Act of God (27 page)

“Why not?”

“This girl, she wanted a VCR in the room. I said to her, ‘Honey, you come down the shore to get away from all that, right?’ ”

“Then what?”

A shrug. “She made this big thing of how she needed a VCR and was there any motel along the beach that had one.”

“And?”

“And I told her to try up at Jolly Cholly’s.”

“Where’s that?”

“Few blocks north. Got a sign like a clown’s face on it.”

I thanked her and left. It was boiling hot in the midday sun, and I’d left the Prelude unlocked with the windows down. As I got to it, a heavyset man in his early thirties was lugging a big Coleman’s cooler across the parking lot. He was sweating like a pig, the cords on his neck straining above an already-sunburned back. A woman about the same age was sitting on a blanket she’d spread over the sugarlike sand, using a shoe to anchor one of the corners.

He called out to her. “Stay where you are, Mitzi. I oughta be able to finish this in seven, eight trips.”

Over her shoulder, without even looking at the guy. “Don’t get on me, Tony.”

He reached the blanket. “Get on you? The fuck you think this is, your birthday or something?”

“You get nasty again, I’m taking off.”

Tony set down the cooler. “Mitzi, you take off again, I swear I’ll drag you by the fucking hair into the fucking water and drown you.”

“Fuck you.”

Tony turned to go back to wherever he’d come from. “I’m telling you, Mitz’, fucking drown you is what I’ll do.”

I got into my car, wondering if Greg and Tony shared a common gene somewhere deep in the pool.

The wooden sign was faded, and one of the screws holding it up was about to go, but it did sport the face of a crudely drawn circus clown and JOLLY CHOLLY’S underneath. There was a bar next to the motel on one side and a pizzeria on the other. All in all, Jolly Cholly’s didn’t look like the sort of place you’d choose for getting away from it all.

The motel itself was built on a concrete pier perpendicular to the beach, a row of units at street level and another on the second floor with a white balustrade of rusting metal. I walked up to the door that had a smaller clown’s-head sign and the word OFFICE underneath it.

The exaggerated hee-haw of a donkey sounded as I walked through the door. In front of me was a hinged counter with an angled stand holding brochures for restaurants, miniature golf operations for the kiddies, and party boats for fishing. A coffee machine too small for guest use was perking on a table behind the counter. The man who came through the door next to the machine might have been Cholly, but the other half didn’t fit.

He was dour and long of face, and his skin was leathery from the sun and age—somewhere in the low sixties, I’d say. His hair was bleached white from gray and black, shag cut in no particular style. His tanned arms were sinewy, strong without being showy, at the ends of the sleeves of a “Seaside Heights” T-shirt with a tear at the shoulder and a food stain between the two words in its legend, as though someone had inserted a sloppy hyphen.

“Help you?”

“My name’s John Cuddy.”

“Utt.”

“I’m sorry?”

“The name’s Utt, Frank Utt.”

“Oh.”

“You figured my name’d be ‘Cholly,’ right?”

“Crossed my mind.”

“Bought the place, it was already called Jolly Cholly’s. Seemed a shame to lose the goodwill, given I’d already paid dear for her. Help you with a room?”

His voice had a singsong quality. I said, “You’re not from around here.”

“From that Boston accent, neither are you. What difference does it make?”

Definitely not the jolly innkeeper. “Not much.”

Utt answered me anyway. “From North Dakota, originally. Fargo, along the Red River. Only one in the country flows south to north. Got tired of seeing the thermometer stuck at forty below in the winters, having to plug the car in at night to keep the engine block from freezing.”

“You ever heard of Steve Nelson?”

“Linebacker, wasn’t he?”

“One of the Patriots’ true and few stars.”

“Went to North Dakota State, if I remember correctly. Not exactly a football factory, but you got what it takes, you can make it anywheres, I guess.”

I said, “What made you come out here?”

“ ‘Back east,’ we’d call it in North Dakota.”

“Back here, then.”

“Already told you. The weather.”

“Yes, but why New Jersey?”

“Heard about the beach. Call it ‘going down the shore’ here, though. Figured it might make a nice change of pace, kind of a retirement before I retired.”

