The Dead Cat Bounce

by Sarah Graves

  And that despite what you may hear on the news, things are not always as they seem.

  Take my own case, for instance. In the old days the people I worked for, especially toward the end of my career, were not all fine, upstanding citizens. In fact, they tended to lean more toward the felonious, with lapses into the frankly murderous.

  You will forgive me, I hope, for not telling you this sooner. But you must have wondered how I came to be acquainted with a guy like Jemmy Wechsler, a fellow who in his salad days did more evil deeds than Vlad the Impaler: back then, Jemmy was a psychopath.

  Which, I hasten to add, I did not know when I met him, and by the time I found out, Jemmy was gone, vanished out of New York with all that money. But how did you think he knew how to get it out of the country, into the care of the close-mouthed folks at Le Banque Suisse? The ability to pull a trigger or wield a garrotte not being associated with the knack for financial sleight-of-hand, last time I looked.

  My point is that when you are a financial consultant to the dripping-with-dollars bunch, yours is not to reason why. It is to make that money produce—the same as when you were at the currency desk, reeling the exchange rates through your head and facing down those rat bastard yen-masters, whom by the way I have always suspected of being Canadian; it would have been the perfect foil.

  Your job, simply, is to win.

  “Anyway, something else I heard,” Jemmy Wechsler said.

  He stowed the Glock. “The old lady, Ellie White’s mother? She was some kind of a dancer, back in New York?”

  I shook my depression off. He was right: none of what he’d said came as any sort of shock to me, any more than it did to him. “So?” I managed a smile.

  “So I heard, and this is a very reliable source here, that the money was payment—Alvin takes a certain blonde bombshell out of the picture. Like a conveyance fee.”

  I sat up on the berth.

  “And I heard,” Jemmy went on, “the bombshell didn’t exactly want to go. So Mcllwaine hired a couple of guys, got the bombshell persuaded.”

  Those scars, I realized. That legendary, inexplicably vicious mugging, just before Hedda came home to East-port for good.

  “That’s right,” Jemmy said, seeing my face. “My source tells me Mcllwaine got a couple of goons to break her ankles, make sure she didn’t have any reason to stick around. No future, anymore, on the stage.”

  I found my voice. “You’re sure of this.”

  Jemmy looked at me. There was distance growing already in his eyes. That, and the increasing knowledge of what he might have to do with the Glock.

  “Guy I talked to,” he said quietly, “he happens to be one of the guys did it. That’s how he got so high-level, how he got his start, doing the nasty work for Mcllwaine. One of the ways,” Jemmy corrected himself.

  “So couldn’t one of those guys have killed Mcllwaine?” I kept coming back to it: somebody from away. “Maybe he’d made an enemy out of somebody crime-connected?”

  Like you, I thought but did not add.

  Jemmy grinned, understanding. “Jacobia, when one of those guys wants you, he does not come along while you are visiting a house, and stick an icepick in your head, then let you wander off so maybe you will recover and testify who he was. One of those guys, he shows up at your own house and goes boom, you are dead. Take my word for this.”

  He angled his head at the hatch. “C’mon, let’s go upstairs.”

  I followed him up on deck, still thinking about what he had told me. Alvin had gotten money from Mcllwaine after Mcllwaine had Hedda’s legs broken, to make her go home to Alvin.

  “One thing about Mcllwaine,” Jemmy went on. “He never forgot an injury. Or a favor. Speaking of which.”

  He turned, gazing past me at the waterfront, looking as if he were trying to memorize it, as if he’d forgotten what he’d been talking about moments earlier. “Look at those guys,” he said.

  Down in the boat basin, men moved on the decks of the working vessels, painting and scraping, fixing engines, tinkering with their gear. They wore old clothes and rubber boots and ratty-looking slickers, and the pickup trucks lined up above them on the docks showed the scars of long service.

  “Lot of ’em don’t have two dimes to rub together, and when they get ’em, a headgasket blows or it’s time to pay the fees or the insurance, or one of their kids gets sick, or their back goes out, or something. But I’m damned if they don’t look happy.”

