Goofy Foot (23 page)

Read Goofy Foot Online

Authors: David Daniel

BOOK: Goofy Foot
12.97Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
The door to unit 3-B at the Sea Chimes was closed this time, so I knocked. I heard the padded approach of footsteps and saw the peephole darken. The door opened. Iva Rand's eyes did, too. “What happened to you? You look awful.”
“May I come in?”
She gave me a skeptical look that said no-yes, eyed the paper bag in my hand and then stepped back passively. She had on another sweat suit, a shiny lavender nylon this time. The nail polish on her bare toes matched.
“Did you bring highballs?” she asked. “That's how it goes, doesn't it? Get the lady drunk, maybe make a pass, and she spills the dark secrets?”
“In bad novels,” I said. “Anyway, it's a bit early.”
“Or late.”
I opened the paper bag and took out two coffees in Styrofoam and set them on the coffee table, along with packets of sugar and plastic thimbles of half-and-half. She looked disappointed. “You should've stuck with the cheap novel.” But she took a cup anyway and pried off the lid. We sat on the antique love seats. On the table
I saw several old issues of
Silver Screen
and
Photoplay
, one of them open, where she'd apparently been reading it.
“I thought those passed on with William Holden,” I said.
“I found them at a yard sale. I confess a longing for the glamour of yesteryear—and all those corny ads for bust-enlarging crème. I was always tempted to try some, but then I worried that rubbing it on I'd end up with hands the size of fielders' mitts.”
“Use Latex gloves.”
“Thanks, I'll send for the crème today.” We both grinned, and I saw again the pretty woman she'd been.
Hoping the convivial mood would last, I said, “Mrs. Rand, Ben Nickerson and his daughter are still missing, but the girl made a call from down this way last night.”
She shrugged. “I don't know why you came here. You think I have answers.”
“Do you?”
“What is this—a game? You tell me your secrets, I'll tell you mine?”
“I'm just trying to put something together,” I said.
“Well, lots of luck. I've got enough troubles of my own, and you appear to have yours.”
“Ben Nickerson's trouble may be a lot more serious.”
“I want to be left the hell alone, goddammit.”
“Garbo did that first,” I said, “and better.”
Her face tightened. “All right, mister, that does it! You turn around and march yourself right out of here!”
I felt a flare of anger. It was impossible to communicate with this abrasive, self-pitying woman. I drew a breath. “Look, if there's been a crime committed, or the suggestion of one, you can be questioned as a material witness. That'll mean a trip over to Plymouth Superior Court. I don't know how that'll play with your lost-lady routine, but I'd think it'd be easier to talk to me here.”
“Why should I? You're no cop.”
I sighed. “No, and I'm not your enemy, Mrs. Rand.”
She didn't appear convinced, but she refrained from comment. She went over to the sideboard and picked up a decanter and poured
herself a knock. Wanting to access her before she hit overload, I said, “Did your husband mention running into Ben Nickerson a few days ago?”
A dark look flitted across her face. “No, I don't think so.”
“Did he say he had a business appointment with anyone? Perhaps to meet at the beach?”
“He doesn't make me party to his work. Never has.”
“You told me he was talking to someone about the old Surf ballroom.”
“To a broker, certainly not to Ben Nickerson. Nickerson doesn't own anything around here.”
“You said your husband owns Standish. That's quite a project he's got going out there on Shawmut Point.”
“Is it?”
“I'm impressed that he's been able to pull it off.”
“Then be impressed. I never said he wasn't smart.”
“I mean, with environmental restrictions, and the sheer cost of coastal land …”
“Point Pines is his brainchild; he's never really shared it with me. I don't know much about it—or especially care, for that matter. I once cared about everything he did. His dreams were my dreams, but that hasn't been true for many years. Now, if there's nothing more …”
I was drilling but wasn't having any luck. “What changed that?” I asked. “Your son's accident?”
Her eyes snapped wide, then almost immediately narrowed. “You shut up!”
I'd struck a nerve. I backed off. “How about a woman named Jillian Kearns? Has your husband ever brought her up?”
“What is this with asking me questions about him and young women?”
“How do you know she's young?”
She sneered. “That's the only kind Randy is interested in. Have you met his charming miss from Takes-ass?”
