After a while, he inserted an Elton John tape and, in spite of my being lulled by our companionable silence and by the road itself, the lilting melodies pricked me into a more cheerful, wakeful consciousness.
“Let’s talk,” I said.
Geof reached out to turn down the volume and said, as if he’d been waiting all morning for me to finally say that, “All right, here’s how I see it. It’s Saturday. I’ve called ahead, so we know the office is open. He’s the president, so he’ll probably be there. If he isn’t, we get his home address and go there. Wherever he is, we find him, and we get in to see him. We confront him with his statement that he doesn’t know Pete Falwell, and the contradictory evidence. After he admits that well, yes, of course, he just misunderstood your question, we ask him when he first met Falwell. We’ll need to verify that. We also ask him some pointed questions about his relationship with Falwell during his tenure as VP at Cain Clams, and we ask him how he happened to come to Port Frederick in the first place and how he got the job at Cain. I think you should handle that end of things, because you understand the business end of it better than I do. We want to know when he got—no, when he was promised—this job he has now. And we want to know what he was doing, where, and with whom on the night you were—”
“Attacked? Assaulted? What was I?”
“Nearly killed,” Geof said, bluntly, and I felt a chill go through me as I gazed out at the weathered barns and houses passing by us at forty-five miles an hour. “He’s going to want to know what business it is of ours to ask, and I’m also wondering whether I should identify myself as a cop or just as your husband.”
“If I introduce you as my husband, could we get into trouble later if he came to trial for something, like maybe whatever we discover might not be admissible?”
“Jenny, to tell you the truth, I’m not sure about that.”
“You’re not on duty and you’re out of your jurisdiction.”
“Yeah, but I don’t know, I’ll have to find out. The thing is, I don’t see that we have much choice, do you? We have to know. There’s nobody else to do the asking. If we get anything incriminating, I figure the worst that happens is that I’ll have to find other admissible evidence to back it up, that’s all.”
It was my turn to be wry. “That’s all?”
He laughed a little, acknowledging the difficulty of coming up with even one solid piece of evidence in any given case, much less two or three.
“Geof,” I said, “let me get this straight. You think it’s possible that he did it, don’t you? You think he’s the one who tried to kill me. All right, I’ll admit that’s possible. But I’m worried about its probability. Am I really that much of a threat to him? Let’s say it’s true, that he did grease the Cain Clam slide into oblivion, and let’s say it was even a true case of corporate sabotage, with Pete Falwell and PFF egging him on. Maybe they even hired him to do the job, maybe they even paid him while he was on the Cain payroll, maybe this job he has now as president of Downeast Marine is a virtual payoff for handing Cain Clams over to Pete and PFF. How would we ever prove it? And what possible harm could ever come to him? You and I both know that PFF would pay his court costs into eternity, and that’s exactly how long any civil suit that my family might file would drag on, and he’d probably get off anyway! If there were damages, PFF would pay them for him. And he’d go right back to work, with an enviable reputation as a rough, tough businessman. You think anybody’d mind? Hah. Even if there were criminal charges, he’d probably get nominated to the U.S. Senate on the Oliver North and Ivan Boesky Presidential ticket. Now just where, exactly, in that scenario is a motive to kill me?”
Geof drove past a sign that said: BOSTON, 5 MILES.
He shrugged. “We don’t know everything yet.”
I sighed. “Truer words…”
“Boy, are you cynical,” he added, which was clearly an imbecilic thing for a cop, of all people, to say. I did not deign to reply. After a minute, he said, “So which one would run for president, North or Boesky?”
By the time we reached the headquarters of Downeast Marine, at Boston Harbor, we had opted in favor of omission and prevarication over honesty and forthrightness. Maybe it was all that talk about Oliver North. We wouldn’t come right out and say to Cecil Greenstreet that Geof was a cop, although he might already know it anyway. And I’d play innocent as long as I could, telling him that my reason for asking was that as soon as I learned that he worked for PFF, I just knew he’d misunderstood my question, and I wanted to give him a chance to clear things up. We’d start out easy and gentle, we decided, and try to avoid coming across so tough and accusing that he’d think he ought to call his lawyer.