  They did, too, shouting companionably to one another as they stepped from the rail of one moving, rafted-together vessel to the next, borrowing tools or trading stories, easy as strolling down a city sidewalk.

  “Anyway, about that anchor chain.”

  The old one with account numbers and ID codes etched on it, Jemmy meant. “Oh, no,” I said. “I don’t want it.”

  The guys who go boom had never showed an interest in me, a situation I had gone to some trouble to maintain. “I’m not keeping that thing here for you, Jemmy. You want to dump it, go ahead, but you’d better make sure you’ve got those numbers memorized.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of dumping it. Actually, I was thinking of giving it to you.”

  I stared at him. “Why?” It was a lot of money.

  He laughed. “Call it a reward. I’ve had six months here, not looking over my shoulder. Maybe thinking about some things, for a change. And the reason is, I knew you would keep your mouth shut, because you promised to.”

  Promises again. They were haunting my existence. For a minute I wished I was known as a non-keeper of any promise whatsoever, especially the ones I’d made to Ellie.

  “I’ll never be able to spend that money,” he went on. “Crazy to think I could. They’re always going to be watching for a guy like me, anywhere I go. If I’m living large, you know they’ll find me. But you, you could figure out a way to dribble it back into the country, get some good out of it.”

  Yeah, I thought, I probably could, at that.

  But I wasn’t going to. Maybe it’s a fine line, but getting paid for giving financial advice is one thing, even if it’s to a bunch of crooks. Simply appropriating the proceeds of murder and extortion was, in my book, another.

  “Jemmy,” I told him honestly, “where that money came from, the only thing I could do with it if I had it would be to give it away.”

  He nodded. “Funny, but that’s kind of what I figured you’d say. So maybe I’ll have to find some widows and orphans, dump it on them. All I know is, I don’t want it anymore.”

  He sounded surprised, but certain. We looked at each other.

  “Hey, have a good life,” he said, and the warmth in his voice was genuine. Then, astonishingly for Jemmy, he reached out and hugged me hard.

  The metal gangway swayed with the rising tide. When I looked down from the dock platform above the water, the Hoodathunkit’s twin outboards were already idling and Jemmy had gone below.

  I didn’t think I would ever hear from him again.

  27

  The stairs to the attic rooms in my house are bare boards that creak whenever you walk on them. At the top, paneled wooden doors lead from a small, shapely entry hall into three tiny chambers whose walls are papered with antique cabbage roses.

  These were the servants’ rooms in the days when each of the family chambers had a fireplace that had to be supplied with wood and kept burning day and night, whose hearth needed sweeping and whose ashes needed carrying down interminable flights to the ash pit. In those days the kitchen floor was kept shining by a scullery maid who crept back and forth over it on her knees, scrubbing it with sand.

  Climbing to the attic I always imagined the dreadfully fatigued young girls going up to it at night, each longing only for the peace of her own narrow bed and the privacy at last of her own thoughts. It was here that I most felt the age of the house, its long, abiding quiet where my own life rarely intruded.

  A handful of cut iron nails lay forgotten on a window-sill. Black iron filigree brackets suppo
rted a short shelf, creating a makeshift mantel. A fallen strip of wallpaper pulled down a swath of old plaster, exposing the ancient lath.

  The plastic that somebody had fastened across a window to keep drafts out moved gently in the puffs of air from a broken windowpane, with a sound like tinfoil being crumpled. I crossed to examine the spot where water had come through, leaking down to my bedroom ceiling.

  The repairs wouldn’t be as difficult as I’d thought. The long strips of wood holding the window sash in its channels were loose, susceptible to removal without splitting. The putty and paint had long ago flaked away, so not much scraping would be needed. Wade had cut me a square of the expensive restoration glass that I had ordered from Boston—one pane of modern glass in an antique twelve-light is as jarringly wrong as one unground lens in a pair of prescription eyeglasses—and after that I had cut the panes myself, using a T-square and a diamond cutter.

  Slowly, I set to work, removing the side trim and lifting out the heavy old sash, cleaning out the broken pane with a tack hammer and a silent apology; I never know quite what to do with old bits of the house that have served so faithfully for so long, yet are too ruined to stay.

