Don't Explain: An Artie Deemer Mystery (16 page)

“Aww, that’s so nice,” said Crystal. “But I thought this was Kempshall Island.”

“Yes, that’s a common misconception. It’s always been Teal Island. Why don’t I hold on to your lobsters in their natural habitat until after the launchin’. ’Course that could take a couple of years.”

“So there have been other launchings?” asked Crystal.

“Many launchin’s,” said Alistair, “many, many launchin’s.”

“What happened?”

“Nothin’.”

Jellyroll started up the steps, and we followed. I found Crystal’s ass as she climbed as aesthetically pleasing as the environment itself. So did Alistair, I’d bet. On the way I told Crystal what happens in the winter when the northeast winds blow and people take everything apart and leave the Crack to nature. I told her why there were no trees around the Crack, and she said that it was hard to imagine waves breaking up here.

We sat down on a shallow dome of rock near the edge.

Then the black-hulled sportfisherman entered the Crack. Richard steered from up on the flying bridge. His son shot videotape from the low, open stern. They slowly made their way along the moored boats down the middle.

“See that boat?”

“The black one?”

I told her about how they’d made a beeline at us yesterday out by the Disappointments. “See the skinny guy at the wheel? He said he’d heard on TV that Jellyroll was being stalked.”

“On TV?”

“That’s what he said. That’s his son taking pictures.”

“Can I use your binoculars?” She looked at the father and then at the son as they passed directly below us, but there was nothing to be seen of Sonny’s face except for the camcorder.

“Everybody’s watching us,” Crystal whispered. Crystal and I hadn’t been together long enough for her to grow used to Jellyroll’s notoriety. For me, it’s been a way of life, and I’m still not used to it. In this country, pop culture makes you famous and fortunate, and then it kills you if you’re not constantly vigilant. Even if you are.

“Is that his wife?” Crystal nodded toward the woman sitting at the crane controls.

Since I’d last seen it, the crane had been reinforced with a wooden A-frame structure that was guyed by thick cables anchored with bolts and turnbuckles into the rock—so the weight
of the submarine wouldn’t pull the crane off the cliff. Edith sat slouched in the seat under the A-frame and stared out across the Crack to the northeast. She seemed to be nodding every now and then at the invective coming in over her headphones. She glanced over to her right, in our direction.

“Look at that!” snapped Crystal. “She’s got a black eye—” Crystal was outspoken on the subject of female battery and abuse. She informed me early on in our relationship that if I ever belted her, I’d meet with an abrupt end. Something about an icepick thrust through my eye socket into my braincase while I slept. I would never belt her, but I didn’t doubt she’d do that if I ever did.

“Pardon us, but could we meet him? You probably hate people asking.”

“No, it’s okay. This is Jellyroll.”

Two women of about forty sat down on the rock across from Crystal and me. Jellyroll went to be petted, as was the routine. He smiled and wagged his tail as they fondled and rubbed him, making the usual sounds.

The woman who’d asked to meet him was stocky and muscular. She wore a halter top, an unbuttoned denim shirt over it, Bermuda shorts, and clogs. She might have been the star sculler in her day on the Vassar four. “Would you like some lemonade?” she asked.

Sure we would, and she withdrew a plaid thermos from the wicker picnic basket hanging on her arm. “I’m Eunice and this is Lois. We live over on the east end. We heard the R-r-ruff Dog was staying at the boathouse, and we couldn’t resist.” She had an endearing toothy smile.

The lemonade was homemade.

Lois was birdlike, light, angular. Who was she? I knew her face from somewhere. I remembered the long fingers with which, one hand at a time, she constantly touched her face as if she weren’t certain that it was firmly rooted and wouldn’t go careening off into the audience. She wore a bulky knit wool sweater with
a high shawl collar much too warm for the weather. I wondered if she were ill, and that’s when I recognized her. I tried not to stare, but I’d definitely seen her before—

“Lois Lane?” I said.

“Yep, that was me. Way back when.”