“It’s not going to work,” I said, as we held our coats against the cold wind coming off the harbor. “He’s going to see right through it.”
“Fine,” Geof said. “Maybe he’ll give us some more lies to use against him. I like that, that’s always good. Or maybe we’ll ratchet him up enough to make him panic into giving us some indication of the extent of his guilt. I like that, too, gives us psychological leverage at a real basic, emotional, gut level. He might make a mistake, contradict himself, give himself away—you just never know what may happen. That’s the pleasure of interrogations.”
I held the door open for him, and said, “I do so like to see a man who enjoys his work.”
Instead of the perky receptionist who had been on duty at the front desk the day I visited Greenstreet, there was a weekend security guard in a uniform. He picked his teeth with his thumbnail as he observed our approach.
“Hello. We have an appointment with Mr. Greenstreet,” Geof announced. Our first lie. We could blame it on confusion, say I thought I’d made the appointment, but maybe I hadn’t, but could we please see Mr. Greenstreet anyway, for just a few minutes, as long as we had come all this way, and we were already in the build—
“You do?” The guard sucked on his thumbnail, looking skeptical, which was only natural, given that he wouldn’t have had us written down on his calendar.
“Yes,” I interjected, and then added for verisimilitude, “we’re a little early.”
“I’ll say.” He grinned at us. “Like maybe several weeks early. Mr. Greenstreet’s in Japan. At an international maritime convention. He left a couple of days ago, won’t be back until—” He checked a desk calendar under his elbows. “Well, I don’t even know when he’ll be back, ’cause they didn’t write down no date here.”
“Japan?” I said.
Geof, who was quicker to adjust than I was, slapped the side of his head with the palm of his left hand, and groaned. “Oh, damn, that’s right! I forgot he said he might be gone. When did he leave?”
The guard glanced at the calendar again. “Says here, two days ago.”
That would have been my first whole day in the hospital, the day after the night before…
I turned to Geof. “He didn’t say anything to me about going to Japan—”
“Thank you,” he said, nodding at the guard, and pulling me away from him. But then he turned back, as if he had suddenly recalled something. “Say, I wonder if you could help us with something else. We need to send some flowers to some friends here in Boston, and we don’t have any idea who the good florists are. Do you know who this company uses?”
The guard grinned again, obviously enjoying our yuppie predicament. Golly, they got to send flowers, and they just don’t know who to call Ain’t life a bitch? “You askin’ me?” But then he turned helpful, by picking up the telephone. “Hey, Grace,” he said into it, after a moment, “who’d I want to call if I was to send flowers to somebody and I was to want to bill it to this company? No, babe, I don’t mean what accountant, I mean what, whatdoyoucallem, florist?” He wrote down a couple of names in a large, scrawling longhand, and then he laughed. “Yeah, babe, it’s three dozen roses for you!”
“Bouquets of Boston,” he said, handling us the names on the paper. He seemed to find the name funny. “Or F
aneuil Flowers.”
We thanked him, and he said, “Have a nice day.”
Outside, I said, shivering partly from the cold and partly from an internal chill, “What do you want to bet that Pete Falwell suddenly had to attend an international maritime convention, too? You’re the cop, tell me: Is this incriminating, or what?”
“Could be coincidental. Come on, let’s find a café with a phone.”
We found a working-class bar near the harbor where it looked as if we could get good hot bowls of catch-of-the-day chowder and big mugs of cold beer. We picked well. The chowder—a tomato-based stew, really, with corn and green peppers and onions and thumb-sized chunks of white fish bobbing in it—was scalding, filling, comforting, and the draft beer, a local brew, did arrive at our table in icy mugs. While I picked at my half of our shared dessert of apple pie, Geof made his way through the lunchtime crowd to the pay phone.
