Boneyard Beach

by Bill Noel

“That’s the one.”

  Chester Carr was a friend who was a Folly Beach native. I talked with him a few times when he had worked at Bert’s Market, the beach’s iconic grocery that never closed, and then we got better acquainted when he befriended Melinda Beale, Charles’s aunt who had moved to Folly two years ago, bringing with her unbridled spirit, a refreshing sense of humor, a thrust adventure, and terminal cancer. She left us a year ago and I’m certain that she’s now spreading her unique sense of joy to her fellow heavenly residents.

  “Walking group,” Cindy said. “Chester Carr. Isn’t he like 137 years old?”

  “Not ninety yet,” Cal said. “Besides the group is a bunch of seasoned citizens Chester’s herded together. They ain’t going to push his speed to heart attack miles per hour.”

  “What about the group?” I repeated.

  Cal looked at each of us. “Thought since some of y’all are aging a bit, you might want to take a gander at joining.”

  Cindy jabbed Larry in the ribs. “That means you dear. You could use some good exercise besides lifting boxes of nails and hardware-do-hickey things.”

  “Two questions,” Charles said. “Who’s in the group?” He held his thumb in the air. “And,” he added his index finger to his raised thumb, “what in decimal-world does .5 mean?”

  Cal removed his Stetson and set it on the table, wiped sweat off his forehead, and said, “For one, I’m in the group. Then there’s Theodore Stoll, Harriet Grindstone, then there’s Chris’s bud William Hansel, and a new guy named Potsticker or something like that, and four or five others whose names these beers have removed from my memory.” He tilted his Coors in my direction.

  I had known William Hansel since my second week on Folly when he had been my neighbor until a peeved murderer torched my rental house with me in it. William was one of the few African Americans who called Folly Beach home and earned a paycheck as a professor at the College of Charleston. I wasn’t familiar with the others Cal had mentioned.

  Cindy chuckled. “Theo Stoll?”

  Cal nodded.

  “What’s so funny?” Charles asked.

  Cindy said, “If Theo’s in the walking group, .5 means they walk .5 inches a week. A lump of coal’d turn to a diamond quicker than he can cross Center Street. Sure it’s the same Theodore Stoll?”

  I wondered how many Theodore Stolls there could be on the island.

  “Plum sure,” Cal said.

  Larry had his elbows on the table. “You said some guy named Pot something.”

  “Yeah,” Cal said. “Potstick or Potting soil or something.”

  “What’s his first name?” Larry asked. He had given up on Cal remembering the last name.

  “Abe, I think. Why?”

  “Just curious,” Larry said. “More drinks, anyone?”

  Charles raised his hand and Larry pointed to the bar. What a great host, I thought.

  We spent the next five minutes speculating about the origin of the group’s name before Cindy stuffed the last bite of pizza in her mouth and muttered that she’d better check on her other guests. She said that she needed to see if Dude had confused them into a stupor or if Brad Burton was telling them how awful all of us at our table were. Charles said he’d go with her in case she needed an extra set of hands to strangle Burton.

  And Larry leaned over and asked if I could stop by his store in the morning. He said he had a problem and may need my help.

  If that didn’t pique my interest, nothing would.

  Chapter Five

  Pewter Hardware was in a seashell-pink, concrete block building with four parking spaces in its tiny lot. The building, located next to the post office, would fit in the lighting section of Home Depot, but if you were thin, and didn’t have to pass anyone in the aisle, you could get to most anything there you could need.

  I was more than curious why Larry wanted to talk to me, so I was at the store as soon as it opened. Scattered storms were predicted so I drove. That’s the excuse I used; the truth was that I was too lazy to hoof it. Brandon greeted me before I’d had a chance to look around and shared that he had a great time at the party but that his head felt like “fifty pounds of cement in a forty pound sack.”

  I didn’t have any hardware store analogies, so I said that I understood and asked where Larry was.

  “The boy called as I was unlocking the door. He’ll be here shortly.” Brandon smiled. “Get it? Larry, shortly.”