“How’s it working out?”

Utt rubbed his chin twice with his thumb and forefinger, but more like the chin was a watermelon pit he was shooting out. “There some reason you’re warming me up like this?”

“There is.” I showed him my ID. “I’m looking for a woman from Boston.”

Utt nodded.

“This is a picture of her.”

He glanced down at it, but just barely. “I knew there was something wrong with her.”

“She stayed with you?”

“For a week. You took one look at her, you could tell there was trouble, but I figured she might be good advertising.”

“Advertising.”

“You ever seen her in a bikini?”

“Just this photo.”

“Doesn’t do her justice. She moved like original sin, twitching her rump this way and that. Near drove her friend crazy to see the other fellows measuring her out.”

“Her friend?”

“The long-hair.”

I looked down at the photo of Proft and Teagle. “Him?”

“Yeah, him.”

I worked on that.

Utt said, “They drove up here in this yellow convertible, said they’d heard I had VCRs in the rooms. Well, I had to do something, didn’t I?”

I stared at him. “Something?”

“To draw the folks in. Mister, we’ve had four bad summers here out of five. Hospital tide, just plain rain, then a couple of winter storms like to wash every grain of sand from the beach.”

I thought of the closed restaurants I’d seen coming in from the parkway.

Utt said, “Tourism’s down so bad, you have to do something, so I tried VCRs in some of the rooms.”

“Just some of them?”

“Well, I figured not everybody’d want one, there are a few who just want to forget about the world. But they usually got the money to help them forget, they head down to Ocean Beach, maybe. Rent a little cottage and not talk to anybody for a week. Your Darbra girl, now she was different.”

“How so?”

“She must have introduced herself to everybody on the strip. I had people coming up to me in stores, mentioning she’d been in, telling people how much she liked Jolly Cholly’s. I was right, huh?”

“Right?”

“About her being advertising. Even when she wasn’t in the bikini, she did me some good here. If only it weren’t for the noise.”

“The noise?”

“One night they was here. The last night, actually. I remember because I kind of expected her to apologize and all, but she didn’t.”

“Apologize.”

“Yeah. From the noise they made that one night with the movie they were watching. See, they wanted a room with the VCR, but I had only the one on the first floor. I figured, most people who’d want VCRs would rather be on the top floor, no feet thumping above their heads, and that way there wouldn’t be so much risk for me from thieves, too, like there might be on the downstairs units. But no, your Darbra girl and her friend, they wanted a downstairs unit and no two ways about it.”

“Why?”

“Be on a level with the beach, I suppose.”

I looked around me. “Can I see their room?”

Utt did the pit-shooting routine again with his fingers on the chin. “Don’t see why not. Won’t even charge you for it.”

He reached behind him to what might have been a rack I couldn’t see, because he came back with a key on a clear plastic tag. Flipping up the hinged part of the counter, he said, “Come on.”

We walked out the door and away from the beach along the concrete sidewalk outside the first-floor units. He stopped at number 123.

I said, “They were willing to take this unit?”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“You have second-floor units closer to the water?”

“Available for that week, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“I did, even a couple you could see the surf from, you didn’t mind craning your neck a little at the window. But like I said, they wanted one on the first floor.”

Utt put the key in the lock and turned it, waving me across the threshold. The room had a queen-sized bed centered on one wall. Centered on the other wall was a low bureau with a seventeen-inch Zenith on top of it and a VCR on top of the television. Past them on the same wall was a doorway opened so you could see part of the bathroom. As Utt closed the unit door behind us, I saw a short refrigerator in the corner, a small table with two dinette chairs in the other corner. The air inside the room was cool, but stale.

“Has anybody been in here since Darbra and her friend?”

Utt shook his head. “Just the maid. And me to clean up the sink.”

“The sink?”

“I’ll show you.”

We walked to the bathroom. The facilities were all almond porcelain, but there was a darker discoloration at the bottom of the wash basin.

“Took me most of an hour to get it that good. Damned if I shouldn’t check these things before they leave, but you can’t always.”