  The mundane chore with its simple series of tasks put my thoughts into order. According to Jemmy, Mcllwaine had begun paying Alvin White large sums of money soon after Hedda’s forced departure from the New York scene.

  This implied to me, as it had, apparently, to Jemmy’s source, that Alvin had done something Mcllwaine wanted him to do, at just about that same time.

  But Mcllwaine, if Jemmy’s source was correct on the rest of the story, was the one who had done something, back in the days before Mcllwaine took on the protective coloration of a super-successful businessman. He had been, at that time, just another hoodlum, albeit an obviously up-and-coming one, and he had been behind the attack on Hedda.

  Which was fascinating, but not very useful. I hadn’t wanted to show Jemmy my disappointment, but all he had reported, intriguing as it was, had happened a long time ago.

  What I had wanted was news of some current motivation for Mcllwaine’s death: a business feud, union dispute, or a cunningly disguised mob-related rubout.

  Some news, in other words, to suggest that I ought to be thinking about something besides Nina Mcllwaine’s new status as a rich, no-longer-abused widow—for her having, in other words, a solid-gold motive for murder.

  But if Jemmy was right, there wasn’t any such something. Of the capable persons whose potential guilt I could bear contemplating, Nina remained the one with a credible reason to want Threnody Mcllwaine dead—the reason being that she was going to get rich and get rid of an abusive husband.

  A simple divorce, for Nina, wouldn’t have been enough. After all, look what happened to the Bolivian beauty. But with Mcllwaine dead, Nina was truly free, and very wealthy. All she needed was the nerve, and I knew she had plenty.

  She was gutsy, greedy, and—I was increasingly convinced—as guilty as mortal sin.

  Turning this over in my mind, I kept working on the window sash. If you coat the old, bare wood with linseed oil before laying in new glass, the wood will not draw the putty’s moisture into itself and the putty will not embrittle as it ages. I laid the glass in, tapping in the bright, triangular metal glazier’s points, careful to keep them flat to the surface of the glass itself, and drew a bead of putty over the seam with a putty knife.

  The putty would need to cure before I could paint it, but the bulk of the job was now complete and the sash had been snug in the channel, so I replaced it, gathered the newspaper full of glass bits, and dropped my tools into my apron pockets. I’d been at it, I thought, about an hour, still pondering the problem of Nina.

  In terms of information, she was as remote and well protected as the woman in the mysterious portrait, down in my kitchen. There had to be a way to turn my near-certainty into proof; the difficulty lay in how.

  Later, I felt certain that what happened next was linked to my thoughts, but at the time all I knew was that the room filled suddenly with the scent of camellias.

  Turning, I saw nothing but the lightbulb hanging from the switch cord over the attic stairway, shining into the corners of the hall and throwing the pattern of the antique cabbage roses into relief.

  But I had not switched that lightbulb on. On my way up the stairs I had been carrying a pane of glass, a bottle of linseed oil, some folded newspapers, and a can of putty, plus the tools. Meanwhile, switching on that bulb takes two hands: one to steady the hanging fixture, which otherwise slips from your fingers as stubbornly as a puddle of mercury, and one to turn the wickedly elusive little knob. Both my hands had been occupied.

  The scent of camellias thickened, drowningly sweet. I had the strong, sudden sense of someone in the room with me, almost inside my head, like the quick, certain awareness you have when you first understand that you are becoming ill or falling in love: as if you are discovering consciously what you knew all along.

  That’s the thing about living in a haunted house: the subtle, out-of-left-field aspect. People think it must be as constant and obvious as a message written in blood, but it isn’t.

  It isn’t at all.

  28

  The Eastport Artisans’ Guild shop, Quoddy Crafts, is located on Water Street overlooking the harbor, and the best advice I can give you about the place is not to bring more money than you can afford to spend.

  There were handmade baskets with sweetgrass woven into the tops, dream-catchers spiderwebbed with silver and turquoise beads, notecards inked with shore scenes so sharply rendered, they might have been sketched with a hypodermic needle. At the display shelves I paused over a linen kitchen calendar embroidered with a flock of chickadees, fingerless gloves made of hand-spun local wool in the same pale mauve as a winter sunset, and deerskin slippers with porcupine-quill motifs worked into the sueded uppers.