He shook his head as he returned, sliding back into his side of the booth. He picked up his fork and stabbed the point of the pie—(I prefer the fat end with the crust on it)—and said, “I told them that Mr. Greenstreet wanted to duplicate his order of the other day. And they said, which one was that, the Bird of Paradise centerpieces for one hundred and fifty tables or the dozen roses? And I said, no, you know, the carnation. Carnation? they said, are you sure? Maybe it was Faneuil Flowers, said the woman at Bouquets of Boston. Must have been Bouquets of Boston, said the man at Faneuil, but we have some lovely carnations just in today, so why don’t we just go ahead and take your order—”
“A dozen roses?” I interrupted. “Did I tell you he’s a randy dandy? Bet you they weren’t for Mrs. Greenstreet.”
“On the other hand,” Geof pointed out, as he swallowed the last piece of apple. “They weren’t sent anonymously to you, either.”
“Jenny,” Geof said, on the way back to Port Frederick. We usually shared the driving duties, but I let him pamper me this time. I did, however, take over the responsibility for the tape deck, and now Tracy Chapman belted her poignant songs about wronged women, strong women, and welfare lives. She put my own troubles into perspective. (As in: Things could be worse. Unless of course, he’d killed me. That was worse. Hard to find the silver lining in that one.) “What was that story you told Heather the day before yesterday? About you taking some sort of drug, thinking it was a vitamin?”
“I did,” I said, and explained about the confusion between Marjorie Earnshaw’s Valium “prescription” and Doc Farrell’s vitamins. “The other night, when you were already so mad at me about driving home drunk? It didn’t seem like the best time to tell you I was also stoned. You weren’t in the best mood.”
“Well, Jesus, Jenny, no wonder you passed out in the car.”
“Exactly.” I felt uncomfortable with the subject, not wanting to recall his anger, not wishing to reminisce about my stupidity at a bad time, on a terrible night. “Geof, there’s something else I’ve been thinking about. Let’s go to St. Michael’s when we get back. I have a feeling there’s something I ought to talk to Father Francis Gower about.” I paused, then added, “On second thought, I think maybe we both ought to talk to him about it.”
“What?”
I spent most of the rest of the ride telling him.
By the time I finished, he agreed that I’d want a cop along when I visited the retired priest in his little home.
21
SINCE WE HAD TO DRIVE NEAR THE NEW EAST GALLERY TO reach Father Gower’s home, I asked Geof if he’d like to stop in and see the art show, while we were in the neighborhood.
We had a more difficult time finding a place to park than we might have had only a few days before, probably thanks to publicity over the MOAC protests. There was a good Saturday crowd inside the three-room gallery. Every wall was painted white, the floors were refinished oak planks varnished to a high sheen, and minicams in the ceiling spotlighted the works of satirical art. The rooms seemed even more packed than they really were because everybody had on winter coats, except the staff, and even they wore bulky sweaters. Small Chinese bowls filled with red potpourri sat atop the heating vents in the floor, emitting wafts of a cinnamon scent. But it wasn’t hot inside. For one thing, the gallery kept their furnace on “low,” as much to economize on heating bills as to protect the art. For another, everytime somebody opened the front door to enter or exit, they let in a blast of chilly air with a smell of snow in it.
Geof’s uncontrollable fit of laughing started mildly enough with a mere chuckle as we stood in front of a parody of Peter Paul Rubens’s masterpiece in oils, The Rape of Hippodameia.
Do you recall ever having seen poor Hippodameia?
In the original painting, her chubby breast is bared and her fleshy arms are flung back helplessly as she reclines like a board in the arms of a centaur while her male defenders struggle to wrest her from the monster’s grip. A small photograph of that painting hung in a frame beside the newer version so we could compare the two.
What had Geof chuckling was that the artist/parodist had substituted a seminaked likeness of a handsome young man in place of Hippodameia. Now, both the centaur and the defenders had women’s heads and bodies.
“Makes you wonder,” I murmured, “if Rubens painted mythology or just his own sexual fantasies.”
