There Must Be Some Mistake (17 page)

“She's coming over now,” Bernadette said, getting off the phone. “Did you read the whole thing?”

“Skimmed it,” I said. “I'd say it was not written in haste.”

“Is that the way she talked, I mean, when you talked to her?”

“I never talked to her,” I said. “I don't remember talking to her.”

“Does she mention the woman?”

“The dancing girl, you mean? I didn't see her in the text.”

“Her name's Olive Mars,” Bernadette said. “There were some things of hers in the house, apparently. She's a high-school teacher in Baytown, well liked by the students, oversees the debate team and assists the cheerleaders. Police can't figure how she hooked up with Parker.”

“Where'd you get all that?”

“Where do you think?” she said.

“Jean talks too much?”

“Sufficiently,” Bernadette said.

JILLY AND I
were back on the deck in our usual seats, only it was raining like crazy outside, blustery and crackling with lightning and thunder. We were backed up against the windows, deep under the overhang, so missing most of the downpour except the splashing stuff. “I thought of coming down to stay for a while,” Jilly said. She had her face hidden behind a cup of coffee held in both hands, and the part of her face I could see, the eyes, had a serious look about them.

“I'd like that,” I said. “Seeing more of you more of the time.”

“You be OK with that?”

“Absolutely,” I said. “We could move Diane's stuff to the storage place and you could have that room, too. A suite of your own. Turn it into a studio, sitting room, whatever.”

“Could be too much competition around here,” she said. “I might get a place.”

“Oh yeah? Sure. OK. But you're welcome to stay, I mean, that would be my preference, if my preference were to be noted. Unless you think it might be an impediment.”

She made a face. “To?”

“You know, whatever. Us,” I said.

“We're all right,” she said.

“We're great,” I said. “I'm a pensioner dawdling at the bay, not much use to anybody, happy to have a friend for the heartbreaking future.”

“That's pretty half empty, isn't it? You're a little young for that.”

“Well, look what happened to my neighbor,” I said. “Or my other neighbor who wrecked his car. Things happen to oldsters.”

“What about the
other
other neighbor?” Jilly said.

“She's a pal,” I said. “A property owner and an acquaintance.”

“You don't think she'd mind if I moved in with you?”

I wanted to answer the question truthfully, so I took the time to stare out at the rain and consider what I might say. I didn't want to lie, or diminish my connection with Chantal, and I ran through a lot of alternatives in a short space of time. Nothing seemed right.

“Probably not,” I finally said. “The ground has shifted some. She may be too, uh, progressive. We're friendly, but I see her less often. Things are different from what they were. I guess she'd be fine. I don't know how you'd be. I don't know what you would expect. I like you, though, and I like you enough to want you to stay here.” I made some corny hand gesture, like a shrug, with hands. “That's my pitch.”

It was Jilly's turn to stare at the rain, which she did for a good long while, sipping her coffee occasionally. Eventually she said, “This is pretty down here, isn't it? Rain or shine. That's really something.”

That was the last word of the conversation. After that we sat on the deck, under the drippy overhang, and waited out the storm. There wasn't much reason to do anything else and staying out on the deck was the next best thing to actually being out in the weather, something I loved when I was a lot younger, and remembered still, though I expect I knew better than to try to recapture the experience now, in my midfifties, when time went so fast that I wouldn't have time, wouldn't, or couldn't, allow myself the time, to savor it. I counted that inability as another of the losses of getting older, which goes too slow at first, leaving you aching to speed things up, and then goes too fast when it's way too late to slow things down. And all the time, old or young, you're looking at people on the other side of the equation, riddled with envy.

We took Chantal to dinner that night at the Blind Captain's Table, a pretty good but touristy seafood joint built out over the water at the end of a pier. It had been there in one incarnation or another for years. The food was good enough, and it was usually crowded, but not so much that night. I said hello to the owner, whom I'd met before, and Chantal knew him, so he sat for a short while with us, chatting about her restaurant and his, and the season, and so on. It was an obligatory visit. When it was done, we ordered.

“So what's Mrs. Parker's letter about?” Chantal said.

“She denies it,” I said. “Said they had a fight, but it was she who was considering suicide and he stopped her. She left for Houston and next she heard he was dead. The dancer is a high-school teacher from Baytown. Her name is Olive Mars. That's about all I know. I'm sure we'll get more as the police get into it.”

“High-school teachers can be especially attractive to older men,” Jilly said.

