fever. “Yes,” he murmured. “Ellie needs me. I’ve got to be strong.”

  “Right. Now let’s get you settled down a little. Where’s Hedda?”

  “I’m right in here,” came the furious blast of her voice from the parlor, “and I can tell you that I have never been so insulted in my—”

  Well, at least Hedda was all right. “Okay, Alvin, here’s the deal. You need to get Janet over here, see if she can stay the night. Have you got everything you’re going to need—food, any medicines you or Hedda are taking, all that kind of thing?”

  He nodded resolutely—feeling better, clearly, now that someone was helping him. “I think we’re fine on that score,” he said, his voice steadying. But then a thought struck him.

  “What about Ellie? What’ll they do with her?” he inquired plaintively.

  “She’ll be fine,” Hedda boomed from the parlor. “She’s young, she can take anything.”

  I felt like punching her, but Hedda’s reply seemed to cheer Alvin. “It’s true, you know,” he allowed fondly. “Ellie is a tough little nut, always has been. I made sure she could handle herself no matter what happened.”

  “All the more reason, then, to take care of yourself. That’s your job, now, to make sure you and Hedda come through without any damage. Can you do that for Ellie?”

  “Ayuh.” He squared his shoulders. “I guess I can, for her.”

  “Good.” I gripped his arms. “We’ll get through this, Alvin. One foot in front of the other.”

  His lip trembled, but he stiffened it bravely. “One foot,” he repeated, “in front of the other.”

  But he didn’t say that he was sure it would all turn out all right, and I didn’t either; neither of us could have stood it. He went to his office to call Janet Fox and I stayed over there—checking the pantry, the freezer, and the refrigerator, making sure there was fuel oil in the furnace tank and propane gas for the cookstove—until she arrived.

  From the window I watched as she made her way through the hordes of reporters. She kept her head bowed, eyes down, her shoulders hunched, and her mouth shut—which for Janet was no particular feat; dull silence was her usual condition. Only her eyes, glittering darkly with dislike once she got inside, showed how intense an ordeal the trip up the front walk had been for her.

  “Fine,” she said, surveying the downstairs rooms as I went through them with her, listing things I thought the Whites either wanted or needed: some conversation, a little distraction—but not the TV, which was packed with news of the murder and Ellie’s arrest—and of course decent nourishment.

  “I’ll be right across the street, so call me if you need anything, and good luck. And Janet, thanks a lot for this.”

  She eyed me curiously. “I said I would do it. I told Ellie,” she replied in a flat, affectless voice.

  “Yes, well. I appreciate it anyway.” I went to the door; if her odd expression struck the tiniest of sour notes with me, I managed to rationalize it. After all, it was her father who had just been murdered.

  Then I let myself out, steeling myself for the reporters’ gauntlet, and ran it successfully—a good, sharp elbow, properly placed and accompanied by an obviously insincere apology, can do wonders—reaching my own door in record time and flattening myself in immense relief against it, once I was inside.

  Duty, I thought gratefully, discharged.

  For now.

  16

  The rest of the early evening was taken up with chores: dinner, dishes, Sam’s homework, several loads of his laundry—the doing of which I had traded for a couple of hours of his work on that bathroom ceiling—and a walk for Monday, who had been getting rather short shrift in the fresh-air-and-exercise department.

  Meanwhile the state police investigators had been in the storeroom, taking photographs and measuring distances and doing whatever else they do in locations where dead bodies have been discovered. They had also questioned me, but without, I thought, any particular urgency. Having a confession, they seemed to feel (although of course they would have denied this fervently), made the rest of their activities merely pro forma.

  Also, as it turned out, the prize fights had been put off on account of some difficulty with the referee. An outstanding warrant for arrest on racketeering charges was, I gathered, an impediment to his employment. So now, at midnight, Sam was in his room working on a model of the warship Calypso, a coal supplier to a World War II gun flotilla that stood in Eastport harbor on July 23, 1916—two years later, the Calypso vanished in the Bermuda Triangle—and Wade was in the living room in front of the television, asleep.

  It was a talent I admired, his ability to sleep while life went on without him in the rest of the house. My ex-husband couldn’t sleep if a single unrinsed cup stood lonesomely in the kitchen sink. He wouldn’t even lie down until every light in the apartment was switched off and every appliance double-checked. His eyes would snap open alertly if, two rooms down the hall from our bedroom, Sam turned over in his crib.

  For a while I had tried reading in bed, using one of those clip-on book lights angled away from his head, but he complained that he could hear the hum of the electrical circuit, that I might forget and leave it on, setting the bedclothes afire, that even after he turned away from me on his side, he could feel the light particles seeping into his skull.

  Now, sitting alone in the kitchen while Wade slept in the recliner two rooms away, I thought about a short conversation I’d had with Ellie at this same table, the night before. It was right after she’d confessed to Mcllwaine’s murder, and before they had let her go home.

  “Jacobia,” she’d said, while the state and county cops tried to get hold of their superiors by radio or telephone, “do you remember last fall right after you first came to Eastport? Hedda needed to have her hip replaced, and I was so awful spleeny about it?”