“Are you kidding?” Geof laughed, causing one or two heads to turn our way. Bursts of hilarity, and little gasps, were popping up all over the gallery, however, as visitors discovered old masters interpreted a brand new way. “Think of those huge naked women he always painted, that ought to give you a clue. Anyway, maybe that’s all mythology is, just some horny old guy’s sexual… Oh, now this is interesting, Jenny, look at this.” We had moved on to the next painting, which was a wickedly clever lampoon of Edouard Manet’s famous painting, The Execution of Emperor Maximilian. In the new version it was women soldiers, instead of men, who loaded their guns and fired them into the Emperor and his two aides.
“Impossible,” Geof declared, with a snort of derisive laughter. “I can’t even imagine women doing that, which I suppose is the point. And if women wouldn’t, why do men?” He dug his elbow into my side. “Is that it, Jenny? Have I got it?”
“You’re asking me?” I felt chagrined as I gazed at the painting. After all, I’d let down the side—the one that wasn’t supposed to be as violent as men. “The woman who beat up her sister?”
He smiled as if I’d said something that amused him almost as much as the painting did. “Yeah, but it took you more than thirty years to get there.”
It was the parody of Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass that ultimately did Geof in, collapsing him in such a fit of mirth that he infected nearly everybody else in the gallery—including me—so that soon we were nearly all chuckling, as much at his reaction as at the painting itself.
Picture the original: those dark-suited men reclining in the grass, that lone nude female among them, so clearly the object of their real appetite, and the artist’s. But what Geof saw was this: Paul Newman, painted from the rear, in the nude, his glorious face turned half-smilingly, seductively toward the viewer; while around him, the business-suited women, looking smug, reclined amid the dappled grass, the shading trees.
“That’s outrageous!” Geof chortled.
“A travesty,” I agreed, also laughing.
“And the goddamned funniest thing I think I’ve ever seen!”
Out of the corner of my eye I had noticed the gallery director, looking in our direction. She, too, smiled at Geof’s reaction to the painting. I excused myself, leaving him to enjoy the show alone for a few minutes, while I walked over to talk to her.
“How’s it going?”
“Great crowds,” she said. “But we keep getting those damn letters, Jenny. And now they’re starting to get them in Minneapolis.”
“Is that where the show goes next?”
“Yeah. I hope it doesn’t scare them off.”
“Any other trouble?”
“No, not really.” Bu
t she frowned, and suddenly looked near tears. “Except, I’m tired of having to be alert all the time, you know?” (Boy, did I ever.) “I’m tired of being brave, Jenny.” (I knew what she meant there, too.) “I don’t like coming in to work, wondering if we’re going to get bombed, or something—”
“I don’t think—”
“I know, I know,” she said, impatiently. “Nobody’s gotten violent yet, but I’ll tell you I feel pretty violated by the things they say about us. I really hate these people, Jenny, whoever they are. Now I think I know what it feels like to work in an abortion clinic. Can’t he—” She jerked her head angrily in Geof’s direction, “—do anything about it?”
“They’re trying,” I said, defensively. I hoped it was true. Since Geof wasn’t going in to work—and bringing home the latest cop gossip—I couldn’t be sure. But I knew that it was tough, often impossible, to trace anonymous letters, particularly ones, like these, that were handprinted —so you couldn’t even trace a typewriter—on a generic kind of stationery that could have been sold anywhere to anybody at any time, and always posted from a different mailbox. The letters weren’t likely to betray their source; something else, some stroke of luck or coincidence, would have to do that.
On the way out of the gallery, Geof read aloud to me from the curator’s introduction to the show’s brochure. “‘The object of this exhibit is, first, to lure the eye, and then to spark an emotion—whether that be humor, anger, desire, joy, or sadness—and, finally, to fire the brain into questioning the most basic tenets of civilization as they are portrayed, reflected, predicted, and established by those artists traditionally considered to be our greatest.’ I suppose you understand that?”
I shrugged. “Beats me. But I sure do like them pictures, Pa.”
I.O.U Page 22
