Sandy Gingras - Lola Polenta 01 - Swamped (3 page)

Now the other cops are pushing people back from the police tape, trying to disperse everyone. Dreamer stands up obediently, takes a few steps back. She’s such a little goody two shoes about authority. I don’t know where she gets it.

Then the big cop walks over to me. “Detective Johansen,” he introduces himself and nods to both of us. “I need to speak with both of you,” he tells us.

The crowd all turns and stares at us. Here I am covered in blood. “Who is she?” I hear someone say.

I point down the lane to my trailer. “I live right there,” I tell him.

“You wait right here sir, I’ll be back. Let’s go,” he says to me.

I turn to Joe. “Thank you,” I say. “I’ll wash your blanket.”

The detective turns to talk a moment with the crime scene guys. Then he walks me through the muttering crowd, one arm hovering kind of near my elbow. Now that I’m standing next to him, I feel like a dwarf. He’s got to be 6’3” and he’s got these thick Popeye arms. He reminds me of a tree, a sturdy New Jersey tree, not one of these swaying Florida trees.

“Go to bed.” He’s waving at the crowd. His voice is deep and rumbling. “Go get some sleep.”

Suddenly, I want to lean against him and collapse. It’s like all the resolve that’s been sustaining me vanishes.

Suddenly, I want to go home… as if I knew where that was anymore.

Chapter 5

For breakfast, I make toast on my George Foreman grill. It works. Kind of. Instead of the usually blurry beige toasty look, I get that parallel-lined, just-grilled look. More char-broiled perhaps than toasted, but tasty. I have a jelly assortment that I took from my motel lobby’s continental breakfast buffet—those gold peel-off pockets with the picture of the fruit on the top. I eat two pieces of “toast” on a paper towel standing up at my card table, grape on one piece and orange marmalade on the other.

Dreamer gets the crusts.

She had a rough night in her new location, besides the murder. Every time the air conditioner came on, she’d jump up and start barking at the floor vent. The AC is a bit explosive. It starts out of nowhere with a huge belchy sound and then the air rushes out of the grill like a little hurricane. “Maybe we’ll get used to it,” I tell Dreamer. Both of us are bleary-eyed. Although I took a long shower last night, I couldn’t get the smell of blood out of my head.

We go out for a walk. Dreamer pants dramatically. “This sun is wicked,” I say. I’m wearing my jammies and some old cowboy boots I slipped on. I know I look lame. “I’m going to have to get some tropical clothes,” I tell her. Her tail wags agreeably.

I look around. A weird bird is screeching in the trees. There’s a haze simmering over the swamp. It’s kind of like summer vacation, kind of like a horror movie.

The police tape is still up around the maintenance shed. I look around. Nobody. I’m curious to see what it looks like in there. I slip under the tape. I try the door. It’s locked, so I peek in the windows. Everything is in its place, each tool hanging on its own hook. It doesn’t look like anything’s been disturbed. I get on tiptoe. I swallow. There’s the blood stain on the cement floor. It’s very large. I wonder if Ernie was killed here. There isn’t anything that looks like a drag mark.

I call my dad’s cell phone when we get back to the trailer. It’s only 7:30 but I know he’s already at work. I know he’s probably on his second cup of coffee. His desk is already clean. He’s ready for action.

“Polenta’s,” he answers.

“Dad,” I say.

“Yes,” he says.

“I got your message.” He called my cell phone last night after he heard about the murder. He listens to the police scanner all day, all night. While he sleeps, he listens. That’s how restive he is. “I didn’t call you back,” I tell him, although he already knows this much. I didn’t have the oompf to deal with him.

“Are you okay?” he asks.

“The handyman got murdered!” I exclaim.

“I know that,” he says exasperated. “I already talked to Sal.”

“I fell on the body.”

“I know that too.”

“What did Sal say?”

“Somebody hit the poor bastard over the head with a putter.”

“A golf club?” I say astonished. Although now that I think about it, I seem to remember feeling something metal when I fell.

“A putter.”

I’ve never heard of anyone being killed by a golf club. “Can that happen?” I ask, trying to picture it.

“Just one blow from behind, then he fell on the concrete floor, so that would make two blows to the head. The autopsy will tell what really did him in.”