“I thought you were brilliant.” She performed these wild theatrical pieces back in the late seventies, and I saw two early ones in Brooklyn. Both were on the same subject—a young woman’s relationship to her schizophrenia. She addressed it, her disease, as if it were another figure on stage, called it Carl. As she did so, she broke up Saltine crackers without remarking on the fact and dropped them on the stage until it was completely covered with crackers. Each step she took crunched.

“Do you live here year round?” Crystal asked.

“We have for the last two years,” said Eunice.

“I went insane,” said Lois matter-of-factly. “Eunice is hiding me out here.”

“We were having breakfast on the porch at the Cod End when that poor woman was murdered,” Eunice said.

“You saw her?” asked Crystal.

“When someone opened the door, there she was, sitting against the sink.” They both nodded silently. “Brains actually are gray. I always thought that was just a figure of speech, gray matter. Hers were, anyhow,” Lois said.

The sportfisherman had turned around and was now heading back out the Crack. I nodded at it. “Have you ever seen those guys before?”

“We saw them in Micmac the other day,” said Eunice. “Hard to miss on that big fancy boat. Lois thinks that’s Dick Desmond.”

“It
is
Dick Desmond.”

“What do you think?” Eunice asked Crystal.

“I never heard of Dick Desmond.”

I thought I remembered the name, an actor—

“The
Ten Pins
,” said Lois. “Remember that show?”

A chill went through me. The
Ten Pins
—It was a TV series, a naked rip-off of
The Waltons
, but cutesier, full of cheap sentiment. Instead of a farm, the family owned a bowling alley!

“Pins? Like
bowling
pins?” asked Crystal.

“Sure, bowling,” said Lois. “He was a star for a minute or two back then. I saw him close up in Micmac. I’m certain it’s him.”

“Did you talk to him?” I asked.

They shook their heads.

“The other guy is his son,” I said.

“Really?” asked Lois. “He looked about fifty to me.”

“You saw him without the camera?”

“Briefly.”

“Yeah, but that’s not Dick Desmond,” insisted Eunice.

“I’ll bet you a hundred dollars.”

“You’re crazy.”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“Hey, look—” said Eunice, nodding toward the crane and nearly whispering. “There’s Roxy. That’s quite a rare sighting, Roxanne Self in the flesh. She’s nearly a hermit.”

“Why?” Crystal asked.

“Nobody really knows, but some people think because she’s atoning for the murder of Compton Kempshall.”

“I met Hawley Self, and he told me he killed Kempshall.”

They nodded. Hawley apparently told everyone that.

“They never found the old man’s body,” said Lois.

“No,” said Eunice. “In fact, some people say he planned his own disappearance. He was about to be indicted for selling defective stuff to the navy during World War Two. There’s no reason to believe Roxanne killed him, or that there ever was a murder.”

“That’s her husband over there, a tough old bird named Arno Self. His family’s been here since before this was a country.”

I briefly put the binoculars on Arno Self. He was an old salt with a big gray beard. He was watching Roxanne talk to Edith Hickle.

The crane whirred, the cable came taut on the sub and twittered vertically. The cables and rock anchors counterbalancing the submarine creaked and strained. You could see the strain in the cables. But nothing moved. That would be a crashing anticlimax. No, it was lifting the sub. The railroad-tie rack moved first, then the sub itself visibly rose but only slightly at first. The crane whirred louder, and then the sub rose off the rack. People applauded nervously. Edith looked tense. I’d look tense, too, sitting under all those desperately straining cables. She hunched her shoulders, but that would have done her no good had one of them snapped. I’d read in books about that happening on ships. The cable snaps back with force enough to cut a man in half. We all hunched our shoulders for Edith. Roxanne Self stood near the crane and watched the proceedings sourly.

Then the sub eased away from the cliff and out over the water. Nothing snapped. Hickle’s island engineering had held. When Edith stopped the outward movement, the suspended sub swung gently back and forth and began to pivot slowly. As it came around, sunlight glinted cheerfully off the bubble canopy. Hickle was crouched inside, but he was clearly unhappy about something.