  Spleeny: nervous, upset, unnecessarily anxious. It was among my favorite bits of downeast dialect.

  “I remember,” I’d told her. “You came over for coffee one afternoon and you ended up telling me the whole story.”

  She nodded. “It was the first I’d even met you, but by the next day you’d called all over the country, finding out whether the surgeon in Bangor was good, or if there was someone else we should go to.”

  Being the ex-wife of a famous neurosurgeon has its perks: The surgeon in Bangor, as it turned out, was board-certified and so expert that patients came from New York and Philadelphia. The day after Hedda’s successful surgery, Ellie and I drank champagne at lunch and went to the Bangor Garden Show.

  On the way home the next afternoon, the sun shone slantwise on the blueberry barrens: high, Alpine-feeling hills with granite boulders the size of Volkswagens pushing up out of them, blanketed with the ankle-high shrubs. Winter had come early and the remains of last year’s growth were the color of raspberry syrup spilled out across the snow.

  Now I thought of her reminding me about it: that I had found things out for her before. As for why I might trouble to do so again, I needed no reminding.

  Once, when my ex-husband telephoned in a fury, demanding to speak to me for some reason that I cannot now recall—I had bought Sam an air rifle, perhaps, or allowed him to go fishing
; my ex-husband thought hunting and fishing were marks of impending degeneracy—Ellie answered the phone and told him I wasn’t home, and that by the way, she had heard a lot about him and wanted to congratulate him on being so flexible.

  Flexible? my ex-husband asked, puzzled.

  Yes, she had told him, she was sure he must be very flexible. Otherwise, how could his head have gotten up there where it was?

  I could hear his reply boiling out of the receiver like an eruption of lava. This was just shortly after Ellie and I had gone together to Bangor; the lunchtime champagne had made me talkative, and I may have mentioned one or two things about him.

  Calmly, Ellie had hung up. “Excitable, isn’t he?” she’d said, turning back to the rhubarb pies we had been making, and I was so astonished and terrified by her action that it wasn’t until much later that I realized what she had done for me.

  The thing was this: after I left New York, my ex-husband had begun threatening me. It sounds unbelievable now, but at the time it was frightening, and at first it was about Sam: that he would sue for custody, or cut off all contact, or take Sam to Europe on vacation and forget to bring him back.

  Later, it became more personal: old houses like mine were notorious firetraps and it wouldn’t take much to light one up. I should check my groceries when I bought them; something could have been tampered with. I had better lock my doors and windows when I was home alone, in case someone tried to sneak in with a knife.

  It was totally bizarre and unexpected, and it got worse and worse. I consulted my attorney, who said little could be done. The threats were indirect; my ex-husband, while obnoxious, was still within the law. I spoke to a psychiatrist, who advised me to call the police if the remarks grew more explicit, or if my ex-husband did anything overt.

  But after Ellie hung up on him that day, I began doing as she had; nervously at first and then with increasing confidence. I would stay on the telephone while he was civil, but if he started threatening me I put the receiver down.

  And after a while the threatening went away, like a child’s tantrum if you ignore it long enough. Ellie had done exactly the right and proper thing, though at the time I was horrified by it, believing it could only make matters worse.

  17

  When I opened my eyes the next morning, the first thing I heard was foghorns. From the upstairs hall window, the rooftops of Eastport floated on an ocean of grey; gulls perched sullenly on the rooflines, grounded by the weather, and the few cars moving in the street had their headlights on.

  Wade kissed me hard on his way off to work, causing me to linger dreamily in the kitchen for several moments until my nerve endings had settled down again. Sam had gone over early to Tommy Daigle’s to see the old Ford jalopy Tommy had bought in hopes of fixing it up by the time he could afford to insure it, so Monday and I were alone. At the back door, she waited impatiently for me to pull on my green rubber rain boots, black oilskin hat, and yellow slicker—one of the pleasures of Maine weather, I have found, is the chance to wear the costume—then bounded into the yard.

  Outside, droplets plinked steadily in the downspouts, the cool, drifting fog was tinctured with the smell of woodsmoke, and the snow on the ground was shrinking as if sluiced away; it was what the old-timers called a snow-eating fog.

  No activity was evident across the street at the Whites’ house—it was 7:30, too early for the reporters, apparently—and Janet’s car was marooned behind a foot of icy muck thrown into their driveway by the snow-plows. Then Monday reappeared from the murk and we went back inside, where the telephone was ringing.

  “Hey, Jacobia,” said Toby Alderman. I pictured Toby in his tiny, neat-as-a-pin law office on Water Street, with its big window looking out on the best view in the world: water and sky.

  “Hey, Toby.” On a clear day, you could see to St. Andrews from Toby’s desk; in a way, it was the opposite of the view you got when you looked at Toby. His eyes, like his office window, were wide and blue, but they gave away nothing.

  Nor did his voice. It was a matter of principle with him. “I talked to Ellie this morning,” Toby said.

  “And?”

  “She asked me to let you know that the arraignment’s this afternoon. That’s when they’ll be reading the formal charge, and she has to plead.”