“This one is the worst,” Chantal said. “He's always ogling. His head on a swivel.”

“I know it,” Jilly said. “We've tried to work on that, haven't we, Dad?”

This was a good lick. One thing to do it with Morgan, another with Chantal.

I said that I recalled this tendency having been called to my attention on a number of occasions by various female individuals, but that I was not myself aware of it as a part of my general practice.

That got a snort from Jilly and a smile from Chantal. Things were going to be civil.

We spent the evening talking about them. Chantal talking about her background, her daughter, her restaurant and bar, the way she ended up in Kemah. Jilly did the same. They got along better than I would have anticipated after the talk with Jilly, who seemed to open up to Chantal in a way that surprised me. Jilly was direct and pleasant, didn't make any nervous jokes, seemed genuinely interested in Tinker, especially. Made a certain sense. Tinker would be closer in age, sort of another Morgan, with a dose of ragamuffin. Or maybe more differences than those, but still in the ballpark.

The food showed up eventually, and we ate it.

For some reason, even though the restaurant was sparsely populated, they put a couple right next to us, perhaps because we were at a window seat, and those are always prized in waterfront restaurants. These two were young, brightly outfitted in upscale off-the-rack branded clothing, and having an intense argument about the Danish TV show
Borgen.
The girl, who looked thirty and ritzy, especially in the hair department, said it could not be very realistic because the politics seemed so amateurish. The prime minister, she said, lives in a two-bedroom apartment, for heaven's sake.

The guy, who was wearing one of those Brooks Brothers happy-summer shirts with Life Savers rainbow stripes, said Denmark was a tiny country and it made sense that the politics there would be amateurish. What was more interesting to him was that they had only, he said, “seven or eight” actors in Denmark, so that they showed up in all the Danish television programs. And he ticked off the other Danish shows in which actors from
Borgen
had appeared.

Chantal got my attention by tapping on my hand. “Would you leave them alone, please?” she whispered.

“Sorry,” I said. “I was listening in.”

“We know, Dad,” Jilly said.

I smiled at her, a smile I thought might suggest that I didn't prefer her to call me Dad, then turned to Chantal. “Did you know we had this woman police person in Forgetful Bay? Name of Jean Darling?”

“Yes,” Chantal said. “She talked to me after the guy painted me blue.” She turned to Jilly. “You've heard about my blue period, I assume?”

“Yes, I have,” Jilly said. “Wonderful work in that period. So essentially, profoundly…
blue.
Did we ever catch the artiste?”

“We did not,” Chantal said. “We haven't a clue.”

“You should ask Wallace to pierce this web of obscurity,” Jilly said. “One of his favorite jobs, here in his dotage.”

“Is true?” Chantal said to me.

“I'm a regular Mangum, PI,” I said.

“Magnum,” Chantal said.

“Right,” I said. “What I meant.”

And so the dinner went well, smoothly, comfortably for all concerned. It was fine. I was pleased they got along. Who knew what was going on under the surface, but up top all was well. A small triumph.

I got a call from Jean Darling but didn't take it because we were finishing dinner. Later, when Jilly and I got back to the condo, I listened to Jean Darling's message. She wanted to talk. Jean Darling was an odd kind of pretty, a little bleary eyed, with freckled skin and good blond hair. She looked a little like the actress on the American version of
The Killing,
almost as if she'd fashioned her appearance after the character. This recommended her, as I was a big fan. Linden and Holder together jingled all my bells, and Sarah Linden I could watch forever. I was spellbound. This did not happen often. Actresses and models looked like so much Photoshop, gorgeous and beautiful, but a little interchangeable. And, as a man of parts, once you've seen Lauren Bacall in
To Have and Have Not
or Grace Kelly in anything, there's not much room for improvement in the looks department. This actress who played Sarah Linden was from Houston, was about Jilly's age, and had something curious and stunning, like she'd changed the game somehow. She didn't say much, but that fit her. I looked her up on IMDB. Did some Google searches. I was taken.

Even though it was late when we got back, I called Jean Darling thinking I would leave a message saying I could meet anytime, but she answered the phone, which threw me off.

“Detective?” I said. “Detective Darling?”

“Mr. Webster,” she said. “I'm glad you called me back tonight. I need to meet with you tomorrow, in the morning maybe? I want to talk about Parker and this letter.”

“Would early afternoon be OK?” I said. “I tend to—”

“That's fine,” she said. “I remember now. Late to bed, late to rise.”

