Sandy Gingras - Lola Polenta 01 - Swamped (14 page)

“It was political?” Joe asks.

“Not really,” Marie says. “Ernie didn’t take sides. He thought the country was weak. He thought people were weak. He kind of looked down on everyone who gave in to their emotions.”

“Who gave in to their hearts?” I say.

She nods. “A lot of his little doors had hearts on them. The door to people’s hearts,” he liked to call them.

Maybe the door to people’s wallets too, I think.

Chapter 24

When I get home, I see George putting away the mower in the shed where Ernie was killed. I wait, and he locks the door behind him and catches up with me, keys jingling around his waist as he runs.

“How was your first day on the job?” I ask.

“I mowed everything,” he says happily. “Tomorrow I learn how to clean the pool. Thanks,” he adds, “Just getting out of the house…”

I nod.

We stand there awkwardly. I’m picturing William and George and Mean Muumuu all squished into that sparkling clean little trailer. It makes my shoulders hunch up. “We used to be normal,” he tells me as if in explanation. “When my father died, my mother kind of went off the deep end. She got real depressed. She got on medication, but it didn’t help much. She cried all the time, and if I didn’t go over there, she wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t get out of bed.”

I don’t know why he’s telling me all this. It happens to me a lot. I must look like a big empty basin that people want to pour out their troubles in.

“Then she started drinking, going out to bars.… It was weird, I mean, my mother was never like that. Anyway, it turned into a full time job—watching my mother. My marriage went right down the tubes. I moved in with her just to keep an eye on her. Then, just when I thought it couldn’t get worse, my mother joined this church: The Church of the Holy Innocents. At first I thought it was great, because she stopped drinking, started going to church and cleaning up her act. Then she started going every day, two times a day. One day, she comes home with this guy, William. She says she got married to him that day. She says it was a church ceremony with only church members; that’s the way they do things. I say, what kind of a church asks you to keep your own family out? I didn’t even know that she was DATING, if you can call it that.

“William is one of the church fathers. His job is to start up a new branch of the church down here. So they sold the house and moved down here. I helped them move, then I stayed. I’m afraid to leave her, to tell you the truth. It’s a weird religion. It’s very rigid. William is in charge of the house and home, and my mother is like his slave. She’s really quiet most of the time, but sometimes I actually hear her say, ‘Yes, sir.’ She gained fifty pounds since she married him. He doesn’t want me to be here, and, believe me, I don’t want to be here, but I feel like maybe my mother will die if I leave. Not that I’m doing any good being here, but I feel like I can’t abandon her.

“Every day she asks me, ‘When are you moving out and going back to Debbie?’ That’s my wife. I think he makes her ask. I wouldn’t be surprised if one day he just changes the locks and I can’t get in. When I get her alone, which is almost never, and ask her how she is or if she’s happy, she says, ‘Please don’t make trouble.’”

I shake my head.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I shouldn’t burden you with this, but I don’t know what to do. Maybe I could hire you to do something?”

“What kind of something?”

“Check William out, check out the church… I don’t know… something.”.

“You might want to hire a real P.I.” I tell him.

“I like you,” he says.

“That’s sweet of you, but I have no experience.”

“I’ll help you,” he says.

“Oh, for goodness sakes,” I say. “Everyone wants to be a P.I. now.”

“I watch TV,” George tells me.

That’s about the extent of the qualifications that I have too, so I can’t say anything. Although now I don’t even have a TV anymore. “Have you been to this church?” I ask him.

“A couple times. They don’t really encourage visitors. They want you to join up. In other locations, they have a whole compound. I mean, you LIVE there. You give up all your worldly possessions and they take care of you. That’s what they’re trying to start here.”

“Sounds like a cult. What do they believe in?

“It’s hard to say. I know more about what they don’t believe in. Almost everything is a sin. No movies, TV, music, books. There are lots of rules. And it seems really patriarchal; you have to obey God and obey your husband. Women aren’t allowed to work, and they hardly ever leave the house without their husbands. And they’re all fat. I think the men just fatten the women up so that they are inert and feel horrible about themselves and so feel even more trapped than they are.”

“How can that be?” I say.