  I already knew what an arraignment was. “What time?”

  He told me, but then he added, “She doesn’t want you to be there.”

  “What? That’s ridiculous, of course I’m going to—”

  But he was firm. “Listen, I had to practically break her arm to get her to agree to accept counsel at all. The only reason she did was that the judge won’t let her plead without legal advice. If she sees you there, I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

  “So she’s going through with it.” Somehow I’d hoped that when some time went by, she would see reason.

  I should have known better. “She’s just bound and determined, Jacobia,” Toby said, “and you know how she is when her mind’s made up.”

  “Yeah, I do. So what happens next?”

  “Well, I think the judge will decide not to accept her guilty plea, send her up to superior court, and wash his hands of her. If that’s the case we’ll have a little more time, maybe a few months, to try straightening out this nonsense.”

  “What happens meanwhile?”

  “I can try to get her out on bail. She’s going to look like a decent bail risk: roots in the community, no prior record, so on. Maine’s funny about bail in a murder case, though.”

  “Which means?”

  “State constitution. It says every citizen has a right to bail except in capital cases. Now,” he went on, “we don’t have the death penalty in the state of Maine, anymore—”

  For which I was fervently grateful.

  “—but murder is still defined as a capital offense.”

  “Bottom line, Toby. What are the chances?”

  There was a silence. While I waited, a picture of Ellie popped into my mind: coppery hair blowing, she perched on the flying deck of Wade’s summer runabout, the Little Dipper, her eyes alight and her arm joyously outstretched as she pointed to the sleek, arched back of a surfacing minke whale, out on the water almost in sight of Head Harbor.

  “One in a thousand,” Toby Alderman said. “Boy, criminal law is tough when your clients are your friends. I like real-estate law, where hardly anyone goes to jail.”

  “I know. If we could get another lawyer in this town, then you could give it up.” But it wasn’t likely; there was enough defense business here to support one, but not in the style to which most modern attorneys have become accustomed. It’s the big crimes of wealthy clients that generate the big bucks.

  “Thanks, Toby, for helping her out,” I told him. “Anything else?”

  “Oh, yeah, nearly forgot. She said to tell you not to give up on that portrait, if that means anything to you. Said you should try again, because it’s important.”

  I had a minute to think that over while he put me on hold to pick up a call on his other line. While I did, the woman on the mantel gazed down at me, inscrutable as ever.

  What the hell was Ellie talking about? Finally I decided her remark was only meant to cheer me—as if that were possible—and that Toby, who disliked nuance and implication, had conveyed her tone inaccurately.

  When he came back, he said, “Listen, Jacobia, I took this case as a favor. Not to Ellie, she still wants me like gum on her shoe, but for her dad. But I’ve got to tell you, if she goes on sticking to her guns on this guilty business, I’m not sure how much I can do. And she sounds like she is going to.”

  If Toby had already talked to Alvin, he knew he was working Ellie’s case pro bono; I had a sad, momentary picture of Alvin, going hat in hand. Not that Toby expected to be tied up on it for long. The way he was talking, there wasn’t even going to be a trial, just a guilty plea followed by a sentencing hearing. He was warning me, in his careful way, not to get my hopes too high.
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br />   “I understand, Toby. I appreciate your calling. She didn’t say anything else about this portrait business?”

  “Nope. Didn’t even make that big a deal of it. Just said she’d rather do the arraignment alone, and that you’ve got plenty to keep you busy right here in town. Anyway, I’ll be there with her, and I’ll call if things don’t go the way I’m expecting.”

  If the district judge took her guilty plea, Toby meant. If it was all over, right then and there. It wasn’t likely—serious crimes, Bob Arnold had pointed out, were supposed to go right up to superior court—but I’d been consultant in enough bankruptcy proceedings to know that in the judicial system, almost any damn fool thing was possible, and judges could be as jealous over their turf rights as anyone else.

  “Okay,” I said. “If she needs anything, let me know and I’ll take care of it. Let me know either way about the plea, will you? And be sure and call me as soon as she can have any visitors.”

  Another brief silence told me not to hold my breath. “Right,” he said then. “Well, I’d better get busy.”

  Me, too, I thought, hanging up.

  18

  I do not think money is the root of all evil, but I know it makes an effective fertilizer. And money, I felt sure, was at the root of this mess. Snapping Monday back onto her lead, I tucked my scarf down into the neck of my slicker and set my sou’wester on my head, then waited for one of the mobile broadcast vans to block the reporters’ view of me as I started for town. It was time to talk to Jemmy Wechsler.

  The fog thickened as I neared the harbor, lending a hushed, ghostly atmosphere to the streets. The antique red brick of the Arts Center building glistened in the mist, and the green silk “open” banner hanging from the upstairs window of Ted Vinson’s pottery shop flapped wetly. Passing the Mexican restaurant with its gay strings of Christmas lights twinkling through the salt-smelling murk, I shot a wistful glance at the grey, weathered timbers of the Happy Landings Cafe, where hot coffee and good company—not to mention fine blueberry pancakes—were always on the menu.