“Yeah,” I said. “My body clock's gone haywire.”

“It's fine. I'll come by around one? That work?”

“That's great,” I said.

“See you then,” she said. “Thanks.” And she hung up the phone before I could say OK myself, left me hanging on to the receiver ready to say good-bye.

Jilly was in her room watching television, so I joined her on the bed there. “What're we watching?” I said.

“House Hunters International,”
she said. “These two women want to live in Bali. One of them, that one with her bra showing, she already lives there. Teaches yoga or something. This other one has moved to Bali to be her roommate.”

“A romance?” I said.

“Probably,” Jilly said. “I guess. They keep saying that this one who has been in Bali for a year got out of a destructive relationship, but they don't mention who the partner was.”

“So mysterious,” I said.

“Isn't it always?” she said.

We watched for a bit as these two women looked at what seemed to be wholly unsuitable accommodations with a hairy Realtor in Bermuda shorts and a flowery shirt. He kept saying, “You got to feel it, feel this room, feel this location.” He wasn't exactly savory. He was sweaty and toothy, and his chest hair was unruly.

“I don't care for the Realtor,” I said.

“Looks like a hot-dog guy at the ballpark,” Jilly said. “Or a plumber from central casting.”

“You're being unkind to plumbers, aren't you?”

“Yes, Daddy,” she said. “OK, I take it back. He doesn't look like a plumber.” She took the beer bottle out of my hand and helped herself to a drink. Then she palmed the bottle's mouth as if to clean it before handing the bottle back to me. “What about the hot-dog guy? Do I have to retract that, too?”

“He looks something like a vendor,” I said, thinking I'd meant the first round of this as a joke. “Mostly he's a guy with more hair than he knows what to do with.”

“Unlike, say, yourself.”

“The detective is coming at one tomorrow to ask me about Mrs. Parker's letter. I don't know what I'm supposed to know about it.”

“She acts like you and Mr. Parker were best buds,” Jilly said.

“I already told her that was wrong. I guess she's in touch with the Canadian police about the missus, trying to corral her and get her back here.”

“The Mounties,” Jilly said.

We watched the rest of the show, and the two women picked the wrong place, we agreed, and then Jilly started cycling through the channels and I went out on the deck for a smoke. Not something I did all that often. I'd mostly quit smoking after Lucy died, but a couple years later two other people I knew got throat cancer. One died, the other didn't, at least not right away, but that was enough for me to pull the plug. One was an older woman who worked at Point Blank as a writer. She had moved from New York, where she worked for one of the big agencies, moved because she wanted out of the city and we paid well. Her cancer was well along when it was discovered, and I spent a lot of time with her after it had been found. She didn't actually get through it. She died on a fold-out bed in the dining room of her rented apartment in southwest Houston. I was there the morning she died. She was weak and refused to go to the hospital. She knew what was happening and how quickly it was going to happen, so the hospital didn't make a lot of sense to her. In the days leading up to her death I drove her around some evenings, we got ice cream, we stopped in to see some other friends from the office, I had to carry her up the stairs at one place. She was very light. She was funny, wry, not very pretty. And she was resigned to her fate. Having the cancer was another piece of lousy luck she chuckled about. She'd been on the lookout for death for a good while. The dining room where she died was small, with green wallpaper and a big rosewood table that we had shoved against the wall when she started sleeping in there. She did that because she couldn't climb the stairs to her bedroom. I called that morning, but she didn't answer, so I drove over.

Jilly had a miniature horse when she was a child. She was raised on a farm or something like it, outside of Houston, and her father bought her this tiny horse she called Chris. It was no bigger than a good-sized dog, a big Lab or a German shepherd, and she was crazy for that horse. She had pictures of it that her father had taken with some weird box camera, little four-by-four snapshots, sepia colored, that she kept in frames in her room. She had other pictures, or copies, in her wallet and at her place up in Houston. Every chance she got, when we were working together at Point Blank, she'd slip one of those pictures into some ad layout or some set decoration for a TV spot or an annual report for a bank or an oil company. Sometimes they got all the way through to the finished product; sometimes the client would catch the pictures and ask what they were. Usually we took them out then, but we regretted having to do it. Sometimes we made up stories about Chris and Jilly together in this one particular picture when Jilly could not have been more than three or four, saying it was an expression of the longevity of the company or product or organization and that it was important to the overall impression given to the target audience. Sometimes that worked.