“What do you mean?” he asks.

I don’t really know what I mean. Sometimes the world is just too strange. You get a little glimpse inside the trailer next to yours and you just want to run screaming from the park.

“I can’t let this happen to my mother,” George says.

We’re in front of George’s trailer now. William is putting out the garbage. He nods to us.

“Oh, all right,” I tell George.

When I get inside, I call my cousin Kathy. She’s a lawyer. “File me up for divorce,” I tell her.

“What?” she says.

“Ed called me to tell me he’s become enlightened. I’ve been squelching his energy,” I say.

“Really,” she says. “Squelching?”

“Considering I’ve been living in a world of a million marbles, I think I’m the one who’s been more squelched. I was almost BURIED alive,” I tell her.

“Why don’t you take some time to think about it?”

“I took enough.”

“Look, you need to be sure about this. The last three people who hired me made me go through all the paperwork and then they changed their minds. They figured out how emotionally draining it is and how much money they would lose. And they were right,” she tells me. “I really don’t know why divorce is so popular,” she concludes.

“We had separate investment accounts and retirement accounts, and the house is his. All I want is the dog. That’s all there is to it,” I tell her. And, suddenly, it does seem that clear.

“I’ll give you the family rate,” she sighs.

I slide my wedding band off my finger and put it on the card table. It slides off my finger easily. I must have lost weight. There’s a pale space on my skin where it was. I’ll have to go to the beach and even that band line out, I think. Then I realize that I don’t even know where the beach is.

It’s 5:30. I don’t have to go to Coconuts til 7:30. I get in my car and start driving. I don’t know where I’m going, but what else is new?

I pull into a big shopping mall. What’s a girl to do after she realizes that her whole marriage was a lie. Go shopping! I buy some pastel-colored clothes. Then I walk into a hair salon. I sit down in front of the huge mirror, look at myself in the big plastic smock and decide to go extreme.“Very short and spiky,” I tell the stylist. “And put some streaks in.” I know I’m on a roll, veering wildly into the superficial, but I don’t care. I need action.

As I’m leaving the salon, who’s coming in but Detective Johansen with a young girl. I stop short.

He reluctantly says, “Hi.” Then he says, “This is my daughter, Juju.”

“Juliet,” she corrects him.

“Juliet,” he says.

She’s a chunky girl who looks about eight years old with unruly curly black hair and cat’s eye tortoise shell glasses. She looks a little like I did when I was her age—her shoulders all set, her mouth pouty.

“Who are you?” she asks me suspiciously glancing at her father. Territorial.

“I’m a murder suspect your father knows in the course of his inquiries,” I say.

He glares at me.

“Really?” she says, her eyes lighting up.

“I allegedly killed a man with a golf club.”

“Wow,” she says. “Was it a lot of icky blood?”

“I’m innocent,” I whisper to her.

“That’s what they all say,” she sneers.

“Suspicion must run in your family,” I tell her. “Your father doesn’t believe me either.” I look at him. He’s looking at the ground.

Juliet narrows her eyes at me, “Did you just get that haircut?”

“Yup,” I admit.

“You look like a porcupine.”

“I thought it gave me height,” I say.

“I’m just getting a trim,” she says, avoiding her father’s gaze. “I’m growing my hair out so I can have dreads,” she tells me.

“Ah,” I say.

“That’s short for dreadlocks,” she informs me.

Her father shakes his head.

“Well, good luck with your trim,” I tell her. I nod goodbye at the detective. He looks at me like he wants to say something. From the look in his eyes, it might be “Help.”

Chapter 25

A neon palm tree fills the window of Coconuts and flickers in a cheery way. The music is tinny and comforting coming from the jukebox. Coconuts is half-full with a dinner crowd of older men eating and drinking at the bar. The door is open to the balmy night air.

Joe has on a blue button down shirt and chinos. His little bit of hair is combed neatly and gelled down so that the comb marks show. I have my new pink shirt on. I haven’t worn any color in weeks, so I feel like a popsicle.

When we sit down at the bar, Joe glances over at me and winks. I wink back.

We order two beers and two cheeseburgers medium rare. The bartender is a woman in her 60’s, big and gravel voiced and gruff but with a wide smile.