“What color was it when you first saw it?”

“The stain?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know from colors that well. Kind of yellowish?”

“Any idea what it was?”

“No.”

Yellow convertible, yellow paint, maybe? I looked around the bathroom, but it didn’t have any character to it, and it had been cleaned since they’d been there.

We came back into the main room. Even with the window closed, the traffic sounds from Route 35 were noticeable and probably annoying, you were trying to fall asleep through them.

I went over to the bureau. “Mind if I go through these?”

“The drawers?”

“Yes.”

“Help yourself.”

I did. Nothing but contact paper, in little clown shapes. “You said something before about noise?”

“Noise? Oh, right. Their last night here.”

“That would be what?”

“Friday.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning nine days ago. I rent the weeks Saturday afternoon to Saturday morning if I can. Out by eleven, do a whirlwind, then in by two with the next one.”

“Go ahead.”

“Well, it must have been only about ten P.M., and being that it was a Friday and all, I wouldn’t have cared too much about the noise. But I had an elderly couple above them, and the old folks come down to me to complain. Fairness to them, I could hear it soon’s I opened the office door. So I told the old folks I’d talk to the people in 123.”

“To Darbra and her friend.”

“Right.”

“And did you?”

“Put on a sweater—we get a real chill off the water here, saves like you wouldn’t believe on air-conditioning. Back in Fargo, we got our electricity cheap on account of the Garrison Conversion, but around here, you like to save every kilowatt you can.”

I didn’t want to know what the “Garrison Conversion” was.

“So you came down to this room?”

“Right. The noise was so bad, some kind of rock music, I thought the door was going to shake right off the frame. I knock, and I don’t get anything, so I start pounding when the douchebag—that’s what they call real jerks around here, ‘douchebag.’ ”

“So I’ve heard.”

“I thought of her boyfriend like that. Great name for him, too.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, Darbra, she couldn’t have been more sociable. I don’t mean coming on to men, either. Just real friendly. The boyfriend, though, he didn’t seem ticked off only when she did that. He seemed more ticked off in general, like he wasn’t real pleased to be here or like my motel didn’t suit his standards.”

Having seen Teagle’s apartment, I found that hard to understand. “Go on.”

“Where was—oh, right. So I’m pounding on the door, and he finally comes to answer it.”

“What did he say?”

“Well, I told him we’d had some complaints about the noise, and he said he was real sorry.”

“Sarcastic?”

“No. No, just straight, like he really was.”

“Not nervous, then?”

“No. Really polite, nice as a six-year-old at Sunday School.”

“What did Darbra say?”

“Didn’t see her. She was taking a shower.”

“How do you know?”

“The douchebag told me, but I could hear the water running, too.”

“Over the noise?”

“What noise?”

“From the VCR?”

“Oh, no. No, her boyfriend turned it down before he answered the door.”

“Before?”

“Yeah. I tell you, it was kind of weird, like him and me were talking by the door to a church, except for all the beers by the television there.”

“So you didn’t come in the room.”

“Of course not. She was in the shower.”

“And you didn’t see her then?”

Utt gave me an offended look. “She was a real foxy lady, but I’m no peeper.”

“Then what?”

“Then I went back to the office. I got my place behind it.”

“No more complaints?”

“No.”

“And they checked out the next morning.”

“Early.”

“Early?”

“Yeah. They could’ve stayed till eleven, like I said. And since they’d checked in late the Saturday before, just finding me by luck and all, I might’ve let them stay a couple hours into the afternoon. But it wasn’t even nine in the A.M. when Douchebag dropped off the key and bolted out of here.”

“Bolted?”

“Yeah. They were gone out the parking lot before I ever got to the door. Bastards.”

“How do you know?”

“What?”

“How do you know they both left?”

Utt looked at me, then looked at the floor, then back up at me. “Well, I guess I don’t. I saw the back of long-hair—I thought of him as that, too, you don’t see so many hippie types the way you used to—as he dropped off the keys, but I was on the phone, and by the time I hung up, they—the car, I mean, was going out the back of the lot onto 35 north.”

“Could you see if both were in the car?”