  Larry’s diminutive size not only would have been perfect for a jockey but had been perfect for climbing up gutter downspouts and trellises and entering second-story windows. His previous career had been as a cat burglar but he’d given it up at the urging of the Georgia Department of Corrections when as incentive they’d given him free room and board for eight years. That world was behind Larry, but his lack of altitude hadn’t changed and provided fodder for jokes—attempts at jokes—from Brandon and others.

  I frowned but Brandon had already turned and started straightening water hoses on the endcap near the entry.

  I heard Larry before I saw him. That wasn’t a short joke. He had opened the door but hadn’t stepped in. “Thanks for coming to the party last night,” he said and peeked inside and yelled to Brandon, “Can you handle the crowd for a few minutes?”

  I was the crowd.

  Brandon was in back and yelled that he thought he could. Larry jerked his head in the direction of a small, Folly River Park across the street. “Let’s check out the view.”

  Larry’s house backed up to the river and he had plenty of time to check the view, so I assumed it was his way of getting out of earshot of Brandon or the crowd that might descend any moment. We walked up the slight incline into the park and Larry said, “Did you see a semi run over me last night?”

  I said no and that I would have noticed and he said that he felt like something gigantic had traversed his head. From my extensive study of this morning’s condition of last night’s attendees, I think I can conclude that beer retailers had a serious spike in sales the last twenty-four hours.

  Larry plopped down on the closest seat at the picnic table. I sat across from him and remained silent. This was his story and I didn’t want to clutter his alcohol-jumbled brain with extraneous chatter. He closed his eyes and squeezed the bridge of his nose.

  “Have you run across someone named Abraham Pottinger?” Larry asked as he slowly opened his eyes. “He’s been here about three months.”

  “Don’t believe so. Who’s he?”

  “Blast from the past.”

  My head didn’t hurt as much as Brandon’s or Larry’s, but that was a bit too cryptic. “Explain.”

  “I met him in Atlanta in the eighties.” Larry stared at the river and seemingly into his past. “I was between careers.” He hesitated and then smiled. “Giving up my job at the chop shop after three police raids and transitioning to burglary.”

  I was one of only a handful of people on Folly who knew about his left-of-legal past before his stint in prison and his move here. To his credit, the first person he told when he had arrived was then chief of police, Brian Newman. He’d said he wanted Newman to know so if anything bad happened on Folly the chief would suspect and want to talk to Larry and that the newcomer would understand and cooperate. At that moment, Newman gained respect far beyond Larry’s size and they’d become friends.

  I said, “That was a long time ago.”

  Larry nodded. “I ran into Abe at a scuzzy diner that catered to some of the city’s lowest lowlifes. He always wore the latest fashions and talked like an English professor.”

  Larry paused again and continued to gaze into the past.

  “What brought you together?” I asked.

  “Money.”

  “Explain,” I said a second time.

  “Abe’s a con man, a damned good one. He could con the tats off Kid Rock. I’d seen him a couple of times in the diner and one day he stopped at my table, said that he needed a partner in a business deal he was working on. I aske
d him why he was talking to me and he said that he needed someone who appeared to be unsavory and little.” Larry smiled. “Half of that, the little part, rubbed me wrong and I told him so. He went in sweet-talk mode and before he was done had me convinced that my size was the next best thing to penicillin. Told you he was good.”

  “Business deal?”

  “He had business cards that said Abraham R. Pottinger and Associates, Theft Risk Consultants. He’d approach mid-sized businesses, the ones with some money but not big enough to afford full-time security like mom-and-pop jewelry stores, high-end appliance stores. He’d tell them ‘for a one-time, affordable fee’ he would conduct a thorough analysis of the business and provide the owner with a foolproof, written plan to prevent theft from outside and from employees.”

  “Why’d he need you?”

  Larry smiled but the lines around his eyes didn’t cooperate. “He told me that he was doing okay, but wanted to be able to introduce me to the store owners as one of his associates. He’d point to me and tell them I was a reformed burglar and would be able to bring my expertise to Abe’s thorough analysis.”