“What are we looking for?” Joe asks.

“Let me remind you that this was your idea.”

He takes a sip of his beer. I take a sip of mine.

Joe says, “Marie told me that Ernie was in a dart’s league here. I’m gonna go play and see if anyone knows anything about him.” He gets up to see if he can get the next dart game.

I hand the bartender a Curious George card. She looks at it. “What’s your name?” I ask her.

“People call me Cha-cha.”

I say I’m investigating Ernie’s death. Did she know him?

“Stanky?” she says, “Sure, I knew him.”

“What did you think of him?”

‘He was a ‘roid-er.’ You’d be surprised how many old guys are.” She looks around the room. “It makes them crazy. They think it makes them sexy.” She frowns.

“He took steroids?”

“My guess anyway.”

“Where’d he get them?”

She looks around the room. Shakes her head.

I say, “Ernie ever talk to you about anything personal?”

“I don’t think he had anybody he really talked to. Quiet type, really.”

“So you don’t know anything about him?”

“Well, sometimes he talked, you know. I’m listening but I’m not real-hard listening. I’m washing-glasses listening. I’m watching-TV listening. He liked that half-attention thing. Some men do. They don’t like to be focused in on. It’s like they’re talking to themselves, and you’re just over-hearing it.”

“Did you ever hear about him blackmailing people?” I ask. She scrubs around with her bar rag.

“I know he collected stories about people if that’s what you mean. He liked secrets. He liked finding out about them. What he did with them, I don’t know.”

Another collector, I think. I know a little something about men like that.

“Did he ever tell you anything about these stories he collected?”

“Let me think,” she says. “He never said no names, but he was always telling me how stupid people were. Tell the truth, I think he made a lot of stuff up.

“There was some psychic who did readings for this woman and he’d tell her what to do to him sexually—you know—based on the cards. Ernie thought that was hysterical.”

I have to tell Squirt that one, I think.

“There was something about old homosexual guys…. It was just weird, and it made me feel funny to listen to his stories when he talked.”

“How did he find out all of this stuff?”

“Ernie watched people. He was like one of them old portraits where the eyes follow you around the room. That was his seat.” She points to a couple stools down, an end seat. “He liked to lean up against that wall. Sometimes he’d draw little things on his napkin, those whirligig things. The guy who caught the fish and rocked back so that the boat tipped, stuff like that. Then he’d show me. ‘See how it all connects,’ he’d say. ‘This part moves and then this part moves.’ He was totally into that.”

“That’s what he did to people,” I say kind of thinking aloud. “Did he have money?”

“He always had cash. But he was cheap. Sometimes he’d be here all night, tip me a dollar.”

Suddenly I’m aware of the stale smell of the bar. I tell Cha-Cha to call me if she remembers anything else. Outside, there’s a fog settling in.

I go over and watch Joe playing darts with a tall guy who reminds me of the shoe bomber and another shorter red-haired man.

“This is Rod,” he introduces me to the big guy, “And this is Tom Atkins. They played in Ernie’s dart’s league.” Joe introduces me as a P.I. who’s investigating Ernie’s death.

Rod shakes my hand. “Interesting,” he says.

Tom excuses himself and says he needs to hit the men’s room.

Rod says nodding toward the door, “It looks like we’re going to get some weather.” There’s the sound of thunder rumbling in the distance, and a Z of lightening lights up the sky.

“Yikes,” I say.

Joe says, “He’s right. We better get home.”

Joe and I walk to the car. The night is dense with humidity. A streetlight shines down on the parked car, and I can see Dreamer’s face pressed to the glass in the backseat.

I’m hunched over the wheel as I inch along the streets. The headlights barely dent the fog. The lightning flashes every few minutes and the sky looks like a neon sheet. “I hope we get home before this hits,” I say.

As I drive, I tell Joe what I learned from Cha-Cha. “I think Ernie liked power. I think he liked to exercise it in strange ways.” I tell him about the whirligigs. I say, “He liked to manipulate people. Did you learn anything from Rod or Tom before I came over?”

“Well, Rod’s an erratic thrower. Darts is a game of very little motion. He uses his body far too much.”