Her anger was rising again. To stave it off, I said, “A doughnut would go good with this coffee right now, but I'll settle for something sneaky in it.”
It was a language she understood. She brought over the dwindling decanter. I held up my cup, and she poured and set the decanter down on one of her movie magazines. We fell back on ritual and touched the drinks, my paper cup to her glass. “To the stars of yesteryear,” I said.
“The past—which can stay right the hell where it is.”
But I wasn't sure it could. Maybe alcohol and caffeine would help my head, though I honestly couldn't see how. Mainly, I needed a reason to stay a little longer, to try to draw the hermit crab from its shell. I moved over to the large picture window. Beyond, far out at sea, sunlight and clouds moved restlessly on the surface of the water. Closer to shore, the wind was blowing spume off the waves like pale sparks. I turned. “I visited your son.”
I braced for reaction—perhaps even attack—but it didn't come. She sat unmoving, staring at nothing. In the stillness, I could hear the growl of a motorcycle along the beach strip.
“He's an impressive young man,” I said, “even lying in the VA hospital bed.”
She gauged me a moment with questing eyes. Her surprise earlier at my battle scars said she probably hadn't known of my visit, and now I was sure. It was one more secret Rand had chosen not to share with her. “Why is TJ there?” I asked.
She moved a shoulder. “Where else? He needs constant care.”
“Your husband could afford private nurses at home. The surroundings would be more cheerful.”
She went on looking at me, saying nothing. It was similar to the reaction Van Owen had had. And now I had to wonder: Was it possible that in everyone's mind, because Rand had willed it so, TJ was dead? She took a cigarette from a cloisonné box on the table, and I used the table lighter and applied flame to the tip. She drew in smoke and then sat back, her legs curled beneath her, her cigarette pointed at the ceiling.
“He was the most beautiful little boy. And he stayed that way, year after year—not little, he grew; he was a wonderful athlete—but happy, well-adjusted, good at school.” Her voice had lost some of its raspy edge. “I'd wanted to have more children, but it … didn't work out. Do you have children?”
“No.”
She nodded. “If I was destined only to have the one, I couldn't have had a better child. And then …” She fell silent.
I thought about the photograph I'd looked at in Rand's den, of Iva clutching her infant son. “Chet Van Owen told me he was different after he got home from the service.”
She frowned, but she began to talk again. “I used to think that Teddy came back from the service with that post-traumatic thing. But I realize it was probably something he'd been feeling before, which is why he chose the military in the first place, instead of college, as his father and I had wanted. I think that his … achievements, the kudos, weren't all that satisfying to him. He used to say he wanted to make connection with people, and I wonder now if somehow those things got in the way. But it's true, when he came home from the Marines he … was depressed.” As she talked, she'd absently begun to round ashes off her cigarette, giving it a point.
“Had he found out about Ginny Carvalho?”
Her gaze came up quickly: dark and sharp. “What do you know about her?”
“She was your son's girlfriend. She drowned while he was away.”
“You seem to be quite a student of Standish's history.”
“People seem to want to share it. Bits and pieces. I'm lost. I need help.”
“From me?”
“If possible.”
“Well, that's got nothing to do with anything. Nothing. And I'm dropping it.”
She squashed out her cigarette and picked up her drink. I said, “One story I heard was that the Carvalho girl was promiscuous.” There was no finesse to my fishing; I was chumming now, casting bait wherever I could. “That she was with some high school guys the night she died.”
She waved a hand in sharp dismissal. “That never panned out. It was a drowning, plain and simple.”
“Was there an investigation?”
“I don't know.”
“How about an autopsy?”
“How would I know that?” She hesitated. “I only know Vin never found evidence of any foul play.”
I blinked. “Vin Delcastro?”
“Who do you think I mean?”
Under the bandage, my head throbbed. “He was police chief back then?”
She looked at me, as if astonished by my density. “He was twenty-some years old. How could he be chief? He was a rookie patrolman. He's the one who found the body.”
Andy Royce, the real estate agent, was sitting at a desk reading a book by Tony Robbins. He hadn't gotten very far in it yet apparently, because when he saw me he didn't hop to his feet and gush optimism. He had already tagged me as a perpetual window-shopper. “Hi, there,” he said blandly.
“I believe you're the man with the commercial solutions,” I said.