  “What happened?”

  “It sounded good. Hell, I even started believing it. The man could con the Pope into becoming Muslim. Anyway, Abe’s affordable fee was up in the thousands and may have been worth it if the service was legit. We sold the proposal to a dozen businesses. Exactly zero of them received a plan.”

  “I suppose for their fee the businesses learned not to buy a security analysis,” I said.

  “Good point. Some of the businesses reported the scam to the police and Abe disappeared from my life as quickly as he entered it.” Larry rubbed the bridge of his nose again and looked me in the eyes. “Until last week.”

  “What happened?”

  Larry pointed toward his store. “He walked through the door sporting a big, con-artist grin, bent down and gave me a hug, and said how great it was to see me. I nearly threw up; my past stomped on me like a combat boot on a cricket.”

  “What did he want?”

  Larry pounded his fist on the table and took a deep breath. “He said he’d heard that I was here and wanted to stop in and see his old friend. He said that he’d turned his life around and was now as straight as a laser. Said he’d moved to the beach and bought a house and planned to spend the rest of his life enjoying the simple things.”

  “You didn’t believe him.”

  “Not for a nanosecond,” Larry said without hesitating. “Once a con man, always a con man.”

  I didn’t remind Larry that he’d turned his life around and wondered if Abe could’ve done the same.

  “Have you seen him since then?”

  “No, thank God. He said we needed to get together sometime over a drink and talk about old times. I thought right, when hell freezes over.”

  “What do you want my help with?” I asked, remembering what Larry had said last night.

  Larry looked at the table, toward his store, and then back at me. “Remember last night when Cal was talking about the walking group?”

  I said that I did.

  “Remember when Cal was saying who was in the group? He said that some guy named Potsticker or something like that was in it.”

  I remembered.

  “That’s mighty close to Pottinger. If it’s him, it means nothing but trouble. Trust me.”

  I’d known Larry for a long time. If he said it meant trouble, it did. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Don’t know, thinking this up on the fly. Maybe you could join the group and figure out what Abe’s up to.”

  I nearly laughed when he said that I could join a walking group, but realized that if the group was headed by Chester Carr, there couldn’t be much walking involved.

  “Why me?”

  “I trust you Chris. You’re good at sniffing out bad stuff and don’t jump off the pier until you see it’s safe below. If you need to, you can take Charles with you. Will you help?”

  No, no way, please no, I thought.

  “Of course.”

  Chapter Six

  A knock on the door distracted me from thinking about Larry, his nefarious history, and a guy named Potsticker or something like that who could be Larry’s past coming to haunt him. The disruption was okay with me since I had no idea what to do about Larry’s situation. It was okay until I opened the door.

  “Are you Christopher Landrum?” asked a tall gentleman, in his mid-thirties, sporting a buzz cut, a starched-white shirt, slacks with a sharp crease, spit-polished shoes, what appeared to be a new navy blazer, and a frown.

  No one outside the Department of Motor Vehicles had called calling me Christopher in the last fifty years, but I said yes.

  He handed me a card that indicated that he was Detective Kenneth Adair with the Charleston County Sheriff’s Office. “May I come in?”

  I figured it would have been rude, and rather unproductive, to have followed my urge and slammed the door in his face. I stepped aside, waved him in, and asked if he wanted anything to drink. He declined, and I asked what I could do for him.

  “I have a few questions, Mr. Landrum. Purely routine.”

  Unlikely, I thought as I suggested that we would be more comfortable in the kitchen, and offered him a seat at the table.

  “Do you know Mel Evans?” he asked.

  As I looked in the detective’s penetrating stare, I decided that it was time to adhere to Dude-mode. “Yes.”

  Being an astute detective that I suspected him to be, he realized after a few seconds of silence that I was finished.