  Eventually I worked my way around to the counter and to Janet Fox, who was tending it, this being her regular afternoon to work in the craft shop.

  “Beautiful, aren’t they?” Janet said of my choices, her voice a near-whisper as she put them into a bag for me.

  As always, I found her too-soft speech an annoyingly manipulative habit. “Yes, they are.” I left the bag where it was.

  At the rear of the shop, a fire burned cozily in the ceramic woodstove. On the braided seat cushion of the rocking chair pulled in front of the stove, a cat curled with her paws crossed over her eyes.

  “You know,” I told Janet, “I’m so glad to see you. I’ve been wanting to tell you how sorry I am about your father.”

  “Thank you.” Her head lifted bravely, in a studied motion. “No one else seems to think I feel anything about it.”

  That, I thought clearly, is because you are such a little sad sack, nobody can tell the difference.

  “And I wanted to tell you, too,” I went on, “how good of you I think it is, your taking on the care of Ellie White’s mother the way you have. It must,” I probed delicately, “be awfully difficult sometimes.”

  In a haunting, the one with the most information is the one who cannot be questioned. That doesn’t mean, however, that nothing can be learned; only that it cannot be learned directly. And while I was standing in my attic inhaling camellias, it had occurred to me that this fact bore some relevance to my quest.

  Carefully, Janet wrote my purchases in the dog-eared spiral notebook that comprises the Artisans’ Guild’s bookkeeping system. Fortunately, the artisans are not in it for the money; the guild is a fund-raiser for the Maritime Museum, a fact with which I assuage my conscience each time I walk out of the shop laden with packages.

  “Oh, it’s not so hard,” Janet said finally, after a pause during which she seemed to be deciding how best to answer me—if at all. “Mrs. White is an old darling, once you get to know her.”

  I managed to pretend that something had gotten into my eye; over the time I had known her I had heard Hedda White called many things, but “old darling�
� was not among them.

  “I think,” Janet said, still seeming to choose her words carefully, “that Ellie is too hard on her.”

  “I’ve been wondering about that myself,” I replied, again covering my astonishment. “Of course,” I added, “I hated to say anything to Ellie about it. Still, she just doesn’t seem to have the same way with Hedda that you do.”

  Oh, Ellie, I begged silently; forgive me. But the idea was to get Janet talking, so I went on agreeing with her.

  “Tell me,” I said, “what’s your secret? I swear,” I put my hand up as Janet looked anxious, “I’ll be as silent as the grave.”

  Janet eyed me warily. Then, “I let her drink,” she admitted. “It keeps her quiet. I figure, what the heck, she’s a crippled old lady. Let her have some fun in her life.” She glanced at me to see how I took this.

  Janet, I thought, you little slyboots. “How do you manage to hide it? The smell—didn’t Ellie notice?”

  “Peppermints,” Janet confessed, “the really strong ones that Ellie makes with the mint she grows in her garden. I pour Hedda a couple of drinks in the morning,” she went on, “and that holds her until lunchtime. Sometimes I powder half a Valium in, too. First she gets giddy, then she eats, then she sleeps it off.”

  “Why, Janet,” I said, a faint chill coming over me, “you are more practical than I realized.” It was, after all, one thing for me to have imagined doping Hedda into a stupor, quite another for Janet to have gone ahead and done it.

  Apparently encouraged by my lack of outrage, Janet preened. “You have to know how to handle people. You can’t be having a knock-down, drag-out every day. You have to give them,” she finished, “what they want from you.” But even as she said this, she kept on glancing at me, ready to change her tack the instant she sensed disapproval. Janet, I thought, was going to come back in her next life as the doormat she already nearly was.

  Outside, a couple of sailors pressed their noses to the glass, shielding their eyes with their hands to see the window display of knitted goods, hand-sewn blouses with pin-tucked bodices, and tatted lace collars as delicately perfect as candied violets.