“Yuck,” I say, flashing back.

“The head is more like an egg than most people would like to believe.”

I’m a little woozy thinking about it again, and my brain feels like a wobbly yolk. I sit down on my cardboard chair. I don’t like to think about organs this early in the morning. Everything seems more fragile before 9 a.m. Truth be told, I’m a total wimp about death. Once, I fainted at a funeral. It was my Uncle Bookie’s service, and I was only fifteen, and I don’t think too many people noticed. Nonetheless, I was flat out in the pew of St. Matthew’s church, and my mother had to sprinkle holy water on my face to revive me.

“Yuck,” I say again. I can’t help it.

“It doesn’t sound like a real premeditated thing. Just maybe, you are making me very angry and I happen to see a golf club standing there and there you go.”

“I wouldn’t trust myself to be able to hit someone accurately with a golf club,” I tell him.

My father says. “Listen, I want you to move out of there.”

“Move again?” I say. My father could have been Napoleon. He likes to command people around. And he has no neutral or reverse gear on him; it’s all action, action, action. No dilly-dallying around thinking about things. No such thing as inertia. He used to drive my mother crazy. When he moved down to Florida, I thought he might mellow out some. But that never happened.

“I don’t want to move again,” I say. “I gave Sal a month’s rent.”

My father says, “Sal won’t mind; he’ll give it back. He owes me. He’s hiring me to look into this thing.”

“For what?” I ask. “Isn’t this a police thing? This is a real crime,” I say.

“Private Investigators do investigate real crimes, you know.”

Not me, I think. I just want to find out about people. I know how pathetic that sounds. But really, I don’t like violent crime. I’m not comfortable with it. I just want to help people fill in the gaps of their lives. That’s what I thought being a private investigator would be—a career like Mad Libs: Last night, your husband said he was

( )
ing at the
( )
,but he was really
( )
ing
( )
ly in the
( )
.

I don’t say that though. I look out my window at my view of the burbling swamp. “Why does Sal need to hire you anyway?” I ask.

“Sal’s hired me before because he’s always getting sued when something happens. Someone backs out of a driveway at night into a palm tree and he gets sued for inadequate lighting. A woman hit an alligator with her golf cart last year and sued him for premise liability. She claimed he should have prevented the alligator from being on the property. They don’t win, but it’s a hassle for Sal. Those old people are sue-happy.”

“Can you sue someone if a murder happens on their property?”

“Sure. It happens all the time. Some places are more murder-prone, or murder-possible.”

“You sent me to live in a murder-possible trailer camp?”

“I told you to move out.”

“What are you going to do to help Sal?”

“I’ll spend a couple hours in the maintenance shed,” he tells me. “I’ll measure, take some pictures. I’ll write up a report on the lighting, the condition of the building, the access-ways. It will be helpful if Sal gets sued.”

“But that’s so boring,” I tell him.

“This job IS boring. Billable hours,” he says, “that’s what counts.”

“Do you know what happened to Ernie?”

“It looks like Ernie was putting the mower away,” he says. “He had parked it in the maintenance shed. Someone must’ve come in to talk to him and ended up hitting him over the head. It was probably very quick, in and out. Two minutes,” my father says.

“Was the putter already in there?”

“It’s hard to say. It was a cheap putter. Sal has a whole bin of extra clubs in that shed that people lost or abandoned over the years. He didn’t recognize the club, but he says he wouldn’t have. It probably was just the nearest thing at hand.”

“But why?”

“I don’t know.”

“I found the body. That detective thinks that I murdered Ernie. He hates me. Last night he questioned me for a half hour about why I’m living in a retirement trailer park. He thinks I’m some sort of fugitive hiding out here. Plus, somebody told him that I had an argument with Ernie earlier in the day. These old people must spy on everything that happens here. He wants me to come down to the station this morning and get my fingerprints taken.”

“That must have been Sal. He told me you had an argument with Ernie. He said Ernie was all revved up, barged into his office and told Sal that he had to kick you out.”

“It wasn’t an argument. The guy was crazy. He was just yelling at me cuz I have a dog. You don’t kill somebody over that.” I think of him driving right at us.

“People kill over less.”

“Well I didn’t.”