Now he pulled himself out of his chair and came over.
“You're the listing agent for the old Surf ballroom at Nantasket Beach,” I said.
“Boy, you're running on a tank of bum luck, fella.” His headshake was all sympathy. “That place was on the market two years, and I finally just moved it the day before yesterday.”
“Really? I missed again, huh? Who finally bought it?”
“Leased it, actually. Ted Rand did. He took it for twelve months.”
“Is he planning to bring back disco?”
“Down the road, who knows? He'll make it a gold mine, whatever he does. For now he was just eager to get the keys. He said something about storage.”
I made gentle stabs with a few more questions, but he wasn't in
the know. “What can you tell me about the Cape Way Motor Lodge?” I asked.
“If you can afford better, don't stay there. It used to be popular, oh, twenty years ago, when people liked the idea of housekeeping cottages. It had a bunch of little units folks could come and stay in for cheap. But the highway yanked most of the traffic off that old road, and when John Carvalho took it over, he let things go. He's a bit of an odd duck, John.”
“None of the personality of Ted Rand,” I said.
“Not by a mile.” Ditto for Andy Royce's sense of irony. “But you want to hear a funny thing? Guess who that property used to belong to.”
“Rand?”
“He let Carvalho take it cheap.” Royce grinned and shook his head in wonder. “Now there's a man with his finger on the pulse. Point Pines is going to make him richer than God. We'll all benefit. Property values are gonna go over the moon. Now, if you're interested in a business opportunity in town, I've got a dry cleaner's that's coming up for sale. And a landscaping service.”
I told him I'd think about it and be in touch. “What happened to your head?” he finally asked.
“A little fender bender. No one else hurt.” Starting out, I had a thought. “Curiosity. Did Carvalho buy the motel
before
his daughter died?”
Andy Royce thought for a moment. “After is how I remember it.”
 
 
My headache, at least, had settled into a dull ache by the time I got out to the Cape Way Motor Lodge. The neon sign was winking away in the hot daylight like a weak pulsar in a lonely galaxy, and I understood for the first time Van Owen's line about the place that time forgot. In back of the motel building I saw Carvalho's old wagon, but the white Toyota was gone, as I'd hoped it would be. Fran Albright was a lovely and dutiful daughter, but overprotective of her father. A grown man had to able to make his own mistakes.
I went to the door of their small Cape and knocked. To my left,
beyond a wooden fence, I saw the dog rear its head. Then, without so much as a snuffle or a bark, it lunged. I knew it was chained, but even so I took a reflexive step backward. “Down, Gruff!” I ordered, and to my surprised relief it obeyed. “Nice, Gruff,” I cooed.
I knocked again. I put my face to the door pane and peered inside. The floor-to-ceiling stacks of yellowing newspapers seemed almost to teeter inward over an angular passageway, like the stage set of a 1920s German film. I half-expected to see Conrad Veidt come somnambulating from among them wielding a hatchet.
I jumped. Carvalho was standing three feet to my right. He'd come up without a sound, astonishing for a man of his bulk. I smelled him, though: an effluence of sweat, sour clothing, and bottled fear. His small eyes looked hostile. In one hand he held a galvanized bucket full of soapy water and a scrub brush. His other hand gripped the .44 Python at his side.
“I'm just here to talk,” I said.
“Don't have the time for it.”
“A few minutes are all I need.”
“I've got nothing for you.”
A droplet of sweat crawl down my temple. Around us, small dragonflies flitted in the heavy air, the thin bright blue ones that we used to call darning needles when we were kids. The story was they'd sew your lips together if you told a lie. If true, it was going to be a silent world soon; people had been telling me far too many. “Come on, John,” I said, “let's talk.”
He didn't oblige as his dog had. He studied me, his round heavy face impassive, small eyes dull. It was an ugly stone of a face. It was hard for me to imagine how he'd ever made pretty daughters. But he had.
“I can call the police,” he mumbled.
“I don't think you'd bother. I don't imagine you're a big fan of Vin Delcastro's.”
Sometimes a key goes into a lock and nothing happens, and you realize you've made a mistake. But sometimes the lock is old, and the key hasn't been in it for so long it takes time to find the tumblers. Carvalho was silent for a full minute. Longer. He set the bucket
down. He didn't put the gun away, but at last he grunted for me to come in. I mopped my face and followed him.