  “Were you with Mr. Evans last Thursday on his boat, the …” Adair took a notebook out of his blazer’s inside pocket, flipped through a few pages, and continued, “Mad Mel’s Magical Marsh Machine?”

  “I was.”

  “What was the nature of your excursion?”

  “Mel had taken a group on a, umm, picnic, the night before and it got too dark to see what they may have left on the beach, so he asked if I could help him make sure the site was cleaned up.”

  I was following the old television detective show line: “The truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth.” Yes, I was skipping the whole truth part. I also realized that he was looking at me like he didn’t believe a word I was saying.

  “Where was this so-called picnic?”

  “Out at the end of Folly, an area often referred to as Boneyard Beach.”

  He leaned forward. “Did you find anything unusual when you got there?”

  Like a dead body, I wondered. “Only a few empty beer cans.”

  He wrote something in his notebook although I doubted that he would have forgotten few empty beer cans. I asked again if he wanted something to drink and again he declined. I was failing to win him over with kindness.

  “How long were you there?”

  I smiled. “Until the sky opened up and a torrential downpour soaked us.”

  His scowl indicated that he didn’t see the humor in us standing in the rain. “So how long were you there before the rain?”

  “No more than fifteen, twenty minutes.”

  “And then you returned to the marina?”

  “Correct.”

  “Did Mr. Evans indicate that anything unusual happened during the picnic?”

  I was now back to the truth, nothing but the truth. “No.” Mel had told me that nothing unusual had happened during the picnic. “Why?”

  He returned the notebook to his pocket and leaned back. “You’ve been dating one of our detectives.”

  I didn’t hear a question so I sat silently.

  His frown broke, but his expression was still professional and didn’t disclose anything. “I don’t know her well,” he said, “but I hear that Detective Lawson thinks highly of you, and that over the years, you’ve been tangentially involved in some investigations.”

  I still didn’t hear a question, but nodded anyway.

  “I wouldn’t give this much information to someone I was quest
ioning, but because of your, umm, relationship with Lawson, I’ll share that our office has received a missing-person’s report about someone who participated in Mr. Evan’s excursion.”

  “Did the person go missing during the trip?”

  Detective Adair shook his head. “That’s where it gets vague. The person filing the report knows that the alleged missing person, a male, college student, was on the trip but thinks that he wasn’t on the boat when it returned to the dock.”

  “Did anyone else notice him missing?”

  “No. I believe that as a result of alcohol consumption, the others wouldn’t have noticed even the strangest occurrence.”

  Adair would have already known about the body on the beach, so he was playing games with me. I wanted to ask if the body had been identified as the student but that would have opened a door that I thought needed to remain closed.

  “Who told you that I was with Mel?”

  Adair’s frown returned. “Sorry, I can’t say.” He stood. “I believe that’s all the questions,” he hesitated and then added, “for now.”

  “Have you talked with Mel?”

  “Yes,” he said in a tone that indicated that it was all he was going to say. I walked him to the door and he thanked me for taking time to talk and said for me to say hi to Detective Lawson and to call him if I thought of anything else.

  Until recently, I had to leave the house to find myself in trouble. It now seemed that trouble came knocking. I was on the phone to Chief LaMond before the detective was out of the drive.

  “What now, Chris?” she said.

  I hated caller ID. “Wondering if you know the name of the murder victim?”

  “Drew Casey. Bye.”

  “Whoa. Anything else?”

  “Oh, thought you asked his name.”

  “You know better, Chief LaMond.”

  She giggled. “Sorry, you’re just too easy to fiddle with.”

  I heard her sigh and then she said, “He was a junior at the College of Charleston. Lived by himself in an apartment off-campus. His family’s out west somewhere but they’ve been estranged since he graduated from high school. Reason unknown and no one knows how to contact them. Mr. Casey must have money since he paid cash for his tuition and didn’t give the college information on his parents when he enrolled. The name and number he gave for the person to contact in case of an emergency came up a dead end. There was no such number and only about a zillion people in the country with the common name. Seems strange, doesn’t it?”