I looked with my binoculars. Joystick in hand, the bony, nearly naked old commander crouched on a bicycle seat, his face twisted with hostility, screaming silently at Edith over the earphones. The cords in his neck were yanked as tight as the cable that supported him. He repeatedly pounded his knee with his fist. Up on the crane seat, risking decapitation, Edith nodded regularly, calmly. The sub’s bubble nose pivoted slowly away from us.

Then the sub started down at a controlled rate. We all applauded— there weren’t that many of us. But again we applauded as concentric rings rolled out languidly when the bottom of the sub touched the water. Was that the actual moment of launching, I wondered?

The sub never actually paused to float on its own, but we figured that was probably in the nature of submarine launchings.
Undramatically, it went right under. We hustled toward the edge to see. It looked like some extinct benthic giant as it submerged, as it broke apart into orange slivers and finally disappeared completely.

Now what? How long does a sub need to stay down to be considered launched? One wondered about the protocol of submarine launchings. As far as we knew, the commander could stay down for days. Edith gave no hint. She was leaning over the edge of the crane listening to Roxanne, who was tapping the palm of her hand with the back of her other hand, making serious points. After a while, Edith shook her head no, sat up straight behind her levers, and folded her arms.

I’m not certain how much time passed before the crane whirred, again, long enough for the spectators to straggle back to the places they had occupied before the launching. We all looked toward Edith, who was taking up the slack in the cable, which when it came taut transferred its load back to the crane, the scaffold, and the cables anchored into the rock. They creaked and cracked. Edith cringed, but again Hickle’s engineering held fast. The sub was surfacing.

We gathered again at the cliff side to watch the orange flecks dance abstractly, then leap together into a vague sub shape—but something was wrong. The sub was surfacing tail first. A murmur ran through the spectators. We shifted closer to the edge as the tail fins broke the surface.

The sub had been launched suspended from its balance point, but now that point had changed. Now the sub was nose-heavy. What would change the balance point of a sub after submerging? There was only one answer to that, clear even to us low-tech lubbers. The sub broke free of the water entirely, and it didn’t stop until it came almost level with the top of the Crack. And there it hung, cascades of water pouring, pivoting torpidly around its new balance point.

At first we were silent. Immediate realization was unavailable to us. We saw it, our jaws gaped, we reached for each other’s arms, but it took a while to realize that the sub had suffered the most fundamental of submarine breakdowns. It had leaked. Bad.

The big bubble nose was filled with water, and Commander Hickle sloshed around inside like a dead guppy. He floated upside down, arms and legs akimbo like a skydiver, fingers splayed. His eyes were bugged, bloodshot, slightly crossed, and his lips were pursed in a cruel parody of a fish. He’d probably died sucking the last draft from the exhausted air trapped at the top of the bubble. I could almost hear that fatal, futile sucking.

FIFTEEN

D
o you think Edith did it?” Crystal asked me in the boat on the way home.

The notion had flitted across my mind, but so does a lot of baseless stuff. “You mean intentionally?”

“Sabotage.”

“Do you?”

“Well, she had a funny look on her face as he was sloshing around in there. She didn’t look surprised. I don’t know these people, of course, and maybe she was in shock, but she didn’t look surprised.”

I gave that some thought…Two dead in three days. New York pace. I supposed Sheriff Kelso would investigate, but he probably didn’t know submarines, couldn’t tell if this one had been sabotaged or not. “Didn’t you feel a little sorry for him floating around in there spread-eagled in his Speedo?”

“Sure, but I feel sorry for Edith, too.”

It seemed odd that Edith would endure a decade of shit from him, if that was the case, while he built the damn thing, then drown him in it on the day it was launched, at the very climax, didn’t it? On the other hand, maybe the timing was all the more reason to suspect Edith; but the truth of the matter no doubt was that Commander Hickle was a crank and a shitty submarine builder.