The place was as dim and claustrophobic as the first time I'd been there, shadowed at the margins by the great heaps of newspapers, as if time had been stored there, walled in and completely forgotten. I realized I needed to get him back there. Opting to believe that he wasn't going to shoot me in his own home, I walked ahead and into the nook he used as his headquarters, with its maps and pyramid eyes, its radio and police scanner, and the big cubby-holed desk—a haven for lonely believers. “Just so you know,” I said, “I'm carrying.” I drew aside my coat to reveal the butt of the Smith in my belt holster, then covered it again. I pulled over a chair and sat. Hesitating at my show of stubbornness, or foolhardiness, he settled heavily into his own chair.
“Talk about what?” he asked, only the faintest spark of curiosity in his eyes.
“Before your daughter drowned in September that year, what was she like?”
His carbuncled face seemed to strain with incredulity. “What does that mean—‘what was she like?' What the hell are you sayin'?”
“Had anything changed? Different habits, new friends?”
“I don't know what you're after.”
I didn't know either. I was free-falling, totally unsure of where I would land. “Had she gained weight? Lost weight?”
“She took to swimming.”
“Swimming?”
“For exercise. She'd taken this notion of being a fashion model. My wife told her she wasn't built for it. She wasn't one of those bony wisps you see in the ads. She was a healthy-sized girl. Athletic and sturdy. She took to swimming and eating healthy.”
“And she was swimming the night she drowned,” I said.
His face wrinkled like an old tarpaulin. “What else?”
An alternative was that she was partying with a bunch of high school guys, as one story had it. Or was there another alternative?
“Vin Delcastro found her early next morning, didn't he?” I said, going through the details that were still fresh in my mind. Carvalho
nodded. “It was after Labor Day,” I went on, “when the force would be small, so a young patrolman would've handled everything, right? Including the follow-up investigation.”
“So?”
“Was there an inquest?”
“You mean … ?”
“For an accidental drowning, wouldn't there have been an autopsy?”
He drew his mouth down in a thin, surprised line. “If so, I never heard.”
“You never asked?” The sharpness of my words made him flinch. More gently, I added, “No one ever explained?”
His eyes were pained and vulnerable, and water glistened in the corners. “I was a teacher in the junior high school, part of the community … It's hard to speak up, maybe make trouble …”
“What kind of trouble? For whom?”
“For me … for anyone. I only wanted my girl back.” I felt sorrow coming from him, leaking from his pores with his sweat. “She's in the graveyard, and her mother beside her.”
I glanced around the cramped space: at the desk with its many drawers, at his filing cabinets. “Would you still have a newspaper that carried the story?”
He shook his head. “I don't want to remember that.”
“It might help to.”
“No. I don't have anything like that.”
And yet he could document each column inch of every crackpot idea ever hatched by the nutboxes who dreamed up the worldwide plot to control us all. I thanked him and rose to go, then realized I still had one question. He listened and frowned. “Ginny never mentioned any Nickerson. Only one she ever talked about was Rand's boy. Seemed like no one existed for her but him. It gave her heartaches when he left town for the service.”
Carrying the Python, he trailed me back out through the labyrinth of old paper. I opened the door and stepped out, and nearly kicked over the bucket. Soapy water sloshed over the rim. He drew the screen door closed between us. I said, “I'm sorry I had to bring all this up.”
“You'd do well not to come out here again. It's not safe.”
“Because?”
“The bigger battle goes on.”
Wheels within wheels: the man's circling mind kept returning with paranoid fascination to his hunt for the grand theory that would explain it all. Crazy, I knew, and yet, as I drove away, I couldn't let go of the growing feeling that there was another kind of conspiracy going on right here in this beach town. Seeing the old man hadn't cleared up any mystery, nor told me where Michelle Nickerson was, but it had given me an idea.

Other books

Her Ladyship's Girl by Anwyn Moyle
The Illuminati by Larry Burkett
A Unicorn Adventure! by Chloe Ryder
Angel Face by Barbie Latza Nadeau
The Beach House by Paul Shepherd
Red Sand by Cray, Ronan
The Dutiful Wife by Penny Jordan
Tabloidology by Chris McMahen
Franklin's Valentines by Paulette Bourgeois, Brenda Clark