‘Did Ernie come back and try to kick you out?”

“He just zoomed away on his mower. I never saw him again.”

“Hopefully the cops believe you.”

I think back to last night—the detective ducking to get into my trailer, looking around not seeing a place to sit, then staring at the blood all over me. I did look like Charles Manson.

“I don’t think they do. I didn’t like the detective’s tone.”

“His tone?”

“He was abrupt.”

“It’s a murder investigation. It’s his job.”

“He could have been nicer,” I say.

Chapter 6

Ft. Palms’ police station is like a mini-plantation on the edge of the city. It’s an old white columned building with gargoyles at the gates, two tiny squares of lawn on either side of wide marble stairs. I go into arched double doors, and the desk sergeant gives me my statement to sign, then brings me into a room to get my fingerprints taken. Then he puts me in a small room with a tin ceiling that smells like an elementary school classroom, but it’s like a little conference room with a table in the middle and mismatched chairs pushed in around it. I sit down and fold my hands on the table to try to stop them from shaking.

I wait and wait. There’s a mirror on the wall. I wonder if it’s one of those two-way ones and someone’s watching me. I try to make myself look innocent—although what does innocent look like? Suddenly, I can’t stop my face from making faces, my shoulders from hunching. I fake yawn several times.

Fifteen minutes later, Detective Johansen comes in. He doesn’t look like he got much sleep either.

“Morning,” he says. He sits down across from me. I smell a limey minty scent. There’s a nick on his ear where he must’ve cut himself shaving. He’s got a wide face with crinkly green eyes, and one eyelid is slanted more than the other so it looks like he’s half-winking at me. It gives him a kind appearance, until he opens his mouth and tells me, “Your fingerprints were on the murder weapon.”

“What?” I say.

He says it again.

“I just fell down. I must’ve fallen down on it and touched it.” I know I should stop talking.

He’s got an inch tall sheaf of papers that he stacks in front of him on the table, as if there’s already a pile of evidence against me. “Yours are the only fingerprints on the murder weapon.”

“How do things like this happen to me?” I ask him.

He says, “And I want to test your dog’s fur. There are dog hairs on the victim.”

“She was just sniffing around. We were just walking. Why do cops always suspect the person who found the victim? It’s not fair.”

“We collect evidence,” he says. “It’s not about fairness.”

“Should I call a lawyer?” I don’t know why I ask him.

“We’re not pressing charges at the present moment,” the detective tells me.

Then he starts asking me questions. Did I see the victim after my altercation with him? Did I argue with him again? Did I go into the maintenance shed to talk to the victim? Did the victim threaten me? Did the victim touch me? Did I defend myself against the victim?

On and on. His questions are like a crazy noose tightening around my neck. I keep swallowing hard. Finally, I get up to leave. I feel like jumping in my car and driving all the way back to New Jersey. Non-stop.

“Don’t leave the area,” the detective says as if reading my mind.

I sit in my car as the air conditioning pours over me. I want to close my eyes and pretend none of this is happening. I want to go home and eat a bag of M&M’s. I think about alternate do-overs of last night. I keep imagining myself not walking into shed, just minding my own business. Why, oh why, did I go into the shed? What a ding-dong.

I get a sudden image of that “going out on a limb” article in the women’s magazine. I wish I had brought that magazine with me to Florida instead of stuffing it back on the rack in the Super Fresh. Maybe it would have helped me to figure out what to do in a situation like this.

“Go out on a limb, if it breaks off, fly,” I remember it said. Fly? That’s the trouble with these self-help things. No specificity. Well, I tell myself, just don’t fall down. Just don’t be a dead stupid victim bird on the ground.

When I get home, I walk Dreamer. My father said not to come into work until noon. I think he meant that he doesn’t want me to come at all. My stomach is still all fluttery.

We go past Ernie’s trailer. The whirligigs are slowly ticking around in the early morning sunshine. The curtains are all closed and the air conditioning is rumbling.

Marie comes out of the door.

She’s got on a flowery pale button-down shirt and yellow shorts. She looks tired but neat, the kind of solidly shaped comforting type you see a lot in Florida. She has a watering can in her hand. She peers at me. “Aren’t you the one who found Ernie?”